The Golden Locket (Unbreakable Trilogy, Book 2) (40 page)

I see Gustav before he sees me. Through the big open doors of a
squero
, a small shipyard on the Rio di San Trovaso, where the carcases of broken gondolas and the embryos of new ones hang from the rafters, he is squatting on the floor amongst curled shavings, listening intently to a grizzled geezer as he planes dark wood. Gustav is stroking the rib of a half-formed gondola with the tip of his finger, and I stand on the other side of the canal watching him, a shiver of desire going through me as I look at his big warm hands. When he’s not punishing me he strokes me just like that.

Right now the boat looks like the bleached skeleton of a long fish. I come up behind the two men and scuffle my feet in the sawdust. Gustav half-turns and waggles his fingers over his shoulder but I’m not to interrupt. I squat close to him, dying to ferret my nose into his black hair just where it falls on to his red scarf. It would be rude to start licking his neck in front of this old gondola-maker, but I want to breathe him in.

‘Did you know, there are seven different kinds of wood going into this gondola? Two hundred and eighty pieces in the hull alone,’ Gustav remarks after a moment. The old man nods at me, a gold tooth glinting, then gets back to work.

I raise my camera and start to shoot.

‘He uses oak for the flanks, fir for the bottom of the hull because apparently it’s light. The stern is made from cherry, and the bow is mahogany. He has to make it asymmetrical. The left side has a greater curve to balance the lateral action of the oar. It’s a work of art. He’ll take out all the nails and do it again if it’s a millimetre out of line.’

Gustav stands up and bids farewell to the gondola-maker in fluent Italian.

‘Is that what you wanted to show me today?’

‘No, but it’s fascinating nevertheless. Maybe we should plant all those trees in the garden we are going to have one day, Serena. In England. Italy. Wherever. Wood for these beautiful boats. It’s just a shame they’re so overpriced now, once the gondoliers reel in the tourists.’ Gustav seems deep in thought as he puts his arm round me. ‘Like streetwalkers tarted up for business.’

We walk back along the Zattere and push open the door of a warm lino-floored pizzeria noisy with the clatter of pans and cutlery. The rustic walls are adorned with misty paintings of the city.

We spend a long afternoon drinking beer and eating pizzas the size of wagon wheels slathered in melted mozzarella and sprinkled with bright green basil before leaving reluctantly and making our way slowly back over the slim Accademia Bridge. We stop in the middle, taking in the curve of the Grand Canal.

‘La Serenissima. Venice the serene and beautiful. They named this town after you, Serena.’

I smile and lean against him. ‘You know this bridge was intended to be temporary when it was built? They were supposed to be finding a suitable permanent design but they seem to have forgotten, and this spindly wooden one is still here.’

We watch the parade of finished gondolas slide under our feet, all painted and varnished and lacquered and gliding nimbly amongst the businesslike
vaporetti
. A trio of heavy
peate
lumbers down the centre of the channel with several grand pianos lashed to their hulls.

‘A bit like the London Eye. That was only supposed to be for the millenium, wasn’t it?’

‘And how different this watery thoroughfare is from the Thames.’

I close my eyes and see the giant wheel turning on the South Bank, how it caught my eye every time I looked out of the window of the Levi gallery during my first-ever exhibition in London. I remember the quiet circuit Gustav and I made on it that day just before Christmas when he asked me to go to New York with him. How thrilled I was.

And yet at this moment the last place I want to be is New York.

The couples below us who have paid a king’s ransom for the privilege of being propelled in a gondola look faintly ridiculous as they rub mottled violet hands and try to arrange their legs elegantly on their cushions, exclaiming and taking pictures while the bored gondolier whistles soundlessly above them.

‘I’ve got something here to perk up those shrivelled-looking honeymooners. Don’t they know there are other ways to enjoy a gondola?’

Gustav chuckles quietly and pulls the silver chain out of his pocket. It has been rolled up so that it looks like a tennis ball made of metallic wool, something a kitten would toy with. It’s tied all round so that it won’t unravel.

‘Gustav? What are you doing?’

He waits for the gondola to slide under the bridge and then tosses the ball straight down into the gondola, making the couple jump and wonder.

Gustav kisses my hair. ‘It’ll take them a while to work out what it is for. But I hope they enjoy it. We don’t need it any more. You’re free.’

