10th January
‘Two blokes dug into the beach, disappeared underneath and haven’t been seen in two weeks. Seriously? What are we meant to do with this shite?’ Detective Peters turned the engine off and didn’t wait for an answer from Detective Ricci as he slammed the car door. Ricci exhaled quietly, and watched for a moment, the low winter sun sparking off in multiple directions through Peters’ smudged window.
‘Same as always. Follow the information,’ said Ricci after a few moments, catching up to Peters making his way along the path towards the patch of gravel where a group of men stood in a circle, all holding a dumbbell in each hand.
‘What information?’
‘The eye witness account.’
Peters laughed. ‘That old codger who sleeps out here?’
‘Not every night,’ said Ricci. ‘He has the spot by the hospital too.’
“Pardon me then, ma’am. He only sleeps out here every other night. Well, there’s a man whose word we can trust. Is this what being partners with a lady officer is going to be like? Gonna spend our time chasing dead ends, are we?’
Ricci didn’t answer, and instead nodded towards the group of men, most of whom looked in their sixties. The detectives had got close enough to hear the group’s syncopated grunts that accompanied their bicep curls. ‘I suppose we ought to wait until they take a break.’
‘Yeah, their time must be precious,’ Peters said under his breath. ‘Out here at three o’clock on a Monday.’ He walked towards the circle, and caught the eye of the largest man who wore a red bandana that looked about to snap at any second, his head and jaw line making an almost perfect cube. ‘Don’t suppose you’ve got a few minutes, fellas.’ The man with the bandana finished the last two of his bicep curls, the group joining him, all inhaling and exhaling in perfect unison, then he dropped the dumbbells and made a parting motion with his hands.
The group circle disjoined, leaving a large gap for Peters and Ricci to approach the man, and the rest of the men began walking away. He nodded in reply to Peters, who said, ‘We’ve had a report of two men disappearing… underneath the beach.’ Peters and Ricci heard the shuffling of footsteps from the other men. From the corner of her eye, Ricci felt them all turn to walk back towards them, and stare at Peters.
The men all said in unison: ‘Bronchus.’
*
Bronchus Bianchi
I had always wanted to fall. To just be falling, and to fall so completely that I was rendered nothing to do with myself. So that I forget the concept of ‘I’, or ‘me’. For there to just be falling. No memories and no wants, just the feeling – the feeling of a fall.
*
Christi Bianchi
From the day I gave birth, I felt my son was an imposter. Twenty-three years old, I had held my baby in my arms, and after a few attempts, I hoped to feel nothing. For what I felt was worse than nothing: contempt. I felt blood in my head, an angry energy in my arms, my arms screaming at me to throw that baby away. My world had been close to perfect: a loving boyfriend with tolerable parents, girlfriends who lived nearby and with whom I shared yoga practices and orange cake, biweekly visits to Teatro dell’Opera, dining out every night in five star restaurants. And then this little... person. Suddenly there was somebody whom Gio loved more than me. And what’s more, I had to be the one to take care of it. Life was simple, so why did we decide to make things complicated?
*
1st January
The sun had been up for half an hour as Bronchus squinted into the distance, his lifting out of sync with the eleven other gym-goers. There were wild, swirling winds and the sea tossed in unpredictable directions. Bronchus’ breaths mimicked the waves: some short, others long, and his muscles moved with none of the precision that the other men were used to seeing.
‘What’s up, Bronchus?’ said the man with the red bandana.
‘What do you think he’s doing?’ asked Bronchus.
The others followed Bronchus’ eyeline, and they saw a bald man in the distance towards the pier. The man carried a large shovel, and was hacking away at the pebbles on the beach.
‘Beats me,’ one of them said. ‘Probably one of them nutters who think they can get rich with a metal detector.’
The group continued lifting and lowering and squatting and pressing. Bronchus watched the digger.
*
11th January
‘I wasn’t particularly suited to it. Because it is work, isn’t it? I don’t believe everyone is made to be a parent. You’re a parent, are you?’ Christi Bianchi sat in her armchair, arms folded on her stomach and each hand tucked inside the large cotton jumper sleeves of the opposite arm. Peters and Ricci sat a few feet away, on a faded velvet sofa, once dark green and now a greenish white.
‘Mrs Bianchi,’ said Ricci, ‘could you tell us anything about what your son was doing day to day?’
