PATINES
She often walked along the waterfront in Venice. On a clear day she could see Belmont, high on its hill, mist-clad as usual like the fairy-tale it wasn’t. There were more stalls in the market these days – packed with bodies and sweat. One stall was selling monkeys, gibbering chain-clad creatures like the one she’d exchanged for the turquoise ring in the loving years. A horrible thing that gibbered and whimpered and chucked its wet faeces all over the place.
Sometimes she’d bring Leah to this rat-hole, but it was such trouble keeping an eye on the child and so near the water as well. ‘Leah’ – she’d never forget the row there’d been when she’d insisted on christening the baby with her own mother’s name. ‘A Jewish name,’ her husband said and spat. His cronies, all as drunk as skunks, backed him up of course. Their wives just gave her funny looks, drawing close. As they always did. Still, she got her way. She did, from time to time.
Faintly, from the Jewish quarter, came the dreaded, mournful sound. Sunset with its prayers for recent dead. ‘Who is dead now?’ she wondered, ‘Is it him?’ She wished it could be her. Runaway daughter, disgrace to her faith, thief − that was the bit that stuck in her throat – not the theft of the ducats but the ring, her mother’s ring. Sold for that perishing ape. She’d been told how her father had cursed her and wept. Well, all was a wilderness now.
She shoved her way along the water front. Soon be dark and a full moon. The floor of heaven, Lorenzo had called it, in the loving years Inlaid with patines of bright gold. She shrugged. ‘What heaven? What gold?’ There’d be none of that for her.
• A regular contributor to IS&T, Mandy Pannett runs an arts cafe, supports two local writing groups and
enjoys giving readings and running writing workshops. She has two
poetry collections from Oversteps Books – Bee Purple and Frost Hollow.
