racing to catch up. The thought of counting them hadn’t occurred to me.
‘Come on, sun’s nearly gone,’ he said, extending a hand to pull me up the last couple.
I looked out across the open rooftop. He was right. A scrap of yellow was sinking behind the city’s domes and a pink blanket had thrown itself across the sky. Beneath us, a busker’s guitar chords floated from the streets. I wanted a cold beer. After the dry cold of the south, the air in Buenos Aires was hot and damp, turning my skin sticky.
A waiter led us to a table in the corner.
‘We’re early,’ said Zach, glancing at his watch.
‘You’re nervous,’ I teased, flipping open the drinks list.
‘No, I’m not.’
But he’d replied too quickly, too defensively. ‘You are! I can’t believe it. You’re nervous.’
He’d grown a beard while we’d been on the road but I saw his mouth twitch underneath it. ‘All right,’ he said, his smile broadening, ‘maybe. But it’s your dad. And I know how much this means to you so…’
He trailed off and I frowned at him.
‘So it means a lot to me.’
I smiled as he ordered from the waiter. Dos birras.
It had taken a couple of weeks to extricate myself from London. First, I’d told Norris that I was leaving. ‘But temporarily, just for a few months, if you’ll have me back?’ I’d asked. We’d been sitting in his office and he’d immediately thumped his desk with his fist, sending several ketchup sachets into the air, and shouted that it was very bad timing. I replied that he was talking nonsense, the lease was sorted and that I wanted to go travelling with Zach. This had radically altered the matter. I thought Norris might cry. His face went red, he clasped me in a hug and told me to take as long as I liked.
Upstairs, Eugene agreed to take in Harry (and he’d sent me so many pictures of him since I’d had to mute his messages).
I met Jacinta, the literary agent, who told me she liked Curtis the counting caterpillar very much and, with my approval, wanted to start the hunt for an illustrator.
I went to a final NOMAD meeting and told the group I was going to South America for an extended holiday. They had various worries about this (Mary wanted to know how bad the malaria was; Lenka fretted that I’d be forced into a drug gang; Elijah warned that I’d have to eat guinea pig. Jaz had told them all to pipe down, given me a huge goodbye hug and promised to keep me updated on the George situation. Her most recent email had said she was ‘as happy as Barry’).
Mia and Ruby had helped me pack. Kind of. Mia stuffed several pairs of tiny knickers in my bag, the ones she’d been given on her hen party. ‘They’re all clean,’ she insisted, ‘sniff them if you don’t believe me.’ I’d declined this offer and taken them out, insisting that Zach had told me to pack light.
The reason for packing light became clear when we arrived in Santiago and Zach picked up a motorbike, an old Honda that looked like it had served in the war. It had been our first tense moment. How could I spend the next two months on that, clinging to Zach’s back like a baby possum? He’d promised it would be all right. And it had been. Apart from an alarming few seconds in a forest when Zach swerved to avoid an armadillo, they had been the most electrifying, affirming, worry-free months of my life.
From Santiago, we’d headed south along the Pacific coast, roaring past lakes and jewel-coloured houses. We stopped for the night wherever we felt like it. Sometimes camping, sometimes staying in a cabana when I insisted that I wanted to sleep on a proper mattress (have you ever tried to have quiet sex in a tent? It’s even less relaxing than having sex while Prue Leith’s talking on the telly).
Zach gave me surfing lessons over a few days in a small town where we bought ceviche from the fishermen every morning. He took me hiking, he took me kayaking, he made us get up early several times, promising ‘the best sunrise’ I’d ever see. They usually were. Right down in the toe of Argentina, we saw his black and white dolphins as well as a humpback whale fling himself in the air like an acrobat, not far from our boat. This made me cry.