A Fool's Alphabet Read Online Free PDF Page B

was all the better for having come from inside her. When she talked to him she would hold the front of his shirt in her hands and then bring her wrists together so he would be trussed. There was no reason he could ever see for his mother doing this, but it was a good sign in her, like the way she made him lift up his arms when she belted him into his macintosh.
    Although Pietro felt a fierce attachment to his parents and the place in which he lived, he always kept in his mind the possibility of Italy as a long-term destination. Encouraged by stories his mother told him, he had visions of a village by the sea where he would one day arrive and be happy. His Italy was a figment of his mother’s imagination. Pietro, who had no means of verifying what she told him, imagined a large country where the sun always shone, even though it was never too hot. People did very little work and he had an idea that they sang to each other instead of speaking. Everyone, he believed, drove a Maserati. In a geography lesson at school they had been given blank maps of the world and asked to name the countries they knew. Pietro wrote ‘Italy’ diagonally across the continent of Africa because it looked the largest, most central and best shaped country. He was at first incredulous when told that Italy was only the jagged afterthought on the rim of Europe.
    He loved the shapes of countries on the school globe and joined in the loud competitions to name the capitals. The relative sizes were perplexing. Britain seemed shamefully small compared to Africa or South America, to say nothing of Russia, which stretched on and on over the top of the world. But what happened there? You never seemed to hear of anything. Presumably boys like him went to school in these funny places and learned the same things. He could not help feeling a bit sorry for them, as though they had missed out on something. He tried to imagine what it wouldbe like if he had been born in Egypt or Uruguay or Australia. Then his father would be an Egyptian. And his mother . . . It was not possible to imagine this, because obviously he would be a different person if he had been born somewhere else. This seemed to him an important thing to understand.
    Now that he was at a school with proper lessons he saw less of his mother. He turned his eye cautiously on his fellow pupils. Most of the lessons were organised as competitions, with the winners announced and given paper stars to stick against their names on the notice board. Pietro at once joined in, certain he could master this game by determination. His tongue stuck vertically from the corner of his mouth as he covered his exercise books in heavy black pencil. When he gave in his work he at last allowed his eyebrows to relax and resume their normal shape. He sat back, waiting for his due reward, and couldn’t believe it when his name appeared towards the bottom of the class. He redoubled his concentration, but found that effort was no substitute for ability.
    Once a year the school had a football match against a rival school ten miles further along the edge of the Downs. Although Pietro’s school taught thrift and modesty it made an exception for the match. The chosen eleven boys were given coloured shirts with numbers, which they were allowed to keep. After the game the teams had a cooked tea which had become the subject of myth over the years. The boys competed through the winter for the honour of being chosen. Pietro practised with his friend Stephen Brown after school, kicking a football backwards and forwards, bouncing it off the wall at the back of the playground. They were too small for selection in the first year but had hopes for the second.
    Pietro’s parents also liked the area in which they had chosen to live. His father was pleased by its remoteness and by the fact that he had managed to buy the house for a reasonable price. Francesca was so absorbed in her son and in the world of her imagination that she