Up ahead children gathered at the school gates and Ulysses slowed and the kid jumped off. He wheeled the bike next to her.
You be OK? he said, handing her the satchel.
Course, she said.
A teacher came out and rang the bell and children started to head towards the door.
I’ll see you here later, he said and bent down to kiss her, but she moved away.
Don’t make a scene, she said.
He walked away to a place where she couldn’t see him and watched her go in. Stocky little thing with her shoulders back and a fuck-off frown. Other kids were chatting to one another but not her, she was all Peg. He’d kill for her. He’d known that for a while. There he was skulking in a doorway, no different to Col. He took the long way back, stopping in art shops and antique shops hoping to find a globe mould.
At home, he made a coffee and opened a pack of biscotti. He pushed back the sofas to the edge of the living room and turned the radio on. He went into his bedroom and brought out the copperplates and laid them next to each other on the floor. There were six, approximately 16 inches by 55. Hundreds of hours of his dad’s exacting work.
Before he’d left for war, Ulysses had cleaned and polished them, coated them in a light smear of petroleum jelly to protect them. He’d wrapped them in paper and card and had attached to each one a printed sheet that showed the twelve etched gores – the flattened segments of the curved surface of a globe – that ran in sequence. Finally, he’d tied old blankets around them because the plates were priceless to him.
He knelt down to the nearest one, untied the fabric and lifted out the print. He moved his finger along the steady presence of the equator line which cut along the widest point of each gore, dissecting the meridian lines that ran from north to south. The major lines of latitude – the Arctic Circle, the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn and the Antarctic Circle – curved across each segment in a steady sweep. He leant in close. Persia instead of Iran. Constantinople, not Istanbul. Russia still Russia, though. He’d date it somewhere in the late 1920s.
His dad Wilbur used to trace over a map of the world and that’s how it would start. Names of cities, countries, mountains, rivers, oceans, whatever took his fancy. And always Nora’s name somewhere. When he’d finished the trace, Wilbur would flip the paper so the world and its writing would appear in reverse. He would mark a grid system across the paper and from this template would transfer the information in each square onto a similarly gridded gore, working scrupulously across the twelve sections of the earth. An instinctive and artistic understanding of the distortion that occurred from flat surface to curve.
All the bluster of the racetrack quietened in those moments, the thrill of the wager gone. And the old boy’s hand steadied as that reverse image moved from tracing paper to copperplate.
Ulysses completed his own trace and etching mere months before his dad died. Countries, and lines of latitude and longitude, but no names. He remembered the feeling of achievement as the printed sheet rolled free of the press. The nodding approval of his dad. The cutting out of the gores and marking their sequence. Painting the sea and landmass. The smell of glue. Positioning the first gore – equator line matching the circumference line he’d drawn around the sphere. The feeling of heartbreak when the paper stretched too much and tore.
He sat up and reached for his coffee. It was cold but he didn’t mind. He thought again about the moulds and how to source them. His dad’s had been Bakelite, works of art in their own right. He lit a cigarette and sat back. Aw, Jesus! he said, suddenly registering the time.
She was waiting alone by the school gates and he came to a halt in a screech of brakes.
What time d’you call this? she said, tapping her wrist.
Sorry, he said and bent to kiss her.
Was it a woman?
A copperplate etching.
Typical.
How’d it go? he said.
I ’spect I’ll get used to it.
Hungry?
What are you thinking?
They stopped at the tripe seller and had a sandwich filled with lampredotto. Kid swiped a sip of his wine – After the day I’ve had, who could blame me? she said.
When they finished eating, he lifted her onto the saddle and pushed the bike along the road.
You need a haircut, she said, flicking his ear.
Thanks, he said.
School brought structure to the kid’s life in a way he hadn’t foreseen. She slept when she was supposed to, and woke refreshed with the sun. She was held back a year on account of her language but that would be rectified at the end of the summer term. Her coffee intake was limited to a milky one in the morning whilst reading a book or studying Italian grammar. Being the oldest in her class brought out her care for those less able or those less fortunate, of which there were many. She was ahead in arithmetic and drawing and learning poems, and writing stories wasn’t a hardship. She coasted and she knew it, but what did she care?