The Water-Breather

4

The trickiest thing about travelling from England to France or Belgium and back is the Channel ferry. You have to join endless queues of cars well in advance and have a ticket with an arrival time that is an hour behind or in front of where you are coming from. The last bit of the drive to the port is always silent. There’s nothing to say, except that Pado hates having to be early for a boat and Ama can’t stand the smells and noises of the ferry. She checks the trees on the roadsides for the slightest sign of a storm at sea. We look with her, waiting in dread, for the cutting rain, the litter-carrying gusts, the dance of cars, from side to side, along the motorway in the wind.

The signposts to the ferry seem to change constantly and Pado’s shortcuts lead us to areas where there’s never a shop to buy fresh bread or a place to fill up with petrol. We’re always running late. When we ask someone the way, no one can understand Pado’s distorted French and he drives on frustrated, leaving passers-by in mid-sentence, mouths wide open, until he finds a person who can answer him properly. Duccio normally reckons he’s worked out the route anyway. Pado is sure he’s recognised the road ahead.

‘It’s this way,’ he says.

‘But that last man told us it was in the other direction!’ Ama protests.

‘He wasn’t from around here,’ Pado insists.

‘How the hell do you know?’

‘I do, that’s all. It was obvious.’

Duccio quietly folds his map back together. He turns the top of the page inwards, just in case.

‘Thanks all the same,’ Ama reassures Duccio, loud enough for Pado to hear. She curls her arm behind her seat to touch Duccio’s knee. He hesitates a moment, then edges away, abandoning Ama’s hand to itself.

We pass at least five public lavatories, but we’re not allowed to stop because Pado assures us his Italian university book on venereology is still a reference. He has it with him at all times.

‘Page forty-one,’ he says, pointing to his case.

Ama opens the book and scrunches up her face as she reads that ‘virulent germs and potential diseases are everywhere, particularly in places of scant hygiene such as public toilets’. Then she turns the pages quickly to avoid looking at the photographs too long.

‘How hideous!’ she winces. ‘Is that what happens in acute cases of gonorrhoea?’

Pado nods and, from over Ama’s shoulder, I can see pictures jumping out at me, like squashed animals on the road, stuck between people’s legs. Giulio says he doesn’t care about the photographs or any disease or anything, but he is going to burst if he doesn’t get to a loo soon.

Pado tells him to quieten down: ‘Men can hold on.’

Ama is sure that it is harder for women and then that’s it because Pado says: ‘How come everything is so much more difficult for women?’

‘That’s not what I meant at all,’ Ama protests.

‘Then why say it like that?’

It all comes down to the fact that Ama was brought up in England and it’s not a place to live because people don’t speak their mind and have to make little, snide comments instead. It’s not as if you can’t make little comments in Italy though.

In fact, we used to have a potty, but that ended when Giulio made it overflow. He was telling Duccio to move over, and not looking, and then it was too late. Streams of pee were flooding the car and Ama was screaming ‘Get out!’ in English, French and Italian all at once. The pee made a stain on the floor and layers of antiseptic wipes won’t make it go away. If the days are hot and the car is warm, a faint smell rises in your nose.

Ama likes to find her own quiet spot to pee. As the only woman in the car, she tells us she has a right to be alone. She points at trees and behind bushes, forces us down lanes. Pado always has a different spot in mind.

‘Here’s perfect! Perfetto.’

‘No Gaspare, not here, please.’

‘Why, it’ll do fine.’

‘No, not here.’

‘For goodness’ sake, who cares?’

‘I do!’

‘I’m going to stop here.’

‘No, go on a bit.’

‘Why?’

‘There’s someone coming.’

‘Where?’

‘There, from behind that house.’

‘I can’t see a house.’

‘There!’

‘That’s not a house.’

‘What the hell is it then?’

‘It’s a barn.’

‘No, it’s not.’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘Please drive on! Look, there is somebody coming.’

‘That’s a fucking cow.’

