Kissing in Italian (17 page)

Thank goodness, because I have a Scandinavian mum, I’m used to all kinds of seafood.

Okay, your mum’s from Norway
, comes the thought,
but what about your dad? Where’s he from?

I push the question away instantly and dig my fork into the plateful of pasta so energetically that its tines scratch on the china.

“It’s actually really good,” I reassure Kelly after a bite. “Just have the pasta if you can’t deal with the mussels.”

“I can’t!” she says miserably. “I don’t even like fish fingers.”

Swiftly, I scoop all the mussels off her plate and onto mine.

“Just eat the spaghetti, as much as you can—”

“I
can’t
!” she says, the tears now visible. “I feel sick!”

“Oh—” I bite back a curse. “Okay, just eat the
bread
,” I hiss at Kelly. “I’ll have your pasta too. And stop crying!”

The tears are falling down her cheeks now. I pick her napkin off her lap and shove it at her to dry them. Catia’s still absorbed in discussion with Luigi Two; they don’t notice as I twiddle Kelly’s pasta onto my fork in a series of swift, gigantic twirls, and dump it onto my plate with her mussels. I’m going to be absolutely stuffed. Even Paige is managing to clear her plate, her head ducked. Thank goodness, dessert is lemon sorbet—not even Kelly can complain about that. But by the time we emerge from the restaurant, I feel sick from overeating, Kelly’s in a haze of unhappiness, Kendra’s even further slumped over in silence, and Paige is eyeing every pizza shop even more longingly.

“You’re still hungry?” I mutter to her. “You ate everything!”

“Are you kidding?” she hisses back. “I dumped it all in my napkin!”

“Oh, I wish I’d thought of that! I had to have Kelly’s as well as my own!”

“This had better not keep up,” she says grimly. “I’m going to need some pizza
soon
.”

We’re passing distractingly pretty shops and market stalls selling more masks and glass and fans; in Florence the specialty is leather, in Siena it’s paper, but here it’s clearly carnival masks and Venetian glass. In front of us rise a series of wide steps over the canal, leading to a bridge lined with little shops: the Rialto.

Luigi Two leads us up to the top, gathers our group around him, and launches into a long description of the history of the Rialto Bridge, raising his voice to be heard over the competing Japanese and French tour groups, the backpackers lounging all around the heavily graffitied backs of the jewelry and glass shops, and the Venetians themselves, walking as fast as the tourists are moving slowly.

“Designed by Antonio da Ponte, which is amusing, as ’is surname means ‘bridge,’ in 1591—’e won a competition for ’is design, beating even the famous Michelangelo.…”

Gondolas, motorboats, water-buses, and taxis pass along the canal and disappear under the bridge; a wide-bottomed barge carrying a cement mixer and a digger wallows slowly toward us, and I realize that this is the only way anything can be transported through Venice at all. We saw an ambulance boat earlier today, speeding down a canal with a light flashing above it; somehow it seems so much nicer going to hospital in a boat, though I suppose the Venetians are so used to boats they don’t seem exciting.

“Many Venetians said it would never last, and that they needed a bridge with many arches,” Luigi Two is saying. “But the foundations ’eld the weight, and as you can see, it ’as been ’ere for nearly five ’undred years! And now, we go to Piazza San Marco.”

Catia always let us have a siesta back in Tuscany. Right now, it’s the hottest time of the day, Venice is unbelievably crowded, and we’re all either queasy from overeating or hungry. I glance at her and see her mouth set in a firm line. No siesta for us; it’s Piazza San Marco in the blazing afternoon sun. Yesterday, sunshine and swimming exhausted us thoroughly: we got back to the palazzo, wolfed down dinner, slapped on aftersun, and fell into bed. Today being dragged around Venice will do the same. Catia’s marching us all over town until we’re too knackered to even contemplate sneaking out to meet boys.

And after what happened in Tuscany, I honestly can’t say I blame her.

As I’ve observed before, Mum’s never quite got the hang of texting. She tends to write letters instead. I scroll down the screen, taking in the whole epistle. It’s the same as before, really. She’s coming, but there are complications. No
mention of Dad—and that’s what’s surprising me. Because I’d been thinking that what’s been taking so long is that Mum wanted to see Dad first, maybe, to talk over what I wrote to her, and Dad is thousands and thousands of miles away in Hong Kong. Maybe she flew there, or he flew to London, and it was hard for him to take time off work.

