As I haul him upright by the hem of his leather jacket, Ryan chokes, ‘Being with you is going to kill me!’
I don’t trust myself to answer; it’s the very thing I fear. I just touch his face reassuringly and keep moving, knowing he’ll follow.
There are loud sirens on the Piazza below, as if we have stirred up a nest of wasps that are now questing in our direction. The facade of the building we’re crossing is longer than the one we just left, and irregular. Looking back over one shoulder, I can no longer see the watchers on the Duomo roof. We’ve left the cathedral behind, as we’ve left behind the Duomo Square and its sea of milling officials, flashing lights and cordons.
I’m debating whether or not to just keep going across the rooftops of the city when Ryan passes me unsteadily, heading left around the corner of the building. Surprised, I swerve left, too, almost running into his back.
He turns to me, eyes wide and bloodshot, face pale from exertion. ‘There’s no way down from here,’ he mutters, a clear note of panic in his voice. ‘No way down. I can’t, Mercy, I’m not like you. I don’t think I can keep doing this.’
His eyes dart fearfully across to the next building, his sides heaving. I can see he’s reached some kind of physical limit. He’s only holding himself together, only submitting to the crazy things I’m putting him through, for me.
There were always more holes than plan, anyway.
I make my decision almost the instant I say gently, ‘There’s always a way down.’
Though I wish there were an easier way for me to return us quickly to solid ground, I pull Ryan to me tightly with my left arm, cover his mouth with my right hand, and take us up and over the edge of the roof. Down, down, into Via Agnello. I can feel him bellowing through my fingers as we plummet to earth, making no sound as we fall from the sky.
I count six floors on the way down. The windows we pass show rooms full of merchandise, mannequins, furniture, but are otherwise empty of life. It still isn’t opening time in central Milan, luckily for us. But in one hour, two at most, people will be clamouring to be let into the Duomo, the Piazza, into all of the surrounding shops and buildings that remain undamaged by fire, untrammelled by tragedy or death, because life goes on. It can do nothing else. We have to hurry.
The only person on the street below is a woman with a dark, wavy, shoulder-length bob, wearing a fashionable tweed overcoat, skinny jeans and slouchy tan boots, a striped tote bag on one shoulder. She’s heading away from us to the northwest, past a couple of parked cars pointed in the same direction. But as I land, I stumble against a stationary bicycle that’s been leant haphazardly against a parking sign located right by the wall. The commotion as it falls over causes the woman to turn and look at us. We’re clasping onto each other like drunks, Ryan and I, and she stares at us for a while, before turning and moving away again, slowly, jerkily. There’s something awkward about the way she walks, as if she’s in the grip of some kind of degenerative disorder, though she can’t be more than thirty, thirty-five.
I take my hand away from Ryan’s mouth and he starts yelling. ‘Don’t you ever —’ Then his shoulders sag and he mumbles, ‘“Don’t” isn’t really a word that applies to you, is it?’
‘It’s all new to me, too,’ I say softly into his exhausted face, ‘just having you here. Till now, it’s always been me fighting some impossible corner on my own. I’ve been battling my own set of major …’
‘Adjustment issues?’ Ryan mutters.
‘Something like that,’ I say ruefully. ‘You’ve noticed?’
‘And I thought it was the effect I was having on you.’ His laughter turns into a fit of coughing.
I shake him gently. ‘We’ll try and do things your way for a while, okay? We’re going to find you somewhere safe to rest.’
It starts off as an empty platitude, but then a tiny idea takes root in my head. It seems so outlandish at first that it couldn’t possibly work. But if it did? It could mean help for him and help for me. And I’m more than willing to take advice these days, provided it’s solid. I’ve been on my own for long enough.
Ryan shivers, weaving a little on the spot. ‘So cold,’ he says absently.
There’s a deserted underpass across the street, bisected by a zebra crossing; an empty bar beside it with a torn, maroon awning flapping a little in the breeze. Melted run-off thunders through subterranean pipes somewhere far below our feet. I look into the distance. Via Agnello, with its pizzerias and public car parks, cheap souvenir shops and menswear stores, didn’t look like this when I was last here. But I know with unerring certainty where we are and where we have to go. I point up the narrow, one-way street in the direction the woman is walking.
‘Think you can go just a little bit further?’ I say brightly.
I’m lying through my teeth, of course. We’re going to have to go the long way around to avoid the mess around the Galleria, but Ryan doesn’t need to know that. And we have to hustle. The streets around here are an illogical warren laid down over centuries, but people will still come looking for evidence of the crazy turisti who leapt off the terrace of one of the most prestigious department stores in town. They’ll be looking for body parts. It’s only a matter of time.
Ryan closes his eyes, and I feel him shivering uncontrollably inside his clothes. ‘You’re like some kind of learner archangel,’ he mutters. ‘Like that guy who was mad, bad and dangerous to know. That’s you. They could’ve been describing you.’
‘Free to bail,’ I remind him quietly.
He coughs a little as he opens his eyes and I see that they’ve grown unfocused. ‘Can’t,’ he slurs. ‘Can’t escape fate.’
I give him a shake, appalled at his words. ‘I’m not your fate, Ryan. I’m your choice. Remember that when everything is going to hell around us.’
I’m not sure if he can hear me any longer. I pull his arm across my shoulders again and we stagger forward, trailing that lone woman who shoulders her stripy tote as if it contains all of the sorrows of the world. I don’t get any sense of what she’s thinking, and I’m glad of it, because all I can see, hear, smell, touch, taste is Ryan’s bone-deep exhaustion. His eyes are fixed on the ground below his stumbling feet and he can’t stop shaking. If it weren’t for me, he would already have fallen. He needs things I can’t give him. We have to hurry, though doing things Ryan’s way — the human way — is always going to take longer.
I march him on ruthlessly while I warm his icy hands in mine. I describe all the buildings we’re passing in a low, cheerful voice while I scan the rooftops continuously for any hint of demonsign. Ryan eventually ceases to respond, and my sense of quiet desperation grows.
As we turn right into Via Ulrico Hoepli, I catch glimpses of faces and forms moving about at upper-storey windows. This late-rising city is beginning to stir. I get the sudden buzz of a middle-aged man in an elegant overcoat, scarf and suit exiting a coffee shop just across the street, something about the end of the world in his thoughts. Then I pick up the ambient thoughts of a couple of men wrangling a new armchair into a delivery van outside a furniture store we’re passing. They hate each other, hate the armchair, and can’t understand why, after everything that’s happened in this city, they still have to deliver it. Today.
I turn left up Via San Paolo, with Ryan braced tightly against me, his every footstep dragging. As we move along the upper edge of the Piazza della Scala, I begin to pick up a tangle of human energy: thoughts expressed in a multitude of languages, emotions that grow louder and more insistent the closer we get, amplifying in timbre, volume and complexity, all the time.
Then I see the crowd of shouting people gathered around a police roadblock at the southern end of the square, a larger crowd milling around another roadblock on