Every night for almost a month after her son’s suicide on TikTok live, their cat waits. Every night, between nine and nine-thirty, their only pet strolls out of the kitchen, wanders through the living room with stretched-out, lazy rubs against the piano and the chaise-longue, and turns the corner leading into the foyer. Every night, at the same time, there the cat stops, little snout tilted upward, and waits, for close to an hour, for someone who will never come home.
‘Cats are creatures of habit,’ her brother-in-law said almost to himself on one of these many nights, after the post-mortem cleaning company had pocketed almost seven thousand euros for scrubbing brain matter off the walls.
Lucia was only half-listening, watching the patch of floor where, she had overhead, the company had scooped up scraps of her son’s jaw.
‘They are,’ someone else agreed. Her sister-in-law.
Her brother-in-law asked, louder, as the cat, tired of waiting, strolled into the room: ‘What’s its name again?’
‘Bianco,’ answered Lucia, almost to herself. The colour of her son’s shattered jawbone. White.
*
Marco named him five years ago, after a long, thoughtful look at its shiny black fur. Marco had been twelve, all fat cheeks and a dimpled smile. The fat would eventually melt away, dissolved through endless nighttime gym sessions, with a single-minded dedication that had pleased her husband; the dimples would stay. ‘Its surname,’ Marco had declared, ‘is Nero. This cat will be bianconero, a Juventus fan like us. What do you think, Dad?’
Throughout the years, Bianco had been taught to play catch, to look for Lucia at mealtimes, and that its litter would be cleaned twice a day, in the early mornings and in the late evenings. And every day at around nine, Bianco had been taught to expect this routine: the faint sound of the gate opening, the rumble of a scooter driving down the paved slope to the garage, the engine idling before the screech of the garage shutters. Then, the tip-tap of football shoes up the stairs. Keychains—a miniature chili pepper in silver and a Turkish nazar for good luck—dangling at the turn of a key. The front door clicking open. A thud: a heavy sports bag dropped to the marble floor. Marco, still sweaty, would walk up to the living room to grab Bianco’s favourite from its basket of toys: a fishing rod with feathers attached at the end that he swung from one end of the room to the other, as Bianco chased and charged and jumped. Finally, Bianco would enjoy some loving scratches behind its ears, underneath its chin, at the base of its tail. Cuddles and nice, long belly rubs.
Lucia could still smell Marco’s sour, teenage-musky body odour mixed with perfume, because the cat, his beloved cat, always, always came before the shower. Lucia would pinch her nose shut: ‘Please,’ she would say. ‘You’re stinking up the place. Go wash up.’
If cats are creatures of habit, Lucia thinks now, what are people? What does that make me?
*
She plagues herself and the man she married and the walls she painted and the furniture she picked when she was younger and sane and whole, like an ugly disease spreading, rotting away at the limbs of her home. Her home, every empty corner a small torment, every silent, scentless room a torture chamber of its own:
The master bedroom, coral-pink walls, a wide wardrobe and a queen’s bed: an ergonomic mattress covered in Egyptian cotton sheets where they co-slept, initially, her husband and her and Marco, only a few weeks old. The pudge of his tummy. The softness of his hair. His newborn bow lips suckling, hard, on her nipples. A miracle.
The bathroom where she gave him his first bath after the house was renovated, plastic toys in the shallow, limpid water. He cried, that day, shampoo in his eyes. The first of many times she’d allow him to hurt, powerless.
The northern end of the rear garden, where Marco used to set up the grill for the Easter Monday grigliata as his classmates flocked to their front door carrying their share of seasoned sausages and horsemeat cuts. Every year, the smoky aroma of oil and herbs and sweet, tender horsemeat saturated the spring day, a testament to how loved he was. How popular.
The front of the garden, the white gazebo where, during the summer holidays, Marco and his friends briefly pretended to do some homework before they abandoned all pretenses to laze about in the sun, skin slathered in tanning oil.
Lucia comes staggering back inside the house. She’s had a glass of wine—maybe two. Has she had a bottle? It’s another damp, hot night, the last ahead of the funeral, and she can’t think, and she can’t walk. This is her home; this is her own tomb.
This is the sliding door to the kitchen, where she and her husband would keep track of Marco’s height: one line a year, black marker stark against the white of the wooden frame. Seventeen in total. She presses her forehead against the line at her own height, where Marco’s heart would have been, harder and harder and harder until she, too, begins to splinter. Marco will never be taller than one hundred and seventy-one centimetres.
This is where they argued about the tattoos he’d gotten in secret: a sword pointing upwards on his calf and the words ‘memento audere semper’ below the protruding line of his clavicle. Where he laughed, young and unabashed, and planted a kiss on her cheek and said, ‘The next will be “scusa mamma” on my chest.’
This is the last cup he drank from, sour with dried coffee and precious traces of his saliva.
This is the coffee table where, six weeks ago, he left his phone unlocked and she glimpsed a text: Still on for tomorrow night with Claudia? one of his friends nicknamed Siffredi was asking.
This is the corridor where, aged 12, he kicked a ball and shattered a handmade Caltagirone vase.
This is where she once caught him tugging at the negligible stubborn fat of his tummy, his face twisted in scorn.
These are the last dirty clothes she picked up from the bathroom floor, still smelling faintly of his favourite perfume. ‘Mamma,’ he used to say before he went out, bathed in cedarwood and pepper, ‘I ought to make heads turn.’
This is where he proclaimed he would be an astronaut.
This is where he changed his mind and vowed to be a policeman, like his dad.
This, this, this.
She walks down the stairs, eyes watery and tired, a headache blooming, pulsing, against her forehead, and steps into the basement: almost a unit of its own, a rustic kitchen area on one end, a lush cream-coloured corner sofa and a stone fireplace on the other, between them a masterpiece of an oak table that she bought, at a bargain, from a vintage furniture dealer. Beyond the door, a wide utility room that could be repurposed into a bedroom. This was supposed to be Marco’s bachelor pad, one day. Soon.
Here they celebrated his eighth birthday, Marvel-themed, when Marco dressed as Spider-Man. Her own superhero. Her boy, her precious boy, blowing the candles as he stood on the same chair where, almost ten years later, he would put his father’s service weapon in his mouth and pull the trigger.
A few dozen people watched him take a seat at the table, front camera pointed at himself, a sweaty, trembling seventeen-year-old child against the brown backdrop of terracotta bricks. She learnt from her husband’s colleagues that it was hundreds of viewers by the time he started to read from a wrinkled piece of paper. That thousands were watching as he got to his last words: You all are right. I am nothing. I deserve to die.
This is where twenty-two thousand people egged him on as he gagged around the barrel of her husband’s Beretta 92 FS, fat tears pooling at the corners of his eyes.
This is also where the journalists will set up their cameras and microphones in two weeks’ time, for their primetime special on the case.
‘You understand that you are doing this against my advice,’ their solicitor said, when he was told their plan. He had turned a sickly grey. ‘If you want to do it, though, I think we should go live from your brother-in-law’s. Not from here. Otherwise, people will be distracted. They will wonder if this is where Marco—well—where he—’
This is where the cleaners picked up what was left of my son’s jaw, she thought.
‘It has to be here,’ she said instead. ‘He was murdered.’
