He just said it the way Pado insists that Mr Yunnan gave his life for Science, or the way Ama quietly swallows and tells us that nothing is going to bring back our grandfather, Grand Maurice, now that he’s dead and drowned in a lake in France. You only have to read Pado’s books to see that there’s no turning back: the organs laid out on metal trays, the close-up pinkish patterns with diagrams, the weight of a lung lying alone without a body. Most people don’t give their names, Pado says. They merely die and get cut up and photographed. But the tumour, on page four of Pado’s cancer book, has a name tag to the side of it. It’s too small to read.
Once on the ferry, the oil-salt smell of the car deck clouded with car fumes, the sound of motors and creaking chains, and the gentle rock of waves get Giulio going. He complains that he’s feeling sick and Ama can’t answer because she can feel it too, a slow vertigo taste that rises from the stomach to lodge in the throat. Pado is convinced ‘it’s all in the mind’. He takes us on a tour of the duty-free shop to pass the time. Giulio is wavering. He can barely walk straight. Pado scoops him up and, as he does so, a stream of sick flies out of Giulio’s mouth. It drips down Pado’s front like a tie and onto the floor. Ama hurries to the cash till to ask for some tissues. She fights against the same lurching, retching urge in her mouth. She stops on a bench and breathes in deeply.
Pado is holding Giulio by the back of his jumper, out in front of him, at arm’s length. ‘Che schifo! Oh no! No! Bloody hell,’ he grumbles, half sorry, half irate. He turns his head away to avoid the smell. Already people are changing direction. A woman with grey hair gingerly steps out of the way and sighs something to herself.
‘Sorry, what did you say? Something wrong?’ Pado hurls at her. She backs away, aghast. Pado pursues her down the corridor, carrying Giulio with him, dangling in mid air, from his sagging jumper. ‘Go on!’ Pado shouts at the woman, ‘if you’ve got something to say, say it. Go on, if you dare, ma va …!’ Giulio swings, crying. He hangs limply above the ground, pushing with his legs against Pado’s arm to get down. Ama staggers to her feet.
‘Put the child down,’ she shrieks at Pado. Then it seems as if all the people on the ferry spin round and watch us, everything stopping, no one but us, perched alone on the sea.
Giulio is sick again. It splatters against the floor and slides with the rock of the ship, this way and that. Pado turns to face the glares. ‘Cosa, what? What is it?’
Ama snatches Giulio from Pado and holds him tight to her chest. She cuddles his head against her. ‘It’s all right my darling, calm down! How are you feeling?’ Giulio shivers a little, a ring of multicoloured sick printed on his lips, and on Ama’s shirt. Pado has got into an argument with one of the stewards. His shouting competes with the noise of the loudspeakers. Ama suddenly grabs me by the arm too and drags me off to find the cabins, with Giulio draped across her shoulder. ‘Come on, get a move on!’
I try and tell Duccio where we’re going. I wave and point down the corridor in front of us, urging him to get a move on. He can’t though, he’s guarding the luggage, a heap of leather and cloth shapes, as high as him.
‘Hang on! What about Pado?’ I say, running beside Ama.
‘Well hopefully he won’t bloody find us!’
We settle in our cabin. We each get a bunk-bed, except Giulio, who has to sleep in the middle, on the floor, in a nest of blankets and jumpers. Ama puts a bowl next to him, in case. We can hear the drinking crowds, with heavy feet, drumming the decks. The pinball machines throw up money and children run, falling between adult legs. From inside the cabin, it sounds like pots and pans knocking in a kitchen cupboard. Pado and Duccio show up, towing the luggage behind them along the corridors. They stack it up next to Giulio on the floor. Pado drops Ama’s bag onto the end of her bunk. It’s a shiny bag she got free from a department store. Pado reckons that’s typically English liking something just because it’s free. The problem with that, Ama argues, is that she’s always typically something when it suits Pado: typically English, typically French, typically Slovenian, typically Dutch. Anyway she’s convinced Pado is typically Italian, even if the mix with the Sicilian bit, she says, has managed to make him look Arabic.
Ama’s bag is splitting at the seams with things although Pado is always telling her to travel with the strict minimum, especially clothes. In fact, he says, you only ever need two of everything because you can wash one item whilst you wear the other. It doesn’t happen that way because Ama has piles of clothes she buys when waiting for Pado to leave his meetings and conferences. The car is barely big enough to hold them all and Pado has to scatter them everywhere to pack the boot, knickers scrunched under the spare tyre, tights between pages of reports, trousers and skirts rolled down the sides of bags. Ama intervenes from time to time: ‘No, don’t put that under that, it’ll crumple’ or ‘I need to be able to get at that later!’ There’s no reply. A bit like when you lean over into the front seats and ask: ‘How much further?’ Then there’s silence. Ama’s bag is also brimming with little bundles of antiseptic wipes in plastic coating. She has kilometres of dental floss too. Before going to bed, she hands out the floss, a good length to each of us to begin sawing at our gums. She’s sure there must be a bit of food stuck somewhere, lost between the back teeth, rubbing against the tongue, refusing to give. Then Ama has her books, lots of them. They are stashed beneath her clothes. She has at least five on the go at once, mostly French and English novels. That’s what she’s always read, ever since she was a child and Grand Maurice lent her new books each day. The two of them would spend hours reading out passages, comparing impressions. Then, as we started travelling, they would write long letters to each other, quoting lines, discussing endings. Now Ama sits up alone at night and reads whilst the rest of us doze off. She has a pocket lamp and it skips up and down the lines across the bed and into the dark with tense flicks of the wrist. Sometimes, we see her in the morning, half asleep, half awake, a book caught between her thumb and forefinger, as if the weight of the story has forced her to give up.
In Pado’s case are reviews and reports bound together with wide clips and bold red writing: ‘Embargo’, ‘Confidential’ or ‘Draft’. He leafs through them, making annotations, or catching Ama’s eye to read a passage about a clinical trial and ask for the exact translation in Italian. Ama invents a word for him, the way she does when she can’t sleep, new words to lift her away, heal the worries, pack the empty spaces of the night. She spins off idioms, chases unknown verbs, multiplies and conjugates the languages in her mind. That’s why all Pado’s colleagues ask for Ama’s translations. She knows what’s behind a phrase, the meaning that everyone is searching for but cannot find. Pado cannot dwell on translation though. There’s no time to waste. If he doesn’t analyse his reports and trials quickly, people across the world might start taking new medicines without realising that their lungs are being colonised by cysts and disease.
When we’ve rummaged through our bags and flossed our teeth, we all begin getting our beds ready, trying to make head or tail of the flimsy bunk sheets and the rock-hard pillows. Ama gives up. She’s not going to sleep anyway and doesn’t really care. The captain’s voice comes over on the loudspeakers.
‘I wish that stronzo would shut the hell up,’ Pado murmurs half asleep. I strain to hear what is being said above the locking cabin doors and stamping corridors.
Duccio looks at me. ‘I bet you there’s going to be another storm.’
Why did he say that? Eventually the captain’s voice trails off into an alarm noise: ‘If you hear this sound, get out of your cabin immediately, leaving any belongings behind, and make your way to the nearest lifeboat station.’
I listen to the three test blasts of the emergency alarm. They stab at me, dig deep inside, indelible reminders. Three short sharp slashes of panic.
I am uncomfortable. My left foot is poking out of the sheet and blanket, and every time