The Water-Breather

Dedication

To my father, who encouraged all things

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Part One

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

Part Two

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise for The Water-breather:

Copyright

About the Publisher

He stands at the edge of the lake and rolls a dry leaf between his fingers. It crumbles apart, pieces flutter from the palm of his hand, down onto the surface of the water beside him. He watches them spin and drift in opposite directions. With the end of his walking-stick, he pushes against thin ridges of mud. They fall away. Water moves forward, running down lines of earth, filling pockets, creating pools.

He sits down on the grass. He lays his head on his knees and closes his eyes. The sounds of the lake wash against his feet.

1

We are always travelling. From country to country, from grandmother to grandmother. We spend winter and spring in the car and, in the summer, my brothers and I have bottles of water on our laps and sweets in our mouths to soften the tight bends that send us sideways across the back seat.

I am Jean-Pio, the middle child. I sit between my two brothers, waiting for the petrol sign to flash up red. It has been my place since we started moving. I either lean forward, my knees jammed into the gap between my parents’ seats, or I push my head back and let my eyes drift through the metal grid of the rear window. I see onto the rushing roads with the occasional tree or lorry to block out the light. I swallow with every bump and dip to quell my car sickness, measured, like a metronome, by the indicator clicking left and right. I read number-plates, decipher stickers on the backs of cars. I play ‘I spy’ in my head. A for air. B for bend. C for car. D for dead-end. I add up number-plates. I count down the kilometres from town to town. I scan the billboards and signposts for new words.

Sometimes, peering into overtaking cars, I meet the gaze of a hungry dog or the empty silhouettes of strangers. I strain to see what they’re wearing and guess where they might be going. They rarely look like us, eyes set on the horizon, children sitting tidily in a row, but occasionally I catch sight of a family like ours. I find parents with feet flattened onto worn down matting and children slouched behind, trouser bottoms stuck to their seats. I follow a father clutching the wheel with impatient hands and a mother severed from the world, floating like paper on a flow of water. I nudge my brothers. Together we turn to glimpse at their fleeting faces, tearing urgently along beside us, leaving sky and ground behind.

In the car, Giulio, my younger brother, sits to my right. Our father says, ‘You can never tell if he’s happy or sad.’ I can tell because when he’s sad his lips crumple and fade into the rest of his face. Duccio, the eldest, is to my left. He’s so handsome that we often can’t walk five metres without people stopping and staring. Our mother reckons that now that he’s eleven, he’s only got one or two years left until he gets a hairy top lip and greasy skin and then that’ll be the end of that. Our back seat is wide enough for us not to touch each other, but if Giulio moves into my space I push him back. If I lean too far over towards Duccio, he crushes my thumb with the seat-belt wrapped around his tightened fist. If we all yell and annoy my father, he pulls the car over and shouts and our mother cries.

Our mother is Ava. Some call her Ave, others Avi. We call her Ama because it’s a mix of Maman and Ava and she hates being called Mum. It’s a bit like me. They couldn’t decide on a single French, English or Italian name so that’s why I’m called two names: Jean-Pio. Ama comes out with ‘we’ about the English, but the origins that shape her mind and flawless white face come and go on the number-plates of passing cars: England, France, Holland and Slovenia. Ama is each and every one of us rolled into one. She is a multi-purpose clasp, an all-embracing shape. She is allergic to the sun and suffers from insomnia. She has always been unable to sleep as far back as we can remember. She can never doze in the car because she develops a lingering pain between the eyes and even if she goes to sleep at night in a warm bed she wakes up with a jump and a tired head that stays with her all day.

Our father is Gaspare, or Pado to us. He’s Italian, with a Sicilian father. Ama says his moods swing from singing ecstasy and smiles, to blind fury. He’s an anatomist and a histopathologist, a specialist in toxins and indoor air pollution. He used to teach in England, but now he rushes around Europe, attending conference after conference, and we go with him. Children, he repeats to Ama, need to see the world. We wait for him in long car parks and he appears between meetings to gesture ‘hang on’ or ‘five more minutes’. Sometimes he carries slides with sections of diseased lungs, or a book on rats which is kept in the glove compartment. It has the answer to many questions: peanuts give brown-brimming tumours, artificial sweeteners cause blooded pockets on the tail and nicotine spreads yellow-stained patches across white fur.

