Chapter 4 — Disappear and Shut Up

(Laura)

Giulia sits me on the couch and puts a glass of water in my hands, and I tell her. I don’t do it well. I keep stopping and starting, and some of it comes out in the wrong order, the stairwell before the champagne, the cufflinks before the bruises. I show her my arms. She looks at the marks and then out towards the balcony doors, and the longer I talk, the stiller she goes.

When I’ve finished, she says nothing for long enough that I wonder if she heard me.

“You were drinking a lot,” she says at last.

I stare at her. “I had three glasses. Maybe four. I’ve had more than that at uni and walked home.”

“You were dancing with him for ages. Everyone saw. You were all over each other, Laura.”

“We were dancing. It’s a wedding. That’s what people do at weddings.” My voice is climbing and I can’t stop it. “I don’t remember leaving. I don’t remember getting in a car. I woke up in his bed with no clothes on and I don’t remember any of it.”

“So you don’t know what happened.”

“I know what happened to me.” I hold up my arms again. “I know what these are. I know what I woke up to. I’m not stupid, Giulia.”

She gets up and goes to the kitchen bench and stands with both hands flat on it, facing the wall. “Did you tell him no?”

“I couldn’t tell him anything. I couldn’t stand up.”

“Then how can you say…” She turns around. Her face is white under the smudged mascara. “You can’t say this. You can’t say it about Piero. Do you understand who that family is?”

“They’re your family.”

“Exactly.” She says it as if it explains everything, and maybe to her it does. “My uncle owns half this city, Laura. The other half owes him money. You go to the police here and tell them Piero Vianello did this, and they’ll write it down very politely, and then somebody will make one phone call and it’ll disappear. Along with any chance of you leaving here without trouble.”

I put the glass on the coffee table because my hand has started to shake again. “Then I’ll see a doctor. A hospital. Someone has to look at me.”

“See one at home.”

“Home? I can’t go home. I haven’t got my passport. Or my phone, or my wallet, or anything.” I can hear how close I am to hysterical, and I make myself slow down. I’ve watched my supervisors on placement talk frightened patients through bad news, and I try to do it to myself. One thing at a time. “I need my things, Giulia. That’s the first thing. Help me get my passport and I’ll work out the rest.”

She looks at me for a long moment. Then she picks up her phone from the bench and walks out onto the balcony, sliding the glass door shut behind her.

I watch her through the glass, pacing in her robe with one hand pressed to her forehead. She talks fast, in Italian, low at first and then sharper. I catch “passaporto”. I catch “subito”, which I’ve learned means now because the aunts kept saying it at dinner. I catch a name, or what might be one, but it’s gone before I can hold onto it. She doesn’t sound like someone begging a favour. She sounds like she’s arguing with a person who already knows what she’s going to ask.

When she comes inside she says, “Have a shower. Someone will bring them.”

“Bring them? Who?”

“Have a shower, Laura.”

So I go into the bathroom and turn the shower on, and I’ve got the ruined dress halfway off my shoulders before I stop.

I stand there with my hand on the tap and frown at the water. I know this. Everybody knows this, from every crime show Mum ever watched with the volume up too loud. You don’t shower. You don’t wash anything. You go to a hospital first, and someone with gloves and a kit takes swabs and photographs the bruises, and only then are you allowed to scrub it all away. Giulia said no doctors and no police, but she said it in a panic, on a balcony, and I haven’t agreed to anything. Once I’ve got my passport, I can find a clinic. Or I’ll make her come with me. Or I’ll go to the hospital the minute I land in Australia. My brain keeps offering plans and I keep nodding along to them, because the alternative is accepting she meant it.

Every bit of my skin is screaming at me to get him off. I can smell his aftershave on my hair. I can smell it on my hands.

I turn the water off.

I wash my hands and face at the basin instead, over and over, until my cheeks are red raw, and I brush my teeth twice with Giulia’s toothbrush and don’t even feel guilty about it. I peel the emerald dress off and fold it into a plastic shopping bag from under her sink, and tie the handles in a knot, because some calm, stubborn part of me says it might matter later. Then I pull on her old uni hoodie and a pair of her trackies over skin that still isn’t clean, and sit on the edge of the bath with my arms wrapped around myself, hating every second of it. When I come out, the buzzer is going. Giulia goes down alone. Four minutes later she comes up with my beaded clutch in her hand.

My phone is in it, switched off. My wallet is in it, with my bank card and every one of my euros. My passport is tucked into the little side pocket where I put it last night.

I turn the passport over in my hands. It’s taken less than an hour. I couldn’t talk a bus driver into letting me on without a ticket, and Giulia has made one phone call and conjured my passport out of thin air, delivered to the door like takeaway.

“How did you do that?” I ask. “Who did you ring?”

“Does it matter? You’ve got it.” She won’t meet my eyes. She’s already at the table with her laptop open, typing. “There’s a flight to Rome at four. You can connect through Dubai tonight. I’ll pay for it.”

“Giulia.”

“You’ll be home by Tuesday.” She reaches for her handbag, pulls out her purse and counts fifty-euro notes onto the table one after the other until there are ten of them in a neat little fan. She pushes them towards me. “For the taxi. Food. Whatever you need.”

I look at the money and then at her. Her hands are trembling. I think it’s fear, and I think I understand it, a bit. These are her people. Her uncle, her aunties, the cousins who’ve known her since she was in a pram. And here I am, the Australian friend she brought to the party, blowing it all up.

But I’m supposed to be her best friend.

“Come with me to a doctor,” I say quietly. “Here. Today, before I go. You can translate. That’s all I’m asking.”

“No.”

“I’m not asking you to go to the police. I’m asking you to sit in a waiting room.”

“No, Laura.” She closes the laptop and looks at me properly for the first time since I walked in, and her eyes are wet and hard at once. “Listen to me, because I’m only going to say this once. You don’t go to a doctor here. You don’t tell anyone here. You don’t tell anyone at home. You get on that plane and you forget his name, and you forget this whole family exists.”

I open my mouth. She doesn’t let me speak.

“Disappear, Laura. Go home and shut up.”