Tourist Trap

Helen had been feeling a break with reality for a decade or more by the time she set foot on the plane. It felt to her like a consistent state of dissociation, as though always out of phase. Everything around her that didn’t feel like a straight-out lie at least felt like a forgery. Every movie, book and record a counterfeit. Every conversation, relationship and event a photocopy. The holiday, then, was designed to realign her senses, to ground her in some way. But it took her no time to realise that travelling just replaced the sense of the inauthentic with the sense of the uncanny: the smell of aeroplane plastic; food served in satchels; miniature bottles of bourbon that she used as a carrier fluid for Codeine and Valium to get her through her flight; the little vent she was constantly reaching up to, adjusting it so that the jet of air pointed over her nose and mouth in an attempt to re-direct the aerosols she imagined haunted the cabin. The brief conversations she had with the passengers next to her felt contained to that same uncanny world, and were all isolated to infuriatingly standard topics: food quality, flight length, the relative merits of the aisle and/or window seat, stories about origin and/or destination.

But it’s not like she made it easy on herself. She spent most of the five-hour stopover in Dubai in the Winston tobacco lounge, chain-smoking and reading a novel that made a claim to representing contemporary millennial living – a book that even its publisher seemed to take little interest in, since a typo appeared on every second page. She bathed in the tobacco smoke, brought the scent onto the final seven-hour leg to Milan, and watched two Oscar-bait films in a row expecting to laugh at their lofty ambitions. Instead, she watched them listless, confused and irritated.

She switched to the digital display of the flight path, and was met with hyperreality: the animation demonstrating clearly to those watching in the silent cabin that the pilot was taking a concerted dog leg around the south of Gaza. She understood then why her ‘holiday’ was feeling so surreal. A passenger flight was the ultimate forgery: a time to feel deliberately disconnected from the happenings of terranean life while gliding above it all. No one around her seemed to notice their location in the real world. Vacationers, travellers, businesspeople: all seeking escapes from their individual realities, all voiding their responsibilities in aerial limbo, all looking straight ahead and avoiding a glance out the east-facing windows at what might be seen on the horizon. For them the on-screen map was nothing more than an CGI graphic, another piece of numbing entertainment. And just as Helen felt the need to saysomething about this disconnection to her neighbour, the cabin lights dimmed. And within minutes, she was asleep again, catching snippets of a movie where Jeffrey Wright learned to love his literary nemesis in the process of judging a prize. 

—

Helen awoke as the plane descended. Tinny announcements came through her headphones in English, then Arabic, then Italian, and soon she landed on ground in Milan with a jolt. She waited to disembark, and then passed through a security process so lax that the guard who stamped her passport didn’t even look up from his booth. She followed a family of tired locals onto the Malpensa Express, trusting that the train went only to the city centre. She sat down with her bag on her lap, felt the carriage lurch, and then they were coasting along the tracks.

The train headed along an exclusive line that cut across the north-western edges of the city. She was still foggy from the Valium, out of whack from jet lag, and felt suddenly like she was on a theme-park ride. Staring out the window half-asleep, she was forced to contend with tricks of the mind. Her brain incorrectly filed all that she saw on the train ride along mismatched memories. At one point, the shrubbery on the side of the tracks made her believe she was whipping past the Glenfield tip. In another clearing, a row of factories looked to her like she was approaching an out-of-time Redfern, long before the warehouses had become co-working spaces. A yellow-brick apartment block looked like that of her first boyfriend’s flat in Liverpool. A chill ran along her spine. She did not feel a sense of freedom from her old life on this train. She felt a sense of foreboding.

This holiday might have been the first time Helen had been overseas of her own volition. As far as she could remember, she’d only ever travelled because her partner or band had wanted to. That, added to the fact that she was more-or-less bankrupting herself on this trip, gave the holiday a sense of importance, as though the journey would need to culminate in something in order to prove its utility and justify her choice. What that thing might be, though, Helen didn’t know. An epiphany maybe. A self-discovery that would snap her out of the funk that she may have always been in. In the weeks since she booked it, she had been treating this holiday as though her whole life had led to it, where everything up until now – bad jobs, bad family, bad relationships, bad bands – had been mere distractions from finding her true calling that, for reasons that were now beyond her, she had thought might be found by spending three weeks in Milan. She could already see that she had placed too much importance on this brief foray to another country.

The train continued. Visions of her past made way for new forms; a villa with a garden replete with an assortment of painted concrete statues made her feel as though she were passing a Fellini set. One abandoned concrete structure had no parallels in her memory, previously a church or a town hall or a social centre: dystopian in its long-lost glory. She passed beaten-down cafeterias and tobacconists, embedded in streets and alleyways that butted up to the tracks. Grape vines climbed up one pastel-coloured apartment block after the other. People on domestic platforms paid no mind as the express shot past them. The train slowed into the city.

Helen took a deep breath and willed herself to let go of all her failings in Sydney (she’d been dumped and evicted) and remind herself of a simple and practical reason for why she was there: to visit her former housemate, a man named Rocco. He had been a part of her last attempt at rising from the ashes, and, she hoped, would guide her through this one too. 

—

Helen spotted Rocco standing on the Cadorna Station platform, towering over the commuters that surrounded him. It didn’t seem like he’d seen her, but just as she began to haul her luggage off the carriage, she looked up to see that one of his hands was already on her luggage handle, then his free arm smothering her in an embrace and his voice bellowing a welcome to her temporary home. She mumbled a tired thank you with her face pressed against his chest.

She followed his lead through the station to the metro line, where they waited under a dot matrix display for a train that, when it arrived from the darkness of a tunnel, pushed a burst of air onto the platform. Her hair blew across her face in the gust. Rocco stepped onto the train in front of her, and Helen noticed in that moment that he’d changed drastically since they’d lived together. There was some memory of his musculature hidden underneath his new layers of flesh. His stomach now hung over his belt buckle. He’d shaved his head, ridding himself of his characteristic mess of hair. His hairline crept up and away from his face, a misshapen circle of skin gleaming under fluorescent lights on the back of his skull. He’d pierced his left earlobe, a gold-plated sleeper resting within it. His forearms, which were once golden brown from day after day of scaffolding in the Sydney sun, were now an off-white. She saw something beautiful in his physical decline, this transformation that had occurred since he’d retired from his failed rugby league career, as though he’d devolved from athletic form to human form, and was more relatable as a result. She had the thought: ‘Rocco walks among us’.

