Kissing in Italian (14 page)

I think I’m sort of in love with Paige at that moment. Of course, if you asked me, I would totally say that violence is wrong and people shouldn’t menace other people, and that I’d be very sorry to see Elisa go flying through a french window.

But, you know, the first word Elisa said when she saw us lying out by the pool was “pigs.” She and her friend Ilaria have been nothing but mean and nasty as far as we’re concerned, and now that Kendra’s in such a vulnerable state, I am absolutely, one hundred percent behind every word that Paige just said to Elisa.

“You heard her,” I say to Elisa, narrowing my eyes. “Piss off and leave us alone.”

Elisa is shocked, looking from me to Paige, who’s looming over her, but she doesn’t turn to leave, and Paige’s fists are clenched. I remember her smacking Luigi in the face yesterday, and I panic: what if Elisa says something that makes Paige so angry she goes too far? I reach out and grab the handle of the jug of water on the table. If Paige lunges for Elisa, she’ll get the entire contents full in the face. That should hold her long enough for Elisa to get away.

My fingers grip the handle tightly. Paige isn’t backing down, Elisa isn’t backing off, the tension’s so thick I can feel it all around us—

I don’t know what would have happened if Catia hadn’t come back into the room just then. But it’s with huge relief that I loosen my grasp on the water jug. For all Paige’s brave words, she isn’t actually going to punch Elisa in front of her mum.

“Kendra has gone to her room to pack,” Catia announces, and I gasp.

Kendra’s being sent home?
I didn’t think that would happen. I really didn’t. It would be an admission of failure on Catia’s part, that she can’t keep control of the girls who are in her charge. Not only would it be a huge deal, Catia would probably have to give back at least some of the money Kendra’s parents had paid to send her here; and she definitely—from what Leonardo’s said—relies heavily on the fees from summer schools to keep Villa Barbiano going. Plus, Kendra’s parents, apart from being very strict, are really high-powered professionals who would go absolutely mental at the knowledge that Kendra had been messing around with a married man hired by Catia to teach us girls. Let alone a married man who’d done the same thing before!

I’d have bet pretty much anything on Catia’s hushing this entire thing up and assuming that Kendra, Paige, and Evan would never breathe a word of it, as long as she kept Luigi and Kendra well separated for the rest of the summer. So I’m gobsmacked at this news.

Judging from their gasps in unison with mine, Paige and Kelly are equally shocked; we clearly all thought it over and reached identical conclusions. Which, from Catia’s words, we got completely wrong.

But we weren’t idiots; Catia’s own daughter also looks completely taken aback.

“Veramente, Mamma?”
Elisa asks, her eyes wide.

“And Paige, Kelly, Violet, you will go to pack as well,” Catia continues.

Now we all really do exclaim.

“What? No way!” Paige says.

“No!”
I hear myself say forcefully, rather to my own surprise. “I don’t
want
to go home yet!”

And Kelly bursts into tears once more.

“Andiamo a Venezia!”
Catia raises her voice to be heard over the din. “Okay? Oh, you girls and your constant drama!” she exclaims with exasperation, flapping her hands in a very Italian gesture. “You are not going home, none of you! We are
going to Venice
!”

Four girls gasp as one. It’s the only sound we have ever made simultaneously. But I’m sure that my reaction, though it sounds identical, is very different from the others’. Because the first thought that popped into my head on hearing this utterly unexpected announcement was:

Mum! What about Mum? She said to hold on, but she must be almost nearly on her way over here, she must! She wouldn’t leave me for much longer, without her, waiting and waiting and getting closer and closer to totally freaking out. She loves me too much for that! I have to let her know, in case she turns up here and finds us all gone
.

I have to let her know to come to Venice
.

“It’s like San Francisco,” Paige breathes at our incredible first view of Venice.

Which breaks the spell for a moment. We wrench our eyes away from the Grand Canal and turn to gawk at her instead.

“San Francisco?”
I ask.
“Really?”

I mean, I haven’t been to San Francisco, but I’ve seen it in lots of films. Amazingly steep streets, cable cars, Alcatraz Island out in the bay, a huge red bridge they call Golden for some reason. Does she mean Venice is like San Francisco because of the
bridge
?

