Monticiano
Chapter Five
Alice is relieved to hear I am staying with friends.
She tells me that emergency services descended on Callico House because the moment Edward learnt of my permanent departure, he arranged for someone to come and change the locks but decided he could single-handedly change the code for the house alarm.
In doing so, he set off the system. After being besieged by police and alarm engineers, he conceded that in future, he would defer to the security company for any issues with the system.
I don’t say anything to Alice, but I still think three squad cars for a tripped alarm seems excessive.
“I’m not going to the funeral, Alice,” I say after a lull in the conversation and before she has a chance to bring up the subject. “I’ll mourn Albert in my own way, in my own time.”
“I understand,” she says, after a soft sigh, “and I think it’s probably for the best. I know I’m being totally selfish, but I could have done with your presence to help me get through the day.
Edward will be busy sucking up to VIPs and relatives.
I’d hoped you might turn up anyway and cause a scene, telling everyone you were his lover and shaking awake all those entitled, homophobic pricks.
And with you there, I’d have had an excuse not to be hanging off his arm all day.
But I do understand, and I think, if I were in your shoes, I would do the same. ”
I tell her I’ve had problems with my phone, but I will text her once I get the device fixed.
After we bid our goodbyes, Nishan pulls up my message history on his laptop and says he can correspond in my stead, just in case.
If anything is complicated, he will contact me once I let him know my cell number in Italy.
Josh has already turned in when Nishan comes to check on me.
“I don’t envy you, Gabe,” he says, before handing over a small box he has brought in with him.
“Look, I could tell how much you loved your sports watch, and I can’t give you an equivalent, but this is something I never wear.
It’s a traditional wristwatch with a perpetual rotor that spins with your wrist’s motion, the kind of thing you find in luxury watches.
Pretty amazing mechanism, actually. But, most importantly, the watch is waterproof and has no electronic components.
There’s a date window, and three pushers, each of which can be set to a different time zone.
Most importantly, the top one can also be used as a stopwatch.
If you don’t take it off, you won’t ever need to use the winder. ”
I lift out the slimline watch, which is secured onto a thick faux-leather strap with double clasps to keep it in place and a flap that hides the watch’s face, fastened by a thin strip of Velcro.
I assume that’s because the timepiece is valuable and the concealed strap resembles a biker’s leather cuff.
“I can’t accept this, Nishan.”
“You can, and you will,” he says. “Honestly, it’s been sitting in a drawer gathering dust. At least I’ll know it’s being put to good use. Now get some zees.”
Even with beer, good food and a pleasant buzz, I barely sleep that night.
With a seat booked on a coach leaving Victoria coach station early the following day, I embark on the longest journey of my remembered life. I arrive in Brussels in the early evening, with just enough time to buy a ticket for the Florence departure the following morning.
Everything seems to be leaning in my favour until I realise I have nowhere to stay overnight.
Instead of booking a hostel or a cheap hotel, I wander the streets for hours.
In my reliable memory, I believe I have never been abroad, and yet many of the rues and avenues are familiar. Josh would call this déjà vu.
Albert used to scoff when I used the term and would tell me those rare occurrences were instances of dual neurological processing.
He explained that it happens when two signals in the brain process the same information—such as a place or a person—but do not synchronise correctly, creating two separate experiences.
The second, slightly delayed signal, becomes a memory of the first. To this day, I don’t wholly buy into his scientific reasoning.
Familiarity strikes me at odd moments, accompanied by sensory recollections—smells or tastes or sounds—and I wonder if hidden memories are being released.
No doubt Josh has told Nishan by now about me being involved in a high-speed train crash in northwest England fifteen years ago—big news at the time.
According to media coverage, vandals had dragged concrete breeze blocks onto the tracks.
The derailed train had hurtled down an embankment and collided with a parked petrol tanker, creating a flaming inferno.
Forty-three people lost their lives that day, many of the bodies unidentifiable.