‘Where are we going again?’ she asked, holding onto a pole as the train jostled through the underground tunnels of the metro network. He quoted a suburb name that meant nothing to her, then paused as the announcer repeated the next train stop in Italian and then in English.

‘I was trying to get you an entire flat,’ he continued, ‘but it didn’t work out. You’ll still have a room of your own, though. You’ll be in the spare room of Silvia and Antonio from my band. It’s real celebrity stuff, Helen, you get to meet two members of I Pentiti.’ Helen had barely listened to the tape Rocco had posted her of his band, I Pentiti, and had only seen snippets online of what they were like live. But he spoke to her as though she were intimately familiar with the band’s approach to punk music, sketching the details of some controversy that had sent them into a short hiatus. He added something about their ‘anti-everyone schtick’ having ‘gone too far’, which she couldn’t quite comprehend. ‘Silvia’s cooked something for us,’ he said, changing the subject. ‘We’ll have a small dinner together, it’s good, she’s a great cook. This person I’m seeing, Arianna, she was gonna come too, but it doesn’t look like it now.’

‘She’s your girlfriend?’

‘Some days,’ he said simply. ‘Depends how she’s feeling. We’re in a rough patch, which is actually bad timing, because my plan was that I’d stay at hers for a few weeks and you could have my apartment. Doesn’t matter though. You’ll really like Silvia actually, she’s like an Italian version of you. I would’ve told you about her in Sydney I’m sure…’

‘I remember,’ Helen said. She recalled a time when he’d drunkenly admitted to having fallen in love with Silvia before he’d left Milan the first time, later proceeding to describe her as his ‘best friend in Italy’ as though his initial admission had never been spoken aloud. ‘She plays drums, she’s from Napoli; very much your kind of person. Only thing is that she’s busy looking after her baby most of the time now, so she’s not like she used to be.’

‘Wait, there’s a baby in the house?’

‘Yeah, but it’s a good baby,’ Rocco said, squinting as though counting the months, in a manner that was unusually awkward for him. ‘It’s probably one by now? It was born…I can’t remember when. The baby’s a chiller though. It has its own room, and the walls are thick in this city, so you won’t need to worry.’

She frowned. ‘Why would I worry?’

‘You were never the biggest fan of kids, right?’

‘I don’t think about kids,’ she muttered.

They stumbled as the train took a corner in the dark tunnels of the metro. Rocco changed topics again. ‘Antonio, Silvia’s husband, is our guitarist. He’s okay, he’s just a bit uptight. Him and I are usually fighting for like, one reason or another…but we’re alright now. He’s happy when I’m unhappy.’ Rocco grinned to mask what Helen could see was a deep divide between them. She began to fret about the situation she’d been dropped into. ‘He’s a serious Milanese of the old school,’ Rocco continued. ‘Very smart, very academic, but he’s hard to crack. He wrote his thesis on paranoia,’ Rocco said, then breaking out into a boisterous laughter, ‘which is pretty ironic actually.’

‘How so?’

Rocco laughed again. ‘You’ll see.’

Helen began to chew at what was left of her thumbnail.

—

Rocco rang the buzzer at the enormous front doors of an ancient apartment building. The click of an electronic latch followed, releasing the lock of a small wooden door housed within the larger one. Rocco strained to squeeze through this passageway. Together, they arrived in a courtyard full of overflowing bins. The gardens were overgrown with weeds. A man smoked in the yard while yelling into his mobile phone, somehow maintaining his rage while giving a knowing and wordless hello to Rocco. They continued to another door, with another buzzer, that then let them into a broad, tiled lobby. Helen broke into a sweat as they ascended a humid stairwell. Around them, walls, floors and balustrades were colour-matched in all beiges and browns. They climbed the stairs breathlessly, circling an out-of-order lift, its steel cage locked shut with a chain and padlock. At the fourth floor, they were met with a parade of noise and activity: Antonio – tall, thin and pale-skinned – greeted them politely at the door, while Silvia yelled her hellos from the kitchen. A baby cried from behind a closed door somewhere within the apartment. Antonio shook Helen’s hand, his palm startlingly soft, and then he pulled Rocco aside with a look of concern. They left Helen standing awkwardly next to them.

‘Dov’è Arianna?’ Antonio asked, peering past him into the hallway.

‘Non lo so,’ Rocco mumbled. ‘Qua non c’è.’

‘Ancora? Che è successo?’

‘Non lei felice con me…’

‘Ma perchè?’ Antonio asked with a note of confusion, followed by a look of concern that looked absurdly ingenuine to Helen.

‘Helen, welcome!’ Silvia interrupted. She stood in the hall breathless, her baby squirming in the crook of one her muscular arms. As the baby reached up to tug at one of Silvia’s roughly plaited pigtails, Helen had the uncanny feeling of looking in a mirror. Silvia stood eye-to-eye with Helen. She wore a variant of a band shirt in the exact same state of disrepair, tied in a knot at the stomach in identical fashion. Helen shook this coincidence off as Silvia led her away from the entrance. The two men remained in the hallway, continuing to speak under their breath.

‘This is our baby by the way,’ Silvia added. Helen made a show of shaking the baby’s hand, the child just old enough to look at her with what seemed like contempt. There was a meal on the stove waiting to be served. The visual unleashed a rumble in Helen’s stomach, which Silvia seemed to detect in the air. She sat Helen down at the table and pushed a plate of nuts towards her. Rocco and Antonio followed, still whispering to each other. Silvia set the baby down in a playpen and returned to the kitchen to serve.

‘So, Arianna is not coming?’ Silvia asked as she set the loaded plates down in front of them. She then sat next to Helen, and across from Antonio.

‘No, not tonight,’ Rocco said. ‘She went to Bar Rondo after her English classes.’

‘Bar Rondo?’

Rocco’s mouth was already full, the others only just taking up their cutlery. ‘She said we could meet her there if we wanted to. I was gonna take Helen. You should come.’

‘I have to mind the baby,’ Silvia reminded him with an insistent glance. ‘But you can all go…’

‘No, I will stay,’ Antonio said. ‘You take the night off, show our guest a good time.’

