Shelter Read online

  ‘What’s that look for?’ The old man squints and loosens his grip on Seppe’s collar. He smells curiously of cooking oil and his fingers are broad, the nails blackened.

  Seppe considers his options. He could make a break for it. But if his father were to find out he wouldn’t even stand up to these ‘peasants’ things would only be worse. Seppe’s hands are shaking. He stuffs them in his pockets and clenches his fists. It doesn’t stop them.

  ‘I caught a glimpse of something shifting a couple of weeks ago when I came in here to fix that rubbing door. Thought it was a rat, but now I know better.’ The old man considers him. ‘Don’t want to be home, is that it? Well, I can understand that, had the same trouble often enough when I was your age.

  ‘We’d better give you something to do, make you useful.’ He dug into a pocket and drew out a knife. Seppe jumps back and the man flips the knife, offering it, handle out, to Seppe. ‘Calma. I’m not going to hurt you. Take this.’

  It’s warm from the man’s pocket, and tiny, no bigger than a butter knife, but the blade winks in the salty harbour light and speaks of its power. Seppe balances it in his palm, not daring to look up. What does this stranger want him to do? The ports are chock full of crooks, another reason his father despises the place. The Major has been accused by some of double-dealing to gain his place in the Livorno fascio, and the battle to clear his name has left him implacable if faced with anyone he considers immoral; the ports are the epitome of this, in his view. And he has many methods of enacting this rage.

  Seppe rolls the knife in his hand, the weight firm and steady. No bloodstains. This is a good sign.

  The man rests back on his heels, watching. Seppe risks a glance and the man smiles. Grown-ups don’t normally smile. They use their special ‘obey me’ voice (his father), cower (his mother), or do as his father demands (his teachers, the padre, the neighbours).

  ‘I’m Renzo. I’m the carpenter round here, keeping the carts steady, the stables safe. I don’t know who you are, and it’s probably better that way, but I need to call you something.’

  It’s beyond Seppe to lie, not about something so fundamental. But he can leave off the family name and that might protect them both. The shame he feels towards being his father’s son is complicated; if he were a good person, he would want to be connected to such a powerful and public man. But here the instinct to conceal his identity is strong.

  ‘I’m Seppe.’

  ‘Well, Seppe, it’s good to meet you.’ He sets off and Seppe follows, still clutching the knife. Renzo looks over his shoulder. ‘That whittling knife’s yours if you like. I’ll show you what you can do with it.’

  Seppe had carved hundreds, thousands of pieces in the decade or so since, but every single time he picked up a new piece of wood, carving erased his father’s poisonous whispers and uncontrolled roars, erased his mother’s futile, terrified attempts at mollification, erased the stamp stamp stamp of blackshirt troops on the move, even more terrifying when the Major led the way. And with every new piece of wood Seppe still considered what Renzo would guide him to do. Hydrated wood was harder to carve, easier to get wrong because the blade didn’t run true, might snag on the denser material. Renzo had kept his carpentry materials as far from the waves as he could manage, building himself a trolley at the back end of the port to pull them from place to place as he, also warped with time, bent until he was almost doubled over.

  THE BARRACK DOOR BANGED open and he jumped.

  ‘So it’s true! The Major’s son got himself captured! Someone said there was a Seppe from Livorno sneaking around. I had to come and see this stronzo for myself.’

  Seppe’s whittling knife clattered to the floor.

  No. No.

  Fredo Neri was here, cronies jostling beside him. Fredo, who he hadn’t seen since the desert, whose last move had been to swear vengeance. Fredo, already issued with the black armband marking him out as a dangerous POW and wearing it with swaggering pride. He stomped towards Seppe, menace clear in the clanging of his boots against the wooden struts of the bunk.

  Seppe went cold. He kept his head down, but it didn’t make any difference, never had. Fredo jabbed him hard.

  ‘Oi, you! Move. I’m having this bunk; you need to take one of those spares by the latrine pot. There’s no way I’m sleeping down there.’