2

I’m eight years old. It’s the spring of 1978. Since Pado developed his theory on how diseases spread from air conditioning, and became president of the European Board of Histopathologists, our kilometre dial has clocked into thousands and started its cycle over and over again. Our journeys, along motorways, across seas and over mountains, have to keep up with the progress of sickness from people’s lungs and air conditioners. Travelling is a race against time. Every moment we pause, or complain, is a moment wasted, an opportunity for disease to take hold. Our car must carry on, always. That’s the way it is. Places to get to. Lives to save. Scientists to convince.

Duccio is entrusted with the maps. He keeps these in the pocket behind our father with the stacks of papers and hotel listings for each country. Some maps you have to fold out more than others. Spain and France stretch far across my lap. We always get lost in Brussels because the guidebook for Belgium has a tear where the Flemish and French street names merge in shredded strands. Giulio has the pamphlets for the conferences stashed behind Ama’s seat: ‘Legionella pneumophila and the use of erythromycin’. ‘Epidemiology and the evaluation of environmental carcinogenic risks’. Giulio also has a book of jokes with two hundred reasons why the chicken wants to cross the road. Ama keeps a paperback called What To Do On Long Journeys. It has been fingered and thrown across the car so many times that it is tattered and scuffed like a grimy shirt collar. Duccio can tell you the make of any car from any country. Giulio and Pado can list most of the capital cities of the world. I can tell when the petrol sign is going to turn red.

In England, we stay with our grandmother, Ama’s mother. She was born in London, but her parents were Dutch and Slovenian and brought her up speaking French in England. That probably explains why she married a Frenchman, our grandfather, Grand Maurice. He drowned two summers ago while fishing for crayfish in a lake in France and our grandmother hasn’t been the same since. Grand Maurice thought he was so lucky to have met her that he called her ‘ma chance’. We still call her Machance even if Pado tells us she hasn’t brought us much good fortune lately. I’m Machance’s favourite and no one really knows why. Maybe it’s because I was Grand Maurice’s favourite too. Ama shrugs and goes quiet about it. Giulio thinks it’s because I’ve got Grand Maurice’s brown-green eyes and, now that he’s dead, I’m the only one carrying them around.

When in Italy, we stay in small family hotels in Milan and Rome or with Pado’s parents in Umbria. In Germany, we have a bed-and-breakfast near the motorway which has sticky muesli and cartoons for children on the TV. In Madrid, the owner of our hotel is so chatty that he keeps us waiting for our room keys to tell us stories we’ve heard a hundred times. Over the reception desk there are posters from Pado’s scientific conferences coloured with microscopic close-ups of viruses and then a torn, withered photo of the owner’s wife carrying dried sausages from Cantabria, the sun setting on her skirt. Ama can’t sleep in the Madrid hotel because of the neon street signs outside our room so we wrap her clothes across the windows and whisper in the night. Before going to bed, Ama sniffs the sheets, one by one, to check they are clean. If she finds a hair, a scab, a toenail or even a trace of scent, she calls the reception in a small voice and we watch as astonished maids remake the beds with Ama following behind, smoothing the spreading white surfaces with her drowsy hands. When we try to help her, she gently pushes us to one side, ‘Just let me do it, please.’

Pado always states, ‘There’s no point telling me things I know. Tell me something new’, so when he pops his head into our hotel room to say ‘Goodnight’, you know you have to hurry to come up with new facts fast:

‘If you weigh all the insects in the world, they are heavier than all the animals put together!

‘Every single snowflake is unique!’

‘Not bad, Jean-Pio, I’ll have to think about those.’