Silvia forced a smile onto her face, and Helen sensed Antonio’s insincerity. She was all too familiar with a comment like that; a way to come across as a good partner in the company of a witness. Though Rocco had spoken of Antonio’s paranoia, Helen could only see a man who was adept at light manipulations.

‘Rocco said you have an interest in cinema?’ Antonio asked Helen.

‘I do?’

‘I told him you worked at a cinema,’ Rocco interrupted.

‘I didn’t tell you that I quit?’

Rocco frowned as he filled his own wine glass. ‘I don’t think so. But I don’t have the best memory these days.’

‘I used to work in a cinema,’ Helen explained to Antonio. Silvia took the wine bottle and filled up hers and Helen’s glasses. ‘I was lucky enough to see pretty much every shit movie released between 2009 and 2022.’

‘They forced you to watch them?’

‘No, but even if you don’t sit down to watch, you still kind of absorb them. Anything I didn’t watch I at least heard about. You hear about every cameo appearance, CGI-generated back-from-the-dead actor, every villain or whatever showing up in some expanded universe. I dunno. Like, I watched most of them because I had a job to do, but how can you pay attention to this shit? Either way, I have a working knowledge of every reboot, every sequel, every botched franchise… I know the dumbest fucken shit because of that job.’

‘It is still important,’ Antonio said seriously. ‘Even bad cinema acts as a window to society. It tells the truth of the mass culture; the psychology of life. Did Rocco tell you I studied film?’

‘He said you wrote something about paranoia…’

‘Paranoia?’ Antonio asked, looking suspiciously to Rocco.

‘Your thesis,’ Rocco said. The two men glared at each other.

‘I suppose you could call it that,’ Antonio continued. ‘I studied Italian film of the 1970s, a time when there was much political violence. And thus, I suppose, yes, paranoia in a sense. Do you know about this time in our history?’

‘Rocco told me bits and pieces…’

‘Cinema is always infected by the times it is made in. Although, new films…these I cannot watch. It is difficult for me to stay modern, even though one could argue that it is my job.’

Helen closed her eyes as she absorbed the intense flavours of Silvia’s ragu. ‘I’m lucky to not have to care about this stuff anymore.’

‘I understand,’ he said. ‘New movies are too American for me now to be honest. It doesn’t matter where they are made. These days, everyone is an American, no?’

‘I guess,’ Helen shrugged.

She took a long sip of wine and felt Silvia’s eyes on her. Antonio seemed to have been waiting for an excuse to talk, and he did so greedily, as though soaking up the quiet at the table, and filling it with his thoughts that felt like sermons – ideas that he delivered as though spontaneous (pausing as if he were contemplating his next point), but sounding suspiciously rehearsed. He explained that a student he was supervising had an interest in the kind of cinematic universes Helen referred to, about their tendency to break the fourth wall: films that were increasingly dependent on winking at the camera and letting everyone in on a secret, always addressing some aspect of production through behind-the-scenes in-jokes. He said that the last American movie he saw was Barbie, which represented ‘an evil’ he had ‘never seen before’. He said that the Barbie movie, which was to him a cynical exercising of a toy company’s intellectual property, was in actuality a two-hour advertisement, one that was given a free pass by the public because it pretended to be self-aware. He said what she already knew: that with the fading efficacy of conventional advertising, Hollywood made the films themselves the advertisement; where each expanded universe, each franchised tie-in, each reboot and sequel, was just advertisement after advertisement for each other’s products. He claimed that his student called it ‘auto-advertising’, which seemed to her like a botched translation. He said that this was a different version of the kind of ‘metatextual affect’ he had based his thesis upon, claiming that such films sought to embed their own critiques within the film in order to transcend all judgement. He said that another student of his was writing along similar lines, exploring the ‘multiverse’ phenomenon in blockbuster cinema, which erased the rules of continuity and plot so that every new character could be explained away as a presence from a ‘new universe’. He said he liked the way their projects intertwined, but he was trying to keep his distance.

‘They are both very talented,’ Antonio continued, ‘but I want them to see that there is more to it than just…marketing. Personally, I believe that this creative turn is a consequence of a kind of fatalism. We all believe, on some level, that the world is at an end. So, it is appealing to think that if this world is ending, then it is all okay, because there may be other worlds as alternatives. Hence this multi-verse. It allows for everyone to be victorious, you see? Because if you fear fire and flood and climate disaster, it is okay, because somewhere there is another world where we don’t live in such fear. If the movie is dystopian, you turn off your film, and you go home feeling better, thinking this life is not so bad. If the movie is utopian, it shows you that better things are possible. You turn off your film, and so on. But there is nothing in-between. It is a pathology of the corporate creative mind, and it has now been forced upon all of us. But we must realise, that there is no other world, that there is no other way unless we make it ourselves. This is why I have been calling for a return to realism. You understand? I imagine a kind of neo-neo-realism; this is how one exposes the truth…’

Silvia stood up and reached for Antonio’s untouched plate. ‘Are you done, Antó?’

He smiled gently at the interruption, and said with odd formality, ‘Yes, thank you.’

Silvia cleared the plates, stacked them on the sink and then sat expectantly. Antonio quietened. Rocco and Helen sat like kids waiting to be excused from the table. When the baby screamed from the other room, Antonio got up and told them all to go. He was only just able to hide his disgust at the sounds the child made.

Rocco and Silvia bickered about which route to take to Bar Rondo. Silvia only caved on the notion of walking Helen along the canals when Rocco explained that, bourgeoisie tourist presence along the Navigli aside, the canals were a staple of Milan’s identity. Silvia conceded, ducked into a corner store and emerged with three tall bottles of Moretti.

Helen took a swig of the bottle after it was opened for her, and cringed at the bitterness of the European beer. She followed the others dutifully, observing both the scene and the heated discussion between her friends, struck by how another city’s many inauthenticies didn’t hit her the way the ones back home did. Silvia snarled at one bar or the other. She translated graffiti for Helen, words that threatened to push tourists into the dank waters. She shouldered past the post-dinner cocktail crowd as they passed in the low light. She feigned apology in one ensuing dustup, while Rocco stepped in as a physical threat to prevent another.

