Steal You Away (27 page)

‘Come and see what they’ve done …’ said Miss Gatta.

‘Who was it?’

‘We don’t know.’ Then she turned to the head. ‘Giovanni, let’s go downstairs and show Miss Palmieri what a fine job our pupils have done.’

She set off and Flora and the headmaster followed her.

To see them together, Mr Cosenza and Miss Gatta, you might think you’d suddenly been transported into the Upper Jurassic.

Mariuccia Gatta, sixty years old and unmarried, with that big shoebox-like head, those deep-set eyes as round as marbles and that blunt nose, was a dead ringer for a Tyrannosaurus Rex, the most notorious and feared of dinosaurs.

Giovanni Cosenza, aged fifty-three, married and a father of two, was like a Docodon. This apparently insignificant mouse-like little creature, with its pointed nose and protruding incisors, is thought by some palaeontologists to have been the first mammal to appear on the planet when the reptiles still ruled the roost.

Small, unseen, these progenitors of ours (we’re mammals too!)
raised their young in underground burrows, ate berries and seeds and crept out after dark when the dinosaurs slept, their metabolisms slowing, and snaffled their eggs. When the great cataclysm came (meteor, ice ages, shift in the earth’s axis, and all the rest of it) those great scaly monsters dropped like flies and the Docodons suddenly found themselves lords of all creation.

Life’s often like that, the people you wouldn’t give a penny for end up rubbing your face in the dirt.

And sure enough the Docodon had become headmaster and the T. Rex, deputy headmistress. But this didn’t mean a thing, because it was Miss Gatta who held power in the school and fixed the timetables, the shifts, the make-up of the classes and everything else. She took all the decisions, and without hesitation. She was the bossy type and she ordered the head, the teaching staff and the pupils about like a troop of soldiers.

The first thing you noticed about the headmaster, Giovanni Cosenza, when you talked to him, was his protruding teeth, his moustache and those eyes that looked everywhere except at you.

The first time Flora had met him she’d been very disconcerted, while he was talking he stared up at a point on the ceiling, as if there were, I don’t know, a bat or a huge crack up there. He moved jerkily, as if every movement were produced by a single muscular contraction. For the rest he was dull and ordinary. Skinny. With a greying fringe that fell over his tiny face. As timid as a weasel. As ceremonious as a Japanese.

He had two suits. A summer one and a winter one. The intermediate seasons might just as well not have existed as far as he was concerned. When it was cold, as it was that day, he would put on his dark-brown flannel suit, when it was warm, his pale-blue cotton one. In both suits the trousers were far too short and the shoulders too thickly padded.

She knew who’d done it as soon as she saw the scrawl (
palmieri stik your videos up your arse
) and the wrecked television and video recorder.

Federico Pierini
.

It was a message to her.

You made me to watch that video on the Middle Ages and this
is what you get
.

It was obvious.

Since the day she had punished him she had sensed a fierce resentment of her growing in that boy. He’d stopped doing his homework and he put on headphones during her lessons.

He hates me
.

She’d realised this from the way he looked at her. With evil, frightening eyes that accused her, full of all the hatred in the world.

Flora had understood and she had stopped giving him oral tests in class and at the end of the year she would award him a pass.

She didn’t know exactly how, but she had a feeling that this hatred was connected with the death of Pierini’s mother. Maybe because she had died on the day she had forced him to stay at school.

Who knows?

At any rate Pierini was really furious with her.

I did wrong, it’s true. But I didn’t know. He’d driven me to distraction,
he wouldn’t let me work, he was disruptive, he told all
those lies and I didn’t know, I swear I didn’t, about his mother. I
went out of my way to apologise to him
.

And he had looked at her as if she were the scum of the earth.

And then the practical jokes: the smashed window, the punctured tyres, and all the rest.

It had been him. Now she was certain.

That boy scared her. Scared her a lot. If he’d been older he would have tried to kill her. To do horrible things to her.

Whenever she saw him, Flora felt an impulse to say: ‘I’m sorry, I apologise for whatever it is I’ve done, please forgive me. I was
wrong, but I’ll never bother you again, if only you’ll stop hating me.’ But she knew that this would only have intensified his hostility.

