Nonfiction by Julie Myerson

Author:Julie Myerson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2022-05-26T00:00:00+00:00

Three

WHEN YOU’RE STILL SMALL ENOUGH that we aren’t yet tied to school holidays and, for a month or two, your father is between jobs, we rent an apartment in a foreign city for the summer. Picking up our lives and – simply because we can – living them somewhere else for a while.

In the mornings I do my work, while he takes you to the playground. Then we all eat lunch under the awning on the terrace with its view of the slow green river. In the afternoons we put you down for a nap, leaving you on your bed with some toys and books and crayons. Sometimes you just play and sing to yourself but if we’re lucky you fall asleep – and then we make love very quietly, careful to smother our cries, keeping the door open just a crack, so we’ll hear you if you call out.

It does feel very exciting, stealing pleasure in this way. The enforced silence, the hum of the air conditioning, the eerie emptiness of the terrace outside – and your father, suddenly and tantalisingly unfamiliar to me, with his warm thighs and rough, eager tongue and the scent of lunchtime tomatoes and wine and the heat of the city still on him.

Sometimes, if we let you sleep too long – for it’s very tempting to doze off on those cool sheets afterwards – you wake up grumpy and red-cheeked, your hair stuck sweatily to your face. And this isn’t good – it means you won’t sleep so well that night – and then we’re annoyed with ourselves for letting it happen.

Though later I look back on this with astonishment: is it really possible that we ever worried about such things?

In the evenings, as the air cools and the pavements are drowned in shadow, we walk to a trattoria, all three of us holding hands, laughing and singing, your father and I swinging you along between us. We play the game of counting cats, sometimes dogs. One time, I think we even count nuns.

But one night, moving through those streets at dusk, we find an old lady. Her clothes are ragged, her shoes just pieces of cloth held together with tape, and she’s bent over almost double and, with what look like a pair of tweezers, is picking up cigarette butts from between the ancient paving stones. For a while we all stand in silence, watching as she pinches each one up with her tweezers before making her slow way over to a low wall and laying it down.

I don’t know how long she’s been working, but already the wall is covered in piles and piles of these butts. Though at any moment – as your father points out – someone could come along and knock them all off. Just one careless sweep of an arm, that’s all it would take –

I don’t know what happens next. Probably your father lifts you up onto his shoulders and we continue on to the little

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