* * *
Mizuki waited in the stairwell for Lara to finish her class: she checked the messages on her phone then switched it off. She thought to leave, to return to the station although she guessed the brothers would be gone by now. A young man flapped a dishcloth out of a window; the sound dislocated and came softly across the courtyard to her, undiminished. People knew their neighbours because the courtyards amplified every detaiclass="underline" the TVs, radios, the clatter of plates and cutlery, the arguments and supple conversations, the flushing toilets, the water running through pipes, and with surprising frequency, people singing or coughing. To live here was to sense your neighbours at all hours, to taste the food they ate, to bear their good tempers and bad. It made no sense that she would like this city, being so opposite to home, so permeable and messy.
When Lara finally arrived the friends kissed in greeting. Lara said she looked tired and asked if she still wasn’t sleeping.
Mizuki shrugged, who knew why these things happened?
‘You should rest this weekend.’
They sat on the cool marble steps of the open stairwell, quietly sharing confidences, while other students (the military wives, the vacationing teachers) on their way to the café mixed with priests and clerks from the seminary offices. Mizuki, closest to the courtyard, kept an eye on the wasps, small specks chaotically charging the air two floors below. No one else appeared bothered.
She repeated the joke, knowing it would annoy Lara.
‘They talk about this place like it’s a zoo,’ Lara slapped her hand to the step. ‘Come on. I need a cigarette.’
Mizuki followed Lara through the courtyard and kept close to her side; her hands tucked away, her collar drawn up. Wasps zagged over the biscuits in untold numbers, their tiny shadows flitting across the wax paper, antennae dipping for syrup. A horror show. Mizuki covered her mouth, held back her hair, half-ran to the door with her eyes closed, suppressing a squeal — bad enough to be stung, far worse to swallow one.
Once outside Lara lit up, indignant now, unaware of her friend’s small panic. Mizuki held her hand to her heart.
‘And where does she get these ideas? She lives in Bagnoli.’ Lara huffed out smoke. ‘These houses are behind gates, no one can visit. Americans keep themselves locked away. They aren’t houses, they’re safes.’
The buildings overshadowed the street and drew out a cavernous darkness. A clean blue sky pinched above tight black alleyways of old stucco facades, of dim intestinal yellows and pinks. Above them hung a sign for the bakery, a simple tin star in a circle. How familiar this was now, this depth: straight lines buckled to time and gravity. Streets designed for walking, for carts, made perfect runs for scooters and dogs and channelled their noise.
‘If they don’t offer me something soon I’ll have to go back.’ Due to finish her course, Lara taught sessions at the language school as part of her placement. ‘It’s good to have work, but it’s always temporary, and it’s not enough. Everywhere is the same.’
They watched students return from the cafe one by one, each buzzing first, then ducking through the small portal door. Mizuki looked over two dusty violas displayed in the window of an antiques store. She held her hand to the glass to see into the shop.
‘They never sell anything. I’ve never seen it open,’ Lara paused. ‘You’re wearing a wedding ring?’
Equally surprised, Mizuki looked at her own hand then held it up for Lara to see.
‘I’ve never seen you wear a ring.’
‘It was my mother’s.’ Mizuki automatically began to screw the ring about her finger. ‘I wear it at home. Sometimes. I forgot to take it off.’
The first bell rang and they returned to the courtyard. Lara hesitated at the door, half-in, half-out, unconvinced by Mizuki’s answer.
Mizuki let Lara walk ahead, worried now that Lara would ask bolder, more direct questions. She hurried by the bakery, did not look at the trays of biscuits, but noticed, up on the third landing, the American, Helen, arms up, flailing, and couldn’t make sense of her gestures, how her hands slapped uselessly at the air. Up the stairs Mizuki kept behind Lara to avoid her questions, and the reason for the waving came to her. A wasp.
