Chapter Thirteen
The contract arrives at one fifty.
Ines reads it twice at her desk with her glasses pushed up into her hair, and then she takes them out of her hair and puts them on and reads it a third time, which is a thing I have seen her do exactly once before, over a Portuguese tax document that turned out to be a crime.
“Nora.”
“Mm.”
“He signed it.”
“I know.”
“No. Listen to me.” She turns it around.
“He signed it as it stands. Your number. Your control clause. Your, and I want to read this out because I do not think you were awake when you wrote it, your clause seven, the client’s chief executive shall not initiate communication with the principal architect on any matter not directly concerning structural or fabric integrity. ”
“That is what I said.”
“That is what you said in a corridor, in a temper, to a man, and men do not sign that, Nora, men take that to a lawyer and the lawyer takes it out and everyone pretends it never happened, that is what a lawyer is for.” She puts it down.
“His lawyer left it in. Which means he told his lawyer to leave it in. Which means he sat in a room with a professional and said the words leave that one.”
I take the contract and I look at the signature.
A. Kastellanos.
Four letters of ink on a page that he touched.
“Good,” I say.
“Nora.”
“Good,” I say again. “It means he will do what he is told. That is all it means. Now leave me alone, I have to get to the site, we are opening the pier on Thursday and Marco thinks I am mad.”
I do not go to the site.
I get down the ramp and into my space and I turn the engine off, and then I do not do anything else.
The underground car park on Via Savona has a sensor light on a two minute timer. It goes off while I am sitting there, because the only thing moving in this car park is a woman’s ribcage, and a ribcage is not enough for it.
So I am in the dark.
The engine ticks as it cools. There is a smell of concrete dust and cold and a little bit of petrol, and above my head, through six meters of building, somebody is dragging a chair.
My hands are on the wheel at ten and two.
I have not driven anywhere. I drove nine hundred meters from the office and turned down a ramp and I am sitting in a stationary car in a private car park holding a steering wheel with both hands like a woman doing ninety on a motorway, and I notice this, and I take my hands off, and I put them in my lap.
They are shaking.
Not much. Not the way they shook in the boardroom, where I could put them flat on a drawing and press down and give the shake to the paper.
This is a fine, high, private shake, the kind you get in a muscle you have been holding for hours without knowing, and there is nothing here to press them on except my own legs.
I look at my left hand.
The scar goes across the pad of the thumb at an angle, a white line, nineteen years old, and it is a stupid scar, it is the scar of a girl who was going too fast because she wanted to finish before her father came back.
He put his thumb on it.
He took my wrist in a corridor with a fig tree dying behind me and he put his thumb flat on the scar and he did not look at my hand, not once, he looked at my face, and his thumb sat there and knew exactly where it was.
I lick my thumb.
That is what I do. I want it written down, because I have been accurate about the ballroom for years and I am going to be accurate about this.
I sit alone in the dark in a car and I put my own thumb in my mouth and then I rub it on the leg of my trousers, hard, back and forth, on the wool, over the scar, over the place, and I do it until the skin goes hot and then past hot, and I keep doing it.
The tissue does not come off. That is the thing about scar tissue.
I stop.
I put both hands back on the wheel.
And a sound comes out of me.
It is not crying. I would know crying. It is one syllable and it comes out low, from somewhere under the ribs, and I have never heard it before, and it goes into the roof of the car and dies there, and I have my mouth open and nothing else is arriving.
I put my hand over my mouth.
It is the same hand.
I take it away.
I hit the wheel. Once. Not hard. The heel of my palm goes down on it and the horn goes, and in a concrete box with a hundred cars in it a car horn is not a sound, it is an event, and it comes back off every wall at once and goes on coming back.
The sensor light comes on.
Eighteen meters away a man is standing at the open boot of an estate car with a crate of water in his arms, and he is looking at me.
And I do the thing.
I lift one hand off the wheel and I turn it palm up and I make a face, the small rueful comic face, sorry, my fault, clumsy, and I smile at him, and he laughs, and he says something I cannot hear through the glass, and he puts the crate in the boot and shuts it and drives away.
I smiled at him.
