Flirting in Italian (19 page)

The cold truth is that I’m effectively alone, surrounded by near strangers. Kelly, the girl I’m closest to, seems lovely, and we’ve started to bond, but I couldn’t honestly call her a friend yet, not after being roommates for just a few days. Paige and Kendra are fun and good company, but I have to remember that we’ve been drawn closer than we would normally be by Elisa’s mean behavior; without that, we might still be circling each other warily, unsure as to how much trust we can place in the hands of girls we barely know. I remember Paige and Kendra sniggering as Mum made that scene with me at Heathrow. My first impression of them was that they were snide girls, quite happy to mock someone else’s public embarrassment. I put that behind me, partly because we needed to maintain a common front against Elisa, but now the memory floods back—Paige commented on it, too, when we met for the first time at Pisa airport, actually rubbing it in.

Would she do something like shut me in a secret passage for a joke, a prank? Would she want me out of the way because she’s obsessed with Luca’s being a prince, hoped Luca would come back from Florence, and knew he and I had spent a lot of time together in Central Park? I thought neither Kendra nor Paige saw me and Luca kissing that
night—they seemed too absorbed in their own flirtations—but what if one of them did, and resented it, and tried to make me look like an idiot when we visited the Castello di Vesperi? Or what if it’s both of them together?

Or am I completely and utterly overreacting? Is there something wrong with me to doubt these girls?

I should talk to Kelly about who slipped away from the group when I stayed behind in the portrait gallery
, I decide.
Work out who could have had the opportunity to set that trap for me
.

And then I think,
But that’s assuming you can trust Kelly. How do you know it wasn’t her? What if Kelly’s jealous of you because you’re English too, but you’ve got more posh social skills than she has? What if she wanted to take you down a peg by shutting you in the passage and giving you a scare? It was Kelly who came to find you, leading the way. Maybe that’s because she knew where you were, and wanted to let you out, be your rescuer, make sure you were really grateful to her and would take extra care helping her out in the future.…

I look around the dining table as we spoon up our minestrone soup, considering each face in turn. I’m seeing each of them from a different perspective, like the moment in films where the killer is unmasked and you realize with horror that it’s someone you know and like, someone you’d never suspected, someone who’s swinging a shiny hatchet sharply toward your unprotected skull.

Kelly, next to me, is still flushed from the excitement of the afternoon and evening, and from the
vin santo
at the castello and the glass of red wine we’ve been poured with dinner. She’s carefully tilting the bowl of minestrone away from her, as I’m doing, the way you’re supposed to tilt your soup
bowl when you’re finishing the last drops. I have no idea why, but it’s considered polite, and Kelly’s a quick learner; she saw me do it and followed me seamlessly. She senses I’m glancing at her and flashes me a quick smile, thinking I’m checking up on her soup-drinking etiquette.

Her smile’s so open and unguarded. I can’t believe someone could play such a nasty trick on me and smile at me like that. I look across the table, at Paige, whose big brown eyes are wide, her mascaraed lashes and dark brown eye pencil making them look huge; I can practically see the white all around her irises as she rattles on about the castello, the bats, the history, being in a real
castle
with a real
prince
, or at least a prince-in-waiting; she’s been talking nonstop for so long it’s like background music now, almost relaxing. But is Paige cleverer than she seems? Playing the dumb blonde could be a really good technique, not just to charm the boys, but also to make sure people underestimate you, so you can get away with things for which you’d otherwise be blamed.

Kendra, sitting opposite Kelly, is quite the opposite of the dumb blonde. She’s sharp as a whip and cool as a cucumber. I doubt that Kendra’s ever been underestimated in her life. Which is why I find it very hard to believe that Kendra would have done something as clumsy as shut me in a secret passage, running the risk of being caught as she locked me in. It doesn’t seem to fit; if Kendra wanted to sabotage someone, I think she’d do something much more subtle. And much more effective.

And then I look at Catia, sitting at the head of the table, poised as always, with her streaked blond hair, her dark red lipstick, her big gold hoop earrings dangling almost to her
shoulders. I simply can’t see Catia making an excuse, slipping away from the principessa, pulling open that door, waiting behind it for me to come along, and then locking me inside the passage. It seems impossible. And why would she do something like that to one of her paying guests?

Because she wants Elisa to start dating Luca
, says a sharp little voice inside my head.
And Elisa told her that you kissed Luca at Central Park. Daughters come first, way before paying guests.…

My head’s spinning. And not just from all this frenzied speculation. The room’s going in and out of focus, and I’m finding it hard to breathe. My spoon clatters onto my soup plate, and I put both hands on the table to help me balance, telling myself I’m just having a moment of dizziness, overexcitement. My eyes close, because it’s too much effort to keep them open. I slump back against the back of my chair, my muscles slackening.