Silvia seemed energised by being free of her home and its demands, freed of playing house with her obnoxious partner, and showing the side of herself that Rocco had always spoken so fondly of. Her voice had even changed. It was more casual, speaking Italian words that were swallowed halfway through, in what Helen assumed was some kind of dialect. Silvia elaborated on her and Rocco’s feelings towards the Navigli crowd, and described how it was somewhere along this walk that she and Rocco had gone on an acid bender and convinced themselves that the Aperol spritz was a psy-op designed to ruin bartenders’ lives in order to keep the working class needlessly occupied. They explained that they had since written a song along those lines for I Pentiti, and had spread the rumour around town until it picked up steam – to the point that the story was finally re-quoted to them.

Silvia and Rocco laughed together, corrected each other’s details or poor translations, even finished each other’s sentences. Helen enjoyed seeing the insight into their friendship, a connection that was more relaxed in Antonio’s absence. She could see that they worked better as a unit of two, their comfort with each other coming through in light physical touch, a more natural and relaxed conversation; a connection. 

They stopped at a corner as a brown, yellow and beige heritage tram rattled and crawled past them, headed to the Duomo. Helen admired it as it passed. The three crossed the tracks and arrived in a small square filled with people in conversation. Behind the crowd, nestled into the corner of a building was Bar Rondo, the kind of bar that here in Milan was dime-a-dozen, but to Helen felt like a time capsule, its timber counter and glass fridges uncannily like the milk bar from her youth. A bartender in a pressed white shirt took Silvia’s order of a gin and tonic, and, although Helen craved the sweetness of a spritz in the humid night air, she asked for the same, knowing enough of how to endear herself to a host to order what they ordered.

With drinks in hand, they walked back into the small concrete piazza, where disparate pockets of youths drank in circles from plastic cups and bottles, where a food truck sold southern Italian street food, and where men looked at the women around them in a way that Helen hadn’t seen or felt from anyone under the age of fifty in years. Thinking that she suddenly felt very much in Europe, she turned to ask Rocco a question, but saw that he had frozen up. She watched him force himself into a calmed state as a young woman approached, cleanly dressed, elegant, and irritable.

‘Buona sera amore,’ he smiled as she stopped next to them. He stepped to one side and gestured to the others. ‘Arianna, quest’è Helen…’

‘Piacere,’ Arianna said flatly, turning back to Rocco and gesturing to Helen with a nod. ‘Tua amica dall’Australia?’

‘Sì, sì…’

‘Nice to meet you,’ she said clumsily. She smiled through pursed lips and whispered for Rocco to come with her.

‘I’ll be back in a tick,’ he smiled, and went off with Arianna. They began a visible argument the moment they were out of earshot.

Silvia took Helen by the arm and led her across Piazza Spoleto to take a seat in observation of Rocco. They made fun of the way he was trying to reassure Arianna with his slow movements and his slow smile, the way he touched her arm, carrying an effect that maybe even he didn’t know he held.

‘What’s going on with those two?’ Helen asked.

‘Them?’ Silvia asked plainly, eyes fixed on the bickering couple. ‘They are not compatible. She is from a different world to us.’

‘Is he serious about her?’

‘Everything Rocco does, he does seriously. You know this.’ Silvia glanced over the top of her plastic cup. ‘But he is serious only for so long.’

Helen laughed at Rocco’s almost cartoonishly defensive expression. ‘What do you think they’re arguing about?’

‘Well. He is bored of her, and she knows it. She will not tell him why he upsets her, and he acts as though there is no problem.’

‘You can tell all that from here?’

‘Well,’ Silvia began, fidgeting with her plastic cup. ‘Maybe a month ago, she came to our house for dinner. Of course I got her drunk. She was…agitated. She told me everything. It was all private of course, but the message was this. She said that in her hometown they have a saying for men like Rocco.’ Silvia looked for the right words in translation. ‘She said, “He has too much lead in his pencil.”’

They watched Rocco talk to Arianna, his eyes darting around the piazza even as she spoke. And as soon as she left, furious, Rocco seemed to loosen up, strolling over to the food truck to buy himself a supplì. He quickly burnt his mouth on the melted cheese, made an exaggerated show of it, and then washed it down with a swig from a full bottle of Moretti that seemed to have materialised, hanging from his left hand like an accessory.

‘You think she’ll stay with him?’ Helen asked.

Silvia grimaced. ‘They always stay.’ She poked her straw through the melting ice, seeking the last drops of liquid, then fished out a lemon wedge and ate its flesh as though it were an orange. She sighed, uncommitted, and slipped off the edge of her seat before righting herself. ‘Rocco is always chasing ass,’ she slurred. ‘Sometimes going out with him is like taking a dog for a walk. I wonder if he will ever realise, on a night like this, that he was supposed to be spending time with me and you. You agree?’

‘I guess so,’ Helen said. ‘But it’s not like he owes me anything. His life doesn’t stop just because I took a holiday, right? Either way, it’s interesting to see him living his life here. When he lived with us in Sydney, with his footy career and everything, it seemed like he couldn’t be himself. He was very…repressed.’

‘Maybe he needed to be repressed,’ Silvia shot back quickly. ‘Maybe Australia was good for him. By the way, I don’t think the pencil saying works. I think he is more like a balloon with too much air in it. Someone needs to put a pin in him. But the women he sees? They are not up to the task. I find it hard not to take things into my own hands…’

‘To cut out the middleman?’ Helen laughed.

‘Yes. It would be a service. It would make our lives easier if he was at peace.’ She paused for a moment and then shrugged. ‘You must have seen it when you lived with him in Sydney, no? How he is always looking for something, always changing, always: “I work in construction now. Now I play rugby. Now I am retired. Now I am Italian. Now I am Australian” – all of this is because he needs to be popped.’ She made an exaggerated pin prick in the air. ‘Pop! Once a day and he is silent. Pop! Pop! Pop!’

Helen was impressed by Silvia’s drunken fury, the way she let off steam while playing the clown. A silence fell between them, Silvia looking suddenly exhausted under the streetlights in the Piazza, her eyes glazed over, depleted.

‘You and Rocco are close, hey?’

‘Certo,’ Silvia said. ‘Some days, I think we are the only friends of each other.’

‘Were you like this before he left for Sydney?’

‘I do not remember. I know that I was sad when he was gone, and I was happy when he returned. Maybe we were closer than I think. People come and go and you never think of them again, but Rocco leaves a memory everywhere he goes. By the way…’ she said, cocking her leg to illustrate her point… ‘also like a dog.’