‘Don’t get angry with me. I can’t believe this.’

‘You can’t believe what?’

‘I simply want a pee, you idiot.’

‘Don’t call me a fucking idiot.’

‘I didn’t, I said idiot.’

‘Come on, out you get. We’re all waiting.’

‘Carry on further! I’m not going anywhere near that cow.’

‘What? Why the hell not? It’s behind a fence.’

‘I know. I just don’t like it. I’m sorry, I’m not doing anything in front of that cow! Forget it, just forget it.’

‘Right. I’m stopping here, behind this tree.’

We stop under a tree, down a lane. The air is cold, and stripped, desolate farmland stretches all about and around. Pado turns the engine off. Ama won’t budge. She refuses to look at Giulio who is tapping her shoulder from behind. Then Duccio and I tap her on the shoulder too, ‘Go on, Ama, please have a pee! It’s all right here.’

‘Will you all stop getting at me! I don’t want to go any more,’ Ama yells, shrugging us off her. We shrink backwards into our seats and Pado kicks the accelerator so hard that the cows in the meadows stretch over their fences to watch the mud on our tyres being sprayed up into the air.

Crossing the Channel is not only dicey because of the rough seas, there are also Pado’s glass jars of preserved lungs and the histological slides for his colleagues to take into account. You have to explain them carefully to customs so Pado prefers to slip them under his seat with all the wine he’s jammed into every gap of the car.

‘Don’t take that much wine Gaspare, it’s not reasonable. You know what they’re like at customs,’ Ama tries wearily.

‘Bloody customs. Ridiculous limits!’ Pado won’t give up.

We divide the wine into ‘good friends’ and ‘acquaintances’. The good friends get labelled bottles carefully laid out under cheese, garlic and pâtés to hide their number. The acquaintances get cheap wine shoved under the back seat, huddled up against the floating organs in their jars.

‘Please tell me they are from an animal!’ Ama begs when she sees them.

Pado merely mutters ‘Yes, yes’ to Ama.

She’s not convinced, and nor are we, because it’s like the time Mr Yunnan first arrived. Mr Yunnan came in a jumble of brown cardboard boxes with numbers on them. Box one goes on box two and so on and so forth, until you have a whole body, or rather a skeleton, as Mr Yunnan has been dead for some time, maybe four or five years, Pado reckons. It was Giulio and I who gave him his name. The first time he was assembled, we couldn’t believe it was so complicated. Clicking the neck onto the spine was the hardest. Luckily, Pado had had delicate hinges fitted so he could rotate the bones to face all his colleagues in the back rows. He says that’s how he describes the kind of deformation of the ribs that can happen with lung inflammation and something about osteoclastic pitting of the bones.

Ama was sure the skeleton was plastic. ‘Look how the finger bones are joined together! Isn’t it fantastic what they can do nowadays! The knees bend, and the feet!’

That was before she read the certificate, half in English, half in Chinese, which said that Professor Gaspare Messina has the right to carry human skeleton number 76455 for professional purposes.

‘There’s nothing to get het up about,’ Pado reassured Ama. ‘He’s dead. I got him through a special deal with the Chinese government, in Yunnan Province. It’s the cheapest and best place for skeletons because they’re generally in good nick when they arrive.’

Ama couldn’t look Mr Yunnan’s way. She was speechless. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I need this skeleton for my work. It’s fine.’

‘It’s fine to drive around with someone’s bones in our car is it? What next Gaspare? What bloody next?’ Ama gasped.

We looked at Mr Yunnan. This extra presence. This unassembled, severed set of bones that we had touched with our own bare hands. It was only when Pado explained that you could tell he was a young man and that he might well have been a prisoner, that I knew that the hinge at the base of his neck was fastened to the point where the executioner shot the bullet that ripped his life away. I knew it. It grew inside me, an unwanted thought that has stayed in my head ever since.

‘He may have died naturally,’ Duccio announced, but he wasn’t convinced either.