“Never a dull moment with Paige,” I mutter to Kelly as an aside.

“Well,”
Paige starts enthusiastically, “when I went to San Francisco, it was, like,
amazing
. You wander around the whole time going, Oh my God, this is
awesome
. And I saw it in the movies tons of times, but it was way beyond anything I imagined from the movies. Do you see what I mean? Like, Florence, and London when we came through, were really cool, but they were just like I knew they were going to be from movies. But this is like San Francisco—
way
more stunning than you expect. You know there’s going to be rivers—”

“Canals
!” Kendra interrupts, rolling her eyes so hard it looks painful.

“Okay, whatever, canals. You know there’s going to be canals. And gondolas. But
seeing
them in real life is
way
more amazing than any movie ever!”

I’m grinning now because I actually know what Paige means. In the train from Florence, coming up the spine of Italy, Catia had told us that arriving by train is by far the best way to see Venice for the first time, and now I get why. You don’t see any of Venice from the train at all; you have a last stop on the mainland, and then the train takes off on a track over the lagoon, dazzling blue water spreading out on either side, dotted with tiny, uninhabitable islands. On the right-hand side is a road parallel to the train tracks, cars buzzing along it, and bright-orange city buses, which seem really incongruous in the middle of the sea. But that’s all you can see: the lagoon, the road, and the terminus, which is a totally normal, boring train station.

So you get off the train, handing your suitcases down to one another in a chain, looking around you with high excitement, and you walk through the station, a bit confused
that this looks exactly like Florence station—surely Venice should look different? And then outside the huge arched entrance doors, you see bright glittering sunshine and a burst of color, like a carnival, and the next thing you know you’re through the doors and at the top of a flight of marble steps leading down and right in front of you is the Grand Canal, and you all gasp and bump into one another as you stop dead to stare your eyes out at the most amazing sight you ever saw in your life.

In her eccentric way, Paige has nailed it. No matter how many pictures of Venice you see, how many films set here, it just doesn’t prepare you for the extraordinary, beautiful, magical reality.

Boats jostling past one another on the water, sliding under the low bridges. Gondolas, water taxis, small private ones barely bigger than dinghies, bigger ones crammed with people that we come to learn are the equivalent of buses here, called vaporetti. Palazzi, behind them, elaborately carved and hung with red and burgundy draperies. Rows of wooden mooring poles, painted bright candy-cane red and white, like the stripy T-shirts of the gondoliers. Golden buildings, shimmering in the sunlight. Heat bouncing off the stones and wrapping itself around us, a shock after the air-conditioning of the train and the cool station.

And people, people everywhere. Florence was crowded, but Venice is absolutely packed. The arching white stone bridge over the canal is crammed with tourists; the promenade in front of the station is equally busy. People are pushing past us to get into the station, muttering crossly in Italian. I try to budge up and see that lots of other tourists
have done exactly the same as us: stopped dead to stare in wonder at the sight before them.

“Venite, ragazze!”
Catia calls, and we snap to attention, bumping our cases down the steps. All along the promenade are boats, moored up, and I realize that the bigger docks are actually—

“Bus stops!”
Kelly’s realizing it too. “Look!” She points up at the colored bands that run along the floating white glass-fronted structures. “Those are the bus numbers! Wow, this is
mental
. Imagine living here and taking a boat to work every day along the canal!”

“So romantic!” Paige agrees, before she forgets that she isn’t talking to Kelly.

You can’t walk a straight line in Venice. There are just too many people. We weave our way through the crowds to the water’s edge, past several bus stops, a little way down from the front of the station, to a little pier with
TAXI
written above it on a wooden sign.

“Sbrigatevi!”
Catia’s calling. “Hurry up.” But how can we possibly? There’s so much to gawk at! The stalls selling Venetian carnival masks, from small ceramic ones that would fit in the palm of your hand to big silk ones with ribbons to tie at the back of your head, beautifully painted and decorated with glitter, plumes, sparkly stones. Lace fans, unfurled and pinned open to show how pretty and delicate they are; and glass—colored glass necklaces and bracelets hanging from long poles, trays of rings set out enticingly, glass figurines, one stall with what looks like an entire orchestra of miniature black-glass musicians each playing their own perfectly executed tiny instruments—

“Violet!”

