Christobel Kent - Dead Season

It had never failed her, not through all the chemo and the surgery, the bruising cannulae, the drips and the hospital wards and the vomiting in the dark. And not for the first time Sandro wondered where Luisa got it from, all that certainty.

Wednesday

The sky had changed overnight; the breath of wind had dropped and, while they slept, it had closed over them like a lid, white-hot. As Roxana climbed off her motorino by the river and removed her helmet, it seemed to her that the city was nothing more than a cauldron, and they were boiling in it like the damned.

As soon as he got back from the seaside, she would talk to the boss. Prioritize , Maria Grazia had said on the phone last night. Make a list of how you need your life to change, and take it one step at a time.

Leaning over the parapet for a moment, Roxana could still feel the helmet’s pressure on the back of her neck and her temples, where it had made her sweat; she knew sweat was designed to lower the body temperature, but it didn’t seem to be working.

In the centre of the river, a bleached stick emerged from the clogged green, a crested bird perched on it, head cocked to look down into the water. Roxana thought that surely there could be nothing living in there; like every Florentine with any choice in the matter, the fish would have moved along to cooler, faster waters.

There was time for a coffee this morning; Roxana had left a good half-hour earlier than usual. Leaving Mamma in the kitchen on her knees in housecoat and rubber gloves, cleaning out cupboards and muttering angrily. Better the fierce, furious, energetic mother she’d always known growing up, than the fearful, gentle, clinging one who increasingly seemed to be taking her over? Roxana thought so.

Last night, for the first time in eight years, Roxana had smoked a cigarette, and not just one, either. When Violetta had finally shuffled upstairs to bed, with a small glass of warm milk, Roxana had gone into the salotto , where neither she nor her mother ever went except to put another coat of polish on the huge Biedermeier dining table. As if sleepwalking herself, Roxana had gone straight for the inlaid box where Dad kept American cigarettes for visitors, had taken a handful, dry and light as dead leaves, felt the cool weight of her father’s old Zippo in her hand and then she’d stopped. The smell of lavender wax and stale air, the solid pieces of heavy, old-fashioned furniture around her — the sideboard from her grandmother’s house, the upholstered chairs, the glass-fronted display cabinet — familiar in every detail even in the dark, the ugly roll-down shutters: it had all suddenly borne down on Roxana like a landslip, and she felt as though she was about to lose her balance. So she backed out, as far as the front door and beyond, out on to the porch, leaning against the dusty plaster and looking into the street. Quiet as the grave.

Lighting up, she’d taken one drag of the stale cigarette, practically coughed up her lungs, and had walked in the hot night down the road to the machine outside the tobacconist’s to buy a half-pack of MS. On the way back home, as she’d listened to the trickle of the river — a tributary of the Arno — that ran through the suburb unseen, through bamboo thickets and culverts, the heat if anything had seemed to be intensifying.

She’d stood in the garden and smoked among the feathery branches of a big unwieldy shrub her father had loved. There was bougainvillea too, growing up the back of the house, a moth-eaten banana palm, and a fig tree whose fruit was just ripening. She’d heard a whine and slapped fast and hard at her calf; the river drew the mosquitoes. She’d put out the cigarette then and gone inside to get a moon tiger, the coiled incense burner whose smoke was supposed to keep them away. Listening in the hall she’d heard Ma snoring at last, a soft, regular sound through the door. She’d been exhausted, poor old thing.

Sitting at the table in front of their empty bowls, Roxana had interrogated her mother as gently as she could.

‘Was it — one of those people trying to sell you something, Mamma?’

What had been starting to worry Roxana was not the stupid phone call, but Ma’s reaction to it, standing there in the gloomy hall in her slippers, about to burst into tears. The forgetfulness, the panic, the disproportionate anxiety over the whole business.

‘You know,’ Roxana had said, trying not to sound impatient. ‘Mobile phone, or internet or something?’

‘Oh, no,’ Ma had said then, and her face had seemed to clear. ‘Oh, no, nothing like that. She was — a friend of yours maybe? She called you by your name-’

‘Oh, Ma,’ Roxana had said, in despair, ‘they all do that. It’s a kind of trick. A selling tool.’

‘A trick?’ Her poor face falling all over again. ‘I don’t think so. She was upset. She was really upset.’

And now, twelve hours later, Roxana was as far from being ready for work as she’d ever been, her mouth sour from the cigarettes and lack of sleep. She stood outside the only bar near work that was open — the Bar dell’Orafo, an exhausted little tourist dive tucked into a subterranean archway behind the bank — and she considered. Considered how few friends she actually had, friends who would call her if they were upset. Maria Grazia was about it — and she’d spoken to Maria Grazia. Eventually.

Across the street, a garbage truck squealed and hissed into position beside two big dumpsters, the noise alone enough to drown out Roxana’s thoughts. The Bar dell’Orafo seemed pretty quiet, and looking through the window Roxana relented: it wasn’t such a bad little place. Who didn’t serve tourists, in this city? The pastries would be no good — only a handful of pasticcere worked through August, just as very few bakers did, and the very thought of those ovens blazing brought Roxana out into another sweat — but the coffee would be fine.

She went inside, ordered a glass of water and a cappuccino, no chocolate on top. Orlando, the wizened, moustachioed barman, made it with ridiculous care, pouring the milk to make an oakleaf shape in the foam. Either oakleaf or heart; if she’d been a different sort of woman she’d have got a heart, maybe, but Roxana liked the leaf better, anyway. Orlando was the middle of seven children, he’d once told her; not much elbow room in his life; perhaps that was why he was working through August, too.

The coffee was excellent, in fact. Someone standing outside the open door was smoking, and for a second Roxana thought, what the hell. The security guard can wait on the door until Val arrives, ten minutes late as he always is. Stay in this little bolthole half an hour, have another, borrow a cigarette, be five, ten minutes late to work. Life’s too short. Just for a second.

Maria Grazia had heard her inhale on the phone last night, when she had paused for breath herself in the middle of singing the praises of her Romanian forest and lecturing Roxana on how to take control of her life. And had started shouting down the line at her. Are you mad? Do you remember that bronchitis three years ago? Do you remember how many times you’ve told me that giving up was the best thing you ever did?

‘Maria,’ she’d said, and it might have been the nicotine rush but it seemed to Roxana that just hearing the words coming out of her own mouth had made her dizzy, ‘I think Violetta — I think Ma might be losing it. I mean-’ taking a deep breath, ‘I think she might be getting dementia.’

Maria Grazia had gone very quiet. When she spoke eventually Roxana could hear the strained note in her voice. ‘Over one phone call? Forgetting to take a message?’

‘It’s not just the phone call,’ Roxana had said.