  Fredo had been one of the first from Livorno to go to war, delighted to enlist and fight for Il Duce. Seppe’s father had reported this news with vicarious pride, then beaten Seppe for not demonstrating the same fervour. The Major’s delight when Seppe finally enlisted had been undocumented, but Seppe couldn’t help but see his hand in the posting he received, landing him straight after brutal training into Fredo’s regiment in the African desert.

  ‘Come on, move. Get near the shit where you belong.’

  No! This was a new country, a new situation, the first time Seppe had ever felt truly safe. It didn’t matter what had happened in the desert, where he’d finally exacted a drop of revenge and doubtless exacerbated things. Fredo couldn’t touch him in here. Seppe stood firm, met Fredo’s gaze.

  It was short-lived; he couldn’t stand to stare at him for long.

  ‘Don’t think I don’t remember what you did, the choices you made. You might have been running from Daddy at the beginning but it’s me you have to fear now.’

  Fredo threw Seppe’s pillow down the hut, aiming at the night soil buckets.

  ‘If you’re not going to do it yourself, scum, then we’ll do it for you.’ The two men either side of him, wiry and mean-looking, preened as if only too keen to follow Fredo’s lead.

  No!

  But Fredo was already out to get him. What was the sense in giving him further reason? Seppe’s actions in the desert had been hasty, borne of a long-held grudge. He would never have done it if he’d known he’d end up trapped here with the man. Better to give Fredo this small victory than to add to the already looming threat of retribution. Even as he watched, Fredo followed the pillow back to the front of the hut. He picked it up between forefinger and thumb and, making sure he had Seppe’s attention, dropped it into the night soil bucket. It tipped over with the weight, the stench mushrooming, lacing the room.

  This would only be the beginning. Seppe bent down for the whittling knife with numbed fingers and moved.

  July, 1942

  They are deep into the African desert when the trucks finally stop and the order comes to set up camp. Seppe had tried to listen out for where they must be, the continent so vast that this not knowing only adds to his disorientation, but the commanders are concealing this information for their own unexpressed reasons. He jumps out, rubbing the crimped ache in his left shoulder. The heat races at him and he flings an arm in front of his eyes. It’s pointless; the swelter snakes under his clothing, coils around his bare arms, claims him as its own.

  ‘Get a move on!’ He’s pushed forward by the mass of soldiers clambering out behind him, follows them to the supplies truck where tents are being doled out. Another endless, monochrome landscape with nothing to break the line of sight but constant, wind-rippled sand, each grain as uniform as the next. And the heat! Seppe’s lips are parched and cracked, his water canteen dry since Fredo tipped it over in the burning sun just as they were due to climb into the truck. But there will be no water supplies until the tents are up.

  He collects his pack supplies from the truck, his arms sagging under the weight of the tent. Fredo is somewhere in the mass of shouting northerners, delighted to be moving closer to the fighting. They are the same lowly rank, he and Fredo, but where Seppe sees only danger in such proximity to the firing line, Fredo revels in this enactment of duty to Il Duce. His zeal makes Seppe sick to his stomach; even in basic training Fredo delighted in learning the precise angles for maximum damage, not seeing that they themselves are the maximum damage. But for as long as Fredo is amongst kindred spirits, singing and marching their way to their designated spots, he is out of the way. Better that he’s chanting about
murdering the lily-livered Allies than that he’s insinuating himself behind Seppe.

  Last week, as they marched through the desert, Fredo had lengthened his stride so that the scraped tips of his hob-nailed boots bit into the back of Seppe’s heels, step after step after step. Today the wound is red and weeping, sand slicing into it and each new move only intensifying the wound. Tomorrow Fredo will find another way to diminish Seppe. It has been like this since they arrived. It will only end, Seppe thinks, with death or capture. He is ashamed for how fervently he longs for the latter, and sometimes, secretly, for the former. How blissful would be the release, the escape from Fredo, from this senseless war. He draws himself in every time Fredo is nearby, tenses for the next slight. The very act of diminishing himself breeds self-loathing and resentment. Resentment of his father, whose sickening beliefs obscured care for his family; of his mother for compelling him into this senseless war; of Fredo. And disgust with himself for never standing up to them.

