High Wire

 

Chapter 4

Awakening

 

The Umbrian winter passed easily enough, although Daniel had had to bury some of his preconceptions along the way, mostly those concerned with the weather.  Italy, he’d thought to himself, was that warm, smiling, perpetually sunny country in the Mediterranean.  What he’d been shortly introduced to, however, was the tepid, dour and perpetually drizzly reality of it all.

 

Michael’s grandfather had turned out to possess much the same choleric disposition as the weather.  Daniel supposed that he’d had fair warning, but had assumed, as one did, that Michael had got to be exaggerating the old man’s faults.

 

No such luck.  Papa Tessitura was a squat, whiskery and cantankerous man with, it seemed, an almost bone-bred dislike of anyone below the age of forty.  Nevertheless, he’d been generous enough with his wine cellar, and now that the spring had finally dragged itself somewhat shamefacedly into view, the two young men found any halfway plausible excuse to sit out on the patio and imbibe.

 

The first flowers were decorating the Barbera vines in the vineyard, and Daniel watched Michael’s younger sister Lucia picking her way through the dozing greenery, trying her best to play the role of seductive hamadryad, albeit with mixed success.  She was a well-rounded eighteen-year old, the archetypical curvaceous Latin signorina with the wild, tangled black locks to match, but that was as far as impressions went.  In temperament, the girl was as single-minded as a tsetse fly, and had without excess subtlety found every conceivable excuse to linger close to Daniel.

 

In that it was a direct reprise of his past troubles with Cathy, Daniel found this attention flattering, amusing and embarrassing in perfectly equal measure.  In that he was currently one thousand miles from home and the guest of Lucia’s grandfather and brother, he found it noticeably tricky, and could only try his best to maintain his own distance, mentally if not physically.

 

Not that it mattered much at this particular point in time.  Michael was nothing if not observant, and the bag was gaping open and the cat had long since taken to the hills.  He clinked his wine glass against the table, his exquisite eyebrow raised in Daniel’s direction.  In case this hadn’t been hint enough, he coughed pointedly.  Daniel jerked his head up guiltily.

 

“Sorry, mate, I was miles away,” he apologised.  Michael swallowed the last of the glossy red wine.

 

“So I see,” he purred, his gaze sweeping the vines and taking in, not quite by chance, the sight of his sister, who was now bending over to straighten the hem of her skirt. Had Daniel been inclined to dizzying heights of charity, he’d have let himself believe that the girl simply did not know how much cleavage this posture was exposing.  Since he was blessed with the normal amount of human cynicism, however, he studiously averted his gaze.

 

“As I was saying,” Michael continued, as if there hadn’t been the most breathtakingly gauche interruption in his flow, “I wondered if you wanted to go out on the piss tonight.  A few of my associates are in town this week.”

 

Though he knew he was being monstrously stereotypical, Daniel couldn’t help but smirk.  The word ‘associates’, coming from anyone of Italian stock, always presented itself with a faintly ominous ring.  He’d read The Godfather once too often, he was sure.

 

“Do any of these people speak English?”  Daniel asked.  He’d better make sure now, or face the prospect of spending the rest of the evening using his friend as an interpreter; and that was the optimistic scenario.  The notion of what his night could turn into if – or more likely when – Michael got blind drunk was a worrying one.  Michael, however, simply snorted out a short, easy laugh.

 

“I’m sure they speak passable English.  They are English.  We’re having a meeting in the city tonight.”

 

Uh-oh, Daniel mused.  Suddenly, this was all sounding a lot less convivial than it was sounding downright political, and he knew that his leapfrog suspicion was the correct one.  On the other hand, he knew Michael well enough to appreciate that he would go out regardless and, without him, Daniel faced nothing more thrilling than a night of alternately watching Papa Tessitura’s socks drying in front of the fire and trying to keep Lucia out of his bedroom without actually resorting to barbed wire or guard dogs.

 

The decision made, or more accurately made for him, he nodded weakly.  If Michael spotted this drag in enthusiasm, he didn’t make mention of it.  He simply refilled their glasses with more of the thick, heady wine and grinned like a Cheshire cat that had just won the lottery.

 

At this point, Lucia draped herself over the rail of the patio in a move that was probably intended to lend her an air of languor, Daniel thought, but merely served to make her look overbalanced.  Lucia possessed all the natural grace of a Brahma bull, he concluded, then chided himself for the thought.  He had to admit that when she wasn’t trying to bat her eyelashes at him, she was a sweet enough young woman.

