‘So you’re an artist?’
Antonello shook his head. ‘I’m a rigger who can draw a bit. My mother wanted me to be an artist. “Artists live forever,” she says. But my father says artists need to put food on the table like everyone else, and art doesn’t pay much.’
‘And you — would you prefer to be an artist?’
‘No, I like rigging. My father’s right, you can’t make a living as an artist. Drawing isn’t work, it’s pleasure, and men need to work to look after their families. What about you? What did you want to do?’
‘I wanted to do nursing, but my parents hated the idea — the night shifts, living in the hospital, inappropriate for a good Italian girl. So I chose teaching instead, and I love it — so that was lucky.’
On the way home, Alice and Paolina sat in the back seat again, all three men in front.
‘Are you two talking about us?’ Sam asked.
‘Oh, Sam, you think that’s all we have to talk about,’ Alice teased. ‘Of course. I’m telling Paolina how handsome you are because she can’t see that for herself.’
It was Antonello they talked about, in hushed tones.
‘Do you like him?’ Alice asked.
‘He’s gorgeous,’ Paolina said.
‘I think he likes you too,’ Alice whispered.
‘How do you know?’
‘Give me a break. He can’t keep his eyes off you. Double dates soon.’
‘As if my parents are going to let me go on dates. Good Italian girls stay home with their mammas until they are married.’
‘There are ways, even for good girls like you.’ Alice put her arm around her friend and, lowering her voice even further, said, ‘Leave it to me.’
They giggled, and Paolina was a little girl again, like the little girls in her class who huddled together with their friends and ran in carefree circles around the school ground, able to forget even their worst troubles, as only children can. He loves me, he loves me not, he loves me…
‘Paolina. Paolina, are you okay?’
Antonello was standing at the door.
‘Si, si come una ragazza,’ she said and winked. They rarely spoke Italian now that their parents’ generation was dead, but she liked to tease him in Italian. There was an extra playfulness that emerged with the language; it pulled them back into their childhoods.
‘Bella Paolina.’ He smiled back. ‘We’ll be late if we don’t hurry.’
‘What time is it?’ She hadn’t expected to fall asleep again, and she was disorientated.
‘Almost 3.15. We should leave in the next ten minutes.’
‘You’re the one that needs to get cleaned up and dressed,’ Paolina said.
‘Let’s be late, we’ll be waiting for hours anyway. Can’t believe he sees patients on a Saturday.’
But he took off his gumboots, came in, and headed for the bedroom to get changed. Paolina sighed: another trip to the oncologist’s crowded and sombre waiting room lay ahead of them. The oncologist was in his forties, and on the wall of his office were pictures of his four children, and what Paolina suspected was his second wife. He was tanned, well-dressed, and always running late, caught up by an emergency or by his tendency to slip into long conversations with his patients about golf or holidays or the weather, as if getting to the point were more painful for him than for them.
But tomorrow was Sunday and, if she wasn’t too tired, if the news wasn’t too bad, they’d drop in on Alex and his family, and their granddaughters would tell them the stories of their week at school and complain about their parents and their teachers, and they’d all forget for a few hours.
Chapter 6
Carrying a tote bag, a hanger with a couple of skirts, and a bottle of champagne, Ash arrived back at Jo’s in a flurry at 7.30. From behind the closed front door, she yelled, ‘Hey Jo, let me in,’ because she didn’t have a free hand to ring the bell.
‘Hi, Ashleigh. So good to see you. Can I help?’ Mandy said as she let Ash in. ‘Looks like you’ve brought your whole wardrobe.’
Ash handed her a bag and the champagne. ‘Thanks, Mandy. You know me — I can’t decide what to wear,’ Ash said, kissing Mandy on the cheek and heading straight into Jo’s bedroom. ‘What are you wearing, Jo?’
‘My red dress — maybe.’ Jo’s bed was covered in clothes.
‘Great. Can I borrow the blue top? My turn. It’ll go with my pencil skirt.’
‘Sure.’ Jo dug the blue top out from the pile and handed it to Ash.
Since their early teens, when they started buying their own clothes, they often went halves. This required negotiation, but mainly it worked. Ash understood fashion — understood which clothes were in and which weren’t, which clothes would mark you as an outsider, which marked you as an insider, so she directed and managed the shopping trips and the decisions on what to purchase, but that suited Jo too. Without Ash, she would’ve lived in jeans and t-shirts, the wrong kind, and dressing for parties would’ve been a nightmare. Even with Ash, she found clothes shopping difficult. The mirrors in the tiny dressing-room cubicles highlighted all her faults. Clothes clung to her belly, accentuated her hips and her thighs. In those mirrors, with their harsh spotlights, she became the fat girl again. Ash didn’t know about her fat history, or the trip to visit her father and his wife, about them forcing her to go on a diet. There were experiences too shameful to tell even a best friend.
Sometimes, when they were in changing rooms, in dress shops, she let slip, ‘I feel fat in this.’ Ash laughed at her. ‘Are you for real? I can see your ribs.’ Or ‘If you’re fat, I’m fat, because we’re the same size. Are you saying I’m fat?’ They might have been the same size, but the clothes didn’t look the same on them. Jo was taller and had a fuller figure. However, the real difference was to do with styles and combinations. When Jo wore the red dress, she wore ballet flats and tied her hair back in a ponytail. If she wore jewellery at all, it was a fine silver chain with her birthstone, a small ruby, that she had bought with money her father sent on a recent birthday. Ash wore the red dress with six-inch heels; she wore a tight black choker, and against her long slender neck it turned into a swirl of tattooed waves. Ash’s mother said it made her look like she belonged on a vampire movie set. The dress had a tie on the right side that could be adjusted. Ash tied it low to create a cleavage.
‘Cruiser? Lemon or lime?’
‘Lime. Can you put the champagne in the freezer — it’s warm.’
Ash moved Jo’s clothes to one side and unpacked her bag, spreading her clothes out on Jo’s bed, on the chair and desk. They took the drinks into the bathroom. Jo rarely wore make-up, but she enjoyed hanging over the basin, squashed up against Ash, so they could talk to each other’s reflections in the mirror as they painted their lips and eyes, as they transformed their faces from ordinary school girls to grown women.
‘Hey, try this mascara, it’s awesome.’ Ash handed Jo the mascara tube. The mascara dyed Jo’s brown lashes black.
‘I hope Kevin was okay about not coming to the party… You’ve got a smudge, there,’ Jo said, pointing to Ash’s left eyelid.
‘Yup — no problem. It’s great to hang out just us girls.’ Ash stopped doing her make-up and blew Jo a kiss in the mirror. ‘God, who said that once there’s a guy around, he has to come to everything? As if we’re attached. Anyway, he doesn’t like Rosie.’
But Kevin’s name was all over the pages of Ash’s journal. Smokin’ hot, sexy eyes, warm hands on my breasts… Remembering those passages, Jo blushed. In the mirror her cheeks turned a blotchy red. Kevin wasn’t the problem. Kevin and Ash having sex wasn’t the problem, either. Of course they were having sex. Of course she knew that. She shouldn’t have read the journal. It was private. It was Ash’s private space. No one should have access to your thoughts. She would’ve hated Ash or anyone else having access to her thoughts… but she wouldn’t have risked writing them down, filling up a whole journal with them, tempting fate at having them discovered. Yet Ash was in her thoughts, constantly. All those entries in which Ash fantasised about her future, and often with Kevin — Ash the successful lawyer, the judge, working for the United Nations, working for Amnesty International and married to Kevin, the famous photographer. World renowned. Living in New York. Living in Paris. Jo was nowhere in those scenarios.