Mrs Bianchi had not looked at the detectives since opening the front door after two minutes of their knocking. Her eyes were fixed on the mantelpiece which shelved several photos of her younger self, arms wrapped around a man with a wrinkled forehead and cocky smile.
‘Anything at all would help us,’ said Ricci.
‘You didn’t answer, Mrs Detective.’
‘Just answer her question, Ricci,’ said Peters, who was slumped against the sofa, palm propping up his head.
‘Ricci!’ Mrs Bianchi’s head span round with surprising elasticity, her green eyes beaming. ‘You’re Italian, dear!’
Ricci turned to Peters who gave a barely detectable nod. ‘Yes,’ Ricci said, turning back to Mrs Bianchi. ‘Rome. My parents are from Rome.’
‘Oh, how wonderful! Rome! I am from Rome, too. You don’t sound Italian, dear. Of course, nor do I. Several decades I’ve lived here now. Lord knows how many English lessons. Oh, bellissima! You’re from Rome!’
‘My parents. ... Mrs Bianchi, did your son Bronchus come to see you at all in the weeks before his disappearance?’
‘Yes, on Christmas, as was his custom. He would pop in, then shoot out. Go back to his gym thing. Have you seen him? Such an odd body, such an odd shape! Such a huge chest, like a barrel – like the Basilica, dear – but such tiny legs!’
‘As we said, ma’am, nobody has seen him in two weeks,’ said Ricci.
‘Always was an odd child.’
Peters exhaled, and Ricci turned to him again to see him looking out the window. ‘Mrs Bianchi,’ said Ricci, ‘did he mention anything to you about going anywhere? Taking a trip?’
*
Bronchus Bianchi
I was small, six or seven, when I had my first Italian lesson. Our school was one of the few in the country to teach the subject. I sat near the front of the class, eager to show the other children what I knew. My parents were Italian! I would know how to speak Italian soon, and I could join in with my mother and father’s conversations! I already knew some words: zitto! Zitto! I shouted. Zitto, zitto, zitto! Sta ‘zitto! Statazit! Everything I had heard, I said. The teacher, a greying, friendly faced man with glasses, stood by the blackboard and had not yet spoken. He wore a half smile and was looking at me, as were all the other children in the class, but I didn’t mind. Tis was my lesson: Italian!
‘I have not said anything, young man,’ the teacher said with his half smile. ‘So I can hardly shut up.’
Shut up? Zitto! Zitto! No, that was a happy sound! It meant… yay! No, it can’t mean ‘shut up’. That’s what my mother would say when I came into the kitchen an hour after dinner and ask what she was saying to my father in Italian. Later I found out that it did in fact mean ‘shut up’. I didn’t speak another word in the class until one day, a few months later, the half smiling teacher asked us to try and describe our dreams with a few words in Italian. Each child went to the front of the class and read from their notebooks.
A broad shouldered, flat-faced girl told us about her nightmares. She would be climbing this tall, seemingly never-ending staircase to the top of the county hospital. She started talking about the operation she’d had there the year before—‘appendixitis’, she called it—and I waited for her to get back to the staircase. She got higher and higher up. Eventually, she said, she’d reach the top, and open a dark green door with a horizontal bar stretched across that she had to push. And she’d be on the roof. Every night, she would look over the edge. And then she would fall, and keep falling and falling. And she would wake up screaming and sweating. Her heart would be beating fast – “Thump, thump, thump!” she said. I once asked her if she could tell me more about the falling, but she sat there silently. I always hoped she would stand at the front of that class again and tell us more about what it was like.
Later, I heard other people talk of dreams where they would fall. They talked about them as such monstrous, hideous things. They would sometimes be scared to go to sleep. I couldn’t understand it.
*
1st January
The sun had long set with Bronchus’ fellow gym-goers long since departed, as Bronchus sat on a metal rail, his backside getting cold as the evening winds picked up. Hung-over New Year’s partiers returned to their pubs for more drinking and shouting. Bronchus was still watching the spot where the digger had been. He could no longer see any sign of him, but knew that he was underneath the pebbles. He had watched as the digger’s shoulders and then head had sunk down. Bronchus got up, and walked heavily and unevenly across the pebbles. When he reached the digger’s spot, he stood a few feet away from the hole, not knowing what to expect as he tried to peek down.
A low voice that sounded somewhat computerised, each syllable too similar, came out of the hole. ‘Someone there? Could you pass me that other shovel?’
