Mostly Children
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After signing some documents in Italian that I couldn’t read, I took a short walk to Grosseto Cathedral, and then to a castle and a small, sunken park beside it named ‘Parco Alle Vittime Del 26 Aprile 1943’ in commemoration of a bombing. I sat on a bench in the park feeling faintly anxious and watched two young men grappling on the grass. I thought of my male friends back home. When I got back to the house after an hour’s driving, I had a go at smoking a cigarette and watched two house martins cutting at each other in the sky over the fields. Then, finally, I felt calm.
For the first week I lived out of my bags and cardboard boxes, and when the flatpacks began to arrive I left them leaning against my car in a detached garage twenty or thirty metres from the house. I ate only what I could find in the village shop, and went to bed early on a rollmat in whichever room took my fancy that night, rarely the bedroom.
A few pieces of furniture had been left behind by the previous owner. There was an old sideboard in the upstairs corridor, empty except for one drawer full of nails and dead, foamy batteries. When the router arrived, I buried it in that drawer, and then filled the others with useful things, bedsheets and towels and so on.
My first concession was the writing desk, which I brought inside on the second week, unpacked and installed in the smallest of the upstairs rooms. I carried a wooden chair up from the kitchen and a lamp from the lounge to give it the look of a proper study. I didn’t have work to do, I didn’t even enjoy reading very much, but the desk gave me something to prop my chin on while I looked out over the countryside, and something to lie my cheek on when I wanted to listen. I liked the look of the wheat, which was still green and soft. I enjoyed the sound of the fighter jets that occasionally crossed the sky: a big crackling noise, like hot water pouring into a mug. I didn’t have a job or a hobby, so really I didn’t have anything to do except pay attention to these things. I followed the movements of mules and cats for hours. I don’t know whether the cats came all the way over from the village or if they were wild. Nobody seemed to be minding the mules. The jets scared the animals, but I couldn’t help feeling excited when they passed overhead. At night I had nightmares about my old job at the hospital, but I didn’t think about it at all during the day.
The more I rested, the more sleep I seemed to need. I often woke suddenly at my desk with a sore cheek and the mid-afternoon sun laid flat across my eyes. One time I woke up in mid-air, having fallen from my seat, and another I woke at ten or eleven in the morning feeling immensely upset about my father, and when I looked out the window I saw a woman in a clay field a hundred metres ahead of me, pulling cherries from the crown of a wild tree. She was standing on the top rung of a ladder, and rooting around in the branches above her head with both arms. I laid my chin back onto my desk to watch. After a moment, the ladder toppled, and she dropped soundlessly eight feet down onto the clay and lay still. A few moments after that a jet thundered by, pulling the whole valley together into the grip of its clamour before disappearing over the mountains and letting it go again.
I put on my overshirt and walked the long straight track to the field. There were six cherry trees in total, and she was laid out on her front at the foot of the sixth, with one of her arms twisted around her body like a sash, and her face pushed into the clay. She had on a long ruffled skirt, and a red t-shirt. She didn’t move at all but I could see no reason for her to be dead.
I was afraid of startling her, so I scuffed my feet a little as I approached. She made a muffled whining sound into the clay.
‘Please don’t move,’ I said in bad Italian. ‘We need to make sure we don’t do anything until help gets here, so don’t move, just stay as you are, I am a doctor.’
The woman rolled right over and sat up straight. She wiped the clay from her face with her right arm. Her left hung low and loose, like a chimpanzee’s. I asked if she had any pain in her back or neck.
‘My shoulder is broken,’ she said in English.
‘It looks to me like it’s only dislocated,’ I said.
She gave me a stern look. ‘Well how am I supposed to know?’
‘I can run to the village and have them call an ambulance, they’ll reset it for you.’
The woman gave her arm a look of disdain. ‘Can’t you do it yourself?’ she asked. ‘You said you were a doctor.’
‘Really I’m a retired surgeon.’
‘Isn’t that harder?’
‘I suppose. Can you stand?’
She stood, and led me up the track to the house.
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I told her to go inside and lie facedown on the kitchen table while I looked for my backpack. She went into the kitchen and then came out again. ‘There is no kitchen table,’ she said.
I ran back out to the garage, hoisted one of the flatpacks onto my shoulder and jogged back to the house. The woman sat down on the counter with her arm hanging dead between her legs, and watched patiently while I unpacked the box. All she said, very quietly, as I laid the tabletop, legs, nuts and screws out across the tiled floor was, ‘I think I’ve seen this one before.’ I worried she might become frightened, but it took all of my concentration to put the table together correctly and I couldn’t think of anything to say.
