Amy couldn’t believe how much she was looking forward to lunch with Sofia. ‘Going out to lunch’ was something her mum did with her colleagues from work on a Saturday. Amy and her friends ate when they were hungry, grazing throughout the day according to their euro supply or at whose house they were hanging out.
She was hit by a sudden wave of homesickness for Della and Maddalyn and her other friends in Germany. As it wasn’t yet time for Sofia to knock on her door she went out to the bench outside, where the rampant vine overhead made everything look green, to get a signal and look on Della and Maddalyn’s social media pages. Maddalyn’s last Instagram post showed a picture of the lush green park near her house in Neufahrn bei Freising, north of Munich, and read:
Holidays! No work.
Amy rolled her eyes and clicked on the speech bubble so she could reply.
I’m working my arse off!
Della’s Snapchat showed her on a beach in France, to which she’d added dog ears and bunny teeth and the label Hangin’!
Swallowing hard, Amy went onto her brother Kris’s Instagram and watched several live videos from the playing fields near their house; she blinked back her tears because her mascara wasn’t waterproof, and clicked to reply:
Take it mum doesn’t know ur smoking down the fields dummkopf
Kris was the elder of her brothers but he wasn’t quite sixteen and still thought smoking made you look cool.
Then she went onto Louis’s Instagram but all her younger brother had put up since the last time she looked was a stupid picture of him stuffing a torch in his mouth and blowing his cheeks up so they shone red. Even with the blown-up cheeks, Louis’s eyes laughed out of the picture, making her heart heavy. At twelve, Louis was the baby of the family, the only one who remembered no home other than theirs in Neufahrn because the family had moved there from England when he was two.
Improvement! she added underneath his post, then a collection of emojis, laughing, smiling, making heart eyes or scratching their heads, because Louis liked emojis better than actual words, judging by his text messages and social media updates.
Then, breath quickening and feeling a bit like a stalker, she looked on Facebook at her mum’s profile, but there were no recent posts apart from a sad face a week ago with a tear and some of her friends commenting Big hugs or Love you lots xx. She closed Facebook down, not sure whether it was grief, guilt or anger that suddenly made her feel like throwing up.
Then Sofia stepped out through her door. ‘Hey, Amy!’
Amy stuffed her phone in her little Cath Kidston bag, one that Dad had bought her. ‘Hey,’ she returned, feeling suddenly shy that not only was she ‘going out to lunch’ but her companion was at least thirty, maybe more, looking hot but cool in a short flowery dress. Her legs were amazing. Amy wished she had skin that tanned instead of the kind you could see through to the veins. Sofia’s dark hair was straight and glossy too. Today she’d divided her ponytail into three separate plaits and Amy wished she’d thought of it first.
Sofia grinned cheerfully. She was one of those people who could give you the feeling that there was genuinely no one she’d rather be with. She’d been a real friend, sticking up for Amy against that shit Davide and that cow Benedetta, helping conquer the hollowness Amy had carried in her stomach since she arrived in this Italian town where all the buildings were old and the native language was neither of those she knew. After she’d nearly been sacked she’d toyed briefly with trying to find another job but bailed on the idea almost at once. All well and good if a new place was an improvement on this one but she could easily be jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire – with no Sofia to wield a fire extinguisher.
‘Ready for a lovely relaxing lunch before you have to hit the tables again tonight?’ Sofia treated Amy to a quick hug. ‘Glorious day but it’s getting hot. Have you slapped some stuff on?’
It was exactly the kind of question Amy would have resented if her mum had said it, but coming from Sofia it just gave her the warm and fuzzy feeling that someone cared. ‘Yep. All done.’ On her first day in Il Giardino she’d ended up with scarlet forearms and a peeling nose, and Sofia, although explaining she didn’t burn easily because she had the same Mediterranean skin as her Italian father, had helped her locate a pharmacy and buy the once-a-day stuff her mum stocked up with at home every summer.
‘Then let’s leave Casa Felice behind.’ Sofia led the way.
They were soon strolling down the hill into the town, the breeze playing with their hair and cooling their skin. Sofia pointed out things she’d already found out about, as if she’d known Montelibertà for months rather than the same couple of weeks as Amy.
Sofia peered to her right. ‘I’ve seen a place somewhere here I like the look of. It’s got a … oh, here it is! See what you think.’ She disappeared through a pair of open doors beneath a smart black-fringed canopy and a sign saying ‘Trattoria del Sole’.
Amy followed Sofia, blinking as they passed straight through the dim interior and the familiar aromas from a pizza oven to another exit, one that gave out onto a terrace much like the one at Casa Felice, with a stupendous view of the valley and the peaks. ‘Love it,’ she breathed, drinking it in. The near things seemed really near and the faraway things very far, as if the scenery had been built up in layers by a giant hand.
Sofia made a beeline for a vacant table nearest the edge of the terrace. ‘It feels a bit as if we’re getting one over on Benedetta by occupying a spot so like the one that’s “guests only” at Casa Felice, doesn’t it?’
Amy felt her spirits lift at Sofia’s conspiratorial tone. ‘Benedetta’s a mega-stress monster.’
They seated themselves on wooden benches warm from the sun. On the terrace the whirr-whirr and zirr-zirr of the insects around the tubs of flowers was louder than the traffic rolling up and down Via Virgilio.
Briskly, Sofia opened a menu. ‘I fancy a nice cold glass of vino.’ She paused, eyes wide. ‘You are old enough to drink?’
Amy laughed. ‘I’m old enough to serve it, so I must be! Do they do shandy in Italy?’ Della and Maddalyn called her a lightweight because she’d failed to develop the joy they seemed to find in alcohol and the trouble they got into when it was involved.
‘Let’s find out.’
A young Italian waiter approached their table, seriously hot, crisply curling hair tucked neatly behind his ears and dark eyes as soulful as a puppy’s. Sofia began a rapid conversation about birra con something. He nodded, smiling at Amy with a tiny lift of his eyebrows as if noting and returning her interest. In minutes, a tall glass of shandy appeared before her along with a glass of straw-coloured wine for Sofia and a tall, frosty bottle of water between them.
The waiter spoke to Amy in English, probably getting that the Italian was largely flowing over her head. ‘The water, it is sparkly, but you can have natural if you prefer it.’
Amy managed to smile back without feeling her cheeks heat up. ‘Sparkly’s lovely.’ It sounded nicer than ‘sparkling’.
The waiter moved on to another table. Sofia took a good gulp of wine and sighed contentedly. ‘I think you’re really brave to leave home for a summer job when you’re only eighteen. Look at me! I’m thirty-one and I’ve only just managed it.’
She laughed, but Amy already knew from