  Seppe hobbles forward and finds his space in the platoon’s line of sand-filmed tarpaulins. The war has been dragging on for years and the supplies are no longer complete. Perhaps those early conscripts had marched into battle with a full complement of gear, but those days seem as alien to Seppe’s version of this war as they do to the hazy memories of peacetime. The incomplete supplies are a solace. It relieves the tedium of assembling the tiny triangle of tarpaulin into a tent, makes it a puzzle that changes every time.

  It soothes him to build things even here in the punishing heat of the desert, his hands finding the rhythm that connects him to Renzo, to a time when he feared only his father, and was not marching in a platoon of zealots. It is as if his father has evoked the worst possible punishment.

  When Seppe’s hands are busy, his agonised thoughts of Alessa also fade.

  He blinks hard, pushes the memory down, forcing it beneath the sand, and turns again to the bundle of tarpaulin, incomplete as usual. Behind him the noises of the battalion swirl and point, forming patterns in the sand-saturated air around them. The chaos recedes as Seppe bends towards his task.

  He needs two tent pegs. Tent pegs are not a problem. He puts down his pack and scrabbles around in the bottom of it for the screws he’d picked up on their first, rattling journey. He takes a length of string from the ball tied to the outside of his pack and cuts it off with the rough spiral of the screw before winding it round the screws, a loop secured at the top, to form a tiny parcel.

  ‘Eccoli.’ The tiny points of the screws drive into the ground more easily than the military-issued tent pegs and will stay put in these shifting sands. He uses two of them at corners, then bends down to straighten up the groundsheet.

  ‘Oi, master builder.’

  Seppe turns around, stands to attention, sand gritting beneath his boots. Their commander often calls him in to fix things. It’s all less time spent with a weapon in hand.

  He’s been fooled. It’s Fredo, mimicking the commander. Fredo’s eyes are gleaming. He has found a way to destroy this moment of peace. Fredo is determined to undo Seppe, picking away at his snatched moments of calm like the rats nibbling at their supplies until Seppe is hulled. Seppe is the easy target, the honourable target. If Fredo can defeat Seppe, he will please the Major back home, and it will be a win for fascism, even as the Regio Esercito is being pushed inexorably back by its real enemy.

  Seppe understands without Fredo uttering a word. If only he had any idea how to stop it.

  ‘My tent won’t go up straight. Come and fix it. God only knows where the likes of you learned how to do this.’ All around them, men are starting to line up for inspection, row upon row of shaven heads with caps crammed on despite the heat.

  This sounds benign enough; many is the day that Seppe has fixed a tent for a fellow soldier. But his heel is sore, the infection hot and pulsing, and the shame froths in him like pus, spews out his answer before he has considered the implications of refusal.

  ‘No.’

  ‘What do you mean, no?’ Fredo comes closer. From here Seppe can see the crooked tooth, the cowlick that even as a small child was more menacing than charming. He will not step backwards. He is steeled by this endless burning sun, by the dread thirst that chaps his lips and spits out his words, husked of caring. For weeks now they have been marching, driving, building camp, breaking down camp, crouching in the shadows of moonlight not knowing if an ambush is imminent. The days oscillate between trudging boredom and terror of death, meld together in this desiccating heat. Seppe’s emotions are worn down, neutralised. None of it can matter any more.

  ‘Sort out your own tent.’

  ‘What did you just say?’

  Seppe shrugs. Fredo leans forward, shakes him by the shoulder. The ache from the truck isn’t fully gone and it twinges. ‘You will help me.’

  The physical touch prods awake in Seppe a memory of his father, shaking him as a child, demanding to know where he’d learned ‘that filthy song’ of resistance, a precursor to a beating. That was the end of Seppe’s time with Renzo, of the peaceful time and the touch stirs everything to the surface. He didn’t stand up to his father, but out here perhaps he can stand up to Fredo. Just once.

  ‘I will not.’ He twitches Fredo’s hand away from his shoulder and glances pointedly at this own tent, inspection-ready and proud, then nods his head at the approaching commander.

  ‘This is the third time my tent won’t make inspection,’ Fredo whispers, urgent now, barely containing his fury. ‘The commander will punish me.’

