A Short Story By Ella Piazzi
Beatrice got off the 4.35pm train exactly one hour and seven minutes later Italian time. The days were slightly longer, definitely longer than they were in London at that time of the year, but at twenty-to-six in the evening in January it was dark anyway. She got off the same train she used to take to go to high school, more than fifteen years before. She didn’t have great memories, but it was a momentary break in her day. There was a monster in her house, that hunted her since she was little. It had red eyes and a long body, and it was faceless.
And it scared the shit out of her.
She pleaded with her mother to sleep with her light on. But she said no.
~ of course my mother has never been particularly maternal ~
But lucky for her, not long after, her grandfather gifted her with a teddy-bear. He won it at a raffle, it was a cheap, brown bear with buttons for eyes and a plastic nose. But it became Beatrice’s guardian angel. She took it with her to every place she moved to, and it never failed to protect her against whatever loomed in the dark. She took it to London too, when she moved there after university. But she left him there when she came to Italy to assist her widower mother.
“Just for a few days. I need help with the bureaucracy.”
~ it will be ten months in three fucking days ~
Beatrice almost reached her destination. Before entering the night, she wrapped up warm with her multicoloured scarf, knitted by her grandmother, pulled an old bucket hat she found in her room on top of her head and wore her fingerless gloves.
“Look! She can’t even knit anymore! Some of the stitches are missing. And the wool is felted! And the gloves… not even rice weeders wore them and trust me back in time they needed them! Going out with dirty hands was shameful! The only good thing is the hat. I remember when you wore it in high school… but of course it’s still look good, it’s branded! It wasn’t cheap when I bought it!”
Ah, the sweet voice of her mother, always present in her life. It was almost almost a blessing knowing that in a world full of uncertainties, the harsh criticism of one of her parents was always going to be with her.
Getting up from the old green and brown cracked seat, Beatrice walked toward the doors, looking at the village lights through the dirty glass. She recognised the P.E. hall and the adjacent secondary school, one of the three Piazza of the village and the roads where, once upon a time, used to live this person or that. The train slowed down to walking speed, the metal wheels clanking against the intricate series of rail interchanges that only had a reason to exist many years before, when Mussolini was in power. Now they laid there, waiting for a miracle or to rot for good, just like the people who lived inside the village lights.
The train halted and the door opened. Beatrice braced herself against the wet cold that stank of damp and old age, the humidity making her bones shiver. She fixed her bag over her shoulder, a canvas shopper she got for free with the logo of Camden Market.
“Don’t you have a proper bag?”
It’s a bag. It serves the purpose.
“That’s not a bag. I wouldn’t use it to go to the supermarket. What will people think?”
Right. What would they think? The ones that left the train with her not much. There was a guy that had his cigarette lit before the train even came to a stop; a lady that got on a car waiting on the other side of the road, a girl that was roughly her age but she had no memory of, and a lady a bunch of years younger than her mother, who had a son two years younger than Beatrice and now lived in the capital.
“They are not married, but nowadays it doesn’t matter. She works at the post office, he works at the hospital. They bought a house in Foro Boario, so he takes Via Bologna and doesn’t have to cross the city. They had a baby, he must be a year old or so, and his mom, the lady you see on the train, goes every day to help them. With the baby and the house, you know. They both work, he also works nights, so it’s difficult. But she lost her husband many years ago, and now that she is retired too…”
You always said that kids are parents’ responsibility, not someone else.
“They both work. Do you know how much nursery costs?”
I work too and I have expenditures too. How comes you never helped me?
“You don’t have kids.”
I don’t want kids. I never wanted them.
“I didn’t want you either, but then you were born, and it was fine.”
~ because it’s what’s normal right? past a certain age you are supposed to have children and give grandkids to your parents as if creating a human life is like gifting a jumper for Christmas but it’s your social duty being like everybody else just not too much yeah? because you are not like everybody else you are unwanted you are not welcomed never been you don’t deserve any love and better for you to never forget it be yourself but not you and if the process makes you feel a stranger in your own skin doesn’t matter it’s the price to pay because you are only good as much as you are able to fit in having a great job that you like and you are good at and a side-hustle that it’s finally picking up is not ok because normal people have government jobs and mortgages and kids and houses full of broken dreams and unhappiness ~
Because in ‘normal people’ mentality being able to take care of yourself doesn’t make you a good person. You must feel ashamed because you have escaped the machine you were supposed to be a cog in and deprived your family of the pleasure to bitch and moan about how tired they are to help you, but how they still do it because there’s no other way.