Bronchus stepped forward, and could now see down the hole. There was the digger: ten feet down, peering up at him. ‘The other shovel, the bigger one,’ the digger said. ‘You can drop it. It’s alright.’
‘Have you found anything?’ said Bronchus.
‘Digging? No. Have you found anything lifting weights?’ said the digger, each syllable sounding a little too similar for Bronchus to feel comfortable, but he thought he heard concern in the digger’s voice.
Bronchus paused. ‘How far are you going?’
‘Do you want to join me?’
*
11th January
Peters was still looking out Christi Bianchi’s window as Ricci asked, ‘Is that your husband, Mrs Bianchi?’
Mrs Bianchi turned to her, ‘Yes, dear.’
Peters sighed, and Ricci looked at him rubbing his forehead, then to her surprise, he asked, ‘Mind me asking, ma’am? The name Bronchus – what’s that about?’
Mrs Bianchi flicked her eyes at the photographs on her mantelpiece, then looked at Ricci. ‘He was a pulmonologist, dear, my husband. He liked the lungs and that sort of thing. Very clever, he was. And he liked the word.’
Peters made a non-committal sound, something between a laugh and a groan.
‘I used to imagine him being called Arturo, or Nicoli. I think he could have turned out differently.’
Peters and Ricci were in the car five minutes later. ‘Just fled, didn’t he?’ Peters said. ‘What did he have to stick around for? Mum doesn’t like him. A group of gym nuts? He’ll turn up on some other coast, safe as houses.’
*
Bronchus Bianchi
The digger and I were now fifteen feet beneath the beach’s surface. There was barely enough room for both of us at the bottom of the hole, so we took turns with the bigger shovel. I wiped a drop of sweat from my nose and the digger raised his hand as though to say he was ready for another shift. I stepped to the edge of the hole, and looked up. There was just a little light from nearby street lamps and the stars in the black sky. A few specks of sand dropped down towards us as the wind swept them into the hole.
‘It’s changing,’ said the digger. ‘The surface. It’s changing.’
I leant against the rough rocky wall of the hole, the shovel coming close to my chest as the digger hacked away. The shovel was now getting stuck in the sand with every other attempt to dig deeper. Soon the digger’s feet were sinking and I was standing on the only reliable bit of footing. ‘I can feel something,’ said the digger. ‘Something. … Hands – they’re pulling me.’ He passed the shovel back to me and let himself sink into the sand. His feet went, his shins, then his whole legs, his stomach. ‘I’ll see you down there,’ said the digger. Soon the only part of him remaining was his shining bald head. My eyes flicked up to the sky to see a plane with wild bright lights above. By the time I looked back, the digger was gone. I pictured him finding whatever was down there. I placed the shovel against the wall of the hole, and jumped as high as I could into the sand.
I tucked my hands and feet into my body and fell and fell and fell a great distance, though I wasn’t sure how I knew, for everything around me was a bright blue.
I looked up at where I had come from: a small sandy-coloured patch on the blue was getting smaller and smaller as I fell. The air was growing warmer, and there was a strong sense of quiet. I knew my hearing was perfectly intact, and that I wasn’t missing anything, there was nothing to hear. I fell with my eyes shut for a few moments, then opened them again, wondering what was below. I tipped my head to the side and saw that I was falling towards two blobs of orange that lay between two longer stretches of green. The movement of my head seemed to make me fall even quicker, and I began swaying and toppling over in circles, my body tucked into a ball. I felt small and unseen and entirely happy.
Looking up once more, the patch of sand was now just a speck in the sky. By the time of my next blink, I had stopped falling. It took me a moment to realise that I had stopped moving.
Something, or someone, was holding me. I looked around at a group of smiling bald faces: six or seven men in orange robes were carrying me. I smiled at the feeling of their hands on my back. Between two of the smiling faces I could see another group of robed men about ten yards away. In their arms was the digger, grinning widely, the whites of his eyes glowing.
After laying there dumbly and happily, forgetting time, I began looking around. Long rows of fluffy green trees sidelined a path. A shaggy-haired dog ran towards us and then away down the sandy-coloured path, a rodent dangling from its mouth. Feeling me crane my neck, the robed men slowly lowered my legs to the ground and carefully pushed my back upwards so that I stood independently. The smiling men nodded at me before walking in the same direction as the dog. I looked at the digger, who had also been left to stand, and we smiled at each other, then followed them down the path. I no longer wanted to fall.