by Penny Feeny
‘That’s great, Stefania, but actually – ’
She interrupted. ‘My friends call me Fani.’
‘Really?’
The tiger eyes glinted. A pink tongue flickered across her lips. ‘Really.’
Gina tried to wriggle into a better position and turned towards the sun.
‘I think you will burn,’ said Fani.
‘Oh, I tan easily enough.’ When she’d been at school in England, her classmates had envied the natural way she shaded to brown; she was never pasty. Here, though, among Romans who took the cultivation of colour so religiously, she lagged behind.
Fani picked up the bottle of suncream. ‘Let me help you,’ she said.
Gina didn’t move. Her indigestion was getting worse, not better, and she wanted the woman to go away. She gave a sigh, which Fani misinterpreted. A stream of Ambre Solaire landed on her chest. She shot upright. ‘Hey! What was that for?’
‘You will burn,’ Fani said again. A packet of menthol cigarettes was trapped against her hip by the cord of her bikini bottom. She offered one to Gina, who shook her head, and lit her own with the composure of someone who has no intention of moving.
‘I had a late night,’ said Gina. ‘I was hoping to nap.’
Fani exhaled with unruffled assurance. ‘It’s dangerous to sleep in the sun, you know.’
‘Look, I don’t want to seem rude, but I honestly don’t remember ever having met you…’ Her voice rose irritably. ‘Am I not speaking your language? What part of Go Away and Leave Me Alone do you not understand?’
Crinkles of worry clustered on Fani’s forehead. ‘Are you quite well?’
Gina clutched her book, thinking what a pity it was only a paperback and how much she would like to aim it at her tormentor’s head, when a fist slammed into her stomach, cutting off her breath. The book fell to the ground; her mouth opened silently. Once more the fist crashed into her gut, winding her. She stared at the other woman as if she were holding her down under water, gripping the tops of her arms and kicking her mercilessly below the waist.
Fani gouged a small hole in the sand and buried her cigarette stub. Then she laid her hand lightly on the gentle swell of Gina’s abdomen and said: ‘It hurts here?’ And Gina finally found sufficient air to scream. A few heads turned, but not many, because half the sounds on the beach were shrieks and bellows and catcalls and the sheer expanse of air and water absorbed them.
Felix, returning unrewarded from his stroll, had not recognised Gina’s cry among so many others, but as he approached their pair of hired chairs and their blue-and-white beach umbrella, he noticed something odd in the way she was sitting: no longer a languorous siren, but splayed as if she’d been dropped from a height. Bending over her was a woman with a bush of black curly hair and strong sinewy legs like a gymnast.
Felix walked awkwardly in flip-flops. He needed to protect his feet from the searing heat of the sand, but he couldn’t run in them. He could only lengthen his stride and focus on his target. Although it was after two and the sun had passed its climax, he’d been going to suggest they escaped it for lunch. A seafood risotto, a mixed salad and plenty of mineral water would be his choice; it was important not to dehydrate. He was not as fit as he should be, so when he reached the parasol he had to hold onto its pole for a few seconds to catch his breath. Then he said: ‘What’s going on?’
The bracelets on the woman’s arms rattled, her sunglasses glared at the sky. ‘You are her friend, I think?’
‘Yes. What happened? Gina, are you all right?’
Gina lay back, her head resting at an angle, her body damp and crumpled as a used towel. ‘Tell her to piss off,’ she said in English.
‘What?’
Before she could answer her limbs jackknifed again. Felix looked at the woman. ‘Do we know you?’
Her manner was brusque, impatient. ‘I am Stefania,’ she said. ‘Gina has become very ill.’
He knelt down beside her. Her face was alarmingly white, her eye sockets a dark purple. She winced when he touched her. ‘I’ll go to the bar and call a doctor.’
‘It is Sunday,’ said Stefania. ‘Finding a doctor could take time.’
‘Gina, do you think you could walk to the car?’ He started to pick up the debris of their outing: books, magazines, fruit, bottles, towels, a large sun hat, packets of pills. He counted the empty foil cartridges. ‘You always eat too late.’
‘Not so,’ said Stefania.
