I’m peering into the cupboards, looking blankly at a pack of pasta and drumming my fingers on the worktop when Dante leans in through the door.
“Marco,” he says brightly.
I turn slowly. “Dante,” I say.
“You come eat with us, yes?”
I blink at him slowly. The idea that Dante and Tom are suddenly us, the idea that I am being invited to eat with them makes my blood boil. The edges of my vision actually cloud a little.
“Where’s Tom?” I say.
Dante shrugs. “He is watching cook,” he says. “We make big omelette. He wants you come now.”
I nod. “Does he?” I say sarcastically.
Dante nods. “Yes,” he says.
In a stalling tactic, I turn back and finger the pasta pack for a second. “Maybe you could ask him to come over here,” I say flatly. “I think we need to talk.” I glance back at Dante.
“You must stop,” Dante says. “You make Tom angry.”
I close my eyes and take a deep breath, then turn to face him full on. “Stop what?” I say.
Dante smiles and shrugs. “Tom knows what he want, you know what you want. Sometimes is different.”
I shake my head slowly. “Dante,” I say. “I really don’t think we need any relationship advice from you. We were doing just fine, and…”
Dante shakes his head and interrupts me. “Not, not fine…” he says. “You force Tom to do things, he tell me. But…”
“Dante, butt out,” I say.
Dante’s smile finally fades. “But?” he repeats.
“Not your business,” I say.
“Tom is my friend,” Dante tells me. “And if Tom wants to stay some days more here on the farm…”
The clouding around my vision returns. In fact, I realise, it’s taking on a red tinge – never a good sign.
“You want to see tourist place, buy t-shirts, you can go on your own but…”
I shake my head and interrupt. “Dante,” I say. “I’m not being clear enough here, am I?”
Dante nods at me earnestly to continue.
“What I mean is…”
Dante raises an eyebrow. “Yes Marco?”
“What I mean is…” I say. I can hear my heartbeat pounding in my ear. “Fuck off!” I say.
Dante smiles strangely. I think he’s trying to create a benign turn-the-other-cheek smile, but it looks more like a sneer. “Okay Marco,” he says in a voice slimy with deceit. “I tell Tom you don’t come for dinner then,” he says.
I nod and step forward. “Yes,” I say. “You tell him that.”
Dante nods and lowers his foot from the step.
“Oh, and Dante,” I say as he walks away.
He glances back but continues walking slowly.
“It’s Mark,” I say. “My fucking name is Mark!”
Dante smiles and shrugs and walks away.
I cook pasta for one and eat half. I sit and alternate between imagining punching that smile off Dante’s face and worrying what he’s saying to Tom.
When Tom finally returns to the van just after midnight, not a word is spoken. He undresses but keeps his underpants on. It’s Tom’s version of the Berlin wall, clearly stating, “Stay away”.
Amazingly he manages to climb into the narrow double bed without brushing against me.
*
The next morning, I’m unable even to look him in the eye. Breakfast feels like a rubber band about to snap – and though I try out various conversational scenarios in my mind, they all ultimately come down to, “Are you really going to choose Dante over me?”
When Tom reappears from the van wearing yesterday’s dirty work clothes, I no longer need to ask the question.
“You’re helping Dante again,” I say, as neutrally as possible.
Tom nods. “I said I was,” he says. “So I am.”
I nod silently.
“And you, you’re going to La Spezia?” he asks flatly.
I shrug. “I’m tired,” I say. “I didn’t sleep well.”
Tom nods and winks at me. “You worry too much,” he says.
The wink softens my mood, and I wonder in a moment of self-doubt if I’m not making mountains out of molehills.
“I think I’ll just kick back today,” I say. “You know Tom, about last night…” I say.
But Tom gives me a tight smile, the slightest of waves and walks away. As he goes he says, “Don’t worry about it. It’s all Okay.”
