Timoleon Vieta Come Home by Dan Rhodes

Author:Dan Rhodes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Canongate Books
Published: 2009-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

GIUSEPPE, OR LEONARDO DA VINCI

Timoleon Vieta killed and ate rats and rabbits and old, slow hares. He scavenged from bins outside houses, turning them over in the middle of the night and eating as much as he could before being chased away by angry people. When he wasn’t rattling bins he was almost like a ghost, slinking along barely noticed, his skinny belly close to the ground. But he carried on heading home. Tired, hungry and alone.

Aurora was sitting at one end of the bench, two hundred and twenty pages into a book about spinal injuries that she had found in the local library. It had been published nineteen years earlier, two years before she was born. She knew a lot of it to be out of date, but it held her attention and she made occasional notes in a pad. She was hoping to go to medical school.

Sitting at the other end of the bench was a boy she recognised. She had spent many hours with her grandmother discussing the terrible things he was said to have done. The old lady had told her that he had been in trouble for small things, but that everybody knew him to be involved in much more than those forgivable juvenile crimes for which he had been caught red-handed. She had heard reports of stolen motor bikes, fights, vandalism and all kinds of unsavoury misdemeanours that she was loath to tell her granddaughter about, but told her just the same. He was, she would say, a slippery one – he seemed to be able to make himself invisible for as long as it took to get away with causing trouble. Aurora had been instructed to stay away from him.

He was watching a house across the street. Having heard that the family who lived there was due to attend a funeral in Montevardi the following day, he was waiting for them to leave so he could break in through their kitchen window and take whatever he could find. He wasn’t expecting much, probably just a video recorder, some CDs and a bit of jewellery, but he was sure it would just about be worth his while. He had a feel for these things. They seemed to be taking forever to pack their cars. At least three generations were charging backwards and forwards.

He noticed the girl waving a piece of paper in his direction.

He took it. On it she had written, What’s the time? He showed her his watch, and went back to looking at the family of mourners interminably packing their two cars. He had heard that the funeral was to be for a nine-year-old girl who had died of some kind of blood disease.

He sensed another piece of paper being held in his direction. Irritated by the distraction, and wishing the girl would go away, he snatched it from her hand. It read, Thank you. He stuffed it into his shirt pocket.

Having filled the car with boxes and bags, instead of simply

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