The Water-Breather. Ben Faccini

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      Crossing the Channel is not only dicey because of the rough seas, there are also Pado’s glass jars of preserved lungs and the histological slides for his colleagues to take into account. You have to explain them carefully to customs so Pado prefers to slip them under his seat with all the wine he’s jammed into every gap of the car.

      ‘Don’t take that much wine Gaspare, it’s not reasonable. You know what they’re like at customs,’ Ama tries wearily.

      ‘Bloody customs. Ridiculous limits!’ Pado won’t give up.

      We divide the wine into ‘good friends’ and ‘acquaintances’. The good friends get labelled bottles carefully laid out under cheese, garlic and pâtés to hide their number. The acquaintances get cheap wine shoved under the back seat, huddled up against the floating organs in their jars.

      ‘Please tell me they are from an animal!’ Ama begs when she sees them.

      Pado merely mutters ‘Yes, yes’ to Ama.

      She’s not convinced, and nor are we, because it’s like the time Mr Yunnan first arrived. Mr Yunnan came in a jumble of brown cardboard boxes with numbers on them. Box one goes on box two and so on and so forth, until you have a whole body, or rather a skeleton, as Mr Yunnan has been dead for some time, maybe four or five years, Pado reckons. It was Giulio and I who gave him his name. The first time he was assembled, we couldn’t believe it was so complicated. Clicking the neck onto the spine was the hardest. Luckily, Pado had had delicate hinges fitted so he could rotate the bones to face all his colleagues in the back rows. He says that’s how he describes the kind of deformation of the ribs that can happen with lung inflammation and something about osteoclastic pitting of the bones.

      Ama was sure the skeleton was plastic. ‘Look how the finger bones are joined together! Isn’t it fantastic what they can do nowadays! The knees bend, and the feet!’

      That was before she read the certificate, half in English, half in Chinese, which said that Professor Gaspare Messina has the right to carry human skeleton number 76455 for professional purposes.

      ‘There’s nothing to get het up about,’ Pado reassured Ama. ‘He’s dead. I got him through a special deal with the Chinese government, in Yunnan Province. It’s the cheapest and best place for skeletons because they’re generally in good nick when they arrive.’

      Ama couldn’t look Mr Yunnan’s way. She was speechless. ‘What do you mean?’

      ‘I need this skeleton for my work. It’s fine.’

      ‘It’s fine to drive around with someone’s bones in our car is it? What next Gaspare? What bloody next?’ Ama gasped.

      We looked at Mr Yunnan. This extra presence. This unassembled, severed set of bones that we had touched with our own bare hands. It was only when Pado explained that you could tell he was a young man and that he might well have been a prisoner, that I knew that the hinge at the base of his neck was fastened to the point where the executioner shot the bullet that ripped his life away. I knew it. It grew inside me, an unwanted thought that has stayed in my head ever since.

      ‘He may have died naturally,’ Duccio announced, but he wasn’t convinced either.

      He just said it the way Pado insists that Mr Yunnan gave his life for Science, or the way Ama quietly swallows and tells us that nothing is going to bring back our grandfather, Grand Maurice, now that he’s dead and drowned in a lake in France. You only have to read Pado’s books to see that there’s no turning back: the organs laid out on metal trays, the close-up pinkish patterns with diagrams, the weight of a lung lying alone without a body. Most people don’t give their names, Pado says. They merely die and get cut up and photographed. But the tumour, on page four of Pado’s cancer book, has a name tag to the side of it. It’s too small to read.

       5

      Once on the ferry, the oil-salt smell of the car deck clouded with car fumes, the sound of motors and creaking chains, and the gentle rock of waves get Giulio going. He complains that he’s feeling sick and Ama can’t answer because she can feel it too, a slow vertigo taste that rises from the stomach to lodge in the throat. Pado is convinced ‘it’s all in the mind’. He takes us on a tour of the duty-free shop to pass the time. Giulio is wavering. He can barely walk straight. Pado scoops him up and, as he does so, a stream of sick flies out of Giulio’s mouth. It drips down Pado’s front like a tie and onto the floor. Ama hurries to the cash till to ask for some tissues. She fights against the same lurching, retching urge in her mouth. She stops on a bench and breathes in deeply.

      Pado is holding Giulio by the back of his jumper, out in front of him, at arm’s length. ‘Che schifo! Oh no! No! Bloody hell,’ he grumbles, half sorry, half irate. He turns his head away to avoid the smell. Already people are changing direction. A woman with grey hair gingerly steps out of the way and sighs something to herself.

      ‘Sorry, what did you say? Something wrong?’ Pado hurls at her. She backs away, aghast. Pado pursues her down the corridor, carrying Giulio with him, dangling in mid air, from his sagging jumper. ‘Go on!’ Pado shouts at the woman, ‘if you’ve got something to say, say it. Go on, if you dare, ma va …!’ Giulio swings, crying. He hangs limply above the ground, pushing with his legs against Pado’s arm to get down. Ama staggers to her feet.

      ‘Put the child down,’ she shrieks at Pado. Then it seems as if all the people on the ferry spin round and watch us, everything stopping, no one but us, perched alone on the sea.

      Giulio is sick again. It splatters against the floor and slides with the rock of the ship, this way and that. Pado turns to face the glares. ‘Cosa, what? What is it?’

      Ama snatches Giulio from Pado and holds him tight to her chest. She cuddles his head against her. ‘It’s all right my darling, calm down! How are you feeling?’ Giulio shivers a little, a ring of multicoloured sick printed on his lips, and on Ama’s shirt. Pado has got into an argument with one of the stewards. His shouting competes with the noise of the loudspeakers. Ama suddenly grabs me by the arm too and drags me off to find the cabins, with Giulio draped across her shoulder. ‘Come on, get a move on!’

      I try and tell Duccio where we’re going. I wave and point down the corridor in front of us, urging him to get a move on. He can’t though, he’s guarding the luggage, a heap of leather and cloth shapes, as high as him.

      ‘Hang on! What about Pado?’ I say, running beside Ama.

      ‘Well hopefully he won’t bloody find us!’

      We settle in our cabin. We each get a bunk-bed, except Giulio, who has to sleep in the middle, on the floor, in a nest of blankets and jumpers. Ama puts a bowl next to him, in case. We can hear the drinking crowds, with heavy feet, drumming the decks. The pinball machines throw up money and children run, falling between adult legs. From inside the cabin, it sounds like pots and pans knocking in a kitchen cupboard. Pado and Duccio show up, towing the luggage behind them along the corridors. They stack it up next to Giulio on the floor. Pado drops Ama’s bag onto the end of her bunk. It’s a shiny bag she got free from a department store. Pado reckons that’s typically English liking something just because it’s free. The problem with that, Ama argues, is that she’s always typically something when it suits Pado: typically English, typically French, typically Slovenian, typically Dutch. Anyway she’s convinced Pado СКАЧАТЬ