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Impossible. I typed in kat kilgour once again, followed one or two dead ends and then, on an image-sharing website, found a virtual, visual diary of her travels. Photographs, many, many photographs. Here were Kat and Albie on the Rialto Bridge, pouting, cheeks pressed together, offering up their foreheads to the phone’s fish-eye lens in that pose that has become standard these days. Here was a moody shot of Albie, posturing with his cheek against the neck of his guitar in moody black and white, the caption ‘lover and friend, Albie Petersen’ and a poorly punctuated commentary beneath from KK’s friends and fans — gorgeous!!! back off bitch hes mine, two thumbs up, bring him to sydney, hes easy on the eye damn gurl he beautiful — my strange pride battling with bemusement at this brazen new world that Albie occupied, where ratings were accorded to everything, including the sexual attractiveness of strangers, and where no opinion went unexpressed. No inhibitions, no repression. I would! said one remark. That’s all, just I would! What had happened to loaded conversations and drunken, whispered confidences in back-street trattorias? Good God, I thought, how might I have fared in a world where people were free to say what they felt?

And now here was Albie in a bed somewhere, his bony torso exposed, cigarette dangling like a French film star, and more comments of a personal nature. I could, I thought, have added one of my own without fear of discovery; chipped in with ‘smoking is NOT cool’ and pasted in a jpeg of a diseased lung, but instead I moved on, skimming past a photo of Kat sleeping on a railway platform, and now standing in front of the Tower of Pisa, pushing it back into alignment and I laughed, actually laughed at the thought of Albie succumbing to the temptation of that picture before catching myself and thinking –

The Tower of Pisa. That’s not right.

The Tower of Pisa is not in Venice. It’s in … well, it’s in Pisa.

I looked at the photograph’s date. Today — yesterday. I swore at the f-ing Tower of f-ing Pisa — and put my hand to my mouth.

I flicked back to the previous photograph, Kat on the train platform. The sign above the bench — Bologna. The caption:

Venice u killed us man. 2 many tourists. On the road again!

I swore louder this time, causing Freja to shift and mumble in her sleep. I felt the panic rise in my chest. Stay calm. Perhaps it was a day trip! Where was Pisa exactly? A traveller’s guide to Italy sat on the top of Freja’s packed case. Bologna sat in the centre of Italy’s thigh, but Pisa was in … Tuscany? I was not just in the wrong city, I was on the wrong coast.

I skimmed forward to the Pisa photos, Albie looking surly and bored on the long promenade of the Arno, head resting awkwardly on his guitar case. Albie on a downer. keep moving on, moving on. sometimes travelling is hard, man. bone-tired. need a place where we can lay our heads. So come back to Reading then, you silly boy! Next, a night-time shot, a photo of Albie arguing with a carabinieri, Albie’s face caught in a sneer, the officer’s eyes shaded beneath his cap. ‘That’s a policeman, Albie!’ I wanted to shout. ‘Don’t argue with a policeman!’ Moved on by fascists was all that Kat could say on the subject. What would the next photo bring? Albie bleeding from a truncheon blow? No, a stray cat drinking from the cap of a water bottle. Night night kitty, said the caption. Siena tomorrow!

Tomorrow. That meant today, this morning, in Siena. The current time was eight minutes past four. Gathering my trousers up in my arms, dangling the evil shoes from my fingertips, I tiptoed to the door.

125. a letter to freja kristensen, posted beneath her door