  This is true. The commander is cut from the same cloth as the Major, the same cloth that Fredo himself seems to be trying to fashion himself from. Painstaking care is taken in the desert to ensure a façade of organization and success amidst this pit of sweat and defeat. This manifested itself in regimented lines of tents even when half the equipment was faulty and dunes make neat quadrants near impossible. Last week the commander had ordered a man to run four miles in the beating sun for failing to present with properly starched collars, out here where sand snuck into the seams and rubbed weals into the tender scrag of your neck. The man had contracted sunstroke, had spent three days in the medical tent before being ordered to the front line, and did not return from it.

  Fredo is almost on his knees, the panic palpable. Seppe shifts forward, acquiescing. He can’t be someone who lets someone else suffer. But as he moves, the ridge on the heel of his boot scrapes against the open sore and he’s frozen with pain, his mouth watery and metallic. Fredo did that. Seppe runs a tongue over his dry lips, Alessa’s voice clear in his mind. If he suffers, he suffers. It’s not your problem.

  He shifts back, favours his good foot.

  ‘You’d better get back to your post. It’s nearly inspection time.’

  As if to emphasise the point, the trumpet sounds. Fredo casts a look at Seppe, half-anguished, half-vengeful. ‘You will pay for this.’

  This is without doubt. Seppe will feel the ramifications later in some imperceptible but vicious way; a slit slashed in the back of his shirt to burn his skin in the sun, buttons missing from Seppe’s jacket to trigger inspection ire. Fredo’s tactics are devious. Seppe could almost admire the guile, the evidence of a long game. Right now all he has is this bitter moment of victory, and he will savour it. He looks out towards the makeshift armoury, where even now gun parts are being cleaned, weapons assembled, ready for their next miserable, tense march towards potential death. Tomorrow they might all be dead …

  EVEN WITH THE DOOR to the carpentry workshop shut tight, Fredo’s vitriol surged in volubly from the uniform store two huts away, although the usual hubbub as the men cleared the parade ground of debris barely seeped through. This screw Seppe had been battling wouldn’t thread properly, the metal catching on his infected thumb.

  Fredo stopped roaring. The screw found its way in the silence and wound easily up the groove. Seppe exhaled. Now to fit the other two screws and that would be another chair finished. He was staying on track, though he barely slept
now. On his second night beside the night soil buckets, a bleary POW had apparently mistaken his bed for the latrine and now, since then he was constantly on guard for a warm stream of piss to splatter him again.

  The door slammed open. Fredo marched in. ‘I won’t stand for it. It’s all part of a conspiracy to wear us down!’

  Fredo’s Italian uniform had been taken from him, presumably to be burned with the others. Now he was in an old British uniform with black POW patches, the same as the rest of them. It happened each intake. The Italians were stripped of the uniforms they’d been in for months, deloused, and given these ‘new’ uniforms. Fredo’s black armband was still in place, though – he was fiercely proud of his status as a ‘real’ enemy.

  ‘It’s clean,’ Seppe offered. He had relished the relative softness of the new uniform against his skin, the absence of sand and lice and the stench of self. The lice didn’t stay away for good, of course, but it helped for a few days. The guards had been taciturn but kind. To Seppe, straightforward behaviour from ‘the enemy’ brought more comfort than the convoluted machinations of his homeland.

  Fredo stared. ‘You’re on their side! You are defending these English ways?’ Had Seppe spoken out loud? Fredo loomed closer and Seppe crouched behind the chair he was crafting. ‘You are worse than I thought! Not only a coward but a traitor too.’

  Fredo kicked the chair. Seppe toppled back from the force, sprawled on the sawdust. Fredo laughed, but there was no mirth.

  ‘I’ll show you, traitor.’ Was he going to beat him? Seppe’s arms came up around his head. But Fredo simply laughed again, hurled the chair against the wall. The leg snapped as it landed.

  ‘Like I’d waste being punished just for giving you what you deserved with one of your useless traitor chairs.’ Fredo picked up another one, slammed it hard into the wall. The hut juddered again. Seppe should stop him; he had to stop him. The guards would penalise Seppe for this waste, rations cut and his cigarette tokens denied for a week or so. He cowered and watched Fredo pick up and destroy another chair, and another. If Seppe got in the way, it would be him thrown against the wall instead.