Here is Richard Finch:
a bony Englishman, forty-five years old, in earth-tone slacks made
out of some kind of stretchy fabric and a polo shirt from Marks and
Spencer, hunched over a pushchair amongst the white marble miracles
of Pisa, birthplace of his second wife. Their child, almost two now,
is curled asleep in the pushchair, sucking at the fleecy ear of a toy
rabbit. She has never been allowed a dummy. Finch checks his watch
every thirty seconds and his wife, clearly annoyed, tells him they
have plenty of time. Her attitude may well be all que sera sera,
he thinks, but he likes to get to the airport early, to be at the
front of the inevitable queue, and they still have to retrieve the
suitcases from her mother's, which is not exactly between their
current position and the airport, and she almost certainly hasn't
taken into account how protracted the leavetaking is likely to be,
particularly now the long-awaited grandchild has to be said goodbye
to as well, and all the snuggling and tears and promises of an almost
immediate return entered into, and the fact that there is probably
going to be rush hour traffic, yes even here, where no-one rushes to
do anything at all. He twiddles his fingers on the crossbar of the
buggy, to stop himself looking at his watch but also as a subtle yet
unmistakeable indication of his ongoing impatience.
Mrs Finch - smaller,
slightly younger, and possessed of a honey-eyed, aquiline beauty
which makes Finch the envy of his friends and colleagues - is
altogether more relaxed. She walks alongside her husband and child
smiling at the folly of the tourists, duelling with selfie sticks to
position themselves at a position of greatest advantage for the same
photo that everyone takes when they come to this small corner of the
country she left behind. Nice to see the place anew, she thinks,
through his eyes. And when Isabella is a little older, through her
eyes too.
“Don't they drive you
mad?”
“Why should they?
Everyone is behaving very well.”
This is true, more or
less, Finch thinks. No-one is actually throwing punches, but it's a
scene, nevertheless. It was her idea, this. To have a leisurely
lunch and wander down to marvel at i turisti, marvelling
at the marvels. All good fun, but they're now half an hour behind
the schedule he had outlined in his head. Perhaps he should have
told her about this earlier.
“Laura,”
he begins. His wife raises a hand. Across an angle of lush grass,
perhaps fifty or sixty yards away, a crowd has gathered, and a woman
can be heard shrieking. Finch can't see what is going on, exactly.
His glasses are at at home on the narrow table in the hallway. Laura
takes his arm. “Do something,” she says. He checks his watch
again, finding himself somehow helpless, through no fault of his own.
They're not even supposed to still be here, according to his own,
silent reckoning. She is pushing him now, towards the fracas, away
from the airport. He steps over the low swag of black chain and
starts to jog across the grass, his gait long yet inefficient, like
an old, lame wolf. The scene before him sharpens into a kind of
sense. A Japanese couple and their son, all in matching golf visors,
the father, with some expensive looking camera equipment slung over
his back as he kneels behind the boy, who is three or four years old,
and whose face is the livid purple of a drunk's cheek. The man has
his arms around the boy and is snatching them upwards in an effort,
Finch assumes, to dislodge something in his airway. Trachea, is it?
The kid is flopping around noiselessly like a dead thing.
The
crowd see the tall Englishman coming and back away in expectation so
that when he arrives dozens of pairs of eyes settle upon him. The
mother is still screaming and shaking. This response does not seem
disproportionate to the situation, Finch acknowledges, which does
appear to be rather grave, but he is surprised by it nevertheless,
perhaps, he considers, because of the woman's nationality, and the
Japanese reputation for calm stoicism. He stands there for a moment,
panting slightly, and remarks to himself that the reason that we have
a word for stereotypes is probably something to do with their
unreliability, otherwise there would be no need to discriminate
between generalisations of this kind and actual fact. The noise the
woman is making, whatever his feelings about it, isn't helpful, so he
puts a hand on her shoulder and flaps his other hand up and down, as
if testing the buoyancy of a hotel pillow, in an effort to calm her
down. The father, who seems to be conforming wholeheartedly to
Finch's possibly somewhat bigoted expectations looks up at him and
says “Medico?” Finch shakes his head and points towards the
squat mediaeval gateway to the piazza through which he and his own
family had entered minutes earlier and beyond which are visible the
chequered markings of an emergency vehicle. “No, ambulancia,” he
says, complete with a bad Spanish accent. “Ambulanza.” He looks
into the eyes of the father and realises that the man's implacable
exterior is a lie, white marble over brickwork, and that he is as
panicked as his wife, still moaning to Finch's left, but at a
manageable volume.
He
reaches out to the child and puts two long hands under the boy's
armpits. The kid has the surprising density of the unconscious, and
Finch lets the small body flop onto his shoulder as he turns to run
towards the gate. As he does so a small, sand-coloured object, wet
with the boy's spit and phlegm, flies out of the kid's mouth, marking
a gentle, curved descent before nestling atop the impossibly green
grass. Almost immediately the boy comes to and starts to cough and
cry. Finch has only taken five paces. He stops and with
considerable care lowers the kid, lighter now by a more than the mass
of a half-eaten rice cake, down onto the lawn. The father gathers
his son into an embrace shuddered by sobbing. People are taking
pictures or applauding. The boy's mother is thanking Finch, over and
over again and pulling at the Englishman's sleeve, which is
annoying, because all he wants to do is check the time, though he
knows that the reward that awaits him is a missed flight, or at the
very best a long, snaking queue at the airport, and him at the back
of it.
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