Giulio invents a new chicken joke. It still has to cross the road, but it makes Pado laugh all the same. When Pado leaves, Giulio asks me where I get my facts from. I don’t really know. I suppose I just pick them up, here and there, glancing through newspapers in hotel lobbies, listening to Pado’s colleagues, staring out of the car window. Giulio and I have a deal: if I get up before him, I have to wake him gently, ask him what he is dreaming about and suggest a good ending. He then goes back to sleep and tells me what happened later. Duccio stands in front of the mirror ruffling his shiny black hair. He hates the way Ama combs it neatly to the side, every night, before he goes to bed. If it weren’t for our parents, he’d never wash his hair or change his clothes. Then no one would smile in the street or beam thirsty grins at him again. When Ama overhears our night-time whispering, she hisses a rustling ‘Ssssh, be quiet!’ and, in between her words, you can hear the pumping exhausts that choke her day, the sound of car doors slamming and the creasing of maps hiding roads that always carry on over the page.

Our hotels are usually within sight of the conference centres and we park the car in between hundreds of others. The rooms are teeming with fellow scientists and the foyers thick with greetings: ‘Meet my wife and children’, ‘I read your book’, ‘Will you be presenting your recent statistics?’

Ama jots down notes for Pado. Her memory sweeps backwards and forwards like the windscreen wipers on the car. She collects papers, remembers dates, faces and addresses. ‘Isn’t that xsthe pathologist from Stuttgart?’ she nudges Pado, writing down a name called up from the depths of her sleepless mind.

Ama is Pado’s translator too. She translates his speeches and articles, rolls out the languages he needs. She says the important thing is never to have an accent. That’s why no one ever knows where she comes from, not even her. Pado doesn’t care about accents, and whatever language he speaks, it sounds like Italian. If we have the room next to our parents, we can hear Ama correcting Pado, stopping and insisting on an intonation. Pado listens to her, running the cold bathroom tap over his toes, swollen from accelerating, foot down against the floor, all day long.

‘Please Gaspare, just try once more, for me,’ Ama pleads.

Then the rosary of Pado’s pronunciations starts up again and coils through the wall that divides us, an echoing rhythm to sleep to.

When we don’t even have time to stop in a hotel, we rush into roadside bars and hurry the waiters with ‘no time to waste’ sandwiches. Then we race back to the car and drive into the night, humped over our knees and our mother wide-eyed in the darkness. Pado uses the time to rehearse his speeches: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, members of the scientific community …’ He presents his findings on smoking and the different aspects of lung congestion to the cold windscreen with Ama’s lost face painted into the glass.

3

Our car rarely breaks down. ‘It’s a stroke of luck’, say the mechanics. The outside is so dirty it has tiny furrows of green growing along the edges, and tinges of grime on the bonnet that suck up the sliding rain like silent parched mouths. Ama wishes the car would conk out from time to time, simply shudder to a standstill like a wounded car should. Behind her closed eyes, she longs for the sound of the engine spluttering, the slow, burning smell of overheating or the sudden scrape of the exhaust as it finally drops onto the road.

‘Cars only break down if they’re left in garages’, that’s how Pado sees it.

Ama has a big bin at her feet to keep the seats tidy. She’ll take everything except eggshells. They smell and turn grey, so you have to wait for the country lanes and roll down your window to throw them into a bush. Sometimes we miss and Pado tells us it doesn’t matter as eggshells rot fast. Ama is not so sure, she reckons they take years to blend into the earth. That means that there must be eggshell everywhere we’ve been, a thousand jagged fragments dotted around Europe, under bushes, lining puddles in the road.

The car dashboard has dark rings of wood that project weaving patterns onto the rear window in the sun. From time to time, Ama brings out a dusting cloth and polishes it. She keeps the cloth in the glove compartment next to her music tapes. She has ten tapes in all, stacked into two piles of five. Pado keeps his tapes separate, crammed into the pouch to the side of his seat. Ama’s cassettes are all of Liszt. Pado’s are all Verdi. The agreement is that Liszt is for the gentle drives through open countryside, whilst Verdi is for motorways and driving fast, books fluttering in the wind. At least, that’s how it’s meant to be, but Pado is always in a hurry and Liszt rarely makes it out of the glove compartment. If Ama does manage to get a Liszt cassette, it’s only because Pado knows that, sooner or later, as the curves and bends speed up, we are going to have to have Verdi and nothing else. As Ama’s eyes are beginning to brush the leaves outside, floating to the notes of her Liszt, Pado lowers the volume until the music is inaudible, until Liszt merges with the indicator and the murmuring of the tyres against the hard tarmac. Then he pulls out his Verdi cassette, one hand on the wheel and the other on the tape machine, and plugs in opera music at top volume. Ama might be lost in tree tops, curled around distant twigs, but she sits up immediately.