‘Excuse me?’
‘This cannot be indigestion, it’s too severe.’ Again she tried to probe and again Gina yelled. ‘I think it’s probably the appendix.’
Gina bit so hard on her bottom lip her teeth left their imprint.
‘Are you a nurse?’ Felix asked Stefania. ‘Or medically qualified in any way?’
‘No.’ She folded her arms, pulled at her twisting curls. ‘But we Italians are very experienced in mal di stomaco. Also, my cousin was sick like this, a few months ago. It was lucky he got to the clinic in time. If the appendix bursts the results are serious. You can get, what’s it called, peritonitis.’
‘I hate being ill,’ muttered Gina.
‘They gave him only a very small scar,’ Fani said. ‘Very discreet. He can still wear his preferred bathing suit.’
‘She might need help getting to the car,’ said Felix. ‘Are you free for ten minutes?’
‘Certo.’
‘She’ll have to get dressed first.’
Gina insisted on putting on her own T-shirt, wincing as she had to stretch her arms. She refused the shorts: saying she couldn’t bear the restriction at her waist. Strong and sturdy, Fani supported her right-hand side; Felix, her left. ‘It’s all right, I can walk,’ she said crossly. But she didn’t disengage herself.
Felix had been obliged to park the car some distance away. He left Stefania and Gina sitting at the parched roadside verge while he went to fetch it. In the stifling heat the air shimmered, refracted like water. A slow stream of cars trawled past, searching for parking spaces or companionship. More than once a crop of male heads poked through open windows and called invitations to the two women. Fani responded with a choice array of insults; Gina dropped her head between her knees and retched.
Felix knew he was not much good in a crisis. When, in recent years, friends, ex-lovers and acquaintances had succumbed to the stealthy onslaught of Aids he had, he freely admitted, avoided dealing with ‘the manky bits’. He’d written cheering missives, he’d sent thoughtful gifts, he’d telephoned. But he couldn’t cope with the physical reality of sickness: the distortion of features, the wasted limbs, the distressing loss of bodily functions, the smell. He gagged in hospital corridors and recoiled from the sight of blood. He had been brought up to be fastidious by his elderly parents; he pulled on gloves to dispose of household rubbish; he was the most regular customer at the local laundry. He was relieved that, at this stage, Gina was merely a pale doubled-up version of her usual self – quieter if anything – she hadn’t even vomited yet.
He got out of the car and came towards her. She was using Stefania as a mounting block, pushing down on her shoulders so she could stagger to her feet. Stefania, trim and unfazed in her immaculate white bikini, pulled open the passenger door and helped Gina into the seat. ‘You must let me know how she is,’ she said to Felix. ‘I shall worry all the time she’s lying on the table in the operating theatre. I shall worry that the surgeon holds his hand steady, that the cut will not be one millimetre longer than it needs… that she recovers well.’
Gina gave Felix an agonised look, as if to say: is this woman for real?
Felix said, ‘Well, um, that’s very thoughtful of you. Give me your number and I’ll call you.’ He leant past Gina and hunted in the glove box for pen and paper, among the neatly labelled cassette recordings of Monteverdi, William Byrd and Thomas Tallis. Gina sighed and squirmed away so that Fani’s goodbye kiss met the clench of her jaw.
‘Jesus!’ said Felix, starting the engine. ‘I know yo
u’re feeling rotten, but do you have to be so ungrateful?’
‘What?’ Another spasm sucked the air from her lungs. Some moments later she said: ‘She kept hassling me. On and on and on. I am not queer, for God’s sake.’
‘Well, if you’re sunbathing half naked on a gay beach,’ said Felix mildly, ‘it’s an easy mistake to make. Actually, I thought you already knew her, that you two had met before.’
‘That was some bullshit she invented. Men do it all the time. I mean, why can’t they come up with a sassier pick-up line? Do you know what Mitch first said to me…?’ She yelped with pain again, adding, after an interval, ‘So I don’t want her calling on me. Anywhere.’
‘Okay, okay. It’s just, you know, I think I told you, I’m not too good in hospitals. I have this recurring nightmare – I wake up in a complete sweat – about coming round after an operation and finding they’ve taken the wrong bit of me away.’
