The Drowning River Read Online Free PDF

were a distraction. ‘Not every day you get to go to Florence,’ Ma had said wistfully when Iris asked about a laptop to keep in touch. ‘Do you want to spend it all in front of a computer?’
    Iris bent down and picked up the little carnival mask off the rug, a cheeky little black satin eyemask, no warty old rubber witch job forRonnie. Halloween seemed a long time ago; Iris remembered the flat full of people as if it was something she’d seen in a film. She’d worn a red feather mask, and her dress with the ruffle. She remembered a couple collapsed on top of each other on the hard sofa, and the old lady – the landlady – bashing with a broom handle on her ceiling below, telling them to be quiet. A drunk American boy asking Ronnie loudly who the fat girl was. ‘Who’s the fat chick?’ Meaning Iris.
    The huge studded front door clanged shut behind Iris and she struggled through the iron gate to the street. Sometimes it felt like a great big 200-year-old prison, the keys she needed just to get out of the place practically filled her bag, never mind her sketchbooks and pencils and apron. Outside the square was cold and grey and quiet, the tall, bare trees motionless in the mist.
    After a week or so of trying – and failing – to work out bus routes, they’d settled on walking. Iris liked walking, Ronnie didn’t; she grumbled all the way, when she was there at all, not refusing to come out from under the duvet, not rolling in at dawn and climbing into bed just when Iris was climbing out. Still, Iris preferred it when Ronnie was there, because they talked a bit about stuff, because Ronnie was nicer for being a bit subdued, and because when Iris got in to school on her own, she always had to spend the first half an hour making Ronnie’s excuses for her.
    She might have said, thought Iris. Given me an idea when she was going to come back.
    The mist was thicker over the river, more like fog. Iris’s route to the Scuola Massi, which was in the Oltrarno on the south side of the river, took her across the plainest and most modern bridge over the river. The Ponte alle Grazie may have been ugly but it had the best views on a clear day, the Ponte Vecchio on one side and the mountains of what Iris calculated from her examination of the guidebook must be the Casentino rising up on the other. Ronnie would jeer at the crowds thick on the Ponte Vecchio;
tourists,
poring over the blue guide just like Iris. As if the two of them were anything else.
    Today the Ponte Vecchio was barely visible, and in the other direction thick low cloud rolled all the way down to the city. At the footof the bridge there was one of a series of hoardings the
comune
had put up, with blown-up photographs of the flood, forty years earlier, that had filled up all the cellars and washed the cars into gardens. Iris read the caption to a photograph of a cavernous warehouse with documents spread to dry on trestle tables and an earnest, bespectacled white-gloved figure picking through them:
From all over the world lovers of art came to help us restore our city.
    All Iris could see clearly was the river below her, turned yellow with all the rain that had fallen last night, and the buttresses of the bridge cluttered with branches and detritus washed down from the hills. Sad stuff, rags and shopping trolleys that made Florence just like any other city; a whole tree torn up from some country riverbank. The muddy water swirled and churned, and Iris watched, not moving.
    Before leaving the apartment, Iris had stood a long time – for her – staring into the mirror in the bathroom. Like all the other rooms it was badly lit, the ceilings too high, electric light all wrong under the vaulting, but when looking at herself in the mirror Iris didn’t mind that. She’d wished for Ma at that moment, to rest her hand approvingly on the small of her back and say, you’re well made. You’re lovely.
    Not lovely, she’d decided, looking at herself as if for the first time.