Here Come the Girls

by Milly Johnson

  The waiter arrived and pushed two long menus into their hands and asked Nigel what sort of coffees they wanted whilst they were perusing.

  ‘Latte grande for me. Venice, what sort of coffee do you want?’

  ‘Same for me, thank you,’ said Ven. She looked down at the menu which was made up entirely of flavours of ice cream and sundaes. It went on for pages.

  ‘You have to try a sundae, especially on your birthday,’ said Nigel, adding quickly, ‘but only if you have time.’

  ‘I’ve got time,’ said Ven, enjoying the temporary respite from being lonely in this most beautiful of all the world’s cities. She wasn’t even going to try and protest as a waitress passed with two heavenly glasses of ice-cream scoops covered in cream and sauce and cherries. She studied the menu and eventually narrowed her choice down to fifteen. Then to five, then to the Cappuccino Fantastico sundae. Nigel had gone for the Midnight Mint Magnifico. Ven left it to him to give the waiter their order.

  Through the window, Ven saw her three friends ogling the ice-cream cabinets. Then they noticed her, gossiped a bit and shot off. Subtle as a sledgehammer. Nigel saw them too and it seemed to tickle him.

  ‘They’ve been a total embarrassment since we were at school,’ Ven smiled. ‘I don’t know why I bother with them.’

  ‘Ah, so you’re all old friends,’ said Nigel, as if he had been pondering about their relationship. Crikey – he didn’t think they were two lesbian couples, did he?

  ‘Yes, old friends,’ sighed Ven. ‘Two with partners – male partners – and two of us without male partners.’ Aaargh! Did that make her sound as if she was making her single status too clear? ‘Happily single, though,’ she tagged on – but, hang on, that was worse. That made her sound as if she suspected he might be after her and she wasn’t interested. The waiter came back with two coffees and rescued her before the hole she was digging herself into reached the centre of the earth.

  ‘So, do you know where the hotel you’re looking for is?’ asked Nigel.

  ‘Not really,’ said Ven, ‘but I’ll find it. I have my trusty treasure map.’ She foraged in her pocket and showed Nigel the childlike map she had printed off. ‘Plus, Frankie taught me how to ask directions.’

  ‘Go on then,’ said Nigel, sipping his latte. ‘Practise on me. Pretend I’m a Venetian.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Ven, clearing her throat in preparation. ‘Are you ready? Oggi compio quarant’anni, mi vuoi tastare le tette?’

  Nigel didn’t so much cough on his mouthful of latte as choke on it. He turned aubergine purple and gasped. It was now Ven’s turn to say, ‘Are you all right?’ and get up quickly to slap him on the back before he died and the ship was left captainless.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said through a gaspy rasp. ‘It went down the wrong way.’

  The ice creams arrived then. Nigel had never been as thankful for a diversion in his life.

  Roz tried not to look at the fake Louis Vuitton handbags which the street-hawker was selling on the steps. They’d been told on the ship that if they were caught buying them, they, as well as the vendor, could be fined thousands of euros should the police see them. But they really were good copies. She tried to displace her thoughts of owning one by licking on her ice cream. They’d seen Ven and the Captain ensconced in the café and made a swift and, in their eyes, subtle exit to leave them alone, and bought their ice creams from another vendor instead.

  ‘Wonder how Ven is getting on?’ said Olive, snatching the thought directly from the brains of the others. ‘With the Captain,’ she added salaciously.

  ‘She must have just bumped into him, because she wouldn’t have kept it secret from us that she was meeting up with him,’ said Roz, who couldn’t wait for the gossip later, back on the ship.

  ‘I hope she finds her hotel. If she does, it will just be the perfect day for her,’ said Olive.

  ‘Oh shit!’ screamed Frankie. She and Roz both stared at each other in open-mouthed horror.

  ‘You did tell her in the end, didn’t you?’ said Roz.

  ‘I forgot,’ said Frankie.

  ‘Oh bloody hell,’ said Roz now. Her eyes suddenly went all sparkly.

  ‘What are you on about?’ said Olive. She couldn’t work out if the two staring gargoyles at either side of her were about to laugh or cry.

  ‘That phrase I taught Ven to find her hotel . . .’ began Frankie.

  ‘What about it?’ said Olive.

  ‘It wasn’t “Where is the Hotel Ani?”’

  ‘What was it then?’ Olive asked.

