the brim. We have to move fast before Michael tries to light up again. We tip the cigarette packet into the water. The cigarettes take up the basin like felled tree trunks on a river. They gradually fall apart, shavings of paper and shredded leaves. Giulio pulls out the plug. The cigarettes clog the hole and gargle. Machance is walking by outside. We don’t have long. The cigarettes won’t go down. I push and prod them unsuccessfully into the plug hole. Then I open the lavatory. They’ll have to go down there instead. We drop them in the bowl and pull the chain, a lengthy throttled flush. Some cigarettes float back up to the surface and linger for a while, others go straight down and never return. Then we realise we still have the packet itself. We drop it into the loo as well. With the brush we crush it up and dilute the water with blue antiseptic. Clean smells drench the bathroom and the packet vanishes.
They haven’t noticed that we left the sitting-room. Duccio is on his own. No one’s patted him on the head. Ama says that we have to protect Duccio. It’s not often that people are born like him. Not even the photographer who came and took pictures of him in his suit could get it right. ‘He’s too good-looking,’ Ama sighs and no one can do him justice. ‘Beautiful children aren’t always beautiful adults though,’ so we have to be careful to appreciate it now. Her friends do. Ama has one friend who kisses us hello and Duccio swears she once touched his lips with her tongue. It was like a warm, wet piece of ham. Giulio and I don’t understand. He has a nose and eyes and mouth like us, but they always look at him, the same way as they look at Ama.
Michael goes to light another cigarette. He pulls the ashtray off the window sill. Giulio tugs at my sleeve. We sit down and do something. Something nothing. I try and think calmly, smoothly. Michael searches from one pocket to another, knocking his head to remember. He gets up and looks in his coat, in Joan’s bag, in his trousers. He’s frantic and he doesn’t like it when everyone carries on talking. He has to find his cigarettes. Now! It has to be now! Joan tries to calm him, but Michael says, ‘The cigarettes can’t have just got up and walked out of the room on their own.’
Machance comes to the door and coughs a little to announce that the loo downstairs is blocked. If we need a lavatory, we’d better go upstairs and be careful not to use too much water, as there’s only a small tank. Ama and Pado don’t understand how the loo could be blocked. It was working ten minutes ago. Lavatories don’t simply block like that. ‘Another thing to fix for my mother before we leave,’ Ama worries. Pado apologises to the guests and fetches some tools from the boot of the car. He begins hacking away at the tap behind the lavatory drain with a spanner, then a hammer. Michael is like a dog, rushing, searching. Pado, with his legs poking out from behind taps, tries to prise the lavatory pipe open. Giulio and I know he’ll never make it. Machance has never opened her pipes and there is rust all around the house. In her bedroom there is a photograph of Grand Maurice shaded with so much dust that it looks like a hoover filter with an old face in the middle. I must never think of what Grand Maurice’s face is like now, dredged from the lake and swaddled in weeds, sealed in his tomb.
Then the pipe loosens, with Pado suddenly saying, ‘What’s this?’
He’s about to pick it up, when Ama warns: ‘Don’t touch it, it’s disgusting!’
She hands him a plastic cup. We always have them ready in the repair kit. He scoops up a lump of shredded matter.
‘Put it down Gaspare, please! It’s revolting,’ Ama fusses.
Pado is not so sure. He points the cup towards the light and swivels it in the palm of his hand.
‘Looks like vegetable with bits of paper.’
Michael hasn’t calmed down. ‘I could swear I had them. I had them there in the sitting-room!’ He squints into the cup of shredded mass and then looks again. He asks for a screwdriver or something from Ama.
He picks around inside the cup. ‘That’s strange!’
He extracts a little white paper. It has disintegrated, but he knows it’s a cigarette filter. He asks Pado to have a look inside the pipe and he scours it with a rod. Giulio and I are just retreating when a heap of filters comes out in an avalanche of matted tobacco. Michael is speechless.
Joan says, ‘How did they get there?’ and that’s when I’m thinking Michael’s lucky to be alive, to have avoided the tumours, otherwise he wouldn’t even be able to speak.
Michael is so angry that he starts packing up his things. He puts his coat on and tells Joan they’re off. Pado attempts to sort things out. He proposes to go and buy some cigarettes. There’s no point wondering how they got there, he’ll pop into town and get some more. We have to stop him! He can’t just go and buy more. We can’t let Michael die.
I shout: ‘He has to stop!’
Michael is astounded, ‘What! You little brat.’
Ama is so embarrassed. Pado is stunned. He ushers me out of the room. ‘You can’t do things like that! Those cigarettes didn’t belong to you!’
I call for Ama. She glares at me across the room, offended, disappointed. She shakes her head: ‘Jean-Pio, how could you? I can’t believe it.’
Michael is gesticulating at us. Pado gently steers me towards our bedroom. He asks me how he’s going to explain all this to his guests, and locks the door behind him. From the bedroom, I can hear everyone arguing and apologising. Giulio is trying to tell me something through the locked door. Pado yanks him away. I have to be left alone, otherwise I won’t learn.
There’s nothing to do in the bedroom. I gaze out at the farms beyond. There are cows scattered everywhere. On the drive, there is a little white car shooting off with Michael and Joan inside. I can’t see their heads from here, but I want to tell Michael that I tried my best to save him. Now he’s going to buy more cigarettes and Joan is going to collapse when he’s gone with swinging lumps of cancer strangling his throat. I lie on the bed and stare at the ceiling coming and going, shrinking down on me until the room pushes back its colours. I get up and pace round the bed. I shake the door from time to time. I look at the cows in the fields. I can’t even count them because the sixth or seventh sometimes slips away and then runs back and looks like the others. I feel dizzy, even without the motion of the car, the solid stillness of these four walls marching down on me. I have to get out. I start hammering at the door. There’s no reply. I don’t want to get a headache in here, not here, on my own. I fight against painful thoughts and images, creeping into me because they know that I’m locked in a room with no way out. I kick at the door again and fall on the bed. I breathe like Ama does when she’s upset. One, two, three, and out. I must stop a headache from coming. One, two, three …
There’s a knock at the door. It’s Machance. She wants to know why the door is locked. I say Pado has the key and it’s my fault because I flushed Michael’s cigarettes down the loo. She sits down on the carpet on the other side of the door. Through the wood, I imagine her gently pulling out the hairs from her chin. A soft sound like a blade of grass sliding from the earth.
Machance tells me she doesn’t know what’s happening to our family. Always tired. Always travelling. And now me misbehaving. ‘It’s really not what Ama needs. She’s already at the end of her tether.’ When Machance was young, she says, things were different, you had to be strong. There were no televisions or radios or cars. You couldn’t just switch on some music to brighten up your day, or jump in a car to have a change of scenery. In those days you had to have your own little television screen in your head to click into, turn off this, turn on that. But that was long ago. Now nothing is the same anyway, since Grand Maurice drowned in the lake in France.
She tells me that Grand Maurice looked a little like me. He had hair that you couldn’t keep down and he never stopped walking and thinking. From morning till evening, he pounded up and down the countryside. That’s why, one day, about four years ago, he set out for a stroll and got his foot caught in a jagged rabbit trap. At the time, Machance and Grand Maurice were living in their house in France and farmers often laid traps in the meadows and woods for game. But Grand Maurice had forgotten, because that was the way he used to walk, head in the air and eyes stuck to the sky. The trap sliced his ankle and clasped