Cupid's Dart (18 page)

A cripple with one stunted leg and one stunted arm stood in the middle of this street of money. None of the elegant people could bear to look at him or give him some coins, and, to my shame, neither could I. I thought that Ange would rebuke me, but she said, 'I think the Catholic Church is rich enough to look after Rome's beggars without our help, don't you?' Straight to the heart of things, our Ange.

We sat on the Spanish Steps, looking at tourists showing too much of the wrong kind of flesh.

'Why do women with that fatty thing, not cholesterol, the other thing, sod it, I can't think of the word, oh yes, that's right, cellulite, wear such short shorts?' she asked.

I felt an exhilarating sense of fun at that moment, under that cloudless Roman sky.

'I don't know,' I said in a rather arch and indeed slightly triumphant tone. 'Why do women with that fatty thing, not cholesterol, the other thing, sod it, I can't think of the word, oh yes, that's right, cellulite, wear such short shorts?'

'It wasn't a riddle,' she said.

We leant on each other's shoulders and laughed and laughed at our silliness. When the laughter had died away, I felt ashamed of the tourists, especially the American and English ones. The elegance of the Romans was a constant rebuke.

We drifted towards the Piazza del Popolo with its two huge churches and its obelisk in scaffolding. We stopped for lunch. Ange had a pizza, I had spaghetti alla carbonara, and I made another mistake. Conscious with sudden pain of its being the last lunch of our trip, I said, 'I want to show you the world.'

'I don't want to be shown the world, Alan,' she replied. 'Then there'd be nothing for me to discover.'

I was saddened by that remark, and at the time I didn't know
why. I know now, of course. She had expressed the reason why our relationship
could not last.

We climbed the hot steps from the Piazza del Popolo to the Pincio Gardens that afternoon, and there we found peace and blessed shade. We weren't only poped out. We were palaced out and fountained out and obelisked out. It had been wonderful, but we had seen all that we could digest.

There were tourist bicycles to hire, with two seats side by side and an awning for shade. Ange glanced at me, wondering if I would despise them. I paid for one, and we rode slowly round the wide paths under the merciful trees. There was a nineteenth-century water clock, designed by . . . somebody. I didn't need any more historical facts. The clock had lost its hands. There was no time here any more.

That timeless afternoon, after our sedate ride, we sat on a bench, and here, far, far from Gallows Corner, Ange began to talk.

'This is so beautiful, Alan,' she began. 'Sitting here, it's hard to believe that anything could be ugly, but it can, can't it, because my family, they're ugly.'

I knew that she was on the verge of intimate revelations, so, although I noticed her incorrect use of the word 'because', I didn't comment on it. I didn't say, 'No Ange, actually the reason why anything can be ugly is not because your family is ugly.'

'I had three brothers and a sister, right?'

'And the little one drowned.'

'Yeah. I wish my oldest brother had drowned. Bastard. My younger brother's bad enough, he's a tearaway. He's got an ASBO.'

She paused, and I felt that I must make some response.

'How many miles does it do to the gallon?' I asked.

She shook her head in amazement.

'An ASBO's an Anti-Social Behaviour Order,' she said. 'You must have heard of them. They serve them on hooligans and that. It puts restrictions on what they can do and where they can go and stuff.'

'I haven't heard of them. I don't think one has ever been put on anyone in the college. What did he do?'

'Nothing much, really. Nicked motor-bikes and charged round the neighbourhood at 2 a.m. on them before abandoning them. Broke people's windows when he was pissed. Pulled up all the lupins in the park. Kids' stuff, mostly.'

'And your older brother's worse?'