 

Michael, as per his prerogative as an older brother, seemed at liberty to disregard Lucia’s good points, however, and he now illustrated this fact quite nicely by picking a handful of dried apricots from the bowl on the table and beginning to throw them at her, one by one.   He only stopped when she caught one of these missiles and returned it, only this time with a far more accurate aim.

 

“Look, Lu, I’m serious,” Michael growled, “bugger off, or I’ll tell Daniel what you used to do with your dolls when you were six.  Got that?”

 

“You’re a wanker,” she retorted, but there was no real malice in the air as Lucia swayed past them, her chin lifted haughtily, and made sure to slam the back door as she went inside.

 

“Finally,” exclaimed Michael, with a genuine show business eye-roll, then sank somewhat lower into his chair and masked the lower half of his face behind his glass for a second, regarding Daniel curiously for some time before he spoke.

 

“Now I’ve got you alone, I keep meaning to ask.  How are you?”  There was a small but noticeable fish-hook dangling from the question, and Daniel glanced around at the back door before he responded, making quite sure that Lucia wasn’t eavesdropping.

 

“Better.  A lot better,” he conceded, eventually.

 

“Right.  Now, is that better as in ‘better’, or better as in ‘I’ll say that so Mike will stop this difficult line of inquiry’?  Just checking, you understand,” he finished, and set his wine down on the table with an air of delicate consideration.

 

“No, really.  It’s been a while since I thought about Jules.  Actually, that’s a slight lie, but it has been a while since it hurt.  It’s helped, being out here.  Thanks for being there,” Daniel volunteered.

 

“È niente,” Michael replied, automatically, waving a languid hand.  “That’s the second most important job of a best friend.  The first, and one that I’ve also fulfilled to the letter in the past, if I may blow my own trumpet here, is taking the time to point out when you’re being a cretin.”

 

Both men jumped as Lucia banged her way out through the door again and planted her fists on her hips in an extremely inelegant gesture of impatience.  She shot her brother a withering glance, turned a wink on Daniel, and then informed them that lunch was ready.

 

One thing that Daniel had discovered, when attempting to make an honest list of Lucia’s good points, was that she could cook like an earthbound angel.  She had made a generous amount of fettuccine al funghi and decorated it liberally with parmesan and black olives, and this impromptu concoction even drew some reserved praise from Papa Tessitura, although the old man made sure to stay in character by scowling at his grandson during lunch and making a pointed note of the Slipknot t-shirt he was wearing.

 

As Daniel had half expected she would, Lucia made a spirited attempt to follow the two of them into Perugia, a move that was quickly thwarted by her brother with a quiet, measured threat to let their grandfather know what she’d got up to in Rome last summer with Stefano Pieralli.  Daniel didn’t press any further enquiry on this matter, although he could hazard a guess, and amused himself with the thought as they walked the two miles into the city.  It seemed that his friend had an impressive arsenal of weaponry held in reserve to threaten his sister with.

 

Perugia, at least, was a somewhat better representative of the idyllic image that Daniel had carried over from England.  The city was a vertiginous mélange of low, red-roofed houses and elegant, graceful Venetian bell towers, carved comfortably into the side of a low, meandering hill.

 

Michael had found them a neat little bar on the bank of a wide, sprawling canal, and now they were engaged in a tentative experiment with a bottle of absinthe while they waited for Michael’s friends to arrive.  At least, Daniel was hesitant.  His friend was currently proposing an altogether more outlandish step, while the elderly lady behind the bar watched them with the air of one watching a young puppy on a Persian rug.

 

“You can’t drink that stuff neat, you silly bastard,” Daniel stated, blandly.  “You’ll end up with your liver in your ear.”  To illustrate the point, he picked up a jug of iced water and topped his own glass up with it.  The soft green liquor swirled and became pearlescent although, Daniel had to admit, it did not look more than fractionally less intimidating for that.

 

Michael said nothing; he merely laid his head on his forearm and gazed into the undiluted absinthe like a gunslinger.  His hand crept out toward it, stealthily.  Then in one extravagant move, he grabbed the glass and downed its contents, throwing his head back like a prima donna on a high C.  The glass was smacked down onto the table once more, and Daniel watched with equal parts of amusement, amazement and trepidation as two involuntary tears ran from Michael’s eyes, which were now as pink as a ferret’s.

 

“Gnrh,” was all he seemed capable of saying, for the time being.  Daniel shoved the water jug across the table, and Michael grabbed it gratefully, taking an impossibly long draught.  He set the jug down, thought for a second, and then took another healthy swig before seeming to recover the power of speech.

