The Water-Breather

Suddenly Ama is stroking my hair. ‘What are you doing there my love?’ she says with bleary eyes.

‘I don’t like my bed,’ I stutter, but then tears well up inside me and I have to say I have a headache. A searing, aching one.

When day breaks, the corridor becomes alive with slamming cabin doors and running children and groggy morning voices. The loudspeaker makes a few announcements about the car deck, the opening times of the shops and immigration requirements. Pado has a shave in the oval basin. He splashes a lotion on his face and the cabin fills with his familiar smell. He carries us off to the restaurant. He guides us across the newly-cleaned, slippery floor.

As we’re grabbing our trays, Giulio tells me: ‘Ama says they’re going to take you to a doctor!’

‘What doctor?’ I gasp.

Giulio steers me behind the breakfast stand where the cornflakes have toppled out of their bowls. ‘Ama told Pado you don’t sleep enough and that’s why you’re always staring into space and getting headaches. I heard her saying it this morning.’

‘What are you two whispering about?’ Pado shouts. ‘We have to hurry. You can talk in the car.’

I’m not hungry. Not now. There’s nothing wrong with me. I saved the ferry from sinking.

The drive back down the ramp is slow. It’s like that coming into England. You have to wait for hours as they check every car and passport. It makes Pado furious. He joins the ‘Nothing to declare’ queue. Ama asks whether that’s wise, but there’s no way he’s budging. Our mother is the only one allowed to talk at customs. Pado is too dark to speak. Ama inherited our grandmother Machance’s Slovenian and Dutch white skin, but she still doesn’t answer the way she should. As we approach the customs checkpoint, Pado rehearses a few lines for Ama to repeat: ‘We’re on a private visit’, ‘No, we only have the allowed limit of alcohol’, ‘I’m a British citizen’. Ama checks her face in the car mirror. She sweeps her hair to one side. She whips on a quick layer of lipstick.

‘Clear answers. Clear and direct,’ Pado stresses. ‘And remember for the French customs, we’re resident in England and for the English customs we’re resident in France. Okay? Did you hear what I said? Hai capito?

Ama lowers her window.

‘Passports please!’

Ama thrusts out five passports. The officer reads through each one. He comes to Ama’s and opens it to find a long string of floss stuck inside its pages. The floss clings to his fingers and winds itself around the passport cover. ‘Sorry,’ Ama stammers, embarrassed. ‘I don’t know how that got there.’

‘Mrs Maseenou? Messounah? Mishina?’ the officer starts, flicking his hand to free it of floss.

‘Messina!’ Ama corrects him, politely.

‘Italian is it?’

‘The man’s a genius!’ Pado mutters to himself.

‘Where is your place of residence?’ The customs official hands back the passports and waits for an answer.

‘Well, um. It’s … um.’ Ama looks at Pado, unsure, panic crossing her face. Pado glares back at her, eyes wide-open, dumbfounded. ‘Ah! Um, here, England! I mean France, sorry France, yes France,’ Ama strives on.

‘France? You have an Italian car!’

‘No.’

‘No, what?’

‘Yes.’

‘So when were you last in England?’

‘Oh, um … two weeks ago, I think.’

‘Business or pleasure was it?’

‘… um, that’s …’

‘Where are you going now?’ the officer fires quickly.

‘Around,’ Ama makes a wide gesture with her hand.

‘Around where?’

‘How’s the weather been recently? Lovely day for this time of year!’ Ama suddenly tries.

The customs officer looks at her astonished. Giulio asks what’s up. Then the officer starts circling the car with renewed zeal. ‘Great, absolutely fucking great. Thanks for that, Ava!’ Pado huffs. He’s so irritated he flicks through the ferry brochure to keep calm and mumbles, ‘Stronzo,’ ‘bastard’ at the customs official, loudly. He hates the way they look at him. He loathes their facetious smiles, the simple voice that explains, in basic English, that this is England and nowhere else.

‘Did you see the way he looked at me?’

Ama tries to ignore Pado’s mounting rage as the customs officer gets more and more curious.

‘Keep quiet, darling. This is not the time to get paranoid.’

She’s struggling to maintain a composed face, but Pado is off: ‘He probably thinks I’m some jumped-up “dago” just off the boat, some peasant looking for work! Well I can tell him and all these bastards that I used to teach in their bloody country, at their bloody universities!’