‘You came to Venice to set me free?’ I rub my wrist, where the silver bracelet still glistens. This explains his serious expression. He came to tell me that it’s over. ‘I don’t want to be free. I want to be glued to you forever!’

‘And you are. You will be. But we don’t need the silver chain to bind us. However long a leash I attach to you, you will always stretch it further. It’s a symbol that has run its course, because I trust, I
know,
that you’ll always come back to me, even when you run away as far as Venice. So I think we need something new to symbolise what we have.’

We stare from the bridge down the Grand Canal flanked by Gothic palazzi towards San Marco, my hotel, and the wide expanse of light from the lagoon beyond. The coral sunset is beginning to stain the sky. Beneath us a boat churns up green foam. Gustav presses his hand on the rail to make me stay put, and dashes down the bridge the way we came. He darts into a little bar beneath the Hotel Galleria and comes out again with two tall glasses of prosecco.

I take a sip from my glass. It’s delicious and light, but the bubbles aren’t inside me yet.

‘You know the strangest thing, Gustav? I’ve done a lot of walking while I’ve been here. I went looking for the convent where I photographed those nuns last summer, but I couldn’t find it. It was as if it had never existed. But then the other morning I passed the Ospedale della Pietà, not far from the hotel actually. Historically it was the church where the fallen women of the city left their babies, nearly always girls, to be brought up. And Vivaldi trained many of them to sing like angels in his choirs.’

My eyes spring with hot tears as I look over in that direction.

‘We can always come back here again, Serena. How about a tour of Italy next year? We can find a lovely villa, in Tuscany maybe, that will only be ours.’

I don’t really register what he’s saying. I lean my head on his shoulder. ‘The foundlings were given the surname Trovato, did you know that? It means ‘found’. Maybe I could do that. Discard my own false history once and for all. Make myself a new one. I could change my name to Trovato. What do you think, Gustav?’

Gustav doesn’t respond. I’m not sure he’s heard me. The wind whistles past us. The buildings of Venice crowd round us as the light fades.

Then he turns me to face him. My heart starts thumping, knocking the golden locket against the bone. He lifts the locket, snaps it open with a little key no bigger than his little fingernail, shakes out into his hand whatever has been rattling in there for the last seven weeks. Now his face has gone white, anxious, unsure, and that makes it suddenly youthful. His black hair whips into his sparking black eyes as he kneels down like a gallant knight bowing to his queen.

The soundtrack to this moment in my life drowns out all those worries, wipes away all the shadows trying to scare us. A crescendo of violins washes around us. Gustav’s black hair blows back from his face so the love shining in his black eyes is clear and absolute.

He opens his hand. What I’ve been carrying around with me all this time, knocking quietly against my throat in the golden locket, is a beautiful diamond ring.

‘I’ve a better idea. How about changing your name to Levi?’

A different stretch of water now, far away across the Atlantic, flowing through a gritty urban landscape of skyscrapers and apartments. I am standing on an old freight railway line thirty feet above the ground, being buffeted by the wind off the Hudson River.

I have an hour to spare after having spent an extravagant afternoon browsing in the boutiques of Gansevoort Street and shopping in Diane von Fürstenberg’s flagship store. I’m now shamelessly weighed down by bags full of dresses with names like Wanda and Zarita, which make me feel like a fortune-teller but also high-maintenance and super-sexy, all long legs and curves. I know my purchases will please Gustav, who likes me in jeans but loves me in dresses. In fact I’m wearing the pretty Wanda dress in midnight-blue lace now but I also have on my biker boots to walk along as much of the High Line as I can before it gets dark. Plus I’m going commando.

Now I am turning back, because soon it’s time to meet my fiancé.

I spread out the fingers of my left hand. The princess-cut diamond set in platinum catches the light. The engagement ring has given me a new place in the world. It hasn’t replaced all the worries. But there’s a fresh, clean start, a new life for me. Soon I will be Levi, not Folkes.

We’re only just into March, but there are one or two spring-like shoots sprouting in the greenery they’ve planted up here. It’s a cool leafy site in the midst of all this concrete. I am alone and it’s not long before the space will be closed. What would happen if they locked all the staircases before I had a chance to get to the ground? What would it be like spending the night up on the High Line?