But then why not tell me that? What I wrote to her about obviously includes Dad too. And he must know about it. I absolutely, one hundred percent refuse to believe that Mum had an affair and didn’t tell Dad. Before she descended into miserable-zombie status, Kelly dared to hint at this possibility, and it was all I could do not to bite her head off.

“You don’t know my mum,” I snapped. “You just don’t. She’s never lied to me, ever. She’s like a pane of glass; you can see right through her all the time—everything’s written on her face. She would never have done that to Dad. She loved him so much. And she could never have kept a secret like that from him, never in a million years. Not for two seconds,” I added, getting my time metaphors all mixed up in my fervor to explain what Mum’s like. “Honestly, it’s literally impossible.”

I don’t know if Kelly believed me; without knowing Mum, you might not. But I’m sure of it. If there’s any secret about my parentage, Dad knows it too. She isn’t breaking any awful news to him. They were in this together.

So why not write “I have to see your dad first and so I’m flying over to Hong Kong”?

There’s something else here. Another part of the puzzle. And, rack my brains as much as I can, I can’t picture what it is. I can’t even get a rough sense of its shape.

To compound things, I no longer have a confidante. Kelly’s checked out of everything. Or out of everything here. As soon as we eventually limped back to the Palazzo Giustinian, exhausted, boiling, completely overloaded with culture, and having learned that Converses, though cool, aren’t actually that comfortable for spending the day tramping over stone, Kelly retreated into her previous life. She’s plugged into her phone, on her bed, in knickers and T-shirt, crying and texting, texting and crying, obviously letting people back home in England know what a totally miserable time she’s having.

I mean—in Venice! Which is a free extra to an already amazing trip to Italy!

I’m so over her. I’ve tried everything I can, right from the very first day, to help her feel more happy and secure and confident. It’s her own fault she’s in this mess, her own fault that she let jealousy overwhelm her and went tattling to Catia—her own fault that she can’t just bolt down some spaghetti, or be like Paige and cunningly hide it in her napkin.

Unlike our quarters at Villa Barbiano, the palazzo has no communal rooms we can sit in. No rec room with TV, no sitting room with sofas. The only way to get away from my grumpy, sobbing roommate is to go out onto the balcony and sit down, the stone warm under my bum, my legs dangling through the iron balcony struts, hanging over the canal below, my feet feeling swollen and hot from the day’s walking. I wrap my arms around the iron, equally warm from the hot sunny day, and rest my forehead against an elaborate piece of metal, looking down at the boats passing below.

“Hey,” says Paige, and I look right to see her sitting on the adjacent balcony. Being very keen on comfort, she’s
brought out some cushions from the chair in their room and strewn them over the stone, and is lying on them in her bikini, doing what she calls catching some rays.

“Hey,” I say back.

“How’s yours?” she asks.

“Crying. How’s yours?”

“Oh boy.” She pulls a face. “She got this email from him. Saying he loves her and that she’s the only one.”

I scowl. “The only one? After his wife and that girl from two years ago?”

“I know, right? The only one right now. Or when he was writing the email.
Pig
.” Paige is scowling too. “So she’s all psyched up again. I swear, it’s pathetic.”

“His wife’s
pregnant
,” I say hopelessly, because it seems to me such a huge deal—another baby coming!—that it should stop dead any debate Kendra’s having with herself about whether she should believe Luigi.

“I
know
! But she’s reading the email over and over again and playing Adele and Amy Winehouse,” Paige reveals.

“Adele
and
Amy Winehouse? Oh
no
. We’d better keep an eye on her,” I say grimly.

“What
happened
to us?” Paige laments. “We were having such a good time!”

She averts her gaze from me—usually an indication that someone’s about to make a personal comment and doesn’t know how it’s going to be received.

“I don’t know what went on with you and Luca,” she observes, “but you seem okay about it.…”

I can’t help huffing a dry, unamused laugh.
If she only knew
.

“It’s complicated,” I say.

“Well, but you’re getting on with things,” Paige says. “You’re not letting it define you,” she adds, in the American therapy-speak that occasionally pops out of both her and Kendra.

“I
can’t
,” I say. It comes out more passionately than I meant it to, and I bite my tongue.