‘Where’s my tape?’ she snaps and stretches for the volume button, her ears ringing with noise.

Pado stops her, ‘We have to push on.’

Ama retreats into hostile mutterings, her smothered complaints frothing out of the windows, trickling down the sides of the car.

Our parents’ struggles last for a while, falling and rising, depending on the traffic ahead or the volume on the tape machine. If Pado is still shouting, ‘It’s bloody Verdi or nothing at all!’, he speeds up to prove his point, chin up against the wheel. His foot pumps the accelerator in an outraged, stamping skip. The car surges forward, shooting ahead like a ball. We bounce over bumps, scrape along walls, hoot people off zebra crossings. Ama stares into her lap, her white hands twitch and fidget with the folds of her dress. She breathes out slowly, at regular intervals, to keep calm. After a few near misses, and as the arrow of the speedometer wrenches at its dial, she hovers her fingers menacingly above the hand brake.

‘Stop Gaspare, you’re going far too fast!’ she yells.

Pado waits to see if she’ll touch the hand brake. Ama turns to her door instead and threatens to open it unless he slows down. Pado drives on, faster and faster. In the back, we watch as Ama opens her door onto the world, widening the gap little by little, the tarmac appearing, swelling into the car until it is running like a frenzied conveyor belt beneath us. The noise of the wheels floods in. Pado won’t take any notice. Duccio tries to convince him. I bow my head, so as not to see. Giulio edges away from the gaping hole, clutching onto his seat. I can feel him pressing his shoulder into me, the way it shakes when he cries. Pado nudges up to the car in front, to the point of touching. Duccio leans over us and pulls in Ama’s door, yanking against the force of the wind and her frozen grasp. Then the car in front skids out of the way, scared by our racing, and we screech to a halt. Ama steps out of the car. She stands silent for a while, in front of us, and then, with spat breath, she turns to Pado: ‘You fucking idiot!’

Ama walks away, crosses fields, kicks dust at the side of the road. We trail behind her, Pado’s window down.

‘Please get back in.’

She ignores him. She stops to look at flowers, picks up stones, folds her arms or runs her hands through the air. She can cut across whole meadows, her head hung low, and disappear into woods to be alone. When she becomes a little wisp on the horizon, Pado jumps out of the car and rushes off after her. Ama can see him coming and she runs to avoid his apologies and smiles, storming over the road into the fields the other side. Cars overtake and slow down to watch our parents racing to and fro, refusing embraces and finally walking back, arm in arm.

Pado is explaining fast. ‘I’m sorry, I really am.’

Ama cries until he has to shout it so loud that all the crows in the trees are thrown up like black seeds sowing the sky with their crops of regret. Then we know it’s time for us to get out of the car and for them to get in. We sit together, hands in our pockets, or in the fields, scratching our fingers in the mud, watching our parents, each on their front seat, trying to sort this out again. We can stay like this for a while, the three of us lined up, a few metres in front of the car, observing the wide windscreen crammed with our parents’ heads. If one of the side-windows is lowered, I creep up close. Snippets of conversation slip out unnoticed. Ama gasps out her splintered words, the rolls of reasons why she can’t carry on with the endless driving, all the conferences and translating. Pado tries to convince her. Ama wraps her refusal around herself and repeats, ‘It’s not a life, Gaspare, it’s not a life.’

I watch Pado’s reaction. His eyes are twitching with arguments. He too has lists, long lists of valid reasons to carry on, lists like row upon row of microscopic slides and, on each slide, more and more reasons. Ama says she no longer knows what is fixed and what is gone. She listens to Pado, but she can’t see herself any more. The never-ending motion of the car is ploughing through his lists, through the days, on and on.

