Pink Snow

1

NORTH

The first person to see it was Peppino.

“Mamma! Mamma! It’s snowing pink!”
Carla turned in her rumpled grey bed.

“Leave me alone, cretino!” She had been trying to sleep for long hours. “I told you not to come in here!” She lashed out and just missed him as he darted out. The door slammed, making the cracked glass panes shudder and crackle. Carla felt a twinge of remorse which quickly gave way to panic. She pulled the covers tightly around her and huddled shivering in the dim pinkish light trickling through the window shutters.

Peppino climbed onto a chair to reach the kitchen cupboard and found only an almost empty Nutella jar. He ran out into the yard, jar in hand. A soft pink blanket covered the cobblestones and iced the rooftop of the tenement like a birthday cake. The snow had stopped falling and the morning sun peered out beneath heavy mauve clouds to illuminate the flaking blue paint of the second floor doors and the railing running in front of them.

Peppino stamped his slippered feet in the snow and noticed it didn’t stick to the soles. He scooped some up with his free hand and tried to press it into a ball, but it trickled through his fingers like washing powder. It wasn’t even very cold. He ran over to the corner of the building, kicking up the snow in little pink clouds, and clambered up the dark stairway where he always expected to meet a monster, holding the sticky jar out at arm’s length in front of him as protection. But the only creature he came across was Claudio’s cat who came up to him at the turn in the stairs and said “Miaow” in a loud complaining voice, nuzzling softly against his bare legs. Peppino tiptoed cautiously past Claudio’s door. Through the railings he looked down on the courtyard with its pink carpet and imagined rolling in it, becoming a big pink sausage.

The snow only covered half the width of the long first-floor balcony. Peppino limped along with one foot squeaking into the snow, the other padding on the bare concrete protected by the overhanging eaves. Silvestro, tail held high, tagged along behind him. Maybe later his mum would pick him up and stroke his head, murmuring kindnesses. In the meantime there was Bobo.

Bobo was dreaming about old times. In the dream there was a festa in the cobbled courtyard. A great long trestle table was laid out with brimming-over jugs of young red wine, and he poured himself a glass as his neighbours, dressed in their Sunday best, ebbed and flowed around him. Two girls in flowered dresses came bearing steaming dishes from one of the ground floor kitchens. He caught one of them by the hand as she passed and tugged her into the darkness of the stairwell. She squirmed and wriggled playfully in his strong arms as he pressed her against the wall. As he lifted her dress he remembered his half-empty glass, and the desire for wine was suddenly more urgent than the desire for the girl.

“Wait here!” He breathed, and stepped back out into the courtyard. Now it was alarmingly dark and empty. The girl had escaped him and was disappearing up the stairs. He bounded after her but the stairs went up and up and she was always ahead of him, out of reach. Finally she stopped and turned to face him, grinning. She produced a jug of wine from between her breasts and began pouring it slowly and deliberately over the railing into the yard below, all the while gazing into his eyes and laughing wildly. He leapt up the last few steps and grabbed her arm, feeling the fragile bones in her forearm snap and break beneath his rough fingers. The jug dropped, smashing into a thousand bright pieces. Wine trickled darkly down the staircase. He let out a cry and struck her hard with the back of his hand. The blow wrenched her head off. But now it was his mother’s head that dangled from the raw hole of a neck, held on by a bloody sinew. The sinew stretched and stretched until it snapped and the head fell to the ground with a loud crack. Sobbing, he held his mother’s body to him as her head rolled down – blood mingling with wine – making a dull knocking noise as it hit each step. Tock tock tock…

Peppino’s knuckles were getting sore with knocking so he stopped, leaned over, grabbed Silvestro’s tail and pulled hard. With a piercing squawk, the cat shot down the balcony to the far end and stared back accusingly from the dubious protection of Claudio’s doorway. Meanwhile Bobo’s door scraped open. A wave of stale smoke and wine sweat preceded Bobo’s knobbly red monster face.

“Gesù Cristo! Peppino! What are you doing out there dressed like that? You’ll die of cold.”

Apart from slippers, Peppino was wearing only the T-shirt and pants he had slept in. There were more important things to think about than being cold. He wasn’t even bothered by Bobo’s sour smell as he was scooped up into the old man’s arms.

“Look, Bobo! Look! Pink snow!”

But Bobo was used to his senses playing strange tricks on him.

“The first snow,” he growled, “Something to celebrate. Come on, little one, let’s have some breakfast.” He shut the door on the pink snow and set the child down on one of the two chairs that made up a substantial part of his furniture.

“It’s pink!” shouted Peppino.

“Porco Dio! You’re right,” admitted Bobo when he opened the shutters, “It looks pink. Must be a trick of the light.”

