‘I’d rather not,’ she said, noticing their dirty hands, their tie-dyed shirts. ‘I think I might just climb up to the top of the steps and look at the view.’
Ralph followed her. He was like a naughty spaniel; bored, precocious, snapping at her heels.
The view was fine. When they’d had enough of it, Ralph said, ‘I wanna take you somewhere special. It’s called the Piazza Barberini. It’s not far from here, just down the hill. When she was in Rome, Sophia Loren used to live nearby.’
He took hold of her arm. Tina allowed herself to be led. She followed him obligingly because it was a pretty street, a steep, deep incision into the hillside. Grand houses frowned out on either side of them.
She was too obliging. What kind of girl, after all, takes any trip on her own? A bold girl? A silly girl? Oh, she wanted to be both, for once. Even Ralph, even he was a step in the right direction. A step, and she was on a trip, a voyage. Rome, she knew, held something special just for her: a fresco, a figurine, a shady walkway, an orange tree. If she kept on looking, she would find it.
In the Piazza Barberini she paused for a moment to stare at a fountain.
‘I’ve got fountains,’ Ralph said, contemptuously, ‘spouting out of my brush.’
Close by was a second, smaller fountain which was covered in big carved bees. ‘That,’ Tina said, pausing for a moment, ‘is very sweet.’
‘Yeah.’ Ralph walked on.
‘And if it was in London,’ she said, ‘it would be covered in bird dirt. They don’t seem to have pigeons here, or if they do, they don’t mess nearly as much.’
‘In Rome,’ Ralph said, conversationally, ‘you’re only considered gay if you’re passive during sex. If you screw other men, but aren’t screwed, then you’re not gay.’
Tina scowled. ‘That’s disgusting.’
Ralph grinned. ‘In Italy the men are men and the women are glad of it.’
Tina rolled her eyes. She decided that Ralph had been in Rome for too long. He’d been here a week already. She’d arrived a mere thirty-six hours ago. She was glad that she was staying for only five days. After seven days Ralph was bored. He seemed incapable of seeing the prettiness around him. He was growing cynical. He didn’t appreciate how good the weather was.
Ralph led Tina towards a church – In Rome, she thought, what else? – and up some steps. At the top, slightly out of breath, he turned and proclaimed, quite seriously: ‘Here lies dust, ashes, nothing.’
‘What?’
‘It’s written on the wall,’ he said. ‘Inside. I kind of liked it.’
She moved towards the entrance. ‘No,’ he said, turning from her, ‘not there. This way.’
Ralph cut to the right, through a small door and down into rock, into a clammy darkness.
The stairs were steep. She followed. ‘The friars here,’ he said, over his shoulder, most informative, ‘had cappuccino named after them.’
‘Why is that?’
‘Bugger knows.’
It was musty and dusty. At the foot of the stairs lay a cramped, airless, stone chamber. It had been transformed, very badly, in an almost purposefully amateur way, into a shop. There was a till and a rack of cards. Nothing much else.
A friar appeared, as if by magic, silently, out of the stonework. He was draped from head to foot in mudcoloured hessian. He stood in front of Tina and blocked her way. He stood close to her, too close, invading her personal space with the kind of bald insolence and gall that only a religious man could muster. She could tell by his eyes that he spoke no English. She was a stupid girl. That’s what his eyes said. She didn’t understand anything. He wanted to compress her, to liquidize her. He hated her.
In his hand the friar held a bucket. In the bucket were coins. He shook the bucket. He had a grey beard. Blue eyes. Tanned skin, like leather. He came from another century. Tina kind of hated him, too, somehow.
She put her hand into her pocket and pulled out some money. ‘Give him something small,’ Ralph said, materializing next to her but making no effort to contribute himself. ‘You have to give a donation.’ She threw some coins in. The friar shook the bucket again, more vigorously this time. Tina took out a few extra lire and tossed them in. The friar grunted, still giving an impression of intense dissatisfaction, before turning his back on her.
‘This way,’ Ralph said, his voice rippling with enthusiasm. ‘Through here.’
From the chamber, to the right, was a short passageway. This was a crypt, Tina decided, a real crypt. It smelled of soil. Of course. On the floor was a thin coating of brown earth.
