Rupert Thomson - Secrecy

I joined her on the bench. ‘What is it?’

She shook her head.

‘Tell me.’

His name was Mimmo Righetti, she said, and he lived on the narrow, curving street where she grew up, in a house with a green door. His father worked with wood. His mother was dead. Why did Mimmo think she was a witch? Perhaps he had heard people in the village gossiping, or perhaps it was just a feeling that had come to him, as sudden and unprompted as a shiver. Your mother’s not your mother, he would chant in his fluty voice, and she would pretend that his face was a window and she was looking through it at the view, and Mimmo would shout, Look! You see? You’re definitely a witch! because all the little hairs had lifted on his arms. But he had identified the central mystery of her life: her mother wasn’t her mother. Later, when he was eight or nine, he added a second line: And your father’s never here. It was true: he wasn’t. Her father, Remo Ferralis, was someone she did not know, and hardly ever saw. That was something else she didn’t understand. When Mimmo called her a witch, it was as if he was addressing all the aspects of her life that she could not explain. Whether he intended it or not, he had given her a way of thinking about herself.

She did her best to live up to his expectations. She would gather plants and herbs and tie them in bunches and hang them from the beams to dry. She would spend hours distilling potions, which they would drink, and which would give them stomach ache or hiccups or diarrhoea. She would build fires, make offerings. Cast spells. She would try to transform herself. Your mother’s not your mother and your father’s never here, Mimmo would chant, and she would whirl round the flames, her black hair flying, and Mimmo would sit on his haunches, hugging his knees, and sometimes she really did feel as if her face had changed, as if she had turned into another person — or no, as if she had become someone, finally become someone — and it thrilled her, and scared the daylights out of her, and made her feel different, special, powerful.

One warm September afternoon, as they returned from an expedition to the woods, trees rising on one side of the white dust road, a steep drop on the other, she told Mimmo they were going to attempt something extraordinary.

‘Today,’ she said, ‘we’re going to fly — like birds.’

‘Like birds!’ He tipped his head back and stretched out his arms, and if she hadn’t grabbed him by the collar he would have missed his footing and plunged headlong into the gully, a fate that had befallen more than one drink-addled peasant on his way home from a dance.

‘Careful,’ she said. ‘You haven’t had the potion yet.’

He grinned. ‘Where are we going?’

‘The ghost house.’

‘I knew it!’

They skirted the village and turned on to a dirt track that led past a vineyard and an olive grove and out along a low ridge. Up ahead, she could see the two tall cypresses that marked the entrance to Sabatino Vespi’s property. It was Vespi who had given her the goatskin bag she was carrying. That morning she had packed it with everything they would need: a jar of water from the ancient spring below the village, some dead skin shaved from Mimmo’s heel, five spiders’ legs, the head of a rose that she had dried in the sun and ground to a fine powder, a chopped-up clove of garlic, part of a honeycomb, a grey hair found near the altar — she thought she had seen it fall from the priest’s head during a Mass to celebrate the Assumption of the Virgin — some sprigs of basil and oregano, a blue flower, a few of her own fingernail clippings, some sawdust from Mimmo’s father’s workshop, and, most important of all, a glinting black-green feather, which must have belonged to a raven or a crow.

After passing Vespi’s house, the track dipped down and curved to the right, and the roof of the ghost house appeared below, crouching on a promontory that overlooked the wooded valley to the north and the smooth clay hills beyond. It was said that the woman who owned the place had been born in the same year as Galileo, which would have put her age at roughly one hundred and ten, but nobody had set eyes on her for years, and the few who claimed to have caught a glimpse of her — a figure hesitating on the track at dusk, a face adrift in an upstairs window — often thought it was a ghost they had seen. She was so old, perhaps, that nobody could tell the difference.

That morning, the two friends hurried down the slope towards the house, an open barn on their right, the tall brick tower of the dovecote to their left. They circled the well and knelt in the yellow grass under the peach trees, which stood at the edge of the property. On waking, Faustina had imagined they would test her potion beyond the trees, where the ground dropped twenty feet to the field below, but when she saw the ladder leaning against the back wall of the house she changed her mind. The ladder seemed providential, too good to be true, though it also carried a warning: two rungs were missing near the top, as if to discourage people from climbing any higher.

She uncorked the jar of water and began to add ingredients. Last to go in was the flower, which she had found behind a market stall the previous Tuesday.

‘Blue to represent the sky,’ she said. ‘Our new element.’

They crept through the grass to the back of the house. Up against the wall, in shadow suddenly, she shivered.

‘What if the woman comes?’ Mimmo said.

‘She won’t,’ Faustina said. ‘She’s dead.’ Then wished she hadn’t said the word.

She followed Mimmo up the ladder, the jar in her left hand. Once on the curving tiles, they kept as low as they could. The slope of the roof would shield them from anyone who might be passing along the track.

She showed Mimmo the feather. His face lit up; he was alive to its significance. As she stirred the potion, using the feather as a spoon, they murmured the incantation he had invented, and always now insisted on: Your mother’s not your mother and your father’s never here . They repeated the words until their heads were empty — the magic needed a clear space, a kind of arena, where it could happen — then she handed the jar to Mimmo. He brought it up to his lips. Over the rim she could see his eyes, wide with excitement and anticipation.

‘Like birds,’ he whispered.

He took two or three gulps, his face twisting as he swallowed. It’s like medicine, she had told him once. The worse it tastes, the better it works. She swirled the contents of the jar and drank the rest.

It was a breathless early autumn day. The sun had lost none of its heat, and the mountains to the north-east were a dusty, faded purple. Her body twitched suddenly, as if she were on the brink of sleep.

‘I think it’s time,’ she said.

They rose to their feet.

Mimmo lifted his arms out sideways, as if to test his new powers. ‘I can’t feel anything.’

‘It’s subtle,’ she told him. ‘Light as air.’

She felt slightly sick; she tried not to think about the spiders’ legs and the priest’s greasy hair.

‘Shall I go first?’ she said.

‘No, me.’ He jumped up and down, making the loose tiles clack. ‘Me first.’

She put an upright finger to her lips.

He scrambled up to the apex of the roof. Still on all fours, he turned his back on the chimney and began to make his way down to the far end. From there, it was a sheer drop to the ground. He stood up. He was facing away from her, his arms held at right-angles to his body. He appeared to be looking out into the heat-haze that shimmered above the land.

Then he stepped off the roof.

For a moment he seemed to remain quite motionless. He hung in the air, the back of his head outlined against the flawless sky, and she thought he was about to veer sideways and soar up over the track and on towards the village.