I just need to rest
, I tell myself.
I’m really tired for some reason … really, really tired.…

And then an awful surge of nausea rises up inside me, jerking spasms in my chest. Unmistakable. Despite the weakness in my muscles, I manage to push myself up to my feet and stumble out of the dining room in the direction of the downstairs loo. I barely have time to make it there before I’m heaving into the bowl; I didn’t have time to put the seat up first, and I have to contort my body extra-hard to get my face twisted over the water. The vomit sprays out of my mouth. I taste the
vin santo
, sour now with stomach acid, and another heave of vomiting is extreme. I start to cry in sheer misery and helplessness, fumbling for the toilet paper, trying desperately to wipe myself clean.

People are crowding behind me now, exclaiming in horror and concern. Someone—Kelly, I think—kneels next to me and holds back my hair. Voices rise around me, but I can’t make out individual ones or what they’re saying; I’m too feeble, too dizzy. Eventually I stop throwing up, because there literally isn’t anything more in my poor abused stomach, and they wipe my mouth with a damp cloth and try to help me to my feet, but my legs won’t hold me up, and I collapse again. Someone exclaims about my lips: they’re blue, apparently.

That can’t be good
, I think.
Blue lips. Someone should probably call a doctor
. But I’m so dozy now, so knocked out by whatever’s happening to me, that I can’t really panic the way I suppose I should, or register much beyond whatever my body’s decided to do next. Right now, that’s lying down on the floor. The tiles are cool under my cheek. The lights are really bright, but I’ve closed my eyes now. I can rest. They’ve flushed the loo and the worst of the smell has gone. My stomach hurts, though, and I can barely breathe.

Someone’s shaking my shoulders, yelling at me to wake up, but I’m a very long way away, as limp as a corpse, and I don’t want to wake up anyway, because my stomach’s really hurting now and I sense that the more conscious I am, the more pain I’ll be in.
Leave me alone
, I say inside my head.
Leave me alone, I just want to go to sleep.…

And despite the bright light in the ceiling directly overhead bouncing off the shiny white bathroom tiles, that’s what I do. I flop forward onto whoever’s shaking me, like a giant rag doll, and pass out as if there were a bottleful of sleeping pills dissolved into the minestrone I just ate.

Maybe I’m dead
.

The thought is not as scary as it probably should be. I’m so calm, so comfortable. The coffin lining is soft beneath me, and it’s fairly roomy; I’m touching the side with my right shoulder, but that’s okay. I don’t feel cramped. Of course, it’s pitch-black, but that’s strangely comforting. I roll over and realize there’s a pillow under my head.
How very nice of them to put a pillow in my coffin. Really thoughtful
.

Memories of vampire and zombie books I’ve read trickle slowly through my mind, people waking up in coffins, screaming their heads off as they realize they’ve been buried alive, pounding at the lids, clawing their way out to the surface.
Honestly
, I think, yawning as I cuddle into the pillow.

Silly them. When it’s so lovely and cozy in mine. I could sleep in here happily for the rest of my life.… No, wait a minute … not the rest of my life, that’s obviously wrong.…

The other thing that’s wrong is that when I yawned just now, my throat hurt. Really, really badly. Like if I coughed, it would be so painful I’d think my head was coming off. And clearly, when you’re dead, you don’t feel any pain.

So maybe I’m not dead after all
.

I am obviously very dozy, because that thought is not as comforting as you’d expect.

I swallow. Ow. My throat’s as sore as if someone strangled me till I passed out. Now, that would be Gothic. Or serial-killer-ish.
Perhaps
, I reflect,
I read too many novels
. The pain in my throat reminds me vividly of the events of what was probably last night, because it feels as if I’ve been sleeping for a while.

No one’s hovering at my bedside; no one’s coming in to bother me. This is lovely. Either it’s still the middle of the night, or I’ve just been left to sleep after my pukefest of yesterday evening. I shudder as I remember it. You can tell yourself as much as you like that you can’t help it if you start to vom, that it’s just something your body does over which you have no control, that last night you weren’t chucking up minestrone because you’d been an idiot and drunk too much, that it wasn’t your fault in any way. You can keep saying that, and I do, but in the end it comes down to the fact that everyone else in the Villa Barbiano saw me sobbing on the floor of the downstairs loo with puke everywhere.

