That Summer in Ischia by Feeny Penny

Author:Feeny, Penny [Feeny, Penny]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781906994600
Publisher: Tindal Street Press
Published: 2011-05-04T16:00:00+00:00

15

Allie woke in an unfamiliar room in the spare light of dawn. It had been cheaper to book a triple. (No worries, Dom said. We don’t mind if you don’t.) Her bed was in a corner alcove, at right angles to theirs, and nearer to the bathroom. They were both sleeping face-down. Meg muttered and kicked at the cotton coverlet. The alarm wasn’t due to go off for another hour, but already there were brakes screeching and gears grinding from traffic at the nearby intersection, the gurgle of plumbing and the rattle of news from televisions turned up too loud.

She thumped the pillow which was giving her a crick in the neck and it bounced like rubber under her palm. She knew Dom and Meg were well-intentioned. They were members of Greenpeace. They’d protested against the war in Iraq (well, who hadn’t?). They were a source of information (in English). They didn’t fret or miss trains or lose their possessions. But she didn’t think she could handle another minute of their company. If she didn’t bail out now, their nerve-jangling pedantry would flip her into a pit of despair.

She stole into the bathroom with a pen and her diary. Dear Dom and Meg, she wrote on a page ripped from December, I’m making an early start and didn’t want to wake you. Hope you have a great time checking out Pompeii. She paused. They might think she was going on a day trip. If she didn’t return as expected, they might report her missing. She could hardly say: please don’t try to find me. She wasn’t going into hiding. Many thanks for everything should do it. You wouldn’t write that to people you were seeing later for supper. She added a couple of kisses after her name so it looked more affectionate and crept back into the bedroom. Dom had turned over; his beard was jutting towards the ceiling, his arm was trailing to the floor. Luckily there were clean clothes at the top of her backpack. She buckled the straps silently but the teeth of the zipped section grated. A feral cat yowled below their window.

Allie felt shitty, leaving her pathetic message by her empty bed and slinking out of the door, but she couldn’t see any alternative. She knew they’d keep on at her until she agreed to stick with them and then she’d hate herself even more for not taking the initiative. That’s your trouble, Sam had told her, shortly after composing a totally weird and to her mind totally wonderful new song. You don’t strike out often enough. Beat your own path.

In the small reception lobby, she paid her third of the room bill to a wall-eyed porter. Then, in the gentle warmth of a new day, she made her way to the ferry terminal.

She was unprepared for the staggering beauty of the bay of Naples, even as glimpsed through the smeared and spattered windows of the hydrofoil. Why didn’t anybody tell me? she marvelled. When

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