Dylan Federico pritchard
I am twelve and Mum is in the bathroom. The tap goes; I hear the boiler rumble into action and picture her, waiting for the warm water to steam before dipping in her hands. Her bag hangs off the banister and the ease with which I slip between the red leather flaps is revelatory.
In her bag: cigarillos, lighters, keys, a yellow purse. I start with coins, the big two-pound ones and a few of the fifties. I feel a ten-pound note between my fingers, rub its two ends against one another, but by the time the bathroom door opens, it’s just the coins in my pocket. Mum turns, her springs of chocolate hair bounce. She smiles at me.
I’ve always been the favourite.
***
As a child who grew up in rural Lazio in Italy I am just happy to be in London with its red phone boxes and tall glass buildings. It’s 2001. I know my voice is funny and so I put on the accent I hear in the estate behind my house. My dad calls me a mockney.
Everything can be sated at home – running in the garden with my sister, taking the dogs to Richmond Park. At secondary school things change. Friends play for local football teams and to join I need a kit, some boots. I ask my parents and they ask how much.
“£100.”
I respond, shyly, knowing by their faces what the answer will be. Dad shakes his head.
“Thing is, I know what’ll happen. You’ll start, and in a month, you’ll be bored.” He nods to himself. “Yep. And then where’ll my hundred quid be?”
So I don’t play football. Or rugby. At school I dip into a non-sporting crowd that marks desks with angry tags, Dazed and Tenor, that mean nothing. At lunch, I loosen my tie and take to the back walls with a spray can from my garage. Me and my friends throw each other into bushes. We laugh at the pain, picking needles from our skin, revelling in the grazed knees and shorn trousers.
I have no need for money. For my parents. I eat, I sleep, I don’t study. I am thirteen and nothing is important.
Until Bruno, our group’s leader, buys a skateboard.
***
I learn her routines. She goes to Asda on a Tuesday and a Thursday. Most weeks she withdraws cash, spending some on the parking and some at the market where she passes a long time feeling the aubergines and courgettes, looking for the ones that most remind her of home.
Normally £50 comes in and between £30 and £40 goes out. She’s relaxed, not frugal, and I use this. At fourteen I pinch my first twenty. That bold move leaves a heat in my chest, a twisting of the lungs that lasts for days. I get used to that pain. Later in life it pinches harder, and in those moments, I pretend I don’t know where it started, but I do.
With that first twenty and with my first proper act of cowardice, I earn my first skateboard.
The next days, the board’s wheels score the pavement and I hop up and off curbs. The wind lifts my curls and am faster than adults, cyclists, sometimes cars.
I stop, kick the board into my hands.
I am part of a group.
***
I’m thirty-two and have a one-year-old daughter my mum has never met. When we’re alone, I try to talk about her. I describe her sheepishly, attempt to put words against her character, but not enough—and not the right ones—come out.
I sometimes shut my eyes and try to see her face. The way she smiled at me: how the mole we share on our left cheek would seek her green eyes (dappled with amber, like me). The cleft in her rounded chin would deepen. Dimples would show.
I can write this now but sometimes in the dark, when I close my eyes, I can’t see it. All that I feel is that burning pain between my lungs, and I curse my attempt at re-imagining her, at bringing her to life.
My wife, S, asks every day if I have taught our daughter, W, Italian. I find it difficult to tell her how much it physically hurts for me to do it.
I think sometimes I blame her.
***
We skateboard every day. At the weekends, we go to Portobello and we get into fights. I use my deck as a weapon and when groups of older youths in grey tracksuits with caps pulled low over their eyes approach us with blades, we give everything over, at first. But then we get courage.
One Saturday, early evening, the market stalls are packed, and evening newspapers flap in the street and the twilight moon is showing. Most people have left. A boy approaches me while Bruno is in the shop. He has a blade, a little knife that takes the light off a streetlamp long enough to see its little silver stub shine in his hand. He flashes it left to right; the air near my stomach moves. I look through my pockets, slowly withdrawing his bounty, skilfully mishandling it to draw out the moment, all the while Bruno approaches with his board raised above him from behind. The board eclipses the lamp and falls on his head. We leave him in a pool of oily water, the evening papers flapping all around him. We take more from him than what he wanted from me and laugh all the way home.
***
Some evenings I follow the thick trail of cigar smoke down from my bedroom and to the kitchen. There is a round oak table that is marked with burns from dishes and spilt ale and on it there’s an ashtray upon which stubbed and fraying fingers of cigars lay like war-torn cadavers. Mum stares at the tiny TV on the wall, her hand resting on her hip, an incredulous look on her face.
“Questi stronzi. Testi di merda.”
She stands before the TV all day. This is a new thing. Every waking hour watching Italian news programmes. Ever since Berlusconi has become Prime Minister, she watches his every move, hatred driving everything. She liked the last prime minister and didn’t watch anything then. How does that work?
“What’s going on?” I ask, fiddling with the cigarillo packet. They have just started writing messages explaining the dangers of smoking. These cigarillos are from Holland, yet I still understand every word: Roken is dodelikk, a universal message everyone can read but not understand. I finger the words and ask something I’ve never had the courage to:
“Mum. Could you stop. The smoking.” I venture with fear. “I really think you could.”
