‘Nan, what are you doing?’
Lisa stepped over a pile of tablecloths and linens covering the living-room floor of her Nan’s tiny lounge. She lived a couple of streets away and Lisa popped around most days after work for a cup of tea – not that Nan ever seemed particularly grateful, although she was quick to complain if Lisa missed a day.
‘What do you think I’m doing? Inviting the Queen to tea?’ She bustled by, a miniature dynamo rustling a large black dustbin bag in her hand. At four-foot nothing, with a face concertinaed by time, she looked as if she’d shrunk, leaving her skin two sizes too big. ‘I’m having a sort-out.’
‘Again.’ Lisa shook her head in dismay, looking at the piles of mismatched napkins, lace doilies and faded pillowcases, most of which she’d never seen before.
‘When am I ever going to use this lot? Load of old rubbish, cluttering up the place, attracting a shedload of moths. There’s a hole in my cardigan.’ Nan didn’t say the words but Lisa knew the thinking behind the latest clear-out. ‘I’m not getting any younger.’
‘Nan, there’s years left in you.’ Her grandmother was an indomitable force of nature. Pushing eighty-five and as sharp as they came. She had all her marbles, and then some.
‘That’s as maybe, but I don’t need all this tat.’ Her mouth wrinkled, prune-like, in derision. ‘It’ll save you the job when I’m dead and gone.’
‘I hate it when you say things like that.’
‘Don’t be daft. Now give us a hand with that box over there.’
‘You never brought that down from the loft on your own?’ asked Lisa incredulously.
‘Course I did. Who else? You think Superman popped by?’ Her nan shook her head in amused disgust.
‘Where do you want it?’
‘I don’t want it. I’m chucking it out. There’s a load of your granddad’s books in there. No good to anyone. But if you want them, help yourself.’
Lisa picked up the ancient cardboard box, resting her chin on the top to keep the uppermost layer of books from slithering precariously on to the floor as she moved it towards the dining table. As she was about to put it down, the bottom gave way and a flood of hard-backed books cascaded to the floor, brittle paper flapping as some of the books collapsed, the pages fluttering out like pigeons released and the hard corners knocking her shins as they landed.
‘Now look what you’ve done,’ Nan tsked, sucking on her teeth.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll pick everything up. Don’t want you putting your back out, do we?’
‘There’s nowt wrong with my back, Missy,’ retorted Nan, as usual refusing to admit to any weakness or acknowledge her creaking joints. ‘But I’ll put the kettle on while you tidy up.’ She shuffled off to the kitchen, leaving Lisa piling the books on the table. Most of them were ancient, the print so tiny and close together that they were difficult to read and the paper was yellowed and speckled with mildew. None of the titles or authors were any she’d heard of and in this state she couldn’t imagine anyone would want them.
As she bent to pick up the last two books, they see-sawed in her hand, separated by a bulky brown envelope that had been sandwiched between them. Although her mother had died when she was seven, Lisa recognised her distinctive rounded handwriting on the front of the envelope immediately. For Vittorio. The words had faded, the final o almost invisible, but they were underlined with two vivid dark slashes, which Lisa instinctively felt turned them into an instruction.
She frowned and toyed with the envelope, feeling the weight of it in her hand. The name ‘Vittorio’ conjured up confusing elusive memories that danced away whenever she tried to catch them.
Why did Nan have it? Vittorio, her father – not that he deserved that title – had upped and left a few years before her mother had died. Was this envelope a deathbed request? Lisa didn’t remember much about her mother, except that she’d been ill a lot. At the age of seven it was probably kinder not to explain the life-sucking treatments that left her mother wan and listless in a fight against cancer.
Sometimes she remembered, or maybe misremembered, things about her father. Being carried on his shoulders, pushed high on a swing, riding a carousel pony and him running alongside the merry-go-round, waving all the way, but they didn’t tally with what Nan had to say about him. She winced, her back teeth protesting at the sudden tensing of her jaw. What sort of father abandoned a daughter and didn’t come back for her even after her mother had died? Well, that was his loss. Thank goodness she’d had Nan.
As she turned the envelope in her hand, the moral question of what right she had to open it became moot as the old gum on the seal yawned open. Two photographs slipped out, or perhaps she’d helped them with an illicit shake. A handsome man in sunglasses laughed up at her, his arm around Lisa’s mother, who was heavily pregnant. Lisa studied the picture, a sudden lump blocking her throat. She had so few photos of her mother, because many of them had been lost when the bathroom in Nan’s house flooded and the ceiling collapsed in the lounge. Few of the photos had been salvageable and Nan being Nan had chucked them all out. She didn’t do sentiment.
And Lisa had no photos of her father at all. She turned it over, looking for confirmation. There it was, Me and Vittorio, Rome. She studied the picture, but it wasn’t a great shot and with the sunglasses and his face in shadow it was difficult to get much of a feel for what he looked like. Her lip curled. She knew what he was like. Irresponsible. Selfish. Heartless.
In the second picture, blurred and out of focus, the same man was pictured on his own outside a building, which she guessed was somewhere in Italy. She turned it over.
Vittorio & the family home. 32 Via del Mattonato, Rome,