‘And what bit would that be?’
He laughed. ‘My tongue – so I can’t even complain about it.’
‘Actually.’ She slid further down in her seat, as if her neck were too brittle to support her head. ‘This sort of talk isn’t very comforting.’
‘Sorry, I’ll shut up.’
He fiddled with the controls of the radio cassette and two opposing voices soared through one of Monteverdi’s madrigals. The body of the small stuffy car, smelling of over-heated plastic, was filled with the torment of lovers parting in a heart-rending lament.
‘Please, Felix,’ Gina whispered as they approached the outskirts of Rome.
At once he switched off the tape. ‘Heaven forbid that you should have to listen to any music composed before you were born. My apologies.’
Somewhat feebly, she batted his hand as he changed gear. ‘It’s not that. You aren’t going to take me to a public hospital, are you? Only… I’m scared…’
‘Darling, I’ll take you to this lovely clinic I know run by nuns. I haven’t used it myself, as it happens, but I’ve heard very good reports. They’re perfectly sweet, the food is excellent and all you have to do is pay them.’
‘Well, let’s hope I don’t have to stay in for too long.’
‘If it’s only an appendix, it shouldn’t be more than a week. Lucky you’d already started your packing too.’
She shot him a quick furtive look. ‘Ironic, don’t you mean?’
‘I’ll drop you off and go and pick up your suitcase.’
‘Listen, Felix. I know you hate these places, but you will stay with me a little while, won’t you?’
‘Well, of course I will.’
‘Also, there’s something else I should have told you. I’m not sure it is my appendix actually. I know you’ll be cross with me for not saying anything sooner, but…’
He could see her struggling for breath and patted her hand. ‘Save your energy,’ he said. ‘It can wait.’
17
Six Weeks Earlier: April 1993
Gina replaced the small flat stick in its tube; she returned the tube to its carton, the carton to the paper bag imprinted with the name of the pharmacy. She tied the paper bag inside an anonymous pink striped plastic carrier, let herself out and dumped her bundle in the nearest skip. Now that it was lost, swallowed up amongst so much other refuse, so many other bin bags of rotting waste, she would not be tempted to look at it again, re-examine the little stick as if it could tell her a different story.
On her way back up the stairs she thought of Phoebe. Most of the time she tried to forget she had a mother, just as her mother probably tried to forget her. Since she’d grown up and moved abroad they’d found more common ground and learned to tolerate each other, but tolerance was as far as it went. Empathy, understanding, were not part of the deal. Yet now, unbidden, rose the image of Phoebe as a frightened young woman, her hair teased into a roll of candyfloss, her eyes winged with black pencil, secretly letting out the pleats of her skirt, stitching elastic into the waistband with neat little running threads. Contemplating what to do next.
Gina was alone in the apartment: two lofty rooms with a kitchenette and half a bath, in the San Lorenzo district. Vicki was away for the weekend, which was just as well because she wasn’t yet ready to confide in her. Vicki would draw up lists of options and outcomes and Gina balked at that level of detail. Anyway, Mitch ought to be the first person to know, although she’d no idea how he would react to the news.
It must have happened over a month ago, on their ski break in the Dolomites. Snow was melting on the lower slopes so the skiing wasn’t particularly good, but the resort had a reckless end-of-season air which was catching. When she proved herself swifter than Mitch on some of their downhill races she was determined to out-do him in other aspects too: drinking, partying, card-playing, acrobatic sex. She was on a newly prescribed progestin-only pill because of her migraines. Could she have been lax in timing her dose? The whole five days had passed in a magnificent blur: a contest of speed and stamina, a rush of blood to the head. She’d never be able to pinpoint the moment.
It couldn’t have happened at their last meeting, that was for sure: a single night’s stopover which had gone badly. Mitch had been argumentative – for no good reason she could see. Then, as each restaurant they’d tried had been full, he’d got hungrier and grouchier. They’d snapped at each other relentlessly and ended up with a greasy takeaway. They’d turned their backs in bed and both had slept poorly. Their fall-out had escalated in the morning when he discovered she’d switched off the alarm and he’d nearly missed reporting for duty. (Though they’d made up, after a fashion, on the doorstep.)
