‘And pazzo means?’
‘Crazy,’ she said. ‘Well, more loony, really. Pazzesco means sort of absurd, and it’s that too. It’s pazzo e pazzesco.’
‘Italian always sounds like food to me,’ I said. ‘No matter what you’re saying, it just sounds like a menu. But you’re right, it’s mad. I mean, as if we could just drop everything and whizz off on holiday with a couple of—’
‘No, hang on,’ Kerry said, interrupting me. ‘You’re misunderstanding me. What’s crazy . . . what’s totally crazy here, is you saying no.’
‘Oh,’ I said, a little taken aback. ‘You think?’
‘You’ve been wanting to go abroad for ages. That nightmare of a man you live with won’t even let you visit your darling sister in Rome and—’
‘Oh, it’s not he won’t let me,’ I said. ‘It’s just complicated, with the kids and everything.’
‘Um, hello . . . He’d go nuts and you know it,’ Kerry insisted. Despite the fact that they had seen so little of each other, she understood Ant surprisingly well. ‘And now you’re turning down the opportunity to go to Spain with him.’
‘I just don’t see it as an actual opportunity, I suppose,’ I explained. ‘It’s not really an option, is it?’
‘Well, I say go,’ Kerry said. ‘If there’s any possible way you can do it, then go. If he likes it, then that opens up the door to all kinds of new experiences for both of you. Hell, you could even come to Rome and visit little old me.’
‘But he wouldn’t like it,’ I pointed out. ‘It’s full of spics and dagos, isn’t it.’
‘Spics and dagos?’ Kerry said. ‘You’re kidding me, right?’
‘It’s not me, Kerry. That’s what Ant calls them. Can you imagine how well that would go down? So no, I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t like it.’
‘And there you go,’ Kerry said. ‘It is him, isn’t it? It’s not you saying no at all.’
‘Ant actually said it was a possibility,’ I pointed out. ‘It’s just I don’t really believe he’d do it.’
‘Then call his bluff.’
‘And I can’t really convince myself it’s a good idea anyway, Kes. Like I said, we just don’t know them.’
‘But they’re nice, you said.’
‘Yes,’ I admitted. ‘Yes, they’re nice.’
‘So it’s a win-win,’ Kerry said.
‘Amy’s a bit too good-looking for comfort, if you know what I mean.’
‘Ah, so that’s it,’ Kerry laughed.
‘She looks like someone . . .’ And then it came to me. ‘Actually, I’ll tell you who she looks like. She looks exactly like that singer you used to have on your wall. The blonde one. What’s her name?’
‘No Doubt?’ Kerry asked. ‘Gwen Stefani?’
‘That’s it! God, it’s been driving me mad trying to remember. But that’s her. Gwen Stefani.’
‘Wow,’ Kerry said. ‘Has she got the bod to go with it?’
‘Well, she’s a dance instructor and a Pilates teacher. So yes, she totally has the bod to go with it.’
‘Jesus,’ Kerry said. ‘Can I come? I’ve had a crush on our Gwen for years.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘That’s why I thought of her, I think: your posters.’
‘But seriously. If you’re saying no because you’re worried Ant fancies her—’
‘I’m not,’ I interrupted. But even as I was saying it, I was thinking, Or am I? ‘I’m saying no because people simply do not go on holiday with couples they met a week ago.’
‘Oh, fuck what people do,’ Kerry said. ‘And if it is about how cute she is—’
‘It isn’t.’
‘But if it is, remember she lives down the lane. That’s what you said, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘So if he was going to fuck her, he would have fucked her already.’
‘Oh, that’s lovely, Kerry,’ I said. ‘Oh, yes, that’s gorgeous. Thanks for that.’
‘Morning!’
I turned to see Ant standing in the doorway.
‘Who’s that?’ he asked.
‘It’s Kerry,’ I said quietly.
Ant nodded unenthusiastically. ‘Give her my love,’ he said, through a yawn.
‘I’d better go,’ I told Kerry, once he’d returned to the kitchen.
‘Of course,’ Kerry said. ‘Your lord and master has arisen.’