'Oh yes. He married a girl when he was eighteen and she was seventeen. They ran away and got married. It broke Mum's heart. Like he was always her favourite. Mums are like that. They make the worst one their favourite, and it breaks their heart. I reckon they think a mother's love can redeem them, see, but nothing could redeem Tom. Only been married two months, he pisses off to Bicester for the weekend – only gets a girl pregnant, doesn't he? And she only goes and has twins, doesn't she? Never does anything by halves, Tom. Went berserk after a stag night, he knifed three people, only luck he never killed any of them. Wrote to us the week before he came out of prison, said he was looking forward to turning over a new life, he meant "leaf " of course, but we knew what he meant. We all went to the prison to greet him, except my dad of course, cos this was after he'd pissed off. We stood there, Mum was crying, my sister was crying cos my mum was crying, I was crying cos my mum and my sister were crying. Ben – he's the one drove the Asbo as you thought, I still can't hardly believe that – was scowling because we was all crying because he can't stand emotion, can't Ben, and there's this beat up old banger that we don't really notice. Well, we can't hardly see for crying, and it's raining too, of course, this was the wettest morning of our lives, and out comes Tom, strange, mad grin on his face, walks straight past us, gets in the old banger and is driven off. None of us has never seen nor heard of him from that day to this.'

She paused. Tears were streaming down her face. I put my arm round her and she shook silently. I have to admit that I had been wondering whether she was making this up. I mean, it just seemed to be too bad to be true, and she
was
a known, proven fantasist and liar. I just didn't believe that someone's life could be like this, and they could end up like her. But then there were these tears; could she possibly act as well as that? Well, again the answer had to be 'Yes'. The world is full of people who act out false lives with a brilliance that most of the members of Equity would envy.

So I sat there, in those gardens, wanting to believe and also wanting not to believe, wanting to have a reality in Ange's life to cling to, and wanting her not to have suffered as she said.

In the end I believed. In fact I got confirmation. I wouldn't be telling her story to you if it wasn't true. There wouldn't be much point in telling you things that never happened.

'What about your sister?' I asked, when her sobs had subsided and she had blown her nose long and hard.

'She's . . . she has learning difficulties. She's in a Home now. Mum can't cope. I take her out every week when I'm at home, take her down the pub. We play darts. She isn't any good, of course. She has throwing difficulties. I love her, Alan. She never has a bad thought. Never has many thoughts, I suppose, but those she has are good. Why have very handicapped people sometimes got only good thoughts while very privileged people are complete fucking bastards?'

I knew this time that it wasn't a riddle, and I had more sense than to rebuke her for the f word.

I looked round the park, drank in the view, let Ange rest a little before the next instalment.

'I could understand my dad pissing off,' she resumed, 'even though a lot of it was his fault – p'r'aps
because
a lot of it was his fault – but never wanting to see us again ever, never even sending a sodding card . . .'

I could feel the hurt dripping off her like sweat.

She still had a tale to tell, there was still one more villain to come.

'I've only ever had one real boyfriend. D'you know, Alan, I can't bring myself to mention his name to you. My mum liked him cos he had very neat hair. Course he did. He'd just come out of the nick, hadn't he? He used to beat me up.'

'Oh, Ange.'

'I left him twice.'

'Why on earth did you go back?'

'You don't know nuthink really, do you? Girls always go back, Alan. Boys say they're sorry, they'll never do it again, girls believe them cos they want to believe them. My friend did it and I thought, how could she be so stupid? But
I
did it. You want to believe, Alan. You haven't got nothink else. He said he'd really try to control his temper. Then one day, we was in a pub, we was on vodka shots, and suddenly my blood ran cold, Alan. Suddenly I realised. He never hit me where it showed. I've got goose-pimples telling you now, here in all this heat. I've gone cold all over. Feel me.'

I felt her cheek. It was cold and clammy.

'It wasn't temper at all, Alan. He was in total control of himself. He just enjoyed it.'

I ran my hand gently up her thigh, placed it on her crotch. She put her hand on top of mine and pressed it. She sighed.

'What did you do?' I asked very quietly.

'I stood up. I said, "It's over. Don't ever come after me or I'll get my brother on to you." I never saw him again. He was a coward.'

That afternoon in the Pincio Gardens, under the parasol of an umbrella pine, I found it hard to believe that a young man could be like that. I am wiser now. I know that this tale, which seemed so extraordinary to me in my academic ignorance, was commonplace and banal. Too commonplace and banal for Ange, my extraordinary Ange.

