The Sweet Life

by Rebecca Lim

  ‘Ciao bella,’ Luca said in his usual heart-stopping way, only today it was heart-stopping for all the wrong reasons. It was suddenly an ordeal to meet his eyes. She just wanted the trip to be over with, before it’d even begun. Janey shook her head when Luca made to open the front passenger door in his usual way, and climbed into the back seat as if she really was a visiting VIP.

  ‘Che?’ Luca said, surprised. ‘Is anything the matter, Janey?’

  ‘Headache,’ Janey lied. ‘Don’t want to keep the Ambassador waiting, if that’s okay. Please just take me there as fast as you can?’ She closed her eyes to forestall any more conversation.

  Luca shrugged and slid into the driver’s seat.

  ‘You are otherwise well?’ he began as the car shot out from the kerb. ‘You enjoyed our little walk?’

  Janey’s eyes flicked briefly to his in the mirror, before she looked away.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said. She lapsed into deliberate silence, hoping he’d take the hint and leave her alone. Half of her was screaming to find out more about him, and the other half was experiencing major trust issues. She hoped the battle of her inner voices wasn’t registering on her face.

  It couldn’t have been, because Luca continued cheerfully, ‘My younger sister, Lucia, she and her school friends plan to go to Ostia tomorrow, the beach just outside Roma. She is only a little older than you, and hopes you may join them. She very much wishes to meet you. You will go?’

  Under normal circumstances, a trip to the beach, and the opportunity to make exotic new friends her age, would be Janey’s idea of heaven. But not now. Not when Janey wasn’t sure about Luca’s motives for saying or doing anything, where she was concerned.

  ‘Um,’ she said. ‘I’m kind of busy tomorrow.’ She mentally crossed her fingers, hoping he wouldn’t ask for details about her plans, because she didn’t have any.

  ‘Then mercoledì – Wednesday?’ Luca replied. ‘She would be most happy to accommodate you.’

  Janey shook her head. ‘Please tell her molte grazie, but my days are booked up until I leave at the end of next week.’ This wasn’t at all true, but Janey wasn’t sure she wanted to make friends with Luca’s sister, even if she did sound lovely and welcoming. It could be another weird trap. It just seemed easier to say no.

  She registered Luca’s quick frown in the mirror as he changed lanes to avoid a speeding motorcyclist.

  Cold turkey, cold turkey, she told herself as she stole a quick, unhappy glance at Luca’s back before staring determinedly out a side window. He seems really nice, Janey thought to herself, and you’re probably wasting a colossally great chance to get to know him better, you idiot.

  But then again, said her other, more sensible inner voice, he could be the ultimate weirdo trying to keep tabs on you all the time, in which case you’re doing the right thing.

  ‘I think,’ said Luca, ‘that you are perhaps – how do you say? – avoiding me because I have caused offence in some way. If you will not tell me, I will – what is that English expression? – get to the bottom of things! You cannot escape me so easily, Janey Gordon.’

  Janey’s eyes shot back to his fearfully, failing to hear the teasing note in Luca’s voice with her nerves wound up so tightly. She said nothing, only slid even more firmly into a far corner of the back seat, away from his probing gaze.

  Luca said more gently, ‘Lucia will be so disappointed! She very much wants to meet the person she calls my “new Australian girlfriend”.’

  Janey flinched, but did not reply. And minutes later, relief washed over her as they were waved through a boomgate flanked by armed guards. At the front entrance of the building, she sent a nervous smile Luca’s way before slipping out of the car and hurrying into the building without looking back.

  She gave her name at the reception desk and was handed a visitor’s pass. An embassy employee guided her up to the antechamber to the Ambassador’s office and politely told her to wait. A moment later, the Ambassador’s personal assistant popped her head out of her office and welcomed Janey. Libby was a friendly woman of around Celia’s age with a sleek brunette bob, wearing a tailored black pants-suit and tortoiseshell Gucci spectacle frames.

  ‘Celia and the Ambassador are still in their nine-thirty meeting,’ she apologised. ‘And Celia wanted to tour you around personally. She told me to make sure I kept you here. Can I get you anything while you wait?’