‘That’s specially flown in,’ Ralph said, kicking it up with his loafers, ‘from Jerusalem.’ He snickered.
Brown. Everything was brown. Everything was wooden. It felt like a Spanish villa: whitewashed walls and dark bark. All this stuff. Candles, soil, stuff.
‘Not wood,’ Ralph said, as though he could sense what she was thinking. ‘Not wood. Bone.’
Bones. Hundreds of hip bones, delicate, like oyster mushrooms, arching in an extraordinary design, a beautiful design, across the ceiling. Ribs as lamp fitments. Vertebrae as candelabra. One wall was only skulls. Thousands of skulls balanced one on top of another on top of another.
Tina walked, numbly, dumbly, from chamber to chamber. Some contained friars, like the one outside but recently deceased, still in their hessian, hands suppliant, fingers, fingerbones. Some were newly buried, thinly covered, freshly coated in soil.
Angels hung, corpse-like, soggy, badly, ugly . . . oh dear. Their wings were collar bones. They flew under bone arches. Tina walked, from chapel to chapel, smelling earth and death and candlewax.
‘Four thousand!’ Ralph whispered. ‘Over four thousand dead Capuchin friars in this small place!’
Tina felt full of skin. Full of moistness. Kind of fleshy and watery, but also dead inside. She was walking through Death’s rib-cage. The whole world was bone and she was such a tiny part of it. In the final chamber, two arms were hung on the wall. Ready to chastise, ready to embrace. Mummified.
Where was Ralph? Behind her?
‘Watch this,’ he said, leaning over, putting out his hand, grasping a bone, yanking and pulling. The friar Ralph engaged with was headless, was armless, was a sagging punch-bag of dust and rot. The bone Ralph yanked at emerged from the neck of a rotting cassock, but it could’ve come from anywhere, originally. It was approximately eight or ten inches long – as round, skinny and hollow as a penny whistle – and when it snapped, it gave out a crunching sigh, like the sound a slightly soggy dog biscuit might make if held in eager jaws.
‘Ralph! Stop it! Leave it!’
‘Hey! Tina!’ Ralph said, dancing in front of her and holding the bone to his lips like it was a little pipe he would play.
He puffed out his cheeks and his fingers flew up and down it.
Tina took two steps back. Her eyes were wide. She was mortified. Ralph! She didn’t like him, not one bit. She hadn’t trusted him all along. She’d never met anyone from Reading before. He was as foreign to her as pesto or tagliatelle or tiramisù. Just as strange and inexplicable.
Tina turned and stumbled away from him, staggered at first but then found her feet, found herself moving faster and faster, picking up speed from chapel to chapel. Wanting, needing fresh air. Had to get out. Where was the friar? Nowhere. Was Ralph following? Didn’t seem to be.
Soil flew upwards and outwards in an arc, some of it she kicked with her heels against the back of her calves where it slid and it niggled, down her socks, into her shoes. Soil from Jerusalem. She kept on running.
It was so hot.
Tina was in her hotel room. The window was open. The nets were shifting, shuffling in the breeze.
She had pulled off her shoes and her socks. Her feet were itching. She dusted them with her hands, delved between her toes with the tips of her fingers. Her mind was still dipping and churning.
Where was Ralph? Why had he done that? Should she have intervened? Should she have stopped
him? He was hateful. She imagined him, still laughing and grinning, relentless, in his own hotel, south of Termini. She wouldn’t see him again.
Tina kept touching her lip, which felt, repeatedly, as if a cobweb was dangling from it, a silky strand, a tiny feather, tickling her, irritating her. She hoped she wasn’t getting a cold sore.
She felt lonely. That was stupid. She touched her lip.
‘I must stop doing that.’ She felt heavy. ‘Stop this. You’re being silly.’
She clambered on to her bed, fully dressed, lay down flat and closed her eyes. ‘Thank God,’ she muttered resolutely. ‘Thank God I’m not a Catholic. Thank God I’m just a buyer at Fenwicks, New Bond Street, London.’ She turned over and sighed.
Tina dreamed. Tina dreamed she was doing Rome on a budget. Her companion was horrible. He was called Ralph. She met him accidentally and he stuck to her like a burr, like a leech, until he grew bored of her. Then he let go, just as suddenly.