Both cackling, Helen yanked Silvia back to the bench, and when she settled herself, asked: ‘Do you think he’ll stay in Milan for good?’

Silvia smiled meekly. ‘Why should I care? Rocco is free to live his life. Unlike some of us.’

Helen watched Silvia then, inspected her falling features, her slumped shoulders, and could see that Silvia had only gained her reputation as the most honest person in the room because she did all her lying to herself.

—

A week passed. It was a week of bad sleeps on Silvia and Antonio’s stiff mattress. Each night was interrupted by the crying baby, and the couple’s arguments, which grew steadily in volume and intensity as they grew comfortable with Helen’s presence. Helen did her best to keep herself busy. She went on long walks to distract herself when the others were occupied, drank coffee after coffee at stand-up bars, followed by drink after drink in the same spots. She met up with Rocco every day, who seemed to be spinning plates, avoiding Arianna, avoiding whatever it was that he was meant to be doing for work.

On one night she sat in on an I Pentiti practice, meeting the band’s bass player Devid, a short, thin man with long curly hair, a woollen flannelette shirt and, just obscured behind his ratty beard, an inverted peace sign tattooed on his cheek. He, like Helen, seemed to be a mediator of the others’ problems. He gently balanced the artistic compromises his band was making on the fly, settling arguments and finding solutions while the band wrote and re-wrote songs.

Helen sat on the floor and developed her taste for bottled Moretti, unable to comprehend their discussions. She began to message her friends back in Sydney, out of boredom at first, but soon, it felt as though she were opening a channel between the two cities. Her friend Sunny back home was planning to release a new record: a split 7” with their band HDPE on one side, and a band from overseas on the other side, with the goal of international collaboration, for what Sunny described as the ‘punk internationale’. They had until this point had no takers, but, on the floor of I Pentiti’s sweaty practice room, something clicked for Helen, and she became a kind of broker for Sunny’s project.

‘Do you guys have a couple tracks that you’d want to get rid of?’ she asked, which the others only managed to compute once Rocco translated the details. He asked that she elaborate for I Pentiti’s benefit.

‘Sunny wants to do a split release: HDPE on one side, someone from overseas on the other… I was thinking it would be cool if I Pentiti wanted to be involved.’

Rocco and Silvia looked to each other first. They made sounds of approval, which seemed to flabbergast Antonio.

‘We have no relationship with any bands from Australia,’ he said.

Rocco recoiled. ‘This would build a relationship with them,’ he insisted. ‘We could even use it as a launching pad to tour Australia sometime…’

‘And how exactly do you think me and Silvia can tour Australia, Rocco?’

Devid interrupted, trying to dissuade the two from launching into another argument, but it was futile. After a dispute about the possibilities of touring with a baby on board, Antonio and Rocco then bickered about the utility of a split 7” during their current trajectory as a band. Silvia reminded them they’d had no trajectory since their baby was born. Then Antonio excused himself. He shut the padded doors behind him on his way outside with a show of politeness. And then Devid made a decision for them all.

‘He will come around,’ Devid said, staring at the closed door with his oversized bass hanging from his thin torso. ‘I’ll make sure of it. We can record those songs we wrote the other week, he likes his guitar parts on those, so he’ll fold. I’ll just say that we need a short-term project to keep moving…’

‘Or we record them right now,’ Rocco added with a glint in his eye. ‘Helen can play guitar.’

Silvia sat upright at the drum kit. She told Rocco that that was enough, and left the room to check on her partner.

Rocco watched her leave, put an arm around Devid and said to Helen: ‘Don’t look so worried; everyone’s just touchy today. Tell Sunny they’ll have the recordings by the end of the month.’

—

Rocco told Helen that there was a Sunday matinee show later that week at a squatted social centre called COA T28. He urged her to come, telling her that the rest of I Pentiti would be there and that she could get a lift with Antonio and Silvia. She felt that sense of foreboding again, thinking they would have offered already if that were the case, but it seemed it was she who was paranoid in this instance; they were happy to oblige.

She waited in the kitchen while the others prepared a day bag for their baby, trying to remember what Rocco had told her about COA T28 back when they had lived together. He’d often cited the place as an example of what Sydney was missing: a venue to gather that didn’t have the financial pressures of rent, that didn’t have needless rules and regulation, a place where anyone with a world view that sat somewhere on a communist to anarchist spectrum was welcome to join in on any number of activities. Dinners by donation. Drum and language lessons. Hardcore shows. Movie nights. Planning sessions for protests and direct actions. She mustered the enthusiasm to see this place, and so, as the family hauled their things to the car, Helen followed dutifully.

She squinted through a beam of late morning sun that shot through a gap in a set of ominous grey clouds. She took in the world from the back-seat window. She felt like a child there: sat next to the baby, who babbled and played with a pair of earmuffs in its car seat while the couple bickered in the front. They drove through the city, the sun dipping in and out of rain clouds, the silence soon replaced by I Pentiti demos that Silvia insisted be played on the stereo through a sketchy Bluetooth connection. In about twenty minutes, Antonio was inching his hatchback down a side street, snaking around the area by Pasteur station until he found a park. Squeezing out the doors in the tight spot he’d somehow fit the car into, they walked past grocers and markets, past tobacconists and closed restaurants, bars with men chain-smoking out the front. Each sight, sound and smell overwhelmed Helen, until they reached a small, fenced-up park that opened up eventually to reveal COA T28.

The building appeared in front of them, and was every part as impressive as Rocco had once described. A couple dozen punks drank longnecks out front of the building. It was nestled on the ground floor beneath a block of apartments, painted in reds and yellows, with a note painted on the walls that Silvia translated as: ‘if you buy this building, you buy its occupants’. Silvia handed the baby to Antonio, who tried not to register his frustration at being allocated the child. Then she led Helen inside.

Silvia gave her a tour of the room, introducing her to people as they passed. Punks in studded jackets, hippies with joints tucked behind the ear, old-timer radicals with thin grey hair in ponytails, a group of younger punks that Rocco was speaking to, who were hanging off his every word. Helen stood in line at the bar and soon arrived at the kitchen counter, where she emptied her pocket to pay for a beer, squinting without her glasses at the unfamiliar coins. A band started playing behind her, which broke her focus, the bartender laughing when Silvia reached into Helen’s hand to pull out two Euro. A line for the toilet stretched into a spontaneous mosh pit of twenty people, who were all shoving each other through exaggerated grins. The band played rapid and loud. The singer screeched into a microphone while standing atop a gas canister that had been propped against the drum kit, preventing it from creeping forward on the concrete floor. Helen, beer in hand and watching from across the room, felt like she couldn’t take in all the details fast enough.

