Vanished Years (21 page)

Watching him, I was awed that he could sleep so sweetly. I would never be as strong. Already the first twinges of hysteria were bubbling
in my stomach. He stirred and turned over, pulling me with him, and I went back to sleep, my face buried in the nape of his neck, hoping never to wake, because I already knew that this moment wouldn’t last. My brain was rousing itself, and it would wreak havoc in the name of preservation.

We had decided to leave Tom and Bruno in the capable hands of Melody and the girls while we drove up into the mountains. They were probably busy sawing off Bruno’s cock on her kitchen table, held down by Tom, I thought, as we drove higher and higher up the zigzagging roads into the Alps, leaving Turin far below, if not our problems. Our hearts were so heavy that we could hardly walk under the weight of them.

Summer ended that day, abruptly, as it sometimes does, and up in the hills it began to snow. We stopped at a small damp hotel and decided to stay the night. It was the last one we would ever spend together and we both knew it, even though we were busy making plans. Quite suddenly it was deep winter. The universe was our mirror. The ground was white by the time night fell, and soon a storm blew up, shaking the windows and moaning through the cracks under the doors. We sat in the empty dining room, a pair of refugees or deserters. The manageress explained that the heating was broken so she made a fire. Her huge Italian bum and thick stocky legs bending over the hearth were the only funny things on that sombre night. The fire guttered and crackled into life, and was hoovered up the chimney by the icy wind while she covered us in blankets and fussed about. Finally we talked and the truth emerged.

Alfo’s was a typical Catholic tragedy. His parents had disowned him when they found out he was gay. There was no information about HIV in eighties Italy – naturally – so he fell into its clutches at the very start of his adult life, condemning him to a secret existence, of which only his brother was aware. He was miserable in Turin, hemmed in by a dreary job, and, like many Italians before him, dreamt of America, the land of the so-called free. There were no
answers or solutions. Soon we were silent again, staring listlessly at the fire, and the future. What was going to happen?

The next morning we got up early. It was freezing and we could hardly move. We drove back to Turin in silence. We met Tom and Bruno at the station. They looked exhausted.

‘I need to talk to you,’ said Tom.

‘I need to talk to you,’ I said.

‘Something terrible has happened.’

‘What?’

‘Geppie’ – Bruno’s dog – ‘was run over last night. I called the girls. He was knocked down by a motorbike on the beach road.’

‘Christ. Have you told him?’

‘No. I was waiting for you.’

We watched Bruno camp around with Alfo as they loaded up the car.

‘Let’s wait and tell him when we get home.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ replied Tom.

I waved goodbye through the back window of the car. Alfo stood alone on the busy street, smiling. He made a ‘thumbs-up’ sign, turned and walked away. Soon he was a dot in the rush-hour crowd, finally erased by the sweep of a bus. I didn’t see him again for twelve years.

I told the boys the whole story. Away from Alfo, hysteria kicked in and Tom and Bruno talked me down. I didn’t know what to do next. Tom thought I should give up everything and go back and live in Turin with Alfo. Bruno thought I should get a job. Either way I would have to wait several weeks to know whether I would test positive or not.

‘You haven’t,’ said Tom flatly, and we drove silently back through the forests of Liguria.

We stopped off in the village before going home and went into the church. We all loved that church at Ramatuelle, going every Sunday and often during the week. At Mass a large woman called Madame Ameil sat in the front row. During the offertory she would throw her
washerwoman’s arms into the air and chant, ‘
Christ, prends pitié
!’ It was very dramatic and utterly ludicrous, because even though she was a saint on Sundays, she was the bitchiest gossip in the village during the rest of the week. As luck would have it, she was sweeping the floor when we came in.

We sat down in a row and I told Bruno that his dog was dead. He gasped and put his hand over his mouth, but otherwise he didn’t react. No tears. No words. He just sat there motionless. The only noise was the rhythmic swish of Madame Amiel’s broomstick and her flapping ears.

