Sara Alexander - The Last Concerto

Alba twisted back to her teacher’s squawk, answerless.

‘Well?’

‘She’s doing shows at the old witch’s house, signora! Thinks herself quite the little maestro!’ Mario called out from his desk next to hers. The boys around him fell into confused whispers. Alba shot him a look. It made everyone but him avert their eyes.

‘I will speak to your mother if this continues to affect your school day in this way, mark my words.’

Bullseye. Alba sank.

‘Does she make you play for all her cronies?’ Mario whispered out of the corner of his mouth as Alba swung onto her hard chair. His friend on the next desk sniggered. She gave an extra lift of her backpack and it missed Mario’s face by a hair.

‘Go to hell,’ Mario spat.

Alba let her biology textbook thud onto her desk, hoping she wouldn’t be the first one called on.

‘Fresu, you may come up for interrogazione , seeing as you wish everyone to notice you this morning.’ Alba felt her shoulders heave an involuntary defeat. She stood up, ignoring Mario’s smirk. The teacher took a breath, pulled down her light brown sweater over the mounds of her breasts and abdomen, peered over the rim of her glasses, and launched her assault. As Alba returned to her desk, relieved she had memorized the chapter on osmosis better than she had expected – much to the frustration of her teacher, who was looking forward to having an excuse to send her out – she couldn’t ignore the smart of shrapnel left by her threat.

When the bell rang at one o’clock, the concrete building thrummed with the swagger of sweaty adolescence, corridors thick with hormonal bodies pushing for escape. Alba adjusted the strap on her backpack, feeling the weight of her textbooks pull down on her shoulders. The throng was an unbearable cacophony, walls of intersecting discordance pushing in like a vice. A familiar panic bubbled in her abdomen. Her fingers raced up and down her thigh, clinging to Bach like a mast; the quicker they scurried, the louder the music in her head rose above the din like a white light.

The music came to a violent stop as a boy was pushed towards her, falling onto her back. Her knees buckled. The concrete met them with a painful blow. She reared underneath the weight with such force that the teenagers around her pressed back against the corridor walls. Her jet-black hair flung out in all directions, a horse flaying against the stable door. She twisted underneath the boy. He fell beside her, banging his head on the ground.

That’s when she recognized her only friend.

‘ O Dio , Raffaele – I’m so sorry.’ They stood up, sniggering teenagers pushing around them.

‘Look at the lovebirds,’ someone shouted.

‘Don’t talk shit!’ Mario yelled from the opposite end of the corridor by the door to the yard. ‘He wouldn’t know where to stick it even if you told him!’

Thunderous laughter now. Alba’s cheeks deepened.

‘Don’t listen to those cretins, Alba,’ Raffaele whispered, scratching his head. Alba watched a few flakes of dandruff tumble down from his scalp over his forehead.

‘Did I break anything?’ Alba asked, feeling the sea of hormones wash behind her, blotting out the crackling voices, loose coins jangling in a pocket. Raffaele looked down at her, his huge black eyes sullen in his white face, small eruptions of acne threatening his cheeks. He launched into typical high-gear chatter. It reminded Alba of the passage she’d practised that morning. As always, he deflected the situation with a long explanation of algebraic logic from his morning’s math class. His familiar patter was reassuring. His rhythm rambled, sprouting shoots of tangential thoughts like weeds, filling the air Alba left bare.

‘So I decided that if I switched my approach, I could actually unpick the correct calculation. I think it just proves that maths is inherently a creative art. Like people always like to split us into artists or scientists, don’t you think? But it’s all bullshit because when I’m asking myself “what if”, it’s just the same as someone dreaming up something. Because that’s what I’m doing. Seeing an imagined list of outcomes and calculating which one is going to get me the result I need. You following?’

Alba watched Raffaele pull a skim of skin from around his nail with his front teeth.

‘Want to walk?’ she asked.

They crossed the forecourt, cutting through the cackles of the young girls and the clattering jeers of the boys. The noise grated, treble, discordant.

‘Hang on a second,’ Raffaele said, swinging his backpack round and reaching inside for a panino . Despite near constant eating, the boy was a spindle. He ripped the bread in two, a flap of prosciutto hung out the side beneath a thin slice of fontina cheese. He reached it out to her. ‘You want?’

Alba took it and sank her teeth in.

‘Mamma won’t stop checking my food. I swear she knows when I throw it away. Which of course I don’t because that’s a waste but what do I do when I’m not hungry? Seriously, feeding you is the only way I can stop Mamma launching into her lecture about the dangers of calorific and vitamin deficiencies in adolescence.’

Alba laughed. He was the only person who could make her do that.

‘Algorithmically speaking it’s complete nonsense. But she’s a Sardinian mother and she doesn’t care about the fact that I love numbers more than her. Correction, she is in fact threatened by that. She doesn’t even try to understand that. But she wouldn’t because she’s a doctor and she fixes things. And so do I. Only with my pencil and my brain. I got top marks for calculus today. There are people who do that all day. Did you know there are people who do that all day, Alba?’

They fell into hungry silence for a moment, chomping down on their halves of crusty roll, flicking off the flakes crumbling onto their sweaters as they strode downhill from the high school. Its large yellow concrete façade rose up behind them, overlooking a small park space with a rusting slide and metal seesaw. They reached Piazza Cantareddu, where the buses pulled into take students back to the neighbouring smaller towns. Raffaele ran a hand through his floppy hair and sighed. ‘I don’t want to go home yet. Absolutely don’t want to be home.’

Alba drew to a stop and wiped her mouth of a final crumb. ‘Come to mine?’

‘What will your ma say?’

‘Eat.’

‘I could – is that OK? I mean, is that a bit weird or maybe rude just showing up again? Are your brothers going to give me that look like I’m-the-boyfriend look because I don’t know how to deal with that look like they’re going to eat me or kiss me or both or worse, I don’t like that look. Mamma’s visiting a hospital down in Nuoro. Dad’s in Sassari at the office.’

Alba pictured her mother’s face if Raffaele turned up on her doorstep. She made it no secret that she loved the boy. The fact that his mother was a doctor and his father a lawyer only served to cement her affections. Alba ignored the sensation that her mother had crafted secret plans for him to become her son-in-law at the soonest opportunity.

Alba grinned. ‘My brothers share a brain. My mum loves you.’

‘I thought you loved me for my physique.’ He pulled a face then and curled his bicep, which peeped up under his shirt in a feeble half moon.

‘I love you because you were the only boy in kindergarten who didn’t try and mutilate my toys.’

They began the climb behind the main square, passing several schoolmates. One girl looked them both up and down, scanning for gossip; she leaned into her friend and whispered something. They giggled. Then both of them, catching the eye of someone beyond Alba, separated, lengthened, and pushed their chests further out, displaying their breasts as a prize. It made Alba feel nauseous. The facile rules of adolescence were exhausting and surreal. She scanned the kids hanging out in groups waiting for their lifts, picking up the whispers in the air: who kissed whom, which eyeliner was best, which Levi’s showed off their hips. Another girl threw a look her way as she passed them with Raffaele, checking for make-up and chosen style, both a drawn blank. Alba wore whatever lay on her chair in the morning from the day before, ran an impatient hand through her hair, and left the house. The other girls’ expressions told Alba that such an intimate friendship with an awkward boy like Raffaele was beyond their understanding.