Free The Night Falling by Katherine Webb Page B

feels is a kind of debilitating urge to surrender waiting to swallow him – a deep black well of it, like the hole at Castellana, into which he might fall and never emerge.
    ‘ My money, you mean? My money, boy.’
    ‘Mine now, in truth,’ says his companion, who Ettore has never seen before. The man grins a mouthful of gappy brown teeth at him, and Ettore would like to knock them out of his mouth. He sees at once that this man is nowhere near as drunk as his father.
    ‘He has lost it all to you?’ he says.
    ‘What he hasn’t tipped down his throat,’ says the barman, who has run the place for as long as Ettore can remember. ‘And he still owes me twenty-eight lire from the winter.’ Twenty-eight lire, in summer, is a good month’s wages.
    ‘Why aren’t you working?’ Valerio says then, glaring at his son.
    ‘I cut my leg. I’ll work tomorrow though … why aren’t you working? What will Paola eat tonight, since you’ve pissed it all away?’
    ‘Don’t accuse me, boy! Mind your own damned business!’ Valerio thumps his fist on the bar and nearly slides off his stool. Raising his voice makes him cough.
    ‘Ah, leave your old man alone, why don’t you? Pleasures in life are few enough for you to deny him a drink and a game with an old friend,’ says the brown-toothed man. Your old man . Ettore stares bleakly at his father, stooped and sunken and coughing; his hair is salt and pepper, grizzled; there’s dirt in the bags beneath his eyes. He is an old man indeed. He is forty-seven years old. Ettore takes the man’s wine glass and drinks it empty.
    ‘You’re no friend of his. And if I see you with him again, you’ll wish I hadn’t,’ he says.
    That night, as Valerio snores on his ledge, Ettore is woken by the movement of Paola getting up from the mattress beside him. She’s as silken as a cat when she wants to be, but he is sleeping fitfully, with the way his leg itches and thuds. He hears her finding shoes, shawl, knife and matches. He almost asks her where she’s going, but since he wouldn’t like the answer, he stays silent. When she’s gone he reaches out, softly, softly, until he finds his nephew’s sleeping body beside him. He rests his fingers lightly on Iacopo’s ribs, and feels the reassuring flutter of air in and out, in and out. It seems faster than it should be, but he’s still so tiny that Ettore isn’t sure. His cheeks are a little rough – some rash or irritation. That Paola has not taken the baby with her tells him where she might be going.
    While he waits, because he can’t sleep until she’s back, he lets himself conjure Livia. Her father brought the family to Gioia six years ago, from a village in the marina – near the sea – where they had once worked on a vineyard that was then eaten whole by phylloxera bugs. Livia came with her parents and two brothers, to face the hatred and the resentment of the Gioiese workforce, who had no time or goodwill for people coming from beyond their own borders to take work. For over a year they lived in the street, camping out beneath the ancient arcs of Gioia, or the portico of a church, or the canopied doorways of the rich and absent, until Livia’s father finally made some friends in the peasants’ union and got enough work to rent a room. Ettore first saw Livia when she was eighteen and he was twenty-two. Just two years ago, but he can’t seem to remember what his life was like before she walked into it; just like now he can’t quite work out how he’s supposed to carry it on without her.
    Livia had waves of deep brown hair – a dark chestnut colour, not true black – that matched her skin tone and her eyes almost exactly, creating a harmonious whole, a sort of soft blurredness that was irresistible. She had a dimple in her chin that was his undoing. She would sit in the market place with her mother and the other women with a bucket between her knees and knife in her hand, scraping the husks from nuts, or shelling peas or