Bruno was ten when he found Geppie in some woods near his village in Alsace. They had lived together for sixteen years. When Bruno left home, Geppie came too, and they roamed France together, not exactly homeless, but never with much of an address, camping out and moving on. They had been a captivating circus act, the little gypsy boy and his pet fox, and Geppie’s death was the end of one road for Bruno and the beginning of another. Now he would have to grow up.

After a while we drove home and the girls met us. Sensibly, they had already buried the dog at the bottom of the garden on the edge of the vineyard, and that’s where our trip ended. Bruno standing alone over the grave at twilight. The sun threw mauve shadows across the vineyard. The umbrella pines moaned in the breeze, and far away at the end of the woods the sea roared against the beach. The sun set and a mist crept up. The beam from the lighthouse ploughed through it. We closed the shutters and the whole picture reminded us that another summer was over. We sat around the kitchen table, glum and exhausted by all the natural and unnatural shocks. This time events really had overtaken us.

Tom went back to Madrid. The girls left for London. Alone and desperate in the half-built house, Bruno and I resorted to religion. We drove to Mass every morning like a pair of unfucked nuns, and sat around in trances for the rest of the day, lighting candles and building little altars in various nooks around the empty house. Religion works best when things are at their worst and after about a week we
were both approaching sainthood, so we decided to make a pilgrimage to Lourdes. We put Mo in the back of the car and set off early one morning, arriving that same evening in the Pyrenees. During this latest dash across Europe we were grim and determined, and Mo watched us suspiciously from the back seat. He wasn’t into moping around. Considering that he had witnessed Geppie’s death at first hand (paw), he was showing considerable powers of recovery. He had loved Geppie, but dogs are sophisticated. We humans wallow in our memories; they let go of the past and move on.

At Lourdes we found a(nother) rather depressing hotel on the outskirts of the town. It was a half-timbered Norman inn surrounded by dripping shrubs. Inside, it had long creaky corridors straight from a horror film. In our room illness clung to the curtains and the beds, and the smell from the half-hearted central heating merged with the damp-stained carpets in a low fog. The residue of faith and broken dreams made Mo’s hackles stand up on end, but we were too tired to move on, so we fed him and then walked down to the basilica.

And so there we were, the neurotic freak, the pixie and the bouncy dog, an unholy trinity, watching the torchlight procession wind around us in a giant halo through the hills above Lourdes, the heavenly music distant and chilling on the breeze, love and death all together, hope and despair, sex, drugs and St Bernadette: everything was included in a moment that was apparently buried alive, only to be stumbled upon twenty-five years later, by the same freak, calcified, with a blind major and his German nurse.

A
n ancient duchess in nurse’s garb stood on a podium with a microphone, incanting the ‘Hail Mary’ in a lethargic drawl, as if she had a cigarette holder clenched between her teeth. The mantra was delivered to the faithful via a clapped-out sound system that echoed and bounced around the sacred spot. It was the day reserved for the Knights of Malta to take the waters, and we were all there, with our ‘malades’ at the front of the line, for redemption. Behind us jostled less well-connected pilgrims, other nurses and doctors with different cloaks and costumes, but all wheeling the same the terminally ill creatures, their faces uncannily illuminated by the footlights of faith, extraordinary regards, eyes burning from shrunken faces on bodies twisted and turned by disease.

My father sat upright in his chair, wearing his straw hat and a regimental tie to honour the occasion, and slowly we crept to the head of the line. Finally we were ushered behind a curtain into a marble changing room where three men removed my father from his wheelchair and his body from his clothes with the precision of fishmongers shelling oysters. Hat, shirt, shoes, socks, underpants in his racing
colours: they all came off one after another as I gingerly undressed myself beside him. Naked and without his glasses, my father sat on a little stool, wrapped in a loincloth, another animal, really, an old tortoise without its shell, bones draped in thin skin, the pacemaker visible in his chest, and the scar from his heart surgery cutting across it – a botched magician’s trick. I couldn’t tell if I was touched or horrified. All I knew was that our roles had irreversibly changed. He was the ancient little boy waiting for the holidays, and I was the adult anxious to get back to the office.

