Carnival for the Dead

by David Hewson

  ‘There is,’ she agreed.

  ‘Then have it!’ He took her hand away and unrolled his sleeve. ‘Take as much as you want!’

  ‘You’re a kind and generous man,’ Marco told him.

  Jason Cunningham wondered whether anyone had ever called him a man in Yorkshire. He couldn’t remember.

  ‘I have something else to ask,’ Marco went on. ‘All I’ve done is slow Camilla’s decline. With your . . . special blood perhaps I could do more. Though it’s not without risk. To Camilla. To you. It’s important you both understand.’

  Jason listened out of politeness. This was one of those doctor’s conversations they had to have so that they kept themselves covered. The sort where they offered to cure you but reminded you it might get sticky along the way. It took a good ten minutes and Jason couldn’t wait for it to be over. The details, the get-outs, the possible side effects . . . they seemed interminable and completely beyond his comprehension. Besides, he’d made up his mind before Marco ever started down this path. If there was a chance he could save Camilla, for good, not just for one night, he’d take it, whatever the risk.

  When the doctor finally finished he looked at her and said, ‘I’m game if you are.’

  She kissed him again. There were tears in her beautiful eyes.

  ‘But I want that tea and cake when we’re done. Maybe a fish supper too. Somewhere that’s not here.’

  ‘Anywhere,’ Camilla murmured, then lay back on the bed, smiling, ready.

  For some reason he passed out halfway through the transfusion. Maybe it was watching the blood too closely. Or the amount Marco was taking.

  When he came to the room seemed completely dark except for the whirring illumination of the machine beneath the window. Jason wasn’t sure whether he was awake or dreaming.

  He was beneath the clean ironed sheets with no clothes on. Camilla was with him, naked too, straddling his chest.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Jason murmured in a voice that sounded slurred and sleepy.

  She placed a finger against his lips then reached down, took his hand, clutched it to her.

  His head didn’t feel right. He couldn’t think straight. Camilla was touching him in places where no one else’s fingers had ever been before and it felt good, felt wonderful, sent delicious images and thoughts racing through his head. He was exhausted, he knew. Drained. But her presence revived him, and the movement of her warm skin, the loose soft fall of her breasts grazing against his chest as she angled carefully over him, made him feel more alive than he’d ever known.

  ‘I ought to tell you . . .’ he whispered.

  ‘Hush,’ she said, and put her index finger to his lips then slipped the soft warm tip into his mouth, moving it to and fro on his tongue.

  Her long black hair fell softly on his shoulders. Her lips came down close to his ear. Hot, damp breath filled his head.

  ‘Jason, Jason . . . kind, kind Jason,’ she murmured.

  He sucked on her finger, not knowing why. Then she withdrew it and slowly, inch by inch, worked her way down his chest, nails scratching gently, playing with his navel, sliding a little further, hesitating, as if uncertain or shy.

  ‘I haven’t never . . .’

  It wasn’t happening right. He was nervous, afraid.

  ‘I know,’ she said, and leaned forward until one of her breasts, he wasn’t sure which, fell to his mouth.

  The nipple was hard, as if it had a life, an identity of its own. He thought of Wakefield and the mother he’d only ever seen in a faded photograph. Then his lips closed on the full white shape hovering over him in the darkness of the clinic room, like the moon fallen to earth.

  He wasn’t quite sure what happened after that. Liquid entered his mouth, warm and salty, not like milk, not human milk. More like . . .

  Before his conflicting thoughts could coalesce they departed his head altogether. As his teeth closed more firmly around Camilla’s breast, and the warmth of her entered him, she found the place, the position, the perfect union between them, and with that the omission which had troubled him disappeared.

  I want to remember this forever, Jason thought, as she rocked above him, crying, calling, beckoning, murmuring sighs of passion in a language he couldn’t begin to understand.

  He threw his head back on the pillow. The warm stream of fluid from her breasts spattered his face and chest.

  Something precious and important began to pass between them, him to her, her to him.

  Camilla’s teeth clenched, her voice, guttural and hoarse, cried out, almost snarled, ‘Every last drop, Jason. Every last drop.’

