'Hello – wasn't any trouble finding it.'
She had lied again, but then the lying was a habit. Good at lying, Charley had told Angela that it was important for her to go again to Palermo. So reasonable a lie, so fluent. 'It's the same as if you've been a driver in an accident, Angela, then you have to get back behind the wheel as quickly as possible. It's really kind of you to offer, but I need to be alone, just as I was alone then. I don't want anyone with me. I want to walk the streets, get it out of my system. Tell you what, Angela, I'm not taking that lovely bag that Peppino bought, I'm going to buy one of those stomach things that tourists have. I don't know what time I'll be back… I have to do this for myself, I have to put it behind me.'
The gardener had let her out of the gates, the bloody 'lechie', and she had almost run down the street from the villa in impatience to get clear of the place. Peppino was long gone, driven away while she was still asleep. She had already taken the children to school and kindergarten. The baby was sleeping. When she'd talked to Angela, lied, she'd thought that Angela was close to spitting out the great confidences. Little Charley, she could be a vicious little bitch, she hadn't wanted to hang around and hear the confidences, nor the weeping. Stick to the pills, Angela, keep popping them. She had run to get the bloody miserable place behind her…
'You are well, recovered?'
'Do I look awful?'
'The bruise has gone, the scratches are good.' He was so damn solemn. 'You do not look awful.'
'Aren't you going to invite me in?'
She grinned, she felt mischief. He was so damn solemn, and so damn shy. He stepped aside with courtesy.
'It is a big mess, I am sorry.'
'No problem.'
She was early. Because she had lied well and run fast down to the sea shore in Mondello she had caught the bus before the one she had planned to take into Palermo.
She wore her tight jeans that hugged her waist and contoured her stomach and thighs, and the T-shirt with the wide cut at the neck that left her shoulders bare. She stepped through the door. She had taken time, unusual for her, with her lipstick and with her eyes, and she wondered now, as Benny let her into his apartment, if Angela would have registered that she had been careful with her cosmetics, might have known she lied.
Perhaps it was a mistake to have been careful with the lipstick and with her eyes, and maybe Axel bloody Moen would have slagged her off for it. The apartment was a single big room of an old building. A small cooker in a dark corner beside a washbasin that was filled with dirty plates and mugs, a wardrobe and a chest, a single bed not made and with the pyjamas lying dumped on it, a table covered with papers and a hard chair and an easy chair that was covered with clothes. There were posters on the walls.
'I was going to clean it, but you are early.' Said as an apology, without criticism.
'It's lovely. It's what I don't have…'
It was what she yearned for, her own place and her own space. A place, space, where she was not a lodger in her mother's home, not a paid guest in Angela Ruggerio's villa.
She was a lying little bitch and a bullying little bitch. She had invited herself into his life. She went to the basin and ran the water till it was hot. She didn't ask him if he wanted his plates and his mugs cleaned, she did it. She ignored him and he hovered behind her. The poster on the wall above the basin was of a pool of blood on a street and the single slogan, 'Basta!'. When she had finished at the washbasin she went to the bed and stripped back the sheets. and saw the indentation where his body had been, and she made the bed neatly and folded hospital corners as her mother had taught her. She put his pyjamas under the pillows. It was a narrow bed, a priest's bed, and she wondered if it whispered when his body moved on it, a chaste bed. The poster, fastened with Sellotape to the wall above the bed, was of white doves rising. She didn't look at him, it was her game with him, and at the chair she started to fold the clothes and to take a suit back to the wardrobe. In the bottom of the wardrobe she found dirty shirts and socks and underpants; she assumed he went back to his mother every week with a bag of washing. She turned. Beside the door was a poster on the wall showing, black and white, the long snaking column of a funeral and mourners. Her hands were on her hips.
Charley grinned. It was her cheek.
'Another Sicilian boy who needs a woman to look after him. Christ, how did you survive in London?'
She had embarrassed him. 'Where I lived, there were men and there were women. I used to bring back the left-over chips at the time we closed the McDonald's – they would have been thrown away. I fed the women, the women did my washing and they cleaned my room.'
'Grieves me to hear there's a male chauvinist piggery alive and well in London.'
He did not understand. He stood awkwardly. What she liked about him, he seemed so bloody vulnerable.
'So, that was me saying thanks, saying you were brilliant. Thanks for being brilliant when everyone else looked the other way. Now, I've been really conscientious, I've read the guidebook. I want to see the duomo, the Quattro Canti on the Marqueda, the old market in the Vucciria. I want to get to the Palazzo Reale for the Cappella Palatina.
I reckon we can do the Palazzo Sclafani as well before lunch. Big lunch, a good bottle, then if we've the stamina-'
'I am sorry…'
'What for?'
'You did not give me a telephone number for you. I could not telephone you.' He hung his head. 'I do not have the time to walk in Palermo.'
Charley blinked. Trying to be casual, trying not to show that she had looked forward to the day, the escape, ever since she'd rung him. 'So you got your room cleaned up and you don't have to do the guide bit, lucky old you. I suppose that makes us quits.'
He fidgeted. 'I have the day off from the school. It was my intention to escort you around Palermo. I have the school, and I have another life. For the work of my second life I have to deliver, urgently, some things.'
'I'll come.'
'I think, Charley, you would find it very boring.'
As if he sought to dismiss her. Shit. She could turn round and she could walk out of the door. As if he told her that she intruded.
'Try me. What's the second life? I've nowhere else to go. I mean, the duomo has been there best part of a thousand years, expect it'll keep another week. Where have you got to go?'
'I have to go to San Giuseppe Jato, and then to Corleone…'
'Heard of Corleone. Interesting, yes? Never heard of the other one. Is that countryside?'
'It is into the country.' He seemed to hesitate, as if undecided. She gazed back into his quiet almond-coloured eyes. Come on, Benny, don't play the bloody tosser. She could not tell him about the claustrophobia she had fled from for a day. 'I am a teacher, but I have also other work. I have to see people in San Giuseppe Jato and in Corleone, and I think you would not find it interesting.'
'Then I'll sit in the car.'
'My other work is for the Anti-Mafia Co-ordination Group of Palermo – how can that be of interest to you? Can we not fix another day?'
Her chin jutted. Axel bloody Moen would have told her to run, not to bother to close the door, run and keep running. The watch was on her wrist. His fingers, twisting, were fine and gentle, a pianist's. She should never relax. His face was of narrow angles, but without threat. She understood the posters on the walls of the room. She challenged him.
'I think that might be of more interest than the duomo. I think I might learn more about Sicily than from the Quattro Canti and the Cappella Palatina, yes?'
As a response he went to the door and unhooked his anorak. He looked around him, as if his room had been invaded, as if he had been boxed and bullied, as if he were too polite to complain, from the basin with the cleaned plates and mugs, to the chair from which the clothes had been taken, to the bed that had been made. He led her outside and onto the wide landing above the old staircase. He turned two keys in the heavy mortice locks.