And when Ralph let go – this was the good part – Tina met Paolo. In the botanical gardens. Paolo was half-American, half-Italian, a doctor and an amateur botanist. He was dreamy.
The day after the dust, the bones, the dirt and the death of the Piazza Barberini, Tina consulted her guidebook over an espresso and then picked her way slowly and cautiously through the via della Lungara to the botanical gardens in Trastevere.
You see, Tina knew that Rome held something special, just for her – a fresco, a figurine, a shady walkway, an orange tree – and that if she searched for it she would find it.
The weather was temperate. Plants were growing. Everything looked glorious in the Italian sunshine. The trees and the specimens were extremely well labelled. Tina wandered around the botanical gardens, smiling to herself, trying to expel all thoughts of candlewax and hessian and dark bark from her mind. And Ralph. Him especially.
Inside one of the greenhouses a smart group of horticultural Italians – smelling of starch, scent and shoe leather – were inspecting the finalists in an orchid exhibition. Tina slipped in to take a look.
The orchids seemed alien, like sophisticated intergalactic creatures. They didn’t look real. Tina squatted down in front of one, closed her eyes and inhaled. The air was warm and smelled only of soil. Soil. She shuddered.
‘You know, that orchid is a colour you see nowhere else on this earth apart from in one other place. It is a purple-brown the colour of the human kidney, sì?’
Tina looked up.
‘I’m Paolo. Hi. I could see you were not with the others. I guessed you were English from your shoes. Am I correct in so guessing?’
‘Oh.’ Tina looked down at her suede moccasins and then back up at Paolo again. ‘Uh . . . The flowers were so lovely . . .’
‘Orchids.’
‘Yes. They almost look . . . plastic.’
‘I suppose you could say that. God is a master technician , huh? I should know, I’m a doctor. I studied in America for several years, in Boston.’
‘Your English is excellent.’
‘Thank you. I enjoy the chance to, ah, take it out for a test drive every so often.’
Paolo shrugged his strong, square shoulders. Tina smiled.
‘Your hair is in such a pretty style,’ Paolo said. ‘The English are so original.’
Tina put a hand to her pale brown bob. Paolo’s beautiful dark eyes clouded over, momentarily.
‘You must think me so presumptuous. You have not even had the chance to introduce yourself.’ Paolo took hold of Tina’s hand. ‘Your name?’
‘Tina.’
‘Forgive me, Tina.’ He kissed her fingers, so softly that she barely felt his lips, just his breath, which later, she discovered, was sweet and nutty and flavoured with pistachios.
Was this the thing? Was this the thing Rome held just for her? Not a fountain or a figurine, but Paolo? He took her for coffee and then invited her to collect wild mushrooms with him that afternoon in the Parco Oppio. Tina floated back to her hotel clutching a moist amaretto biscuit in one hand and something that felt suspiciously like the key to Paolo’s heart in the other.
The haughty Italian matron who presided over the front desk in Tina’s hotel obligingly changed some of Tina’s pounds into lire and then announced, in her clipped English: ‘A man came for you earlier. He left no name but he was wearing something full of . . . fluff, on his head, a hat,’ she grimaced, ‘and shoes made of plastic. He is . . . uh . . .’ Unable to find the right word, the woman twirled her finger in a circle and raised her eyes skywards.
‘Mad?’ Tina tried.
‘No.’
‘English?’
She shrugged. ‘Sì.’
‘Did he leave a message?’
‘Sì.’ The woman offered Tina a folded piece of paper. Tina opened it up. In badly formed letters was written:
Tina I’ve gotta see you It’s urgent
love ralph
Tina turned the note over, picked up a stray, yellow Bic pen from the desk and wrote:
Ralph, At last I think I’ve found what I was looking for in this magical city of Rome. I won’t waste your time or mine by describing what it is, but I am quite certain of what it isn’t. It isn’t a short Englishman in stack heels with a bad haircut and dirty teeth. I know that now. What you did in that church yesterday appalled me. I’ve decided I don’t want to see you any more. You disgust me. Goodbye.
Tina
Tina handed the notelet back to the woman. ‘If he comes by again,’ she said sweetly, ‘will you make sure that he gets this?’ Then she slipped the Bic pen, without so much as a second thought, into her jacket pocket.
