‘She’ll tell us when she’s ready,’ Lou had said.
‘But what if she’s on the run?’ Toni had asked as they sat at the airport gate and waited for Trinity to return from the loo. She went to the loo all the time, even more than Lou with her menopausal bladder.
‘On the run from what? Europol? The Gardai? The paparazzi? You used her passport to check her in online. If she was wanted for a crime, someone would have picked her up by now,’ said Lou, as if to imply that Toni was behaving in a very paranoid way.
At Catania airport, they hired an ice-cream pink Fiat 500 and Trinity sat in the small back seat with the luggage.
‘It’s cosy,’ said Toni, who was in the driver’s seat.
Lou peered into the back where Trinity was perched with all the bags settled on the other seat as if they were considering flinging themselves onto her.
‘Very cosy,’ she grinned. ‘You OK, darling?’ she asked.
Trinity beamed and gave her a thumbs up.
Toni liked to quickly adopt the driving style of her holiday country so was revving the little Fiat and waving in irritation at anyone who gestured or honked their horn at her as she negotiated the roads around the airport.
With Lou being the Google Map reader, they left Catania and were soon out in the countryside with Mount Etna’s snowy peaks in the distance.
‘It’s very fertile land,’ Lou said, admiring the landscape with its vineyards, olive tree groves and exotic plants she’d love to grow in her own garden. ‘They’ve got tamarisk trees,’ she added, looking up the flora and fauna on her phone. ‘I love them – they’re pink flowering trees. Impossible to grow at home.’
Toni ignored this – she had no interest in floral things – and after a while, Lou stopped looking things up. Winding down her window, she sat back in silence, basking in the heat and the difference of this unfamiliar island with the scent of lavender, lemon and wild rosemary drifting in the open windows.
By the time they’d reached Syracuse, close to where the island of Ortigia lay and which Toni assumed was the island Margo’s mother had told them about, she’d acclimatised herself totally. The city was beautiful with its honeyed Greek and Roman-style buildings, pretty balconies overflowing with flowers and plants, and tiny streetside cafes where people were sitting, letting the balmy Mediterranean sun heat them.
‘Turistica!’ Toni shrieked, ignoring the relaxed atmosphere to gesticulate at the other drivers, who all continued to drive as if either in the Monaco Grand Prix or a slow bicycle race.
Finally they made it across the city towards Ortigia, which could be accessed by three bridges. When roadworks obscured the route they’d planned to take, Toni swerved into the side of the road and slammed on the brakes. Lou, sleepy in the heat, appeared to be just staring out the window now.
‘Let’s ask someone,’ she said and yelled, ‘Ciao, parla inglese?’ to a passing young man.
This golden-haired young man turned, revealing the face of an Adonis and a tan like toffee. He leaned against the Fiat and gazed at the three occupants in turn. It was a leisurely gaze, as if he was assessing them on some Sicilian scale of beauty and giving marks out of ten.
‘The bridge to the island closes soon. You must drive to park quickly,’ he said to Toni, who was clearly scoring quite high on the scale, given the purr in his voice as he looked her over.
Toni had travelled in white jeans, a white silk T that did not quite disguise the expensive lace bra underneath, and her platinum hair hung elegantly over her shoulders. She looked expensive, as if someone was travelling behind with her Louis Vuitton steamer trunks instead of having piled a couple of very battered chain-store suitcases into the back seat of the car herself. Toni had long ago found it was a waste to buy expensive luggage – they got wrecked no matter what they cost.
‘You may not be able to park,’ said Adonis, openly admiring all Toni’s expensiveness. ‘There is the car park but parking on the road this moment is ...’ he shrugged, every movement fluid, ‘impossible.’
The word was dragged out luxuriously. Imposseeble.
‘Right,’ said Toni crisply, ignoring the admiring gazes Adonis was getting from the other women in the car. They had both woken up from their dreamy looking-out-of-the-window phase.
Toni didn’t care if Adonis had abs like a washboard and could make love all night long with the rhythm of a metronome: she was over the male of the species in all its forms, even when it came in the Italian Male version, which was evidently a primo version. Men were the enemy. All the most aggressive drivers on the way from Catania airport to Syracuse had been men. Oliver was a man. Gerry Lanigan was a man. Enough said.
Toni gave Adonis a glare that she hoped would freeze his veins even through her sunglasses. ‘I drive straight and then turn right?’
‘Yes,’ purred Adonis. ‘See you around.’
Toni gave him a tight nod and pushed down on the accelerator.
As they raced towards the bridge, Lou was aware that normally, she’d have looked at her sister in alarm, or at least said something along the lines of ‘Slow down, perhaps ...’ in a persuasive way. Heaven forbid she’d say anything like ‘Are you trying to kill us?’ which might have been reasonable because Toni had already reached sixty kilometres in a forty-kilometre zone on two separate occasions on the drive from the airport. But today, in the blissful heat of Sicily, with the car windows open and the scent of the fresh saltiness of the sea wafting in along with smells of ripening lemons, ground coffee and something that could definitely be frying onions and garlic, Lou felt nothing but a languorous heat in her bones.
Toni would drive the way Toni drove. Lou had no power over what happened. No power at all, she thought dreamily, her face catching the sun through the open window.
Since they’d got up that morning, she’d felt most unlike herself, as if the old anxious Lou Fielding had been left behind with all her proper summer clothes. This new version did not have the right bras, or long flowing kaftans to cover up her body, which was her normal holiday behaviour. She had only clothes belonging to her sister and a few things they’d bought at the airport, including black Perspex sunglasses that made her look like a 1950s movie star.
This Lou had done none of the things she normally did before she so much as went away for one night: she had not cooked meals for Ned or her mother. She had not written complex emails for work detailing what needed to be done by whom and when. Instead, she’d sent a long chatty text message to Emily, who’d be in classes, then had a lazy shower at Toni’s and smothered her body in Huile Prodigieuse golden body oil. Then, she had rambled through the airport with her sister’s vintage canvas carry-on over one arm, wearing Toni’s stretchy coral pink maxi dress and her own orange and aqua Havaianas with her toenails painted Ibiza Party Pink by Trinity, who said she’d once done a weekend course in nails.