I sit and stare a little numbly at the space where he stood. The fact that Tom is apparently forgiving me makes me furious anew. I’ve no real desire to go to La Spezia on my own, but the idea of sitting here while they work the farm, or giving in and going and helping them, well, none of the options seem even remotely desirable.
My stomach is knotted, and not really knowing where I’m going or why, I pack up the chairs, lay them in the rear of the van, and climb into the driver’s seat.
I realise that there’s something slightly provocative about taking the chairs with me. Tom could doubt, could worry that I’m not coming back … I suppose I hope he does.
“Actually,” I think furiously. “I hope he shits himself at the idea that I have fucked off with his passport, his clothes, his money …” When I reach the end of the lane, I even pause. The idea suddenly seems appealing… simply turn right and go home?
But then my mood softens again. If Tom is going to have a last chance, then fairness dictates that he be warned, that he take that decision knowingly.
I take a deep breath and wrench the wheel to the left.
Mindlessly I follow the signs towards La Spezia. Just after Romaggiore, the last of the five coastal towns, I come to a decision-time roundabout with three possible exits, one towards the Autostrada and home, another for La Spezia, and a third marked Campiglia. The sign for Campiglia carries a drawing of the mediaeval town centre.
My tiredness makes me hesitate. I’m not really sure I can face a day in the city, so I drive once again around the roundabout.
I could go back now and give Tom his last chance right away. But he’s with Dante right now, and it really has to be discussed one-on-one.
I drive round again and consider the La Spezia exit. Finally when another VW van joins the roundabout and spins off towards Campiglia, I follow.
*
The town of Campiglia nestles against a tree-covered hill and with the ever-present backdrop of the Mediterranean it looks stunning. A tall crane overlooking the harbour gives the town a genuine workaday feel. I wish, with a pang of regret, that Tom were here to explore the shady streets with me.
I park the van in the sandy car park, and wander through to the sea front. The sea is sparkling and a sea breeze is whipping up frothy whitecaps.
Families are setting up along the beach, putting up windbreaks and throwing pebbles into the sea. Another reminder of what a holiday is supposed to be like.
As I walk past a phone box, a North African wearing a fluorescent orange djellabah, steps out. He smiles at me and unravels a roll of fake watches. It’s the same stuff they sell in Ventimiglia; the same stuff they seem to sell everywhere in fact.
I shake my head and, apparently convinced, the man shrugs and walks away. The door to the phone-box catches the wind and hangs open and, without really deciding to, I step inside.
Jenny answers immediately, and tells me that she is just about to step out of the door. But picking up the urgency in my voice, she phones me back and listens patiently. It’s hard to explain to a third party what’s going on, and by trying to do so, I realise that, other than the simple fact of our derailed holiday plans, most of what’s happening comes down to nothing more than an unnameable suspicion, an inexplicable lack of trust, a curious all-pervading feeling that Dante isn’t what Dante appears to be.
By the end of the conversation, I’m so surprised at just how little I have to go on or explain, that I’m fully expecting Jenny to tell me to stop being stupid. But she doesn’t say that at all.
<
br /> “You listen to your feelings,” she tells me. “You go with your intuition. And if you need to get Tom out of there, then go back and bloody get him. Make him leave.”
I wonder if I haven’t oversold my case. “But what if I’m wrong,” I argue. “What if Dante truly is just a lovely generous hippy philosopher.”
“Hey, if you are wrong,” Jenny says. “Then Tom will lose a few extra days at the farm and gain some time somewhere else instead. It’s hardly a drama. It sounds like he’s being a completely selfish twat to me anyway, so he probably deserves it.”
After the phone call I head to the nearest bar and order a double espresso. I take the most sheltered table against the transparent windbreak, but the wind is still strong enough to blow the tassels of the Orangina parasol wildly from side to side.
The waitress is miserable and unfriendly – the first truly unpleasant service I have ever had in Italy. Ignoring my attempts to speak Italian and superciliously speaking perfect English with an American twang, she takes my order.