‘For goodness’ sake, control yourself, Gaspare. Shut up! Please!’ Ama begs.

‘I mean, look at this idiot,’ Pado rages.

We can feel Pado’s raven hair twitch with indignation. He’s no foreigner to this place. He has our mother and she has pale untouched beauty chalked all over her face. We smile to soothe him. His jaw is set in fury. His hands are dancing across his lap, boiling with a desire to wipe this moment away. Ama is edgy. The customs officer looks into the car. Pado can’t smile, not at him. Ama smiles too much, much too much.

‘Could you open up the car please, Madam!’

‘Figlio di … Fucking …’ Pado growls.

Ama hoists herself out of the car to try and resolve this on her own. The customs officer leans into the boot. He begins lifting wine bottles out. So far he has counted twice the limit. Then he discovers the jars of lungs. Ama blushes, coughs and sniffs. Pado can’t bear it any longer. He’s out of the car too, waving his certificates. He has had enough. On the back seat we shrink into nothing. Giulio curls into a closed, tight ball. Duccio rearranges his maps into separate country piles, making sure the corners meet. I feel myself sliding down, further under the seat. I clench my teeth and wait, trying to help Pado in my thoughts. Ama goes to stop Pado, but his eyeballs are fixed. She stands in front of him, supportive and pleading. It’s going to be all right. She knows he can do it. He’s got to do it.

He’s doing fine, explaining calmly enough, then he says it – the word he can never pronounce – ‘innocent’. It is innocent like ‘inno+scent’ not ‘inno+chent’, we’ve told him a hundred thousand times.

The officer says, ‘Sorry, what?’

Pado raises his voice, ‘Why bother innochent people?’

The officer takes it badly and they’re off.

‘Please follow me, Sir.’

‘Listen …’

‘Kindly do as I say!’

Another officer comes and joins the first. They lead Pado into a room. Ama gets back into the car, crying. She bangs the door shut so hard that we all freeze. She sits holding her head in her hands, then she gently switches on the tape machine for some music, something to take her away from here, from this. Instead of music, the tape is still stuck on Giulio’s joke. His distant voice coughs and laughs. Ama punches the eject button furiously. The tape flies out onto the floor. She picks it up and hurls it onto the top of the dashboard. Giulio fiddles with the biscuit packet beside me, pushing his face up against the glass so no one can see his eyes. Then I hand Ama a biscuit to calm her. She absently takes a bite and throws it out of the window. A seagull snatches it up and deposits a large white dropping on the car in exchange. Pado returns a while later with a heap of clipped receipts.

‘What the fuck is this shit doing on the car?’ he shouts.

He starts up the car again. Ama leans out and tries scrubbing the bonnet with a tissue. The white stain won’t go. She scrapes at it with a piece of paper. It rubs onto her hand. We drive off into England, Pado yelling about customs officers and seagulls that shit everywhere. Duccio leans against the head rest in front of him. I can see he is watching Ama clench her dirty finger, two layers of antiseptic wipes wrapped tight around it.

6

From Portsmouth to London and then on to Machance’s is always busy.

‘Left-hand side darling,’ Ama reminds Pado at every crossroads and roundabout.

By the time we get to London, Pado has to turn and say: ‘Yes, I’ve understood it’s the left. Thank you.’

Our drive is going to take a little longer than usual as we’re stopping near Regent’s Park for a doctor’s appointment. Ama gently tugs at my sleeve.

‘Jean-Pio, we’ve arranged for you to pop in on a colleague of Pado’s. He’s a headache specialist. A very good doctor.’

‘What headaches?’ I complain.

‘Come on. Please darling. It’ll only take a moment and we’ll all feel better.’

There’s no point arguing as Pado has already parked the car and started reading the door numbers. Giulio looks at me as if to say, ‘See, I told you.’

Pado helps me out of the car and Ama waits behind.

‘I’ll only complicate matters, really I will. Your father is much better at these things. I’ll stay with your brothers,’ she assures me.

Pado pushes a button on an intercom. A woman’s voice shouts back, out of the wall: ‘Fourth floor!’ We go up some brown-carpeted stairs. As we’re about to go in, Pado sits down on the sofa on the landing. He leans his head on his arms and takes a long, deep breath.

‘Are you all right Pado?’ I say.

He looks up and pokes me in the stomach, smiling. ‘Course I am. I’m just a little tired today and I can’t see when I’m going to find time to do my research for the next conference. Anyway, we’re here to sort you out. Not me. Come on caro! Andiamo!’