  Janey smiled and shook her head. ‘Have you been working here long?’ she asked, staring up at the airy gilded ceilings with their baroque scrollwork.

  Libby nodded. ‘Gorgeous, isn’t it?’ she said, taking a seat next to Janey. ‘I’ve been with Doug – the Ambassador – and his family since he was second secretary at the London office. I much prefer Rome.’

  ‘I’ve never been to London,’ Janey replied with interest. ‘What’s it like?’

  ‘Centre of the universe,’ Libby grinned, ‘and boy, does everyone know it! Goes without saying the weather’s better here. And the food. The men are pretty easy on the eye too,’ she added with a wink.

  Libby and Janey chatted for another twenty minutes. When Libby asked how she’d been spending the last few days, Janey reluctantly opened up about the strange things that had been happening to her.

  ‘Almost as if the guy was standing a metre away,’ she shuddered, describing the two weirdly specific text messages she’d received only the day before. ‘Like he was watching me, no matter where I went or what I was doing.’

  ‘Have you told Celia?’ Libby exclaimed. ‘You’ve got to report this cyber bullying to your aunt. I can’t believe you’re just dealing with this on your own! We have resources here, we can help you. But you have to tell your aunt everything you’ve told me!’

  Janey sank back a little wearily in her plush armchair. ‘I’m not really in Celia’s good books at the moment,’ she shrugged. ‘We ’ve had a couple of small misunderstandings over stupid stuff. And she ’s been really busy, and so have I. We haven’t been able to clear the air, and telling her all about my troubles with some mystical Fellini character probably wouldn’t help. I’m not sure she’d believe me anyway.’

  Libby had to hurry away with a quick apology as the phone suddenly rang in her office, leaving Janey in the luxuriously appointed waiting area.

  If she craned her neck, Janey could just make out Libby at her desk, tapping something into her computer while she cradled her handset between her ear and her shoulder.

  Janey glanced down at her watch and noticed that it was nearing noon. As if on cue, her stomach rumbled ferociously, and she clutched at it with a tiny laugh, hoping no one had heard. But her laughter died in her throat as the familiar, but unwanted, buzz of her mobile sounded.

  It was another text.

  She drew the mobile out of her rucksack as if it was a snake, poised to sink its fangs into her hand.

  I’m in the building. Come

  find me? Or I’ll find u.

  Either way.

  Janey gave a small shriek and dropped her phone.

  Libby paused part-way through her call and looked up. She cupped her hand over the mouthpiece. ‘Sorry, Janey! I’ll be right with you!’ she hissed, before launching back into Italian with her caller.

  Janey gingerly picked up her mobile phone and dropped it into her backpack, before scribbling a note on a piece of paper and sliding it under Libby’s nose.

  Feeling unwell.

  Will reschedule the tour

  for another day. Soon.

  Nice meeting you!

  Apologise to Celia.

  Libby looked up in surprise, halting her phone conversation once more. She called out to Janey to wait, but Janey had already slipped out of the Ambassador’s chambers and was clattering down the central staircase to the exits.

  On her way out of the embassy grounds, she froze when she saw Luca lounging against the bonnet of the parked car, chatting to another one of the embassy’s drivers. She panicked. Was he lying in wait for her? Hadn’t
Luca himself only just said that she couldn’t escape him so easily?

  Pretending she hadn’t seen him, Janey put her head down and hurried on.

  But she could hear Luca’s voice behind her, calling out to her to wait!

  Janey lost her head completely and scrambled out of the embassy grounds. She climbed onto a nearby bus that was letting passengers off at a stop just outside the embassy walls with no idea where it was going. Somehow, at that very moment, it didn’t matter one bit.

  When her heart stopped hammering quite so loudly, Janey dug through her backpack for her guidebook and tried to work out, from the passing street signs, just where they were headed.

  The bus wasn’t at all crowded, and Janey felt a little shy about standing up and approaching the elderly couple several rows back, or the loud gang of teenage boys lounging just by the doors, and asking them in broken Italian where they were going.

