Last tour

Chiara has done the Forum walk four hundred and some times, and today is the last one, and the group doesn't know. Fourteen of them. A couple from Ohio in matching hats, a German family, three friends from Manchester who've clearly been up late, a quiet Japanese man travelling alone with a very good camera, an older woman from somewhere in Scandinavia who asks about everything. The usual. She's got the umbrella with the ribbon, the little receiver clipped to her belt, the voice that carries without shouting, which took two years to find. Tomorrow she starts at an architecture firm in Turin. A real job, her mother says, though Chiara's fairly sure four hundred tours in the sun is a real job too. She hasn't told the agency she's not coming back. She'll email them tonight. It seemed cleaner. "So," she says, at the top of the Capitoline steps, where she always starts. "Before we go down. Everybody look at it for a second. Just look. Don't take a photo yet." They look. They always do, if you tell them to. The Forum's below them in the flat morning light, columns and broken arches and the long grass nobody cuts. The Ohio couple hold hands. The Manchester three go quiet, which is something. She takes them down. She does the Senate house, the temple of Saturn, the spot where they burned Caesar. She does the joke about the tourists who ask where the gladiators fought, which is the Colosseum, which is next door, which is a different ticket. It lands. It always lands. Halfway through, by the Vestals, the Scandinavian woman asks a question Chiara has never been asked. Not about the Vestals. About her. "How many times have you walked this?" "Today? Once." "In total." Chiara thinks. "Around four hundred." "Does it get boring?" Fourteen faces, waiting. The honest answer is complicated. The honest answer is that the stones don't change but the light does, and the people do, and somewhere around tour two hundred she stopped seeing the ruins and started seeing the people see them, and that's the part she'll miss, and that's the part she can't explain in a job interview.

"No," she says. "Different every time. You lot are different." The German father asks what's different about them and she says, without thinking, "You're the last group," and then has to explain, and then the whole thing is out, and the Manchester three cheer, and the Ohio woman says "oh, honey," and the Japanese man takes a photo of her, of Chiara, not the ruins, and shows her, and it's good. She finishes at the arch. She always finishes at the arch. She does the bit about how everything here was built by people who thought it would last forever and it sort of did and it sort of didn't, and then she thanks them and tells them where the good gelato is, the real place, not the one by the exit. They go. They tip better than usual, which she pretends not to notice. The Scandinavian woman stays behind. "Turin," she says. "Good luck." "Thank you." "Come back sometimes. Walk it without the umbrella." Chiara says she will. She sits on the steps for a while after they've gone, with the umbrella across her knees and the receiver still clipped to her belt, watching the next groups come down. There's a guide she knows doing the Senate house bit. He's doing it wrong. She doesn't go over.