He just said it the way Pado insists that Mr Yunnan gave his life for Science, or the way Ama quietly swallows and tells us that nothing is going to bring back our grandfather, Grand Maurice, now that he’s dead and drowned in a lake in France. You only have to read Pado’s books to see that there’s no turning back: the organs laid out on metal trays, the close-up pinkish patterns with diagrams, the weight of a lung lying alone without a body. Most people don’t give their names, Pado says. They merely die and get cut up and photographed. But the tumour, on page four of Pado’s cancer book, has a name tag to the side of it. It’s too small to read.

5

Once on the ferry, the oil-salt smell of the car deck clouded with car fumes, the sound of motors and creaking chains, and the gentle rock of waves get Giulio going. He complains that he’s feeling sick and Ama can’t answer because she can feel it too, a slow vertigo taste that rises from the stomach to lodge in the throat. Pado is convinced ‘it’s all in the mind’. He takes us on a tour of the duty-free shop to pass the time. Giulio is wavering. He can barely walk straight. Pado scoops him up and, as he does so, a stream of sick flies out of Giulio’s mouth. It drips down Pado’s front like a tie and onto the floor. Ama hurries to the cash till to ask for some tissues. She fights against the same lurching, retching urge in her mouth. She stops on a bench and breathes in deeply.

Pado is holding Giulio by the back of his jumper, out in front of him, at arm’s length. ‘Che schifo! Oh no! No! Bloody hell,’ he grumbles, half sorry, half irate. He turns his head away to avoid the smell. Already people are changing direction. A woman with grey hair gingerly steps out of the way and sighs something to herself.

‘Sorry, what did you say? Something wrong?’ Pado hurls at her. She backs away, aghast. Pado pursues her down the corridor, carrying Giulio with him, dangling in mid air, from his sagging jumper. ‘Go on!’ Pado shouts at the woman, ‘if you’ve got something to say, say it. Go on, if you dare, ma va …!’ Giulio swings, crying. He hangs limply above the ground, pushing with his legs against Pado’s arm to get down. Ama staggers to her feet.

‘Put the child down,’ she shrieks at Pado. Then it seems as if all the people on the ferry spin round and watch us, everything stopping, no one but us, perched alone on the sea.

Giulio is sick again. It splatters against the floor and slides with the rock of the ship, this way and that. Pado turns to face the glares. ‘Cosa, what? What is it?’

Ama snatches Giulio from Pado and holds him tight to her chest. She cuddles his head against her. ‘It’s all right my darling, calm down! How are you feeling?’ Giulio shivers a little, a ring of multicoloured sick printed on his lips, and on Ama’s shirt. Pado has got into an argument with one of the stewards. His shouting competes with the noise of the loudspeakers. Ama suddenly grabs me by the arm too and drags me off to find the cabins, with Giulio draped across her shoulder. ‘Come on, get a move on!’

I try and tell Duccio where we’re going. I wave and point down the corridor in front of us, urging him to get a move on. He can’t though, he’s guarding the luggage, a heap of leather and cloth shapes, as high as him.

‘Hang on! What about Pado?’ I say, running beside Ama.

‘Well hopefully he won’t bloody find us!’

We settle in our cabin. We each get a bunk-bed, except Giulio, who has to sleep in the middle, on the floor, in a nest of blankets and jumpers. Ama puts a bowl next to him, in case. We can hear the drinking crowds, with heavy feet, drumming the decks. The pinball machines throw up money and children run, falling between adult legs. From inside the cabin, it sounds like pots and pans knocking in a kitchen cupboard. Pado and Duccio show up, towing the luggage behind them along the corridors. They stack it up next to Giulio on the floor. Pado drops Ama’s bag onto the end of her bunk. It’s a shiny bag she got free from a department store. Pado reckons that’s typically English liking something just because it’s free. The problem with that, Ama argues, is that she’s always typically something when it suits Pado: typically English, typically French, typically Slovenian, typically Dutch. Anyway she’s convinced Pado is typically Italian, even if the mix with the Sicilian bit, she says, has managed to make him look Arabic.

