Heading Inland

by Nicola Barker

  ‘Stop pressing against me! Let me out of here.’

  ‘Tina,’ Ralph said, ‘I regret what I did yesterday. And I want to give you that money I owe you from the Vatican Museum.’

  ‘Keep it. I don’t want it.’

  Ralph put his hand into his pocket and drew out an old tissue, a bus ticket, a couple of lire and a cheese straw. Tina blinked and focused. It wasn’t a cheese straw. It was a bone.

  ‘My God! What is that? Did you steal it?’

  ‘Uh . . . ?’ Ralph looked down. ‘It’s a cheese straw.’

  ‘Oh.’ Tina felt claustrophobic and slightly dizzy. ‘I thought it was the bone. I mean, I thought you had the bone.’

  Ralph guffawed. ‘That’s one way of putting it.’ He adjusted his position. Tina squinted at him, somewhat perplexed. Close up, she found his white skin, his dead eyes, particularly distasteful.

  ‘My friend thought you were a drug addict,’ she said, sharply. ‘You look a mess.’

  ‘Fine,’ Ralph responded. ‘So I’m sorry about the way things turned out yesterday. But that note you left . . . See,’ he bared his teeth, ‘my mouth is spotless.’

  ‘But your shirt,’ Tina smiled back, tight-lipped, jabbing at his chest with her middle finger, ‘isn’t Lacoste. It’s a second-rate impersonation. Which, to be brutally honest, Ralph, seems entirely appropriate.’

  While Ralph paused to digest this information, Tina took her chance and gave the door a violent shove, pushed it forward and snapped out of the restrictive glass bubble into the foyer. Ralph was disorientated for a moment but then quickly followed. He didn’t let up. He trailed her to the front desk.

  ‘Go away, Ralph.’

  ‘It’s only . . .’

  She spun around. ‘What?!’

  He was still holding the bus ticket and the cheese straw in his right hand.

  ‘It’s only, I mean . . .’ he said, shiftily. ‘Couldn’t we talk this over in private?’

  ‘Get lost, Ralph.’

  Ralph didn’t budge. Tina asked for her key and then pressed for the lift. ‘By the way,’ she said sharply, ‘Paolo said Sophia Loren never lived in the Piazza Barberini. She never even lived in Rome. It’s just a myth. My guidebook says the same thing.’

  Ralph opened his mouth to say something, but before he’d uttered a single syllable, Tina had swept off, up the stairs, taking them two at a time.

  The lift arrived. The doors opened. People got out. The doors closed. Ralph remained where he was. He grimaced, looked around him, cleared his throat and then gently, neatly, carefully, he folded up his copy of La Moda.

  ‘It looks fantastic, Paolo,’ Tina murmured. She was sitting in his spotless flat and staring down at a steaming plateful of pasta and mushrooms.

  ‘Tuck in,’ Paolo said, turning this little smidgen of colloquial English over on his tongue like an exquisite truffle. Tina picked up her fork. She ate a small strand of the pasta and then smiled. ‘It’s delicious.’

  Paolo beamed at her.

  She speared a mushroom. She inhaled deeply and lifted the mushroom up towards her lips. She could smell it. It didn’t smell like a mushroom at all. It smelled of old bone. Rotten bone. She paused.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  Tina closed her eyes for a moment. Don’t blow it, Tina, she thought frantically. This man is a dream. You’ve arrived, girl. You’ve arrived! But her brain took no account of these thoughts and projected the unpalatable image of a dog’s anus on to the inside of her eyelids. Her gorge rose.

  ‘Tina?’

  She opened her eyes. ‘Paolo?’

  ‘Is something wrong? Is it the evening light? Is it too bright?’

  ‘The light?’ Tina blinked. ‘Oh. Yes, it is bright.’

  ‘Easily remedied.’

  Paolo sprang up and over to the window to adjust the blinds. While he was distracted, Tina grabbed her handbag from the floor, yanked it open and tipped the mushrooms from her plate straight into it. This whole manoeuvre took a total of four or five seconds.

  She snapped the bag shut.

  ‘Tina!’ Paolo expostulated. Tina squeaked and looked up guiltily. But Paolo was not staring at her. He was staring out of the window. ‘Tina, come here for a moment.’

  She did as he asked. Paolo pointed. ‘It’s him, huh? You see him?’

