‘I was working in a shop when I was in college, but I thought it would be a handy way of making extra money,’ Trinity said idly.
‘Clever idea,’ Lou had replied, feeling that if Trinity kept dropping titbits about her life into the conversation, she’d soon find out what the younger woman was running from.
‘You have lovely feet,’ Trinity had said in Toni’s house as she folded up bits of tissue paper and wrapped them between Lou’s toes in a very professional way.
‘They’re long and thin,’ Lou had said, admiring them. ‘Totally different from Toni’s. She has enormous big toes.’
‘I heard that,’ teased Toni, who was packing. ‘Are you slagging off my ginormous toes?’
‘No. But I do like my feet,’ Lou went on. ‘Lillian has narrow ankles but my feet are—’
‘Very Italian looking,’ Toni agreed, peering over Trinity’s shoulder as the first coat of polish went on.
‘How can feet be Italian?’ asked Lou, snorting with laughter.
‘Narrow, elegant, perfect for fine leather shoes,’ Toni said. ‘Mine are Irish. Pale and prone to retaining water after long flights.’
They all laughed, but the idea that she had different feet from the rest of the family stayed with Lou. There were so many things about her that had been different from Toni: Toni was decisive, never appeared to worry about anything, and was a sleek tall woman with fair hair, albeit helped along with hefty doses of hair salon bleach. By contrast, Lou put on weight if she so much as looked at a carbohydrate, had felt anxiety and depression her whole life, and her eyes were a deep brown unlike anyone else in the Cooper family tree.
Nobody else had depression. Her mother was brusque whenever Lou was outwardly down, having not ever actually said ‘buck yourself up’, but she’d certainly come close. Lou had never felt up to explaining to any of her family that depression was not something one could choose to recover from. She’d thought of saying it to her mother once: ‘It would be like asking someone with two broken legs to suddenly start walking. You wouldn’t because they can’t walk. Depression is having two emotionally broken legs and you can’t walk, no matter how much you want to.’
Obviously, she’d never said it. Instead, she’d simply felt different, wrong. Suddenly all these differences were making sense. The things she thought separated her were there because she had more family. There was more to her that she didn’t even fully understand yet. She was not missing something; instead, it was like she had something extra. Not less but maybe ... different? How utterly bizarre. The realisation felt so huge, so new, that she almost couldn’t think about it for too long at once. As if it needed to seep slowly into her consciousness and could not be rushed.
Toni was keen to start searching for Angelo as soon as they landed in Sicily and had been bitterly disappointed to find he had no presence on social media. ‘We’ll track him down,’ she said.
Lou hoped it would take time.
At the airport, Lou had bought three Brazilian bikinis, two in mad florals and one in pale leopard print in one shop – it was years since she’d donned anything but a sensible suck-it-all-in one-piece – and five novels in the bookshop, picking them as if she’d been picking sweets, for their deliciousness and promise of joy. She’d bought a bar of white chocolate and ate it all as she meandered through the shops, not allowing herself to feel a hint of guilt because she wasn’t having just the two squares of dark chocolate as all the diet guides instructed. What was the point of dieting? This was her shape. Perhaps even her genetic shape?
She’d bought a glossy expensive lipstick in duty-free: a cherry red, not her usual colour at all. When applied, it made her mouth look luscious and full. Normally, Lou didn’t go for anything sexy in the lipstick arena. Her mouth was full, like her rounded cheekbones. But she never emphasised it to such an extent. Until today. Today was different. Warmed by the sun, peaceful in this blissful island city, she gazed around her with a peace she rarely felt. The island was truly a place of magic, a wild Mediterranean magical site dusted with sand, ancient history and stone buildings that had been there through all the great epochs of history.
In the same way that Lou had felt something fey and otherworldly in the old Mulraney place in Easkey, some sense that the people there had truly seen the world, she felt that Sicily herself was a wise goddess sitting in the sea, watching the world around her and remembering all she had seen in the past. The Sicily goddess was enlightened, knew that men had fought for centuries over this jewel in the Mediterranean, and knew that, despite their menfolk’s battles, the women were keeping everything going: caring for their bambinos, cooking pasta in salted water, and pouring wine from goatskins when the days’ work was done.
Lou let the honeyed warmth of Sicily sink into her very being and idly wondered if she was having a strange out-of-body experience brought on by all the shocks.
Ned had let her down. Oszkar and Bettina had let her down. Her mother had let her down. They had all made her question her identity: who was she if she wasn’t Lillian Cooper’s dutiful daughter or Ned Fielding’s easily placated wife? Who had she become as she’d filled all these roles? And stretching back furthest was the trickiest thing to navigate of all: who was she now that she was no longer the mother of a daughter who needed her all the time?
Emily was a grown-up at university and had her own life. Lou, who had put every part of herself into nurturing Emily and all the loved ones in her life, was left with a gaping hole that might have been filled by her husband, her work, her relationship with her mother.
The loss of all of these made her realise that she was on her own. She was still a mother but her child no longer needed mothering in the same way. The family she’d thought was hers, wasn’t hers anymore. Not in the sameway.
It felt as if darling Mim was talking to her from her unicorn:You need to take charge of yourself, Lou. Rely on yourself. You can do it!
Lou wasn’t sure if Mim was truly speaking to her or if she was merely channelling the sort of wise and strong thing Mim would say, but the upshot was the same. Lou had the strangest sense that now, here, she had the chance to reinvent herself. In Sicily’s balmy heat, she could become someone else, the person she’d always wanted to be.
Perhaps the Lou who jumped out of her skin at the noise of a passing truck was not who she was, really. Perhaps she could be someone else. Someone stronger, someone who could feel the joy of her life and not just the fear.
Chapter Fifteen
‘We’re here, Lou.’
They were parked in a tiny space overlooking the sea and a seabird sat on the car park’s low wall, staring in at them quizzically. Ortigia was made up of even tinier streets than the rest of Syracuse. It was lined with more ancient amber-hued buildings and tourists lazily meandering along from narrow pavement onto narrow roads as if they hadn’t a care in the world.
‘Are you getting out of the car, Lou?’
The Sicilian version of Lou smiled lazily at her sister. Toni’s every nerve seemed stretched tauter than an elastic band. Toni was the one who was falling apart now.
‘Yes, I’m getting out,’ she said, arching her body luxuriously in the little car seat and stretching like a cat.