The lights from the TV screen are shining off her eyes. It’s hard to know what she is thinking. She has always been like that. Her movements are utterly surprising at every turn. When she walks, she floats, and there is never any indication of a change of direction: the woman just moves and you follow. On the screen, the Prime Minister, Berlusconi, has just slapped the arse of the host of a quiz show. She’s a foot taller, with beautiful shiny hair and lucid eyes and instead of slapping the grinning leather bollard in the face she giggles playfully. He owns the programme, the TV station, the country.
“L’Italia e’ finita.”
She pours herself a tumbler of gin. Her hand picks up the pack of cigars, covering the warning, and she goes elsewhere in the house.
I sit there a while until the thickness of the room makes my stomach churn. On my way upstairs I stop at the banister and take a twenty and a five from her purse and have never felt more distant from her.
That night, the wind is so strong a branch repeatedly scrapes the bedroom window.
***
Bruno moves country and I grow large, too large to skateboard. I keep snapping them due to my weight. And anyway, I decide it’s time to grow up. The last time I met up with him, Bruno made another boy, Joe, ‘Lay a brick on a brick’, and filmed his friend shit on a brick. They thought this was hilarious. I wasn’t so sure.
Looking at my grades, I realise I could’ve done with this realisation about Bruno sooner. I am fifteen and unless I pull off a miracle, I will not be carrying on with my education. I am averaging D’s across the board and if I don’t get a few B’s, it will be over before it really started.
I make friends with boys who study. They are nice, if a bit boring, and that is fine.
***
After I learn that I never met my grandfather on Mum’s side because he died of smoking, I see a pattern and try to talk to her about it, but she ignores me. Just doesn’t respond. I can hear the coughing is changing and that the density of the smoke in the house is thicker. I have moved into the loft and yet it smells of smoke so much that I have every window open all the time, even when I can see my own breath.
OK, I think. If she won’t listen. Well then.
So me and my sister join powers in a rare agreement and go into the cupboards and take out her sticks of cigars and hide them. Then I wait until she is home and, in the bathroom. And I am by the banister once again. Out of habit, I wait to hear the boiler go, and then I open her bag and rummage through, finding three lighters and two packets of cigars. When she comes out sooner than expected she sees me, holding her bag, and it is like the first time she has ever really seen me. Because her eyes go so large they might drown me, somehow. And then I see that I am holding her purse, and not her cigars, and that muscle memory has made me do something bad and Mum’s years of mistrust of her son come raging through her arm and into the flat of her hand and onto my face.
I was doing something good and now I know it is ruined. Another flash of silver and the taste of blood in my mouth and something is finished – I don’t yet realise – forever.
Someone at school offers me a cigarette. I take it.
***
I am studying hard. Very hard indeed. I even ask my father for help in mathematics and science, even though I’m sure I’ll fail both.
“Dad, how does this formula work?”
He looks at the equation. My worst fear comes true.
“To understand the formula, we must start at the beginning. Learn the theory.”
An hour and a half pass and in that time I write off the idea of passing maths. I thank him for his help and pretend the exam is next week, so as not to get another tutoring session from him.
I smoke out of the window. Richmond Super Kings. They cost £2 for 10. They are the length of an unsharpened pencil and must be a device for torture. No one even notices because the stench from the kitchen is of such force.
Mum is more engrossed in the TV than ever. Italy is in a bad way. Bad, bad, way. And her mum, my nan, has announced herself as a Berlusconi supporter. Strained conversations occur through a tangle of wires, both seemingly watching the same show. Mum stands before the screen while the Prime Minister is on air, pointing at it, shaking her head.
“No, no, no. Mamma, e’ pazzo.”
A period of silence. My nan is giving her view. Then Mum’s face turns and with an arid whisper she says “Addio” and hangs up the phone. They cut ties and no longer speak.
More gin. More cigars. There seem to be evening tears when I am in bed waiting for sleep. I can hear blubbering and picture Mum crying. It is not something she does. Sometimes, I hear her shout at my father, and I wonder how, him being the most mild-tempered and devoted husband the world has ever seen. I imagine affairs and alternate lives, but know that it’s impossible, with them both being in the kitchen each evening.
They are speaking less to each other and to us. My father has a nervous energy that sees him take calls and scurry up and down the hallway with no obvious task at hand.
So one night, I decide to follow the trail of smoke and peak into the kitchen and see that it is in fact my dad who is crying. My mum barely looks disturbed, staring straight at the TV screen.
I watch for a good while until my Mum bursts into a fit of coughs and holds her throat and my dad raises suddenly. Then I tiptoe up the stairs and lie in my bed, watching drops of rain slide down the Velux window in the ceiling above me.
***
I pass my exams and can go to Esher College, a sixth form college with good teachers and 1200 students the same age. I feel revived and relieved, but when I tell my mum she asks for the specific grades.
“6 B’s, 3 C’s and 2 D’s,” I laugh.
