The miniature ladies had been coming to the Villa Soleil on Friday mornings for a year, ever since Mrs Burton suffered the stroke that made it impossible for her to attend the miniature meetings at the other ladies’ houses. On Beth’s first Friday, they alighted in the spacious high-ceilinged front room of the villa like bright birds, all chatter and flap. Caroline, Erica and Jane. First names will be fine, darling, they told her, we don’t stand on ceremony out here. There used to be more of us, they said, ‘us’ meaning English ex-pats, but … time and tide, they sighed, time and tide.
And Brexit, said Erica.
Oh yes, and Brexit, agreed Jane and Caroline sadly. They double-cheek-kissed Mrs Burton (Beth didn’t think she’d ever be able to call her ‘Annie’) and settled in their usual places around the mahogany table, talking nineteen to the dozen as they hovered with their paint brushes and tweezers over the small-scale medieval French mountain village they were building. They giggled a surprising amount, at least the three visitors did, and Beth, only a fortnight into her agency job caring for silent, aphasic Mrs Burton, could already tell that Friday mornings were going to be a blessing on the week’s schedule. All she needed to do, apart from carefully removing the dust cover from the diorama before they arrived at nine, was make their tea the way they each took their tea at ten thirty, and wheel it through on the trolley. Otherwise, Beth was free to sit at the window seat, watching the sea glinting beyond the garden’s cypress trees, listening to them talk.
The miniature ladies had all been living in Menton ‘since forever’ and had plenty of advice. Don’t swim at the dog beach! Never go to the first pizzeria on the marina strip, that terrible man buys in all his bases. The number 18 bus will take you all the way to Monte Carlo. You must go to St Agnès while you’re here! You’ll have to see Webb-Ellis’s grave! You must walk across the border and go to the Hanbury Gardens! When Beth asked them about the armed gendarmes she could see standing around the railway station below the villa, they looked at her across the roof of the castle keep. We have an immigration problem here, said Caroline, and the others, even Mrs Burton, who Beth hadn’t thought was following the conversation, nodded soberly. But, cried Erica, you have to take the train to Ventimiglia! You simply must go to the Friday market! It’s wonderful! Housewives come all the way from Nice every week to stock up. You must sit upstairs on the right-hand side of the train for the views. You need to take a really big bag. You must go next week, mustn’t she Annie! We’ll manage beautifully, they said. Mrs Burton nodded her assent.
To begin with, the only view from Beth’s window seat upstairs on the right-hand side of the train was into the parallel carriage of the other train waiting at the station, the one that had just pulled in from Italy. She watched the gendarmes in their bullet-proof vests moving slowly through it, seat to seat, inspecting the passengers’ faces. Then her train was on the move, and suddenly the views she’d come all this way from New Zealand to see – but because of Mrs Burton had not yet seen very much of – were right there, as beautiful as she’d always imagined, even through the smeary glass of the train window.
The Mediterranean stretched blue to the horizon, barely undulating under a blazing sun. Fishing boats bobbed near the shore. Beth watched the scene unfold as she eavesdropped on two women conversing in rapid Italian. Beth had a smattering of French, but all she had of Italian were supermarket words – lasagne, pizza, mozzarella, spaghetti, fettucine, pesto – and so far as she could tell they were not talking of food. But whatever they were discussing she could feel the energy in their speech, and saw in her peripheral vision this same energy expressed in the animation of their faces and hands. I’m in Italy, thought Beth. I’m actually in Italy! The moment came with one of those sudden sucker punches of missing Cameron. Now that she was finally doing it – the O.E., the Grand Tour – she missed him like crazy, which was crazy, because after dilly-dallying for a year she’d been the one to break it up, precisely because she’d concluded that if she left him she wouldn’t miss what they had together, but if she stayed she was going to miss her life. All through the lockdowns and the border closures he had said ‘Sure, let’s travel’, but then the borders opened and … nothing. He’d moved on, he said, to another phase. He felt too old now to just travel around, he said. He wanted to do it later, after they’d had a family, after they’d paid off a house. Now, later; now, later … the debate had worn them out. She had decided for herself: now.
At Ventimiglia she got out and followed the crowd as the miniature ladies had instructed. It wasn’t so much following as being sucked into the current. She was swept along the platform, past armed polizia positioned at intervals along its length. Then the current sped up, the press of people thickened and the stream narrowed. She was being channelled towards an exit, a dozen steps descending. She was carried down, straight towards a wall. There was no way to stand aside, to refuse to be swept towards the three men and one woman standing there with their bullet-proof vests and their holstered revolvers, each cradling an assault rifle as protectively as they themselves must have been held in the arms of their mothers perhaps twenty years ago. She locked eyes with the young woman in her uniform with her guns, and it was like locking, just for that moment a steel clang, not human – but then the current made a sharp left turn in front of those scrutinising eyes and swept up another set of stairs, fanning out at last into the station foyer and across the concourse, out into the street and on towards the market.