~ and everybody else is doing the same so that’s ok because you are normal~
Managing to avoid the dissection of your life, and the criticism that wiser people had to provide you with as part of their reward for going through the same grinder before you, it wasn’t part of the plan. You escaping the machine, leaving the dystopian authoritarian regime behind you and proving to everybody that it can be done with some effort, wasn’t your best move.
~ that’s the problem everybody wants to believe it can be done but it requires special conditions and even if they don’t like their lives and will always find something to complain about but never a way to sort it out it’s fine and if you do… well then there is a special section in Hell just for you because people don’t like to be proven wrong even less to feel stupid and there is a thin line that is not to supposed to be crossed but you crossed it anyway multiple times so well done you ~
Beatrice started to walk, following the same path she walked when she was in high school. But back then the latest she arrived was 2.15PM, way before sunset. The village didn’t change much in all this time, but in the daylight it seemed existing, if not being alive. The fifteen years she spent abroad had solidified everything in a clear bubble and buried it under the usual seeping fog.
That house on the left, for example. The one with the turquoise blinds. A girl named Jessica used to live there with her mother, just the two of them. When her parents divorced, her father moved to Turin and started a new family. Jessica was one year older than Beatrice, in school she was in the same class of the new generation of yobs and Beatrice wasn’t allowed to hang out with her or her friends. Beatrice dutifully put her and her friends in the ‘big no no’ box and did her best to avoid them. The other class – there were enough kids to make two for that year – was made of the sons and daughters of teachers and doctors and bank employees. They would never have been in the same class. Even if some of the troublemakers managed to grow nicely and have decent jobs while the sons and daughters of teachers and doctors and bank employees attempted suicide and went to therapy for 20+ years and declared bankruptcy to avoid a fraud conviction.
~ because they are the ones who fit in and it doesn’t matter what they do they will always be the good ones because they are the sons and daughters of teachers and doctors it’s like a game where each one has a role to play and no one is escaping it except for you ~
“You know that Jessica and Asia had an accident last night?”
Are they ok?
“Not really. Asia has a bunch of broken ribs and a whiplash injury. Jessica is in hospital, they had to remove her spleen. She has a leg broken in more than one point. And you had to see the car! Ready for the scraps. But it was predictable. Two girls aged 15 in the same car with two boys aged 21 that come back home at five in the morning after a night out. I am sure they were drunk! And tired. At five in the morning you have to be in bed, not driving a car. Unless you are going to work. And I am sure they were high as well!”
They had to be. All the above and much more. But it was fine because each one had a part in the village, and they did theirs. Time would have granted redemption and erased the wrong.
It was months before Jessica left the hospital, and at that point she had to repeat the year. She spent one last summer with her friends, the same new generation of yobs that closed around her to protect her from the village gossip, and then she went to live with her father.
“She lost a school year! For what? For a night out? There will be time to go out when you grow up! She will have to move to Turin, to avoid the shame. And her mom will have to leave everything behind and start again because of her. If only she stood home.”
Beatrice wasn’t at risk, though. If she had a resemblance of social life until secondary school, it all ended when she turned 14. Her high school was in the nearby village, her classmates were from different places, and she had no way to access any of them, while her old schoolmates, the ones she wasn’t allowed to hang out with, made friends with the new kids and met the old ones in the afternoon. She spent her time reading in the nick that was her garden, five years of almost complete isolation. From there, though, she travelled the world in 80 days, sailed with buccaneers looking for a hidden treasure, fell in love with good boys and bad ones, fell out of love, lived in post-atomic societies and slayed vampires and hacked computers and worked undercover and was a spy and a doctor and travelled in time.
