bag is splitting at the seams with things although Pado is always telling her to travel with the strict minimum, especially clothes. In fact, he says, you only ever need two of everything because you can wash one item whilst you wear the other. It doesn’t happen that way because Ama has piles of clothes she buys when waiting for Pado to leave his meetings and conferences. The car is barely big enough to hold them all and Pado has to scatter them everywhere to pack the boot, knickers scrunched under the spare tyre, tights between pages of reports, trousers and skirts rolled down the sides of bags. Ama intervenes from time to time: ‘No, don’t put that under that, it’ll crumple’ or ‘I need to be able to get at that later!’ There’s no reply. A bit like when you lean over into the front seats and ask: ‘How much further?’ Then there’s silence. Ama’s bag is also brimming with little bundles of antiseptic wipes in plastic coating. She has kilometres of dental floss too. Before going to bed, she hands out the floss, a good length to each of us to begin sawing at our gums. She’s sure there must be a bit of food stuck somewhere, lost between the back teeth, rubbing against the tongue, refusing to give. Then Ama has her books, lots of them. They are stashed beneath her clothes. She has at least five on the go at once, mostly French and English novels. That’s what she’s always read, ever since she was a child and Grand Maurice lent her new books each day. The two of them would spend hours reading out passages, comparing impressions. Then, as we started travelling, they would write long letters to each other, quoting lines, discussing endings. Now Ama sits up alone at night and reads whilst the rest of us doze off. She has a pocket lamp and it skips up and down the lines across the bed and into the dark with tense flicks of the wrist. Sometimes, we see her in the morning, half asleep, half awake, a book caught between her thumb and forefinger, as if the weight of the story has forced her to give up.
In Pado’s case are reviews and reports bound together with wide clips and bold red writing: ‘Embargo’, ‘Confidential’ or ‘Draft’. He leafs through them, making annotations, or catching Ama’s eye to read a passage about a clinical trial and ask for the exact translation in Italian. Ama invents a word for him, the way she does when she can’t sleep, new words to lift her away, heal the worries, pack the empty spaces of the night. She spins off idioms, chases unknown verbs, multiplies and conjugates the languages in her mind. That’s why all Pado’s colleagues ask for Ama’s translations. She knows what’s behind a phrase, the meaning that everyone is searching for but cannot find. Pado cannot dwell on translation though. There’s no time to waste. If he doesn’t analyse his reports and trials quickly, people across the world might start taking new medicines without realising that their lungs are being colonised by cysts and disease.
When we’ve rummaged through our bags and flossed our teeth, we all begin getting our beds ready, trying to make head or tail of the flimsy bunk sheets and the rock-hard pillows. Ama gives up. She’s not going to sleep anyway and doesn’t really care. The captain’s voice comes over on the loudspeakers.
‘I wish that stronzo would shut the hell up,’ Pado murmurs half asleep. I strain to hear what is being said above the locking cabin doors and stamping corridors.
Duccio looks at me. ‘I bet you there’s going to be another storm.’
Why did he say that? Eventually the captain’s voice trails off into an alarm noise: ‘If you hear this sound, get out of your cabin immediately, leaving any belongings behind, and make your way to the nearest lifeboat station.’
I listen to the three test blasts of the emergency alarm. They stab at me, dig deep inside, indelible reminders. Three short sharp slashes of panic.
I am uncomfortable. My left foot is poking out of the sheet and blanket, and every time I feel a wave knocking at the boat, I’m sure it’s a piece of jagged driftwood. The ferry mows over it and we all drink and sleep and run along the corridors not knowing that the wood is swinging its way round the motors to smash a hole in the hull to sink us. I quickly stick my head in the pillow and think of something else. Then I awake with the sound of waves again and stare into the bunks. Pado is grinding his teeth, his jaw twitching. Everyone is asleep, even Ama! I struggle out of bed and check, up close. I stand there looking at her. Her nostrils are moving softly. There is a faint band of light across her cheek from the torch she is still clutching in her hand. I study the fine lines under her eyes which, she says, grow a little deeper every night she can’t sleep. I watch the hem of the sheet flutter slightly with her breath. I can’t believe it. She really is asleep! I delve into Pado’s bag. I get his camera and position myself near the door. The flash goes off and Ama sits bolt upright. She knocks her head on the bunk above and shouts for the light. I scramble for my bed.
Ama is screeching: ‘You idiot, espèce de crétin!’ and I’m crying because she has to be really angry to shout at me in French, even if I was trying to help her by proving that she might have been asleep. Everyone is awake now and telling me I’m stupid. Ama looks weary. Maybe she wasn’t sleeping after all. Maybe she’s never slept. Not ever. Closing your eyes doesn’t mean anything. That’s only resting, but the mind goes on and on, pleading for a second, just a second of sleep, to soothe the swelling of continual waking and thoughts. I lay my head against the sheet and crease its whiteness with my toes.
The night seems interminable now with the clinking of chains and the rush of sea under the boat. People are walking and staggering along the corridors about us. Occasionally there’s a shout as my eyes are shutting or a lazily-held bag knocks against the walls. Between three and four o’clock in the morning, someone tries our door by mistake. The handle jumps up and down, followed by, ‘Shit, it’s the next deck up!’ These are enough words to wake me completely. I shake, following the shuddering movement of the carpet-covered ceiling. I’m sure I heard a thundering wave charge against the ship. I can feel it, rising up above the others, ready to slap us out of the water. I get up and open the door a little. There’s no one in sight. I shut it again quickly. Maybe they’ve already sounded the alarm? In the half-light of the cabin, I look at the evacuation instructions on the back of the door. All the figures are wearing life jackets. Where are ours? I peer under the bunk. I can’t see them anywhere. I finally spot a bundle of material tucked away by the base of the bunk ladder. If I stretch too far though, I’ll wake up Pado and he’ll make me get back into bed and then no one will hear the alarm or have time to get out of the cabin as the waves turn us over. Why did I think that? My heart drums in my throat, pushing at my head. My mind inflates with television and newspaper disaster images, stories of shipwrecks, corpses floating in the sea and boats smashed against rocks with the spray of the water dancing in the air. I watch the light from the corridor under the door. I imagine the water seeping in. A drop at first, then two, then a stream and then a wave that bursts through doors and comes bellowing down the corridors and stairwells. I see the ship filling with water as we struggle to reach our life jackets and Pado yelling and Ama yanking Giulio from the floor with the sea currents curling over us.
‘We can’t sink. The ferry mustn’t sink.’ I start saying it, slowly, continuously.
I’m thinking of Grand Maurice and how the water of the lake must have pushed open his mouth, poured between his teeth and flooded through his body down under the reeds. He lay at the bottom of the lake for a week, with his eyes and ears and nose clogged with water, before they found him. I know that if I’d been fishing with him, it wouldn’t have happened. He wouldn’t have slipped in the water. He couldn’t have.
‘We mustn’t sink. We can’t sink.’ Over and over again, I trip out the words.
I feel the door quiver a little with the long heavy corridor silence. Is there anyone on the ship? Maybe we are the only ones left as the boat drifts out of control towards the convulsing open sea. Maybe everyone is already jumping onto the lifeboats, scrambling and screaming for help? My head is pumping. I push against the door with my feet. If I hold the door back, we’ll be all right. We’ll be saved.
I’m shivering and I don’t know if it’s the cold or the rush off the top
