Sunbathing Read online

  I sat up in the creaky bed, turned on the lamp and looked over myself. I was covered in bites. They were everywhere: on my ankles, arms and fingers, my knees and my thighs. On my elbows. I balled up my fists to stop myself from scratching but I couldn’t take it, so I rubbed the bites with my knuckles, thinking that rubbing was less dangerous than scratching somehow. I focused on objects in the room to distract myself. Like the little wooden shelf nailed to the wall opposite me, on which someone (Giulia, probably) had put a bronze cup, a cloth and a little glass bottle filled with water (for a flower? I’d need to pick a flower). Above the shelf hung a small round mirror. I reached over to the bedside and unplugged my phone, opening the apps and pulling down to refresh, once and then again, but the feeds wouldn’t load. I tried one more time before giving up.

  When the sky turned a kind of grapefruit colour and a pinkish light began to fill the room, I got up and stood in the window, taking in the outside. Past the hill in the early daylight I could see more hills, and a snow-capped mountain. I don’t know why, but it made me feel like I was somewhere else, not at a friend’s house in the Italian countryside but somewhere totally alien. On another planet or in another realm, maybe, like a place you might go in your sleep or in death. I stood there for a moment until the feeling went away.

  Directly beneath the window was an old stone arch, and a field of grasses and what looked like pumpkin or zucchini plants. Bright-green stems and big flat leaves curled around the stone and the wire fence and down the hillside. A church bell rang, though it was hard to tell where it was coming from, because the sound bounced around the valley.

  I realised then that I could hear Giulia humming downstairs, so I pulled on a pair of pants and went down to the kitchen to find her.

  ‘Good morning!’ she said. ‘I’m making coffee.’

  I hugged her with one arm and took a seat at the kitchen table.

  ‘I couldn’t sleep,’ she said. ‘It’s so fucking hot.’

  ‘Yeah, me neither,’ I replied.

  ‘Not at all?’

  ‘Just for a bit this morning.’

  ‘Good.’ She looked at my arms. ‘You got bitten,’ she said. ‘Hold on.’

  She disappeared, and I heard clinking sounds in the next room. When she returned she was holding a bottle of calamine lotion.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘We don’t have cotton balls, though. Want a couple squares of toilet paper?’

  ‘I’ll just use my finger.’

  ‘Good girl,’ she said. ‘No need for waste this early in the morning.’

  She turned off the coffee pot, which was an ancient-looking thing. A labyrinthine stovetop coffee maker with two small metal ledges attached for two cups to sit on, and two spouts curling out from the pot. When the coffee was ready, it began dribbling from the spouts right into the cups. I sat there, half-watching the pot and half-applying the lotion.

  ‘Did you make these?’ I asked about the cups. Pinch pots with delicate little handles and blue and yellow flowers painted on them.

  ‘Yeah, years ago. How fucked are they?’

  ‘They’re not fucked, they’re good.’

  ‘No, I love them,’ she said. ‘Even if they’re wonky.’

  ‘Me too,’ I said.

  Giulia took cream from the fridge and ice cubes from the freezer and we stirred both into the coffee before carrying our cups out into the front yard to sit at the table and chairs that lived under the walnut tree. I was afraid—had been afraid all week—that the moment we were alone, Giulia would reach out a hand and place it on my forearm and ask if I was okay.

  But she didn’t. Not reach out a hand nor even give me a look; she just drank her coffee and mapped out the view that encircled us, waving a hand in front of her. She pointed to the towns across the valley—told me their names and which ones had market days—and then to the sea beyond the hills.

  I couldn’t see it.

  ‘What’s wrong with my eyes?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’ She laughed. ‘Something.’

