The Best Thing by Margo Lanagan Read Free Book Online

conversations they sound as if they’re fighting; when they’re fighting, they make enough noise for ten people. All of a sudden I get an inkling of why Pug took up boxing—the blissful quiet of fighting without words.
    It’s a three-way conflict between Oriana, Mr Magnini and Pug’s older brother Luciano. Mrs Magnini throws in the odd placating remark, trying to draw attention back to the enormous, rich lunch she’s cooked, and Pug rolls his eyes at all the noise and provides brief translations for me. Towards dessert he starts getting fed up with them.
    ‘Basta, basta!’
he yells over the three of them, so suddenly I jump. The noise stops, the room rings. He scowls from father to brother to sister, then goes on to say something very emphatic, with a lot of arm-waving, indicating me with his hands, indicating them, himself. When he stops, his father looks at me, waves his fork at Luciano. ‘Sorry. My son can’t help, he is an idiot.’ Oriana hoots and Luciano laughs and retorts something.
    ‘Shut up, Lu,’ says Pug.
    ‘Sorry.’ Luciano pretends to be ashamed of himself, then winks across at me.
    We get through to coffee before the next eruption. For a while Mr Magnini puts up with Luciano’s goading, greeting it with a haughty look, a puff of air, a wave of a large hand. Then Luciano hits some sore spot and he can’t stay silent any more. Back and forth they go; it’s like watching a tennis match.
    Pug reaches across and picks up my coffee in its little gilt cup and saucer. ‘Come on, Mel, let’s leave ’em to it.’
    I follow him onto the patio, which is pebblecreted with a whitebalustrade and two ornate concrete pots spilling red geraniums. A vegetable garden marches away down the yard, and a tiny white concrete fountain in the shape of a semi-nude goddess spills into its bowl on the strip of left-over lawn.
    It’s a relief to see sky instead of black flock curlicues on a gold paper background, instead of fancy-cut crystal glass and gold cutlery and lace tablecloth. It’s great to breathe air instead of pasta-steam and chicken-steam and garlic-onion-and-rosemary steam, to feel the nausea-block in my throat easing back in the eerie quietness.
    I steady my saucer on the iron-lace table. ‘Is it always this bad?’
    ‘Oh, yeah, about. Usually I haven’t got any excuse to dip out, but.’ Pug smiles at me, shamefaced. ‘Yeah. Sometimes it can get heavy, you know, Dad laying down the law and Lu and Oriana just blowing up. Once he decides on something, he won’t bloody shift.’
    ‘And what about you? Don’t you ever blow up at him?’
    ‘Well, just then was about … yeah, that’d be about the most noise I ever make.’
    ‘What were you saying to them? I was impressed.’
    Pug looks at his runners tapping on the terracotta tiles. ‘I told them they should be ashamed of’mselves. I said, “I’ve brung this girl along specially to meet you. What’s she going to think? What’s she going to tell her parents? That we’re a bunch of crazy wogs who can’t control their tempers? She’ll leave me, listening to you lot. She won’t want to have anything to do with me.”’
    ‘You idiot.’
    ‘Well, at least they’ll get off my back now, about meeting you. Aah, they’re all right. Take ’em one by one and they’re fine. It’s just in a group they start actin’ like animals.’
    Among the photos on top of the television, an old one of Luciano, Dino and Oriana in a row. ‘Oh, this’s
you!
’ I say, grabbing it up.
    ‘Yeah, in the middle.’ Pug’s arms go around my waist, his chin onto my shoulder.
    ‘Oh well, I knew
that
!’ Putting him down is a way to cover up the sudden—oof! What is it? A throb of anguish, a knot tightening, a terrible
reaction.
His younger sister is just plain innocent, a happy little kid, nothing to worry about; Luciano is cocky and self-important in his little brown suit. Between them my crew-cut, big-eared Pug seems to beam out sweetness; it’s his wide