Once it was ready, I asked her again to lie facedown on the table, with her long arm hanging down towards the floor. I retrieved my backpack from upstairs and brought it down, but could find nothing heavy to fill it with. At home I would have used logs, or coal. I explained this to the woman, and she suggested filling it with water.
‘It’s leather,’ I said pathetically.
‘Why do we need a heavy backpack?’
‘I was going to tie it to you. I need something pulling down on your arm for half an hour or so.’
‘Can’t you do it?’ she asked.
I could. ‘Ok, yes,’ I said.
I laid myself down onto the tiles, and shimmied a little way under the table. Her hand reached down towards my face, limp and so close it made my eyes cross.
‘Tell me if this hurts,’ I said and placed my two hands onto her bare arm, above and below the elbow. Very slowly, I began to draw her arm down towards me. I could feel the dislocation in the ease with which it slid from the rest of her body. It was like pulling a stick out of mud.
She made a sound into the table and I eased off for a moment, then began to pull again. This time the arm came even more easily than before: her hand came closer to my face, her index finger nearly brushing the small, hard triangle of bone between my eyes – the glabella.
I turned my face to the side and continued to pull her towards me. Only when I felt her fingertips approach my cheek did I stop again; then I maintained everything as it was, perfectly still. I had no way to know how much time was passing. My own arms grew tired. After what I thought was about twenty minutes, but might have been any length of time, I stopped and asked her to sit up and roll back her shoulder.
She did so, cautiously. ‘I think it’s better.’
I smiled. ‘That’s called the Stimson technique.’
‘Is it?’ she said. ‘Means nothing to me.’
I told her to have it checked by a doctor as soon as possible, and offered to show her some stretches she could do to stop it popping back out. But she refused, then shook my hand, smoothed out her skirt and left. She must have gone back out to the cherry tree to fetch her ladder because when I went upstairs and looked out from the study window it was gone.
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I woke up on my rollmat the next day with a phantom pain in my shoulder. I had gone to sleep in the bathroom next to a bathful of hot water as an experiment to see how the steam affected my sleep, but now the steam had all condensed and the room felt wet and unhealthy. I rolled up my mat and took it downstairs with me to the kitchen. For breakfast I poured some porridge oats and milk into a pan, and solved a crossword puzzle on my phone while they came together. Then I cleared everything away and went down to the garage, pulled the remaining flatpacks off of the car and started the engine. I had decided to take another trip to Grosseto, to buy a few things that weren’t stocked in the village: a pedal bin, an ironing board, a bottle of bubble bath. I honked the horn before setting off to scare away any cats that might be hiding under the car, and cringed at the noise. It reminded me with a shock that my father had died, and was dead.
Nothing ran out from under the car. I pulled out of the garage, and started off down the track towards the village and the main road. The sun had hardened the ground, and the car shook terribly. As the clay field drew up on my right, with its six abandoned cherry trees, I thought about the feeling of the woman’s loose arm in my hands, and her index finger hanging above my eyes, and felt embarrassed. For the first time I asked myself what I was doing here. Then I looked back at the clay field and caught a lick of white fabric lifting in the wind and I stopped the car.
I crossed the clay to the sixth tree. She was in the same position as the day before, thrown onto her front like an abandoned toy, her skirt flapping in the breeze, her shoulder popped. There was no ladder this time, and no cherries in her hands. Approaching her, my feet sinking into the clay, I felt like I was falling asleep.
‘Can you stand?’
Her head tipped to one side, out of the clay. ‘Yes.’
We walked to the house in near silence. The only thing she asked was whether I had bought any coal yet. ‘No,’ I said.
When I opened the front door she strode straight to the kitchen table and laid down upon it as she had the day before. I watched her from the doorway. I felt embarrassed again, and slightly repelled. Her body on the table looked dead.
I approached, dropped to the floor and pushed myself under the table on my back like a car mechanic. This time I held her for what may have been as little as ten minutes. She didn’t say anything. When we stood up I demanded her name, and she said ‘Barbara’ without looking at me, suddenly so proud again.
‘Well, Barbara, you should know that I’m away from home most days, these last two excepted, and you won’t always be able to rely on me for free medical help, so you ought to be more careful.’
‘Do you know what I do for a living?’ she asked impassively.
I was angry at being ignored, so I said nothing.
‘I’m a software engineer,’ she said. ‘I have an excellent laptop, and I can work from wherever I want.’
‘Well, I’m delighted.’