Eventually Jessica returned from Turin. She got back in contact with her old friends, which she never really lost, and rebuilt her life from where she left it. The memories of the accident stung for a minute, but it was quickly replaced by the gossip of her dating a guy three years her junior. Even that didn’t stick for long. They had been together ever since, had a kid that just started high school, a dog, two cats and a nice house with the garden.
Beatrice reached the intersection where the station road met the circular road that went around the whole village like a crippled wedding band. She stopped and looked: right, left, right again. She remembered, as usual one second too late, that it was supposed to be left, right, left. She was in Italy, not in the UK.
~ traffic is not that intense anyway ~
There was no peak-hour buzz, if an ambulance hit the siren, it was probably kilometres away. And even that wasn’t a common sound. During the summer was a bit better: someone went for a walk looking for a fresh breeze, someone else sat in the garden, windows were open and the TV voices reached outside, while the house inhabitants set up the table for a cold dinner. But it was January, and the windows were tightly shut against the night. if Beatrice rang a random bell, someone was going to open. She knew there were people inside those black bricked monsters, as she knew there was some form of life in the village, crawling out of her sight when she looked, and that always made her suffer.
“You’ve always been too sensitive. The world out there is not good for the ones like you. People are mean. Never talk to anyone, never let others know how you feel, they will be happy if you are suffering. Even happier if things go wrong. The only people you can trust are the ones in your family. We will never laugh at you.”
I would love Sailor Moon stick as Christmas present. The one from the third season.
“Ha! Ha! But that’s a toy, it’s for kids! You are 13. Choose something else.”
I’ll think about it.
“Let me know soon, I’ll go and buy it this weekend. Otherwise, no present. And stop crying. You need to understand there’s an age for everything. It’s not time for cartoons anymore.”
What about one of those crop-tops that are so popular with my classmates?
“You are too young. What about a pyjama instead? A flannel one, that will keep you warm.”
But my feet are cold anyway. I could do with a pair of socks.
“You don’t go to sleep in your socks. They go in the shoes.”
I would use clean ones.
“Doesn’t matter. They still go in the shoes. If you are that cold, you can always wear an extra layer. The house is warm, not like my mother’s house. That was cold. It still is. She closed the doors to warm up only one room. It’s not that cold here.”
Beatrice tightened her coat around her body. She had the feeling her steps were the only sound in the whole village. She felt lonely, she missed her chosen, extended family, her tango lesson and kickbox classes, her pets and her pottery course and the theatre gigs and the museums and the warmth and safety of the people that she loved and who loved her back.
“That’s what you do when your family needs you. You help. Look at Max at the end of the road. Family helps each other. No matter what.”
I have things to do too. I live in London, I am not on holiday there. I have a house and a family and a job, even if I don’t know for how long still.
“Don’t be ridiculous. Your friends are not your family. And at work they’ll understand. Or you can get another job. You always brag about how easy it is to get a new one, you’ll be just fine.”
Beatrice kept walking, right in the middle of the road. She wasn’t risking being ran over by a car. She passed the place where there used to be two big dumpsters, one for recycling paper and cardboard and one for everything else. Nowadays they collected rubbish door to door, with a specific calendar on what and how put out on each day. The bins were gone but the low kerb was still there. Past that point, like it was an invisible line in the asphalt, began Beatrice’s free-roaming zone. That was the furthest she was allowed to go as a kid, not a single centimetre past it. Entering that invisible area had an unsettling effect on her. It was like going through cold gelatine on a hot day, an unpleasant experience that only left you sticky and suffocating.
On the right there was a semi-detached house, built by one of the only three foreigners of the village. There was the South-American, who inherited his grandfather’s house in the village and moved there from Chile. Or was it Argentina? No one cared if they could gossip about him: it was common belief he was into drug trafficking just because he had a lot of spare time and he was an outgoing person who enjoyed company. Then there was the French. She followed her husband to Nice, got a baby who grew up there but moved back to Italy when he went to university. In time, he got married too and produced a single grandchild and when her husband died, she moved back too. The last one was Giovanna, who lived in the left apartment. Her real name was Joanna, she was from Bristol, came on holiday, met this Italian baker and fell madly in love. She moved to the village, got married, had a daughter and, three years later, a boy. She’d been working in the bakery since she came off the plane and continued to the present day, helping her daughter and son-in-law, now that they took over the family business. Her husband instead had finally enough time to go fishing. The back of their property didn’t border directly with Beatrice’s parents’ house, but the lack of privacy given by the closeness and too much silence brought to her garden every laugh, every joke, every scream of joy coming from that way. And despite her house was still on the free-roaming zone, Beatrice wasn’t allowed to go.