Peppino wondered what kind of magic a ‘trick of the light’ could be to change the colour of snow. One more thing he had yet to learn. He staged a battle between his Nutella jar and a wine stained glass on the sticky table top while Bobo lit up a cigarette and shuffled around the murky kitchen coughing, lighting the gas fire, fumbling with the coffee pot, pouring milk into a pan, opening cellophane packets of shiny brioche. At least he fed himself properly, he thought, and had enough to feed the boy. He’d seen what happened to people who didn’t.

Bobo was the only resident in the old tenement who had been there in the days when it was occupied by the rice factory workers. Many of the workers had come up from the starving south to find work. Each family shared a two-roomed apartment, a kitchen with a bedroom behind. There was a ceramic-hole toilet at the end of each side of the building on each of the three floors. It had been a lively place, smelling sweetly of sleeping children and warm family friendships, poisoned by the occasional feud. Sometimes there would be parties in the courtyard, especially in the spring time when the mondine would liven things up. They were fierce young women who turned up in spring time as seasonal workers to wade through knee-high water in the rice paddies, their dresses tucked into their underwear, singing as they pulled out the dangerous weeds. The landlady of the tenement, a sour faced widow, lived in spiteful luxury in a spacious apartment over the entrance to the courtyard in the corner of the building. It was the only one with three bedrooms, a lounge, a dining room with fancy plaster cornicing and a proper bathroom with a bath tub and hot water system. She secured her shutters during the noisy gatherings in the courtyard, but as long as the rent was paid, she never complained. A trio of Neapolitans provided the music, and the vineyards in the foothills of the Alps on the other side of the rice paddies provided the dark foaming wine.

Now Claudio dominated the square of weed-riddled cobbles from the master apartment, and only three of the other dwellings were lived in permanently. But at weekends the tiled floors of the building reverberated with vibrations from practising electric guitars and drum kits, and ancient bedsteads were rattled by clandestine lovers who slid along the balconies at odd hours, trying to blend into the mottled plaster of the walls. Via Settembrini 3 had been scheduled for demolition. The factory workers had moved to apartments with proper bathrooms and the mondine had long since been replaced by weed-killer.

Inspired by his dream, Bobo began telling Peppino about the parties they used to have, and how he had loved the angel Gabriella, and saved her from drowning in the River Sesia, how she had agreed to be his wife in the darkness of the stairwell, and how she had run off to Venezuela with the rogue Vanni Esposito the day before the wedding. Peppino allowed the babble to wash over him soothingly as he reached up to dip the spongy brioche into his bowl of warm milk and transferred it quickly to his mouth, sometimes not fast enough to prevent the soggy part from flopping off and sploshing onto his bare knees.

It had started to snow again. The pink granules fell rather than floated from a heavy violet sky.

The third person to see it at Via Settembrini 3 was Enrico. Wearing only an old T-shirt and jeans in spite of the winter weather, he flung open his ground floor door with a great clatter, stepped out and stretched. For a moment he held the pose, his skinny body taut and arched slightly backwards, arms reaching towards the sky. Then he bent forward, his long hair falling over his face. He picked up a handful of snow and let it run through his fingers. Oddly, it didn’t feel very cold. His first urge was to share the experience with someone. He wouldn’t dare wake Claudio, and Carla was unlikely to care even if a nuclear bomb fell nearby. Perhaps that was what had happened – some kind of nuclear disaster had caused this strange phenomenon. Whatever the cause, if his senses weren’t deceiving him this was surely a historic event, and he was present at it. That left Bobo, who at that moment appeared on the first floor balcony, carrying Peppino on his back.

“Hey, Bobo! What of this?!” The words never came out right.

“Yes, it’s come early this year.” Bobo still refused to get excited, but Peppino yelled: “It’s girls’ snow! Pink! Pink! Pink!” and pulled at the ears of his mount as they proceeded awkwardly along the balcony and disappeared into the stairwell. Wrapped in a smelly old jacket, Peppino was consigned to Enrico while Bobo went ‘over to the corner shop to do some shopping’. Enrico knew there was a convivial osteria next to the shop that Bobo was hardly likely to pass without going in.

Claudio savoured the lingering sex smell before he opened his eyes and made out the profile of the English girl he had picked up the night before in a club in Milan. Not bad. A pity about the squealing. It took the suspense out of those drawn out moments when you could do anything to them. Anything at all. Lovely arse, though. Beautiful long pale thighs. He reached out and stroked one. Jane responded quickly, shifting towards him. She hadn’t slept at all, sensing his body next to her charged with sensuality, even when his mind was far away from her in a twitchy dream. She’d lain there, replaying the night’s events over and over, tasting the thrill again and again.