She examined the walls pasted with posters, colours faded and hung from as far back as the eighties: a tattered poster against South African apartheid, a freshly painted mural in solidarity with Palestine behind a massive pot of boiling pasta, a sculpted hammer and sickle mounted to one wall, a poster from Fugazi’s first ever European tour. More slogans and notices that she’d never be able to decipher.

As the crowd spewed onto the street after the band’s set, Helen was surprised to note that not only was everyone around her having fun, but that they treated her as one of their own too. They joked with her as best they could. They told her she reminded them of Silvia. They all found the likeness very funny, and began to refer to Helen as ‘il gemello’, the twin: a notion that Silvia also found hilarious when she caught up on the fact. When a bottle was smashed, a half dozen people picked up the pieces and brought them inside in waves until a dustpan could be located, laughing and yelling through the masses. In the side street, impatient little Fiats tried to inch past this collection of punks who made half-attempts at staying out of the traffic’s way.

Helen was all too aware that this entire scene, if in Sydney, would be shut down within a week by a resident’s noise complaint. Yet, as Rocco and Silvia explained, COA T28 was just one of a half dozen places in this city that had not only operated continuously for almost half a century now, but had done so all without paying a dollar in rent. There hadn’t been a single needless renovation. They had never been forced to pay for a hired security guard by council, nor a licensing fee for selling booze, nor a fee for playing ‘copyrighted music’ on the stereo; all such obstacles that had almost ruined Helen and her friends in their attempts at running a legal venue in Sydney.

Helen understood then why Rocco had been so frustrated when she had lived with him. She watched him move around COA T28, smiling and joking and yelling excitedly about topics she couldn’t guess at. She remembered how pent-up he was in Sydney, how he was so quick to anger, how he’d get up at 6 a.m. for work and return after dark from footy training. She saw now that it was only here that Rocco could find a way to be content, even though he seemed to be doing his best to scupper that plan with a series of unspoken dramas that he was constantly dismissing. 

‘This may surprise you,’ she said to Rocco when he sat next to her, ‘but I’m enjoying myself. I’ve never liked this positive nineties-style hardcore…or at least I assume it’s positive, I dunno what they’re singing about…’

‘It’s positive,’ he confirmed, both balancing on the flimsy bench seat – cheap brackets screwed into cheap timber plank – that wobbled precariously on the footpath outside the venue.

‘And everyone’s so nice to me here. Like they’re nicer to me than my own friends are.’

‘Well, you’re new in town,’ he said, ‘and you’re pretty…’

Helen raised her eyebrows and smirked. ‘I’m pretty now?’

‘You know what I mean. Plus, you’re vouched for by us. Sure, the people are nice, but you’re seeing everyone at their best today. Probably, they’re seeing you at your best too.’

‘I guess.’

‘And everything feels nice as a tourist.’

‘Maybe,’ she mumbled. She felt momentarily deflated, as though she was being dismissed. She sat mute for a while and sipped from her beer until he spoke.

‘You understand why I moved back here?’

‘I do,’ she said. ‘It’s like seeing you in your natural habitat. I guess I didn’t realise how hard it was for you in Sydney until seeing you here. In this city. These people. What I’m trying to say,’ she said self-consciously, ‘is that it’s nice to see you happy.’

Rocco took a greedy hit of a joint that was passed to him, looked down at Helen through what she could see now were heavy bags under his eyes, and said slowly: ‘I’m not happy, Helen.’

He looked across the throng of smokers and drinkers, to see that Arianna was approaching. She seemed nervous, and was flanked by three friends who seemed equally uncomfortable. None of them, as Silvia had alluded to back at Bar Rondo, seemed to be of this community. Rocco seemed to grow anxious too, distracted by the presence of Arianna and her friends, who gathered in a tight circle at the end of the street, all packed in together along the footpath, disturbed by the people around them leaning on parked cars. Rocco stared at his feet, and then looked across the pathway to Silvia. She held her baby under one arm, in deep conversation with Devid.

‘There are things I can’t tell you,’ Rocco continued, ‘reasons I’m staying here.’

‘Okay,’ Helen said slowly. ‘Like what?’

She saw Arianna breaking off from her circle to head towards them.

‘I just told you I can’t tell you…’

Arianna pretended not to see them and slipped straight inside the venue.

‘But if you can’t tell me, then who can you tell?’

‘Well,’ he shrugged. ‘That’s a problem too.’

Helen took a hit of a joint as it passed, and felt that she was in too deep when Arianna returned from inside wielding two plates of food that had been cooked behind the bar. Rocco sat upright, his expression changing, a forced smile and joviality coming across him.

‘Sei fame?’ Arianna asked him.

‘Sempre,’ he smiled. He took the plate in one hand and immediately offered a spoonful to Helen. ‘It’s a regional dish,’ he told her, as she accepted a mouthful of what seemed to her to be mostly butter and cabbage. ‘It’s not for everyone,’ he admitted.

Helen wiggled down the bench to let Arianna sit next to Rocco, which she did with a kind of uptight rigidity. She seemed perturbed that Rocco was feeding Helen, and began to spit small, sharp sentences at him in Italian. He dismissed the comments and told Helen a story about I Pentiti’s last tour that he’d already recounted the week before. Arianna continued to interrupt, Rocco responding with pleading eyes. He restarted his story while trying to control the pasta as it slid in its pool of butter on the paper plate. He was drunker than he looked. Arianna’s sentences grew longer, then louder, and after one more dismissive retort from Rocco that Helen could maybe just translate as ‘don’t worry about it’, Arianna stood up and walked across the road. She reached the dimly lit park, turned around in the now lightly spitting rain and, in English for what must have been Helen’s benefit, yelled: ‘Go fuck yourself.’

There was a brief moment of silence around them before Rocco muttered through a mouth half-filled with food: ‘I see she’s getting the most from her language classes.’