We get back in the car, the seats taut with unresolved temper. To calm matters down, Pado puts on one of the story tapes he and Ama have recorded for us. Ama has imitated the pigs from Animal Farm and Pado has taken on The Three Musketeers in a special battling tone. Occasionally, in the middle of a story, Ama and Pado break into hysterical laughter, struggling to put on an accent or pronounce an unpronounceable word. Their recorded, crackling giggles fill the car, pushing back the resentment and anger. In the background of the tapes, you can hear doors banging, a dog barking and Giulio. He always insists on being present when the tapes are made. He’s even managed to get a slot on a cassette to tell us a joke. Every time that tape comes on, he asks to listen to it over and over again, rewinding and rewinding, until one day it gets so chewed that the machine spits out knotted loops of music and squashed-chicken jokes.

The tapes, in the cramped swinging car, can mingle with thoughts in my mind and change into fears that stick like headaches, at least I call them headaches. There’s no other way of describing them. The headaches come on stronger as the motorways rush their white broken lines into a sickly mess or when the little petrol sign suddenly flicks on red. I watch it waver for a while and then it jams on redder than before, a stain that won’t go as the last drops of petrol slip away into the engine. I go to warn Ama. The sight of her tense shoulders stops me. I pull back, not daring to touch her.

I hesitate, then pat Pado on the arm instead. ‘The light! Look at the petrol light!’

‘It’s all right,’ he answers, ‘I’m sure we can manage another thirty kilometres to the next petrol station. Well done for noticing.’

But how can it be all right? There’s no petrol station anywhere and the road is hurtling itself further and further into the distance. I watch the kilometres tick past, hoping that Ama won’t realise that we are going to grind to a halt with juggernauts and trucks flying about us like leaves in a storm. I concentrate on the stories on the tapes instead. Some manage to calm me. Others bring on a smarting-cut punch between the eyes, the blurring of shadows along the road, the memories of number-plates uncounted. I focus on my brothers’ elbows skewering me. I hold on to that niggling pain, catching like a nail on my skin. I breathe softly, slowly, in and out, but my head leaks, a punctured bowl emptying. The unwanted thoughts, the thoughts I’ve turned back a thousand times, suddenly come, and once they’ve come, they’re shoved aside by new ones, tumbling, falling into my head. My mouth is full of them. I try not to attach words to them. They swim, crippled without letters stuck to their sides, and then that’s it. They trick me. They catch me out. They take shape and snatch words, glue them to themselves. I shut myself off from the car, the perpetual swaying, the rub of its wheels, but I can’t blot out the humming of unsolicited thoughts as they dress themselves faster and faster in aching words and images. I listen to the stories on the tapes again. I reinvent new endings, swap characters with others. I create images and thoughts to wipe everything away. I stop. I start. I warn. I save. The petrol sign is redder and redder and no one is doing anything about it.

Pado looks calm. It might be all right. We might get away with it this time. I look at the cars rushing past. I follow them closely. Then that’s it. A thought springs up inside me again. What if the last drop of petrol has just gone and we’re about to slam to a halt right here in the middle of the motorway and we can’t get out of the car and the lorry behind us swerves and hits the car in front and the car in front spins round and starts coming back the other way? Why did I think that? I didn’t think that really. Look at the lorry. Quick, a word for the driver – ‘Don’t die’ – but then the lorry overtakes and slips into the distance before I have time to say my word for it. What if the driver goes round the corner now and ploughs into the road, tunnelling into the cracked grey surface of the tarmac? What if we shoot round the corner after him, straight into the piled-up cars in front? I hold on to myself and it’s as if I’m pulling on a string of words, till like a chain they dance me away. I silently repeat ‘We mustn’t crash! We can’t crash!’ – I yell it to myself so hard that my ears are singing. I call for help, but no one can hear. I see faces from the morning, cars that passed us by. That staring woman, that crying girl, that dog with a blue collar, tossing and turning its head through the wound down window. I imagine our grandfather, Grand Maurice, fighting and writhing against the water that choked him. I see his face slipping, his feet digging in to the sinking mud, his mouth, his eyes, his ears filling with the lake. Then his face mingles with faces from yesterday and more faces from the day before that, and number-plates, and cars and the motorways they were on. What were the people in the cars doing? What language were they speaking? The days and towns slide past. I can’t remember, but I must remember. What number-plate? What car? I put my hands over my eyes. A spiralling headache comes on full blast. The pain arrows through my eyes and I can’t think at all. I’m overturned by a dizziness that flicks me up and down inside.