“How do you mean?” He’d found he was watching the gondoliers again, as they rested on the opposite side of the canal. Larking about in a foreign language, shoving each other, lazing in the afternoon sun as the cobbles gave off wreaths of warm mist.
“I was your age in the Seventies and I thought I had it all in front of me. I was like one of Pan’s People off Top of the Pops. That’s what I looked like. And I called it sexist at the time, the way all the blokes looked at me and tried to chat me up. I just breezed through and then it was a decade later and I was a housewife for a bit. Poodle perm, batwing mohair sweaters, negative equity, the lot. And by the time I’d got myself out of all that, I found I’d turned into a little old lady, like this...”
“You’re not a little old lady…” he murmured. One of the gondoliers was climbing back aboard his boat and Robert was watching him: the curious, wiry strength of him, the overdeveloped calf muscles.
“I may as well be,” she said. “And who has looked at me during this holiday, eh? Who has looked my way?”
Robert’s heart went out to her, because his Aunty took such a pride in her appearance, and it was a shame if no one paid her any attention. But he had seen men looking, in the Departures lounge at Standsted, in that shop in Pisa.
“Them?” she gasped. “They were perverts. I don’t want perverts looking at me.”
SLIPPING AWAY
It was a strange city, and not for the reasons they expected.
Not because of the weird, overlapping sounds of the canals at night, or the fog that slipped down and swapped all the streets around so that nothing was in the same place as before. And not because of the thought of ancient ballrooms, casinos and bordellos sunk underwater, preserved somewhere beneath their feet, with monstrous fish drifting about through gilded rooms, under chandeliers bearded with lichen and weed.
It was strange because it seemed empty to Robert and Jane. They were here together, but they were both looking for other people. There was a sense of something here for both of them, but neither knew how to find it.
“We may as well be invisible,” Aunty Jane said. “We’re like ghosts in a city that’s sinking...”
Robert didn’t like it much when her thoughts went morbid and lurid like this and she told him all about it. Each night, when he knew she was sleeping, he slipped out of their shared hotel room and went hunting around the Academia bridge. There were men hanging around, sure enough, smoking fags and following him when he attempted to lead them a merry dance.
But they didn’t play the rest of the game like they were meant to. They had some other cryptic purpose, knocking about the woolly-smelling canals in the dark. Robert couldn’t figure it out.
Their holiday was taking a bleak, sour turn and reluctantly Robert had to put it all down to sex. We’re on what could be a romantic trip, he thought: that’s why. All this romance is just like rubbing our faces in it.
WAITING ON
They ate in a trattoria with a courtyard out back. Their waitress kept pinching Robert’s cheek and his ciggies and came over to gabble at them in Italian, as if they understood every word.
“She’s very insinuating,” Aunty Jane said, flicking her menu. She had come up in terrible bumps from insect bites and was itchy, dizzy and cross. “She’s much too familiar. I don’t like her.”
Aunty Jane considered herself to be a very fine waitress and took great interest in how others behaved on the job.
“I think they’re all ex-prostitutes, who run this place.” Robert was studying the plastic lobsters on the walls and the mirrors with disturbing clowns painted on. Everything was garlanded with fairy lights. “They’re all retired and they’ve set up a co-op and now they’re raking it in.”
“Their bread buns aren’t very fresh,” Jane sighed.
The waitress was back. She wasn’t that helpful with explaining the menu. “Oh, lasagna, tagliatelle, spaghetti...is all the same.” Then she was nudging Robert with her bony elbow. She was wrinkled from the sun, but very pale and her dyed black hair had gone thin on top. “She your mama, yes? Your lover, no?”
“Oh no,” said Aunty Jane.
“No, no,” said Robert. “My aunt. Just my aunt. My friend.”
The waitress didn’t understand and passed him a rose. “Che bello,” she told him, and ruffled his hair.
Aunty Jane was looking aghast, but not at him.
“What’s the matter?” At a table in the ramshackle courtyard of the trattoria, Santa Claus was wearing a pink linen suit and sitting hunched over by guttering candlelight. He was polishing off a dressed crab and beaming to himself.
“He’s following us about,” Aunty Jane said, transfixed by that formidable beard.
“Never,” Robert laughed. “It’s a small town, really. Like Whitby. You’re bound to bump into people again and again...it’s like maze with everyone going round…”
She shook her head, looking grim. She fiddled fearfully with her long dark hair. “No. He’s a pervert. He’s a Santa Claus pervert and he’s coming after me.”
Robert had to laugh.
CHRISTMAS STALKING
The old man finished his dinner and paid up just as they were going. He didn’t make it obvious and neither of them noticed him casting sidelong glances their way, but somehow he timed it so he was leaving the noisy, shabby trattoria just as they were.
Their waitress was hugging Robert goodbye and Aunty Jane was hissing, “told you!” as Santa squashed by, grinning.
They took the dark back alleys to their hotel. Aunty Jane had them scooting along, shooting backwards glances all the way, until Robert lost patience with her.
It was true, though. The bearded man in the pink linen suit was ambling after them, all the way to their hotel.
They’d been lucky with their hotel, managing to
