front of the car, observing the wide windscreen crammed with our parents’ heads. If one of the side-windows is lowered, I creep up close. Snippets of conversation slip out unnoticed. Ama gasps out her splintered words, the rolls of reasons why she can’t carry on with the endless driving, all the conferences and translating. Pado tries to convince her. Ama wraps her refusal around herself and repeats, ‘It’s not a life, Gaspare, it’s not a life.’
I watch Pado’s reaction. His eyes are twitching with arguments. He too has lists, long lists of valid reasons to carry on, lists like row upon row of microscopic slides and, on each slide, more and more reasons. Ama says she no longer knows what is fixed and what is gone. She listens to Pado, but she can’t see herself any more. The never-ending motion of the car is ploughing through his lists, through the days, on and on.
We get back in the car, the seats taut with unresolved temper. To calm matters down, Pado puts on one of the story tapes he and Ama have recorded for us. Ama has imitated the pigs from Animal Farm and Pado has taken on The Three Musketeers in a special battling tone. Occasionally, in the middle of a story, Ama and Pado break into hysterical laughter, struggling to put on an accent or pronounce an unpronounceable word. Their recorded, crackling giggles fill the car, pushing back the resentment and anger. In the background of the tapes, you can hear doors banging, a dog barking and Giulio. He always insists on being present when the tapes are made. He’s even managed to get a slot on a cassette to tell us a joke. Every time that tape comes on, he asks to listen to it over and over again, rewinding and rewinding, until one day it gets so chewed that the machine spits out knotted loops of music and squashed-chicken jokes.
The tapes, in the cramped swinging car, can mingle with thoughts in my mind and change into fears that stick like headaches, at least I call them headaches. There’s no other way of describing them. The headaches come on stronger as the motorways rush their white broken lines into a sickly mess or when the little petrol sign suddenly flicks on red. I watch it waver for a while and then it jams on redder than before, a stain that won’t go as the last drops of petrol slip away into the engine. I go to warn Ama. The sight of her tense shoulders stops me. I pull back, not daring to touch her.
I hesitate, then pat Pado on the arm instead. ‘The light! Look at the petrol light!’
‘It’s all right,’ he answers, ‘I’m sure we can manage another thirty kilometres to the next petrol station. Well done for noticing.’
But how can it be all right? There’s no petrol station anywhere and the road is hurtling itself further and further into the distance. I watch the kilometres tick past, hoping that Ama won’t realise that we are going to grind to a halt with juggernauts and trucks flying about us like leaves in a storm. I concentrate on the stories on the tapes instead. Some manage to calm me. Others bring on a smarting-cut punch between the eyes, the blurring of shadows along the road, the memories of number-plates uncounted. I focus on my brothers’ elbows skewering me. I hold on to that niggling pain, catching like a nail on my skin. I breathe softly, slowly, in and out, but my head leaks, a punctured bowl emptying. The unwanted thoughts, the thoughts I’ve turned back a thousand times, suddenly come, and once they’ve come, they’re shoved aside by new ones, tumbling, falling into my head. My mouth is full of them. I try not to attach words to them. They swim, crippled without letters stuck to their sides, and then that’s it. They trick me. They catch me out. They take shape and snatch words, glue them to themselves. I shut myself off from the car, the perpetual swaying, the rub of its wheels, but I can’t blot out the humming of unsolicited thoughts as they dress themselves faster and faster in aching words and images. I listen to the stories on the tapes again. I reinvent new endings, swap characters with others. I create images and thoughts to wipe everything away. I stop. I start. I warn. I save. The petrol sign is redder and redder and no one is doing anything about it.
Pado looks calm. It might be all right. We might get away with it this time. I look at the cars rushing past. I follow them closely. Then that’s it. A thought springs up inside me again. What if the last drop of petrol has just gone and we’re about to slam to a halt right here in the middle of the motorway and we can’t get out of the car and the lorry behind us swerves and hits the car in front and the car in front spins round and starts coming back the other way? Why did I think that? I didn’t think that really. Look at the lorry. Quick, a word for the driver – ‘Don’t die’ – but then the lorry overtakes and slips into the distance before I have time to say my word for it. What if the driver goes round the corner now and ploughs into the road, tunnelling into the cracked grey surface of the tarmac? What if we shoot round the corner after him, straight into the piled-up cars in front? I hold on to myself and it’s as if I’m pulling on a string of words, till like a chain they dance me away. I silently repeat ‘We mustn’t crash! We can’t crash!’ – I yell it to myself so hard that my ears are singing. I call for help, but no one can hear. I see faces from the morning, cars that passed us by. That staring woman, that crying girl, that dog with a blue collar, tossing and turning its head through the wound down window. I imagine our grandfather, Grand Maurice, fighting and writhing against the water that choked him. I see his face slipping, his feet digging in to the sinking mud, his mouth, his eyes, his ears filling with the lake. Then his face mingles with faces from yesterday and more faces from the day before that, and number-plates, and cars and the motorways they were on. What were the people in the cars doing? What language were they speaking? The days and towns slide past. I can’t remember, but I must remember. What number-plate? What car? I put my hands over my eyes. A spiralling headache comes on full blast. The pain arrows through my eyes and I can’t think at all. I’m overturned by a dizziness that flicks me up and down inside.
‘Turn off the tape. Please!’ I manage to say.
They won’t. I am drifting, disorientated.
‘Stop the car!’
My words melt away. Giulio shakes me, but I can’t feel anything. My voice has changed, it’s an unheard, stifled whistle.
Pado looks round in surprise and parks in a lay-by. I can see a public lavatory in the distance and run towards it.
‘Don’t go in there. It’s filthy!’ Pado shouts after me.
I go in anyway. I lean against its wall, cars filing past and men staring at me from behind urinals. I try to find a lavatory. Most of the doors are locked. One door is open and it has a scratched outline of a mouth swallowing up a telephone number inside a heart. I sit on the closed seat, panting, trying to banish myself from my thoughts. I recite ‘We mustn’t crash’ again and again. I can smell the rotting taste of panic everywhere. All the time Pado is hooting impatiently.
‘Hurry up. Hurry up!’
I sprint back outside. Pado is beginning to pull away and, with the buttons of my head unfastened, I run to reach the car before any new thoughts trip me up. My brothers are looking at me worriedly through the rear-window. I get back into the car. Pado observes my face in the driving mirror. I know he wants to ask what’s up, but the other cars are pushing past us and the picnic is getting warm. He smiles instead. He leans towards me.
‘Get him a drink of water, he’s dehydrated.’
His face is full of warmth, spreading into ridged lines, a map with motorways, rivers and hills. Then the story on the tape slides back in again on its way round the machine and its voice sings like a stone cast up from the tarmac.
Ama looks worried. ‘Gaspare, we should stop again. Jean-Pio’s obviously not feeling well. Slow down!’
Pado accelerates ahead. ‘He’ll be fine. Will everyone just bloody calm down, lasciatemi in pace.’
I gaze at the changing clouds out of the window. They have joined into one slow dragging crease in the sky. Ama turns
