People like her – and him – if you call them on stuff, they’ll full-on gaslight you. This is our last night, just get through it. Stick with me. And when you’re back home, just never see her again.’
‘But, Ferd, what about Liam? He’s our uncle. I can’t never see him again.’
Jessie waited until everyone had ordered before she said what she always said on the last night of their holiday. ‘Bunnies? Can we go round the table and say our personal highlight?’
A chorus of groans was her answer.
‘It was swimming,’ TJ said. ‘It’s always swimming.’
‘Excuse me,’ Tom said politely, ‘but my highlight was actually not swimming.’
‘Swimming and gelato,’ Vinnie shouted.
‘Thank you, Vinnie,’ Jessie said. ‘I know you all laugh at me –’
‘I don’t,’ Dilly said.
‘It’ll come,’ Bridey said.
‘Tell us your highlight,’ Johnny prompted Jessie.
‘Having all my bunnies together. Our tribe of bunnies. There was one day when every bunny came down to the vegetable garden with me and we picked tomatoes. You don’t know how happy that made me. Thank you all for that.’
‘Thank you, Mum,’ Bridey said. ‘For paying for everything. For all the gelato and stuff.’
‘Daddy did too.’
Bridey’s look was disparaging.
‘Johnny? Your highlight?’
‘I’m up to six espressos a day now without feeling like I’m about to have a heart attack.’
‘You really put the work in.’ Jessie felt great, great affection for him. And pride, yes, pride. ‘You deserve the results.’
‘Ferd?’
Ferdia stared off into the middle distance. ‘It was all good. But if I had to pick one thing –’
‘You do,’ Dilly murmured.
‘Sorta, like, the total point of “highlight”.’ Bridey was lofty.
‘– I’d have to go with seeing the Medusa in the Uffizi!’
‘Really?’ Jessie was astonished, then alarmed. What if Ferdia turned into an art lover? She’d have to make herself into one too!
‘I was going to say that!’ Nell was glowing. ‘I’ve loved it here. So much beauty, and cool people, thank you so much! But my very best bit was the Medusa.’
Ed said, ‘It’s been heartening to see Italian market gardeners turning away from pesticides.’
‘Ah, Ed.’
‘And the wedding,’ he added. ‘That was brilliant. Cara?’
‘Not having to make fish fingers and chips forty times a day. All the cooking you did, Jessie, seriously, thank you. Basically, having nothing to do except read and drink wine was just looooooovely.’
Gloomily Liam said, ‘My most memorable moment was the crappy Italian road banjaxing my back.’
Even though Saoirse was next, Robyn piped up, ‘Liam was my highlight.’ She slid him a sideways smile. ‘Thanks for driving me to the outlet so I could get Sergio Rossi fuck-me slingbacks at sixty per cent off.’
‘Language!’ Bridey snapped. ‘There are children present!’
Quite, Jessie agreed. Whatever happened next year, Robyn wasn’t coming.
‘Saoirse?’ Jessie was gentle. She suddenly felt the full extent of Saoirse’s misery: she’d had a hard week.
‘Just, you know,’ Saoirse mumbled, ‘all of it. The sunshine and that. Thanks, you guys.’ Her voice trailed off.
Jessie’s heart twisted. She knew exactly how her beloved daughter felt: uncool and wrong, the object of a joke, rather than a fully fledged human being. Saoirse’s time would come, just as Jessie’s eventually had, when she finally made real friends, when people saw her ‘flaws’ as assets. But until then, Saoirse would feel lonely and foolish. She would get crushes on people who pretended to love her back, not because of who she was but for what she could do for them. Jessie remembered it well. But then she’d met Izzy and Keeva Kinsella and everything had dramatically improved.
SEVENTY-EIGHT
From the very first Friday evening, so long ago, when Rory had taken Jessie and Johnny ‘down home’, Izzy and Keeva had been nothing but lovely. That night, the three of them had shared a bedroom, Jessie in one single bed and the sisters topping-and-tailing in the other. They stayed awake until the small hours talking about everything.
Lying in the dark, Jessie related her stories of Burmese Cat Man and Amateur Flute Player and was delighted to reduce them to helpless mirth.
‘I thought I had the funniest story ever!’ Keeva howled. ‘But you win!’ Then she told her about the local lad who’d sidled up to her and said, with heavy suggestion, ‘I could do great things with your three acres.’
‘Anything going on with you and Rory?’ Izzy asked.
‘Not a thing.’ Because there wasn’t, not back then.
‘Or Johnny?’
‘Nor him either.’
‘“Hey, Johnny,”’ Keeva said, in a squeaky voice. ‘“How come you’re such a big hit with the goils?”’
Once again, the three of them burst into a storm of laughter.