Free Steal You Away by Niccolò Ammaniti

carving knife in hand, was quartering a gnu, or a donkey, since the carcass would hardly fit on the marble-topped table.
    ‘Awaaaaaawaaaaa,’ moaned his mother.
    ‘What did you say? I can’t understand a word you’re saying, Ma. I really can’t,’ said Graziano, leaning against the door jamb. Then he remembered. ‘Oh, yes. The vow.’ He turned round and trudged off to his room. He collapsed on his bed and before goingto sleep decided that next day he would go and see Father Costanzo ( I wonder if he’s still around? He might be dead by now ) to discuss his mother’s vow. Maybe the priest could dissolve it. He mustn’t let Erica see his mother in that state. Then he told himself that there was no real harm in it – his mother was a practising Catholic and he’d believed in God himself when he’d been a child.
    Erica would understand.
    He fell asleep.
    And he slept the sleep of the just beneath a poster of John Travolta in his Saturday Night Fever days. Feet sticking out of the little bed. Mouth wide open.
9
    Go. Go. Go.
    Go, it’s late.
    Go, and never stop.
    And Pietro went. Down the slope. He could see nothing but darkness, but what the hell , he pedalled in the gloom, mouth open. The feeble lamp of his bike wasn’t much use.
    He leaned over, put his foot on the ground and sideslipped round the bend, then straightened up and, wheels spinning free, started to pedal again. The wind whistled in his ears and made his eyes water.
    He knew the road by heart. Every bend. Every pothole. He could have ridden along it even without a lamp, with his eyes closed.
    There was a record to beat, he had set it three months earlier and never since matched it. How on earth had he done it that day? God knows.
    A rocket. Eighteen minutes twenty-eight seconds from Gloria’s villa to home.
    Was it because I’d changed the back tyre?
    He had ridden so hard that when he’d reached home he’d felt sick and had vomited in the middle of the farmyard.
    This evening, however, he wasn’t going so fast to beat that recordor because he felt like it, but because it was ten past eight and he was very late. He hadn’t shut Zagor in his pen and hadn’t taken the rubbish to the bin and hadn’t turned off the pump in the vegetable garden, and …
    … and Papa will kill me .
    Go. Go. Go.
    And as usual, it’s all Gloria’s fault .
    She would never let him leave. ‘You can see it looks awful like that. At least help me paint the letters … It’ll only take a minute. You’re such a bore …’ she would say.
    And so Pietro had set about painting the letters and then making the blue frame for the photograph of the mosquito sucking blood, and hadn’t noticed that meanwhile time was passing.
    Certainly the malaria poster had come out really well.
    Miss Rovi would be bound to hang it in the corridor.
       
    It had been a wonderful day, though.
    After school, Pietro had gone to Gloria’s for lunch.
    At the red villa on the hill.
    Pasta with courgettes and eggs. Schnitzel. And chips. Oh yes, and a cream dessert.
    He liked everything about the place: the dining room with the french windows through which you could see the well-mown lawn, and further off the fields of wheat, and the sea in the background, and the bulky furniture and that picture of the Battle of Lepanto with the burning ships. And the maid serving you dinner.
    But what he liked most of all was the laid table. Like those in a restaurant. The spotlessly white and newly washed tablecloth. The dishes. The basket full of rolls, focaccia and black bread. The carafe of sparkling water.
    All perfect .
    And it came naturally to him to eat properly, politely, with his mouth closed. No elbows on the table. No mopping up the sauce with his bread.
    At home, Pietro had to fetch the food from the fridge, or the leftover pasta from the top of the cooker.
    You take your plate and glass and sit at the kitchen table in front of the television and eat .
    And when Mimmo, his brother, was there, he