Kieran.Stories

Liam added ‘Antonio Vivaldi Essentials’ to the family Spotify. Finn bought a book from Amazon on Mussolini. Bridget sorted the travel and health insurance, sunblock, luggage and early check-in at the airport, and on the Wednesday she asked next door if they would catsit. She packed. 

Finn had turned a quiet sort of feral. It took Bridget until the week of the holiday to notice. She marched him to the shower. She dragged a black comb through his hair. She hadn’t held his head like that for a long time. When she saw how she’d combed it, she saw how ridiculous it looked. Her Aryan boy. She left him to his own devices. Her little outburst over. Before Rome, she wanted to make headway with planning. Her PPA time was always interrupted. She settled in the living room. Next door were busy building an extension. The hammering and the drilling and the music. The endless bass sound thrumming against the walls. 

At the airport, they went to Burger King. Finn got the book out from his rucksack. He started to read, ignoring his burger. Bridget waited for Finn to notice his dad glaring at him.

‘You’re not reading that on the plane.’ 

‘Why?’ 

Liam waited. ‘It would be like reading a book about Hitler in Germany.’ 

‘That’s such a reductive thing to say,’ Finn said, and Bridget laughed, she couldn’t stop herself. 

Liam got out his wallet. He put a fiver on the table, between him and Finn.  

‘Go to the Smiths and get another book.’ 

‘For a fiver?’ 

Liam replaced the fiver with a tenner. Maybe he thought he was winning this. Finn took the money and left their table. He returned ten minutes later with a big bag of Haribo, and no new book. Liam removed himself from the situation. As Finn read, Bridget asked if she could open the sweets. ‘Knock yourself out.’   

On the plane, they were sat separately. Liam was in front and across. After take-off, Bridget saw that he was twitching, trying to see what Finn was up to. But he’d be up to nothing. When they landed, she wished the flight had lasted longer. The heat was immediately oppressive. 

Bridget found their passports and gave them to the receptionist. She watched as they made photocopies. She followed Liam to the lift. Finn wanted to take the stairs. ‘Third floor,’ Bridget said, as he vanished around a corner. Nothing was said in the lift. It wasn’t that there was an atmosphere, it was more a lack of atmosphere. Finn had his own room for the first time. His was next to theirs. Bridget handed Finn his keycard. They all went into Finn’s room first. Bridget inspected the bathroom, while Finn fell onto his bed, and Liam looked at the view. Liam dragged their case back into the corridor. ‘You want to see our room?’ Bridget asked. Finn said he was fine where he was. She went out and heard the door lock behind her. 

It had been bothering her all night. She went to the loo and shone her phone torch over her thigh. She pushed up her pyjama bottoms and saw that it was, in fact, a series of bites spreading from one red pulse. She googled the nearest chemist. There was a farmacia on the same street as the hotel. It opened in three hours. She returned to the bed, like a prisoner returning to their cell. There was her book on the bedside table, and there was a reading light. She scrolled. She saw that Aretha Franklin had died. She knew nothing about Aretha Franklin, but something about the photo and the two dates in white underneath, and the fact that the young woman in the photo had no clue how this photo would be used, made her cry. 

Her Italian was better than she remembered. It came back to her. The girl was wearing a retainer. She turned and presented the cream to Bridget. This would be the recommended one. This would be the one that she would use, if she was bitten. Bridget thanked her and paid.  

It was a short walk back to the hotel. She crossed the road to avoid a lady asking for money. 

In the lift, there was the smell of sunblock. Bridget touched the back of her neck. Was she burnt? She found their room on the third floor. Liam was on the bed masturbating, inhaling a pair of Bridget’s knickers. ‘No.’ She used her classroom voice. He stopped and the knickers dropped onto the bed. Bridget took her cream into the bathroom, dropped the empty box into the bin, and applied it to her sore left leg.    

What was their problem? Just in general. Why were they like that? 