“She is 3 years younger than you. You have nothing to share.”
Let me hang out with others my age, then.
“You know they are not good. They go to bars and smoke. They will only cause trouble and you need to focus on school. Did you finish your homework?”
Yes, I did. All done.
“Then what about starting the ones for tomorrow?”
They are done already.
“Impossible. Let me check.”
I am 17, there is no need for you to check my homework.
“What if you missed something? Four eyes are better than two. Mh. Looks like you did everything. What about refreshing history?”
But there is no test tomorrow.
“If you check your knowledge every day, you won’t have to do it all together at the end.”
Right. Check it, Beatrice. Check it. And then check it again: mobile, money, keys. Then repeat. And when you are done and ready, check if you have your keys one more time for good measure. And then midway to the train station check again. Because it doesn’t matter that, at that point, you are locked out anyway. Just check one more time, and then six more times on the train, and a couple more, in case you lost them somehow, or they grew legs and decided to walk out of your bag, so you can silence for another minute the voice in your head that tells you that you are not enough, that you’re not good enough, that you are untrustworthy and unable to live unless you are constantly supervised.
The first street on the right was hers. In the first house used to live Massimo, the youngest of the only four kids, herself included, who roamed the road. He studied nursing, like his parents, and when he lost his father and her mother was diagnosed with cancer, he moved back home with his wife, a nurse too, and their two kids, one of them with Asperger syndrome.
“It was nice, you know? When his mother needed help, he came back. And they helped each other. She was looking after the retarded kid and her son looked after her while she did chemo.”
I am here now, right?
“Sure, looking at the clock every five minutes to see how long before you can leave me again.”
I have been on the verge of suicide for years thanks to you. It’s normal I want to leave again soon.
“You never had anything to worry about, you always had food and clothes, I took you to the best doctors and even paid for your university! You had what a lot of people never had. And you are very ungrateful.”
There are things more important than private doctors and branded clothes.
“You speak like that because you don’t have children. And now you’ll never know.”
I am not a mother. I don’t have it in me to care for another human being in that sense.
“You didn’t even try!”
A child is not a bad pair of trousers that you can return if you don’t like them!
“No mother comes with the instructions book.”
But you didn’t even listen when I told you what I needed!
“When you are a kid you don’t know what you need.”
I am telling you now! All I want is for you to recognise you made a fucking mistake and to say that you are sorry for it!
“What a foul language! Is that what you learned living by yourself?”
One more house and then there were the gates of the clink. It was a black space confined in between the new neighbours and the old ones, that in a different lifetime have been her friends. Or something close to it. There were lights coming out both sides, even a laugh and shreds of conversations. Someone that opened and closed a door, or a window, for whatever reason.
~ we used to play together Rita and I even if she is one year younger but we grew apart as soon as she started secondary school and began hanging out with classmates which I wasn’t allowed to date and when she got married she had guests coming from Germany and the US because the same kids that I wasn’t allowed to hang out with grew to be researchers and economists and landed good jobs they liked and left them fulfilled but it was a shock to see the pictures of her wedding because her maid of honour was a girl that I remember she hated in school but it was even more shocking to see none of them was 13 anymore and they grew beards and wrinkles and kids while they frozen in my memory in the last photogram I had of them as kids of the 90s and now she lives in one apartment with her husband and the guy I believed was going to be my best friend till the day we died lives in the other and despite the close proximity and me being here for 10 months I never saw either of them not even once ~
Beatrice fumbled for the keys she didn’t lose for another day and opened the gate. She let herself be swallowed up by the darkness. The glass above the door was lit; her mother was probably sitting on the sofa watching another State-TV programme about whatever crime news event happened last – mother kills baby, father kills mother, boyfriend kills girlfriend – thinking whatever dark thoughts she thought, with three blankets across her because the heating was expensive, so she kept it to a maximum of 16 degrees.
