‘Are you too hot?’ asked Toni, half concerned. ‘It’s not supposed to be this hot in April, but today feels boiling. At least twenty-one degrees.’
‘This is perfect,’ said Lou, opening the car door, putting out a long limb and admiring her Ibiza Party Pink toes. Italian feet. She had Italian feet. And possibly Italian legs too, she thought delightedly.
They grabbed their luggage and set Google to tell them where to go for their Airbnb. They walked for five minutes along a narrow road, then turned right and right again until they were on a sinuous lane outside a three-storey building with an arched door and a coded lockbox that contained their keys.
Toni opened the arched door and they were in a cool courtyard with two doors off it. Theirs was to the left, Toni unlocked it and they climbed up a few stone steps into a beautiful apartment. It was both compact and airy, with a large single marble-floored room decorated with vast plants, conte crayon drawings of the local ruins on the walls, as well as old framed maps of Syracuse, Catania and Ortigia itself. There was a black upright piano against a wall, leather-bound books in a big bookcase and an old record player along with a small collection of actual vinyl records.
Between two towering pots of feathery ferns were two ochre-coloured couches along with a 1960s hanging bubble chair, fatly acrylic and with a white leather cushion.
‘Ooh look,’ said Trinity in delight, racing over to the chair and settling herself into it carefully, then swinging so that she twirled in it on the heavy metal chain that kept the chair tethered to the high ceiling. Side tables of old dark wood contained lamps, mosaic coasters and bowls of shells. A paperweight of opalescent Murano glass sat with an old black typewriter on a small writing desk, and to one side French windows opened onto a small balcony with filmy muslin curtains.
Lou went out to the balcony and when Toni joined her she found that they were at the edge of the island city, staring straight out to sea. If she looked to the left, she could just see a rocky quay where people sat and looked down into the sea. Further out was a swimming platform swamped with bathers laughing and dangling their feet in the dark azure waters.
‘This holiday was a brilliant idea,’ Lou said and hugged her sister.
For a moment, Toni thought of remarking irritably that this wasn’t a holiday, it was more of a Sherlock Holmesian quest to find Lou’s biological father – but if Lou wanted to think of it that way, who was she to question that.
Leaving Lou to gaze out to sea, Toni kept exploring. The kitchen was tiny, more of a room for making coffee than dinner. Lemons sat in a little fruit bowl along with three limes so gloriously fat and ripe that Toni began to think of making lemonade with limes just to taste how beautiful they were. As Lou exclaimed about how much they could see from their balcony and Trinity was still twirling in her chair, ever-present headphones in as she listened to music, Toni began to climb the marble staircase to the upstairs. She somehow felt like the grown-up who’d brought two teenagers on holiday, and she was examining their lodgings while said teenagers were squealing with delight over random things.
There were two bedrooms and opposite them was another French window. This led out to a large terrace with dark wooden boards underfoot, a mosaic table in indigo colours, sun loungers and painted terracotta pots containing lavender, basil plants, and cacti such as Toni had never seen. A striped canvas awning in blue and white kept the table in the shade and along the prettily shaped railings nearest the sea was a bench carved in stone with a long blue-and-white cushion on it.
Toni sat down, breathing a deep sigh of relief. They had made it. They were here.
The sound of loud music suddenly interrupted the peace of the evening, and Toni sat upright with a jolt.
‘Disco Inferno!’ Lou’s voice squealed as the beat began to penetrate Toni’s skull. ‘I love this! Let’s dance!’
Definitely two teenagers.
Lou woke early the first morning. The room was dark, but she could see hints of light from under the blackout blinds. Toni was fast asleep in the bed beside her, starfished in the bed, face down. Utterly out for the count.
Lou felt energised. She wanted to get out and see Ortigia.
She knew why she was here: to find her father, but now that she was in Sicily, she wasn’t going to waste a moment of this. A spark of a new Lou was growing inside her. A Lou who didn’t do what people expected her to do. A Lou who rubbed golden oil on her long legs and sashayed in Brazilian bikinis. A Lou who didn’t phone home to talk to all the people who expected her to run around after them.
Grinning to herself, she wriggled out of the bed, snagged a sarong and pulled it on around her waist and went out of the room. Trinity was sitting on the little balcony downstairs with a cup of herbal tea. She was wearing a baseball hat, sunglasses, and her skin gleamed with the zincy whiteness of a red-haired person who’d just covered themselves in sunscreen.
‘Good morning,’ said Lou delightedly. She did love this, starting the day with a gorgeous young person who was pleased to see her.
She’d tried so hard to ignore the empty nest that she’d practically blocked it out. But spending time with Trinity made her realise how much she missed Emily and missed being a mother. A mother with a daughter who needed mothering.
‘Lou,’ said Trinity, and reached out her slender, white arms for a hug.
‘I’m a bit sticky with sun cream,’ she added, pulling out her earbuds. ‘I really burn. You look like you get very brown.’
‘Yeah,’ said Lou, and paused. ‘I always wondered why I had such olive skin and now it maybe makes sense. If I really do have a Sicilian birth-father.’ Her mothering instinct kicked in: ‘Did you get breakfast?’
‘Can’t quite face breakfast at the moment,’ said Trinity, ‘but I will in a minute.’
‘Coffee?’
‘No,’ said Trinity quickly. ‘I’m very happy with my herbal tea. I’m not into caffeine.’
‘Probably healthier,’ said Lou cheerfully.
She loved how young people took care of their bodies. When she’d been in her twenties, she’d drunk lots of coffee to get her going in the morning and Toni had consumed caffeine tablets like sweeties in college. But Emily’s generation truly took care of their bodies in a sensible way.
She came back to the balcony with coffee and toasted bread with butter and honey, a piece of which she gave to Trinity.