‘Don’t be like that. We’ve been talking for almost an hour.’
‘Forty minutes,’ she corrected.
‘It’s Saturday. I’ve got things to do. I have children.’
‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Whatever. And send me a postcard this summer. From Chislet.’
I slipped the phone into my pocket, and it was only when I went to look at what the girls had been doing that I realised I hadn’t passed the phone over so that they could say hello to their aunt. But they were engrossed in making flowers from coloured pipe cleaners and seemed to have forgotten about Kerry anyway.
‘Those are lovely,’ I told them. ‘Are they for me?’
Sarah offered me her misshapen flower-in-progress immediately, while Lucy shook her head violently and said, ‘No!’ as if it was the silliest suggestion I could have made. At least with my daughters I always knew where I stood.
In the kitchen, Ant was reading the Daily Mail on his iPad.
‘Look what Sarah made,’ I said, showing him the flower.
‘That’s cool,’ he replied, barely glancing up from the screen.
‘Coffee?’
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Coffee would be good. So what did your big butch sister have to say for herself?’
‘Oh, not much,’ I told him. ‘She wants to become Italian. That’s the latest thing.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘She’s going to apply for Italian nationality,’ I explained. ‘Something to do with Brexit and her job.’
‘Right,’ Ant said disinterestedly. ‘Fair enough.’ He was clearly far more interested in the article he was reading than anything Kerry had had to say.
I crossed to the coffee maker and switched it on, then slipped in a capsule, and as I waited for the ‘ready’ light to come on, I licked my lips, turning the words over in my mind, trying them out for size.
It felt for some reason as if I’d reached a fork in the road. It seemed as if the slightest nudge could send me off down a different track, and that the repercussions on my destiny could be major. I was struck by a sense of foreboding that made me hesitate. I opened my mouth to speak and then closed it silently. I opened it to speak again, but then failed for the second time to make a sound.
‘Kerry thinks—’ I finally managed, but just at that moment, Ant’s phone buzzed. He glanced at the screen and said, ‘Christ! They’re keen.’
‘Who’s keen?’ I asked. I was assuming it was going to be about work.
‘Joe,’ Ant said.
‘Oh? What does he say?’
‘He’s asking if we’ve had any more thoughts about Spain,’ Ant said. ‘Because otherwise Amy’s going to invite someone else. Reading between the lines, I don’t think Joe’s that keen on whoever she’s got in mind.’
‘Ah, right,’ I said, my finger hesitating over the coffee button. ‘And have we? Had any thoughts, I mean?’
Ant shrugged. ‘You gonna make that coffee or not?’ he asked.
So I pressed the button and the machine lurched into action.
‘I suppose it might be better than hanging around here,’ he said, as the coffee maker buzzed and the brown liquid dripped into the cup.
‘Really?’ I said with consternation. ‘Gosh. Then maybe we could, um . . . What would you think about us going on our own?’
‘On our own?’
‘Yes.’
‘To Spain?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I mean, there’s no reason we have to go with them, is there? And we could always go away with them later, when we know them better. I’d still like to go to Spain and get some sunshine, but just maybe not with th
em.’
‘Speak Spanish, do you?’ Ant asked.
‘No,’ I said. ‘No, you know I don’t, but I don’t think we nec—’
‘Amy does,’ he said, interrupting me. ‘She’s fluent, apparently.’
‘Does she?’ I said. I had no recollection of any discussion about that subject.
‘So it would make things easier, wouldn’t it? Plus, they’ve got the house booked and everything’s sorted. I mean, I wouldn’t know where to start.’
‘You’re actually thinking of saying yes, then?’ I said, so shocked I had frozen with Ant’s coffee cup in my hand.
Ant shrugged again. ‘Why not?’ he said, reaching out for it. ‘What have we got to lose?’
As things turned out, getting passports for the whole family was devilishly complicated, and as not one of us had ever had one before, and because we needed them all at the same time, the process required multiple trips up to London.
At the first meeting they’d warned Ant that it would take up to six weeks to complete the process, and though, in the end, it took five, we were unable to book the same flights as Joe and Amy, who were flying at the beginning of August.