The men asked him to stand while they slid a kind of sling underneath him. He stood shakily with his arms stretched out, and they lowered him onto it and fastened him with straps. On a count of three they lifted him and threw aside another curtain, revealing the bath itself, a grey marble tomb of icy water. The duchess’s ‘Hail Mary’ was piped through to these inner recesses of the temple. Suddenly she switched languages and began the prayer in an extraordinary French devoid of any attempt at an accent. ‘Joo voo saloo Muree plenda grass …’

I always find the French ‘Hail Mary’ slightly shocking because while we say, ‘Blessed is the fruit of thy womb’ (Jesus), they say, ‘
Le fruit de vos entrails
’, meaning the fruit of your entrails, which presents a rather grisly image to which the duchess gave a thrilling downward inflection.

‘Quite a talented linguist, old Podge,’ mentioned my dad as they took him down the steps into the inner sanctum, which was not unlike the RAC Club in London.

These kind sweet men lowered him into the freezing water and I was afraid he would have a heart attack then and there, but he just moaned and shivered. A Knight leant over him; together they said the ‘Hail Mary’ in low urgent voices and there was something medieval about their two heads close together. Their whole lives were wrapped up in this belief, handed down and adjusted across two millennia. My father’s body, like the religion itself, was a mere whisper of its former self, but the faith remained. It was a gilded ship
rowing him slowly across the twilight sky towards the faraway star. The old campaigner was heaved out of the water and the kind men put him back together again, while I wrapped my loincloth around my waist and stuck my toes into the freezing font.

T
here were no lines of aristocrats, no chanting dignitaries, that windswept autumn morning when Bruno, Mo and I arrived at the grotto. Just a cluster of nuns, their robes billowing in the cold wind, chatting by the river. We tied Mo to a bench beside them, having ascertained that he could not take the cure, which was a shame because he loved water almost as much as food, and perhaps would not have got cancer at the end of his life if he had taken a quick dip.

We took off our clothes and wrapped ourselves in loincloths. Everything was full of meaning, and the image of a mother God was never more appealing nor more present. She would forgive Alfo and me, and keep an eye on Geppie, even if that old mood-swinger Yahweh wouldn’t, and it felt secure to be there. Mo’s furious barks could be heard from the river as we were completely submerged by two local boys in charge, and came out spluttering but glowing into the chilly air. We put our clothes on without drying, which is supposed to be one of the miraculous aspects of the experience, and left, shocked and revitalised. It was all over in five minutes.

Outside, the nuns were making a fuss of Mo and he was tugging
at their robes. They were screaming with delight, and the whites of Mo’s eyes informed anyone in the know that he was getting turned on. As we sat down he saw his moment and leapt on one of the poor novitiates, the glistening pink lipstick of his member peeking through its furry foreskin, and humped her with urgency. An older nun intervened, as the young sister turned red and screamed louder. This was probably as near as she would ever get to having sex, which was a gruesome thought, because Mo was not a gentle lover. He was in the full vigour of his youth. Consensual sex was anathema to him, and he liked his partner to put up a spirited resistance. I finally managed to disengage him, without having to throw the proverbial bucket of water over them both, apologising profusely while giving a sharp tap on the nose to my dog, who lay down with a grunt and sulked for as long as his memory served him, which was about fifteen minutes.

The sisters were French, from Toulouse, with pink scrubbed faces under their wimples, and bright virginal eyes, unclouded by desire.

‘What brings you to Lourdes?’ the older nun asked, clearly in charge.

‘I want a miracle for my friend Alfo,’ I replied.

‘And my dog died,’ said Bruno, and we both burst into tears.

With the grotto in front of us, our story spilt out. The ladies listened with compassion and dignity, the elder nun invigilating the proceedings with concern. They were a small flock of tame blackbirds, their little beaks framed in starched linen, perched on the bench, gripping it against the wind, leaning towards us to hear better, while we were a pair of lost parrots from a faraway jungle, shivering in tie-dyed T-shirts and ripped jeans. (It was the first summer of love, that year.) Bruno’s hair flew in the wind. Mo looked up from his sulk, from one group to the other, and thought we had all gone mad, but actually this was religion, an affectionate contact from opposite ends of the earth, and there was no trace of judgement in these girls’ eyes.