  Tina craned her neck and followed the line of Paolo’s index finger.

  ‘You see him? The same one as earlier. Next to the street lamp. Smoking.’

  Ralph. Next to the lamp-post; bad shoes, bad hair, puffing on a cigarette. Something was wrong, though. It was his hat. It wasn’t on his head, perched jauntily, as one might have expected; it was hanging from his belt buckle like a furry codpiece.

  ‘I have reason to believe that man is stalking you,’ Paolo said. ‘I have every reason to believe it.’ Without another word he strode swiftly from the room.

  ‘Hang on a second . . . Paolo?’

  The door slammed. Tina returned to the window. After a short time, Paolo appeared in the street. Ralph gave a start, grabbed hold of his hat, turned on his heel and ran. Paolo followed, but didn’t venture beyond the end of the road. Tina went back to the table, sat down and picked up her fork.

  Of course he insisted on escorting her home. He told her how one of his uncles had been glassed in the Palazzo Nuovo for his cufflinks. ‘People see you, Tina, and straight away they can tell you are green. You are green like a dollar sign. A big, green dollar sign walking down the road.’

  He frog-marched her into the hotel foyer, watched as she picked up her keys, called the lift. While they waited for it he arranged to meet her early the following morning for breakfast. He kissed her ear as the lift doors opened. ‘Don’t leave the sanctuary of the building until I am here to meet you, OK?’

  Tina smiled and nodded. Paolo was so protective. It gave her goosebumps.

  ‘You are so desirable,’ he muttered, ‘so damn vulnerable . You are an accident, Tina, just waiting to happen.’

  Tina had a shower, wrapped a towel around her midriff and then strolled into her bedroom.

  ‘My God!’

  Paolo was sitting, bold as brass, on the end of her bed.

  Tina clutched at her towel. ‘Paolo! What on earth are you doing here?’

  Paolo clucked his tongue and shook his head. ‘The window. You left it wide open. I was checking the rear of the building. I came up by the fire escape. You must be more cautious, Tina. I could have been anybody.’ He stood up. ‘I’m sorry to have to scare you like that. It’s just that we can’t be too careful, huh?’

  Tina nodded.

  Paolo returned to the window, swung his leg over the ledge and jumped out on to the escape. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow. Breakfast.’

  Tina nodded again.

  ‘The window. Close it tight, sì?’

  ‘I will. Straight away.’

  She closed it. She sat down on her bed.

  ‘Is that guy some kind of a fucking psychopath or what?’

  Tina froze and then she yelled.

  ‘Aiuto!’

  In the short silence that followed an accent that was distinctly English and distinctly Ralph’s said, ‘And what the fuck does that mean?’

  Tina squatted down. A loafer was visible, protruding from the end of the bed.

  ‘What the hell are you doing under there?’

  Ralph was silent for a moment and then he said gently, ‘I think I’m dying.’

  ‘You’re what?’

  ‘Dying. I climbed in. You were in the shower. I needed to talk to you. Then I heard someone else climbing up the escape, so I scrambled under here. Then he sat down on the bed and now I’m stuck.’

  ‘Stuck? How?’

  Ralph cleared his throat. ‘To put it bluntly, I have an erection and it’s stuck inside the mesh on the underside of the mattress. It’s like chicken wire or something.’

  ‘You’ve got a what?’

  ‘I’ve got an erection.’

  Tina recoiled
. She grabbed hold of her clothes, her jacket, her shoes, and dashed into the bathroom. She shot the bolt and got dressed. When she’d finished dressing she called through. ‘If you’ve not gone by the time I count to ten, Ralph, I’m going to scream and scream until the police come.’

  ‘One.’ She put her ear to the door to listen out for his response. ‘Two.’ She could hear him speaking but not what he said. ‘Three.’ She pulled the door open a fraction.

  ‘Four.’

  Ralph’s loafer protruded, as before. He had not moved.

  ‘Five.’

  ‘What’s the guy’s name, anyway?’ Ralph asked, apparently unruffled by Tina’s little display.

  ‘None of your business.’

  ‘Funny name. Must be foreign.’

  Tina scowled. ‘Paolo.’

  ‘Paolo?’ Ralph snorted. ‘He’s so fucking paranoid. More to the point, he’s so hairy. Even his ankles. I was staring at his ankles for a full five minutes while you were still in the shower and, I’m not kidding you, the hair was half an inch thick. It was extraordinary. Staring at his ankles was the only thing that stopped me from screaming myself stupid.’