A secretary opens the door and the doctor emerges from behind her to greet us. He can’t wait to talk to Pado about his latest book. Pado would prefer to get straight to the point.

‘We’re in a bit of a rush, sorry, but if you come to my next lecture …’

The specialist is disappointed. He pulls his chair up towards me. Talking to Pado, he shines a torch into my eyes, takes my blood pressure and checks my knee reflexes.

‘You don’t have to bother with all that,’ Pado intervenes. ‘I’ve already checked him over. I think you just need to get him to describe his symptoms.’

I don’t know what to say except that I get headaches in the car and on the boat.

‘Describe us the feeling?’ the doctor asks. I can’t. ‘Where does it hurt?’ he adds. I don’t know.

Pado breaks in to avoid the silence. ‘He’s been having these headaches and dizzy spells for some time now. He gets some form of vertigo or migraine. It seems to come when he is tired. Maybe he’s a little dehydrated from time to time. My wife says he’s easily distracted too. Personally, I don’t see the connection.’

‘How often do you drink water?’ the doctor questions me.

I give him the same answer I’ve given Pado: ‘Every morning, lunch time and in the evening and, since I’ve been told to drink more, at tea time too.’

‘He probably gets travel sickness like most children!’ The doctor reaches for his prescription papers. ‘There are some very good new pills,’ he promises Pado.

‘No, really,’ Pado stops him. ‘I don’t think we would have come to see you if it was just to get some travel sickness pills. Besides, I recently read some research into the side-effects of those pills. They’re not too great.’

I begin to shift in my chair because the specialist seems to be quickly searching for ways to impress Pado.

‘I tell you what,’ he says to Pado, ‘could you leave us alone a few minutes. I’d like to ask him a couple of questions.’

Pado now looks like he thinks this whole specialist thing is a bit of a waste of time. He gives in anyway.

‘If you think that would help. But remember, he’s only eight.’ Pado pats me on the back. ‘It won’t take long, try and tell him what it’s like.’

‘Yes,’ I smile. As Ama said: we’ll all feel better afterwards.

I’m left facing the doctor, who has taken out a writing pad. I imagine Pado walking down the stairs to join Ama. Perhaps they’re sitting in the car together, with music slowly suffocating in the machine. Or maybe Pado is in the room next door, trying to fit in some work, reading through magazines or rewriting his book with the photos of white rats, fleshy pink stumps growing out of their backs and cut-open lungs.

‘Well, Jean-Pio, what can I do for you? Why don’t you tell me how the headaches start?’

I begin to tell the doctor again that sometimes, in the car, with the swerves and dips, I get a bit sick, but that instead of feeling sick in the stomach I get a headache and that if I get a headache I have to close my eyes to make it go away. Then, when my eyes are shut, I feel even more sick. And that’s that. I can’t tell him any more. He wouldn’t understand that I have to stop the car from crashing or the ferry from sinking or that if I’d known Grand Maurice was going out fishing on his own, I would have thought about it all day so that he didn’t drown and leave us with a gap in everything. And now that Grand Maurice has gone, and we’re all stranded for ever, I have no choice but to swap bad thoughts for good thoughts all day long because I can’t think that someone can just go out fishing and never come back, or that hundreds of people, all across the world, are drowning and dying every day and no one is trying to stop them, or that all the air conditioners are spewing out diseases that kill and no one knows.

‘Are there any other pains? Do you get stomach aches? Can you sleep?’

I look at the ceiling. I don’t want to be here. I don’t want the specialist to talk to me any more.

‘No, nothing,’ I say.

We both fidget in our chairs.

The specialist gets up and calls Pado in. There’s no reply.

‘I bet you he’s gone down to the car,’ I tell him.

We look outside and there’s Pado leaning through the car window talking to Ama. He notices us and makes his way back up to the doctor’s. It’s my turn to be alone now, whilst Pado listens to what the specialist has to say.

Pado finally emerges, ‘Thanks for your time,’ and points me down the stairs.

‘Well,’ Ama says, as we arrive back at the car, ‘what did he say?’

‘We’ll talk about it later Ava. You know as well as I do that it’s not that simple. Travel sickness, he thinks, maybe.’

‘Oh that’s a surprise!’ Ama sneers. ‘I wonder how he could have got that?’ She strokes my face. ‘What about the water though? Does Jean-Pio understand he’s got to drink more water?’ Ama carries on. ‘We can’t go on like this. It’s getting ridiculous.’

