same age as Daniel, Cancio, Matteo. Oh God, two children lost from the same family!
Beside me, Joe caught his breath. ‘Look!’
To one side of the wall, amongst the many images, was a poster bearing the words: DeLuca, Anna, 66 years old. Beloved friend. Death will not keep us apart. Beneath was a photocopied picture of three young women standing in front of the Villa della Madonna del Mare, not as it was now, but as it once must have been, well kept, its gardens tended. The front door was ajar; the shutters on the downstairs windows opened wide. A young version of Anna was in the centre of the group; dark hair cut in a short bob. She was wearing pedal pushers and a gingham top with capped sleeves. To one side of her, a small girl with frizzy hair was grinning at the camera; to the other, a taller, more solidly built young woman stood slightly back. The face of the third girl had been erased; whoever had done it had scratched at the paper so viciously it was torn.
‘Who could have put that up?’ I asked Joe.
‘I guess Anna still has friends here.’
‘But the girl’s face…’
‘I know. It’s weird.’
I picked at the edge of the paper, pulled at it. A small strip tore away in my hand.
‘Leave it,’ Joe said. ‘Come on, let’s go.’
I bought what I needed from the pharmacy and we returned to the car via the harbour. I felt uneasy, unsettled by the defaced picture on the memorial wall. Someone had cared about Joe’s mother enough to put up a poster in her memory. And someone had cared enough to vandalise it. Someone loved and someone hated; someone wanted to remember and someone wanted to forget the past; to obliterate it.
As we walked through the town, my discomfort increased to the point where I was cold, despite the warmth of the day. It wasn’t only the sinister violation of the face in the photograph, I had the exact same sensation I’d experienced at the villa the previous evening: that we were being watched.
I looked behind me, expecting to see someone dart into a doorway, but nobody was there. I looked up, to the windows of the houses that lined the narrow streets, but all I could see were the reflections of the houses opposite in the glass.
The waterfront, that had looked so appealing from the other side of the bay, was, close up, as scruffy and run down as the rest of the town. The street facing the harbour was lined with bars and the pizzeria, Vito’s, was at the far end. A teenage boy was sweeping the terrace outside. He was dark haired and slender with heavy eyebrows; obviously Valentina’s son. He concentrated on his work, pushing the head of the brush under the tables, making a pile of dust. His expression was serious, as if he was carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders.
‘Ciao,’ said Joe as we drew near.
The boy looked up. ‘Ciao,’ he replied.
His eyes were dark and sensitive, wary, his arms wiry and tanned. He still had the narrow shoulders of a young boy, yet he worked with the diligence of a man.
Joe walked on, but I stopped to watch the boy.
He was only a little younger than Daniel would have been if he had lived. How wonderful it must be to have a teenage son; Valentina was lucky. If only I’d had the chance to see Daniel grow up! If only Anna hadn’t taken all that potential joy from me.
A wave of grief took me by surprise and in its aftermath I wondered if anyone had ever posted a picture of Daniel on the memorial wall: Anna or her mother? I couldn’t bear the thought of that: Daniel’s picture, out here, in this hot, distant little town, so far from home.
Valentina’s son was beside me, concern in his eyes. ‘Stai bene, signora?’
‘I’m fine. I’m sorry. Ignore me.’
‘American?’
‘English.’
He looked at me, still worried.
‘Really, I’m okay,’ I said.
‘I could fetch you some water.’
‘No. I don’t want anything.’ I smiled reassurance. From some distance away, Joe looked back over his shoulder to see where I was. ‘Joe over there used to be friends with your mother. We’re going to come here for pizza one day,’ I told the boy.
‘It’s the best pizza in town.’
‘That’s what we heard! I’ll look forward to it. See you again…?’
‘Francesco.’
‘Francesco. See you soon.’
I grabbed the rim of my hat and trotted after Joe, catching him up at the harbour wall. The water was green tinged, glassy, a slick of fuel making rainbows on its surface. Boats rocked at the ends of their ropes. Tiny pink jellyfish were floating around the weedy chains that anchored the buoys. The sun was warm on my skin.
Joe pointed to the far headland, no more than a hundred yards away as the crow flies. I could see the wall that surrounded our villa, with trees behind it, thickly bunched together, the black tips of the cypresses. I couldn’t see much of the building, only one edge of the roof, but the location from this viewpoint was like something from a film; the wall, the trees, the sea almost enclosing it.
‘It looks mysterious,’ I whispered.
‘Mysterious?’
‘Don’t you think it does?’
‘The locals think it’s haunted,’ said Joe.
‘Really?’
‘The waiter told me this morning. He said, if you stand here, at night, sometimes you can see lights inside the walls.’
I laughed uneasily.
‘People always make up stories about abandoned buildings,’ I said. It was an attempt to disguise my disquiet about what Joe had just said and at the same time convince myself that my sense of the villa being occupied was pure imagination.
‘He said he and a group of friends were fishing close to the villa one night and they saw a woman drifting through the gardens.’
‘Drifting?’ I struggled to keep my voice steady.
‘They were convinced it was a ghost. They said she almost looked human, but when she raised her head, she had no face.’
The woman standing beside Anna in the picture on the memorial wall didn’t have a face either.
I looked at Joe from beneath the rim of my hat. He was staring at the villa. I thought he might have been teasing, but he wasn’t smiling.
Before Daniel’s death, neither Joe nor I believed in life after death or any other concept that Joe liked to term ‘superstitious nonsense.’ We weren’t unsympathetic, but used to feel something akin