I had been lucky to be found unconscious and bloodied on a grass verge towards the back of the train, with only a train ticket on me and no record of my identity.
Despite posters in police stations, no parents, guardians or anyone else came forward to claim a missing child, which is why I ended up in foster care.
Authorities estimated my age at the time and, somewhat sombrely, gave my date of birth as the day and month of the crash.
My first foster mother, Bertha, a kind-hearted but straightforward woman who saw the police photograph of me from the hospital grounds standing against a brick wall, said I looked like an angel, which is why she named me Gabriel Redbrick.
After MRIs, scans and neurological and cognitive tests, the doctors confirmed that I had retrograde amnesia but was otherwise in good mental shape.
And whoever had raised me before the accident had kept me in excellent physical health.
The police discovered from CCTV that I had boarded the train alone at London Euston and paid for the ticket to Glasgow Central in cash.
My earliest memory is waking in a hospital bed.
According to the police and other survivors, I had been sitting at a window seat and was thrown out during the collision.
Now Brussels is unearthing latent memories.
Had I visited before? In the fading light, I recognise landmarks—Grote Markt and the St. Michael and St. Gudula Cathedral—most likely places I have glossed over in books or seen on television travel programmes.
But there’s also a sense of familiarity when I pass otherwise unremarkable buildings, granite-fronted with only a street number to identify them.
Innocuous structures such as these can be found in any capital city across the world, the purpose known only to those allowed access to the premises.
Except in this case, a clouded memory haunts me of having entered the front doors of at least two of those I pass.
The oblique remembrance elicits no emotion in me, simply a factual recollection.
The only time anything stirs within me is when I walk through a park lit by lamplights and see a group of old men still sitting around a chequered board painted onto the concrete floor, playing a game with waist-high chess pieces of black and white moulded plastic.
An inexplicable sense of dread fills me, my heart lurching, and I move quickly past.
Once outside the park, I stand and compose myself, trying to rationalise what I’ve witnessed, but the intense emotion makes no sense.
By luck or buried foreknowledge, I find my way to a twenty-four-hour café near the coach station, where I nurse a huge coffee and feed on a limp baguette of cheese and lettuce. In the early hours, I walk to the coach station and find a metal seat in the waiting area, determined to stay awake.
I don’t think I have ever felt this alone, not even during the homeless dark days on the streets around the back of King’s Cross Station.
At least then I had shared the night with other lost souls.
Not that being on my own evokes any negative feelings.
I am more alert and centred when I only need to focus on my survival.
For the next leg of the trip, apart from getting out during the few pitstops to stretch my legs, eat food and use the conveniences, I doze and barely notice the countryside flashing past.
As instructed by Nishan, I pick up a SIM in the coach station at Florence and immediately fire off a message to the unique number he gave me.
I luck out at the bus station, finding a ticket seller who speaks perfect English.
She not only books me onto two connecting buses heading straight into the heart of Monticiano, which will get me there in less than three hours, but also directs me to the first one leaving in fifteen minutes.
Arriving in the heart of Monticiano, stiff and dog-tired, I finally decide to dig into Albert’s emergency money for a taxi.
“Stop at the end of the lane,” I tell the local taxi driver, who, remarkably, also speaks a little English. His neckless head swings around, and he glowers at me as though I have lost my wits.
We are, after all, in a sea of uninhabited countryside.
Even though I don’t know him from Adam, I don’t want to give away my final destination to anyone.
Maybe I’m paranoid, but life has been anything but ordinary lately.
Instead, I pay the man and drag my heavy rucksack onto the dusty track.
Not a minute too soon, either. Stale sweat and cigarette smoke infested the air and the fabric of his back seat, adding faint nausea to my underlying travel fatigue.
As he revs the engine and drives off, I stroll over to the grass border at the entrance of a much older and dustier route than the main road’s fresh tarmac. Fixing the rucksack onto my back, I take a deep, cleansing breath and lurch off down the way.