“Not even one A.” She goes to her cigars and retrieves a fresh one.
At college I feel a new person. Unlike secondary school, everyone wears their own clothes. Time moves forward in a pleasant way and I have friends who are the perfect blend of studious and social, and so I reach final exams with OK prospects and the excitement of university beckoning.
Mum and I are speaking more. One evening, she teaches me how to make my favourite meal: spaghetti alle zucchini. The mistake, she says, is to cook the zucchini in olive oil rather than sunflower oil.
“English people think because it’s expensive, it’s better. But olive oil is for salads.” She shakes her head with a smirk.
We cook the vegetable in batches and let it dry overnight. The next day, she shows me how to cook the pasta al dente, and I grate parmesan while she turns the spaghetti and zucchini together with an oversized fork.
“Bravo,” she nods, as we eat dinner together, the zucchini crisp and bitter and the pasta with just the right give to it.
After dinner, we watch Italian news and I have stopped asking her to stop smoking. I smoke with her, now. At first this upset her but very quickly it meant we could talk more and a relationship grew.
“You seen this guy, eh?” My mum points at the screen.
I scowl and take a sip of espresso, something I don’t enjoy but do to be more Italian. “Another chump, eh. Do you get embarrassed that these are your people?”
I try to say this humorously but it doesn’t land. My mum turns to face me and what used to be lightly tanned skin at the worst of times seems to me to be picking up a greyish tint in mid-summer. She coughs then says:
“It’s complicated. We’re quite a new country. Only unified in 1860 by Garibaldi when no one really wanted it. It’s been a struggle. You go to Florence and what do they say? Fiorentini, not Italian. The north and the south get on about as well as they do in Korea. The southerners are lazy and the northerners stuck-up and resentful.”
“Why then,” I say, “have southerners voted for him.”
I point to the small, bronzed, balding man Berlusconi, who smiles broadly with a woman on each arm.
“He owns the best football team. He owns the glitziest channels. He speaks confidently. He simply reflects the truth in what most men want, and he does it with zero vergogna.” She pinches my ear and turns it a bit.
“It’s always the men.”
I take a sip of the earthy coffee and ruminate this for a while, the idea of vergogna – the translation of which is a mix of shame and disgrace – as a positive, while staring at the man on the TV with the Botox and the fake tan.
I cannot see my own future: I have no discernible passions, no great talent, my grades are average, but looking at the screen I have a firm image of what not to become, and this helps me, somehow.
***
At the end of a history exam my dad calls me to say that everything is finished. She has throat cancer and it’s ‘aggressive’. They wanted to keep it from me, how serious it was, so that I could pass my exams and go to university. But she won’t be making it.
That burning feeling lights up in my chest and I return home and she is in bed. It smells like soft excrement and medicine, antiseptic, perhaps. Her face looks like it has begun decomposing. I hold her hand and she smiles at me and for some reason it doesn’t feel like it is the end. I am not accepting, I guess.
She’s too weak to talk but the smiles continue. I tell her I will do better at school, that I will do much better. For her. I am talking nonsense, a lot of it, and then she croaks the word rest and so I raise and depart from the room. At the doorway, I peak through the crack. She lights a cigarillo and stares blankly at the screen in the corner.
***
That night, after I see Mum as a pile of rattling bones lying in her own excrement and still refusing to stop smoking, I get upset and take money from her purse. Sixty pounds; what were they for, I wonder? A quick stick of cigarillos on the way to her cremation?
My response, of course, is to smoke. To drink. And to do drugs. I head to a friend’s and get my hands on some ketamine and buy it with the sixty pounds and do it and life is simple. So simple and one-dimensional that I don’t notice the seven missed calls from my dad, the ten from my sister. Because I have rendered the world into a flatter, softer state. Until it wears off. Then, reality’s sharpness returns with striking clarity at around 5 am.
***
W is in the bath. I sit on the floor next to her and my dog H rests his chin on the rolling edge, trying to reach the toys W is squeaking. I give him his favourite, the blue octopus, and he patters off, tail sweeping the air from side-to-side. Bath time is a good time for me to teach W Italian. I have spongy letters that I arrange, and I read them out individually, phonetically. ‘A’ in Italian is ‘Ah’. E is ‘Eh’. And so forth. I arrange the letters into words like cucciolo, puppy, and cane, dog. I read them out, over and over, and then I think of a new word.
Sometimes these become little stories. I’ll use the word I constructed as a springboard. I write Mama. I talk a bit about her mum, then my mum. After a while, a new word comes to me, and it takes some time to arrange it. At the end, I point out each letter phonetically:
“Ver-goh-jna.”
W’s eyes are big and blue, like her mother, rather than Mum’s green. She shivers and I notice the bubbles in the water have dissipated. I poke through the surface: it’s lukewarm. I lift her from the bath seat, pull her into a towel’s embrace, and hold her until she is dry.
#
Dylan Federico Pritchard is a British Italian writer with an MA in Creative Writing from Goldsmiths London. He is working on a collection of short fiction and a novel. His work has previously been long listed for the Fish Short Story Prize 23/24.