The Water-Breather. Ben Faccini

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       7

      It’s an hour’s drive to our grandmother’s house from London. Machance isn’t old, but she looks it because she hasn’t really eaten very much since Grand Maurice died two years ago and she moved back to England from the house in France. She sits in her bare dining-room and tells Ama that it’s hard being alone.

      She spends most days dead heading the flowers in her garden and, in the evenings, she extracts the fine hairs from her chin with a rapid pull of her fingers to pass the time. By nightfall, she has a tiny nest of thin hairs in her palm. On windy nights, she casts them from her window into the breeze and by morning they have gone. I imagine them gathering in the bark of trees, forming rings of wiry softness clinging to the trunks.

      Soon after we arrive at Machance’s, Ama sets to work, going through urgent bills and clearing up untidy rooms. She stops as soon as Machance appears, not wanting to get in the way, not able to explain. She glances over the sparse furniture and sagging paintings, confused by the disrupted order of the house.

      Then people start turning up to see Ama and Pado. These friends and guests come and go, sad at the fact that we’re never in one place.

      ‘Why don’t you stay a while? We never see you!’ ‘Why are you always rushing off so soon?’

      Ama answers them all with the same empty expression, her bag for the next journey already packed and prepared in her head.

      Two visitors, Michael and Joan, stay a little longer. Pado rolls out medical stories and cases he’s heard at his conferences, like the one about the woman who smoked so much that her lips went yellow and grew into grapes of tumours that clustered like chandeliers from her mouth down into her lungs. Michael listens to Pado in horror.

      ‘Enough! Enough!’ he begs: ‘You’re going to put me off smoking!’

      Joan urges Pado to carry on. ‘Keep going, Gaspare. He’s got to give up one day. He already can’t breathe properly going up stairs!’

      Michael tells her to stop being so ridiculous and gets up, pointedly, to light a cigarette. Machance brings him an ashtray. He balances it delicately on the window sill, blowing his smoke outside. I watch him from the table, inhaling, sucking in the smoke in big gulps. Pado and Ama move on to another subject. Machance explains something to Duccio. Isn’t anyone going to say anything to Michael? Isn’t anyone going to show him Pado’s book on lung disease? I look at Michael again, rotating the ashtray with his finger. Now he’s knocking the grey ash off, with precise little taps of the cigarette. The smoke snakes into his mouth and sticks to his lips, like deadly air flowing in and out of an air conditioner. The tumours. What about the tumours? His lips will swell and rot. He won’t be able to speak or swallow and the scabs and stubs sprouting from his lips will turn into blisters of blood. I picture him dying and the doctors waiting to cut out his lungs for a photo or a microscope slide, with his finished life etched in its dulling colours. I feel a headache mounting, a sickness in the back of the eyes. I stare back at Michael, transfixed.

      Machance interrupts my gaze and asks me to help her lay out some glasses. I reach across the table. I spot a pack of cigarettes, inside Michael’s jacket, draped over the chair. I can’t stop looking at it, poking out of the grey material. I carry an empty bowl to the kitchen. What if Michael ends up like Mr Yunnan or Grand Maurice and all the other dead people? We have to stop him! I corner Giulio near the fridge: we should do something quick! Giulio says if I can grab the cigarette packet, he’ll divert everyone’s attention. He starts running up and down asking Ama for a sip of coffee. She tells him to calm down, plonks him on her lap and roughs up his hair. As she curls strands of Giulio’s hair round her fingers, I dig into Michael’s jacket. Pado looks at me strangely. He is wondering what I’m doing, but he’s too busy waiting for the next joke or smile to mind. Michael laughs with Pado.

      I can feel the cigarette packet burning in my hand.

      Giulio and I rush off to the bathroom. We pass Machance turning last year’s apples from the garden on the window ledges. She rotates each apple, every day, to check that it’s not rotting. Not that it matters much: she’ll never eat them anyway because she is thinking of Grand Maurice. In the bathroom, Giulio and I run the warm water and fill the basin to the brim. We have to move fast before Michael tries to light up again. We tip the cigarette packet into the water. The cigarettes take up the basin like felled tree trunks on a river. They gradually fall apart, shavings of paper and shredded leaves. Giulio pulls out the plug. The cigarettes clog the hole and gargle. Machance is walking by outside. We don’t have long. The cigarettes won’t go down. I push and prod them unsuccessfully into the plug hole. Then I open the lavatory. They’ll have to go down there instead. We drop them in the bowl and pull the chain, a lengthy throttled flush. Some cigarettes float back up to the surface and linger for a while, others go straight down and never return. Then we realise we still have the packet itself. We drop it into the loo as well. With the brush we crush it up and dilute the water with blue antiseptic. Clean smells drench the bathroom and the packet vanishes.

      They haven’t noticed that we left the sitting-room. Duccio is on his own. No one’s patted him on the head. Ama says that we have to protect Duccio. It’s not often that people are born like him. Not even the photographer who came and took pictures of him in his suit could get it right. ‘He’s too good-looking,’ Ama sighs and no one can do him justice. ‘Beautiful children aren’t always beautiful adults though,’ so we have to be careful to appreciate it now. Her friends do. Ama has one friend who kisses us hello and Duccio swears she once touched his lips with her tongue. It was like a warm, wet piece of ham. Giulio and I don’t understand. He has a nose and eyes and mouth like us, but they always look at him, the same way as they look at Ama.

      Michael goes to light another cigarette. He pulls the ashtray off the window sill. Giulio tugs at my sleeve. We sit down and do something. Something nothing. I try and think calmly, smoothly. Michael searches from one pocket to another, knocking his head to remember. He gets up and looks in his coat, in Joan’s bag, in his trousers. He’s frantic and he doesn’t like it when everyone carries on talking. He СКАЧАТЬ