But to be honest, leaving later suited me better. Though we’d seen them four more times before they’d left, even spending a pleasant afternoon around their pool, I was still feeling a bit nervous about the intimacy of sharing a house with them. Avoiding travelling with them on top of everything else seemed like a plus to me, despite the stress of having to deal with all the travel arrangements alone.
Flying for the first time was an amazing experience. I had butterflies in my stomach all morning, and when the plane finally left the tarmac I couldn’t help but break out in a crazy grin. I almost cried, if I’m telling the truth. I was flying, like a bird! And we were on our way to Spain!
The girls took the whole thing in their stride, chattering and fidgeting excitedly throughout – kids are so adaptable at that age, nothing fazes them – while Ant looked pale and stared rigidly at the advert-covered headrest in front of him. As we’d got up at 1.30 a.m. to make our flight and as Ant had never been a morning person, I couldn’t tell if he was scared or sick, or just tired. But as he would rather have died than ever admit to any of those, I simply left him to his own devices.
By the time we stepped off the plane, it was eleven in the morning, local time. The temperature, the pilot said, was thirty-six degrees.
Now, we’d had quite the heatwave back home just before we left, with temperatures reaching a sultry thirty-five. But this – this thirty-six degrees in Malaga – was a completely different kettle of fish. It felt like nothing I had ever experienced, and by the time I reached the bottom of the steps, I was soaked.
‘Can this really be just thirty-six?’ I asked Ant as we crossed the tarmac towards the bus.
‘It’s the humidity,’ a stranger beside us said. ‘It’s a hundred per cent today.’
‘It’s like a bloody sauna,’ Ant replied. ‘I hope it’s not gonna be like this the whole time.’
I found passport control unreasonably stressful and, despite the air conditioning, sweated so much that I feared they would think I looked guilty. Which, of course, only made me sweat even more.
For some reason, I’d got it into my head that one of the passports might not ‘work’ or something – I had visions of the Spanish police shaking their heads and taking our kids away. But in the end, the policeman barely glanced at them before waving us all through.
Finally, we trundled our suitcases out into the great unknown to face a wall of bearded men holding name tags.
‘God, how are we supposed to find Joe among this rabble?’ Ant asked, and it was exactly what I was thinking.
But then Lucy broke free from my grasp and ran straight under the barrier, pushed her way through the front row of men, and jumped into Joe’s outstretched arms. ‘I found him, Mum!’ she shouted proudly. ‘I found him!’
Four
Joe
The house was in a tiny hamlet called Fuente Nueva, and it was truly in the middle of nowhere – about two hours west of the coast and three north of Malaga airport. I had never realised just how big and empty Spain was until that first drive from Malaga through the rolling, sun-bleached landscape. Three hours barely moved us up the map.
Fuente Nueva consisted of twenty or thirty houses – actually, dwellings would be, I suppose, a better word, as they had all been dug out of the mountainside. The frontages overlooked a vast flat plain bordered in the distance by a mountain range, the Sierra Maria.
The landscape of the plain was bleak tundra interspersed with outcrops of rock, and to give you a better idea of how arid it was, if you’d filmed a drone attack on a couple of jeeps, everyone would have assumed it was Iraq. Only a patchwork of fluorescent green fields to the east, mainly comprised of heavily watered broccoli, gave the game away.
The house itself was extremely cool, in all senses of the word. It consisted of what looked, from the outside, like a tiny white stucco shed, but this was in fact merely the entrance to a series of caves cut deep into the hillside. These chambers were rounded and organic, with bumpy white-painted walls. They remained so cool that even at siesta time, when the outside temperature frequently hit forty, you still needed the thick quilts the owners had provided.
In front of the house, bordered by hewn rock face to the right and some unused outbuildings to the left, was an airless courtyard that shimmered in the heat, and in the middle was a blue-tiled pool with a so-called jacuzzi. I say so-called because, as the pump was out of order, it was really no more than a sit-down zone at one side of the pool – though that turned out, in the end, to be incredibly useful as a kiddy-pool.