I jump, Kelly tugging my elbow; I’m the last girl onto the pier. The taxi driver smiles at me as he takes my suitcase and throws it blithely into the well of the motor taxi. It’s beyond luxurious: shiny polished pale wood, chrome rails running all around the open back, a white padded cushion on the seat. The four of us girls sink onto the backseat, exchanging awestruck glances as the driver unties the boat from a stanchion, tosses the rope into the boat, jumps in fluidly, and takes his place at the wheel. Catia has taken her place in the cabin, too cool to sit outside—or not wanting to be deafened by our shrieks of excitement as the boat backs out into the water, turns, and starts to buzz down the Grand Canal.

Salty sprays of water splash up on either side of the boat. We bump over the wake of the water-buses; we watch the gondolas slipping elegantly in and out of the smaller canals that feed into the wider one, the gondoliers, in their straw hats, ducking smoothly under the low bridges; we point at the seagulls perching on the mooring poles. On either side Venice rises up, one building more beautiful than the next, castellations, balconies, private gardens with stone walls around them. Grand hotels, art galleries …

“Ooh! The Prada Foundation!” Paige gushes as we pass an exquisite white building with rows of white balconies and elegant dark-green shutters: a discreet gray banner declares its name. “Can we go? I
love
Prada handbags!”

“I think it’s an art gallery, not a shop,” Kendra says dryly.

“Oh,” Paige says, disappointed.

“They’ll still sell stuff, even if it’s an art gallery,” Kelly points out. “All the galleries we’ve been to have shops.”

This is absolutely true, and Kendra and Paige nod in unison before they remember that not only are they not talking to Kelly, they’re not listening to her either. I really hope this wears off soon; I’m already over it. They’ve made their point, they’ve punished Kelly, can’t they just let it go?

I turn my head away from them and pretend they’re not there. I fill my eyes with Venice. I see two water-buses on the same line—the N, it looks like—going in opposite directions down the canal, but needing to use the same stop: one’s pulled in, people flooding off and on, and the other one is hovering midstream. The first one chugs away from the stop, weaving its way around the other one, which waits for it to pass and then turns toward the stop. The buses have huge black rubber bumpers around them, and so do the stops, so they can thwack against the sides without worrying; as the bus pulls in, someone—a sailor? Bus conductor?—on board slides a gate open, jumps onto the pier, swiftly winds a rope around a stanchion, and signals that passengers can start walking off down the little gangway.

Old ladies pulling shopping trolleys. Businessmen and-women in smart suits. Kids with backpacks tucked under their arms. Normal people, going about their everyday lives, tuning out the hordes of tourists with cameras and baseball caps. It makes me wonder what it would be like to actually live here, to catch this bus back and forth to school or university, to live a life on the water.…

We stop, swivel, pause in the middle of the Grand Canal. We’re waiting for another water taxi to emerge from under a bridge, and once it’s gone we pass through, the buses slipping past us, a gondola too, the gondolier angling his pole
skillfully under the bridge; everyone seems to know how to get past everyone else with no obvious rules, no traffic lanes.

“Imagine a pileup,” Paige comments. “Everyone would drown.”

The sky above is dazzling blue: when the boat pauses, you realize how hot it is. And then we chug beneath the bridge, a moment of damp coolness surrounded by stone, and barely thirty seconds later we stop in front of a little dock outside a palazzo.

“Is this the only way in?” Kelly asks, tilting her head back to take in the lines of the building. “Can you imagine if it was? If you didn’t have a boat, you’d be completely stuck!”

“There must be another way to get in,” I say as the taxi driver ties up the boat and hands us all out onto the pier, passing up our cases. But the big Gothic-shaped doors, which are open to receive us, do look very like a new entrance, and the tiled hallway inside, high, arched, painted with frescos, definitely looks like the kind of posh entranceway in which Venetian aristocrats would receive their guests.