As well as Mussolini, Finn had taken up Larkin. He had screenshotted his favourites, but he wanted to learn them by heart. You didn’t really know them if you were just constantly looking at them on a phone screen. He was peeling off bits of his croissant, while his mother stood in line for the coffee machine, and his father, looking crestfallen for some reason, dipped a spoon into a pot of yoghurt. Finn tried to remember the start of ‘This Be the Verse’. The Mussolini biography was on the table, the spine broken. Finn dipped his little finger into the red compote and smeared it over one of the pages.  

She was talking quickly to the girl behind the counter. Finn couldn’t understand the conversation. Mum put the tube on the counter and turned to leave. He couldn’t look the girl in the eye, even though she was obviously the most beautiful girl he had ever seen, prettier than all the girls at school, combined. She had a retainer, like him. 

The tour started at three. They got the bus from near the hotel to somewhere closer to the Vatican. For the first time in his life, Finn felt actual beads of sweat on his forehead, underneath his fringe. He was wearing all black, out of defiance. It didn’t help that the bus was rammed, more rammed than any bus he’d ever been on. He noticed Mum pulling up her shorts again, scratching her leg. It was embarrassing. People were noticing. ‘Mum. Stop it.’ She stared at him. He’d never seen her look at him like that. He felt something building in his throat. 

The place was underground. Mum stood under the ceiling fan. Finn and his dad took one of the sofas. It was such an odd place for a leather sofa, Finn thought. Finn avoided touching it with his bare skin. They’d been given purple stickers, so their tour guide could pick them out. The guide was late. Finn had stuck his sticker centrally on his chest, but now he thought he should have picked the left or right. He couldn’t change it now. The sticker would lose its stickiness. Dad had barely said a word all day. He wasn’t even looking at his phone, he was just sitting there. Finn stood. Mum had found a new cream. They’d been into a couple of chemists. He was close to her now, under the fan. Not whispering, speaking quite clearly, she said, ‘If you talk to me like that again, like you did on the bus, there will be consequences.’ She had stuck her sticker on her shoulder bag. Finn returned to his dad. He crossed his legs. The guide came down the steps, gathered them up. Finn decided that he’d stay up all night in his room to finish the Mussolini book. The text was so small it made his eyes hurt. The text was so small, it was like a joke at his expense. 

Finn was usually good at feigning boredom, but it was proving difficult in the Vatican. He was seeing things he never thought he’d see. It was like being on a film set, sort of. 

He didn’t know how to put it, and he prided himself on having quite a good internal monologue; he often spoke to himself in proper sentences, as if he was narrating his own life, which he was. 

They were coming to the Sistine Chapel. They were told not to speak, or to take any photographs, and it was important that they kept moving around the room, so they didn’t cause congestion. The guide said there was a special way out of the chapel for the people on her tour, and this exit would lead them right to the square. Finn went ahead of his parents. He followed the throng. He came to the middle and looked up. God in his pink brain, reaching out to Adam. It all felt pretty important, and Finn thought he understood then why people believed in this, devoted their lives to it. There was a shout from somewhere, he couldn’t tell from what direction, and he looked around to see people moving their heads from up to down. The shout was followed by a crack. Finn got a glimpse of the woman on the floor. 

She had felt European. Bridget saw herself watching all the people on their bikes, and she remembered thinking that she would get a bike, and a beret, not that many people were wearing berets in Oxford in 1994. Not that her memory was good nowadays. The bikes were black. Sitting in the wicker chair on the rooftop bar in Rome, acclimatised to the heat, she saw Oxford as was, or she thought she did. It was at this point, drinking a martini she didn’t really want, Bridget realised life was not short, that it was a long line. Three hours earlier, the woman’s head had hit the floor like a rock. She was drunk when she met Liam in Oxford. Maybe that was significant. She laughed. A text came through. The boys were going for a walk. Liam thought it was a good idea to have a chat about what had happened, in case Finn was upset. Perhaps she’d burn all their boxers, or she might do absolutely nothing at all.