 

“All right,” he said, at last, his voice slightly cracked, “I won’t say I wasn’t warned, so feel free to gloat at your leisure.”

 

“Gloat?  Me?  No, but if you have kids, they’re going to get told about this.  I hope you know that,” Daniel mused, picking his own glass up and studying it carefully.  He eventually decided that there was no further avenue of escape, and knocked it back semi-confidently.

 

The chilly liquid insinuated itself down his throat, and he engaged in a momentary struggle with his gorge before realising that some honour was at stake here, and swallowing heavily.  He felt his sinuses burn bright for a second as the fumes added their own particular interlude, and then he reached for the iced water.

 

“Okay,” he volunteered, “that tasted like boiled shit.”

 

They were joined, at length, by Michael’s friends, and Daniel nodded cautiously as he was introduced.  Claire, a tall and willowy young woman with a small diamante nose-stud, a very short crop of peroxide blonde hair and a seasoning of a Liverpudlian accent, offered him a friendly handshake.

 

Her companions, revealed as Stephen and Jake, were near-perfect carbon copies of one another in the kind of lassez-faire Goth outfitting that had last been in fashion around thirty years before and, even then, only just.  They were also, both of them, commensurately taciturn in sunglasses that they didn’t deign to remove despite the low light of the bar.

 

Out of the corner of his eye, Daniel noticed that the old woman’s expression had shifted from one of caution to one of outright alarm, although she didn’t make any sudden moves and merely carried on wiping a towel along the top of the bar.

 

Claire wandered over to the bar, returning with a large bottle of white rum – Daniel observed that it seemed slightly incongruous in these surroundings – one bottle of whisky and four bottles of red wine.  When the company were suitably refreshed, Claire slapped a companionable hand onto Michael’s shoulder.

 

“Thanks for asking us over, mate,” she grinned.  “So how’ve you been?  Your granddad working you hard, is he?”

 

“What, me?  His most favoured scion?” asked Michael, displaying a fine imitation of indignation.  “Actually, yeah, he has, but at least I’ve had my partner in sedition here all winter.  And what’s new in the homeland?”

 

“There’s talk about organising a protest by the Students’ Union.”  This was from Jake, who was nursing a curious cocktail of rum and water without seeming to want to drink any of it.

 

“Protest?”  Michael’s eyes sparkled, “where, when and why?”

 

“Last Saturday in May, outside the Foreign Office,” Jake provided, and at last, he sipped carefully at his drink.  “As to why?  Well, no offence, Mike, but you’ve been off the grid for a while.  We’ve heard a little rumour that Sutler is talking about having a go at Saudi Arabia.  Something’s gotta be done.”

 

Off the grid?  Daniel thought, while his brain laughed quietly to itself.  The guy carried himself as if he were an MI5 operative.  Out of nowhere, he caught Claire’s eye and was sure he saw her gaze flicker momentarily toward the ceiling in sympathy.

 

“Saudi Arabia?” Michael commented, his voice dented with a sigh.  “I can’t say I’m reeling with shock, mind you, but what’s the cover story going to be?”

 

“The usual bollocks.” This was from Stephen.  “War on terror, and all that, and he’ll get away with it, too.”

 

“So what’s the point of the protest, then?”

 

Daniel didn’t quite realise that he’d spoken aloud; not until four heads turned, as one, in his direction.  Jake’s and Stephen’s expressions were virtually unreachable behind those affected sunglasses, although he imagined he could very well guess.  Claire had adopted a perfect poker face, while Michael had arched his brows and was performing a quite novel adaptation on the theme of amused admiration although, Daniel was perfectly well aware, he wasn’t going to come charging to the rescue just yet.  Michael had always done his friend the dignity of never presuming that he couldn’t look after himself.

 

“The point of the protest,” Stephen countered, sourly, “is to do whatever we can.  Make a statement.  This isn’t a fascist state yet.  What can they do to us?”

 

“Nothing, I suppose,” Daniel sighed, refilling his glass, although making a passing note not to touch the absinthe again and a further note that arguing with these two wasn’t going to achieve anything much, whether on his side of the line or theirs.  Stephen, seeming a trifle mollified, turned his attention back to his declamation.

 

“That Nazi pig is going to have to understand that not everyone is going to put up and shut up,” he went on, seemingly to the world at large.  “And if we can manage it, well, he’s going to get a smack in the face, too.”

