It was a cold, damp August day and their father insisted on keeping the roof down as they travelled along the French autoroute; the two girls, hair feeling like it was being torn from the roots, had a flapping tartan picnic rug over them for warmth. As their father drove, their mother attempted to keep their spirits up and boredom at bay by playing endless games. I-spy was their default game. Sometimes, instead, they would make up words from the letters on the number plate of the car in front of them. And the other game they played was spotting green Eddie Stobart and red Norbert Dentressangle lorries.
Cassie was five lorries ahead of Jodie. Cassie was always ahead of her in everything. Cassie had their mother’s blonde hair and beautiful features. Jodie had her father’s dark-brown wire-brush hair and hooked conk of a nose.
‘I spy with my little eye something beginning with R!’ their father said, glancing in the mirror. They were two hours south of Calais, in the Champagne region.
‘Rheims!’ Cassie shouted out as a sign for the city loomed ahead.
‘No!’ he replied.
‘Road sign?’ said their mother.
‘No!’
A large, crimson limousine with GB plates glided past them. Jodie saw, in the back seat, a snotty-looking girl of about her age, wearing Walkman headphones, looking down at them disdainfully.
‘Rolls-Royce!’ Jodie said.
‘Yep!’ her father said, as the Rolls pulled away into the distance.
Jodie stared at it, enviously. Why weren’t they in that car, instead of this crappy old Saab?
‘Your turn, Jodie!’ her mother said.
‘I’m bored with this silly game,’ she replied, sullenly, still watching the sleek car that was now barely a speck on the horizon. Where were those people going? To somewhere special with swimming pools and discos? They wouldn’t be staying in the kind of crummy hotels they stayed in every night, she bet.
She should be travelling down through France in a beautiful Roller like that, too. One day, she vowed, she would. One day people would be staring up at her with envy, as she passed them in the fast lane.
It wasn’t a dream, she knew. It was her destiny.
The following week they stayed three nights in Como. Not in the famous Villa d’Este on the waterfront of the glorious lake — the kind of place where the girl in the crimson Rolls-Royce would have stayed — but in a B&B in a narrow, dusty backstreet, where she was kept awake in the small bed she had to share with Cassie by the constant blatter of mopeds and scooters.
As a treat, their parents took them for a drink at the Villa d’Este the first night. At the table next to them, at the lake’s edge, sat a beautiful family. The tanned father wore a silky white shirt, pink trousers and black loafers. The mother looked like a contessa, or maybe a movie star. They had a daughter, a few years older than herself, who was wearing a very cool dress, Manolo Blahnik shoes, and had an elegant Chanel handbag. Jodie wondered if they were famous, because a waiter in a smart red jacket fawned over them repeatedly, topping up their glasses from a bottle of champagne then replacing it in the shiny silver ice bucket. The three of them were talking, animatedly. The father puffed on a large cigar and the mother was smoking a slender filter-tip cigarette.
There were beautiful people at the other tables, too. Elegant women with silk scarves and jewellery; handsome, tanned men in white shirts and sleek trousers.
Her parents seemed so drab in comparison. Her father was wearing a yellow shirt with a fish pattern, boring grey chinos, socks and sandals. Her mother was looking a little smarter but the effect was ruined by a dreary white cardigan. Cassie wore an Oasis T-shirt and jeans. It took her father an age to attract the attention of a waiter, and when one finally came he seemed so aloof, as if he could tell they did not belong there.
God, Jodie wanted to slide under the table and vanish. These are not my parents. This is not my family. I don’t know these people. Really, I don’t.
At least the weather was better here. Sunny and hot. On the second day they went on a cruise on a tourist lake-boat. She sat with her parents and Cassie on the upper deck, listening to the running commentary from the boat’s guide, as they sailed from Como to Bellagio, where they were due to stop for an hour for lunch.
Rising up behind the shoreline of the dark green water of the lake were steep, green hills, dense with olive, oleander and cypress trees. There were small towns and villages with yellow, pink and white houses, apartment blocks, church towers and factories, printing silk for the world scarf trade, the guide said. Then right on the waterfront, with their private docks and moored launches, were the grand villas of the rich and famous.
The guide pointed out each spectacular house in turn. The Versace villa, the Heinz holiday home. The Avon Cosmetics family’s summer residence. A vast extravaganza under construction by a Russian oligarch. Another vast and slightly vulgar edifice being restored by a London hedge-fund gazillionaire.
While her father took endless photographs, and Cassie, bored, played Tetris on her Gameboy, Jodie stared in awe. She’d never, in her life, seen houses like this. Their home felt like a shack in comparison. She wanted one of these places. Felt a yearning, a pang of desire deep inside her. This was the kind of place she was born to live in. She could picture the chauffeur opening the rear door of her crimson Rolls-Royce as she stepped out onto the driveway, with a clutch of designer carrier bags from Gucci, Versace, Hermès and YSL.
As the guide talked about an island they were passing on their right, which had a famous restaurant with no menu, Jodie turned to her father.
‘Daddy, how do you become rich?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘How do I get to afford a place like any of those villas we’ve just seen?’
She could see the same envy she had, reflected in her father’s face. It was as if he was looking at all he had never achieved in his life, she thought. ‘How do you get to afford one of those?’
‘The way you do it, Jodie, is you marry a millionaire.’
‘Yeah, but,’ Cassie said, raising her head from her computer game. ‘Only beautiful women marry rich men.’ She turned to Jodie. ‘Which kind of rules you out.’
Jodie glared at her sister. Cassie was almost seventeen, two years older than her. It was always Cassie who got the new bicycle, which would then be passed on to her three years later. The new music system, again handed down to her when Cassie was given a newer more modern one. Even her clothes were mostly hand-me-downs from Cassie.
They were cruising past a huge villa, set back a short distance from the lake with immaculate gardens in front of it. She saw a group of people sitting at a table beneath a huge cream parasol, having a lunch party. A large, beautiful wooden Riva powerboat was moored at the bottom of stone steps down to the dock.
She stared at it. At the group of people. At the boat. She was feeling deep envy, and even deeper resentment. Why wasn’t this her?
Her father ran his fingers through Cassie’s blonde hair. ‘How are you doing, my angel?’
Cassie shrugged and nodded.
Her mother smiled at Cassie, then at her father, then took a photograph of the two of them together, as if Jodie did not exist.
‘I’m going to live in a house like that one day!’ she announced.
Her mother gave her a sweet smile. Humouring her.