~ but your mother’s house was cold right? ~
She wasn’t wrong. Her mother was on one of the sofas, wrapped up like a mummy, watching a talk show about a son that killed his mother.
“You are back.”
“Looks like…”
“Do you need to shower?”
“It would be nice, yes.”
“Clean once you finished. I don’t like when there are water-stains all over.”
~ because on white ceramic are definitely a sore eye ~
“Dinner is on the stove, if you want to eat.”
“It’s not even seven.”
“Well, here we eat early, we are not international like you. Do you want it warmed up?”
“I can do it myself.”
“No, I’ll do it. You’ll just get everything dirty. Oh, my back…”
“I told you. Leave it.”
She didn’t. She got up, complaining all the way, then complained that she was tired and all she wanted was to go to bed, and finished by serving boiled eggs and boiled veg on a plate she left on the counter. Beatrice took a quick shower and wore some house clothes, but by the time she took her plate, her dinner was lukewarm again. She ate standing against the counter, swallowing the tasteless and hateful dinner in big gulps.
~ it’s an ensemble of vitamins and nutrients and my body doesn’t recognise anything else so it’s just fine ~
“Are you done?”
“Yes.”
“You know you can sit, right? And eat like normal people.”
“So you can complain about setting up the table too?”
“I don’t understand why you need to come back so late.”
“I am sorting your shit out. But, to do so, I need to get the train, because I can’t get the car. And you know why I can’t get your stupid car? Because it’s rotten. You bought it, parked in the garage and only took it out at the weekends. Now, if I take it, I risk being left stranded. You can’t use it but fuck me if you get rid of it.”
“I would have to pay money, you know? And now that I am alone, it’s not that easy to reach the end of the month!”
“You are sitting on something close to a million euros! Plus, you have your pension and half of my father’s pension, thanks to me and my going back and forth for the past 10 months. Did you ever offer to pay for transport, at least? Nope. Not once. And I am not even working!”
“I am tired, I’ll go to bed.”
“Of course. You can’t twist the conversation anymore, so you run away. Don’t worry though, I’m done. I’ll be on my way first thing in the morning.”
“It’s your life, do what is best for you.”
The queen of passive-aggressive won one more match. Beatrice took a shaggy breath, opened the fridge and took the bottle of wine she kept there despite more than one raised eyebrow from her mother, replacing it with another one.
~ because this is my line there is the invisible line of the village that implies that by my age you are supposed to have a family or have had one at a certain point and it gives you several acceptable options like being married with a partner that already came pre-packed with kids from a previous relationship while a viable alternative is living together with kids but it’s not encouraged in the long term and then there is the line I am not supposed to pass past Joanna’s house because it’s not safe and all the other lines my mother always placed around me like Mikado and she moved at her convenience and that’s fine for you to have your lines and swear by them but I have mine too and mine is that after another day where I ate bullshit breakfast lunch and boiled dinner I want a fucking drink because I need it and I deserve it and I can have it and no one can stop me because I am closer to 40 than 14 ~
When Beatrice reached the end of the bottle, she opened the new one and took it to her bedroom. The house lost definition around her. The TV programme became less dull. She wasn’t afraid of passing the little kerb in front of Joanna’s house. The darkness wasn’t that solid anymore. Gelatine was just gelatine, and taking the train was going to be a wonderful experience.
She woke up hours later, the TV still on, her mouth full of cotton and her head spinning. She hated wine hangovers.
~ I need water ~
She got up and started to walk to the bathroom. She didn’t trust herself to go down the stairs in the dark half drunk.
And then she saw it, on top of the stairs. The same monster that hunted her when she was a child. It still had the same red eyes and long body, and it was faceless. There wasn’t her teddy bear to protect her, but this time she wasn’t a child anymore; she wasn’t scared either. She was prepared. She went through worse, and she survived. The fucking thing wasn’t going to screw up with her anymore. And with an atavistic whoop, she pushed the monster down the stairs.
It was only when it cried in pain its last breath that she recognised her mother’s voice.