Every Day for the Rest of His Life

Once, in the early eighties, when I lived in Italy for a few months that should in all have killed me, I saw a woman keel over and vomit onto her child. I was sitting at an outdoor restaurant, waiting for a man on whom I was then financially dependent, when I saw it happen. She was standing in profile to my table, quite a distance away, both hands on the bar of her pram, and she simply reeled forward and vomited quite cleanly into the bassinet, approximately where the baby’s head would have been. From my vantage, the whole thing was soundless. It happened as if on a frieze. She brought up two fully realised streams of dark-coloured vomit before a bystander pulled her away.

It was a teenage boy who intervened, or he looked like a teenage boy – shaggy, rangy, not yet grown into his own proportions, if he ever would. He sat her down by a nearby fountain. An older woman with feathered hair and sunglasses rushed to the pram, which was now sitting out in the middle of the square. She pushed her glasses up on her head and looked down into the bassinet, casting about her in alarm. I guessed the teenager as a local, the woman at the pram as a tourist. The mother I couldn’t, still can’t, guess. She was heavy-set, wearing a floral dress that went down to her ankles, and as she sat on the rim of the fountain with her knees childishly apart, the boy smoothed her long hair up out of her mouth and I saw her pugilistic face, eyes rolling wild and blotches of rioting blood shining through her pale skin. It was a hot summer.

An old couple was sitting near me, taking breakfast. The woman noticed first.

‘What’s going on over there?’

‘Where’s that?’

‘The fountain.’

The old man snorted. ‘You know well I can’t see that far. You tell me. Is it violent?’

They were British, with estuary accents. I’d seated myself near them intentionally; I was looking for people unlikely to engage me in conversation, and they’d barely seemed interested in talking to each other. I was facing away from them, but remembered from a summary glance as I entered that the man was wide and jowly, his skin pocked and dumplingish with age. The old woman, contrarily – as she seemed contrary to him in every respect – looked quite flash, plum-stained lips and Fanny Cradock eyebrows, the sort of bungalow duchess who might capitalise well on her innate camp if she were only aware of it.

‘I think there was a fight,’ she said. ‘There’s a woman restrained by the fountain, and a woman looking distressed in the square with a pram.’

‘A pram?’ The old man picked at his plate; I heard the scrape and clink of cutlery. I, too, was nursing a piece of cake – my man would pick up the bill when he arrived, in requital for whatever vulgarities he wanted to say to and about me today, in public, in broad daylight, in English and even louder in Italian, just because he could. ‘You think a fight over the baby?’

‘Big fat woman. Maybe trying to steal it.’ She said this as if it were a syllogism. ‘Can’t imagine how she thought it would go.’

The feathered-hair lady dug in her travel backpack up to both elbows while her two children – twin boys, I think – stood behind her in distress. She was the good sort, I thought. She’d come out of this to applause and doves. Around her, a crowd of non-heroes was massing: fidgeting, chatting, scandalised by their own uselessness. The woman shouted instructions to a bystander, who raced away.

‘Should we get a waiter to call the police?’ the old man said.

‘I’m sure someone’s doing it.’

The old man didn’t press the issue. The boy was nursing the mother with a bottle of water, spilling it down her chin and wetting her collar. Her face was difficult to look at, hyperventilating or fighting back further heaves, her expression unbearably raw, a rent in the world. Another man sat down next to her – a man I’d recognised, by some complex of sympathetic cues, as the feathered-hair lady’s husband.

‘Wait – the crowd is helping her,’ the old woman exclaimed. ‘Oh, I don’t understand.’

‘Are you sure she was the one trying to steal it?’

They weren’t going to get there, which would have been fine with me, but the old woman’s misnarration threatened to muddle the events themselves. I wanted to follow this. ‘The woman vomited,’ I cut in, carefully feminising my voice.

The old man whirled around. ‘What?’

‘Onto the baby?’ the old woman demanded. ‘The woman at the pram?’

‘The woman on the steps. It’s her pram. The boy got her away.’

‘What? Who’s the woman by the pram, then?’

I wished immediately I’d said nothing. I didn’t dare look at them. I’d done my make-up in a rush that morning; I was certain my foundation was pilling on my upper lip. I was wearing sunglasses, but it wouldn’t be enough. I was amazed I’d gotten a table.

‘You saw this?’ the old woman shouted. ‘Lord!’

The feathered-hair lady had found the wipes she was looking for. Wincing, with vigorous movements, she was trying to clean the inside of the carriage and, presumably, the baby. The mother, splayed against the fountain, was speaking loudly to her and the onlookers. I couldn’t discern her words, if they were in English at all, and I couldn’t place her tone: I thought I heard sarcasm, spite, but it was difficult to imagine her bold enough. We never heard the baby’s crying. Either it didn’t travel far enough, or it was somehow not occurring.

The old man turned to me again. ‘Did it look like the heat?’

‘What do you bloody mean “look like the heat”, Harold. What does throwing up look like?’

He snapped his fingers at me. ‘I’m talking to you. What was she doing before she threw up?’