He hadn’t broken into the school on his own.

That was clear. The different kinds of handwriting on the wall proved that. He must have taken some of his cronies along. But she would bet her life it had been him who had smashed the TV.

‘Look at the mess,’ groaned the head, bringing her back down to earth.

In the technical education room, as well as Flora, the head and the deputy head, there were two police officers writing a report. One was Andrea Bacci’s father. Flora knew him because he had come to school a couple of times to talk about him. The other was the son of Italo, the caretaker.

She read the other graffiti.

The headmaster sucks the deputy headmistress’s cock.

Italo’s got fishy feet.

Flora couldn’t help smiling. It was certainly a comic image. The headmaster on his knees and the deputy headmistress with her skirt lifted up and …
Maybe it’s true, the deputy headmistress is
a man
.

(
Stop it, Flora
…)

She saw Miss Gatta’s malicious eyes scrutinising her, trying to read her thoughts. ‘You see what they wrote?’

‘Yes …’ murmured Flora.

The deputy head clenched her fists and raised them to the sky. ‘Vandals. Wretches. How dare they? We must punish them. We must apply an immediate remedy to this running sore which is afflicting our poor school.’

If Miss Gatta had been a normal woman, a scrawl like that might have set her thinking seriously about the way her sexual identity and her relationship with the head were viewed by some of the pupils.

But Miss Gatta was a superior being and didn’t have such thoughts. Nothing shifted her from her perfect obtuseness. Not a
trace of embarrassment, not a hint of unease. The ruffians who had broken into her school had merely reawoken her fighting spirit and now the Prussian general was ready for the fray.

Mr Cosenza, however, was red in the face, proof that the words on the wall had struck home.

‘Do you have any suspicions?’ asked Flora.

‘No, but we’ll find out who did it, Miss Palmieri, you can bet your salary on that,’ snapped Miss Gatta. She had never seen her so furious in all the time she’d known her. One corner of her mouth was quivering with rage. ‘Have you read the one about you?’

‘Yes.’

‘It sounds like a message to you,’ she said in Hercule Poirot-like tones.

Flora said nothing.

‘Who can it have been? Why a video, precisely, and not a …’ Miss Gatta realised she was about to say something unseemly and broke off.

‘I don’t know … I’ve no idea,’ said Flora, shaking her head. Why, now that she had the chance to report Pierini, hadn’t she done so?
I’d get him into trouble
.

You could see a mile off that the law was going to twine like a climbing plant round that boy’s life and she didn’t want to be the one who initiated this symbiosis.

There was also a simpler and more utilitarian reason. She was afraid that when Pierini found out that it had been her who had reported him, he would make her pay dearly for it, very dearly.

‘Miss Palmieri, I asked Giovanni to summon you here before the other teachers because some time ago you came to me to complain that certain pupils were playing you up. They might have been the same children who did this. Do you see what I mean? I’m wondering if this might have been a way of getting back at you. You said you couldn’t communicate with your pupils, and sometimes such failures in mutual understanding manifest themselves in this way.’ She turned to the head for confirmation. ‘Isn’t that so, Giovanni?’

‘Yes …’ he concurred, bending down to pick up a piece of broken glass.

‘Please, Giovanni! Don’t touch that! You’ll cut yourself!’ shouted the deputy head, and the headmaster immediately stood to attention. ‘Miss Palmieri, might that not be the case?’

Then why did they write what they did about the headmaster
doing that to you?
How she would have loved to answer the harpy like that. But instead she stammered: ‘Well … I don’t think so … Otherwise why would they have written the other … graffiti?’ She said it in fits and starts but she said it.

Miss Gatta’s eyes disappeared into their bags. ‘What’s that got to do with it?’ she growled. ‘Remember that the head and I are the highest authorities here. It’s only natural that they should feel resentful towards us, but it’s not at all natural that they should feel resentful towards you. You were singled out above all the other teachers. Why didn’t they write about Miss Rovi? She uses the video recorder too. Let’s not be silly about this, Miss Palmieri. The person who wrote those words has a grudge against you. And I’m not surprised you have no idea who it could have been, you don’t observe your pupils as carefully as you ought to.’