  Tina paused and then addressed herself emphatically to Ralph’s loafer. ‘Paolo has every reason to feel paranoid on my behalf. I have a strange man stalking me, pestering me, hiding under my bed while I’m in the shower . . .’ Modesty forbade her to mention the erection.

  ‘And the erection,’ Ralph said. ‘Don’t forget about that.’

  He twitched his foot. Tina stared at it malevolently. The thick sole, the scuffed heel. Slip-ons, she thought. So common. They were brothel creepers, really, with a large ornamental buckle glued on the side. Nasty, stupid shoes.

  ‘Anyhow, Paolo’s a doctor,’ Tina muttered, dragging her eyes from Ralph’s footwear. ‘Doctors are caring by nature. It’s an instinct.’

  ‘A doctor!’ Ralph parroted. ‘How gratifying for you.’

  He was quiet for a while and then he said, ‘You wouldn’t happen to have a pair of nail clippers handy, would you?’

  ‘Nail clippers?’

  ‘So I could try and cut myself free.’

  Tina looked churlish but picked up her bag anyway and was about to open it but then paused. ‘I don’t know if I want you cutting yourself free. You might be dangerous.’

  Ralph snickered. ‘Let’s get one thing straight between us, Tina. I had no interest at all in ever seeing you again after our little bit of fun in the crypt yesterday. And although I have an erection, that’s no reason to think I find you irresistible.’

  Tina tucked her bag under her arm and headed for the bathroom. She’d just remembered Paolo’s mushrooms and wanted to clear them out over the sink to minimize the mess.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Finding some clippers.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Tina grabbed some tissues and pulled the bag wide. She paused. She stared.

  ‘Oh, shit.’

  In her bag, instead of the mushrooms she’d expected, there were ten finger bones. Ten clittery-clattery finger bones. Yellow bones. Earthy bones.

  She dropped the bag.

  Ralph was still talking. Tina wasn’t listening. She backed away from the sink, out of the bathroom, into the bedroom and gently pushed the door shut. When she next spoke her voice was low. ‘I couldn’t find any clippers after all.’

  ‘Great.’ Ralph sighed. ‘So now what?’

  Tina grimaced. ‘If you leave yourself alone for a few minutes maybe it’ll have a chance to go down.’

  ‘It won’t go down. It has no intention of going down. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.’

  Tina said nothing, only stared peevishly up at the lamp fitment. Ralph continued talking, undaunted. ‘You don’t know the half of it.’

  ‘I don’t want to know. I’m not interested. I just want you out of here.’

  ‘So I got home to my hotel yesterday,’ Ralph said, his voice slightly muffled by the bed and the mattress, ‘sat down, dozed for a while and then ching! A hard-on. Well that’s hardly anything out of the ordinary. So I grappled with it for a while, but the more I touched it the harder it got. And it wasn’t a good hard. It was a bad hard. It was angry. I couldn’t relax. It hurt if I sat down, it was even worse if I stood up. It burned. And it wasn’t a sexy feeling, just kind of irritating. Eventually I started to get depressed. Frustrated too. But then out of the blue, after a few hours struggling, I found relief. Want to know what it was that relieved me?’

  Tina’s lip was tingling. She curled it. ‘Desperately.’

  ‘You. It was you.’

  She recoiled.

  ‘Funny, huh? As soon as a thought of you flitted into my mind I felt a kind of loosening, I mean, it didn’t go down or anything but the discomfort eased a bit. But it kept me up all night just the same. And I felt weak. Like all the blood had been diverted from my body and brain into just that particular part of me.’

  Tina smirked but said nothing. ‘In the morning I walked over to your hotel. I left you the note. In the foyer it stopped hurting altogether. Strange, huh?’ He paused. ‘So you don’t even have some scissors handy?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, can you try and lift the bed then? It feels like I’m being garrotted.’

  Tina appraised the bed. It was large and heavy and the headboard was a thick, dark wood. She squatted down. ‘There’s no way I can lift this thing. It’s huge. You’re just going to have to untangle yourself.’

  Ralph fiddled quietly for a while. The sound of his nails against the mattress wire set her teeth on edge. She stared over at the bathroom door.

  ‘Have you ever had a 24-hour erection before, Ralph?’