Barbara sneered, smoothed out her skirt and left. I waited for ten minutes to be sure she was gone, and then went back out to collect my car from the side of the track and drove it the short way back home.
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Four identical days passed, with four more visits. I considered going out and picking all the cherries from every tree in the field. I knew it wouldn’t make a difference. It might make the whole charade seem that bit more lunatic, but in the end I knew it wouldn’t make a difference.
‘It’s not good for you to do this to yourself,’ I said when I found her on the fifth day.
She turned onto her back, rolling all of her weight right over her disjointed arm, and lay on the clay looking up at me.
‘This is the last time,’ I said. ‘I refuse to do it again after this.’
And we rushed up to the house together.
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I woke up early on the sixth day, curled up on my rollmat in the larder. My tongue tasted of fruits and yeast, and I had a strong feeling that staying the night there had somehow been bad for my teeth.
I made my porridge on the stove and left the dirty pan and my bowl in the sink to soak, then showered and dressed and put a few items of clothing and a toothbrush into my leather bag. I made a quick run up to the study to look out at the track. The cherry trees were nodding in their field. Above them, the clouds tracked quickly in the sky, pushing through white demarcations left behind by the jets. There was nothing else out there yet, no cats or mules, and nobody laid out on the clay.
I hurried down to the car and took off without sounding my horn. Within three minutes I had passed the village, and after ten I was out on the main road, heading towards Grosseto.
There was nothing I wanted to see. I drove in past the churches and piazzas I had explored the last time with no desire to revisit them, and parked outside a small hardware store where I was able to buy my ironing board and pedal bin. I had forgotten what the third thing I needed was. From there it was a thirty minute walk to the hotel, and on the way, by chance, I went past the Parco Alle Vittime Del 26 Aprile 1943 again. It looked even more sunken and miserable than I remembered, little more than a burnt strip of grass truncated by the car park on one end and the high walls of the castle on the other. This time I stopped to read a plaque, and regretted doing so when I learned that the sorry park commemorated ‘mostly children’.
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The hotelier handed me my key from a row of thirty and showed me to my room. There were two or three bars in the area, which he pitched enthusiastically as we climbed to the third floor and which I assured him I would go looking for later that night. But in fact I had no real intention of leaving the room again until morning, as I’m sure he could tell.
I changed into a pair of pyjamas as soon as the door shut behind him, climbed into bed and willed the hours to pass over quickly so that I could return home. But they didn’t. At midnight I stood at the window and watched the night dragging its stomach over the top of the town. I was thinking about what a long walk it was to the car, what a long drive to the house. I was picturing the house, the track, the field. At half midnight I climbed back into bed and pretended to be falling asleep. At one I climbed out again, changed back into my clothes and left.
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The roads were quiet and dark and very nearly featureless, but I was at no real risk of falling asleep. A small, tumorous store of humiliation pressed into my brain and preserved me.
I made it to the village in just under forty minutes, and drove up to the track from there. It was around two, and the wind was down. A smell, slightly sharp, maybe sulfuric, lingered over the clay.
I pulled the car in off the track and cut the engine. It was too early in the season for cicadas. I climbed out of the car and looked across the field. The six cherry trees stood tall and black against the night, commanding the silence, marshalled on the level clay, and I tramped towards them, only half-believing that I had come back.
A black bundle lay at the foot of the third cherry tree, and grew no more human as I approached. It was only as I heaved her up from the ground, and forced a quiet catch of shock from her throat, that I was able to believe that this loose, black weight was Barbara. I carried her to the car and dropped her onto the backseat without consideration for her shoulder, and she didn’t say a word, she only breathed. We drove to the house, and she allowed herself to be carried inside to the lightless kitchen, and laid out over the table. Then I dropped down onto my back, pushed myself into position beneath her and groped around in the darkness over my head until I found her arm. Her skin, when I found it, was cold. I took the arm in both hands and began to pull it down towards me. The familiar feeling of her dislocation was there, the nauseating give, the silent scraping of the joint beneath her skin. I could sense her hand hanging just above my face, but her arm was still slack, soft. I pulled a little harder. I pulled until I felt two of her fingers brush against my lips. Then I walked my hands a little higher up her arm and pulled again, and her two fingers descended gently into my open mouth.
Her fingertips tasted of varnish and clay. They landed on the end of my tongue, and I closed my lips around them. Then, for ten minutes, neither one of us moved. My eyes closed. I drifted in the silence. Pictures of home summoned themselves to me. I forgot which room I was in. Gradually my grip loosened, and my lips parted, and her arm began to slip away.
