This time his gaze takes in my short denim cutoffs, and the knotted white shirt which keeps riding up to reveal my midriff. I pull my bag quickly over my stomach, almostfeelinghis eyes move over me.
“Okay, okay, I get it. I’ll go back upstairs and change.”
I reach out to press the button for our floor, but Alex’s hand darts out to stop me.
“No, just… just leave it,” he says, sounding a bit strange. “There’s no time now. The bus is about to leave.”
We’re on the ground floor now, and the lift doors open to a view of the huge, tiled reception area, the bus in question just visible through the glass doors at one end of it.
“Look, I’m sure it’ll be fine,” Alex says, looking at his watch. “You just probably won’t make it all the way to the top, that’s all. I think you need a permit to go all the way up anyway, and they only issue a few per day, so it might not matter all that much.”
“Oh. Right.”
I’m not sure whether to be relieved or disappointed that my childhood dream of climbing a mountain is probably going to end just short of the summit. Then again, it was a “childhood dream” I’d totally forgotten about until I read about it in my diary, and I’m not sure I even meant it at the time, so maybe Alex is right. Maybe itdoesn’treally matter.
“It’s the taking part that counts, anyway,” I say, following him out of the lift and across the sunlit reception to the waiting bus. “Isn’t it?”
“If you say so,” comes the reply. “Is that something you saw on Instagram? It sounds like one of those stupid motivational quotes people post, with a picture of a sunset behind them.”
“No. Well, yes. Quite a few times, actually. But it’s true, though,” I persist, talking to the back of his head as he stops outside the bus,waiting to board. “Or it is in my case. The old me didn’t even take part a lot of the time. Now she is.”
“Great,” says Alex, unmoved. Could the old you — or the new you, or whichever you this is — maybe hurry up and get onto the bus, then, before it leaves without us?”
“Yes, she could,” I reply, refusing to take the bait. I smile brightly as I brush past him to climb up the bus steps. “New Summer, reporting for duty.”
I’m off to climb my first mountain.
My thirteen-year-old self would be so proud.
Ten
“Coo-ee! Over here, you two! We’ve saved a couple of seats for you. We saw you were on your way down.”
Rita and Gerald are sitting side-by-side at the back of the bus, with two empty seats in front of them: which is a mercy, really, because it means they can act as a buffer between me and Alex, and save us from having to sit in stony silence all the way up the mountain.
There aren’t many opportunities for silence — stony or otherwise — with Rita in the vicinity, though. She babbles on about her Fred, and all the things they used to get up to together, as the bus winds its way up the volcano that towers over the island, passing through pretty little villages and making me cling desperately to my seat as it navigates the narrow, twisting roads that take us right through the clouds and above them.
“But it turns out ferrets ain’t supposed to eat cheese,” Rita ends sadly as we pull up at our first stop — the Las Cañadas crater that sits just below the cone of the volcano, 2,000 meters above sea level. “So that was the end of that.”
“Doyouknow what she’s talking about?” Alex whispers as we get off the bus in the car park. “Because I’m not sure I do?”
“I lost track somewhere after that first viewing point we stopped at,” I admit, not wanting to tell him I’ve been looking out of the bus window and daydreaming about me and Jamie, and what I’m going to say to him when we finally meet.
“Has he called yet, then?” asks Alex, seeing me glance at my phone.
“There’s no service this high up,” I tell him, wishing he wasn’t so good at knowing exactly what I’m thinking all the time. “So I expect he has by now, yes. There’ll probably be a message waiting for me when we get back to the hotel.”
Alex looks like he’s got a sarcastic response to this on the very tip of his tongue, but, fortunately for me, Gerald chooses this moment to ask him to take a photo, and Alex waves away the phone he’s holding out, before putting his rucksack on the ground and rummaging through it.
“Here,” he tells Gerald, producing an expensive-looking camera with an enormous lens attached to it from the bag. “Let me take one with this instead. It’ll be much better, I promise. I can airdrop it to your phone if you like.”
I watch curiously as he holds the camera up at eye level and starts fiddling with the lens, while Gerald poses obligingly in front of the giant rock formations that stand like sentinels at the edge of the caldera, holding both thumbs aloft, like a children’s TV presenter.
“So, are you some sort of photographer?” I ask as Gerald wanders off, and Alex turns to the cone of the volcano itself, which towers behind us, its tip white with snow.
I’m starting to wish I’d taken his advice on the shoe front.
“Yup,” he replies, clicking away with his back to me. “I am, indeed, some sort of photographer. Excellent detective work, Scooby.”