She didn’t know what to say to that. The light of the day had just begun to fade, the last of the sun just fallen behind the apartment blocks that surrounded COA T28. Helen wrestled through her tote bag for her cardigan, and strained to put it on, cramped in the presence of the people around her drinking and talking and smoking on the footpath. She took another drag of a joint that was passed around, and felt it hit her harder than expected. Devid handed her a beer, which she took in one hand, almost dropping it as a dizziness came over her. When she turned back to Rocco, she saw that a friend of his was placing a pill in his hand. He took one last look through the park to ensure Arianna wasn’t coming back, then swallowed it quickly. He looked down to see that Helen had been watching.

‘Did you want one?’ he asked her as an afterthought.

‘I’m okay,’ she said. She felt her head spin and took a deep breath to calm herself.

Helen had been looking at her feet when she noticed that Silvia was standing in front of them. She was straining under the weight of her baby and asking Rocco a series of insistent questions that Helen could only comprehend had something to do with Antonio.

‘How should I know?’ Rocco groaned finally in English. ‘He’s probably inside. I saw one of his students before. They’re probably talking movies or whatever.’

Silvia rolled her eyes. She crouched down in front of Helen, and began speaking, but Helen couldn’t hear her. A band had started inside, but they may as well have been sitting against the amps. People began to push past each other to go watch. Silvia was still there, talking, as Helen turned back to her. She was faced with the situation of being handed a one-year-old child to hold for the first time in her life. She hesitated. She didn’t want her new friends to see that she wasn’t quite with it, but she didn’t want to seem like a psycho who refused to hold a baby either. So she took the baby as it was passed to her. Silvia went inside, and Helen held the kid in two hands, as if she were holding a football.

The baby stared right through Helen, who gazed back at the fragile lifeform, perplexed. She recognised something in the child’s features, but couldn’t place it, a neutral expression that she’d seen before, as though unimpressed by the world around it. In this moment, she felt suddenly a part of Silvia and Antonio’s – and Rocco’s – life. As though sensing this, the child began to squirm in her clutches. She thought she might be holding it too firmly around the ribcage, so softened her grip. The baby slipped. So she squeezed tighter, which made the baby whine in discomfort. Helen became all too aware then that she was irresponsibly stoned and drunk. A panic rose within her that the baby seemed to sense, and then it began to shriek.

‘Help,’ Helen whimpered, but Rocco didn’t hear her. He was talking to a young woman and her friend, straining to hear them from the bench seat. Helen tried to catch his attention again, but, oblivious to her predicament, he stood up then to join the conversation.

Helen realised that Rocco’s weight had kept them in a perfect equilibrium until that moment. The bench seat beneath her tilted. Sliding along the plank of timber, she yelled out for help one more time, her voice joined by the shrieking baby, and then her hip hit the ground with a thump, and her elbow hit the hard concrete. Helen winced in pain, her vision blurred. She was lying on her side with the screaming baby held out just shy of the ground, still gripped in both her hands, and she felt like a toddler who had fallen with a precious ice cream.

‘Jesus!’ Rocco shouted. He lunged forward and snatched at the baby, gathering it up in his arms while she continued to lie sprawled on the ground. He tucked the baby firmly under his arm. ‘What just happened?’

Devid had witnessed the whole scene and pushed past his friends to help Helen back up onto the seat. ‘Are you okay?’ he asked, and Helen sat, stunned and confused.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

‘It’s alright,’ Rocco hummed, as the baby wriggled in his arms. ‘You shouldn’t have to deal with this…it shouldn’t be happening.’ He sat the baby in his lap and seemed overwhelmed. He looked down and into the baby’s eyes, who began to settle in Rocco’s hands.

‘Rocco…’ Devid said slowly.

‘They haven’t named it yet,’ Rocco continued. The baby smiled and reached out to him.

Devid interrupted once more, and said to Helen: ‘You need to take the baby before the others come outside.’

‘What?’ she asked. ‘Why?’

‘Yeah, you should take the baby,’ Rocco added uncomfortably.

Suddenly, Silvia appeared in the doorway. She went to tell the others that she was leaving with Antonio, but then stopped. Her mouth dropped at seeing Rocco with her child in one arm.

‘Che cazzo fai!?’ Silvia hissed.

Helen read between the lines. Through her wooziness, she took the baby out of Rocco’s hands by instinct, moments before Antonio appeared through the crowd. He looked at the others in confusion. All of them acting strangely in his presence.

‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.

‘Nothing,’ they all said.

He took the baby out of Helen’s arms. ‘We must go home; it’s already eight o’clock. Did you want to stay, Helen, or are you coming with us?’

Helen considered the offer, but knew, looking at Silvia and Antonio’s strained faces that it would be better for her not to be among the nuclear family’s weekend argument and whatever wordless controversy was happening around her.

‘I’ll stay here a while,’ she said.

‘Yeah, we’re gonna party,’ Rocco smiled unconvincingly.

‘Okay. Well, have fun,’ Antonio said, the baby writhing and squirming in his arms. He turned his back to them and headed towards the park. Silvia, with a sigh of relief, leaned down to kiss Helen on both cheeks, and whispered a sincere ‘thank you’ into her ear. Then she followed Antonio into the darkness.

Helen sat there reeling. She took a sip from the beer that sat next to her feet, only to discover that it wasn’t her drink, but a bottle that someone had used as an ashtray. She spat the liquid onto the pavement as subtly as she could, determined not to add any more chaos to what was becoming an increasingly odd evening. She found her actual beer and washed out the taste of marinated cigarette butts. Then she felt Rocco’s arm drop across her shoulders.

‘I’m really glad you came to visit,’ he said then. ‘It’s been fun.’

‘Yeah,’ she said tentatively. ‘I’m glad I got to see all of this.’

‘You’re sure you don’t wanna take anything?’

‘I’ll be fine. I’m like…’ she stopped herself from telling him that she wasn’t holding up so well, then added oddly: ‘…thirty-nine.’

‘Right,’ he frowned. ‘Well, let me know if you change your mind.’