At least Elisa wasn’t there
, I think, clinging to this one little piece of consolation.
At least she didn’t see me like that. She’d
probably have taken pictures on her phone and shared them with everyone she knows. Sent them to Luca, even
.

I bury my face in the pillow with embarrassment. Why did I ever wake up? I should just go back to sleep, for days and days, and by the time I do eventually emerge from my room, so much time will have passed that everyone will have forgotten all about it.…

My stomach’s churning as I remember last night.
It can’t have been something in the soup that made me puke like that. I was really, really sick, and no one else was
.

Unless they got sick afterward, of course
.

And it couldn’t have been the biscotti and
vin santo
, because we all had that, too. From the same plate, and the same decanter.

Okay, now I’m definitely not going to get back to sleep. My brain’s spinning.

How on earth did I get that sick?

Oh God, and what if Catia called my mum to tell her what happened? She’s probably already jumped on a plane to come and get me!

Shoving the pillow behind me, against the wall, I haul myself slowly to a sitting position. It hurts, more than I had expected. It’s not just my throat that’s sore. My esophagus aches all the way down to my stomach, which is equally painful. It’s as if all that violent throwing up, all those cramps, have bruised the entire inside of what my biology teacher would have called my upper digestive tract. I’m thirsty; I want some water, but I have the unpleasant feeling that drinking anything, swallowing anything, is going to hurt a lot.

Still, I’m awake now, and restless.
No wonder I was happier
when I thought I was dead
. I pull the sheet off my legs and swing them slowly over the edge of the bed. I heave myself to my feet, and gasp, because standing up sends tremors through my body, and my stomach really is very sore indeed. Patting the wall with my hands, I work my way along it to the window, and the shutters, which I unlatch. Light pours in, white and clear: I squeeze my eyes shut, letting the sunlight filter through my eyelids, getting myself accustomed to daylight.

Well, it’s definitely not the middle of the night
.

I look down, opening my eyes gradually, and see that I’m wearing a nightie. Someone undressed me, took off my stinky vomitty dress and my underwear, and put a nightie on me while I was unconscious. Somehow, that realization is particularly hard to bear, the thought of my naked body flopping around, all my squishy bits on full display as someone—Catia? Kelly?—pulled off my bra and knickers. The humiliation just never stops. I stand there biting my lip, feeling increasingly thirsty and miserable, holding on to the side of the shutter for support, wondering whether I should just follow my first idea and stay in bed for days until everyone’s forgotten all about the events of last night.

The bedroom door opens: Kelly’s standing there.

“You’re up!” she exclaims. “Wow! Great! How are you feeling?”

“Pretty awful,” I say, trying very hard not to cry.

“I bet! Do you need the loo?”

I think about it and eventually shake my head.

“You haven’t got much liquid in you, I suppose,” she says, considering this. “It’s all come out already. Ooh, I should get you a glass of water. The doctor said you should be drinking
fluids when you woke up. And when you keep that down, you’re supposed to have yogurt with salt in it to balance your tummy out again.”

I nod. She goes off to the bathroom and by the time she returns, I’ve sat back down on my bed again, feeling wobbly at the knees. She hands me the water. I sip it slowly, wincing with every swallow, as she says earnestly:

“Luckily, the doctor came really fast. He lives down in the village and Catia got hold of him right away. He said it was lucky too. You were really sick. He pumped your stomach, to make sure you’d thrown everything up, and then he washed you out with the stomach pump.”

I raise my hand to my neck, touching the band of muscle there. No wonder it feels bruised.

“They put a tube down my throat,” I say, realizing what must have happened.

“It was
so
awful,” Kelly says, shivering. “You were completely out of it, which was the only good thing. I helped. Well, I was holding back your hair and stuff. And Benedetta was brilliant.”

I can believe that. Benedetta is the cook. Earlier this week she had us learning how to make pasta dough. She doesn’t speak a word of English and rattles away in Italian so fast that sometimes I literally cannot distinguish a single word, but the cooking demonstration was tons of fun.

“It was really important the doc got there in time,” Kelly’s saying. “You have to do the pumping and washing thing almost straight after people have eaten whatever bad stuff that’s poisoned them for it to work. Otherwise, you’d have had to go to the hospital.”

“I don’t understand what did it,” I say, handing her back the empty glass.

“Well”—she frowns deeply, looking very concerned—“that’s it, isn’t it? That’s the problem. Benedetta’s in a right state. She was really worried that it was something she made that gave you food poisoning.”

I shake my head.

“It can’t have been,” I say. “We all had the minestrone. We all had bread from the same basket and grated cheese from the same big piece. I didn’t have anything here that anyone else didn’t eat.”