  She then pointed to the neighbours’ houses, ones in the street that we could see from the table, and others we couldn’t that were further away. Martina and Sandro lived next door and had a cat named Micio. The house next to theirs was abandoned, owned by a man who lived in Poland who didn’t want to live in it or rent it out, and Giulia and Fab liked to sunbake on his balcony. Annarita lived at the top of the street, with her son and a number of cats, Giulia didn’t know how many. Berto was halfway to town on an orchard, and had ducks and geese, and three cats that he refused to name so Giulia called them Grigio, Bianco and Arancione. Berto farmed eggs, and each week Giulia and Fab would walk up and visit him and bring home a carton. Tiziana and Giovanni were further into town still, and had it all—a dog, Mandorlino (‘Little Almond’), stray cats, ducks, lizards in tanks, fruit trees, liquor, wine, chocolate, vegetables, everything—and, Giulia said, used any excuse to drop by the house. Sitting there in the morning sun I’d wondered if Giulia and Fab were like grandchildren in a village full of doting grandparents and it’d made me smile.

  ‘That’s Monte della Rocca,’ she said when I asked about the mountain I saw from my bedroom window. ‘It’s where the rebels hid before coming down and killing all the Nazis. I’m glad you could see it.’ She took a sip of coffee and looked up at the sky. ‘It’s not always clear enough.’

  We sat in quiet for a minute, looking out over the countryside and just enjoying it. Being together, for the first time in years. But I thought maybe I should be thinking about the tragedy of life on earth.

  She breathed in. ‘Have just one conversation about fundamental human rights here, and you’ll see what the terms and conditions are.’

  When we finished our coffee, we took a walk up the hill so that Fab could sleep in. He’d been up late writing, Giulia told me. He was working on his first book, a collection of short stories.

  When we reached the top of the hill, Giulia showed me the village, or what we could see of it from there, and as we walked along the main road she named all the fruit trees that grew wildly and in orchards all around us: apricot, apple, peach, plum and fig, noting the ones we were allowed to pick from and the ones we weren’t. We walked along the road until we reached a kind of flatness, where we could no longer see the mountains or the town, only the road, and the wide expanse of green and brown either side, and the cherry orchards to the left of us. I asked if we were allowed to pick the cherries, but Giulia told me they were overripe and rotten and eaten by worms.

  ‘I was hoping you’d be here in time for the cherry festival,’ she said, pulling the weeds from in between the red poppies on the side of the road. ‘They have pie and cake, and competitions. And everyone goes into town and parties.’

  ‘When is it?’ I asked.

  She turned back and grimaced at me. ‘Like two weeks ago.’ Then, seeing the disappointment on my face, ‘It wasn’t as good as last year, though.’

  I could tell that she was lying so we both laughed.

  Giulia jumped the wire fence into the orchard and I climbed in clumsily after her. As we walked between the trees Giulia picked cherries from the branches and showed me how to check for worms. If the cherries leaked juice when you squeezed them, it meant there were holes. And where there were holes, there were worms.

  ‘It’s actually too hot,’ she said, taking off her hat and fanning herself with it. ‘Sorry, I didn’t realise when we left.’

  I was relieved. I’d been dying but too embarrassed to say anything, in case Giulia said, ‘Are you kidding me? This is nothing!’

  ‘Oh, thank god,’ I said. ‘I need water.’

  We walked back down the hill towards the house, tracing walls and trees and garden hedges for tiny bits of shade where we could. I tried to remember where I’d forgotten to apply sunscreen; my ears probably, as usual, and maybe the backs of my arms.

  When we’d almost reached the house, Giulia shouted ‘Briciolaaa!’, making me jump. br />
  A small cat wriggled out from under the wooden bench next to the front door and trotted over to wind herself around Giulia’s legs. She was long and skinny and sort of spotted, with lemon-yellow eyes and ears too big for her head.

  ‘Who’s this?’ I asked.

  ‘Briciola,’ she said, pronouncing it Brrri-cho-la. It was the most beautiful sound. ‘The strayest of the village strays.’

  ‘Crumble!’ shouted Fab from somewhere just inside the house. ‘“Briciola” is crumble, right, Giuli?’

  ‘Nearly!’ she called back. ‘Crumb! Like breadcrumb!’

  We went into the kitchen and found Fab writing in a notebook at the table.

  Giulia leaned down and hugged him around the chest and kissed him on both cheeks, one after the other. When she rested her chin on his head, her dark brown hair hung over his and it looked like it was his hair.

  ‘How good is that?’ she asked, looking at me. ‘Crumb?’