There was quite literally nothing to do in Fuente Nueva. There were no shops, no cinemas; there was no beach. It was too hot to walk anywhere and there were no restaurants or bars to visit of an evening. Best or worst of all, depending on your perspective, we’d forgotten to ask about Internet, and not only was there no Wi-Fi, but our phones didn’t pick up a signal either. Though she acted like it had been a conscious choice, saying how great it was to ‘digitally detox’ for a while, I could tell that Amy was gutted at the oversight.
With the exception of a brief drive to nearby Orce for food once or twice, we’d done nothing whatsoever for ten days.
Personally, other than the fact there was no beach, I thought the place was pretty amazing. My job, my life, was physically exhausting, and sitting in a super-heated pool reading, or taking long siestas in the deep, silent darkness of our cave-bedroom, was as close to paradise as I could imagine. But Amy and Ben were getting restless, and I was beginning to admit that perhaps it had been a good idea to invite the others after all, if only to take the pressure off me. Ben, particularly, was longing for the arrival of fresh blood.
All the same, my sense of unease remained and during the three-hour drive to the airport I tried to reason with myself that my nervousness was groundless. After all, what could go wrong?
But I’d once managed to fall out with a girlfriend in Italy, I remembered. And OK, I’d only been eighteen, but on another occasion I’d had a huge bust-up with one of my best friends in Amsterdam. So shit can happen, even on holiday. And I couldn’t help but think that if something were to happen, that house, that constrained courtyard, our isolated village . . . well, it could all become a bit of a pressure cooker.
The fact that they’d decided not to rent their own car bugged me too. Of course, it meant that I had to drive back to Malaga to meet them, but that wasn’t really the problem. I like driving, and it gave me some time to myself. It was more the fact that they’d be depending on us for everything the entire time that worried me. So even though I knew that the suggestion to rent a single seven-seater Kodiaq for all of us had been Amy’s, I was unable to convince myself it had been one of her better ideas.
For the return trip from the airport, Ant sat up front, with Heather and the kids in the rear seats. As Ant fell asleep almo
st immediately, that was a bit of a shame, really. Heather was awake and seemed quite lively at first, and I would have enjoyed having someone to talk to for the drive home. But as it was all but impossible to hold a conversation with her in the rear, I quickly gave up and put on Spanish radio, and by the time we got home, they’d all been asleep for some time.
It was about 3 p.m. when we arrived, and Amy had laid out an impressive spread of food to welcome our new arrivals. Unfortunately, we’d all eaten sandwiches from a service station I’d stopped at, so it was food that nobody wanted. Amusingly, nobody mentioned the sandwiches – it seemed that even the girls understood that it was bad form to admit to having eaten. And so we sat and nibbled politely at Amy’s vegan quiche, at her pasta and potato salads; at the kilo of hummus she’d whipped up.
‘No one seems very hungry,’ Amy said eventually.
‘It’s the heat, I think,’ Heather said. ‘But I’m sure we’ll eat it later.’
‘It was a mistake setting up outside,’ Amy said, and she was right. Even in the shade of the olive tree the heat was unbearable. Sweat kept dripping off my chin on to my plate.
Once we’d cleared the table, they chose rooms. Heather went on so much about how lovely the place was that I thought she sounded a bit fake. Ant, on the other hand, seemed unimpressed and a bit edgy, but as the girls were unusually quiet too, I gave them all the benefit of the doubt and assumed they were just shell-shocked from the journey.
From four to six, we all slept. The cave-bedrooms were cool, silent and pitch black. I don’t think I’ve ever slept better anywhere in my entire life than I did during those siestas in Spain.
After sleeping, as the temperature dropped, everyone seemed a little more relaxed. The kids splashed around in the pool; Amy sat nattering to Heather; and Ant wandered around holding his phone in the air, desperately trying to get reception. You could tell from the get-go that the lack of Internet was going to be a problem for him.
Around eight we ate the leftovers from lunch, and then while Heather and I cleared the table in amicable silence, Amy and Ant walked to the dirt track that ran in front of the courtyard.
From Something Old Page 13
