Never the Wind by Francesco Dimitri

Author:Francesco Dimitri
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags:  
Publisher: Titan

* * *

The phone rang at the time Ada should have been swinging by. Mum picked up and then called my name.

Ada was on the other end. ‘Can you talk?’ she asked under her breath.

Mum had returned to the kitchen table, where she was filling a pot with coffee. ‘Yeah, it’s beautiful weather,’ I said.

‘Just listen, then. I’m not coming this morning. I’m preparing some stuff for later. I’ll come and get you tonight. You wanted a bonfire, we’ll get a bonfire. Can’t give you an exact time, just wait for me on the porch after your family’s gone to bed, okay? Can you do that?’

My heart was drumming. ‘I don’t see why not.’

‘Get your towel,’ Ada said. ‘Your guitar too. It’s not a fire without a guitar.’

* * *

I am putting order where there was none, organising a story, a fiction of sorts, events that in real life bled into one another with no apparent rhyme or reason. I am sure to be making minor mistakes, misremembering facts, omitting details, perhaps forcing the hand here and there for the sake of clarity, of rhythm (would you be able to repeat beat by beat chats you had twenty and more years ago?). It is small stuff. The crux of the matter is that these events did happen, more or less in the order I recount here, more or less in the world we deem real. That summer our world behaved like a dream, thus showing, I believe, its true nature.

On the night of the bonfire I stole back to the porch after Mum and Dad had retired to their room, as I did most nights, only this time I wore trunks beneath my cargo shorts, and left behind my book to take my guitar and beach towel instead. I eased into the swing, sat the guitar on my lap, and waited. The rocking, the breeze, the call of the hoopoe: everything was mundane and everything was a portent. I was excited, bursting with anticipation. I’d heard, from Ferdi, stories of bonfires on the beach. I’d heard stories of girls.

I prayed the righteous man wouldn’t come, wouldn’t spoil this for me. When steps rustled the gravel, my heart sank.

‘Hey,’ Ada whispered. ‘It’s me.’

I had been expecting the whir of mechanical wings. ‘Where’s your bike?’ I asked.

‘I walked. Bikes are noisy.’

I would never hear the whir again. We get to know what our first times are, but seldom our last.

We tiptoed down the drive, and it seemed to me that our feet were impossibly heavy, that the friction of flip-flops on gravel would wake Mum, Dad, everybody within ten miles. As we approached the gate, the beastly roar of cars jumped at us. In the week of Ferragosto, traffic never slept.

‘We can’t go the usual route,’ Ada said.

I’d guessed that much: kids out and about late at night were not an unusual sight in Portodimare, but I was a highly recognisable kid, and people gossiping were not an unusual sight either. We walked on the main road for a short while, then Ada turned right onto another dirt track.

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