Danielle McLaughlin - Dinosaurs on Other Planets

Rocosalto was a small, faded town, at least those parts visible from the train station: a strip of flat-roofed shop units, a couple of bars, a tabaccheria. Taking her suitcase with her, Lily got up and went to the door of the waiting room. Sandra, being the organized one, had booked this year’s holiday immediately upon their return from last year’s. She had a thing for “off the beaten track,” which more often than not translated into soup in chipped bowls and bunk beds. Lily had worked out exactly what she’d say when Sandra asked for her half of the money back; she’d written it out on a piece of card. But Sandra hadn’t asked.

There was a fountain in the middle of the square outside the station: three copper heads on a marble plinth. It hinted not at honor but at reprisal: decapitated heads left to bake in the sun, mouths slightly parted as if they’d cried out while the cast was being poured. Lily went over and sank her arms in the water, sluiced them back and forth, in and out around the bloated cigarette butts that floated on the surface like belly-up maggots. The water was cool, but in this position, bent over the basin, her hair fell forward onto her face and the sun scorched the back of her neck. Etta had come to stand in the doorway of the waiting room. She didn’t wave or call out or inquire about the fountain. She just leaned against the doorframe, watching. Nutmeg. Nobody had used that word to describe her hair before, but now that she thought about it, that’s exactly the color it was.

A man arrived pushing a baby in a buggy. As he squeezed past Etta, a wheel glanced against her foot, knocking off her shoe, which snagged on the undercarriage of the buggy and got carried forward a short distance. Etta hopped on one foot as she went to retrieve it, a graceful, elegant hopping, the shoeless foot raised up behind her so that she looked for all the world like a flamingo. Lily turned back to the fountain, ran a hand again through the water. She was thirty-nine, battle-scarred, fraying around the edges. The last thing she needed was some undamaged twenty-five-year-old — anyone, for that matter, who might consider themselves entitled to beauty. She was too tired for all of that. The man with the buggy came out of the waiting room, accompanied by the mother and child, and as they went by the baby started up a loud wailing.

Sandra and Julie would probably have a baby. Sandra had said as much when she’d called round last month with the renewal forms for the parking permit, which had always been in her name. She’d delivered the pronouncement in small, hesitant sentences, punctuated with long pauses, as if, already, before it was even conceived, the baby required delicate handling. Lily couldn’t give a damn about the baby and had told her so. The baby wasn’t the point. What a pity Sandra hadn’t shown such propriety in other things: who she slept with, for example. They could have half a dozen babies for all Lily cared; half a dozen mewling, puking, shitting babies one after the other. It was, in fact, what she wished for them, what they both deserved.

A truck pulled into the parking lot, an open-backed truck with one side panel a darker green than the rest and the name of the hotel where Lily was staying emblazoned across the bonnet. The driver, a stocky man in his forties, jumped out. “Ciao, bella,” he shouted, at the same time waving across the square to Etta, beckoning her over. Etta didn’t budge, but she shifted position in the doorway, stood a little straighter.

“It’s just me,” Lily said.

“No,” the driver said. “Due.” He took a piece of paper from his shirt pocket and read out first her name, then Sandra’s.

“My friend wasn’t able to come,” Lily said. “She’s sick.”

“Ah,” he said. “I am sorry to hear that. Very sorry.” He glanced in the direction of the waiting room. “And the young lady?”

“She’s not with me.”

He shrugged and seized her suitcase, threw it in the back of the truck as if it were an animal to be grappled with. He covered it with tarpaulin and tied it down with thick rope. Inside the cab, the seat was torn and speckled with cigarette burns. It was also tiny — how three of them might have fitted, Lily couldn’t imagine. As she fastened her seatbelt, she saw Etta crossing the square to the fountain, her holdall slung across her shoulder. The driver put the truck in gear, a process that seemed to involve much brushing against Lily’s leg, or was she imagining that? Etta settled herself on the edge of the fountain and drummed her heels against the marble. The cashier hadn’t returned, and the buildings on either side of the station had brought their shutters down. Lily wondered if she should inquire if Etta had heard from whoever was supposed to be collecting her. They could hardly just leave her here by herself, could they? But as she was trying to work out how to roll down the cab window, the driver swung the truck in a wide, sweeping arc and drove at speed out of the station.

At the tollbooth outside town, his arm rested a moment on her knee as he rooted in the ashtray for coins. Back home, she was considered pale; here, her legs appeared startlingly white, as if her entire life up to now had been lived underground. The driver, whose name was Allesandro, said something to the tollbooth operator and the operator laughed, then glanced at her as if to see how she was taking it. They were driving into lush, verdant countryside, swaths of green meadowlands checkered with squares of blazing yellow saffron. They drove up into the mountains, through pastureland thick with wildflowers, rabbles of multicolored butterflies gusting across the windscreen. Every so often, there were warnings of deer: signs depicting Lilliputian animals, fairy-sized beasts, captured mid-leap. She’d left her sunglasses in her suitcase, and even when she shut her eyes a yellow haze persisted behind her lids.

“Your friend,” Allesandro said. “Is she very sick or just a little sick?”

“Very sick,” Lily said. “Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma,” because she’d read an article about that on the plane on the way over and, anyway, Sandra deserved it.

“Santa Madonna,” Allesandro said, and he shook his head. “I am sad for you, very sad.”

They turned at a sign for Rifugio del Lupo, a timber chalet-style building of a kind Lily associated not with Italy, but with Switzerland, where she’d holidayed once with Sandra. The patch of rough gravel that served as a parking lot contained just three cars. On a small terrace to the front, parasols bearing the logo of an ice-cream company shaded red plastic tables and chairs. She followed Allesandro into a dimly lit bar with benches upholstered in faded velveteen. At a table in one corner a group of four — two men and two women — were sharing a bottle of wine, though there was no sign of anybody who might have served them. Giant pinecones painted with artificial snow hung from the ceiling, and on the shelves behind the counter were plastic reindeer, tinsel, a Nativity set, and other things out of season.

—

THOSE WHITE-FLOWERING, SMELLY BUSHES that grew along the railway line were not oleanders. Oleanders, it turned out, were a different creature entirely. For one thing, oleanders were biggish with dark green leaves that were long and leathery. Their five-petaled flowers stood distinctly on barky stalks. Nothing, in other words, like the messy, breathy balls of white that had graced the bushes she’d seen earlier. She knew this now because on the wall of the bedroom Allesandro showed her to there was a framed picture of flora and fauna of the region, an educational-style bilingual poster of the kind seen in interpretative centers. It had dozens of species of wildflowers and tiny field animals, hand-drawn in astonishing detail with close-ups of petals and stamen and seeds and, occasionally, as if the artist had tired of the concentrated gaze, a lake, a mountain, a rooftop panorama, dropped unceremoniously between plants and insects with no thought as to scale.