“Sometimes you just have to shove stuff away until you can deal,” Paige observes. “I get that. You pull it out when you’re ready.”

I nod, temporarily unable to speak.

“I just want us all to have a great time in Venice!” she says, moving on from the Luca subject with a swiftness for which I’m grateful.

“Me too,” I say, in heartfelt tones. “I think that if we throw ourselves into being here, we won’t, you know, dwell on the bad stuff.”

“I know! I mean,
look
down there!” Paige sits up and points through the balcony at the canal below. A little boat is chugging by, entirely filled with flowers. “Geraniums! It’s a flower boat!”

I can’t help giggling at the enthusiasm with which she yodels “Geraniums!” Craning my neck, I look down through the bars; the boat is a riot of pink and red and white blossoms.

“Oh wow,” I say, and run for my phone to take a photo. Luckily, the boat stops in midcanal so that its driver can have a chat with what I think is a postal boat coming in the other direction, and I manage to get some good snaps.

“Look, Kelly,” I say, going back into the bedroom; she can’t hear me, but I hold the phone in front of her face. “A flower boat! Cool, eh?”

She takes out her headphones, raises her swollen eyes to me, and says:

“I’m not coming down to dinner.”

“Oh,
Kelly
,” I sigh. “Don’t
do
this.”

“Paige and Kendra aren’t talking to me, you’re sounding all cross, and I think I’ll throw up if Catia makes me eat fish stew,” Kelly says, her lower lip wobbling. It doesn’t help when Catia announces in advance what we’re having for dinner: it just makes the dread of anticipation worse for Kelly. “I
can’t
. I just need to be by myself.”

I don’t have any energy left to pump into the uphill task of convincing her.

“Okay,” I say resignedly. “I’ll try to smuggle back some bread.”

“Ta,” she mutters, and puts her headphones back on.

I mean,
whatever
.

Kendra’s in a weird mood over dinner. Elated, but almost speechless. As if someone hit her over the head but she liked it. She toys with her food, and Catia makes some snippy comments about hoping she’s not becoming anorexic, which, considering that her own daughter seems to live entirely on espresso and cigarettes, is a bit rich. Kendra excuses herself as soon as dinner’s over, saying that she’s tired and wants to go to bed early, and Catia reveals to me and Paige the existence of a room with a billiard table, in which she suggests we amuse ourselves after dinner.

To my surprise, this cheers Paige up immensely. I
wouldn’t have thought she’d know how to play snooker. But then, thinking about it, I realize that people are always doing it in American films and TV series.

“In Britain, it’s kind of an old-guy thing to do,” I explain as she gleefully chalks up a cue stick.

“You’re kidding! We have them in all the bars where I live.” She pantomimes a big theatrical wink. “Not that I’ve been in any, of course. Here, I’ll teach you to play pool. Though ‘snooker’ is a really cool word. Snooker!” she says, and it sounds hilarious in her accent.

Who’d have thought it—me and Paige. If not BFFs, we’re certainly BTFs. Best Temporary Friends. I certainly didn’t see that coming. But we’re united, at least, in refusing to withdraw into the kind of slump that both Kendra and Kelly are indulging in. It may be unfair of me, but I think it’s selfish of them. We’re all in this together, away from home, and though the group could cope with one of the four throwing a wobbly, two is unquestionably a downer.

Thank goodness, Paige teaching me pool is a lot of fun, especially as she keeps showing me how guys put their arms around girls from behind to do what I call copping a feel and she calls doing a booty rub. We laugh, a lot. We laugh so much that Paige’s mobile rings four times before we hear it, and she only just answers it before it goes to voice mail.

“Hey, Ev! No, I wasn’t ignoring you—Violet and I were playing pool. She calls it snooker! Isn’t that such a great word? I— You’re what?”

Evan’s actually managed to make her shut up for a moment. Go, Evan! I practice hitting the cue ball, though I’m a bit nervous because of seeing an old Peter Sellers comedy
film years ago where he rips a big hole through the green baize. The mere idea of tearing up the principessa’s family’s billiard table is terrifying, and probably why I’m not managing to hit the ball hard enough. I click my tongue in frustration, try again, and only just manage to send the white ball into the red one I’m aiming at with the limpest of clicks.