  ‘“I’m forty years old today. Do you want to feel my tits?”’

  ‘Oh Frankie!’

  ‘I feel sick and full,’ said Ven, anchoring her spoon into the last scoop of coffee ice cream left in the bottom of the tall sundae glass. ‘I can’t finish it. I’ll burst if I do.’

  Nigel had no such trouble. ‘That,’ he announced, ‘is the reason I take half a day off every time I come to Venice. I have my fix, then I walk for an hour afterwards to burn some of it off.’

  ‘Do you get off at every port?’ asked Ven, trying to let the burp building up inside her seep out unheard.

  ‘No,’ said Nigel, ‘I’m usually too busy, but I always try and visit here.’

  ‘I suppose you’ve seen everywhere twice and more,’ realised Ven.

  ‘Yes, but it’s not that much fun wandering around by yourself,’ said Nigel with a surprising note of sadness in his voice. ‘However beautiful the places are.’

  ‘You’re not married then?’ said Ven, flicking her eyes towards his empty ring finger.

  ‘I was,’ said Nigel. ‘Alas, it didn’t last very long. My wife hated being at sea, and I couldn’t give it up – it was an impossible situation. She wouldn’t come on board and so we hardly saw each other.’

  ‘Didn’t she realise what life would be like as a Captain’s wife then?’ asked Ven, confused, trying to hold back the ‘stupid woman’ comment. Then she wondered if she was being too nosy and was about to apologise for it when Nigel opened his mouth.

  ‘She said she did, but she obviously didn’t,’ he replied.

  ‘I thought you’d have women running all over you. Everyone seems to wet their . . . er . . . get all flustery when they know you’re in the vicinity,’ said Ven. ‘Even men.’

  ‘It’s the romantic white uniform,’ grinned Nigel. ‘But if a wife isn’t travelling with a Captain, it’s a lonely life for both of them, with three-month stints at sea. And an even harder life if you have children. Which we didn’t.’

  ‘I suppose it must be,’ said Ven.

  ‘This job is my lottery win in life,’ said Nigel with smiling passion. ‘It’s all I ever wanted to do and I love it.’

  Ven gulped. ‘That’s wonderful,’ she managed. ‘It must take you years to become a Captain.’

  ‘It’s quite an apprenticeship, yes,’ he affirmed. ‘Twenty years in my case from cadet to Captain, via college and life aboard oil tankers and Navy vessels.’

  ‘How long will you be on the Mermaidia?’

  ‘We’re usually assigned to a ship for two years, but obviously that can be longer or shorter depending on circumstances. I’ve only been on her for four months,’ Nigel explained, before picking up an earlier thread of the conversation. ‘Do you have any children, Venice?’

  ‘Me? Nooo. Funnily enough, none of us have any,’ replied Ven. ‘Even though we all planned to have four each.’

  ‘Have you been single long?’

  ‘Since last year.’

  ‘An amicable split?’

  Ven sighed and wondered whether to elaborate on the slow shake of the head she gave by way of an answer.

  ‘Nigel, if I told you, you wouldn’t believe me.’

  ‘Try me,’ he said, his arms folding on the table and moving in to listen.

  ‘We kind of started to fall apart about three years ago,’ began Ven. ‘Both my parents became ill at the same time and . . . one of my friends was just recovering from a health
problem too. Ian’s work was slow so things were a bit rough. He was a self-employed electrician. Used to market himself as “Electric Ian” – Electrician, get it? However, his main business rival was called Alec, who used to market himself as Alec-trician. Alec undercut him at every opportunity and he was a much slicker outfit than Ian, to be honest. So there was a lot of pressure on the marriage with illness all around us and not much work for him. Feel free to laugh at any point in this story, because this is where it gets really ridiculous,’ said Ven, though Nigel did not look as though he found it funny. He was listening intently as Ven continued.

  ‘Anyway, Ian was a good-looking guy, always preening himself, plus he was, well, how to put this delicately . . .’ flaming heck, why had she ever started this story? ‘. . . quite blessed in the trouser department, although there’s a reason why I’m telling you that.’ Ven gulped and felt herself growing pink and hot. ‘Well, a few of his mates formed a sort of Chippendales tribute act and said he should join them because they were earning really good money. So he did. He started beefing himself up at the gym and having fake tans and bleaching his hair and having his chest waxed, and in the end he got to be so good at it that he went solo as a male stripper – calling himself . . . Knobbie Williams.’

