Also by Niccolò Ammaniti
Steal You Away
I’m Not Scared
The CrossroadsLet the Games BeginAnna
Niccolò Ammaniti was born in Rome in 1966. He is the author of six novels translated into English and two short story collections. Several of his novels have been adapted for film, including Steal You Away, which was longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, The Crossroads, winner of the Premio Strega Prize 2007, and the international bestseller I'm Not Scared, which won the prestigious Italian Viareggio-Repaci Prize for Fiction and has been translated into thirty-five languages. Kyle Doust studied Italian literature and linguistics at La Trobe University, Melbourne. She has lived in Italy since 1998.
First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published by Canongate in 2012
Copyright © Niccolò Ammaniti, 2010
Copyright © Kylee Doust
The moral right of the author has been asserted
First published in Italy in 2010 as Io e te by Giulio Einaudi editore, Torino
Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright materials. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of the book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 85786 198 6
eISBN 978 0 85786 199 3
Typeset in Van Dijck by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd, Falkirk, Stirlingshire
And this one’s for my mother and father
In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, ‘The Crack-Up’
But can you save me?
Come on and save me
If you could save me
From the ranks of the freaks
Who suspect they could never love anyone.
Aimee Mann, ‘Save Me’
Contents
Cividale del Friuli: 12 January 2010
Cividale del Friuli: 12 June 2010
Batesian mimicry occurs when a harmless animal species takes advantage of its similarity to a toxic or poisonous species that inhabits the same territory, imitating its colouring and behaviour. In this way, the imitating species is associated in the predators’ minds with the dangerous one, increasing its chances of survival.
Cividale del Friuli
12 January 2010
‘Coffee?’
A waitress is studying me over the top of her glasses. She’s holding a silver coffee pot.
I put out my cup. ‘Thank you.’
She fills it up to the brim. ‘Are you here for the fair?’
I shake my head. ‘What fair?’
‘The horse fair.’ She looks at me. She’s waiting for me to tell her why I happen to be in Cividale del Friuli. In the end she pulls out a notebook. ‘What’s your room number?’
I show her the key. ‘One hundred and nineteen.’
She writes down the number. ‘If you’d like any more coffee you can serve yourself from the buffet.’
‘Thanks.’
‘My pleasure.’
As soon as she moves away I pull a piece of paper folded into four out of my wallet. I flatten it on the table.
My sister Olivia wrote it ten years ago, the twenty-fourth of February 2000.
I was fourteen years old and she was twenty-three.
Rome
Ten years earlier
1
On the evening of the eighteenth of February 2000 I went to bed early and dropped off straight away, but during the night I woke up and wasn’t able to get back to sleep.
At ten minutes past six, with the feather quilt pulled up underneath my chin, I was breathing with my mouth open.
The house was quiet. The only sounds I could hear were the rain tapping against the window, my mother walking backwards and forwards between the bedroom and the bathroom upstairs, and the air going in and out of my throat. Soon she would come and wake me up to take me to the meeting with the others. I turned on the cricket-shaped lamp that sat on the bedside table.
The green light painted the slice of the room where my backpack sat, swollen with clothes, beside the waterproof jacket and the bag with my ski boots and skis.
Between my thirteenth and fourteenth birthdays I’d had a growth spurt, as if they’d put fertiliser on me, and I was taller than my peers. My mother said that two carthorses had stretched me. I spent a lot of time in front of the mirror studying my white skin stained with freckles, the hairs on my legs. On the top of my head grew a hazel bush that had ears sticking out of