‘Don’t you understand?’ the old woman exclaimed, unfurling in full Katharine Hepburn. ‘The woman’s a drunk!’

I hadn’t seen her, and that’s what I told them. But I had seen the thinness, the red colour, of her vomit. The three-bottle Merlot sickness that brings you running to the hotel sink, only sometimes in time. I wondered where my man was. I itched the arch of my foot under the tasteful tan slingbacks he’d picked out for me. I still have them.

‘She has the look, doesn’t she?’ the old woman fumed.

The old man hushed her. ‘Could we suspend our judgement a moment? None of us knows anything.’

‘You can’t even see her!’ she cried. I was caught between irritations: at her monotonous shrillness, at her husband’s credulity. ‘We do need to call the police. She’s going to get the better of them – they’re going to give it back to her.’ She shouted into the restaurant. ‘Telefono! Un telefono, pronto!’

The feathered-hair lady lifted the baby from the bassinet. She jogged it gently in her arms with the practised rhythm of a true mother. The woman detained on the fountain tried to force her way to her feet; by force, they sat her down again. A ripple of new tension ran through the crowd. The boy who was holding her, having for a moment thought himself a loose appendage of the situation, was reminded he had her arm in his grip. The husband, who had not previously been helping with restraint, pinned her hand to the concrete bench and looked at his wife – she stared back, petrified. Only the mother’s face, now, held resolve; only she seemed certain of the situation’s requirements.

‘Can we weigh our possibilities here?’

‘The police can “weigh possibilities”. Mothers know. Why do people get drunk? The courage for atrocity! She could’ve been about to drown it!’

I’d created a monster. The mother, bile still glossy on her chin, continued to hold forth to the bystanders: a soliloquy to arrayed judges. The bystander who’d earlier run off returned with blankets piled to his chin. He pulled soiled sheets from the bassinet and piled the new ones in, punching them into the corners.

But the old couple were no longer paying attention. The old man must have been a lawyer. He proceeded against his wife in an oratory that was steady, convincing and wholly false. ‘This is a woman at a tourist statuary with a child at eight in the morning. Consider: a dizzy spell. Consider: morning sickness. Heat. On the balance of probabilities, it is quite implausible that she’s drunk.’

‘It’s not implausible,’ I interjected, without thinking.

‘Unlikely, then.’

‘Not that, either.’

Again he swivelled his whole body to talk to the back of my head. ‘Oh, too-roo. You’re a mother as well, I suppose.’

I had to laugh. ‘No.’

The mother focused her shouting on the feathered-hair lady, who shrank further in horror. Good girl, I thought. She’d properly identified the threat: it wasn’t the boys holding her down, not the crowd, but the moral centre she had to subdue. When you try to make people understand, they roll over you. Her only chance was force. I didn’t understand her. I wasn’t interested to. I wasn’t interested in understanding the old woman. I wasn’t interested in understanding myself. I couldn’t bear to watch any longer. I looked down at the soft sunken body of my cake on the plate.

The old couple went on bickering about justice, the assumption of guilt or innocence, the child protection system in Italy. The old woman went on about trauma: a child is defenceless, it’s deformed by everything, even if it were somehow an isolated bender the child was already damaged irreparably. The old man, who I’d by now gathered was not as concerned with caution as with inaction, cried back that a child forgets, an infant is forgetting itself, a hard little nub of matter that’ll pinball through much worse on its way to adulthood, and anyway wouldn’t its mother hauled away by polizia leave even deeper marks, and—

‘He will remember,’ I said. ‘He is damaged irreparably. But only if it’s out of the ordinary. Her only hope’s to vomit on him every day for the rest of his life.’

A waiter, bearing a telephone, breezed in past me before they could respond. ‘Ecco, signora.’ He left it lightly on their table and sped away.

The old woman started in. ‘What’s that supposed to mean? Are you insane?’

‘Forget it.’ I needed a cigarette. My man would be here any moment with a pack, a light, a crushing kiss. ‘Call the police.’

‘What kind of a joke is that? Who are you?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Who are you?’

‘The baby’s a girl,’ the old man said suddenly.

The old woman stopped dead. ‘What?’

‘The baby’s a girl.’ The old man cleared his throat. ‘She said “he”. But the baby’s a girl, I think. Look.’

And we all did look, for the first time in some time, back towards the square. The blankets lay in a squat pile on the ground. Though dyed much of the way through by the red vomit – now darkened in the sun, like dried blood – they were, indeed, a sugary pastel pink. A girl’s set. The feathered-hair woman gathered her children around her, the husband and teenage boy gawped from the steps of the fountain, as the mother trundled towards us across the cobbles, her pram reclaimed. It jerked and bounced alarmingly as she drove it with one hand, but she didn’t seem concerned. She drank from a second water bottle of unknown provenance, crushing it in her hand, pressing every bead of moisture out of it and into her large pink body. Her eyes were wide open. She was going to be fine. I knew it. She was armed and ready for anything, from now until forever.