Free The Night Falling by Katherine Webb

need to rest, after all.
    ‘I’ve lost a whole day’s work today, then?’ says Ettore, his eyes snapping open. Paola gives a curt little nod. Never once, since he was ten, has he missed a day’s work when work was available. He feels like a man left stranded; he feels traitorous and betrayed all at once. He sits up again but Paola stops him with a curse.
    ‘It’s too late now! You might as well rest. Luna is trying to borrow a needle and thread, to close the wound.’ Paola undoes the sling and deftly gathers Iacopo into her arms. She smiles wearily at him, and his little face broadens in delight. ‘How did it happen?’ she asks.
    ‘I don’t know. I … I lost my balance. I was thinking about … something. I just lost my balance, I think.’
    ‘Didn’t you get a meal?’
    ‘A little bread, but no wine.’
    ‘Those miserly bastards !’ Paola suddenly barks, and Iacopo’s eyes go wide. She quickly puts him over her shoulder and sways him, rolling her eyes anxiously to the ceiling.
    ‘Paola, please don’t worry. I can work. It will be fine.’ But Paola shakes her head.
    ‘You must go to our uncle. Ask him for an easy job while you heal.’
    ‘I will not.’ They glare at one another, and Paola looks away first.
    Ettore stays still for a few hours, taking in the strangeness of seeing their one room in daylight. He watches the beam of light from the single window as it glides slowly across the floor. Paola comes and goes. She brings him a cup of water and then a cup of acquasale , thin soup made by boiling up stale bread with salt in water, with a little olive oil or cheese added in times of plenty. There is mozzarella in the soup she gives him; Ettore glances up but doesn’t ask how she got it, because he knows she won’t answer. A man called Poete has a crush on her; he works at the small mozzarella factory at the far end of Via Roma. He has hands like paddles, a chinless face, and always smells of milk. The workers at that factory are allowed to eat as much mozzarella as they like inside the factory, but they aren’t allowed to take any home for their families. That way, the workers gorge themselves once or twice, but are then too sick of the stuff to want it any more. A few months ago a man tried to smuggle home a whole mozzarella – a knot the size of his fist. When it looked as though he would be caught he stuffed it into his mouth and tried to swallow it, and choked to death. Poete got his job, and there’s not much he wouldn’t attempt, it seems, for the things Paola will then do to repay him. She chose him carefully. Poete has subverted one of the lads who brings the milk from the farms every morning, in heavy pails swinging from the handlebars of his bicycle; so Paola regularly gets pilfered milk for Iacopo, since her own is never quite enough for him. Clearly, Poete has also found a way to smuggle out cheese sometimes. It tastes impossibly good, impossibly rich. Ettore shames himself by wolfing it down, and not sharing it with his sister.
    It’s hard for Paola to get paid work because of the baby, and because of her reputation. If there is an outbreak of violence in Gioia, a protest – like the stoning of a shop where the baker has been mixing dust into the loaves and selling at high prices – Paola is at the front. She makes her voice one of the loudest, and she does not defer to authority, or to the Church. When she was fifteen there was the scandal of the priest who had been discovered interfering with the little orphan girls in his care. Paola claims to have thrown the torch that finally set his house on fire. The peasants have little enough use for the Church, anyhow – the priests say the droughts and hardships are the result of their godlessness, and they continue to charge for funerals, weddings and christenings, when none can pay. Last year, when the government ordered rationing to help with the post-war shortages and women were frequently made to grant sexual favours to