Chapter 2
2
‘I can do you all some spaghetti hoops?’ Mum calls out from the kitchen.
‘Go on then,’ Dad calls back.
‘I thought you said you wanted Italian food?’ I remind him.
‘Well, it sounds like it’s spaghetti hoops or nothing,’ Dad replies. ‘I’ll take what I can get.’
‘We could order a Domino’s,’ Tom chimes in.
‘That’s not very Italian either, is it?’ I point out.
‘It’s close enough,’ Tom says with a shrug.
‘And I’m too hungry to care,’ Dad adds.
I smile as I glance over at the two of them. Despite their obvious differences – and they would both probably hate this, if I said it out loud – my dad and my younger brother are like two peas from the same pod sometimes. Usually when they’re hungry.
Mum pops her head around the door and raises her eyebrows at me optimistically.
‘Pizza is pizza,’ she says. ‘And it means I don’t have to cook.’
Those are not words you would usually hear leave my mum’s lips. Mum absolutely loves cooking, and cleaning, and organising – no, really – and just generally being loving and caring towards her family. She lives for it. However, the thought of sitting down on the living room floor with me and going through my old things is appealing to her way more this evening.
She smiles widely as she practically rips off her apron.
‘I’ll make the call,’ she announces.
‘It’s an app,’ Tom calls after her with a chuckle. ‘I’ll do it.’
‘Even better,’ Mum says, hurrying back, sitting on her legs on the floor next to me.
Sue Cole – my mum – is new to her sixties but, in a way, she’s been rehearsing for them for some time now. Even when she was much younger, she loved an apron, knitting, baking – all of the things that are allegedly the hobbies of women approaching retirement age, but rarely are. She doesn’t look her age at all, with her chestnut lob hairstyle, with one natural flash of grey at the front that looks too perfect to have come from anything but a salon.
‘Okay, let’s see what we’ve got,’ she says as she begins sorting through a pile of folders.
‘Come on,’ Dad says with a scoff. ‘None of this shit is going to help her, is it?’
‘Colin,’ Mum ticks him off.
‘He’s not wrong,’ Tom joins in as he pulls a face at a poorly drawn sketch of the Colosseum. He holds it up for our dad to see and he laughs.
‘You were never going to be an artist, love, were you?’
‘Thanks, Dad,’ I say with a sarcastic smile.
Colin Cole is almost ten years older than my mum – which, I swear, he thinks is some kind of flex. Dad is definitely a throwback to a bygone era (sometimes I really do wish we could throw him back) with his neatly trimmed moustache and his ideas about men and women. He’s mellowing as he’s ageing, and as Tom and I are forcing him to redefine things, and his expectations of us.
I’m thirty-one and Tom isn’t far behind me at twenty-eight. Honestly, I think Dad thought we both would have been married off and having kids with our partners by now, and sometimes we still find him scratching his head over why I don’t seem to have found anyone, or why Tom is the way he is .
The way Tom is isn’t really much of anything, by the way. When it comes to style, Dad tends to wear whatever army shade combo Mum has bought for him, but Tom, on the other hand, is really into his clothes, and he spends a fortune on his trendy haircut, and it genuinely blows our dad’s mind. That’s just the way Tom is, though. He’s the ultimate cool guy, and he always has been – and he still manages to be the golden boy, even if Dad does find the fact that Tom likes a facemask confusing.
Tom makes friends wherever he goes and women fall at his feet because for some reason people just seem to instantly like him, before they know him. I wonder if that’s a male privilege or a confidence thing but, for me, it always feels like I have to put in the work to prove myself, to get people to notice me. I don’t know, maybe I’m talking rubbish, but it’s better than thinking that my awkward, quiet, kind of clumsy demeanour might just be putting people off. Confidence is one of those things that feeds itself. I have no idea how you get any to begin with but having people instantly like you, just because of your vibe, sounds like it would be one hell of a confidence boost.
‘Remind us why you lied,’ Dad pipes up.
I sigh. I can’t exactly tell him the truth – that it was a failed attempt to get the hottie from work to tear off my clothes and have his wicked way with me – but I’m in too deep not to explain now.
‘Because we’ve got this big client, in Italy, that we’re going to see, and they want to bring their brand to the UK, so – to seem valuable at work – I lied about how much I knew about Italy, and Italian culture, and…’
‘And you thought the Colosseum had a chimney,’ Tom adds.
‘That’s not a chimney, it’s the leaning tower of Pisa in the background, but I suppose that just proves your point,’ I say with a laugh. ‘Okay, Dad, you’re right, none of this shit is going to help me.’