She felt him shaking as he removed his arm from over her shoulder. There was an uncertainty in his movements. A sad desperation in them too. He stretched his back performatively, and then looked back at her. ‘Also, if you need, you can crash at mine tonight. If you want some time away from the baby and everything…’

She felt herself being sucked into Rocco’s vortex. Felt the need to put up a boundary she’d assumed was already there. She thought that she might have been paranoid, but it was undeniable that this was a different Rocco than the man she lived with in 2022. This Rocco had opened himself up to a life of ‘ill-discipline’, as his footy coaches would surely have described it. Dizzy, and drunk and stoned, she had the sudden realisation that she’d spent almost all her time in Italy thinking and talking only about Rocco, and almost none of it trying to decide what it was that she was supposed to be finding in Milan.

Helen sat still and made a concerted effort to sober up. She listened to Rocco’s stories. She watched his friends coalesce around him. She listened politely to their conversations in Italian. Within another half an hour or so, it became clear that Rocco’s pill was kicking in, and at that point, Helen had had enough. Rocco began to speak only to his friends who were on the same wavelength. He left Helen off to the side, smiling politely. She didn’t feel comfortable trying to contribute anything. She didn’t feel comfortable trying to find someone she could connect with. Yet another band had started playing inside, and she didn’t even feel comfortable going in and hiding in a corner to watch. As the crowd crushed around her to get into the building – putting out cigarettes, closing out conversations, inching past each other with polite apologies – Helen gave up on trying to fit in and slunk away.

She disappeared around the corner, and stared confused at the map on her phone until she found a way to the familiar site of Bar Rondo. She followed the tram tracks to the stop she remembered from a week ago. A carriage from the heritage fleet arrived minutes later: a polished timber exterior gleaming in the light, creaking as it pulled to a stop, the doors squeaking as they folded open. She stepped inside and sat on the wooden seats, admiring the fact that a city, if it wanted it bad enough, really could keep a carriage like this in service for a century, a transport system that held true to its initial function without needless upgrades. No one blinked an eyelid when the driver left his booth with a two-metre steel pole in hand, a pole he used to manually switch the tracks at a junction.

The tram continued, rattling and jostling as it took a long and arduous corner. It stopped at the foot of the Duomo: the enormous centrepiece towering over its piazza. Helen, along with the rest of the carriage, disembarked. As one, they gazed up at a building centuries in the making that she’d been told was forever in a state of refurbishment. ‘Sisyphean’, she thought, recalling a story about how the Sydney Harbour Bridge was constantly painted from one end to the other in perpetuity.

She felt the bustle of the city, and looked back to the list of tips Silvia had texted her the week prior: a walking route that went behind the Duomo, past the Martini building that stood tall at the end of a long street, flanked by immaculate shopfronts. The walk included a visit to Piazza Fontana, where two headstones marked the death of an anarchist student caught up in the Years of Lead. One had been laid by the City of Milano, who had written a neutral passage about his ‘accidental’ death, the other by local anarchists that accused the police of murdering him. A monument each for the two truths of Milan, a constant reminder of its dividing lines: a city of fashion and finance, and its counterculture in the squatted buildings in the surrounding suburbs. She thought of Rocco, Silvia, Antonio and Devid, and their ways of playing a part in maintaining this tradition of cultural antagonism. She couldn’t think where a tourist like her could be placed among that quagmire of opposing forces.

Finding her way back to the Duomo, Helen began to feel agitated. She was hungry, thirsty, bored and lonely in equal parts. She felt something like panic, walked faster, until she found a bar with photos of their dishes printed on a corflute menu. Rocco had told her to avoid such places, but the afternoon had made her antagonistic towards him and she decided on the spot to eat here, at this tourist trap. She stood for a moment confused about the dinner protocol until she caught the attention of a waiter and asked to sit at a table facing the piazza.

She glanced at the laminated menu at her table and guessed that the slightest view of one of the Duomo’s spires was enough to induce a price increase to all the menu’s items. She fiddled with a sugar packet, branded with the ‘Bar Duomo’ name, and pocketed it as a souvenir. She decided that she liked the place, almost as a way of giving the sachet some kind of sentimental value. To Helen, there was comedy in the tackiness of somewhere like this; a kind of upfront dishonesty that she appreciated. When the waiter returned, she ordered a half litre of wine, the risotto, and the cotoletta alla Milanese, knowing it would be bad, but curious to assess the kitchen’s attempt at regionally specific authenticity.

The wine arrived quickly. She poured a glass and observed the people around her. She wanted to plant some images in her mind; images that would stay with her and thus make this holiday something she’d remember fondly. A woman in her fifties sat with a cigarette in one hand while watching live Coldplay videos on her phone at full volume. She didn’t appear to have ordered anything. A child sat playing with an iPad while his mother drank a zero-alcohol Heineken and stared into a void, the back end of the Duomo standing tall behind her. An old man read a newspaper over his ten o’clock espresso. Helen sipped at her wine. To her left stood two soldiers from the Italian military with machine guns strapped to their back. They were minding a monument, or a museum, or maybe even the Duomo itself, but were caught in their own conversations, non-responsive even when an ambulance arrived with a howl to attend to someone who had collapsed in the piazza.

She felt like she was farewelling the city early. A consequence of a Sunday maybe, or a way of mentally running from what seemed to be a collection of personal crises in the interactions she’d had that week. As she struggled through the bland repetitions of the risotto, she tried to reassess her opinion of what was feeling like a failed holiday. Each mouthful was the same, another northern Italian dish informed by butter, challenging her imagined ideas of this country. She hadn’t felt anything in Milan yet that she hadn’t already felt at home. But when she got to the bottom of the plate, she had the thought that to be a tourist is to be a spectator, and that to be a spectator means making a wordless oath to passive observation. Which was a role that Helen had never respected in anyone she’d ever known. 

The waiter arrived to clear her plate. He told her they were preparing to close, so she ordered a limoncello to finish, swigging the last of her wine as he dawdled back inside to fetch the digestif. She felt as though she were entering her natural state: on her own, looking and observing, unaffected by external drama.

Through the restaurant window, she watched the waiter pour her drink from a bottle that she recognised. In his hand was the same brand of limoncello that sat on the shelf at the bottle shop she worked at back home. A bottle that was perpetually on special and covered with dust. Startled by the connection between this tourist trap and the many traps she’d set for herself back home, she felt that familiar feeling of breaking with reality again. Herself as an import, the bottle as an export, both finding each other eventually on this plane of counterfeit things. With one spire of the Duomo in the distance, and an empty table in front of her, Helen told herself that it’s not a trap if you get in willingly.