“I
know
.” Kelly grimaces. “The doctor went through everything you ate here with Catia and Benedetta. But he thinks you can’t have had whatever made you sick long before you started upchucking.”

“Lunch was ages before,” I say. “It can’t have been that.”

“No.” She turns the glass in her hands. “We all had the biscotti and
vin santo
at the castello.…”

She’s still looking down at the glass, revolving it slowly between her palms.

“Look,” I ask nervously. “Do you happen to know if Catia rang my mum at all?”

A couple of hours later, the doctor has been summoned to check me out, given me the all-clear, and gone again. Catia has flapped around me like a worried hen; she
did
ring my mum to say I had food poisoning, and got the full force of Mum’s panicked maternal instincts. I can’t help smiling
a bit—even though she told Mum I’d been resting after the doctor came to pump me out, and that he’d said to let me sleep it off, Mum’s been calling practically every hour. Catia looks very, very tired. She brought me the house phone and practically dialed the number for me, desperate to give Mum the reassurance she needs that I’m alive and well.

I was dreading the call—Mum panicking about me is always really exhausting—but the good part is that I barely had to talk at all. Mum’s flapping made Catia’s look like amateur hour; she rattled on for half an hour, barely pausing to take a breath. I put the phone on speaker, propped it on a pillow on my chest, and lay back as her voice streamed out, sympathizing, worrying, suggesting ways to rehydrate myself, reminiscing about a trip to Jamaica in her modeling days when she ate dodgy shellfish and was the sickest she’d ever been in her life, and the stylist and the photographer were sick too and they had to postpone the shoot for a couple of days because they were all weak as kittens afterward. Mum had looked positively gaunt in the photos because of all the weight she’d lost throwing up and, you know, the other end too. They hadn’t had retouching in those days and they could barely use the photos because she looked like a skeleton—that was before being so thin was all the rage, of course.

She’d been on the verge of flying out to see me—she’d practically booked a ticket to Pisa for the first flight out this morning—but then she’d thought, No, Violet wouldn’t want me to make a fuss—I give a particularly enthusiastic murmur of agreement at that bit—but she’s been on
tenterhooks
, and
so
relieved the doctor’s saying I’m okay, but I must make sure to rest up … unless I want her to come and get me and take me home to recover? There’s a flight this evening; she could easily make that. She’d just throw some clothes in a bag.…

That’s the only point where I need to stir myself and reassure her that no, I’m fine, I really am, that whatever I ate is long gone now, that I’ll be back to my studies here tomorrow, and please, Mum,
please
don’t make too much of a fuss. It takes a long time to keep repeating that so she can hear it and take it in. But after thirty minutes of pleading with her not to come over, let alone take me back home, she runs down like a toy with its batteries slowly going dead. I mumble what feels like endless “I love you’s” and even more “I miss you’s,” say “I’m fine” over and over again, and finally stab the red Off button, shove the pillow under my head, and slump back, exhausted.

I’m
so
not ready to go back to London.

“Hey,” Kelly says, pushing open our bedroom door. Her laptop’s tucked under her arm, and she’s carrying a bowl, which she places on my bedside table. “Here’s the yogurt with salt in it. Benedetta says it’s just what you need to get your stomach lining back to normal. She went down to the village and got special probiotic stuff for you first thing this morning.”

I wrinkle my nose.

“No, really,” she says seriously, putting the laptop on her bed. “I tried some. It’s not bad at all. She says once you get that down and digested, she’s making you some lunch
in
bianco
. That means ‘white,’ and it’s what you eat here when you have a bad tummy. It’s, like, rice that’s boiled with veggies, no fat or anything. Oh bollocks, what did I say?”

Because I’ve involuntarily retched at the mention of vegetables.

“It’s just, when I was throwing up,” I say feebly, “there were all these little bits of carrot and celery from the minestrone coming out of my nose. I don’t think I can face veggies for a little while.…”

“I’ll pick them out myself,” Kelly offers, sitting down on her bed, facing me. “Before I bring it up.”

I’m weak and feeble, and tears of gratitude actually prick at my eyes when she says this. Dutifully, I reach for the yogurt bowl and put a spoonful into my mouth. My body is very disoriented by the violence of my pukefest. I don’t know whether I’m hungry or thirsty, or if I need the loo. So I have no idea how it’s going to react to the yogurt. Kelly watches me alertly as I swallow the first spoonful; its cold, slippery texture is very gentle on my sore throat, and the taste isn’t bad at all—she was right. We both sit there for a few minutes as the yogurt slides down to my stomach, waiting to see if it’s going to come right up again. But it doesn’t. It feels good, actually.