The Water-Breather. Ben Faccini
in my mind and change into fears that stick like headaches, at least I call them headaches. There’s no other way of describing them. The headaches come on stronger as the motorways rush their white broken lines into a sickly mess or when the little petrol sign suddenly flicks on red. I watch it waver for a while and then it jams on redder than before, a stain that won’t go as the last drops of petrol slip away into the engine. I go to warn Ama. The sight of her tense shoulders stops me. I pull back, not daring to touch her.
I hesitate, then pat Pado on the arm instead. ‘The light! Look at the petrol light!’
‘It’s all right,’ he answers, ‘I’m sure we can manage another thirty kilometres to the next petrol station. Well done for noticing.’
But how can it be all right? There’s no petrol station anywhere and the road is hurtling itself further and further into the distance. I watch the kilometres tick past, hoping that Ama won’t realise that we are going to grind to a halt with juggernauts and trucks flying about us like leaves in a storm. I concentrate on the stories on the tapes instead. Some manage to calm me. Others bring on a smarting-cut punch between the eyes, the blurring of shadows along the road, the memories of number-plates uncounted. I focus on my brothers’ elbows skewering me. I hold on to that niggling pain, catching like a nail on my skin. I breathe softly, slowly, in and out, but my head leaks, a punctured bowl emptying. The unwanted thoughts, the thoughts I’ve turned back a thousand times, suddenly come, and once they’ve come, they’re shoved aside by new ones, tumbling, falling into my head. My mouth is full of them. I try not to attach words to them. They swim, crippled without letters stuck to their sides, and then that’s it. They trick me. They catch me out. They take shape and snatch words, glue them to themselves. I shut myself off from the car, the perpetual swaying, the rub of its wheels, but I can’t blot out the humming of unsolicited thoughts as they dress themselves faster and faster in aching words and images. I listen to the stories on the tapes again. I reinvent new endings, swap characters with others. I create images and thoughts to wipe everything away. I stop. I start. I warn. I save. The petrol sign is redder and redder and no one is doing anything about it.
Pado looks calm. It might be all right. We might get away with it this time. I look at the cars rushing past. I follow them closely. Then that’s it. A thought springs up inside me again. What if the last drop of petrol has just gone and we’re about to slam to a halt right here in the middle of the motorway and we can’t get out of the car and the lorry behind us swerves and hits the car in front and the car in front spins round and starts coming back the other way? Why did I think that? I didn’t think that really. Look at the lorry. Quick, a word for the driver – ‘Don’t die’ – but then the lorry overtakes and slips into the distance before I have time to say my word for it. What if the driver goes round the corner now and ploughs into the road, tunnelling into the cracked grey surface of the tarmac? What if we shoot round the corner after him, straight into the piled-up cars in front? I hold on to myself and it’s as if I’m pulling on a string of words, till like a chain they dance me away. I silently repeat ‘We mustn’t crash! We can’t crash!’ – I yell it to myself so hard that my ears are singing. I call for help, but no one can hear. I see faces from the morning, cars that passed us by. That staring woman, that crying girl, that dog with a blue collar, tossing and turning its head through the wound down window. I imagine our grandfather, Grand Maurice, fighting and writhing against the water that choked him. I see his face slipping, his feet digging in to the sinking mud, his mouth, his eyes, his ears filling with the lake. Then his face mingles with faces from yesterday and more faces from the day before that, and number-plates, and cars and the motorways they were on. What were the people in the cars doing? What language were they speaking? The days and towns slide past. I can’t remember, but I must remember. What number-plate? What car? I put my hands over my eyes. A spiralling headache comes on full blast. The pain arrows through my eyes and I can’t think at all. I’m overturned by a dizziness that flicks me up and down inside.
‘Turn off the tape. Please!’ I manage to say.
They won’t. I am drifting, disorientated.
‘Stop the car!’
My words melt away. Giulio shakes me, but I can’t feel anything. My voice has changed, it’s an unheard, stifled whistle.
Pado looks round in surprise and parks in a lay-by. I can see a public lavatory in the distance and run towards it.
‘Don’t go in there. It’s filthy!’ Pado shouts after me.
I go in anyway. I lean against its wall, cars filing past and men staring at me from behind urinals. I try to find a lavatory. Most of the doors are locked. One door is open and it has a scratched outline of a mouth swallowing up a telephone number inside a heart. I sit on the closed seat, panting, trying to banish myself from my thoughts. I recite ‘We mustn’t crash’ again and again. I can smell the rotting taste of panic everywhere. All the time Pado is hooting impatiently.
‘Hurry up. Hurry up!’
I sprint back outside. Pado is beginning to pull away and, with the buttons of my head unfastened, I run to reach the car before any new thoughts trip me up. My brothers are looking at me worriedly through the rear-window. I get back into the car. Pado observes my face in the driving mirror. I know he wants to ask what’s up, but the other cars are pushing past us and the picnic is getting warm. He smiles instead. He leans towards me.
‘Get him a drink of water, he’s dehydrated.’
His face is full of warmth, spreading into ridged lines, a map with motorways, rivers and hills. Then the story on the tape slides back in again on its way round the machine and its voice sings like a stone cast up from the tarmac.
Ama looks worried. ‘Gaspare, we should stop again. Jean-Pio’s obviously not feeling well. Slow down!’
Pado accelerates ahead. ‘He’ll be fine. Will everyone just bloody calm down, lasciatemi in pace.’
I gaze at the changing clouds out of the window. They have joined into one slow dragging crease in the sky. Ama turns to check on me.
‘I’ve never seen a child stare into space so much. That’s all he does all day long!’ she sighs to Pado. ‘No wonder the boy gets car sick.’
‘I’ve got a bit of a headache,’ I tell Ama. ‘I’m fine.’
She doesn’t answer. She digs her nails into the fabric of the front seat and picks furiously at the thread of the seams.
The trickiest thing about travelling from England to France or Belgium and back is the Channel ferry. You have to join endless queues of cars well in advance and have a ticket with an arrival time that is an hour behind or in front of where you are coming from. The last bit of the drive to the port is always silent. There’s nothing to say, except that Pado hates having to be early for a boat and Ama can’t stand the smells and noises of the ferry. She checks the trees on the roadsides for the slightest sign of a storm at sea. We look with her, waiting in dread, for the cutting rain, the litter-carrying gusts, the dance of cars, from side to side, along the motorway in the wind.
The signposts to the ferry seem to change constantly and Pado’s shortcuts lead us to areas where there’s never a shop to buy fresh bread or a place to fill up with petrol. We’re always running late. When we ask someone the way, no one can understand Pado’s distorted French and he drives on frustrated, leaving passers-by in mid-sentence, mouths wide open, until he finds a person who can answer him properly. Duccio normally reckons he’s worked out the route anyway. Pado is sure he’s recognised the road ahead.
‘It’s this way,’ he says.
‘But that last man told us it was in the other direction!’ Ama protests.
‘He wasn’t from around here,’ Pado insists.
‘How the hell do you know?’
‘I do, that’s