I am in the habit of collecting skies, and this one is a keeper. August evening on a Siena hillside, a sky that would put you in mind of a Georgian court, all swathes of blue silk, piled powdered wigs, hints of blushing flesh.
Florence was too much for me. I don’t know how the Florentines can stand it, how they can go about their business every day amid such sensory clamour, everything in the sunlight too bright, too pungent, too close. Who wouldn’t feel cowed by the campanile; the blinding façade of Santa Croce, all that gilt and splendour casually laid on?
After I walked out of the Convention Centre, after I’d seen my mother for the first time in forty years, I hurried through the streets, head bowed, back to my hotel, craving a shuttered room and my own piece of sky.
As the doors of the hotel lift met, I felt the familiar shiver crawl up my spine, the sweat gather on my forehead, the tips of my fingers grow numb. The metallic taste on the lips, the ammoniac smell in the nose. On my bed at last, I summoned the sky from Aunt Heather’s room in the nursing home nearly six months before. They’d called me, said she was agitated. ‘Aunt Heather,’ I said when I got there, ‘It’s Laurie.’
She looked at me, with her serious grey eyes, and her legs under the bedclothes stilled.
‘What’s the day doing?’ she said, ‘Laurie, tell me the day.’
So I told her, the way she used to tell me. Two skies: one stretching overhead, entirely whole; the other scattered, lying about the sand in fragments of captured water, the broken passage of gulls reflected from one still pool to the next. The dunes shadowed and heatless, cold white-tipped waves, Mussendun a black mole on Inishowen.
There was a movement from the bed behind me. ‘Rosa got spooked,’ she said. I turned to stare at her. She hardly ever mentioned my mother. Rosa disappeared at sixteen, a few weeks after I was born. Aunt Heather raised me, had raised Rosa as well, been mother to both of us. You’d think that would have made her resentful, but I never saw that in her. She used to say, ‘My time will come.’ People thought her religious. They say I look like her, tall, light-haired, angular, nothing graceful.
I moved to the bed, took the age-spotted hand in mine.
‘But you won’t, will you Laurie?’ she said, then she closed her eyes, sank back on the pillow, began to breathe easy. I went back to the window, looked down at the strand, put one hand over my ear like we used to when we’d found a shell, heard the blood pumping in my eardrum. The sound of the sea; Aunt Heather’s breathing; the sound of the sea; off and on. Then the breathing grew louder and it became another sound, like when you untie the mouth of a balloon that’s been up for days and that sound hung in the air above her bed. And then it moved away, towards the window, to where I was standing, to where I breathed it in. And then mine was the only breath in the room. I felt the panic rise in me then, and the room tilted and the sea went where the sky should have been, and then it was dark.
After Aunt Heather died, I went to the doctor about the constriction in my chest, the whispered breathing, the beat of a wing in my head. He asked me to describe how it felt.
‘Like someone lying on top of me,’ I said and he prescribed an inhaler.
I hadn’t told him the whole truth. It was so much more than that, like a knee on my chest; a fist in my mouth, like someone trying to climb inside me. After a while, I taught myself how to breathe when the panic came, how to collect skies.
Amongst Aunt Heather’s belongings, I found a tight bundle of letters, photos circled with a crumbling rubber band. In the bundle were some pictures of me as a baby, one of my mother in a plaid mini skirt, taken the summer before I was born. The last was a postcard dated November 1966. It was a black and white photo of an avenue in the Boboli Gardens, addressed to Aunt Heather: ‘I’m sorry. I can’t do it. I’m in Florence, helping out after the flood. I love you both, Rosa.’
I researched the ‘Mud Angels’ in the library, the flocks of beat generation youngsters who’d made their way to Florence when the Arno burst its banks in ’66. There were pictures of them, knee deep in mud, working sometimes by candlelight to clear away muck and debris, scrape oil off canvasses, drag books out of the slime in the Biblioteca Nazionale. How was I supposed to feel? Proud? That my mother had felt it her duty to salvage art for the generations to come, and had felt nothing for me? On my way out, the librarian handed me an article.
Legambiente, an Italian environmental organisation was promoting a reunion of gli angeli del fango forty years after the event. I felt like I held my heart in my hand as I scanned the column of attending angels: Shannon, Sharwood, Shatner, Shaw. Rosa Shaw.
The afternoon of the event, I stood in the foyer at the Hotel Belarno, its walls lined with grainy black and whites: a dead cow being winched out of the Arno; a boy soldier wiping mud from a crucifix; a suited man, his face bereft, filling a wine carafe at the Fountain of Neptune.
‘Rosa!’ a voice cried.
I turned to see two women collide in an embrace. There was a flurry of hugs, delighted cries, a standing back to appraise.
‘My God, Carla, you look exactly the same!’ Mid-fifties, a trace of an Irish accent still, and the badge on her lapel: ‘Rosa Shaw Ferrara’.
‘Come and meet Antonio,’ and as she took the woman’s arm, she glanced over at me, and just for a second a question came in her eyes, and then she dismissed it and led the woman to a dark-dressed man. They began to speak in rapid Italian. Rosa took a wallet with photos from her bag: ‘Franco e Roberto,’ she said.
I could have walked up to her then, introduced myself, her abandoned daughter. But what would have been the use of that? Aunt Heather had been mother enough for me. I didn’t need another.
On the balcony in Monticiano, as the fire flies spark in the dusk under the pines, and the shiver begins to crawl again up my spine, I put the glass of limoncello to my lips and swallow hard. I consider what I have been left, what Aunt Heather breathed into me with her last breath. I am not alone, I know what she meant. Her time has come. I will never be alone again.
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Bernie McGill lives in Portstewart in Northern Ireland. In 2010 she was a supplementary prizewinner in the Bridport Short Story Prize and Second Prizewinner in the Seán Ó Faoláin and the Michael McLaverty Short Story Prizes. In 2008, she was first prizewinner in the Zoetrope: All-Story Short Fiction Contest. She co-wrote The Haunting of Helena Blunden, a stage play, for Big Telly Theatre Company in 2010 and The Weather Watchers, a play for young audiences for Cahoots NI in 2006. She is the recipient of three Individual Artist Awards from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. Her first novel, The Butterfly Cabinet was published in the UK and Ireland in August 2010 by Headline Review, and will be published in the US by Free Press in July 2011. Her short story ‘No Angel’ will appear in the forthcoming Salt publication Best British Short Stories.
Her story ‘Sleepwalkers’ is available to read here.
Her story ‘No Angel’ is available to read here.
The Butterfly Cabinet has its own Facebook page here.