 

It struck Daniel, as he studied the assembled company, that while Michael frequently ventured much the same opinions as Stephen, and with much the same degree of fervour, he had an altogether more pleasant way of communicating them to others whereas, with the best will in the world, it was tremendously difficult to view Stephen as anything more laudable than a squawking kookaburra.

 

Michael had formed a friendly alliance with the half-empty rum bottle, and was laid back easily in his chair now, the bottle perched on his thigh, his eyes hooded and his smile slow and flexible as he played the perfect audience.  Daniel took all of this in and made one further, more personal note: that while it would appear to the casual observer that Michael was either stone drunk or very close to it, his gaze was as sharp as acid and as steady as the Rock of Gibraltar.

 

“How many are we expecting on the day?” he was asking.  Jake shrugged, the action barely there in any case.

 

“Couple of hundred if all goes well, though I’m still bloody disappointed.  For the union, that’s a pretty feeble effort.”

 

“It’s better that way,” Claire put in, and Jake vibrated very gently with surprise; Claire had not, so far, ventured any contribution to the political aspect of the evening.

 

“How so?”

 

“A few hundred people marching down Whitehall are going to look intimidating enough as it is.  Five thousand could mean trouble.  And by the way,” she went on, while Daniel clicked his admiration of her brio up a notch, “you’d better make certain that everyone understands well in advance that we stay off government property.  If we go in there, they’re allowed to blow holes in us, but I’m sure you don’t need telling.”

 

Jake and Stephen shared a long-suffering glance.  “Okay, Claire,” Jake said, wearily.  “I understand that.  Look, I have done this before, you know.”

 

“Weren’t those Amelia Earhart’s last words?” Michael volunteered wryly, before tipping the last of the rum down his throat in the ensuing silence.

 

The conversation never fully recovered from that comment, if only because everyone was well aware that Michael had played an ace, if a profoundly sarcastic one.  Jake, clearly electing to play Good Loser for the time being, directed the discussion onto the topic of his college studies with only the merest hint of mental gear-crunching.

 

Claire fielded Daniel while he was at the bar, and winked at him.

 

“Glad to see you can hold your own against those two,” she said, sub-vocal.  “They’re nice enough when you keep them off politics, but that’s the tricky part.  You know, Mike told me a bit about you, but you’re not what I expected.”  Daniel waited, expecting some clarification on this point, but it seemed there was no more forthcoming.

 

“Thanks, I guess,” he smiled.  “Have you known Mike long?”

 

“Oh, yes,” Claire responded, and this time, the conniving twinkle in her eye supplied a very broad, vivid brush-stroke of the rest of the picture, for which Daniel was very thankful; he had certainly not been about to make further enquiries, and particularly not under the nose of the elderly barmaid, who was now arranging glasses on a tray with a vehemence that suggested that each and every item had personally insulted her.

 

When they got back to the table, Stephen was holding court – and never had a term been so accurately applied, Daniel thought – on the subject of imperialism.

 

“It’s been the overriding theme of Western history,” he was saying.  “Whether it’s religious, military or financial, we’ve always tried to force our views on other countries.”  Who’s ‘we’? Daniel thought, but mildly enough, and he was reasonably sure that he could keep his sarcasm on a short lead for the remainder of the night, especially now that he knew he had an ally in Claire.

 

Michael, for his part, had apparently started dissolving his already precarious inhibitions in alcohol.  Not for the first time, Daniel wondered whether there existed a single topic on the face of the earth for which his friend would not cheerfully and adeptly play Devil’s Advocate.

 

“The problem here, Steve,” Michael said, a model of pleasantry, “is that there doesn’t seem to be any other way to go about things, and the way we’re headed, I’m not sure there’s much difference between one tyrant and another.”  He paused here, lighting up a cigarette.  “In summary, when someone’s got their boot on your neck, what difference does it make what colour it is?”

 

There followed an awkward silence, while all present ran this metaphor through their minds to double-check it.  There was this to be said for Michael: his comments occasionally had the same effect on conversations as a brick heaved through a church window.  Stephen tried to recover his rhythm, but it was Jake who volleyed for him albeit, as it turned out, clumsily.

 

“So you’re saying that you’d be happy to sit back and let Sutler and his type overrun the planet?”

 

“My eloquent friend,” Michael opined, toasting the company with his glass, “the day I say anything like that, you can be sure you’ll hear all about it.  I’m just saying that nobody’s blameless in this world and, if anything, it’s not action that causes the most damage, it’s the lack of it.”  He paused here, waiting for some interjection, but none came, so he continued blithely.  “I’d rather eat my own nose than see fundamentalist Christians in high office in my country, but to pretend that they’re the only danger to us is incredibly short-sighted.”

