Abroad (28 page)

After a while, I felt Claire elbow me.

“Taz,” she said. “Are you going to try it?”

“Try what?”

She smiled and held forth what looked like a Communion wafer in her hand.

“Where’d you get that?”

“Ervin,” Marcello said. “So?”

It was zanopane, that mysterious substance. I hesitated. The few drugs I had tried—marijuana, hash, a stray mushroom with one of my boyfriends back at Nottingham—had mostly just left me dizzy and nauseated. Claire liked to smoke marijuana in the house, always announcing, rather irritatingly, that she was about to smoke a
spinello
. Gia and Alessandra also indulged, but as far as I knew, the B4 avoided any of these drugs. They were all for alcohol, but drugs seemed not to fit in with their lifestyle, other than healthy sales.

Marcello turned to me.

“It’ll be fine, Angel,” he said, then parted my lips and put the wafer on my tongue.

As the bread dissolved in my mouth, I thought of how, one night, Professor Korloff spent the better part of an hour in our cozy little classroom musing about the drug use of the Greeks, Romans, and Etruscans. “Homer was all about opium,” the professor told us. “What do you think nepenthe
was
? Drug of forgetfulness, my ass. Look at Telemachus when he visits Menelaus in Sparta. Helen doesn’t want him to know what happened to Odysseus, so—boom! A little nepenthe, and he forgets his dad altogether. Oh sure, they were all into it. Marijuana, hash, mushrooms. Scholars don’t like to dwell on it, but where do you think all those visions came from? Oh, I’m for it. Yes, yes. The more visions the better.”

With zanopane there was no waiting for something to happen. The chemical seemed to travel immediately from the mouth to the rest of the body, then shot through from the top of the head to the ends of the feet. I can only describe it as a warm rush of absolute delight. My heart was bursting with the knowledge that everything in the world would eventually be all right—wars, politics, sickness, everything. Hunger would be solved, disease cured. I was surrounded by the best people in the world, people who utterly loved me and whom I loved back.

And the music! Before, the band had seemed irritatingly twangy, but now I understood that there was a great method to it, and that if I just listened, I mean, really
listened
, I would understand not only its patterns but also the patterns of the forbidden history in this place, of Arthur’s precious Etruscans and the fallen lovers and magistrates and the rest of the secrets the dead had to offer.

We sat there, the four of us, holding hands, lost in our own thoughts for days. But it couldn’t have been, because the music was still playing, and the other people were still around us on their own blankets. Finally Colin turned to the rest of us and said, in that authoritative way he had, “Let’s go home.”

And how did we
get
home? I couldn’t tell you. Or I could tell you too much. Because this drug was not like the liquor constantly filtering through my bloodstream that fall, soaking my synapses, clouding my judgment. With zanopane, everything is sharper. Life’s little confusions pulled away. I remember rising, being helped up by Colin while Marcello looked on. I gathered the blankets. In my hands, they turned into a handful of rabbits. Colin led us outside the park gate and put up his hand. In a moment, a chariot arrived, driven by my father, pulled by two sad-looking horses.

“I’m so happy to see you,” I said.

He looked at me and smiled, the same smile he would give me when I was a little girl and we would all go together to the park. My mother, my aunt, Fiona, our cousins, and I. They were older, five, six, and horribly tempered. I would hang back with my parents while the others ran ahead, knocking things over and making trouble, and my father would pick me up and whisper:
Never tell anyone, little Tabitha, but you are the dearest, and I love you best.

We all got in and he drove us up and up to our cottage, which someone had cleaned and decorated in a very fine manner, the way the Little Princess’s cold garret had been transformed in that book about the orphan, which had always been Babs’s favorite. Babs! There she was, handing me tea. She told me not to worry and went into the other room. Which was silly, because I wasn’t worried—quite the opposite, in fact. But I was a bit tired, so I went to lie down on my bed, only it wasn’t my bed but a bed in an apartment, which must have been Colin’s. It was very spare and neat, with a map of ancient Grifonia, shelves and shelves of books, and a small set of knives in a glass case set into the wall.

“I hope you don’t mind if I rest,” I said to Colin, who was in the kitchen.

