The Lost Girls of Rome by Donato Carrisi Read Free Book Online Page A

multi-use knives, batteries for his mobile phones, even a kit for purifying urine in case he ended up in a place without drinking water.
    He had pared everything down to essentials. For example, he had never owned a book. He read a lot, but every time he finished one, he gave it away. He had only stopped since he had come to live with her. Sandra had created a space for him in the bookcase and he had started to warm to the idea of having a collection. It had been his way of putting down roots. After the funeral, his friends had comeup to Sandra and each one had brought her a book that David had given to them. The books were full of his annotations, corners turned down to mark the page, little burns or oil stains. She imagined him calmly reading Calvino, smoking a cigarette in the burning heat of some desert, next to a broken-down off-road vehicle, waiting for someone to come and rescue him.
    I’ll continue to see him everywhere, they all said to her, it’ll be difficult to shake off his presence. And yet it wasn’t like that. She had never had the feeling she could hear his voice calling her name, nor had she ever unthinkingly put an extra plate on the table.
    What she did miss, desperately, was the daily routine, those little, unimportant moments that had made up their lives.
    On Sundays, she would usually get up after him and find him sitting in the kitchen, drinking his third pot of coffee and leafing through the newspaper in a cloud of aniseed-scented smoke, with his elbow placed on the table and the cigarette held between his fingers, the ash on the verge of falling, so absorbed in his reading as to forget everything else. As soon as she appeared in the doorway with her usual disapproving expression, he would lift his head with its mop of curly hair and smile at her. She would try to ignore him while she made breakfast for herself, but David would continue to stare at her with that goofy smile on his face until she couldn’t hold out any longer. It was that crooked smile, the result of a broken incisor, a memento of falling from his bicycle when he was seven. It was his glasses, with their fake tortoiseshell frames held together with scotch tape, that made him look like an old English lady. It was David, who within a few moments would draw her on to his knees and place a damp kiss on her neck.
    At that memory, Sandra put down the glass of wine on the table next to the sofa. She reached out an arm to pick up her mobile phone, then dialled voicemail.
    The electronic voice informed her as always of the presence of one message, which she had already listened to. It was dated five months earlier.
    ‘
Hi, I called a couple of times but I always get the recorded message … I don’t have much time, so I just want to make a list of what I
miss … I miss your cold feet searching for me under the blankets when you come to bed. I miss you making me taste things from the fridge to make sure they haven’t gone off. Or when you wake me up screaming at three in the morning because you’ve got a cramp. And I know you won’t believe this, but I even miss you using my razor to shave your legs and then not telling me … Anyway, it’s freezing cold here in Oslo and I can’t wait to get back. I love you, Ginger!
’
    David’s last words seemed to sum up a perfect harmony. The kind possessed by butterflies, snowflakes and a very small number of tap dancers.
    Sandra switched off the phone. ‘I love you too, Fred.’
    Every time she listened to the message, she felt the same sensation. Nostalgia, grief, tenderness, but also anguish. A question was hidden in those last words, a question Sandra could not and would not answer.
    It’s freezing cold here in Oslo and I can’t wait to get back.
    She had been used to David’s travelling. It was his work, his life. She had always known that. However much she might harbour the desire to hold him back, she had realised that she had to let him go.
    It was the only way to make sure he came