  ‘Obsessed,’ I said.

  I sat down and tried to lure Briciola inside with a long stringy bit of grass I’d picked up on our walk. She just watched me from where she sat on the welcome mat.

  ‘She never comes in,’ said Giulia.

  ‘Maybe because everybody always shoos him out—her out,’ Fab replied. ‘She is scared now.’

  ‘Same with food,’ said Giulia. ‘She’s a bit wary.’

  ‘Yes. Weary.’

  ‘Wary,’ Giulia corrected sweetly. ‘Nervous about something.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘Definitely wary as well.’

  It was lunchtime by now, so Giulia rummaged through the fridge and put things on the kitchen table for us to assemble. She told Fab to take his notebook upstairs to his desk. ‘You don’t want oil on it.’ He was one draft in, and most of the manuscript was written by hand because working on the computer made his eyes sting.

  We assembled a salad of greens and a plate of sliced meats, and then Giulia unwrapped some cheeses. When I went to pour a jug of water she came over and showed me how to attach the filter to the tap. ‘There are cold bottles in the fridge,’ she said. ‘We have to fill them every day.’

  After lunch we sat outside in the shade of the tree again, bringing bits of things for Briciola to eat. Leftover parmesan and tuna from the fridge. Bits of ham. She was so bony that when she nudged you in thanks it kind of hurt. I tried taking photos of her with my phone but she looked scary in all of them, too skinny and too ragged, not at all cute or soft like she was in real life. Giulia went inside and got the empty cartons of cream from our morning coffees and she placed them down on the grass in front of Briciola and we watched as she worked at them: putting her whole head inside the cartons and licking them clean. Each time she emerged, her whiskers and nose would be covered in white, and I’d think of Donna—your little old cat.

  3

  At your funeral almost everyone talked about the food. Those who weren’t talking about the food were asking, ‘What happened? Do they know yet?’, to which others mostly replied, ‘I don’t think so,’ or, ‘They’re still waiting’, or else pretended not to hear. Soft rain came down all day, sailing down like snow, so the guests took shelter under the awning and inside the bowls club, between the bar and the dartboard and the pool table.

  People took turns talking into a microphone and then we drank until the tab was all used up. I don’t remember what was said, or how the hours passed, but I do remember the volume of us all, the sound of us there in those rooms, with the doors opening out onto the greens, and how I thought we should be quieter. Mourners should be quiet, shouldn’t they?

  Afterwards I lay on Lars’s sofa as the real adults talked. They shared their stories of you, their funny ones and sweet ones and ones that made everyone laugh until there was no air left in the room, but I couldn’t think of any. The rain had stopped but everything was still wet. I was trying to think about the nice bit, the rest of it, before the bad dream of things started, but I couldn’t. All the good memories were packed away somewhere. I could only think of the infuriating parts: the loss, the emptiness, the last conversation we had, and all that had transpired before that.

  ‘That’s too funny,’ someone was saying about a story I hadn’t heard and I felt like we were talking about you in front of you, like you could’ve been standing right there.

  Lars’s place wasn’t full of flowers like mine was, or like I knew Rachel’s would be, even though the two of you had known each other longer than you’d known Rachel and me put together, and even though you and Rachel hadn’t spoken in years. I wondered if only family members and ex-wives were sent flowers, and why that was. I wondered, too, why flowers at all? Why not huge bottles of vodka or books on how not to die of grief, and why not vouchers for resorts or beach shack rentals, so that a person feeling like this could just go away and be alone for as long as possible? Probably because flowers were safer and cheaper and they were alive.

  The inside of Lars’s place reminded me of you; there’s an inherent stuffiness to even the most spotless of older man dwellings that feels, at once, comforting and alienating. It was in the framed photographs—a little dusty—that hung on the walls and the jumpers on the backs of chairs that smelled faintly of cologne. There was, inevitably, a collection of books on niche topics cluttering bookcases and coffee tables, and rugs that had been vacuumed somewhat feebly.

  When Lars came and sat on the end of the sofa, picking my legs up and placing them on top of his, I had to close my eyes to keep from crying, and be sure to smile so he didn’t worry I was losing it. You know what I was thinking? People die all the time. That’s what I was thinking.

