Smorfia’s Walk Through the House

Tam came back to Naples determined to beat Smorfia at her own game.

“I’ve been practising,” she said, before she had even sat down at the café table. “I know all ten of the pictures from your postcard. Test me.”

Smorfia laughed and tested her. One, Italy. Five, the hand. Four, the pig. Twelve, the soldier. Tam got every one.

“Good,” said Smorfia. “Now twenty numbers. In order. The order the balls came out.”

She read them out, fast. Tam closed her eyes and made pictures, the way she had last time, chaining them into a story: the soldier tripped over the pig, the pig ran to Italy… By the twelfth number the story had become a pile of animals and flags with no beginning and no end, and she lost her place completely. She remembered maybe eleven, and not in the right order.

“It doesn’t work for long lists,” she said, frustrated.

“A story works for short lists,” said Smorfia. “For a long list you need a place.”

“A place?”

“Close your eyes. Walk into your house. Your real one, at home. Where do you come in?”

Tam closed her eyes. “The front door. It sticks. You have to push it with your shoulder.”

“Put the first picture there. The first number was seven. What’s seven in the smorfia?”

“The pot.”

“So there’s a big pot jammed in your front door and you have to shove it out of the way to get in. What’s next after the door?”

“The shoe rack.”

“Second number was thirty-three. The steps. Somebody has built a tiny staircase out of shoes on the rack.”

They walked through Tam’s whole house together that way. The coat hooks, the kitchen table, the fridge, the window with the plant, the stairs, the bathroom mirror, her bed, all the way to the little desk in her room. Twenty places, twenty pictures, each one put somewhere Tam had stood a thousand times.

Then Smorfia said, “Walk back through it. Tell me what you find.”

Tam walked through it in her head. A pot in the door. Shoe steps on the rack. A scraped knee hanging from a coat hook. She said each number as she found its picture. She didn’t have to remember the order. The house remembered the order for her. Front door, shoe rack, hooks, table.

She got eighteen out of twenty.

“Eighteen!” Tam stared at her. “Where did the other two go?”

“Tell me what you saw at the fridge.”

Tam frowned. “A soldier. Twelve. And at the window… also a soldier. I put the soldier in twice.”

Smorfia checked her list. “The fridge was twelve. The window was forty-eight.”

“What’s forty-eight?”

“The dead man who talks,” said Smorfia. “It’s a funny old one from the book.” She waved her hands spookily. “But you didn’t know it, so you made up a picture, and the first thing your head grabbed was a soldier. Now twelve and forty-eight are both soldiers, and you can’t tell them apart.”

Tam groaned. “So I need a different picture for every number.”

“Every number, its own picture. Never two numbers on one picture, and never two pictures for one number. That’s the only rule that matters.” Smorfia tapped the table. “The old smorfia book has ninety pictures for ninety numbers, and every one is different. That’s why it’s lasted so long. Our grandmothers and our grandmothers’ grandmothers all used the same pictures, so if my nonno says ‘the pig’, the whole table knows he means four.”

“It’s like a code,” said Tam.

“It’s exactly a code. And a code with two numbers on one picture is a broken code.”

Tam made a new picture for forty-eight right there and then, a spooky talking statue, and put it at the window in her head. She walked the house again. Twenty out of twenty.

She felt a rush of pride, and then something quieter underneath it.

“I always thought I just had a bad memory,” she said.

“Everybody thinks that,” said Smorfia. “It’s not true. Bare numbers are slippery for everybody. Pictures stick better, and places stick best of all, because you already know your way round your house without trying. The trick isn’t magic and it isn’t a gift. It’s just a better shelf to put things on.”

Later, when the tombola started, Smorfia’s nonno called the numbers and everyone round the long table shouted out the pictures. “Ninety!” “Fear!” “Twenty-five!” “Christmas!” Tam joined in for every one she knew.

On the walk back to the hotel she opened the call book and wrote:

The smorfia: ninety numbers, ninety pictures, every one different. For a long list, put each picture somewhere along a walk you know, like your own house, and walk back through it. Never put two numbers on the same picture.

Then, underneath, she drew a tiny door with a pot stuck in it.