The food stalls were so enticing that she went round twice before she settled on what to buy. Nothing from the grim-looking woman with the ash-laden cigarette stuck between her lips leaning over her display of runner beans. Not tongue or kidneys, not ham or sausages. There were olives and olive oil in the pantry at the Villa Soleil, so no to the olive man, and plenty of herbs in pots on the terrace, so not the basil plant with the enormous leaves either. She lingered by the flower stalls, but who for, so no to flowers. Back at one of the first stalls she’d passed, she picked out aubergines, tomatoes, mushrooms, courgettes, a lettuce and some nectarines. As she paid she mixed up her languages like an idiot – thanks, grazie, merci, ça va – but the man only laughed and wished her buona giornata. She bought chorizo, ravioli, a small pot of basil pesto, some Gorgonzola and a loaf of ciabatta. The really big bag she’d brought along was full to the brim. She hitched it to her shoulder and walked through the open-air part of the market for a view of the old town on the other side of the river.
No, she didn’t need a leather handbag or knee-high boots or a scarf with Frida Kahlo’s face on it. What she wouldn’t mind buying, if she could find one, was a summer dress, something light and cheap that would get her through the next month. She hadn’t realised how hot it would still be on the riviera in September. She wandered back, flicking through racks until she found one that would do. She tried it on in the makeshift curtained-off changing room. Kind of a sack, and a bit of a granny-print going on there, and it looked odd with her Nikes, but who cared. Cameron might have cared, there was a time when she’d have made an effort for Cam, but – the sucker punch surprised again – no need now. The dress was loose and light and cool; that was all that mattered. She left it on and repacked the carry bag with her jeans and tee shirt at the bottom and all the food on top. The bag bulged and the bread teetered. Next time she’d bring two really big bags. But the summery dress was a huge relief. It made her feel a little floaty, which may have been the reason that, strolling back through the food market, she paused again at the wall of flowers and pointed at the pink peonies. The woman smiled and lifted them from the bucket, water streaming, wrapped them in a cone of lime green paper and handed them across. Beth almost gave them straight back – they were too much, too big – a bunch almost as large as a toddler, and just about as awkward to carry with only one arm free. But they were perfect for the Villa Soleil – they were the same colour, for a start – and it suddenly felt like a sweet, private joke, it made her smile, to think of bringing a vase of these huge flowers into the same room as the miniature ladies. With lunch, she thought. Yes, she’d rustle them up a lovely fresh Ventimiglia-market lunch. She pulled out her phone and double-checked her return train ticket to Menton. Excellent. Just time for a quick coffee at one of the streetside cafés.
She made a beeline for a vacant outside table and commandeered both chairs, one for herself and one for her bag. She laid the green cone of peonies the length of the tabletop, letting their heads dangle free of the surface so as not to bruise the petals. She ordered a cappucino from the server, and sat back to watch the world go by. Watching the world go by, yes! At last, she actually was! She framed a selfie: the new summer dress, the bag stuffed with fresh produce, the huge peonies – oh wow, it was a kind of … what was it … perfection, a completion, a dream-come-true. Oh my god, she thought, look at me, actually doing it, actually in Italy! She’d post it later: Amazing market in Ventimiglia!
She smiled at the young man sitting alone at the next table, but he was staring into the middle distance. He was fidgety, nervous, distracted. All of a sudden he stood up and walked into the cafe, leaving a small black backpack under his table. He’s going to the toilet, thought Beth, that’s all. But he was so nervous-looking, and as he walked past he had patted his stomach, or not really his stomach – he had patted whatever it was he had packed and strapped around his waist, under his tee shirt. The shirt was stained and dirty. His jeans, too. His laces were grey. He wore no socks.
The server brought Beth’s cappuccino and Beth messed up her response – merci, grazie, d’accord, si – to the offer of chocolate dusting. She stirred the froth. She couldn’t take her eyes off the backpack. Shouldn’t she have mentioned it to the server? Shouldn’t she shout and warn? She didn’t want to create a fuss. Was she about to die for the sake of not making a fuss?
He was coming back. He wouldn’t come back if he was trying to blow the place up. But he would if he was a suicide bomber. He sat down at his table, so close to Beth. He leaned towards her, his anxious face. She held her breath. She couldn’t believe this was happening, this was it, this was how it would go. It’d be on the news, she’d be listed. Cameron would find out before that though, surely – no. No, he wouldn’t, her parents would. Cam wasn’t her next of kin any more.