  Maybe two months before you died, Rachel and I went to lunch and a movie. Rachel, tall and sweet, with her Prada bag hanging off the back of her chair. She told me she’d reached out to you—texted and suggested a drink—but never heard back. She said it in her gentle way, only telling me because I asked if she’d heard from you lately, and when she saw I was annoyed she changed the subject swiftly and tried to talk me down—never interested in disparaging you properly, unlike me.

  We were eating at that table we all used to eat at together.

  ‘I’m sure he’s still processing things,’ she said kindly, later, though by then it was three years after the break-up, long enough to process all of it five times over. And so I sat there and drank my coffee, though I thought of our conversations (yours and mine) of the past week, the past year even. Though I suppose only half of them were conversations, the other half technically fights. Emotional warfare. I don’t think he’s processed a second of it, I was tempted to say. But I didn’t want to worry her, and I was tired of feeling guilty for badmouthing you.

  By then I’d watched a few of your break-ups—though the first one, the one that unfolded before I could talk, probably didn’t count—and so I’d had a few lunch dates just like this one. Meetings with the women you loved, and who loved you, where we’d promise to always treat one another like family. Funnily enough, that part was always easy and happened of its own accord; the women were all beautiful, of course. The real work, I often found, was in staying on good terms with you.

  On that summer Saturday, Rachel talked about you with extraordinary compassion. And I thought I might even tell you about it sometime—just how kind she was behind your back.

  After lunch, we crossed the road into the cinema, where it was dark and cool, and we watched a Korean zombie thriller. We’d agreed via text that, whatever we saw, it wasn’t allowed to be about love or family. But because everything is about love or family, there was a subplot designed to torment us: a man in his fifties had left his wife and children for a younger woman. But in a moment of doomsday clarity, as the zombies seized the southern part of the country, he realised he’d made a terrible mistake. So he said sorry to his beautiful young girlfriend, leaving her standing alone on a bridge, and he fought zombies left and right to return to his family in Daegu. When he discovered them, hiding in the children’s bedroom of the family
home, he breathed: ‘I’m worthless. And I don’t deserve any of you.’ His wife, unbothered, zombies scratching at the door, replied: ‘Nobody cares,’ which made us chuckle. Then an undead arm reached in through the window behind him and ripped his head off, which shut us up.

  4

  The Altino house was three hundred years old, maybe older, Giulia told me. As the first week passed, I often forgot I was staying with friends and felt like I’d been sent off to boarding school to think about what I’d done. Maybe because of the guestrooms, or the pictures of the Virgin Mary and the Botticelli angels above the beds. Or maybe it was the sink that was shared between the upstairs bedrooms for teeth-brushing and handwashing.

  Giulia kept a vegetable garden by the front door. In the mornings before the sun, and in the afternoons when the light moved behind the house, she carried buckets of water from the laundry outside the kitchen to the garden. I sat under the walnut tree, watching and talking to her while she scooped cupfuls of water and poured them onto the plants, comforted by the sound, its rhythm and exactness. I watched her moving through the green, touching things and talking to them quietly, her back hunched in a way that didn’t suit her young body, but was lovely nonetheless—motherly or something. When the watering was done, she would join me at the table to watch the sun come up or go down.

  The shower and toilet were downstairs and outside, near the washing line, so that when I needed to pee in the middle of the night—and I always did in Altino, though not at home in Australia, I don’t know why—I had to sprint downstairs and up again through the dark house on my tiptoes. Past all of the alcoves and dark corners and white curtains curling in the midnight breeze.

  There were four bedrooms in all. Giulia and Fab’s, the Birthing Room, and two more guestrooms, both of which would be used by visitors who were coming in a month’s time for the wedding.

  As I got used to the house, to the hours my friends kept and the way the two of them chose to pass the time, I began to feel at home. And there were days when I dreaded the arrival of others—the looming obligation to be personable, the energy it would take to look interested, to stop my eyes from glazing over and my mouth from pursing while other people talked—and days when I wished that the house would fill with noise and movement instead of leaving so much room for my thoughts and feelings.