“We’ll all rest,” he said, bringing me water. “It was a long walk.”

And then they got in bed beside me, all three of them, which was quite cozy, really, because even if you have a lot of money, it is hard to find a large bed in Umbria. No one told me that, it was just something I suddenly knew. I told Claire this and she laughed.

“Taz, you’re the funniest person I know,” she said.

“I’m not funny at all. I keep telling you all that.”

She smiled and rubbed my foot. For some reason she was down at the bottom of the bed. Then Marcello kissed me. I was a bit embarrassed, having him kiss me right there in front of the others, but Claire was still rubbing my foot, so I supposed it was all right. But it wasn’t my foot anymore, and was it Claire? I opened my eyes and I was kissing her, not Marcello, though he was there, next to me, watching, smiling.

This kiss was different from the other one, back in my bedroom. Freed by the zanopane, I pulled her close until we were matching—leg to leg, waist to waist, breast to breast. Perhaps it was supposed to be this way all along, Claire and I.
At last, at last
. Certainly I could begin to see how these things could be possible.

“You are a very nice person,” I told her. Marcello laughed, because now he was the one I was kissing, and the balance was correct again. And then, growing tired, I rolled away to let the inevitable happen. This was my job; it was how I would come to understand. And I did. I did understand. It was all about balance, really. Love, friendship, life—all of it. Sometimes you are balanced, and everything is all right with the world. Other times you’re not and everything goes off-kilter. When you’re not balanced, you just have to wait it out, and the person you are kissing will move on and the right one will come back. It was about waiting. I knew that now.

We were moving toward something else, too—that warm, comforting blackness I’d happened upon on our trip to the tomb. I was there, running my hands over those walls, pressing my body against the sides of that magnificent underground palace, only it was all just the way it had been originally built. The murals on the walls were still bright, the carvings were still sharp, free of erosion and time. There were stone beds with pillows and blankets carved into each wall, along with wine pitchers, flutes, cups, even robes hanging next to the beds and slippers on the floor. The ceiling was grandly arched, and columns were carved into each corner. Chariots. Wrestling. On the far wall, a scene of a lively banquet, complete with music, men and women toasting, and cheetahs lounging on the floor. High above us all, near the ceiling, two griffins reared back, their lion’s paws out, their beaks open to announce that this place was everything we needed, all of us. The Etruscans had built it, and now I would lead us. I would show us all how to travel unhindered to the next world.

21

I woke early the next day in my own bed, alone, fully clothed, the covers up to my chin, as if someone had tucked me in there. My phone was blinking with texts from Luka and Jenny and a message from my mother. For some reason, I couldn’t read the clock. As I swung my feet to the ground, I was hit with a black wave of dread so enormous I fell back down again. Tentatively, I allowed myself to remember the evening before, and all at once the mood in the room changed into something evil. There was a roar, and the guilt took the shape of water, rising and dark. It came under the door, oozing. I shuddered, climbing to the head of the bed, but the slime continued to rise, until finally I called out for Marcello, Claire, Colin, anyone to help me.

The door flew open. It was Jenny, looking resplendent and chagrined.

“What on
earth
?”

“Oh!”

“What are you doing in bed? It’s time for my cuppa, four-thirty. Though from the looks of things perhaps we should skip right to brandy.”

I began to sob.

“What is it? Good Lord, Taz, I never thought I’d see tears out of you. Always so stoic. It isn’t the neighbor? I told you not to put all your eggs into one cart.”

“Basket.”

“
You
are a basket. What the hell is going on?”

“We took zanopane last night and now I feel shitty beyond belief.”

“You did what?” Jenny’s voice was sharp with alarm.

“Zanopane. Marcello had it.”

“I didn’t sell to Marcello,” Jenny said.

“No, no. It was someone named Ervin.”

“Come on,” she said, pulling me up. The movement caused the room to whirl. “Obviously he gave you the cheap stuff. You can die from that.”

“I think I might vomit.”

“Oh, you should. Into the shower,” she said. “Go.”

“I can’t.”

“You’re shaking all over. Hasn’t anyone told you about this stuff?” She grabbed my hand and led me to the living room, then with both hands placed me on the sofa, as if I were a rag doll. With great authority, she began bustling about the kitchen, boiling water and cutting bread.