The young man was signing more than he was speaking, and she realised he had even less Italian than her. He was holding out a cell phone and pointing to its cable input socket and even without words very clearly asking her if she had a phone charger with her (in that bulging overstocked bag of yours, perhaps?). Ah, non, desolée, said Beth, and she suddenly was, desolate, because what had she been thinking? She could see now how young he was, just nineteen or twenty, around the same age as her kid brother, and that whatever he had in the small black bag and strapped around his waist was the sum of his possessions. The server approached. The boy paid for his coffee, counting out the exact euros onto her tray. He held out his phone and signed his question again, gesturing into the cafe: May I recharge my phone here?
“No,” said the server, in English. Sharp, unfriendly. She walked away, his coins on her tray.
The expression that flashed over his face before he reined it in! His story came to Beth in a rush: he was one of the Lampedusa people. A week or ten days ago there had been an influx of boats – an assault, a declaration of war, the Italian Prime Minister had said – of makeshift, barely watertight boats launched from Tunisia, overloaded with human freight, eight thousand people fleeing Africa for Europe, the boats tipping and rocking, gunwale deep. All those people pressed so close. Dreams so heavy, pressing the little boats down, down into the dreamy silken sea.
Yes, he was one of those. Tunisian maybe. And he had made it to Ventimiglia, having just spent perhaps his last few precious euros on a coffee that he had hoped would win him the opportunity of charging his phone, that lifeline.
Stricken. That had been the look. And then he pulled himself together, repaired his expression, retrieved his backpack from under the table, stood, patted his waistband. Beth could tell he didn’t know in which direction to walk. But to hesitate was to mark himself out, so he stepped into the pedestrian traffic, plunged in. She almost followed him. Almost. But the longer she sat there undecided the more impossible it seemed that following him would lead to anything at all. She’d touch him on the elbow, would she, and he’d turn gratefully towards her and then, what, by virtue of her touch his phone would suddenly, miraculously, be fully charged? And on it a train ticket to Nice booked, paid for and confirmed? And he would be fully restored too, would thank her effusively in Arabic (which she would understand) (oh yes, and be able to respond with a fluent run of short, shy, self-deprecating pleasantries) and away he would bound, fit and lithe, heading for the train station, loping happily along the home stretch.
She couldn’t see him now. He’d been absorbed by the crowds. But if he was trying to get to the station, he had gone the wrong way. He would land up at the market instead, first the food stalls, then the clothing, shoes, bags and kitchenware. He would not get to the river without stepping past the young Black men offering their wares – handbags and watches mainly – from cloths spread directly on the ground. To whom did those young men return those fake products at the end of the long day? She imagined a van, into which everything would be reloaded at six pm to be driven away for safekeeping overnight. And the young men, stretching out their long limbs, arching backwards to ease the ache between their shoulder blades and at the base of their spines. To the river then, to wash, and somehow to eat some scratch meal before lying on those flattened cardboard boxes she’d glimpsed on the riverbanks beneath the bridge. Their home stretch, you might say.
Beth signalled the server. Cash or card? Cash, said Beth. She rummaged in her wallet and found a ten euro note. When the server returned with the change on a platter, Beth sifted through and left the smaller coins as a tip.
She wove between the tables, holding the peonies ahead like an oversized Olympic torch, going through crab-wise in order not to bump her fellow patrons with her overloaded shopping bag, the ciabatta see-sawing. Excusez-moi, pardon, merci all the way to the edge, and then onward to the station to catch the 11.05, which would get her back to the Villa Soleil in time for lunch.
On the concourse outside the station, a woman sat slumped on a bench. Five or six young men were hovering around her. Sudanese? Senegalese? Ghanian? One of the men bent and removed the woman’s flip-flops. They weren’t flip-flops, Beth realised, they were soft-soled slippers with a pink fluffy over-foot strap. Another of the men presented a shoe box, and a third removed its lid, removing a pair of white runners which he placed next to the slippers. The first man knelt at his wife’s bare feet – Beth was sure, suddenly, this was his wife – and lifted one by cupping his hand under her heel. It was very gentle, the way he offered her foot to the new shoe, the laces as loose as he could make them. Very gentle the way he began to ease her swollen toes into the opening.
Beth slowed, turned, backtracked a few steps. But she was still dithering, undecided, stupidly uncertain. And so it was the peonies she deposited on the woman’s lap, and not the food. Not the food and not even a few coins for food.
The woman looked up briefly, time enough to lock eyes, time enough for that turn of the key to drive home with a solid clunk the facts of the matter. There was time enough for Beth to see the woman tip the peonies off her lap, to see them discarded on the ground next to the pink fluffy slippers.
J’en suis desolée, whispered Beth. If she was going to catch the train, if she was going to get back to France in time to make a nice big lunch for the miniature ladies at the Villa Soleil, she would have to dash.
Established authors, aspiring talents, and complete nobodies wishing to submit short stories for consideration in ReadingRoom can email a story on Word Document, generally not exceeding 3000 words, to stephen11@xtra.co.nz.