I stare at the sea and think about Tom. I wonder if he really is falling in love with Dante. If he is then maybe there’s no real hope for us anyway.
I finger a flyer on the table, and then slide it out from under the ashtray and idly turn it towards me. Silvio Berlusconi beams out at me. The photo shows him standing with a group of children beneath the Italian flag. Forza Italia, is emblazoned across the top of the flyer.
When the waitress returns she clatteringly dumps my coffee on the table before me. “That’s three euro,” she says, clearly wanting to be paid immediately.
While I fumble for change, she slides the flyer towards her across the table. “Yours?” she asks.
I pull a five-euro note from my wallet and glance up at her. I shake my head. “No,” I say. “It was here on the table.”
She screws the flyer into a ball and lobs it over the windbreak. As she swipes the five-euro note from my hand and walks away, she mutters disdainfully, “Berlusconi! Ma! Forza Italia! Pff! Brutta gente!”
Suddenly I’m finding her more interesting. When she returns with my change I smile broadly at her. “You speak very good English,” I say.
She puts a hand on one hip and looks at me dourly. “I’m doing a degree,” she says. “English and French. This is just for money.”
I force my widest smile. “Well, it’s very good,” I tell her. “I speak French too… I live in Nice,” I say.
She pushes her bottom lip out and nods, still all attitude. She starts to turn away.
“Hey, before you go, can you just tell me something?” I ask.
She pauses and turns back to look at me, too lazy or disinterested to fully interrupt the movement of her body towards the door.
“You said brutagente,” I said.
She frowns at me and shrugs.
“What does brutagente mean?”
She shrugs again and grimaces. “Brutta gente,” she says, clearly correcting my dreadful pronunciation. “He’s a prick,” she says. “Berlusconi is a crook.”
I nod, and then speaking quickly before she moves away, I add, “So brutta gente means what exactly? A crook?”
She frowns at me and shrugs. “Ugly people… bad people.”
“So if a family was brutte gente?” I say. “That would be what? Like, a bad family?”
She nods. “Yeah, I guess.”
I nod. “But bad in what way?”
She wrinkles her nose and frowns at me as if I am completely deranged. “How would I know?” she says.
As I drive back, my sense of urgency – my feelings of illogical non-specific stress – grow exponentially.
Sure, the Mec-Market woman’s comments could be nothing more than a local feud between families. Italian families are famous for their long-running feuds aren’t they? It could all mean nothing at all.
But somehow, added to my all-pervading anxiety, my natural distrust of Dante’s motives, well, it seems that in some way everything is slotting into place. It’s like one of those game-shows where an object is slowly revealed… the picture is starting to come into view, and I though I don’t yet know what it’s of, I’m sure it’s not nice.
The question remains, how to get this across to Tom without sounding hysterical and paranoid.
I park the van in its usual spot and climb down. I wait a moment, half-expecting Tom to come and greet me. I need a chance to talk to him alone, but no one comes. All is quiet.
I walk to the farmhouse – still no sign of life. I cross the front of the building and head towards the chicken house. Only clucking chickens greet me.
The door of the pig-shed is locked shut with a padlock, which strikes me as peculiar. The pigs are silent too, and in fact, I realise, I have never heard a pig the whole time we have been on this farm. Could Dante have killed them all?
Somewhat pointlessly, I rattle the padlock and then continue on around the building, past the outside bathroom and on round to the front of the house. I shrug and try the door but it too is locked.
I rack my brain trying to remember what Tom said they were doing today, but I can’t for the life of me remember.
“And what could they be doing anywhere but here?” I wonder. Dante doesn’t even have a car.
I loop around the buildings, again, this time shouting Tom’s name at every corner, my sense of disquiet growing.
I cup my ears and scan the horizon, but I hear only a crow squawking, the chickens clucking, a wasp buzzing by. As I walk back to the van, I glance at my watch. It’s just after three. They won’t be expecting me till at least 5 PM; I’ll just have to wait.