Giulio is prodding me to know what happened. I’m counting time away, nothing to say, nothing to think. Duccio has a map on his knees and is drawing in the precise route we took from the ferry to London.

7

It’s an hour’s drive to our grandmother’s house from London. Machance isn’t old, but she looks it because she hasn’t really eaten very much since Grand Maurice died two years ago and she moved back to England from the house in France. She sits in her bare dining-room and tells Ama that it’s hard being alone.

She spends most days dead heading the flowers in her garden and, in the evenings, she extracts the fine hairs from her chin with a rapid pull of her fingers to pass the time. By nightfall, she has a tiny nest of thin hairs in her palm. On windy nights, she casts them from her window into the breeze and by morning they have gone. I imagine them gathering in the bark of trees, forming rings of wiry softness clinging to the trunks.

Soon after we arrive at Machance’s, Ama sets to work, going through urgent bills and clearing up untidy rooms. She stops as soon as Machance appears, not wanting to get in the way, not able to explain. She glances over the sparse furniture and sagging paintings, confused by the disrupted order of the house.

Then people start turning up to see Ama and Pado. These friends and guests come and go, sad at the fact that we’re never in one place.

‘Why don’t you stay a while? We never see you!’ ‘Why are you always rushing off so soon?’

Ama answers them all with the same empty expression, her bag for the next journey already packed and prepared in her head.

Two visitors, Michael and Joan, stay a little longer. Pado rolls out medical stories and cases he’s heard at his conferences, like the one about the woman who smoked so much that her lips went yellow and grew into grapes of tumours that clustered like chandeliers from her mouth down into her lungs. Michael listens to Pado in horror.

‘Enough! Enough!’ he begs: ‘You’re going to put me off smoking!’

Joan urges Pado to carry on. ‘Keep going, Gaspare. He’s got to give up one day. He already can’t breathe properly going up stairs!’

Michael tells her to stop being so ridiculous and gets up, pointedly, to light a cigarette. Machance brings him an ashtray. He balances it delicately on the window sill, blowing his smoke outside. I watch him from the table, inhaling, sucking in the smoke in big gulps. Pado and Ama move on to another subject. Machance explains something to Duccio. Isn’t anyone going to say anything to Michael? Isn’t anyone going to show him Pado’s book on lung disease? I look at Michael again, rotating the ashtray with his finger. Now he’s knocking the grey ash off, with precise little taps of the cigarette. The smoke snakes into his mouth and sticks to his lips, like deadly air flowing in and out of an air conditioner. The tumours. What about the tumours? His lips will swell and rot. He won’t be able to speak or swallow and the scabs and stubs sprouting from his lips will turn into blisters of blood. I picture him dying and the doctors waiting to cut out his lungs for a photo or a microscope slide, with his finished life etched in its dulling colours. I feel a headache mounting, a sickness in the back of the eyes. I stare back at Michael, transfixed.

Machance interrupts my gaze and asks me to help her lay out some glasses. I reach across the table. I spot a pack of cigarettes, inside Michael’s jacket, draped over the chair. I can’t stop looking at it, poking out of the grey material. I carry an empty bowl to the kitchen. What if Michael ends up like Mr Yunnan or Grand Maurice and all the other dead people? We have to stop him! I corner Giulio near the fridge: we should do something quick! Giulio says if I can grab the cigarette packet, he’ll divert everyone’s attention. He starts running up and down asking Ama for a sip of coffee. She tells him to calm down, plonks him on her lap and roughs up his hair. As she curls strands of Giulio’s hair round her fingers, I dig into Michael’s jacket. Pado looks at me strangely. He is wondering what I’m doing, but he’s too busy waiting for the next joke or smile to mind. Michael laughs with Pado.

I can feel the cigarette packet burning in my hand.