  She fanned her face and looked about with more interest. The bus wound its way up and down narrow streets, the driver venting loud volleys of frustrated Italian as mopeds, motorbikes and pedestrians charged in and out of his path. The entire city seemed to live life in fast-forward and Janey was fascinated to see Rome’s citizens coexisting with so much ancient history. Turn a corner, and beside a fenced-off pile of broken marble columns there might be a tiny grocery store or wine bar plying its trade, above which would be apartments crammed with ordinary families going about their business, toddlers playing on the narrow balconies overhead while their mothers hung out washing, or in one case, splashing about in an old tin bath while the bus passed several metres below.

  As she sat back and watched parts of Rome she’d never seen before rattle by, and life go on at its peculiarly Roman pace, she began to relax. Fellini didn’t seem real any longer. It felt like he was worlds away and she chided herself for losing her nerve.

  If Luca wasn’t Fellini, she wouldn’t blame him if he thought she’d suddenly developed bipolar disorder where he was concerned. But if he was, and Janey shuddered at the thought, then a big fat cold shoulder was what he deserved, and more!

  The bus turned onto a major thoroughfare jam-packed with bleating traffic. Janey stood and craned her neck out the half-open window above her head, desperate to find a street sign anywhere, and was rewarded when the bus screeched to a stop just beside a sign that read, rather grandly, ‘Corso Vittorio Emanuele II’.

  Janey hastily located the right street map and worked out that she was near the bottom end of the Piazza Navona, an oval-shaped public ‘square’ that she’d visited with Luca, that magical afternoon when he ’d just seemed like a gorgeous guy with no agenda. In the past, the Piazza Navona had been a vast stadium where ancient Romans had raced chariots or something, but now it was filled with the roar of three iconic fountains and the chatter of hundreds of tourists guzzling gelati and iced drinks, taking photos of the same things.

  She remembered that they’d run out of time to explore the fascinating street of antique dealers that ran off the northern end of the piazza, the Via dei Coronari. ‘That is for a whole other day,’ Luca had said laughingly, when Janey had expressed a desire to browse the antique shops for a souvenir to take home. ‘There are so many, and some so specialised, that you would need days to view the wares, and then more, to haggle with the dealers. Some have been there for centuries, in one guise or another.’

  Janey jumped off outside the baroque façade of a public museum, and made for a nearby laneway that led right up to the southern end of the Piazza Navona.

  Glad to be out of the crowded bus in the slightly less stuffy heat of the afternoon, she grabbed a granita from one of the cafés facing the piazza before wending her way through the posing tourists and souvenir vendors in the square. She made a beeline for the street of antiques.

  Luca had been right. The street was one peeling façade after another, housing more antiques than she’d ever seen in her life. She browsed a store that sold old prints, some from as early as the sixteenth century and extremely rare and fragile. She purchased a tiny, framed etching of some Italian wildflowers from the eighteenth century for Gabs’s parents – to thank them for helping her get back on her feet – and strolled on, peering in the windows of a dealer who sold Roman and Etruscan era marble busts, and another who sold only gilded, religious icons. She stopped to wander through a long, cool showroom of modernist Italian advertising memorabilia and twentieth-century furniture, smiling at the woman fanning herself with an art catalogue at the cashier’s desk, before heading into the tiny shop front of a dealer who sold Italian paintings from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

  ‘Buongiorno, signorina,’ smiled the handsome young art dealer. He was seated in a faded deck chair at the back of the store, in front of a retro 1950s electric fan that was on at full blast. A plate with the remains of a sandwich on it sat at his feet. He returned to reading an Italian paperback, allowing Janey to browse at her leisure.

  She stole a sideways glance at him. He looked like he was in his late twenties, and had a mop of dark curling hair and the sensitive features and dark soulful eyes of a poet or intellectual. Libby had been so right about Italian guys! Janey smiled, flicking slowly through rack after rack of oil paintings displaying Italian street and beach scenes, the canals of Venice, ancient ruins, and portraits of long-dead people. Some were so realistic, it was as though her eyes were connecting with them through an open window of time.

