I begin to shift in my chair because the specialist seems to be quickly searching for ways to impress Pado.
‘I tell you what,’ he says to Pado, ‘could you leave us alone a few minutes. I’d like to ask him a couple of questions.’
Pado now looks like he thinks this whole specialist thing is a bit of a waste of time. He gives in anyway.
‘If you think that would help. But remember, he’s only eight.’ Pado pats me on the back. ‘It won’t take long, try and tell him what it’s like.’
‘Yes,’ I smile. As Ama said: we’ll all feel better afterwards.
I’m left facing the doctor, who has taken out a writing pad. I imagine Pado walking down the stairs to join Ama. Perhaps they’re sitting in the car together, with music slowly suffocating in the machine. Or maybe Pado is in the room next door, trying to fit in some work, reading through magazines or rewriting his book with the photos of white rats, fleshy pink stumps growing out of their backs and cut-open lungs.
‘Well, Jean-Pio, what can I do for you? Why don’t you tell me how the headaches start?’
I begin to tell the doctor again that sometimes, in the car, with the swerves and dips, I get a bit sick, but that instead of feeling sick in the stomach I get a headache and that if I get a headache I have to close my eyes to make it go away. Then, when my eyes are shut, I feel even more sick. And that’s that. I can’t tell him any more. He wouldn’t understand that I have to stop the car from crashing or the ferry from sinking or that if I’d known Grand Maurice was going out fishing on his own, I would have thought about it all day so that he didn’t drown and leave us with a gap in everything. And now that Grand Maurice has gone, and we’re all stranded for ever, I have no choice but to swap bad thoughts for good thoughts all day long because I can’t think that someone can just go out fishing and never come back, or that hundreds of people, all across the world, are drowning and dying every day and no one is trying to stop them, or that all the air conditioners are spewing out diseases that kill and no one knows.
‘Are there any other pains? Do you get stomach aches? Can you sleep?’
I look at the ceiling. I don’t want to be here. I don’t want the specialist to talk to me any more.
‘No, nothing,’ I say.
We both fidget in our chairs.
The specialist gets up and calls Pado in. There’s no reply.
‘I bet you he’s gone down to the car,’ I tell him.
We look outside and there’s Pado leaning through the car window talking to Ama. He notices us and makes his way back up to the doctor’s. It’s my turn to be alone now, whilst Pado listens to what the specialist has to say.
Pado finally emerges, ‘Thanks for your time,’ and points me down the stairs.
‘Well,’ Ama says, as we arrive back at the car, ‘what did he say?’
‘We’ll talk about it later Ava. You know as well as I do that it’s not that simple. Travel sickness, he thinks, maybe.’
‘Oh that’s a surprise!’ Ama sneers. ‘I wonder how he could have got that?’ She strokes my face. ‘What about the water though? Does Jean-Pio understand he’s got to drink more water?’ Ama carries on. ‘We can’t go on like this. It’s getting ridiculous.’
Giulio is prodding me to know what happened. I’m counting time away, nothing to say, nothing to think. Duccio has a map on his knees and is drawing in the precise route we took from the ferry to London.
It’s an hour’s drive to our grandmother’s house from London. Machance isn’t old, but she looks it because she hasn’t really eaten very much since Grand Maurice died two years ago and she moved back to England from the house in France. She sits in her bare dining-room and tells Ama that it’s hard being alone.
She spends most days dead heading the flowers in her garden and, in the evenings, she extracts the fine hairs from her chin with a rapid pull of her fingers to pass the time. By nightfall, she has a tiny nest of thin hairs in her palm. On windy nights, she casts them from her window into the breeze and by morning they have gone. I imagine them gathering in the bark of trees, forming rings of wiry softness clinging to the trunks.
Soon after we arrive at Machance’s, Ama sets to work, going through urgent bills and clearing up untidy rooms. She stops as soon as Machance appears, not wanting to get in the way, not able to explain. She glances over the sparse furniture and sagging paintings, confused by the disrupted order of the house.
Then people start turning up to see Ama and Pado. These friends and guests come and go, sad at the fact that we’re never in one place.
‘Why don’t you stay a while? We never see you!’ ‘Why are you always rushing off so soon?’
Ama answers them all with the same empty expression, her bag for the next journey already packed and prepared in her head.
Two visitors, Michael and Joan, stay a little longer. Pado rolls out medical stories and cases he’s heard at his conferences, like the one about the woman who smoked so much that her lips went yellow and grew into grapes of tumours that clustered like chandeliers from her mouth down into her lungs. Michael listens to Pado in horror.
‘Enough! Enough!’ he begs: ‘You’re going to put me off smoking!’
Joan urges Pado to carry on. ‘Keep going, Gaspare. He’s got to give up one day. He already can’t breathe properly going up stairs!’
Michael tells her to stop being so ridiculous and gets up, pointedly, to light a cigarette. Machance brings him an ashtray. He balances it delicately on the window sill, blowing his smoke outside. I watch him from the table, inhaling, sucking in the smoke in big gulps. Pado and Ama move on to another subject. Machance explains something to Duccio. Isn’t anyone going to say anything to Michael? Isn’t anyone going to show him Pado’s book on lung disease? I look at Michael again, rotating the ashtray with his finger. Now he’s knocking the grey ash off, with precise little taps of the cigarette. The smoke snakes into his mouth and sticks to his lips, like deadly air flowing in and out of an air conditioner. The tumours. What about the tumours? His lips will swell and rot. He won’t be able to speak or swallow and the scabs and stubs sprouting from his lips will turn into blisters of blood. I picture him dying and the doctors waiting to cut out his lungs for a photo or a microscope slide, with his finished life etched in its dulling colours. I feel a headache mounting, a sickness in the back of the eyes. I stare back at Michael, transfixed.
Machance interrupts my gaze and asks me to help her lay out some glasses. I reach across the table. I spot a pack of cigarettes, inside Michael’s jacket, draped over the chair. I can’t stop looking at it, poking out of the grey material. I carry an empty bowl to the kitchen. What if Michael ends up like Mr Yunnan or Grand Maurice and all the other dead people? We have to stop him! I corner Giulio near the fridge: we should do something quick! Giulio says if I can grab the cigarette packet, he’ll divert everyone’s attention. He starts running up and down asking Ama for a sip of coffee. She tells him to calm down, plonks him on her lap and roughs up his hair. As she curls strands of Giulio’s hair round her fingers, I dig into Michael’s jacket. Pado looks at me strangely. He is wondering what I’m doing, but he’s too busy waiting for the next joke or smile to mind. Michael laughs with Pado.
I can feel the cigarette packet burning in my hand.
Giulio and I rush off to the bathroom. We pass Machance turning last year’s apples from the garden on the window ledges. She rotates each apple, every day, to check that