I want to sit with that for a second, because it is the most frightening thing that has happened to me today, and a man knocked a chair over this morning.
I can produce that. I can produce it from inside this, from the middle of it, with my thumb still stinging.
It is in me and it is loaded and it does not need my permission, and I have built it over years, one dinner at a time, one and Papa?
at a time, and it works perfectly, and it will work perfectly for the rest of my life, and I have just watched it fire at a stranger with a crate of water.
The light goes off again.
I get my phone out.
The screen is very bright and I turn it down twice before I can look at it, and I go into the messages, and there she is, at the top, because she is always at the top.
INES.
My thumb is on her name.
Here is what I would say. I have it. It is not complicated, it is nine words. I am in the car park. Can you come.
She would come. That is the whole problem with Ines.
She would come down the ramp in her coat inside three minutes, and she would open the passenger door and get in and shut it and not say anything, and she would sit in a cold car in the dark with me for as long as it took, and she would not put her hand on me, because she knows, and she would not ask, because she knows.
And tomorrow I would be a woman who called.
Tomorrow I would go onto that site as a woman who sat in a car park and could not do it on her own, and Ines would look at me across the office in a way she would think I could not see, and I would see it, and it would be there for thirteen weeks, and then it would be there forever, and there would be one more person in the world who has watched me on the floor.
There is already one. She saw me cry. She has never mentioned it and she has never had to, because I have never once forgotten that she could.
I take my thumb off her name.
I open a new message and I type:
Contract received. Send the executed copy to Bonelli. Tell Marco I want the needle drawings by Thursday and tell him I am not discussing it.
I read it. It is perfect. It is exactly the message a woman sends when she is fine.
I send it.
Then I put the phone face down on the passenger seat, which is where the boards were this morning, and I get out of the car.
I do not go to the lift.
I stand in front of the pillar.
It is a reinforced concrete column, square section, from the 1970s, and it has a corner blown off it at chest height and the corner is not new, and there is a stain running down out of the break that is the color of tea.
My hand goes onto it.
I do not decide to. It goes on the way it goes on a wall, palm flat, and the sensor light comes on for it, and I stand in a car park in Milan in my good coat with my hand on a rotten pillar.
Chloride. Somebody used sea sand, or the drainage above has been leaking for thirty years, and the water has got in and it has found the steel, and the steel has begun to rust, and rust takes up more room than steel does.
That is the whole of it. That is all corrosion is.
A thing swells inside another thing and the other thing cannot hold it, and the concrete does not crack because it is weak, it cracks because of what it is holding, and it goes on holding it, and it goes on cracking.
I stand there with my palm on it.
It is the first steady thing I have touched since ten o’clock this morning.
I do not know how long I am there. The light goes off twice and I put my other hand out and wave it around, in the dark, in a coat, like a lunatic, to bring the light back, and it comes back, and I go on reading the pillar.
Then I get back in the car.
The clock on the dashboard says forty two minutes past five. I got in it at thirty one minutes past.
Six minutes.
I start the engine and I go and get my daughter.
Sophia is on the stairs when I get home, sitting on the third step with her shoes still on, which means she has been told to take her shoes off and has decided to hold the position.
“Shoes.”
“I am wearing them,” she says, as though this settles the matter.
I get her inside. I get the shoes off. I do the things you do, the pasta water, the bag emptied, the drawing from Giulia’s on the fridge with a magnet, and the drawing is of a house with the front wall missing so you can see all the rooms, which is what she draws, she has never once drawn a house with the front wall on.
She eats her pasta with a spoon.
She tells me about Enzo and the moon again. Enzo has revised his position. The moon is now following Enzo’s grandmother.
I laugh and I put my hand flat on the table and I feel that my hands are still not right, they have not been right since ten o’clock this morning, and I hold the fork properly and the fork goes still.
She stops eating.
She goes quiet in the specific way she goes quiet, the way that means a thing has been under construction in her for some time and is now finished and about to be delivered.
“Mama.”
“Yes.”
“Sofia B has a father.”
The kitchen is very warm. There is a pan on the stove and the tap is dripping because it always drips and I have never once fixed it.
“Yes,” I say.