Giulio and I rush off to the bathroom. We pass Machance turning last year’s apples from the garden on the window ledges. She rotates each apple, every day, to check that it’s not rotting. Not that it matters much: she’ll never eat them anyway because she is thinking of Grand Maurice. In the bathroom, Giulio and I run the warm water and fill the basin to the brim. We have to move fast before Michael tries to light up again. We tip the cigarette packet into the water. The cigarettes take up the basin like felled tree trunks on a river. They gradually fall apart, shavings of paper and shredded leaves. Giulio pulls out the plug. The cigarettes clog the hole and gargle. Machance is walking by outside. We don’t have long. The cigarettes won’t go down. I push and prod them unsuccessfully into the plug hole. Then I open the lavatory. They’ll have to go down there instead. We drop them in the bowl and pull the chain, a lengthy throttled flush. Some cigarettes float back up to the surface and linger for a while, others go straight down and never return. Then we realise we still have the packet itself. We drop it into the loo as well. With the brush we crush it up and dilute the water with blue antiseptic. Clean smells drench the bathroom and the packet vanishes.

They haven’t noticed that we left the sitting-room. Duccio is on his own. No one’s patted him on the head. Ama says that we have to protect Duccio. It’s not often that people are born like him. Not even the photographer who came and took pictures of him in his suit could get it right. ‘He’s too good-looking,’ Ama sighs and no one can do him justice. ‘Beautiful children aren’t always beautiful adults though,’ so we have to be careful to appreciate it now. Her friends do. Ama has one friend who kisses us hello and Duccio swears she once touched his lips with her tongue. It was like a warm, wet piece of ham. Giulio and I don’t understand. He has a nose and eyes and mouth like us, but they always look at him, the same way as they look at Ama.

Michael goes to light another cigarette. He pulls the ashtray off the window sill. Giulio tugs at my sleeve. We sit down and do something. Something nothing. I try and think calmly, smoothly. Michael searches from one pocket to another, knocking his head to remember. He gets up and looks in his coat, in Joan’s bag, in his trousers. He’s frantic and he doesn’t like it when everyone carries on talking. He has to find his cigarettes. Now! It has to be now! Joan tries to calm him, but Michael says, ‘The cigarettes can’t have just got up and walked out of the room on their own.’

Machance comes to the door and coughs a little to announce that the loo downstairs is blocked. If we need a lavatory, we’d better go upstairs and be careful not to use too much water, as there’s only a small tank. Ama and Pado don’t understand how the loo could be blocked. It was working ten minutes ago. Lavatories don’t simply block like that. ‘Another thing to fix for my mother before we leave,’ Ama worries. Pado apologises to the guests and fetches some tools from the boot of the car. He begins hacking away at the tap behind the lavatory drain with a spanner, then a hammer. Michael is like a dog, rushing, searching. Pado, with his legs poking out from behind taps, tries to prise the lavatory pipe open. Giulio and I know he’ll never make it. Machance has never opened her pipes and there is rust all around the house. In her bedroom there is a photograph of Grand Maurice shaded with so much dust that it looks like a hoover filter with an old face in the middle. I must never think of what Grand Maurice’s face is like now, dredged from the lake and swaddled in weeds, sealed in his tomb.

Then the pipe loosens, with Pado suddenly saying, ‘What’s this?’

He’s about to pick it up, when Ama warns: ‘Don’t touch it, it’s disgusting!’

She hands him a plastic cup. We always have them ready in the repair kit. He scoops up a lump of shredded matter.

‘Put it down Gaspare, please! It’s revolting,’ Ama fusses.

Pado is not so sure. He points the cup towards the light and swivels it in the palm of his hand.

‘Looks like vegetable with bits of paper.’

Michael hasn’t calmed down. ‘I could swear I had them. I had them there in the sitting-room!’ He squints into the cup of shredded mass and then looks again. He asks for a screwdriver or something from Ama.

He picks around inside the cup. ‘That’s strange!’

He extracts a little white paper. It has disintegrated, but he knows it’s a cigarette filter. He asks Pado to have a look inside the pipe and he scours it with a rod. Giulio and I are just retreating when a heap of filters comes out in an avalanche of matted tobacco. Michael is speechless.

Joan says, ‘How did they get there?’ and that’s when I’m thinking Michael’s lucky to be alive, to have avoided the tumours, otherwise he wouldn’t even be able to speak.

Michael is so angry that he starts packing up his things. He puts his coat on and tells Joan they’re off. Pado attempts to sort things out. He proposes to go and buy some cigarettes. There’s no point wondering how they got there, he’ll pop into town and get some more. We have to stop him! He can’t just go and buy more. We can’t let Michael die.

I shout: ‘He has to stop!’

Michael is astounded, ‘What! You little brat.’

Ama is so embarrassed. Pado is stunned. He ushers me out of the room. ‘You can’t do things like that! Those cigarettes didn’t belong to you!’