  Still Nigel didn’t laugh.

  ‘I didn’t recognise him any more. He used to be a nice, decent bloke, but all the attention he got changed him. To cut a long story short, he got himself an old open-topped sports car and a bit on the side, so I found out later, and two weeks after my dad died I came home from work to find he’d moved out. I hadn’t a clue he was having an affair. Mum and Dad left me a little house and a nest-egg that they’d been saving for me – I was so cross with them because I didn’t want that sort of money – I’d have rather they spent it on themselves. In the end, I had to give Ian half of it in our divorce settlement. Then not long after he’d cashed in the cheque, I was made redundant.’

  ‘That’s awful,’ said Nigel, eyes full of sympathy. ‘Cruel. Did you have to sell your home too?’

  ‘Ian took over the mortgage and moved his girlfriend in. I didn’t want to live there anyway, especially after finding out what those two used to do in it when I was out working. I moved into Mum and Dad’s place but there are too many sad memories there for me.’

  ‘What a shame,’ said Nigel.

  Ven plastered on a smile, suddenly panicky that Nigel would think she was a drama queen. ‘Oh, please don’t let me leave you with the impression that I’m a miserable old bat. I’m a great believer in what is meant to be, will be. Mum and Dad were always very positive people. They believed in karma, although they didn’t actually call it that in their day. And they were right because . . .’ She nearly told him! ‘. . . because now I’m in the middle of Venice and Ian is in the past. And life’s good.’

  ‘And you are forty today and looking nothing like that age and one man, at least, isn’t going to take your money from you.’

  Before she had a chance to protest, Nigel swept up the bill from the table and opened up his wallet. ‘If you wait for me, I’ll help you find your hotel,’ he said, disappearing to the rear of the café, in the direction of the loo. He came back in time to see Ven in conversation with a bemused Angelo.

  ‘. . . quaranta anni, mi vuoi—’

  Nigel made a loud interrupting cough. ‘It’s fine, I think I know where the hotel is. Grazie Angelo, y arrivederci.’

  ‘Arrivederci, signorina, Capitano. We will see you again soon, we hope.’

  Nigel herded Ven quickly out of the café.

  ‘You stopped me practising my Italian,’ she protested.

  ‘The thing is . . .’ began Nigel. How to put this? ‘The Venetians have a different way of putting things to most of Italy,’ he bluffed. ‘It’s a little like the difference between a Glaswegian accent and a Cornish one. What Frankie taught you . . . er . . .’ he searched for the words ‘doesn’t translate properly here.’

  To his relief, Ven appeared to buy that. ‘Oh, I see. Well, that was a waste of time learning that then,’ she sighed.

  ‘Think it might be best if you let me do the talking,’ said Nigel with Irish gallantry, leading the way out of the alley.

  Olive stepped off the vaporetto water bus as it pulled in at the little island of Murano.

  ‘I’ve always wanted to come here,’ she said to the other two. ‘Barnsley was famous for glass-blowing at one time, you know. That’s why there is a glass-blower on the coat-of-arms.’

  ‘You sound just like Mrs Euston,’ said Roz, pulling a face at the mention of the horrible old form teacher in their school whom they had all hated. ‘Just don’t start growing a unibrow like she did.’

  A tall, good-looking Italian man was welcoming the crowd who were disembarking and asking them to follow him.

  ‘Wow, now I’m interested,’ said Frankie.

  ‘Where’s he taking us?’ Roz wanted to know.

  ‘Heaven and back, I hope,’ joked Frankie.

  But she knew, as they all did, that they were being shepherded towards a glass-blowing demonstration and then on to a shop in the hope they would be buying a Murano glass souvenir – or even better, getting a huge mirror or chandelier shipped home. They followed Mr Handsome-Italian into a workroom filled with benches and brutal-looking tools and a fire-filled kiln. There, waiting for the crowd to assemble, was a round old man with chimp-hairy arms, chequered shirt and very tatty and baggy jeans. He looked more tramp than artist as he was introduced as Enrique who was a master craftsman. Apparently the glass-blowers of Murano were the rock stars of history. Very greatly desired as husbands. Roz hoped that in the Middle Ages they wore better-fitting clothes than old Enrique. He made the Rolling Stones look smooth.