I stayed exactly where I was, laid out on the tiles, while Barbara sat up and rolled her shoulder in the darkness. I listened closely as she slipped down from the table and padded away, and when at last I heard the front door open and close in the hall, I rolled out from my spot under the table and went hunting for my rollmat, the flavour of clay still there on my tongue.
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I spent the following day stationed at my desk waiting for her. The fighter jets made six or seven passes in the afternoon, but the clay field lay empty. I hiked down twice during the day and once in the middle of the night just to be sure, but she wasn’t there.
The morning after that I woke up early, having never fallen entirely asleep, made my porridge quickly and returned to my desk. The skies were quieter. The clouds hung still, and in five hours not a single plane went by.
I took a break in the kitchen for lunch, half-convinced that I was scaring the world away with my watching. I made a sandwich and placed it on a plate on the kitchen table, just south of the point where her nose, for seven days and a night, had pressed down against the wood. The loneliness I felt, sitting at that table eating my sandwich, was breathtaking. It was a feeling I didn’t know I was capable of summoning. I left my crusts on the plate, gathered my coat and my keys and strode out into the sun. I stared at the six cherry trees as I drove by, but the wind was still down and they did not flinch.
In my imagination she was on a beach somewhere, pitched out onto her front, broken and disjointed, breathing in the heavy white surf. Or she was in her house, wherever it was, crumpled below a loft hatch, or twisted up in a car wreck, panting through smashed ribs. Nobody in the shops and bars in the village had heard of her. They told me the closest hospital was on the outskirts of Grosseto, so I climbed back into my car and set off on the main road.
I arrived at the hospital just after three. The car park was empty except for my car and four ambulances sitting empty by the entrance to the emergency ward. A paramedic leant against one, sharing a cigarette with a street cleaner.
I had expected blank stares from the front desk, but as soon as I said Barbara’s name I was directed down a corridor with a show of waving and anxious looks. I met a doctor at the other end who reacted similarly, and insisted on walking me to the room himself. The blind was down on the window set into the door, and when I put my hand to the doorknob the doctor gripped my shoulder, gave me a grim, earnest look and placed his hand over mine.
The room was dark. Windows ran right across the far wall, but the blinds were down on these too. Darkest of all was the mound on the hospital bed. Heavy green blankets covered everything, so heavy you could hardly see the breaths roll through them. Only a shred of white poked out, a shy, bandaged forehead. I approached it, conscious of the watching doctor, and stooped to kiss it. When I turned back the doctor was staring at his feet.
‘Where did you find her?’ I asked in English.
He pressed his lips together sympathetically. ‘We found him in the sea.’
‘Do you know what she was doing there?’
He pressed his lips again. ‘I’m sure you know, sir, he was flying his fighter jet. With the Aeronautica Militare, I’m sure you know.’
I turned back to the bed, and a sudden low sob blew out from beneath the blankets.
‘This person is called Barbara?’ I asked.
‘Colonnello Ernest Barbara,’ came the doctor’s answer, and a second sob shook out from the blanket below me. ‘English, like yourself.’
I took a hold of the blankets and pulled them clear of the patient’s face. Two oily, green English eyes peered out from between the bandage wraps.
‘He is very fortunate,’ said the doctor. ‘Had he ejected later he would not have not been in such a good state.’
The eyes stared up at me, bloodshot, blinking and welling up in turn, almost unbearably apologetic.
‘Anything more to be done for him?’ I asked. ‘I am a surgeon as it happens.’
‘For this one?’ said the doctor. ‘No, nothing to be done for this one. A lot of broken bones, so a lot of waiting. Both legs, and one arm and some ribs. A lot of waiting still to be done.’
‘I see.’
I tucked the blanket back up around the colonnello’s shoulder. He continued to stare up at me, the bandages around his eyes blotted with tears, and I gave him a stiff, martial nod, then turned and walked past the doctor, back out into the corridor.
.
That was my only lead. I left my car in the hospital car park and walked, one last time, to the Parco Alle Vittime Del 26 Aprile 1943. I read the plaque about the dead children again in full and cried softly to myself, and then sat down on the bench to have a cigarette. The wind picked up the smoke. The rest of the sky was empty. I watched two boys grappling on the grass ahead of me, and then I watched the empty sky and thought of the person I had been back home. Really he was much the same as me. He was not so different from my father. It’s amazing sometimes, I thought to myself, how little things actually change.
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Sam Corbett is a writer and journalist from Brighton based in South London. He regularly contributes to the books, obituaries and London sections of The Times, and has previously written on music for The Financial Times. He is currently working on a novel.
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