But something’s not right; my reliable old intuition sensors tell me so. I have to admit that I’ve sometimes been wrong. But I’ve often been spot on too. I start to chew my nails.
I slide open the van door and grab the kettle to make tea, but the water-pump spits and gurgles and spins into a high-speed whine, so I move all of the bedding out of the way and pull the translucent tank from under the sink. It’s empty, so I head off back towards the farmhouse.
It won’t fit between the tap and the washbasin, so I unscrew the showerhead and use the tube as a filling hose. The pipes clang and judder as the tank starts to fill and I sit on the step and stare out across the fields and wonder again where on earth Tom and Dante could have got to. The banging pipes remind me of the plumbing in our childhood home, and I try vaguely to work out why plumbing does that, then give up and put it down to a vague concept of “airlocks.”
I check the tank, and when I see that it’s only slightly filled, I realise how much it holds and just how heavy it’s going to be to carry. So with another sigh, as if this is the hardest thing in the world, I set off to fetch the van, calculating as I walk that five gallons must weigh about twenty kilos.
It’s a beautiful day. The air seems cleaner today and the light is harsh and white, the shadows deep and sharp. I wish the holiday were turning out differently. I wish Tom and I were in a boring campsite somewhere, heading out for a nice walk together and a simple picnic in a forest.
And something is wrong, I’m sure of it now. The physical sensations of ‘something wrong’ – the tightness in the chest, the sick stomach, the pulsing of my heart… I can feel it all happening as I walk.
“Maybe someone had an accident,” I think. “Maybe Dante had to take Tom to hospital.” He was playing with a chainsaw only yesterday after all.
When I get back with the van, the container is two-thirds full and the pipe banging has stopped. The only sounds are of running water and the countryside.
I have a piss and then decide that the tank is full enough and shut the water off. I heave the container out to the van. I was right – it’s far too heavy to have carried it any further.
Remembering the showerhead I have left on the hand basin, I return. For some reason it won’t go back on straight. Screwing it back onto the tube is a ridiculously simple task, but it just won’t go.
I curse and unscrew it and
start again, and again. And again! Every time it cross-threads and gets stuck, so I return to the van and hunt out a pair of pliers. As I fiddle, trying to force the damned tube to screw onto the stupid showerhead, I frown at something – at a thought slowly surfacing even though my brain is occupied with the task at hand.
Finally with a little brute force, the nut slips into alignment and tightens satisfyingly. I breathe a sigh of relief and just at that second I realise what is bothering me.
The banging in the pipes has started again. And there’s no water running.
I turn to head out into the daylight, and then pause and suck on my bottom lip and listen for a moment to the regular clanging sound.
I tap the cold water pipe with the pliers to see if it makes the same sound, to see if that’s where the noise comes from. It makes an identical echoing tap-tap-tap sound. “Maybe that’s why they call them taps,” I think.
And then a really strange thing happens. The pipes reply. I smile and raise an eyebrow at the spookiness of Dante’s intelligent plumbing, and tap the pipe again, three times this time.
As I turn to leave, again there’s a reply. Clang, clang, clang.
My pulse increases a little. My smile fades.
Then I get it. Laughing, I dump the pliers in the washbasin and jog around to the front of the house, knowing that I will find the front door open; knowing that Tom is in the kitchen tapping out messages at the kitchen sink and grinning at me.
But it’s locked. There’s still no one home.
I check the windows, but they too are locked. I check the side window – the shutters are closed. I run around to the back of the house, to what I figure must be Dante’s bedroom window, but the shutters are closed there as well.
Dante’s place usually looks like a bomb just went off inside, with all the windows and doors blown outwards. I have never seen everything look so closed.
I bash the faded green louvers of the shutter with my fist and try to think what to do next.
I hear the noise again, though fainter here, less metallic, more deadened than before. It’s also closer, clearly coming from behind the shutters.
“Think,” I say out loud. Doorlocks, windows, pipes, shutters. Shutters!
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