  ‘Oh my goodness,’ he gasped. ‘Oh . . .’

  When he woke up he was in the bed on the left, the one he thought of as Camilla’s. His nose was pressed into the pillow. He was wearing a pair of soft cotton pyjamas that he’d never seen before. The smell of her was everywhere, a soft perfume like flowers and rose water. And soap too, hospital soap. Jason sniffed his wrist and realized it was him. He’d been cleaned up, the way nurses did.

  It took all his strength to turn over. Then he tried to get up and found it was impossible. He didn’t have the energy.

  Marco came in, put a thermometer in his mouth and felt his pulse. The Italian looked concerned, not that he said a word.

  Jason remembered the funny dream, and recalling it felt at odds with himself, pleased and frightened, ecstatic and a little ashamed.

  ‘Where’s Camilla?’ he asked, and realized he sounded a little croaky.

  ‘Gone,’ Marco said. ‘Bounded out of here this morning with a spring in her step.’

  ‘Lucky her. I feel terrible.’

  He looked at the other bed, the one he’d been in. They’d been in.

  ‘It wasn’t a dream, was it?’

  ‘What, exactly?’

  ‘Last night. Me and Camilla.’ He wondered if he was blushing. His cheeks felt as if they ought to be going red but somehow he doubted he had the means to achieve this. ‘Something happened.’

  ‘Something happened,’ Marco agreed. ‘What exactly?’

  ‘I don’t like to say.’

  The Italian sat on the bed and looked worried.

  ‘I think it’s important you do, Jason. For your sake. For mine. Perhaps for Camilla’s too. Please . . .’

  He seemed very earnest and he was a doctor. So Jason told him, as simply as he could. Even the part about the milk, if that was what it was. Marco listened carefully. He looked both fascinated and appalled.

  ‘I thought I was dreaming!’ Jason protested. ‘You know. One of them dreams . . .’

  ‘I can imagine.’ Marco went to the window and raised the blind. It was the first time Jason had seen real daylight enter this particular room. When it fell on him he felt a sudden pain on his face, the kind you got when you put vinegar on a cut.

  ‘Ow!’ he exclaimed. ‘Ow!’

  The hurt was getting worse, becoming unbearable.

  ‘It’s only daylight,’ Marco said.

  ‘Stop it! Stop it now!’

  ‘Of course.’

  The doctor closed the blinds then came back and sat on the end of the bed.

  ‘What’s wrong with me?’ Jason asked.

  ‘I don’t know. I never really knew precisely what was wrong with Camilla. I had . . . ideas. Sometimes they seemed ridiculous.’

  Jason asked the question, though in his heart he didn’t want to hear the answer.

  ‘What do you think it’s called? The thing she had?’

  Marco shook his grey head.

  ‘I told you before. There are no names. No medical ones. Only common, pejorative terms which I will never utter in your presence.’

  ‘Pejora . . .?’

  ‘Bad. Nasty. Horrible. Names you could never have applied to Camilla.’

  Jason swallowed. It was hard. His throat was dry. His skin still felt itchy from the sunlight.

  ‘Have I got what she had?’

  ‘I think so. The light. Your pallor. You seem to have
the same symptoms.’

  ‘Does she still have it?’

  ‘No. I think I can say that with certainty. She couldn’t have walked out of here if that were the case.’

  ‘Camilla didn’t know this would happen,’ Jason cut in, desperate to defend her. ‘It wasn’t deliberate. Besides . . .’

  He remembered her beauty, and what he understood of her courage, her decision to be in this white, clinical prison.

  ‘I’d still have done it anyway.’

  Marco nodded.

  ‘I believe you would. You’ve cured her. For now anyway.’ He scratched his grey head. ‘With your blood. Your presence. Your bravery. Your love, and the fact it was quite, quite selfless. I don’t know. I’m a doctor. I can only speak of things that can be measured, observed, analysed. With this . . .?’

  ‘Well that’s something, int’it?’ Jason felt proud. ‘I mean. I wanted to help.’

  ‘You did. It was very valiant, very generous of you. How do you feel? Physically, I mean.’

