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Thirty-three

IN FLORENCE THEY FOUND A hotel near the Duomo with slick terrazzo floors and window shutters that peeled into the narrow street. The city air was fat with taxi horns and rain. Bells rang in towers and domes. The plumbing chimed in sympathy, and from below came the smells of espresso coffee, salami and baking bread.

Scully filled a bath and washed their clothes in shampoo. He scrubbed shirts and pounded jeans, rinsed rancid socks over and over and hung it all from shutters and radiators to drip dry. They climbed naked into their separate beds and listened to the plip of water on the floor. For a while they looked at one another, not speaking. Light fell in bands across the bed linen. Before long they slept, surrounded by the shades of their steaming clothes.

It was late in the day when they woke. Billie woke first. She felt shimmery. Her head felt bigger. She pulled a blanket around herself and sat flicking through their passports. She looked at their big, round, happy faces and all the stamps in weird languages. She was smaller in her photo. She liked how smiley they were in their old faces. Scully got up. She watched him brush his teeth till the toothpaste turned pink. He didn’t look in the mirror. His bum wobbled and his nuts rattled stupidly. When Scully was in the nude he didn’t care. It was because he wasn’t beautiful. Only beautiful people cared.

• • •

OUTSIDE IT WASN’T RAINING but the city was wintry and dim. In a self-service place they ate pasta and bread. It was steamy and full of clatter. Chairs scraped on the floor. People shouted and laughed.

Afterwards they just walked. On a bridge there was something like a little town where African people, black people, sold shirts and watches laid out on the wet stones. Across the river they walked in pretty gardens and climbed to a fort that looked like the wrecked castle in Ireland. All across the roofs of the city were pigeons and the sound of bells.

Scully walked along with the kid feeling lightly stitched together, as though the slightest wind would send him cartwheeling. It was quiet between them. They merely pointed or tilted their heads at things, thinking their own thoughts. He wondered where the nearest airport was and whether there was credit left on the Amex card. He felt strangely peaceful. The muddy Arno rolled by. The Ponte Vecchio lighting up the dusk.

They walked in their case-wrinkled clothes past Italians who looked like magazine covers. Dagger heels, glistening tights, steel creases, coats you could lie down and sleep on. Their shoes were outrageous, their peachy arses, male and female, like works of art. Women ran their lacquered nails through Billie’s hair and Scully stared at their glossy lips. Buon Giorno.

Billie saw him in the lights of shop windows. He looked dreamy but his blood was back.

‘All for one,’ she said.

‘And one for all.’

• • •

BEFORE BED BILLIE CUT HER toenails with the little scissors in Scully’s pocket knife. He lay on his bed. Their washed clothes were half dry. All the edges of Billie’s eyes, everything she saw had a shiny edge to it. While he lay there she clipped his toenails, too and marvelled at the glowingness of things.

• • •

UP IN THE FIG TREE with Marmi Watson from next door balancing beside her, Billie pointed down the street to the figure striding along, briefcase swinging, legs scissored, hair falling black from her neck. Afternoon light in her eyes.

‘Look,’ she murmured proudly. ‘That’s my mum. Just look at that.’

• • •

‘ALL FOR ONE!’ THEY SAID, the three of them on the bare floor of the Paris apartment. ‘And one for all!’ Laughing themselves silly in the mess, laughing, laughing.

• • •

IN THE WEAK HEATLESS LIGHT of the piazza next day the kid didn’t look so great. Scully didn’t like the new pucker of her wounds. They seemed moist long after he bathed them. Billie refused to wear her hat but didn’t complain of any pain. She seemed in fair spirits. He watched her feed crumbs to the pigeons. He tried not to bug her with conversation. But he resolved to get a list of English-speaking doctors at the American Express office when he went in to check the state of his account. He wondered if the damp had gotten back into the bothy. Winter solstice. How did the Slieve Blooms look today? He felt odd. Disconnected from himself. Yesterday and today. Without pain — almost without feeling. It was like having come through a tunnel, a roaring, blind, buffeting place and come out into the light unsure for a while, if all of you was intact. The disbelief of the survivor.

The bells of the Duomo tolled into the china bowl of the sky. He looked up at the gorgeous cupola. Look at that. It wasn’t just love that flunked him out of architecture — it was visions like this, signs across the centuries that told him to give up and stop pretending. The world could do without his shopping malls, his passive solar bungalows. If it wasn’t the gap of greatness, then nature would sap the remains of your pride. A drive out to the Olgas, to Ayer’s Rock, to a terracotta polis of termite mounds, to the white marble plain of any two-cent salt lake would cure your illusions. Scully had no room left for illusions. What more could be beaten out of him?

• • •

DOWN BY THE PITTI PALACE, the Amex office smelt of flowers and paper and damp coats. They were hallowed, frightening places to Scully. Behind glass and wood and carpet, so much power. Queues of smooth, confident men in pinstripes. The well- oiled clack of briefcases. The casual shifting of currencies and information. The instantaneous nature of things. Like a pagan temple. Scully clutched his precious plastic card. Billie hooked a finger through his belt loop. Gently, conscious of the impression they were already making, he pressed the hat onto her head to cover the worst of her wounds. Cowed by the smell of aftershave, he found his Allied Irish chequebook, and brushed at the creases in his shirt. In five languages, all around, people bought insurance, travellers’ cheques, guidebooks, package tours, collected mail, flaunted their mobility.

Cash the cheque, he thought. Pray it doesn’t bounce. And the list of doctors.

Billie scuffed her RM’s in the carpet. He would give up soon — she could feel his key winding down since yesterday. The money burred down on the counter at the level of her nose, she felt the wind of it against her hot cheeks. That little bed in the attic. A horse. A castle.

‘And a telegram for you, Mr Scully.’

Billie felt his knee jump against her. She let go his belt loop and watched how carefully he opened the envelope. The money still there on the counter, and people in the queue behind them clucking with irritation.

‘Billie?’

She grabbed the money and tugged at him. He smiled. It was a look you wanted to Ajax off his face with a wire brush. She pulled him back from the counter to the rear where old people argued over their maps and kicked their luggage.

‘Just let me read it again,’ he said vaguely, but she snatched it from him and pressed it flat on a low table.

SCULLY. MEET TUILERIES FOUNTAIN NOON DECEMBER 23. COME ALONE. WILL EXPLAIN. JENNIFER.

It was hard to breathe, looking at it. Not even the bit about him going alone. Just the idea, like a rock falling from the sky. The wickedness of it. It made Billie’s chest hurt, as if she’d gulped onion soup so hot it was cooking her gizzards.

‘She shouldn’t be allowed,’ she whispered.