She’d delayed the pregnancy test till the very last minute, but she couldn’t put it off any longer, because Mitch was on his way over again. She returned to her bedroom and opened the double doors of her wardrobe to find something to change into. All these beautiful clothes – how much longer would she be able to wear them? How much longer would she be able to work? Head and shoulder shots for jewellery might be a possibility – though wasn’t the shape of the face and the texture of the hair supposed to change too? Defiantly she dragged a tight pair of trousers off a hanger. This was ridiculous: there was no way she could have a baby. She pulled the trousers over her thighs, drew up the zip and fastened the metal stud without difficulty. See, she told herself, there’s time yet to make up your mind. Important decisions shouldn’t be taken in a hurry.
Did she want it to stop, she wondered, all the flying about? It was three years since she and Mitch had first met, during a photo-shoot in Egypt. He’d been billeted in the same Cairo hotel and somehow they’d switched drinks at the bar during a brief power cut. She could still recall the shock of the unpalatable single malt on her tongue – and the taste of Mitch himself later. Then came the calls: ‘Where are you next Thursday? Striking distance of Basel by any chance?’; ‘A few days exploring the Great Barrier Reef – tempted at all?’
Gina always said yes.
One of the delights of their relationship was the fact that so much of it took place on neutral ground. They didn’t have the chance to get bored or bogged down in dreary mundane tasks; everything was an adventure. They came together like dancers, their passion fresh and sparkling and newly energised. But lately she’d detected a shift. When he’d hired the van to drive her stuff to Rome, he’d said, ‘I hope you’re not planning to do this again in a hurry. I want to know where to find you.’ And, by degrees, the border hopping, the intercity rendezvous had become less frequent. Usually they met in Rome, occasionally in Manchester. He’d even talked about buying a property, which to Gina had been a step too far. Until now. Until this.
At the bottom of the wardrobe, where it had fallen, she found her favourite crimson shirt. There was no time to iron it but as she fed buttons into buttonholes the fabric strained a little. Could her breasts be bigger already? All to the good: she wanted to look desirable. She wanted Mitch on her side; she wanted them both to be in agreement.
She would have to proceed
carefully. First, they would go out to eat. She’d booked a table at a place which was reputed to have an Arabic influence because one of the partners was Syrian. Along with bread and olives, a dish of chillies was routinely served as an accompaniment to the meal. Mitch thought Italian food was too predictable, so she was pleased at the find. Afterwards, when he was mellow with food and wine, she would lay her cards on the table.
She went to sit in front of her make-up mirror. Her routine was automatic; she knew exactly how long it should take – but he arrived early. She was clamping curlers to her lashes when the doorbell rang. ‘Just a minute!’ she called blithely through the entry phone. She needed to paint a juicy kissable mouth.
But when she let him in, he ignored her lips and pecked her cheek like someone who could scarcely be bothered. He had a stooped, weary air.
‘I bet you’re ready for a drink. I’ve got a nice Pinot Grigio for you in the fridge.’
‘No, I’m fine, thanks.’
He must be tired again, she thought, though she should have spotted the clues: he had no bag with him for a start, and he was unshaven – usually his fair, square jaw was razored smooth so as not to give her a rash. She shouldn’t have been so busy telling him about the restaurant and making a half-hearted apology for the dishevelment of her room. The contents of two handbags were scattered on the bed, an obstacle course of key rings, pens, combs, notebooks and scissors. ‘Another ten minutes,’ she said, ‘and I could have cleared it all away. You’d be able to find somewhere to sit down.’
There was too much jauntiness in her voice, contrasting with his flat delivery. ‘Is that a problem? Do you want me to go?’
‘Of course not. Vicki’s away and we have the place to ourselves.’ She returned to the stool by her dressing table, half expecting him to follow, to take her hair in his hands and pull the brush through it in slow sensuous strokes.
Instead, he went to stand on the other side of the room, by the window. He thrust his hands in the pockets of his jeans. ‘We need to talk.’