Ama’s bag is splitting at the seams with things although Pado is always telling her to travel with the strict minimum, especially clothes. In fact, he says, you only ever need two of everything because you can wash one item whilst you wear the other. It doesn’t happen that way because Ama has piles of clothes she buys when waiting for Pado to leave his meetings and conferences. The car is barely big enough to hold them all and Pado has to scatter them everywhere to pack the boot, knickers scrunched under the spare tyre, tights between pages of reports, trousers and skirts rolled down the sides of bags. Ama intervenes from time to time: ‘No, don’t put that under that, it’ll crumple’ or ‘I need to be able to get at that later!’ There’s no reply. A bit like when you lean over into the front seats and ask: ‘How much further?’ Then there’s silence. Ama’s bag is also brimming with little bundles of antiseptic wipes in plastic coating. She has kilometres of dental floss too. Before going to bed, she hands out the floss, a good length to each of us to begin sawing at our gums. She’s sure there must be a bit of food stuck somewhere, lost between the back teeth, rubbing against the tongue, refusing to give. Then Ama has her books, lots of them. They are stashed beneath her clothes. She has at least five on the go at once, mostly French and English novels. That’s what she’s always read, ever since she was a child and Grand Maurice lent her new books each day. The two of them would spend hours reading out passages, comparing impressions. Then, as we started travelling, they would write long letters to each other, quoting lines, discussing endings. Now Ama sits up alone at night and reads whilst the rest of us doze off. She has a pocket lamp and it skips up and down the lines across the bed and into the dark with tense flicks of the wrist. Sometimes, we see her in the morning, half asleep, half awake, a book caught between her thumb and forefinger, as if the weight of the story has forced her to give up.

In Pado’s case are reviews and reports bound together with wide clips and bold red writing: ‘Embargo’, ‘Confidential’ or ‘Draft’. He leafs through them, making annotations, or catching Ama’s eye to read a passage about a clinical trial and ask for the exact translation in Italian. Ama invents a word for him, the way she does when she can’t sleep, new words to lift her away, heal the worries, pack the empty spaces of the night. She spins off idioms, chases unknown verbs, multiplies and conjugates the languages in her mind. That’s why all Pado’s colleagues ask for Ama’s translations. She knows what’s behind a phrase, the meaning that everyone is searching for but cannot find. Pado cannot dwell on translation though. There’s no time to waste. If he doesn’t analyse his reports and trials quickly, people across the world might start taking new medicines without realising that their lungs are being colonised by cysts and disease.

When we’ve rummaged through our bags and flossed our teeth, we all begin getting our beds ready, trying to make head or tail of the flimsy bunk sheets and the rock-hard pillows. Ama gives up. She’s not going to sleep anyway and doesn’t really care. The captain’s voice comes over on the loudspeakers.

‘I wish that stronzo would shut the hell up,’ Pado murmurs half asleep. I strain to hear what is being said above the locking cabin doors and stamping corridors.

Duccio looks at me. ‘I bet you there’s going to be another storm.’

Why did he say that? Eventually the captain’s voice trails off into an alarm noise: ‘If you hear this sound, get out of your cabin immediately, leaving any belongings behind, and make your way to the nearest lifeboat station.’

I listen to the three test blasts of the emergency alarm. They stab at me, dig deep inside, indelible reminders. Three short sharp slashes of panic.

