The Homemade God

Prologue

That was the summer they wore flip-flops. Everywhere they went, they wore them. The bank, the gelateria, the hair salon and the bar, but also the undertaker and the police. Four pairs of rubber shoes on white-hot stone.

Slap slap, slap slap.

There was a heatwave all over Europe. No one could remember a summer like it. There were water shortages and wild fires. Warnings about too much sun and dehydration. Really the lake was the only place to be. Midday it shot forth tiny flints of light, but it could turn every colour under the sun, and in the early mornings it was the best. There might be low-slung mists so that everything disappeared, including the reeds, and only the little island was left, floating in the middle on a bed of cloud. Or on a clear day the water was a piece of glass with a deep-blue sky inside it, fringed on all sides by hills, an upside-down island growing out of the one on top, and swallows skimming beneath the surface. At night the dark smelt of sweetened cypress, with all the lights across the mainland breaking out like low stars.

Slap slap they went, following each up and down. Whenever he hears flip-flops, Goose remembers that summer his father died on an Italian lake and he went with his three sisters to fetch him home. Sometimes, on the edge of sleep, he even finds himself back on the island in the middle, though in truth he hasn’t been there for years. Like a ghost, he moves through the villa he knew so well – all those frescoed rooms, the glasshouse filled with lemon trees, the music salon with its ten harps that no one could play – until at last he finds Netta hunting for a phone signal in her giant straw hat, or Susan shining with sweat in the kitchen against a background of green majolica tiles, or Iris leaving food for the stray cat, and it’s strange how content it makes him feel, how secure and happy. (‘Iris!’ Netta will roar. ‘Do not let that manky thing inside!’ Too late. It is drinking milk on the table.) He goes over that summer in his mind, ransacking it for signs and clues, different ways of doing things from the terrible ways they got done. And yet it’s also true he finds them howling with laughter, all four of them. He can’t think how it was so funny, except it was. Until that summer, he had no idea you could laugh like that and still be sad.

They had to stick together, his sisters said. They were family. They shared the same beginning. They were woven into the same story. They’d spent birthdays together, Christmases together, all those summers on the lake. No one knew them the way they knew each other, so if they stuck together it would be all right. They would fetch their father’s body and find his last painting. But his sisters had no idea what was coming, or what Bella-Mae might do next. They had no idea that trying to stay close would be the one thing that finally split them apart, as if she had crawled inside hairline fractures they could not see, and pushed them so far that one crack joined with another, then another, until everything broke, like a shattered pot. And yet it’s strange. To this day, Goose is still not sure who she was, not really. An innocent, a grifter, worse? Even the hyphen in the middle of her name suggests not one person but two at the very least, holding hands. If only he had been different, strong and unbending like his father, he might have stopped things before it was too late. He could still be with his sisters now. But he isn’t. He is a man in his mid-forties sending invites they’ll say yes to, knowing full well they won’t come.

Slap slap went their flip-flops, side by side on Lake Orta. Slap slap, slap slap.