  Ralph stopped fiddling.

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Maybe you should go to a doctor or something.’

  ‘Why? Fancy calling Paolo over?’

  Tina’s thoughts turned to Paolo. She touched her bottom lip with her index finger and dwelt on his pistachio-flavoured kisses. Her fingers, she noticed, after a short interval, smelt very strongly of soil. Soil? She stared at her hands. They were clean. They were spotless.

  ‘I’m only saying,’ Tina continued, slightly anxious now, ‘that you snapped that bone yesterday and ever since . . .’

  Ralph chuckled. From under the bed his laughter sounded like a mouse scampering. ‘Have you got bones on the brain or something?’

  ‘You snapped that bone and now you have this strange stiffness.’

  ‘The penis doesn’t have a bone in it, Tina. It’s blood that makes it hard.’

  After a pause, Ralph added, ‘I guess it’s just one of those things. We don’t much like each other but in some weird way we’re destined to be together.’

  Tina struggled to stop herself from growling.

  ‘Fate,’ Ralph sighed, and then tapped his foot against the mattress.

  Tina felt claustrophobic. She walked to the window. ‘So why do I keep seeing bones everywhere?’ she asked, almost piteously. ‘And why does this whole room reek of soil? Damp soil. Can’t you smell it?’ She yanked the window open.

  Ralph sniffed obligingly. ‘Smells of old cum and mothballs under here.’

  ‘We’re cursed!’ Tina exclaimed dramatically, half meaning it, half not.

  ‘Bullshit!’ Ralph sounded utterly unperturbed. ‘I don’t believe in that stuff.’

  ‘But you believe it’s fate that we should be together? That’s so stupid. Maybe I should call down for a porter.’

  Ralph continued to fiddle. ‘Great idea. Try explaining this situation in pidgin Italian.’

  ‘I’m tired.’

  ‘Ring Paolo, then,’ Ralph said brightly. ‘Explain things to him.’

  Tina blinked. ‘Paolo? No way.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I’ll look stupid.’

  ‘Hardly. I’m the one looking ridiculous here, not you.’

  Tina said nothing. Ralph, in turn, ruminated for a while. Then he said, quite softly
, almost inaudibly. ‘Maybe you’re right, though, maybe I shouldn’t have taken that bone after all.’

  Tina froze. ‘What?’

  ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have taken it. I should have just dumped it.’

  Tina’s hands formed into fists. ‘You took the bone? Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘Not exactly.’ Ralph tried to stifle a yawn but failed. ‘You did.’

  Tina’s hands flew to her throat. It tightened.

  ‘You nearly slipped, remember? I thought that monk fella was coming so I tossed the bone into your jacket pocket.’

  Tina stared down at her jacket. She took two deep breaths, and then slowly, fearfully, she slipped her hand into her right pocket. Inside she found some tissues and a couple of English coins. Nothing else. She exhaled her relief and then steeled herself for the left pocket. She dipped in her hand . . . More tissues, an old bus ticket, and then? Something stiff and slim and potentially fibrous. Gently, gently she withdrew it. The bone. Only it wasn’t a bone, it was a Bic pen. Yellow, innocuous.

  ‘You bastard!’

  Ralph howled. ‘Sorry,’ he coughed, between gasps. ‘I guess that was rather close to the bone!’ He laughed some more. Tina said nothing. Instead she went and picked up the phone.

  Most of it she explained there and then. The remainder she whispered to him outside on the fire escape, away from Ralph’s prying ears. Of course he was angry. But there was a slant to Paolo’s anger that Tina hadn’t anticipated. It wasn’t the sacrilege or the invasion of her privacy or even the lie over her former intimacy with Ralph that he minded. It was the erection.

  ‘A 24-hour erection? No way. It is not possible.’

  Paolo clambered into the room, got down on to his hands and knees and stared at Ralph and his entrapped member. Ralph shielded himself with an outstretched hand. ‘What is this?’

  Paolo was undaunted. ‘No way. I am a doctor. I have never heard of such a thing.’

  Ralph grinned, sensing Paolo’s pique. ‘Actually, it’s been more than twenty-four hours now. It’s closer to thirty.’

  Paolo swore in Italian and then stood up. ‘OK, turn away, Tina, I don’t want you seeing anything that might prove unsettling. And you . . .’ He kicked Ralph’s foot.