  ‘Bloody awful.’ Jason thought for a moment. When he closed his eyes he could see himself drinking from the warm, soft generosity of her breast. ‘Spitting feathers too.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Spitting feathers. It’s Yorkshire. Thirsty. Dead thirsty. Can I have something please? Right now?’

  ‘Coffee? Tea?’

  At first Jason didn’t say what came straight into his head. It seemed a stupid idea. Marco would think him bonkers. Or downright odd.

  Then he thought, in for a penny . . .

  ‘A tomato juice would be nice if you had it.’

  ‘Tomato juice . . .’

  Marco folded his arms for a moment then reached beneath the bed and pulled out the cardboard sign Jason first saw by the front door, the one asking for blood, at a price. With perks.

  ‘I’ll find you a tomato juice. I’ll put this outside too.’

  Jason didn’t want to think about outside. Not at all. Not in the sun.

  ‘Will I be here long?’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘As long as Camilla was?’

  The Italian thought for a moment and said, ‘I don’t know how long Camilla was here exactly. I inherited her. From the doctor before me . . . I didn’t want to ask.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Marco waved the sign.

  ‘I’ll find you someone, Jason. I promise. In the meantime I will fetch books. I will teach you Italian. You can teach me . . . Yorkshire. Whatever you wish. You can have fried fish. I’ll bring it. Whatever you want. There’ll be time. Plenty of it. Perhaps . . .’ There was that shrug Jason had come to recognize. ‘There will be someone else to teach you after a while. As there was for Camilla. With me.’

  Then he left.

  Jason Cunningham thought of Wakefield. He knew he’d never return to grey, bleak Garibaldi Street, not in a million years. He looked at the freshly made-up sheets on the bed beside him and wondered where Camilla was now, where she’d end up, and with whom. She was beautiful. He wasn’t. Not on the outside anyway. He’d had something, though. Something that set her free. And put him in her place.

  He closed his eyes and slept immediately. There was a dream, or perhaps a dream of a dream. Camilla was back in his bed once more, her taut, naked form moving rhythmically in the space above, low, short words he couldn’t understand tumbling from her mouth as she made love to him with a steady, determined passion.

  Fighting, wrestling to become one, a single conjoined beast, they were consumed by a milk-white dust storm of flour and yeast gathering round them like a grainy fog that wanted to cling to their sweating bodies, take nourishment from it, become something else, something alive.

  The sudden, agonizing moment of sharp liquid heat happened again, together, and this time he screamed, as did she.

  Afterwards, clinging to one another in the whiteness, her hot mouth found his ear and she whispered, ‘One day I will come for you, Jason.’

  ‘That would be nice,’ he murmured, only to realize that he was alone and awake beneath the fluorescent lights of the room with the shuttered blinds. There was a line in his arm. It was hooked up to the whirring machine on the wall.

  He went back to sleep and when he finally woke Jason Cunningham felt as if he’d been out of it for days. Weeks even.

  A plump and rosy-cheeked girl with a long, horsy face and a bob of blonde hair was putting her rucksack on the floor as she sat down on the adjoining bed. He watched as she rolled up her sleeve. Her arm was as well-padded as the rest of her, with a prominent blue vein running from elbow to wrist as if it had been drawn there with a child’s crayon.

  ‘Ooh . . . you do look lovely,’ he said.

  CARPACCIO’S SAINT

  Teresa left her phone turned off overnight. The next morning – which was grey and filled with swirling clouds of light snow above the canal – there were three messages waiting for her, two from Silvio Di Capua, one from Orsini.

  Ignoring them, she walked downstairs to Strozzi’s apartment.

  The two of them were working away at the masks again. Camilla had her sleeves rolled up. Teresa walked over and gently took hold of her left arm. The young woman seemed too surprised to object. There was a plaster there and, around it, several marks of earlier transfusions.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ Teresa asked.

  ‘I’m sorry!’ Camilla stuttered, flushing with anger and embarrassment. ‘What is this? What business of yours . . .?’

  ‘I don’t know the answer to that,’ Teresa admitted. ‘Yet. But it’s some business. It has to be.’