Paolo pushed aside a bush and whistled to himself. ‘Do you see what I see, Tina?’
Tina recoiled. There was something about this fungus, something that made her palms dampen. Paolo put out his hands and gently plucked the mushrooms. ‘With strips of pasta, some garlic, hard cheese . . . a touch of single cream.’ He kissed the air and then plopped the mushrooms into the basket he was holding.
‘They look a little like . . . uh . . . bones,’ Tina said. ‘Don’t you think?’
‘They taste like flesh,’ Paolo said, standing up and striding off. ‘Very rich, very strong, very gamey.’
Tina followed a short distance behind him. She caught up at the next bush. ‘This is a nice park. Are we close to the Colosseum?’
Paolo pushed aside the bush but there were no mushrooms underneath, only a used soft drinks can and the plastic segment of a syringe. He stood to attention. ‘You don’t want to come here at night. Homeless people haunt this place. That is why I hunt here for mushrooms, because others don’t have the audacity to look in such a venue. So you have to be observant,’ Paolo added. ‘Especially a woman on her own. That makes you extremely vulnerable.’
He stalked off again. Tina followed. ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘I’ve found Rome very hospitable. I mean . . .’
‘A woman came into my surgery yesterday,’ Paolo said. ‘She had been mugged while walking through the Jewish Ghetto. They wanted her watch. She resisted. They sliced into her arm with a blade, through the tendons, down to the bone. The blade was rusty. I knew even then it would go septic, get infected, start to swell and rot like garbage in the stinking heat of an Italian summer.’
‘My God.’
‘You must be wary. To you this is simply a holiday, but to the casual vagabond and thief, you are a perfect financial opportunity.’
Tina, from the corner of her eye, noticed what she thought might be a cluster of wild mushrooms, but they were sprouting alongside something that bore a startling resemblance to a clump of dog shit and she couldn’t bear the idea of drawing Paolo’s attention to them, not even for the thrill of earning his approbation.
‘Have you noticed what I’ve noticed?’ Paolo stood still, like a bloodhound, his nose flaring, his fists tightening. Tina’s heart sank. He’d seen the mushrooms. Before she could respond, however, Paolo whispered, quite urgently, ‘As I was saying, this place is new
to you and so the sights and the pleasures of the senses are here to be enjoyed for the very first time, but I . . . I am more familiar with this environment so can take in the larger view, the periphery. Someone is following us. Did you see him? When I bought you your gelato he stood a little distance away. Later he bought one for himself.’
Paolo pointed. Tina followed the line of his finger. She failed to detect anything unusual.
‘See?’ Paolo asked. ‘In the scruffy clothing, with his long face, his dirty arms. He has a pronounced limp. He’s ducking behind that yellow flowering bush. He knows I’m on to him. A junkie. Probably a thief.’
Tina looked again. A man with a child and a suitcase. A young woman sitting under a tree reading a magazine. Two teenagers playing with a frisbee. And then she saw him. Ralph!
She nearly swore, but she stopped herself. ‘Paolo!’ she exclaimed. ‘Over there! See? Some mushrooms.’
Paolo looked where she’d indicated, strode over, crouched down and plucked them from the soil. ‘Such a meal I will make you!’ he exclaimed. ‘Such a feast!’
By the time he’d straightened up again, Ralph had made himself scarce. Tina blinked and wondered if she’d dreamed him.
She went home to change for dinner. Ralph was loitering outside her hotel. He was holding an open copy of La Moda in front of him but he wasn’t reading it.
‘What do you want, Ralph? Didn’t you get my note?’
His face was pale and moist. He seemed distracted.
‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘and to be honest . . .’
‘I don’t like being followed around,’ Tina said, emphatically.
‘So who the hell is that guy?’ Ralph interjected indignantly . ‘Christ, you’re a fast worker. Yesterday it was me, today it’s some fat Italian with hair sprouting out from his cuffs and his collar.’
‘It was never you, Ralph,’ Tina said haughtily as she pushed past him and stepped into the hotel’s revolving doors. Ralph was nimble though, quick on his feet, and he stuck to her, entering the same little segment of the doors. He was crushed up against the back of her as she pushed and walked. He smelled of Dettol. Then he stopped and the door jammed. Tina tried to keep moving but Ralph was too strong. The glass held fast.
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