The Tin Heart Read online

The Tin Heart

  by A M Kirkby

  Text Copyright © 2011 A M Kirkby

  All Rights Reserved

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, events, and locations are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons or events, living or dead, are entirely coincidental.

  Short stories

  A Ghost Story of the Norfolk Broads

  The Tin Heart

  Sword of Justice

  Novellas

  Walsingham Way

  Green Land

  Doppelgänger

  Novels

  Etruscan Spring – forthcoming

  Etruscan Blood - forthcoming

  Children's books

  Kasbah cat

  Pagliaccio the opera cat

  The Tin Heart

  by A M Kirkby

  Have you ever seen one of those Italian churches full of ex-votos? Not the ones covered with little marble tablets like a doll's house cemetery, nor the ones with little wax legs and arms like a massacre of plastic dolls, but the churches with the little tinsel rags bound on to the Virgin, with a sort of gaiety and seriousness like that of children waiting for Christmas. You know what Christmas is like in Italy, too. Rather wonderful; crisp, sharp weather, and all the little stalls out on the streets selling caramelised almonds and nougat. Red carpets rolled out in the street. Except that this year, Venice was flooded, and instead of the carpet of blood it had a carpet of silver - or lead, as it turned out to be. But on with the story. I was a student then, and as students are, broke. I arrived in Venice the night before Christmas Eve, late at night - I'd hitched a lorry down to Mestre, and then taken a lift from a nightwatchman going in to work - and I had nowhere to stay. I thought I'd find somewhere if I carried on walking - well, you always do - so I struck out for the Rialto. Venice was dark; about half the lights seemed to be out, and the ones that worked managed only to make damp, dim little pools of light in the murk.

  I got to the Rialto all right. Nothing here. Not a single door open, not a glimpse of light through any of the shutters. Only the long unlit street stretching in front of me, the cold stone shining in the drizzle. And the smell of the fish market. Funny how I remember that. tell me about the Accademia, the Doge's Palace, the Mint, the Ca' d'Oro, and I can't remember it; and when I do think I remember it, it turns out that what I remember is an illustration in a book, or a paragraph in a catalogue. But I remember the smell of that fish market, and the hints of movement in the darkness that might or might not have been cats.

  I suppose it was about two o'clock in the morning. It got quiet. Very quiet. I could hear my own breathing, my own heart, and the slow pulse of water rippling against the side of the canal. I could roll myself up there and wait, or I could go on. I hadn't quite decided when I noticed, just across from where I was standing, a narrow alleyway between two stark walls of brick.

  I still don't know what led me to go down there and not down the main street. I suppose it's that streak of stubbornness that cuts into mystery., never doing the obvious thing. Even now I still go and look round corners into rooms where the doors are ajar. I take shortcuts into mystery. I even peer down little alleys like this one, follow them, see where they go - but only in daylight.

  Now, of course, I have a suspicion that alleyway was laid out especially for me to walk down.

  I don't want you to get the wrong impression. It wasn't one of these nightmare roads that twist about, where you lose your sense of orientation, where you can't retrace your steps. Nothing like a labyrinth. I'm sure I could at any time have walked back, apart form my own obstinacy keeping me going. No, it was a bit more subtle than that. The alleyway just seemed to curve, just a little, always to the left, until I realised that I couldn't see back.

  The light seemed to have changed. It was as murky as the light on the Rialto, but where the Rialto's lamps cast a leprous white light, this was yellow. Just as the alleyway seemed to come to an end, I saw where the light was coming from.

  The church door was just a little ajar; just enough to let out the candlelight. It seemed that it spun a filament of fire across the pavement to my feet. I walked the wire. The door opened softly; inside, the candles were blazing, as if it was Christmas already. No-one about. I pulled the door to behind me.

  The church seemed to waver and sparkle in the warm haze of candlelight. It was a baroque jewel box hung with red curtains, every capital, every corbel, every pinnacle covered in silver or gilt. The Virgin on the altar was a babylike face above a mass of lace, velvet, cloth of gold that wound her body like a cocoon. Around her on the velvet were pinned little hearts, holy Valentines, chocolate boxes. Ribbons snaked through laces of filigree, silver hearts and red ribbon.

  It had that strange night-before-Christmas feel, that fervent expectation of a new and splendid day, that emotionalism of the midnight carol service. Happy little tears prickled at the corners of my eyes and I felt my own heart leaping. Smiling I walked towards the Virgin, holding out my hand to her as she held hers out to me.

  In her outstretched hand was a little tin heart; a tiny heart, surrounded by ruffles of gilt lace, red ribbons flying in bifurcated tails. I don’t know why; I reached out and took it, and at that moment I felt a cold draught from the door I’d left ajar.

  The stuffy atmosphere seemed to have blown away. I shivered. I looked round, wondering whether anyone had seen me take the little heart; but there was no-one there, just an uneasy feeling of something happening behind my back. I thrust my hand between the buttons of my coat, found the breast pocket inside, and slid the little heart in just over my own. One last look at the madonna, the cracks in the plaster now obvious to my eyes; I’d lost sense of time but now I realized from this that the cold grey light of almost-dawn was already stealing through the high windows. I distanced myself from the statue, and in a far corner of the church behind a choir pew I settled down to doze until daybreak.

  When I woke the candles had all guttered. The church was grey, as if the mist outside had come into it. I was cramped, and as I limped down the aisle the muscles in my back tore.

  There was an old woman in crepe black on her knees before the madonna’s altar. Just as I saw her, her eyes caught mine; I looked away, sidled out of the church into the fog.

  I wondered whether the maze of pillars in the church had confused me into coming out by a different door; the alley seemed to be gone, and instead I’d come out into a vast square of which I couldn’t see the other side. Though maybe it was just the fog; I could hardly have seen the other side of an alleyway, it was so thick. When I felt for the wall, though, it wasn’t there; my fingers met air.

  Venice that day seemed a city of interiors. I glimpsed bars, domestic courtyards through doors, the vast caverns of churches yawning open. Inside looked warm, outside was cold and damp. Every interior was etched strongly like a Vermeer print, inside the frame of the door or window; outside everything was blurred, smudged, faint. I spent the day looking in, wondering if I should, but never crossing the magic threshold.

  Almost as though I’d spent the day in a trance, I realized about three in the afternoon that I’d done nothing. I hadn’t found a hotel, I was lost, I’d been wandering for hours with no thought, woolgathering, out of it.

  The twisting back streets where I was didn’t exist on the map. I’d see glimpses of palaces I recognized across a canal, then the canal would turn, there’d be no bridge, or a brick wall would turn the pathway aside from the canal edge, and I’d be back in the mist again.

  Your sense of direction gets lost when you’re in fog that thick. I’ll swear that twice or three times I passed the same restaurant, one with an orange shaded lamp in the window. It hardly penetrated the grey fog. My back s
till twinged from sleeping on the hard bench. I tried hard to keep a straight line, reckoning I’d hit the edge of the Fondamente Nuove if I carried on; but after a few hundred yards there’d be another turn in the alley, or I’d be brought up short at the edge of the black water, with no bridge to cross.

  I have no idea how long I kept going. It was dark, and I was limping from light to distant light in the darkness between the pools of luminous mist, when I realised I’d come out to the Piazzetta. Even in the glaring light I couldn’t see the top of the Campanile, hidden in the mist; the great arches of the Basilica yawned blackly on to the square.

  The pavement reflected the whole scene in a shimmer of fairy lights. I stepped forward, and realized as I stepped down on to the pavement that it was covered with a thin film of