Chapter Five
Turin. July.
There are three other beds and all of them have somebody sitting beside them.
I count them, because counting is what my hands do when they want to be busy and my hands cannot be busy, because there is a cannula in the back of one of them and the other one is holding a child.
Bed one has a husband asleep in a plastic chair with his shoes off.
Bed two has a mother and a sister and an aunt, and they have been arguing quietly for an hour about a name, and it is a magnificent argument, and I have followed about a third of it.
Bed three has a boy of maybe twenty two who has not sat down at all and who keeps going to the window and coming back.
Bed four has a curtain half pulled and a Norwegian in it.
It is ten past two in the afternoon. I know that because there is a clock over the door and I have been looking at it since half past midnight, and for about three hours it was the only thing in the world that was on my side.
She weighs three kilos and forty grams.
They wrote it on a card and clipped the card to the end of the bed, and under the weight there is a line for the surname, and the surname is LINDQVIST, in a nurse’s capitals, and there is only one of it.
She is on my chest and she is furious.
Not crying. Not yet. Working up to it, the way weather works up to it, with a lot of small preparatory movement and a face like a man about to make a complaint, and then she does it, she opens her mouth and she does it, and every part of my body answers before I have taken any decision at all.
My arms come in. My chin comes down. Something goes through me from the back of the neck to the base of the spine and it does not ask me anything, and it does not care what I think, and I am not in charge of it.
I have never been not in charge of anything.
The midwife is called Agnese and she is somewhere north of sixty and she has hands like a man who works outside.
She has been in and out all night. She was the one who told me, at four in the morning, in Italian too fast for me, to stop being polite, and when I did not understand her she said it again in the kind of Italian you use on a dog, and I understood that, and I stopped being polite.
She comes back at half past two with a clipboard.
She sits down on the edge of the bed. Not the chair. The bed, which is against every rule of every hospital on earth, and she sits on it the way you sit on a wall.
“Bene,” she says.
“Bene,” I say.
She looks at the child. She puts one finger under the small foot and the small foot pushes back, and she nods at that, as though the two of them have concluded a piece of business.
Then she turns the clipboard around.
There are boxes. There are a great many boxes. Most of them she has already filled in herself, in ballpoint, in a hand that slants hard to the right, and she goes down them with the end of the pen, and I follow.
She stops on one.
“Persona da contattare,” she says.
I look at it.
“Somebody to call,” she says, in English, and her English is bad and careful and she has clearly decided to spend it on me. “Now, or after. Husband. Mother. Sister. A friend. Anyone.” She taps the box. “We call. Not you. You are tired. We call.”
The ward is very warm. Bed two has settled on Chiara. The boy at bed three is at the window again.
Here is what I have.
I have a room with a slope in the floor and a tin on the shelf above the sink.
I have a landlady who has not asked me for a document.
I have three hundred and sixty euros, which is more than I had in February, which is the single most encouraging fact of my adult life.
I have a chisel in a drawer. I have a phone with a number in it that belongs to a solicitor in London who does not know she is still in my phone, and I have a folder with three hundred thousand pounds in it that I did not take, and neither of those is a person.
I have nobody in this country. I have nobody in the country I come from, and the reason is that my father does not know where I am, and the reason for that is that I did not tell him, and the reason for that is that I could not think of a sentence I could say to him that would not require me to say the rest of it.
I do not have a husband. I have a man who stood in a room.
“No,” I say.
Agnese looks at me.
She does not do the thing. That is what I want on the record about her.
She does not tip her head. She does not soften her mouth.
She does not put her hand on my arm and say cara, and she does not look at the child and then back at me with an expression that would have finished me, and I mean that, I mean that literally, I was one gentle face away from coming apart in a public ward and she did not give me one.
She takes the pen and she draws a line through the box.
One line. Straight, hard, the whole width of it, and she moves on to the next box, which is about vaccinations.
That is the kindest thing anybody has ever done for me and she did it in under a second and she has no idea.
She fills in the rest. She takes the clipboard away.
Then she comes back and stands there and says, “The name.”
I have not decided the name.
I have had eight months and a folder of Italian paperwork and a room with a slope in it, and I have thought about the beams under the floor and the water in the walls and the license conversion and the two hundred a month, and I have not once, not for a single evening, allowed myself to sit down and choose a name, because choosing a name is a thing you do when you believe a thing is going to arrive.
I look down.
She has stopped being furious. She has her eyes open and they are not looking at anything, they are not able to look at anything, they are just open, aimed generally upward, at a face, at the place where a face is.
“Sophia,” I say.
Agnese writes it on a bracelet the size of a rubber band and she fastens it around an ankle and it is far too big and she says something about that in Bergamasco or in whatever it is she has, and she laughs, once, a short bark, and goes.
The afternoon goes on.
Bed one’s husband wakes up and puts his shoes on. Bed two’s aunt leaves, and comes back, with a bag of oranges nobody wants. The boy at bed three finally sits down, and puts his head in his hands, and his wife reaches over and knocks on his skull with one knuckle, twice, like a door, and he laughs.
Nobody comes.
That is not self-pity. That is a fact about the afternoon and I am recording it.
At no point between two and six does the door open for me, and the door opens eleven or twelve times, and every single time my head comes up, because a body will do that, a body will keep doing that for a long time before it learns.
At six, Agnese comes back in her coat.
Her shift ended at five. I know it ended at five because a different woman has been doing the drugs round since five, and I have been watching that clock all day the way I watch a crack.
She has her handbag over her arm and a scarf on, and she is a completely different person in a coat, she is somebody’s grandmother going to get a bus, and she stands at the end of my bed and looks at me for a while.
“Okay,” she says.
“Okay,” I say.
She nods. She does not come closer.
“Un anno,” she says, and she holds up one finger, and she says it in English, carefully, because she has decided to spend it.
“One year. You are tired one year. Then finish.” She shrugs, one shoulder, and it is not unkind, it is the shrug of a person telling you the tide comes in at four.
“Then you are only tired like everybody.”
And she goes home.
I lie in a bed in a public ward in a city where I know nobody, and the light goes down over Turin, and the child on my chest breathes in the way they breathe, which is badly, which nobody warns you about, and I put my hand flat on her back the way I would put it on a wall, and I read her, and she is holding.