Flora lowered her eyes.

‘What shall we do now?’ interjected the head, trying to calm the T. Rex down.

‘Do? Tidy up. We can discuss this young lady’s teaching methods on some other occasion,’ said the deputy head, rubbing her hands together.

‘The children will be here soon. Perhaps it would be better if they didn’t come in … if we sent them home and called a staff meeting to decide on an effective response to this outrage …’ suggested the head.

‘No. I don’t think that’s the best course. We must let the children in. And we’ll hold lessons as usual. The technical education room must be locked. One of the science teachers has booked it for this morning, but he can teach upstairs. The pupils mustn’t know anything. Even the teachers must be told as little as possible. We’ll call Margherita and have her clean up and then, this afternoon, we’ll
call in the painter to redecorate the walls, and the two of us …’ Miss Gatta glared at Flora. ‘… no, the three of us – you, Miss Palmieri, will come along to help us in our inquiries – will go to Orbano to see how Italo is and try to find out who the culprits are.’

The head trembled all over. Like those skinny little dogs that quiver at the sight of their masters. ‘Quite right, quite right. Good, good.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘The children are due any time now. Shall I give the order to unlock the doors?’

Miss Gatta gave him a leer of assent.

The head left the room.

The deputy head now turned her attention to the two policemen. ‘Well, what are you two dithering about? If you’re going to take photographs, get on with it. We’re going to have to lock up. There’s no time to lose.’

The noise the cartilage of a broken nose makes when you put it back into place is not unlike the sound of teeth sinking into a Magnum.

Scrooooskt
.

What makes your nerves explode, your heart race, your flesh creep, is not so much the pain as that noise.

Italo Miele had already suffered this unpleasant experience once before, at the age of twenty-three, when a hunter had stolen a pheasant he had shot. They had started fighting in the middle of a sunflower field, and the other man (a boxer, no doubt) had quite without warning hit him full in the face. On that occasion his father had straightened his nose.

That was why now, in the outpatients’ department of the Sandro Pertini hospital in Orbano, he was shouting and swearing that he wasn’t going to let anyone touch his nose, least of all some young upstart of a houseman.

‘Look, it can’t stay as it is. It’s your decision, of course … but you’ll be left with a crooked nose,’ muttered the young doctor, in an aggrieved tone.

Italo struggled up from the litter on which they had laid him. A plump nurse tried to stop him, but he batted her aside like a midge and approached the mirror.

‘Mamma mia …’ he muttered.

What a mess!

A baboon.

His nose, as purple and fat as an aubergine, hung to the right. It felt as hot as a steam iron. His eyes were hidden under two swollen ring doughnuts which started out magenta and shaded into cobalt blue. A deep wound sutured with nine stitches and dabbed with tincture of iodine split his forehead in half.

‘I’ll put it back into place myself.’

Grasping his jaw with his left hand and his nose with his right, he took a gulp of air and …

Scrooooskt
…

… he wrenched it back into line.

He stifled a wild scream. His stomach churned and filled with gastric juices. He almost retched with the pain. His legs gave way for an instant and he had to lean against the basin to stop himself collapsing on the floor.

The doctor and the two nurses stared in amazement.

‘That’s done, then.’ He limped back to the litter. ‘Now take me back to bed. I’m worn out. I want to sleep.’

He closed his eyes.

‘We’ll have to staunch the blood and give you some medication.’ The querulous voice of the doctor.

‘All right …’

God, he was tired …

More exhausted, drained, battered and bruised than any human being on earth. He was going to have to sleep for two days at least. That way he wouldn’t feel the pain, wouldn’t feel anything, and when he woke up he’d go home and have three weeks of convalescence being cared for and pampered and pitied by the old woman. He’d eat endless dishes of fettuccine with ragù and watch TV and plan how to make them pay for what they’d done to him that terrible night.

Oh yes, they were going to pay.

The state. The school. The families of those hooligans. Never mind who. Someone was going to pay, down to the last goddamn lira.