I am uncomfortable. My left foot is poking out of the sheet and blanket, and every time I feel a wave knocking at the boat, I’m sure it’s a piece of jagged driftwood. The ferry mows over it and we all drink and sleep and run along the corridors not knowing that the wood is swinging its way round the motors to smash a hole in the hull to sink us. I quickly stick my head in the pillow and think of something else. Then I awake with the sound of waves again and stare into the bunks. Pado is grinding his teeth, his jaw twitching. Everyone is asleep, even Ama! I struggle out of bed and check, up close. I stand there looking at her. Her nostrils are moving softly. There is a faint band of light across her cheek from the torch she is still clutching in her hand. I study the fine lines under her eyes which, she says, grow a little deeper every night she can’t sleep. I watch the hem of the sheet flutter slightly with her breath. I can’t believe it. She really is asleep! I delve into Pado’s bag. I get his camera and position myself near the door. The flash goes off and Ama sits bolt upright. She knocks her head on the bunk above and shouts for the light. I scramble for my bed.

Ama is screeching: ‘You idiot, espèce de crétin!’ and I’m crying because she has to be really angry to shout at me in French, even if I was trying to help her by proving that she might have been asleep. Everyone is awake now and telling me I’m stupid. Ama looks weary. Maybe she wasn’t sleeping after all. Maybe she’s never slept. Not ever. Closing your eyes doesn’t mean anything. That’s only resting, but the mind goes on and on, pleading for a second, just a second of sleep, to soothe the swelling of continual waking and thoughts. I lay my head against the sheet and crease its whiteness with my toes.

The night seems interminable now with the clinking of chains and the rush of sea under the boat. People are walking and staggering along the corridors about us. Occasionally there’s a shout as my eyes are shutting or a lazily-held bag knocks against the walls. Between three and four o’clock in the morning, someone tries our door by mistake. The handle jumps up and down, followed by, ‘Shit, it’s the next deck up!’ These are enough words to wake me completely. I shake, following the shuddering movement of the carpet-covered ceiling. I’m sure I heard a thundering wave charge against the ship. I can feel it, rising up above the others, ready to slap us out of the water. I get up and open the door a little. There’s no one in sight. I shut it again quickly. Maybe they’ve already sounded the alarm? In the half-light of the cabin, I look at the evacuation instructions on the back of the door. All the figures are wearing life jackets. Where are ours? I peer under the bunk. I can’t see them anywhere. I finally spot a bundle of material tucked away by the base of the bunk ladder. If I stretch too far though, I’ll wake up Pado and he’ll make me get back into bed and then no one will hear the alarm or have time to get out of the cabin as the waves turn us over. Why did I think that? My heart drums in my throat, pushing at my head. My mind inflates with television and newspaper disaster images, stories of shipwrecks, corpses floating in the sea and boats smashed against rocks with the spray of the water dancing in the air. I watch the light from the corridor under the door. I imagine the water seeping in. A drop at first, then two, then a stream and then a wave that bursts through doors and comes bellowing down the corridors and stairwells. I see the ship filling with water as we struggle to reach our life jackets and Pado yelling and Ama yanking Giulio from the floor with the sea currents curling over us.

‘We can’t sink. The ferry mustn’t sink.’ I start saying it, slowly, continuously.

I’m thinking of Grand Maurice and how the water of the lake must have pushed open his mouth, poured between his teeth and flooded through his body down under the reeds. He lay at the bottom of the lake for a week, with his eyes and ears and nose clogged with water, before they found him. I know that if I’d been fishing with him, it wouldn’t have happened. He wouldn’t have slipped in the water. He couldn’t have.

‘We mustn’t sink. We can’t sink.’ Over and over again, I trip out the words.

I feel the door quiver a little with the long heavy corridor silence. Is there anyone on the ship? Maybe we are the only ones left as the boat drifts out of control towards the convulsing open sea. Maybe everyone is already jumping onto the lifeboats, scrambling and screaming for help? My head is pumping. I push against the door with my feet. If I hold the door back, we’ll be all right. We’ll be saved.

I’m shivering and I don’t know if it’s the cold or the rush off the top of the waves that are about to come and drown us. I pull a blanket over me. I shove my back hard against the door, my eyes peering down at the gap underneath it, waiting for the trickle of water to begin. My head hurts so much.