It would be fun in the summer. Disastrous in the winter. I quicken my pace along the reclaimed railway sleepers, passing over the Meatpacking District with its old roller-skating parks and basketball courts, rusting fire escapes zigzagging their treads across brick façades, traffic lights swinging on cables in front of huge billboards displaying monochrome six-pack male torsos.

I’ve completed the material for my ‘Windows and Doors’ exhibition. In fact the images are printed and framed already. But I’ll always be a voyeur at heart. Every so often I stop and use my new extra-powerful Leica zoom lens to pry through windows at the ragged signs of human life, the flickering of a TV screen, cutlery placed like the hands of a clock across the messy circles of abandoned plates, a solitary dress dangling like a cadaver off a hanger.

I train my lens like a marksman on one apartment in particular. It’s level with where I am but attracts my attention because it’s like a glass cube balanced like an afterthought on top of an old warehouse on the other side of a litter-blown car lot where Coke cans clatter like the shoes of ceilidh dancers. Inside the loft I can clearly see that it’s like a movie set, all poured concrete and exposed bricks. It’s furnished with battered old car seats for sofas and wood burners and iron girders. Huge leaded windows open onto a flat roof with a barbecue and cane loungers and nothing but a low parapet to stop a several-storey drop.

Despite the bright lights burning in there, I can see no signs of life. Not surprising, really. The inhabitants are probably out at work or shopping, like I have been. I’m about to wind in my digital eye when over against the graffiti-splashed far wall of the apartment the lifeless hump in the unmade bed suddenly erupts into movement. Some naked bumster will jump out in a minute no doubt, late for a date, and hurtle into the shower that I guess is concealed behind that wall of glass bricks. But although a long arm flicks aside the sheet, revealing two sleepers for the price of one, they don’t get out of bed. Quite the reverse. There’s a flailing of youthful limbs, elbows and knees and chins tangled so that I can’t tell where one person starts and another ends. But then they separate and arrange themselves into an intricate pose so perfectly choreographed that I realise, too late, that it really
is
a movie set, complete with studio lights and other unwinking cinematic eyes just like mine.

A dark-skinned girl rises out of the snowy mound of bedclothes and flicks a mane of very long, messy black hair off her face and down her sinuous dancer’s back. She is sideways on so I can see the curve of her back and the soft heavy drop of her big breasts over a man’s chest. She hangs over him, lifting her bottom and thumping it down onto his groin. Then looking away into an unseen corner of the room she starts to speak. The gloss on her lips glistens even from where I’m standing. Studio make-up. Perhaps it’s a romantic comedy they’re making, or the love scene from one of those street-dancing movies. Or porn.

Still speaking to an unseen observer or director, the girl starts to gyrate, a fluid wave moving up from her hips through her spine to her shoulders and back again. A pair of hands comes up from beneath her and cups both breasts, and she leans lower so that her nipples dip onto the man’s mouth. Still her lips are moving. Is she reciting lines, or poetry, or is she singing?

The railway sleepers shake a little beneath my feet. Someone else must be up on the High Line taking a sunset walk. I really ought to tear myself away.

I am about to stop filming – because I am on video mode now – when I realise with a twist in my gullet that if this is a sex scene it may not be simulated. The man’s mouth is right on the girl’s breasts now. I can see the muscles in his cheeks draw in as he sucks on her nipples. Mine sharpen in response. The girl is flinging her head back, pushing her nipples hard into his mouth. Her little bottom lifts up, showing me the shaft of him going right into her; no way is that simulated. She lifts right to the tip then plunges down on him, and they both lift off the bed, ramming faster at each other, his fingers digging furrows into her breasts. She leans back to angle him into the small of her back and he’s throwing her off the mattress as her mouth opens in a silent scream. She freezes mid-climax.

I’m breathing fast, leaning against the railings of the High Line, my legs knocking with the cold, my bare thighs clamped tight against the wetness springing there.

My face, Gustav’s face, our bodies superimposed on the action going on over there. All my voyeur instincts and responses kicking in. I want him now. As soon as I get him on his own I’m going to make Gustav do that to me. I’m going to get him on his back, push my nipples into his mouth and ride him like a cowgirl. We can make our own sweet music together, and this time he will be starring in the video alongside me.