  Boring as Roz thought all this might be, and although she had just come along because Olive wanted to, she found it as fascinating as the others to see a blob of glass be heated and rolled and pincered into a fragile Ferrari horse. Old Enrique deserved the round of applause he got at the end. Not that his sex appeal had changed any. He might have been brilliant at his job but no one was throwing their knickers at him.

  The girls wandered around the shop together, ooh-ing and aah-ing at the magnificent mirrors and lamps and trying not to bump into anything.

  ‘I’m going to buy this for Ven,’ said Olive, picking up a red glass heart threaded onto a leather thong. ‘Just a little extra present for her and a souvenir of Venice.’

  ‘Get the matching earrings as well and I’ll half you,’ said Roz. ‘It’ll serve as an apology later when we get back to the ship. Unless she did get her tits felt and enjoyed it.’

  ‘Add the bracelet and let’s pay a third each,’ put in Frankie, fishing her purse out of her handbag. ‘I really hope she found that hotel without having to ask for it.’ She gasped. ‘Oh my, you don’t think she practised her Italian out on the Captain, do you?’ The three women looked at each other and broke into a naughty fit of laughter. Even a Murano jewellery set wasn’t going to fully make up for this one.

  Ven and Nigel found the Hotel Ani, tucked into a corner at the side of a bridge. Big pots of red flowers flanked the door. It looked romantically shabby with its balconied windows above loaded with pink and white flowers. Ven could imagine Juliet leaning over there and having a conversation with Romeo below.

  ‘Well, Lady Venice,’ said Nigel, ‘I shall now get back to my duties aboard the good ship.’ He added politely, ‘You’ll be able to find your way back okay?’

  ‘Thank you, Captain, I will,’ said Ven, looking up at the crumbling façade. Nigel waited for her to go inside before he left her, but she wasn’t making any move to.

  ‘Aren’t you going in?’

  ‘No.’ Ven shook her head. ‘I’d never be able to gesticulate that I just want a look around.’

  Nigel looked at his watch, then said, ‘Come on, I’ll take you in.’

  ‘No, it’s fine, really,’ said Ven, although her face said otherwise and Nigel pushed open th
e door of the Hotel Ani and beckoned her to follow him.

  ‘You can’t come all this way and not go the last furlong.’

  Ven followed him. It was so cool inside, painted cream walls with the slightest green tint and beautiful ancient furniture, all mismatched pieces but perfectly suiting their surroundings with their understated grandeur. Nigel approached the reception desk where a very slim woman in a black dress was standing and began to talk to her.

  ‘Chiedo scusa, sarebbe possibile se la mia amica desse un’occhiata in giro? Vede, i suoi genitori quarant’anni fa hanno speso la loro luna di miele in questo albergo, e siccome non ci sono più, la mia amica voleva vedere il luogo in cui era stata concepita . . . rimarrà solo pochi istanti.’

  ‘Ma ci mancherebbe, ci dia un’occhiata. Siete i benvenuti!’ replied the lady with kind enthusiasm, beckoning Ven forwards.

  ‘I asked her if you could look around for a few minutes,’ explained Nigel. ‘I told her that your parents honeymooned here and she said that you are very welcome.’

  ‘Si, si,’ waved the pretty young receptionist, throwing her arms open to gesture to Ven that she was free to wander at her leisure.

  ‘Venice, I am going to leave you. I feel as if I’ve intruded enough on your plans,’ said Nigel. ‘Will you be all right? The water launch is—’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know where to find it,’ said Ven. ‘Thank you so much, Nigel. You really haven’t intruded at all.’

  ‘Don’t forget to meet me by Reception at half past four for your bridge visit,’ he reminded her.

  ‘Oh yes, we’ll be there.’ Ven smiled. ‘We’re all really looking forward to that.’

  Nigel mock-saluted her and Ven waved as he left the hotel, then she shyly began to look around.

  Her parents had been in this very room. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine them skipping down the staircase as new-lyweds. It was too easy and her eyes blurred with tears. What a lovely place to begin their married life, she thought. It was so calm and cool and beautiful, and the huge picture windows looked out onto the nearby canal and the gondolas rowing their passage along them. She knew her mum and dad had taken a gondola because they told her they had. How could they not? Who could come to Venice on honeymoon and not take a gondola ride? And in one of these rooms in this hotel, their child was made and they couldn’t have called her anything else but Venice, however pretentious it might have sounded for a Barnsley council-estate couple.