Mizuki fell immediately on the first sting, sudden and heavy, and upturned her bag even as the wasp, caught in her hair, stung her throat a second and third time. She frantically ruffled her hair, felt the insect between her fingers as something rough, like a seed head, caught then swiped free, she saw the pen, a red tube, tumble out of her bag with her lipstick, face cream, sun cream, tissues, hand mirror, mascara; her course books scudded down the steps, her phone. She snatched up the pen, snapped off the top, stuck it to her shoulder and injected herself.
By the time Lara reached her, Mizuki was done. The wasp, flicked out of her hair, spun circles on the marble.
And now the part she hated, a light woozy bafflement, how she might even seem a little drunk. How inevitable this was because of the biscuits, the syrup, the wasp’s natural aggression, and how day after day for six weeks the odds were getting thin. Inevitable now that Lara would ask questions about the ring and Mizuki would have to explain herself.
* * *
Lara brought her to the office then returned to the stairwell to collect her bag and books. Mizuki sat by the computers expecting to feel sick, an awful anticipation. She took the water offered to her, insisted that she was all right, and explained to Lara once she returned that she took antihistamine each night as a precaution. Who could say if this helped, if this time there would or would not be a reaction?
‘When I was a girl,’ she explained, ‘I was stung.’ Once, on her foot — and her legs, her arms, her face swelled like she was some kind of windbag, or some instrument. And while her throat had not sealed, a mighty itch had troubled her afterward as if her neck was fur-lined, and the threat that one day she might choke stuck with her. Ant bites, spider bites, a scratch once from coral, and she swelled up, ballooned.
As if to prove her contrariness the insulin depressed her. She could feel the immediate effect. Not sick now but tired. A nurse from Elementario Due came out to check her pulse, her throat, and declared if something was going to happen, it would have happened. Mizuki wasn’t sure that this was true. She hid in the toilet and hoped that Lara would leave her, but Lara stuck outside and waited in the corridor.
* * *
An undiscouraged Lara accompanied her to the station. Because of her tiredness, Mizuki felt a general disconnection from what she was doing; more than this, she felt empty, and this emptiness seemed evident in every spoken word and gesture, to the flow of passengers rising on escalators or paused on the stairs, the deepening sunlight, the presence of the scaffolding, of paint pots and rollers laid across the platform. She insisted that she would be all right; two hours now and there were no serious fears, no reaction. She just wanted to be home. Home? In the hot and still air it seemed possible that she could haul herself above the hubbub and swim free. In her dreams flying and swimming were the same action, but even when dreaming she never really lost what was troubling her, she never really became free.
Mizuki took off her sunglasses and shook her head. She pointed at the stubby towers of Porta Nolana, close by there was a café, she said, she had something she wanted to say.
Lara paid for the coffees, brought them to the window where they stood and faced the Circumvesuviana station. The sun sparked off windscreens and chrome of passing traffic. She couldn’t help but scan through the waiting groups outside the station for the brothers.
Lara dusted sugar off her hands.
Unsure about how she should start, Mizuki took out her passport and passed it across the counter, the text inside was printed in Japanese and English. ‘My name is not Mizuki Katsura,’ she began. ‘I didn’t intend to lie to you. I haven’t told you everything. I’m married. It’s true that this ring belonged to my mother.’ Mizuki rubbed her finger as Lara paged through the passport, conscious that her friend would not look at her. Mizuki looked to the station forecourt. ‘When I first met my husband he told me he had two ambitions. He wanted to marry before he was fifty, and he wanted to see every building designed by Kenzo Tange. He likes this architect. Back home, in Tokyo, he has an office in a building designed by Tange. He sometimes arranges his business so that he can go to a new city and see Tange’s buildings, and he has seen almost all of them, but he hasn’t come to Naples. He hasn’t seen the Centro Direzionale. After we married he became busy with his work. He’s away most of the time, and I was looking after his mother, who is very sick and very difficult. When I decided to leave, I couldn’t decide where I should go, or what I should do. And one day he was talking about Tange and Naples. I don’t know why, but I made up my mind to come here.’