  After making her way around the shop, she was drawn back to a tiny oil painting of a towering arched ironwork gate, framing what looked like a square containing an Egyptian obelisk on one side and a grand, domed church on the other. She couldn’t work out where this place was, but the glimpse of the square beyond the open gate was archetypal Rome. For upon the cobbled square could be glimpsed a tiny taxi, some passing cars, and a distant scattering of people strolling in the sunshine.

  ‘Quanto?’ she asked, holding up the painting to the angelic looking young man in the deckchair, unsure whether he spoke English. ‘E dove?’ she added, feeling tongue-tied. She wanted to find out where this magical place could possibly be, but her Italian was so bad she’d probably just asked after the health of his cat!

  The young man laid down his book and wandered over to take a look at the painting she held in her hand, with its peeling backing paper and tacky frame. Janey crossed her fingers that it wouldn’t cost more than she had with her, because she’d never wanted to own a painting more than she wanted this one.

  He turned it over in his hands several times.

  The young man finally replied in accented English, ‘Good choice, Miss. This is a pleasant view of Santa Maria di Montesanto and the obelisco at the Piazza del Popolo from beneath the arch of the Porta del Popolo. It is late twentieth-century,’ he explained, pointing out the taxi and cars. ‘So it is not so much. For you, I make 150 euro. It is well worth such price. It is very fine.’

  Janey tried to hide her disappointment, working out that the little painting was over two hundred dollars – her entire budget for several days in Rome! She took the painting back from the man, regretfully tucking it back where she’d found it.

  ‘Mi dispiace.’ She shook her head. ‘I can’t afford it. But it’s been lovely meeting you.’

  She turned to step back out of the shop when the young man called, ‘Wait! I am mistaken.’

  He rummaged through the pile of paintings Janey had just left and drew out the tiny oil again. ‘Fifty euro, okay? The frame, it is not so good. And see, the back, eh?’ He picked at the peeling paper with a fingernail. ‘It will need the changing.’

  Janey smiled broadly at the young man’s gallantry, because clearly the painting was worth more than fifty euros, regardless of the frame’s condition. He hadn’t made a mistake, she knew, he was being kind, and Janey’s heart soared because she could afford fifty euros and she could have her little slice of Rome forever!

  ‘Deal,’ she said, then frowned. ‘If you’re sure?’

  The young m
an nodded, and wrapped the little painting securely in brown paper and string before handing it to her. She emptied her wallet gladly, and they smiled at each other as the young man accepted her scrounged-together pile of notes and coins.

  ‘You will come again before you leave Rome?’ said the young man, more as a command than a question. ‘I am Gabriel Sansovino.’ He held out a hand to be shaken.

  ‘And I’m Janey Gordon,’ she beamed. ‘And I will most certainly return. You have a lovely shop.’

  Gabriel Sansovino inclined his head and replied cheerfully, ‘Alla prossima volta! Ciao, till next time,’ before returning to his deckchair, sandwich, book and fan.

  Brandon

  Celia and Janey reached home at almost the same time.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ Celia asked when she spotted Janey in her bedroom placing the small, wrapped oil painting carefully into her suitcase. ‘Libby said you weren’t feeling well – apparently you bolted out of the Ambassador’s rooms as if you’d seen a ghost! She started telling me some garbled story about you, but the Ambassador interrupted us before I could make sense of what she was saying. Is there anything you need to tell me?’ Her expression was faintly disapproving.

  Janey flushed, knowing her behaviour around Celia had been perceived as pretty flaky to date! Unsure whether Libby had updated Celia on her problems with Fellini, Janey said, ‘Sorry I ran out on you, but I was feeling really bad . . .’ Her voice trailed off. She wanted to tell Celia what had been happening, but equally she didn’t want Celia to think even less of her. Her story was rather strange. Where did she start? ‘Um . . .’

  Celia didn’t give her a chance to clarify things, interrupting gently, ‘Well, as long as you’ve combatted whatever nasty bug that was – though I must say you seem to have recovered very quickly – we can reschedule the embassy tour. It isn’t going anywhere. But I’ve got another treat in store for you for tomorrow morning that we will have to act on quickly, because tickets to the Raffaello exhibition are hot property at the moment and all entries are timed. You’re going to love it!’