In the car, Giulio, my younger brother, sits to my right. Our father says, ‘You can never tell if he’s happy or sad.’ I can tell because when he’s sad his lips crumple and fade into the rest of his face. Duccio, the eldest, is to my left. He’s so handsome that we often can’t walk five metres without people stopping and staring. Our mother reckons that now that he’s eleven, he’s only got one or two years left until he gets a hairy top lip and greasy skin and then that’ll be the end of that. Our back seat is wide enough for us not to touch each other, but if Giulio moves into my space I push him back. If I lean too far over towards Duccio, he crushes my thumb with the seat-belt wrapped around his tightened fist. If we all yell and annoy my father, he pulls the car over and shouts and our mother cries.
Our mother is Ava. Some call her Ave, others Avi. We call her Ama because it’s a mix of Maman and Ava and she hates being called Mum. It’s a bit like me. They couldn’t decide on a single French, English or Italian name so that’s why I’m called two names: Jean-Pio. Ama comes out with ‘we’ about the English, but the origins that shape her mind and flawless white face come and go on the number-plates of passing cars: England, France, Holland and Slovenia. Ama is each and every one of us rolled into one. She is a multi-purpose clasp, an all-embracing shape. She is allergic to the sun and suffers from insomnia. She has always been unable to sleep as far back as we can remember. She can never doze in the car because she develops a lingering pain between the eyes and even if she goes to sleep at night in a warm bed she wakes up with a jump and a tired head that stays with her all day.
Our father is Gaspare, or Pado to us. He’s Italian, with a Sicilian father. Ama says his moods swing from singing ecstasy and smiles, to blind fury. He’s an anatomist and a histopathologist, a specialist in toxins and indoor air pollution. He used to teach in England, but now he rushes around Europe, attending conference after conference, and we go with him. Children, he repeats to Ama, need to see the world. We wait for him in long car parks and he appears between meetings to gesture ‘hang on’ or ‘five more minutes’. Sometimes he carries slides with sections of diseased lungs, or a book on rats which is kept in the glove compartment. It has the answer to many questions: peanuts give brown-brimming tumours, artificial sweeteners cause blooded pockets on the tail and nicotine spreads yellow-stained patches across white fur.
I’m eight years old. It’s the spring of 1978. Since Pado developed his theory on how diseases spread from air conditioning, and became president of the European Board of Histopathologists, our kilometre dial has clocked into thousands and started its cycle over and over again. Our journeys, along motorways, across seas and over mountains, have to keep up with the progress of sickness from people’s lungs and air conditioners. Travelling is a race against time. Every moment we pause, or complain, is a moment wasted, an opportunity for disease to take hold. Our car must carry on, always. That’s the way it is. Places to get to. Lives to save. Scientists to convince.
Duccio is entrusted with the maps. He keeps these in the pocket behind our father with the stacks of papers and hotel listings for each country. Some maps you have to fold out more than others. Spain and France stretch far across my lap. We always get lost in Brussels because the guidebook for Belgium has a tear where the Flemish and French street names merge in shredded strands. Giulio has the pamphlets for the conferences stashed behind Ama’s seat: ‘Legionella pneumophila and the use of erythromycin’. ‘Epidemiology and the evaluation of environmental carcinogenic risks’. Giulio also has a book of jokes with two hundred reasons why the chicken wants to cross the road. Ama keeps a paperback called What To Do On Long Journeys. It has been fingered and thrown across the car so many times that it is tattered and scuffed like a grimy shirt collar. Duccio can tell you the make of any car from any country. Giulio and Pado can list most of the capital cities of the world. I can tell when the petrol sign is going to turn red.
In England, we stay with our grandmother, Ama’s mother. She was born in London, but her parents were Dutch and Slovenian and brought her up speaking French in England. That probably explains why she married a Frenchman, our grandfather, Grand Maurice. He drowned two summers ago while fishing for crayfish in a lake in France and our grandmother hasn’t been the same since. Grand Maurice thought he was so lucky to have met her that he called her ‘ma chance’. We still call her Machance even if Pado tells us she hasn’t brought us much good fortune lately. I’m Machance’s favourite and no one really knows why. Maybe it’s because I was Grand Maurice’s favourite too. Ama shrugs and goes quiet about it. Giulio thinks it’s because I’ve got Grand Maurice’s brown-green eyes and, now that he’s dead, I’m the only one carrying them around.
When in Italy, we stay in small family hotels in Milan and Rome or with Pado’s parents in Umbria. In Germany, we have a bed-and-breakfast near the motorway which has sticky muesli and cartoons for children on the TV. In Madrid, the owner of our hotel is so chatty that he keeps us waiting for our room keys to tell us stories we’ve heard a hundred times. Over the reception desk there are posters from Pado’s scientific conferences coloured with microscopic close-ups of viruses and then a torn, withered photo of the owner’s wife carrying dried sausages from Cantabria, the sun setting on her skirt. Ama can’t sleep in the Madrid hotel because of the neon street signs outside our room so we wrap her clothes across the windows and whisper in the night. Before going to bed, Ama sniffs the sheets, one by one, to check they are clean. If she finds a hair, a scab, a toenail or even a trace of scent, she calls the reception in a small voice and we watch as astonished maids remake the beds with Ama following behind, smoothing the spreading white surfaces with her drowsy hands. When we try to help her, she gently pushes us to one side, ‘Just let me do it, please.’
Pado always states, ‘There’s no point telling me things I know. Tell me something new’, so when he pops his head into our hotel room to say ‘Goodnight’, you know you have to hurry to come up with new facts fast:
‘If you weigh all the insects in the world, they are heavier than all the animals put together!
‘Every single snowflake is unique!’
‘Not bad, Jean-Pio, I’ll have to think about those.’
Giulio invents a new chicken joke. It still has to cross the road, but it makes Pado laugh all the same. When Pado leaves, Giulio asks me where I get my facts from. I don’t really know. I suppose I just pick them up, here and there, glancing through newspapers in hotel lobbies, listening to Pado’s colleagues, staring out of the car window. Giulio and I have a deal: if I get up before him, I have to wake him gently, ask him what he is dreaming about and suggest a good ending. He then goes back to sleep and tells me what happened later. Duccio stands in front of the mirror ruffling his shiny black hair. He hates the way Ama combs it neatly to the side, every night, before he goes to bed. If it weren’t for our parents, he’d never wash his hair or change his clothes. Then no one would smile in the street or beam thirsty grins at him again. When Ama overhears our night-time whispering, she hisses a rustling ‘Ssssh, be quiet!’ and, in between her words, you can hear the pumping exhausts that choke her day, the sound of car doors slamming and the creasing of maps hiding roads that always carry on over the page.
Our hotels are usually within sight of the conference centres and we park the car in between hundreds of others. The rooms are teeming with fellow scientists and the foyers thick with greetings: ‘Meet my wife and children’, ‘I read your book’, ‘Will you be presenting your recent statistics?’
Ama jots down notes for Pado. Her memory sweeps backwards and forwards like the windscreen wipers on the car. She collects papers, remembers dates, faces and addresses. ‘Isn’t that xsthe pathologist from Stuttgart?’ she nudges Pado, writing down a name called up from the depths of her sleepless mind.
Ama is Pado’s translator too. She translates his speeches and articles, rolls out the languages