 

Daniel had been studying Claire’s face throughout this faintly acerbic speech, and wondered if it mirrored his own.  The schadenfreude he was experiencing at seeing Jake discomfited was strong enough to be all but palpable, and now he saw it in Claire’s eye, too.

 

“Saudi Arabia’s a hellhole,” Daniel put in, after the kind of decent pause for consideration that Michael never seemed to need, “but it’s not going to do anyone any good if we bomb the place back to the dark ages.  For one, it’ll play havoc with the oil market, and nobody needs that.

 

“For another, all we’re going to do is leave them open to any bloody pack of vultures that’s passing.  Remember what happened to Afghanistan?  The Americans chased the Soviets out, yes, but then they left the country to rot and who moved in on it?  The Taliban.”

 

At this point, the old lady behind the bar wobbled over to them and indicated, in very carefully punctuated English, that she would like to close her establishment for the night.  Daniel was glad of the interruption; as much as he was a fan of the verbal duels that Michael got them both into with amusing regularity, he felt that he would, on the whole, prefer to court them in sobriety, a state he’d long since left behind somewhere at the bottom of a wine glass.

 

The party split up outside the bar.  Jake and Stephen shook Daniel’s hand cautiously, almost as if they expected him to explode.  Claire, meanwhile, pressed cool lips to his cheek and flung one extremely affable arm around his neck as she did so.

 

“See you at the protest, then?” she added, with a broad wink.  Daniel was unable to identify the precise subtext of this, although he didn’t mind.  He simply nodded warmly, and bade her goodbye.

 

When the two returned to the house, Papa Tessitura was waiting up for them, and Daniel had a sneaking suspicion that he’d only done so in order to heap this fact onto any guilty conscience they might already be experiencing.  He growled a short burst of Italian at his grandson before heading off to bed and, although he didn’t speak the language, Daniel felt that he had the gist of the comment cornered.  He asked anyway, though.

 

“What did he say?” he asked Michael, once the old man’s heavy tread had disappeared up the stairs.  Michael shoved his thumbs into his pockets and smiled hugely at the ceiling for a moment before replying.

 

“He told me that my father would be ashamed of me,” he said, his grin widening.  “I can only assume that this means that my dad was a more discreet drinker than I am, because I know for a fact that he was a mighty piss artist at my age.”

 

Daniel made them both a last coffee in the kitchen, and returned with these and two aspirins apiece.  Experience had taught him that this went some way toward mellowing the worst of the next day’s hangover, and he was grateful that he was still sober enough to remember this little tip.  He watched in incomprehension as Michael dropped his aspirins into his coffee and stirred them thoughtfully.

 

“You’re bloody weird, did I ever tell you that?” he laughed.

 

“About twice a day for the past twelve months, as I recall,” Michael shot back at him, and then sipped at the coffee, which now had a growing spiral of coagulating white muck on its surface.  “And if you’re curious about this, it’s called doing penance.  Besides, I can still taste absinthe and, in comparison, this stuff is nectar.”

 

“Mike?”

 

“Yep?”

 

“On a scale of one to ten, how sure are you that this protest isn’t going to end up turning nasty?”

 

“Oh.  About nine, maybe seven when I’m sober.  Look,” he went on, chucking back some more of the devil’s brew in his coffee cup, “you don’t have to come, if you’re worried.”

 

“Second most important job of a best friend, remember?”  Daniel tapped the arm of the chair with his finger to underline his point.

 

“And what about the first?”  Michael’s deep eyes gleamed like a fox’s in the glow from the kitchen doorway.

 

“That?  Come on, I’d tell you you’re a cretin, but you already know you are, which probably explains why we get on so well.”

 

Daniel eventually retired to his own room with his coffee and, belatedly remembering Lucia’s occasional clumsy attempts at subterfuge in trying to get him alone, turned the key in the lock.  The room was in darkness, but he elected to light a single candle rather than switch on the lamp; he felt that this would be more in keeping with the thoughtful slant to his mood.

 

The sky outside was mumbling with intermittent thunder, signalling the marshalling of a heavy spring storm over the Apennines.  Daniel drew the curtains on it, although he left the window open an inch.  He’d loved sleeping to the sound of thunderstorms all his life, and he didn’t want to waste this one.  He crawled underneath the blankets and, presently, slipped quite seamlessly into a patchwork dream of nothing coherent.

 

 

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

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