  She’d brought the previous night’s story with her. This was on ordinary paper again. Whoever was writing them no longer felt the need to hide the words. Only the first – which would surely have interested the police, since it mentioned both Aitchison and Sofia directly – required that.

  ‘Please,’ Teresa said, showing the pages to Camilla. ‘Read this. I think you should call Jason and ask him to come round.’

  The girl’s bright, darting eyes opened in amazement.

  ‘Jason? What’s this got to do with him?’

  ‘Read it,’ Teresa ordered. ‘Then tell me.’

  Strozzi watched them both in silence, taking in every word. Camilla put aside the delicate female mask she was working on and began to turn over the pages, blushing so lightly it was barely noticeable. From time to time she would exclaim, mostly in Croatian, a language Teresa could not begin to comprehend. The young woman dashed through the first few sheets at a steady pace, swearing and crying out in outrage from time to time.

  After a few minutes she thrust them to one side. She stared at Teresa and demanded, ‘That’s enough. Who wrote it?’

  ‘The same person who wrote all the others,’ Teresa said with a sigh. ‘The Plague Doctor. Or one of them. I simply don’t know. But that’s not the most important question, is it?’

  They both stared at her.

  ‘Why?’

  Strozzi, who didn’t seem much minded to move, said, ‘Unless this is too personal, may I?’

  He nodded at the pages.

  ‘We’ll finish them together,’ Camilla said, looking at Teresa. ‘Give us time.’

  She left them alone for a while, dodging more phone calls, but sending a short and, she hoped, sensible email to Silvio Di Capua to say that if he had any questions about taking over the department he should pose them, and she’d answer freely, happily.

  After half an hour she went back downstairs. Camilla and Strozzi sat at the table in silence. The pages were there, face down.

  ‘I’m sorry if this seems offensive,’ Teresa said. ‘I felt you ought to see them.’

  Camilla checked her watch then said, ‘Jason will have finished his morning shift by now. I need some fresh air.’

  ‘And coffee! And frittelle,’ Strozzi announced, trying to brighten the mood.

  Two minutes later they were out of the door, heading across the Ponte agli Incurabili, the musician taking the wooden gangpl
ank in his humming electric wheelchair, a black beret on his head, a scarlet scarf tied over the top, then round his ears and beneath his chin.

  Teresa followed Camilla in silence as she stomped across the steps head down, upset, dabbing at her eyes with a tissue. It was bitterly cold but that was not the reason for her tears.

  Signora Rizzolo, who ran the pasticceria, took one look at them then directed all three to a back room. It was a bare place that probably hadn’t been decorated since the 1950s. The single oven was still cooling down in the tiny adjoining kitchen, which made the place uncomfortably hot. Jason Cunningham, a tall, pleasant young man, Teresa thought, kept slapping his hands to get rid of the flour as he listened to what they had to say.

  ‘Read it for yourself,’ Camilla ordered as they sat down at a bare, bleached wooden table, Strozzi manoeuvring his electric wheelchair alongside the rest of them with ease then untying the scarf from his head and placing his beret in his lap.

  ‘I don’t think I want to from what you’ve told me,’ Jason said. ‘Where’s this rubbish come from?’

  ‘From someone who’s trying to guide me towards Sofia,’ Teresa told him. She thought of the figure in the dark, the long white mask, and decided to keep the meeting with him the previous night to herself. ‘The Plague Doctor, whoever he is.’

  ‘How would something like this help?’ he asked, wide-eyed.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘But I think you should look at it.’

  ‘All right,’ Jason replied then sat down and skimmed quickly through the papers, Camilla nudging him with details at times.

  They devoured frittelle and sipped coffee in silence. When he was finished he was blushing too, and scratching at his fair hair with a floury hand.

  ‘Bloody ’ell,’ he said in English. Then, in good Italian, added, ‘Someone’s got quite an imagination, haven’t they? They should be doing this for a living, not giving it away without . . .’ He turned over the title page. Jason, in real life, was a lot smarter than his ingénue namesake in the tale. ‘Without even putting their name to it.’

  Teresa waited. Eventually it was Strozzi who leaned over, stroked his beard nervously, as if by way of apology, and said, ‘But some of this is true, Jason. Some . . .’