She never hears me when I speak

There’s a stubborn mulish silence from within and Marc regrets his words almost immediately, can imagine, through the layer of wood between them, the scrunching of silvered brows, the quiver of Vale’s lips as he scrambles and shakes the empty, scrambled box of his brain, trying to find the answer, the retort. Coming up empty.

“It’s 112,” says Marc, apologetically, feeling bad. Vale has never gone as far as to call the police before, even when he’d woken up one day and found a stranger in his home – in his eyes, anyway. Usually Marc can talk him back down and bring him home.

Vale shuffles around in there. Marc imagines him pacing, but stopping, every odd step because his hip would start to twinge.

“You’re not a very smart robber,” Vale remarks at last.

“I’m not a robber,” says Marc, “I live here. I was just taking out the trash and got locked out.”

“Hah!” says Vale with all the triumphant tone of one who’d gotten a liar in the act, “Bullshit. You don’t live here.”

“I do.”

“No, I live here,” Something young, childish almost, emerges in the petulance undertone that Vale’s voice has taken, “This is my house.”

“It’s my house, too,” Marc reminds him, sighing. He’s getting restless looking at the door; dark oak, wooden paneling, and Vale behind it. Makes him think of things he doesn’t want to think about. The stench of antiseptic, the hospice that awaits, inevitably. Fourteen years have never felt like an uncrossable chasm before. Marc makes himself turn away, back to the door, feeling the passing breeze sting his eyes when he blinks. Tears: Marc tilts his head up, doesn’t let them fall.

In Tavullia you can still see the stars in the night sky, sparse, but faint, silvery glints. The half-crescent moon grins tauntingly down at him.

“You don’t,” Vale is saying. “I don’t even know you.”

“My name is Marc.” As he speaks the words, he realizes he’s never spoken those words before to Vale, he’s never had to introduce himself. When they first met, Valentino Rossi had looked at him and smiled, recognition in his eyes: So you’re the brave Marc.

“I don’t know a Marc,” says Vale loudly, stubbornly.

Marc snorts, damply. “Back then, you wish you didn’t know a Marc.”  He sits down, on the cobblestoned path that wends out his backyard. His sandals scrape against the pebbles in the ground. The potted plants decorating the steps are dark, vague shapes. He reaches out to pluck a leaf, fiddling with it, bending it in half in his hands just to have something to do. “But you will. It’s for the better that you know Marc.”

Vale sounds suspicious. “Why?”

“Because he’ll race you and he’ll beat you.”

“I don’t like the sound of that,” Vale decides, and Marc’s laugh trips over the snot thickening in the back of his throat, sliding back. “I don’t like losing.” Marc sniffles, sniggers.

“Teaches you a bit of humility. Jaja.”

“Bah, who needs that? I may not have won a race yet” – Marc closes his eyes, Silverstone 2000 flashing – “but I’m inevitable, I’m going to win and win and keep winning and I’ll never stop.”

He’s younger than Marc had ever encountered, even during one of his episodes. Marc doubts any of the young riders he’d ever raced with or managed has an ego capable of matching a cocksure Valentino ascending to his prime.

“You will,” Marc tells him, “because like I said, you will meet Marc. You’ll race him, and maybe you will win, one or two times, but Marc will win more. He will break all your records. He will have the same number of titles as you do. You will make him very mad one day and kick him off his bike and say a lot of shit about him, expecting him to back down and leave you alone, but he won’t – he’s not that easy to scare off. He loves you too much for that.”

"Who is this Marc?" There's a note of astonishment akin to wonder in the rising lilt of Vale's questioning tone.

Marc opens his mouth to reply, but the door swings outwards, cracks against the back of his head, and sends him stumbling off the steps. He rights himself, head throbbing, and whirls around. Vale stands in the doorway, a silhouette against the warm light spilling from inside their kitchen. The microwave’s door is ajar, the red digits reading the time 10:24. Marc rubs the back of his head, grimacing.

Vale’s clouded eyes find his, squinting like doing it hard enough will part the cobwebs in his eyes. Once, Marc had naively believed those eyes would be strikingly blue forever; he had gotten used to the faded-out irises, but he missed the electric blue, though he has never said this out loud.

Vale had refused to go under the knife, pitching a fit that amounted to a toddler’s tantrum and in the end Marc gave it up as a lost cause. It gave him something to do around the house anyway, buying foam and babyproofing the sharp edges around their house even as Vale bounced off the walls and shouted his eyesight was just fine. Between the two of them, Marc hadn’t thought Vale’s eyes would get the worst of them.

“It’s me,” says Marc, edging the words round the lump in his throat. “I’m Marc.”

It takes a while, sometimes, for Vale to remember him, or if he does – he’s stuck in a time where they are at their worst, and Vale is suspicious and vitriolic, asking where is everybody and how the fuck did Marc get into his house and telling Marc he looks old and decrepit to which Marc will tell him to look in the mirror.

But Vale’s eyes light up with unconcealed delight when Marc steps close enough to him for his face to take shape in his eyes, his vision, and a smile spreads across his face.