'So that's my family,' she said. 'What about yours?'

'There's nothing to tell.'

'There has to be.'

'There isn't.'

Then she said something very wise – I was constantly taken aback by her wisdom.

'That in itself is a story,' she said.

So there in the Pincio Gardens, in the late Roman afternoon, I told her what little there was to tell. I told her that I was an only child, and that my mother and my father were very quiet people who showed no outward manifestation of their love.

'How do you know they loved each other if they didn't demonstrate it?' she asked.

'Well, they hardly ever argued. They never seemed to disagree about anything. They never seemed upset.'

'I'm not that thick that I haven't gathered a thing or two about your philosophy lark from listening to you,' she said, 'and it does seem to me that you've come to a very positive conclusion, that your parents loved each other, from a whole series of negatives, and that doesn't seem right to me.'

'I want to think they loved each other,' I said.

'Well that's me and . . . I nearly said his name . . . all over again, isn't it?'

We were so different, I thought, and yet we were two of a kind. My hand was still on her crotch and she was still pressing down on it. Time was standing still. I looked at the sun and it wasn't sinking.

I told her how this week in Rome, watching how tactile people were, watching all the kissing and handshakes and affectionate touches, I had realised that I had never been touched by my parents, not once, with any real affection or warmth. My mother would kiss me morning and night, a cool, controlled, structured kiss. My father never kissed me at all. When they saw me off to boarding school – I can't remember whether I told you that I went to boarding school, but you have probably deduced it – my father would shake my hand and say, 'Good luck, old prune', and when I came back from boarding school he would shake my hand and say, 'Well done, old prune.' I told her how he locked me in my room for four hours because I'd said I'd mow the lawn, and I hadn't done it. 'No need to have offered, boy, but if you say you're going to do something, you must do it.'

To my amazement, Ange was almost as shocked by my story as
I had been by hers.

That evening we wandered slowly through the streets, peered into secret courtyards where there were yet more fountains, found a restaurant that had a buzz about it, and dined in the open air again, in a sweet intimate little square, with the obligatory fountain and obelisk. Our last night. It was very special. As we drank the last few sips of our red wine – she was beginning to appreciate red wine already; I could turn her into a connoisseur – I was very careful not to behave like a university don, not to question her about what our few days had meant to her.

'You know I was talking about birds that first night,' she said.

'Yes.'

I had a fierce desire to be back on that first night, to have it all still before us.

'I think about them a lot. Do you think they're glad to be alive, or do they think, "Bleedin' 'ell, this ain't half a dangerous old world? Sod this for a game of soldiers"?'

I wished that we had it all still to come, the Spanish Steps and the Trevi Fountain, the Forum and the Sistine Chapel, and . . . well, no, perhaps not the Fountain of the Tortoises: I didn't want her to drool over those bronzed young men again.

'I mean, do they have sex education from their mums and dads or are they born knowing how to do it? Do they feel joy? Some people say a skylark sings to announce that this is my patch, so piss off the lot of you.'

Here we were, tired and mellow and closer than ever after our revelations in the Pincio Gardens, and she was twittering on like a bird about birds.

'I'd like to think it sings from the excitement of life and the brilliance of its talent. I wish I could sing. I sound like a cracked teapot, know what I mean?'

I thought about mornings in our home, and her singing in the bath, and me not minding that she sounded like a cracked teapot. I wondered where we would live.

'Sleep's another thing. I mean a bird sleeps when it's dark, right, and it's awake when it's light, right? Except owls where it's arsi-versi, because our teacher said that owls have special eyes.'

It was hard for me to continue to allow her incorrect use of 'because' to pass, to resist saying, 'Sorry, Ange, but owls don't hunt at night because your teacher said they have special eyes. They've never heard of your teacher.' I mean, I did listen to what she said, and I found it all very charming, and it strikes me now that some of it was more original than the things I was coming out with, which were the conclusions I had inherited from history.

'So what about the Land of the Midnight Sun, Alan? What happens there?'

I found it hard, in the warm velvet Roman night, to think about the Land of the Midnight Sun.