Jane hadn’t been prepared to be stared at. The club her friend Sarah had taken her to was filled with beautiful people, some of whom were dancing in swirling rays of light on a central dance floor while others eyed them, assessing their attractiveness. She sipped her cocktail nervously as Sarah chatted in half-formed Italian to some people she knew from work. Jane felt like a shabby country girl and wished she had stayed at Sarah’s flat with a cup of tea. But when she looked up, at least a dozen eyes were examining her. Nearly all of them belonged to guys who looked like they had stepped out of an aftershave ad. And none of them seemed to mind being caught staring. Hadn’t anyone told them it was rude? And why were they ogling her, when the place was awash with scintillating beauties in designer clothes? Perhaps she shouldn’t have worn such a short skirt.

She drained her glass and allowed one of the starers to buy her another one. After a desultory attempt at conversation the starer got into an argument with a guy who had elbowed him at the bar and she moved away through the crowd to the other side of the dance floor, feeling eyes follow her. She found a wall to lean against and softened into the music, pushing the row she’d had with Tim when he’d stomped off earlier that evening into a sealed compartment at the back of her mind. Through a haze of smoke and lights she felt the burn of a certain pair of pale blue eyes which hadn’t left her, and was surprised to find she was enjoying being gazed at by their owner. She pushed her shoulders back and returned the gaze. And when he approached she was ready for him. His physical closeness in the hot pounding atmosphere was almost too much to bear. They had another drink and a little nonsensical conversation that transcended language. Then he kissed her.

“You come with me,” he had assured her, using about one third of his English vocabulary, as she melted into his arms. “Bellissima.”

Normally, of course, she wouldn’t have dreamed of getting into a car with a complete stranger in a foreign country. But some kind of magic compelled her. She followed him like a rat after the Pied Piper.

“Don’t wait up for me,” she murmured to Sarah who was at the bar as she passed, flanked by two men in suits. Sarah winked.

Claudio drove her out of Milan along the back roads, a full moon glinting on black canals. He stopped several times on the drive home to roll joints – expertly mixing tobacco and hashish in the palm of his hand. He touched her nipples through her tight dress and slid his fingers expertly under her skirt as she tried distractedly to smoke and car lights flashed across the dashboard. She had only vaguely noticed the squalor – a thick layer of dust covering rickety furniture ­– as they passed through his apartment to this bed, with its mountains of pillows. And he had known how to touch her and how much to hurt her and exactly how long to make her wait to have him inside her and he made her feel like the most beautiful woman on earth. What did it matter if you didn’t speak the same language, when your bodies could communicate like that? And now it was starting all over again.

Later, in the ancient bathroom with water dripping from rusty pipes, Jane remembered Tim. It was a very distant memory – another life. She thought about their light and airy flat overlooking Victoria Park, the plants and coloured objects carefully chosen and positioned. And the greyness of Tim’s fumblings between the crisp sheets. The colour, she thought, had been in the wrong place. Here the colour was in the sex, and who cared about the decor. There’s no going back from here, she thought.

The light twinkled pinkly through the patterned glass of the tiny window, giving the grime a rosy sheen as she tried to soothe the soreness between her legs with a trickle of cold water. She heard the front door scrape open, a loud miaow, and Claudio’s voice exclaim: “Cazzo!”

Claudio had been in the bathroom before Jane and used up all the hot water. Clean shaven and dressed in crisp shirt and jeans carefully laundered by his mother he pulled on a sleek leather jacket and stepped triumphantly onto the balcony to survey his domain. He froze for a moment, joint in hand, just as Enrico had done. And there was Enrico, squatting with the kid in the middle of the pink courtyard. Snow peppered their heads and shoulders as Peppino scooped up snow with a plastic spade and tipped it into a bucket.

“What’s going on?” There was a note of accusation in Claudio’s voice.

Enrico and Peppino looked up unanimously.

“I’ve no idea,” said Enrico, “But it’s serious. It doesn’t melt.”

“Sure. Now snow doesn’t melt.” Claudio snorted. Enrico might read a lot of books but he was as thick as shit, like all the rest of them, however many long words they used. If he was so intelligent, why was he living like that, without even a beaten up old Fiat to his name?

“We took some indoors and it didn’t melt,” said Enrico.

“It’s like plastic,” added Peppino.

“Of course it wouldn’t melt in your place, there’s a coldness of the Madonna in there.” It was well-known in via Settembrini that Enrico didn’t feel the cold. He rarely lit the gas fire and even now his door was wide open. “Perhaps if you heated it, it would.”

Claudio casually held the burning end of the joint he was smoking near the ridge of pink decorating the top of the railing in front of him. As it touched the snow a bright sore formed, the snow amalgamating and hardening around the glowing tip of the joint. Claudio knocked the glob off and relit the tattered end with ill-feigned nonchalance.