Giuseppe goes to his tiny kitchenette and returns with bread and ham and three tiny dimpled glass bottles of Orangina. Lucy sits next to the dog and strokes his neck and breathes out, feels her insides untwist and unfurl and settle into place. And then she puts her hand into her rucksack to feel for her phone. The battery died some time during the night. She finds her charger and says to Giovanni, ‘Is it OK if I charge my phone?’
‘Of course, my love. There’s an empty socket here.’
She plugs it in and holds the on button down, waiting for it to spring into life.
The notification is still there.
The baby is 25.
She sits with the children over the coffee table and watches them eat the bread and ham. The humiliations of the last week start to wash away, like footprints on the shore. Her children are safe. There is food. She has her fiddle. She has a bed to sleep in. She has money in her purse.
Giuseppe watches the children eat too. He glances at her and smiles. ‘I was so worried about you all. Where have you been?’
‘Oh,’ she says lightly, ‘staying with a friend.’
‘N—’ Marco begins.
She prods him with her elbow and turns to Giuseppe. ‘A little bird told me what you’d been doing, you naughty man. And I couldn’t have that. I just couldn’t. And I knew if I told you I was going you’d have persuaded me to stay. So I had to sneak off and, honestly, we’ve been fine. We’ve been absolutely fine. I mean, look at us! We’re all fine.’ She pulls the dog on to her lap and squeezes him.
‘And you have your fiddle back?’
‘Yes, I have my fiddle back. So … is there a room? It doesn’t have to be our usual room. It can be any room. Any room at all.’
‘There is a room. It’s at the back though, so no view. And a little dark. And the shower is broken, just a tap. You can have it for twelve euros a night.’
‘Yes,’ Lucy says, ‘yes please!’ She puts the dog down and gets to her feet and hugs Giuseppe. He smells dusty and old, a little dirty, but she doesn’t care. ‘Thank you,’ she says, ‘thank you so much.’
That night the three of them sleep in a tiny double bed in the dark room at the back of the house where the sound of tyres hissing on the hot tarmac outside competes with the creaking of a crappy plastic fan as it oscillates across the room, the television of the people in the room next door and a fly caught somewhere in between the curtains and the window. Stella has her fist in Lucy’s face, Marco is moaning gently in his sleep and the dog is snoring. But Lucy sleeps hard and deep and long for the first time in over a week.
14
CHELSEA, 1988
That day, 8 September 1988, should have been my second day at big school, but you’ve probably already guessed by now that I did not get to go to my long-anticipated big school that year, the school where I would meet my soulmates, my lifelong friends, my people. At intervals that summer I would ask my mother, ‘When are we going to Harrods to buy my uniform?’ And she would say, ‘Let’s wait until the end of the holidays, in case you have a growth spurt.’ And then the end of the holidays approached and still we had not been to Harrods.
Neither had we been to Germany. We usually went for a week or two to stay with my grandmother in her big airy house in the Black Forest with its dank above-ground swimming pool and silken pine needles underfoot. But this summer we could not afford it, apparently, and if we couldn’t afford to fly to Germany then how on earth, I wondered, were we going to be able to afford school fees?
By the beginning of September my parents were making applications to local state schools and putting our names on to waiting lists. They never specifically said that we had financial problems, but it was obvious that we did. I had a stomach ache for days, worrying about being bullied at a rough comprehensive.
Oh, such petty, tiny concerns. Such trifling worries. I look back at eleven-year-old me: a slightly odd boy of average height, skinny build, my mother’s blue eyes, my father’s chestnut hair, knees like potatoes wedged on to sticks, a disapproving tightness to