‘Who’s there?’
And the voice, hoarse and urgent, reached her through the blind passageways and partitions of the hideous building, she knew that voice.
‘Where are you?’
Help, she meant to scream, but nothing emerged, no more than a whisper, as if she’d lost breath and voice at once. Opened her mouth again and this time it came, the air whistled back into her lungs, her larynx opened like an instrument and she bellowed, she didn’t even know what. Here.
At her feet Valentino was curled in a foetal position, whimpering. Pressed against the wall, Roxana looked down on him as if from a great height, and knew she should do something else. She should get something heavy and hit him hard before he got up again.
She didn’t move.
Is he coming?
There was nothing else she could do.
*
In the stinking dark Sandro’s hands were bleeding from the splintered wood of the cheap pine door he’d broken down. There’d be a price to pay for the damage, Tyrrhenian Properties would exact it, he’d known with dull certainty as he pounded away at the wood with his battered knuckles. But mostly he could only think, I’m too late. Again, as always, too late.
He’d nearly dislocated his shoulder as the boarding finally gave way under his weight. Astonishingly, behind the hoarding the glass door to the cinema’s littered lobby had stood ajar. Three doors led off the back of it, one a double set leading into the auditorium. He’d decided against that one, taken another at random and found himself in the muffled darkness of a corridor, walls padded with fake leather, sticky carpet underfoot.
Confined spaces had never been one of Sandro’s phobias — or at least he’d never thought so. But in that corridor, straining for a sound, any sound to give him a clue that he was there for a reason, he felt the certain signs of rising panic, an inability to fill his lungs or expel air from them, a drumming in his skull.
The walls were coated with something gritty, and Sandro didn’t like to touch them but had no choice, and the greasy carpet clung to the soles of his shoes. The first door he pushed at was a cupboard, and he cursed. He didn’t want to go further into the building — there was no light. He kept moving in the dark and when he came to another door he opened it and stepped through.
Pitch black: Sandro blinked and waited in vain for his eyes to adjust. But at least there was some air in here, some elusive draught from somewhere, and he let the door to the suffocating corridor close behind him. He shouted in the thick darkness, and as he waited he thought he did, finally, hear something, a scuffling, and a soft ugly thump in answer. Emboldened, he moved into the room, sniffing for a way through, like a trapped potholer following a breath of air from the outside. And banged his shin hard and painfully on something. He cursed again, louder and more profane this time, cazzo, cazzo, blinking not so much at the pain as in furious disgust at his own clumsy incompetence.
With his hand pressed against his shin in a pointless attempt to dull the pain, he heard the scream. And didn’t know whether it was a man or a woman, almost gagging against the layered smells, fresh pine and latrine and old sweat. For a moment Sandro thought he might choke on it and die right there but his heart kept on thumping steadily, against all reason.
‘Who’s there?’
A silence and then he heard her cry out, he didn’t know whether it was the same voice, but he could tell this time that it was a woman, and turned towards the sound. Tripped and stumbled through the cluttered blackness of the room, feeling that draught freshen and pick up as though, miraculously, it was leading him towards the sound. There was another door. Another corridor, so dark, so dark he had to put out his hands and feel his way.
She shouted again. Here.
And a door gave under his hands and he was in there with them. Some thin grey light in here, though barely enough to see in the few seconds Sandro had to gather himself that at his feet a crouched form was struggling upright.
‘Watch out,’ a woman’s voice said sharply, from somewhere else, and Sandro could only think, as the shape on the floor launched itself at him, Oh, Jesus. I’m too old for this.
*
Giuli heard the ambulance’s siren from a long way off, getting louder. She heard the rattle as the shutter came up and saw Luisa standing there.
‘Oh my God, Giuli,’ she said, staring. ‘Oh my God. Oh my God.’ In a voice Giuli had never heard Luisa use before, tremulous under huge pressure, a dam holding back some great flood.
It’s all right, Giuli wanted to say, only she didn’t know if it was. There was blood on her hand, and on her jeans. Heard the siren become deafening and abruptly stop, then saw the ambulance men crowd into the space with their bulky jackets and a bag of something and a cylinder of something else.
And then one last face appeared, a narrow, battered face belonging to a man with dark eyes and an expression of anguish and fear and desperation who edged to the door frame and stopped, and stared. Josef.
Beside her Anna lay half-collapsed on her front, still warm, still breathing, holding tight and alive to Giuli’s hand and making a small sound, over and over again. Giuli heard all this and saw all this and felt all this but really she heard and felt and saw none of it. All she saw was the child, the new child in her lap, her free arm around it, the child warm and bloodstained and covered with some waxy stuff, its eyes glued shut, its body folded and naked as a puppy’s, on the skull the skin still transparent with newness. And the child — the new girl, the new being among them — opened her mouth, and made herself heard.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Saturday
He had appeared on the Saturday morning, nine o’clock, which would have been a decent hour on any other day. At least they’d slept well, like the dead, for the first time in what seemed like months. But they hadn’t set an alarm, and the sound of the street bell woke them.
As she padded through the flat to answer the intercom Luisa registered the new cold in the air as a benediction. Summer would end.
‘Who?’ she said, not understanding. Then she got it, and put a hand to her breastbone. Please God. Not Giuli, now. She buzzed him in.
She stood at the top of the stairs in her nightgown and slippers, aware of her face crumpled from sleep, her unbrushed hair. She listened to the slow climb of footsteps and it occurred to her that this was a brave step for the boy to take.
Boy? The man who raised his head to hers as he climbed the last flight was about forty. And she needn’t have worried about her hair; Enzo, Giuli’s fidanzato, looked as though his mother cut his for him. An open face: kind.
He stopped on the landing, hesitant. ‘Permesso?’ Polite, too.
‘Is Giuli all right?’ she asked, unable to keep the anxiety out of her voice. Remembering the astonishment in Giuli’s face as she held the bloodstained bundle in her lap, could it only have been yesterday afternoon? It might have been too much for her.
But Enzo’s face split in a shy smile even at the mention of her name and Luisa saw it all in that instant, and relaxed.
‘Yes,’ he said, ducking his head then raising it again to meet her eye. ‘I–I — she didn’t call me, all yesterday.’ The ghost of that anxiety clouded his open face. ‘But last night — then last night-’
Luisa nodded. They’d been at the hospital, waiting uselessly on plastic seating, not relatives, barely friends, to be told everything was all right with the baby. And then Giuli had started up and said, there’s something I’ve got to do.
‘So she’s fine,’ said Enzo, looking down again. He stood there waiting to be invited over the threshold, holding a bike helmet between his hands. He mumbled. ‘I’ve come to ask you — to ask you-’