“No food,” I moaned. “I’m serious.”

“Tabitha Deacon, listen to me. You have broken the B4 rules. You
know
that we never take drugs. It’s our law.”

I blinked. “Actually, I never heard that one.”

“I know I’ve mentioned it. My God, between you and Anna, this is getting truly exhausting.” Jenny slammed the teapot down. “Profiting from zanopane, or whatever, is one thing, That’s just
smart
. Once you start dabbling in it, you’re right in there with the rest of the idiots. Especially when you don’t know if it’s
decent
.”

“I’m sorry, Jenny. All I can see right now are giant black ants crawling up the wall.”

The toaster rang. She took the bread out, buttered it, and handed me a piece. “All right. Eat. Now.”

“I can’t.”

“Do it.”

Tentatively I nibbled at it, then gagged. It tasted like a mouthful of sand. When I started choking, she handed me a glass of water.

“All right, dearie, all right.”

She sat down next to me and rubbed my back.

“You mean to tell me,” I finally managed, “that you sell the stuff, but you’ve never taken it?”

“Of course we have,” she said. “But I decided it was detrimental to us. Too many unfortunate incidents.”

I moved away from her slightly. Something was flickering behind my left eye, a candle I’d forgotten to blow out.

“Jenny, why do we have to follow your rules?”

“You don’t obviously. And look at Anna. She and I are in a huge row.”

“I know. She’s very angry with you.”

Jenny sat next to me on the sofa, tucking her feet under her.

“Oh dear,” she said. “You
do
look green. Now. Taz. It’s best that you don’t tell anyone—and I mean anyone—about your little experience.”

“But I did it with three other people.”

“Talk to them. They’ll understand. It’s for your safety.”

“What is?” Claire said, emerging from her room. She was wearing only a towel, and her hair was a mass of tangles.

“Hello,” Jenny said, barely looking over.

“Jenny! Long time. I’d hug you, but … you hate me. Also, I feel like I’m dying. Been puking all fucking day.”

“Ugh.” The vision brought bile to my own throat.

“I was just telling Taz here it would probably be best if you didn’t spread it around—about your experience last night.”

“Which one?”

Jenny raised her eyebrows and cleared her throat. “The zanopane, dear.”

“Oh.” Claire shuffled to the window, looking at the rain. “Why?”

“It’s very easy to get a reputation as a user. If you’re not careful you’ll get all sorts of North Africans knocking on your door.”

“Oh my God, you are the worst,” Claire said. “A racist, too? Taz, are you kidding me?”

“I’m not a racist. I happen to know that there is a large population here of North Africans, Syrians, and Albanians who immigrate here from their … unfortunate situations. As you ought to know, people in unfortunate situations can get very, very desperate. If they find out you do drugs, they will do their best to
sell
you drugs. And frankly, girls, your neighborhood is not exactly the best.”

“First of all, fuck you for making me argue with you while I’m in this state,” Claire said, pouring herself some tea. “
But
. I stand by the fact that you
are
a fucking racist.”

“You’re missing the point, dear. You don’t want the other dealers to know you.”

“
Other
dealers?” Claire asked.

Jenny glared at Claire and pressed on. “Just do me this
one
favor and ask your boyfriends to keep it down about your night.”

“Weird,” Claire said. “But fine.”

“And don’t take it again. At least you, Taz. Look at you. You’re a mess.”

It was true. I couldn’t even move.

“Do you promise?”

“I do,” I said.

“Good,” Jenny said. She sighed. “Then I’m going to find you something decent to wear. We’re going for a walk.”

“I—”

“No protesting.” With that, she marched back to my room.

“I’m sorry,” Claire said once she’d gone. “I didn’t know Marcello brought it along. We’d been talking about taking it a few weeks ago, but I didn’t know it would be last night.”

“It’s okay.”

“Seems like Jenny’s watching out for you. I still think she’s a bitch, but at least she’s doing that. About this drug thing, anyway.”

“Oh, she always looks out for me.”

“Taz, my friend,” Claire said, resting her chin on my head. “When I believe that, I’ll grow a pair of wings.”