Free Come and Tell Me Some Lies by Raffaella Barker Page A

precisely two hours before the plane leaves for Rome. I should like to take you with me.’
    Scattering clothes and toothbrushes, books and shoes, I spiralled around the flat, packing nonsense in my excitement. Dad had been invited to read at the Rome Poetry Festival, and Mum was too afraid of flying to go with him. I was on my way to Rome for the first time since infancy.
    We arrived at the Hotel George Washington in time for a silvered sorbet in the walled garden. We sat in the shade of a faded pink umbrella, and Dad lifted his sunglasses from his nose and beamed his delight. ‘This is the nearest you or I will ever get to heaven,’ he said. I squirmed with pleasure, happy to be in Rome with my father, doing the sort of thingthat other people did. We took a taxi and walked through the still, hot gardens of the Villa Giulia where twisted pines and plush cypress trees canopied us, suffocating the blaring horns and screeching brakes of Rome.
    In the evening we went to watch athletics. It was dark when we reached Mussolini’s stadium. Neo-classical statues surrounded the arena, lit blue and holy by tungsten arc lights. We ate hot dogs and drank beer, squashed together on a bench in the midst of pooping hooters and wildly excited Italians. Looking down at the cinder-red track where athletes pranced and jogged, I shivered with the presence of long ago, when gladiators fought to the death. I was choosing a random athlete to throw to the lions when Dad gripped my arm. ‘Look, there he is. It’s Moses.’ A towering, gleaming man, his skin polished mink-dark, skipped and hopped past. The crowd surged, rolling to its feet to honour the American hurdler, and Dad sat rapt, silent.
    A starting-pistol cracked, and Moses floated over a chain of white hurdles, tilting his long body forward. Over the line, he flashed a wide white smile and three girls behind me screamed a fanfare of bliss. Dad was as carried away as they were, tears coursing down his face as he clapped and clapped.
    The poetry reading took place at sunset on the following evening. In a glade in a garden a great platform had been erected. A row of poets sat drinking to one side, swaying on their seats like a throng of sea-lions. At a spotlit lectern a blonde with heaving
décolletage
introduced them in breathless Italian. Dad stood up; the other sea-lions bayed approval. He moved to the lectern and read his poems in English. When he stopped, red roses rained on him from the applauding audience. Dadpicked one up and gave it to the blonde, who pressed it down into her cleavage. Everyone liked that. The poets clapped and the crowd cheered. I crumpled in my seat, and realized how nervous I had been.
    Dad was having dinner with an old friend, a tall blind poet with the hooked nose and white face of a snowy owl. They took me with them to a tiny restaurant and I became very drunk. They did not notice until we left, when I stumbled helplessly. Dad and his friend grasped an elbow each and pulled me home, their walking-sticks tapping an accompaniment to our weaving progress.
    In the morning, Dad was unsympathetic about my throbbing head. ‘Poor love,’ he said. ‘But you know, it happens to everyone the first time they come to Rome. It’s the air as much as the wine.’ He scarcely looked up from his paper and his foaming coffee. ‘To cleanse your soul we shall visit some churches today.’ I ate a brioche, a taste of almond air, and suppressed my self-pity.
    Dad and I flew back to London after a day spent between the Etruscan Museum in the Villa Giulia and La Rinascente, a jewel of a department store. As a souvenir I had a black bikini; Dad had a tiny Etruscan statue with a vast penis.

Chapter 23
    It was Saturday. Brodie and Flook, who had now joined him at King Henry’s School, met us at the bus-stop in Norwich after lessons and Dad drove us all to Liza’s house in Suffolk.
    The Glade stood beyond a quarry. We drove off