‘Isn’t it nice to look through it, though?’ Mum says – seeing the bright side, as always.
‘Yeah, I guess it is,’ I say with a sigh.
‘It doesn’t make you feel old?’ Tom asks with a faux sincerity.
‘Piss off, I’m like three years older than you,’ I clap back.
‘Oh, Robin, look,’ Mum interrupts our bickering as she hands me a pile of letters.
‘Is this…’
‘Your letters from Andrea, your Italian pen pal,’ Mum reminds me. ‘Oh, she was such a lovely girl. Such a shame you never got to go on your foreign exchange holiday.’
Andrea was my school pen pal. We used to swap letters all the time, back when she was studying English, and I was taking Italian. Of course, she had been learning English since she was even younger, so her spelling and grammar were better than some of the kids in my class, and my Italian was terrible so we always swapped letters in English. I don’t really remember much Italian at all, just random little phrases, like ‘shut the door’ (which, I think, is chiuda la porta if you’re interested).
We were supposed to swap letters for a while, building up to a foreign exchange holiday that the school did every year, but as (bad) luck would have it, there wasn’t enough in the budget when it was my year.
‘It’s probably for the best,’ Dad points out. ‘Remember Tom’s German exchange kid?’
Tom laughs.
‘Good old Jonas,’ he says. ‘I wonder where he is now.’
‘Prison?’ Mum suggests.
‘You’re just saying that because he said your cooking was boring,’ I tease her.
‘No, it’s because he raided your dad’s drinks cabinet, and kept screaming German obscenities,’ she corrects me.
‘And he did keep stealing things, claiming they were souvenirs,’ Tom recalls. ‘Honestly, I think he was just bored, and messing with us. When I went to stay with his family they were so strict.’
‘Actually, didn’t he nearly burn the house down?’ I blurt as the memory comes back.
‘Right, that’s it, we said we’d never speak of that boy again,’ Mum insists. ‘But Andrea was lovely. So sweet. We would have loved to have her stay with us.’
‘Oh my gosh,’ I squawk as I look through the old letters, noting one detail in particular at the top of the page.
‘What? What is it?’ Mum asks in her usual mixture of excitement and nerves.
‘Nothing bad,’ I’m quick to reassure her. ‘It’s just a strange coincidence. Andrea is from Bari – that’s where I’m flying to with work. We’re staying at a resort in a nearby town.’
‘That’s not a coincidence, that’s fate,’ Mum corrects me. ‘You were always supposed to go there. This is the universe, course correcting, putting you back on the right track.’
‘All right, Derek Acorah,’ Tom jokes.
I cock my head at him.
‘I’m not sure that’s who you mean,’ I tell him. ‘He’s a psychic.’
‘Who do I mean then?’ Tom asks.
Dad scoffs so loudly it makes me jump.
‘None of you mean anyone because it’s all nonsense,’ Dad insists. ‘There’s no such thing as bloody psychics.’
‘You say that, but I knew that you were going to say that,’ Mum tells him. Then she turns to me. ‘Whether it’s fate or just coincidence, you should contact her.’
‘What are the chances she still lives where she lived when she was, what, thirteen, fourteen?’ Tom says in disbelief.
‘We swapped email addresses,’ I tell him. ‘I’m young enough for us to have made it to that stage, at least.’
I think I say that little reminder, that I’m not that old, mostly for my own benefit.
‘You seemed to lose touch all at once – why is that?’ Mum asks.
‘I don’t know,’ I tell her, which is a lie – I do know. I was a teenage girl, I had discovered boys, and suddenly sitting in my room writing letters to a girl who lived over a thousand miles away didn’t seem like a priority. Obviously now, as an adult, I’m kicking myself. Well, making friends as an adult isn’t as easy as when you’re younger, especially not ones who you feel like you have an actual connection with. Thinking about it, and who my friends are now, they’re either from school, uni, or work.
‘Will she still have her old email address?’ Mum asks curiously.
‘Well, I still have access to mine,’ I reply. ‘I think a lot of people do. When Amelia got married a couple of years ago, her RSVP email address was “millymoo69”.’
Tom sniggers.
‘Send her a message,’ Mum encourages me.
‘Yeah, then me having to carry all of this down from the loft wasn’t for nothing,’ Dad says.
‘Erm, I carried all this down,’ Tom corrects him.
‘Same difference,’ Dad says with a shrug.
‘Either way, I don’t think this stuff is much use to me, sorry,’ I say – I don’t know why I thought my old school projects would hold anything insightful. ‘It was worth a shot.’
‘It’s been fun, reminiscing about old times,’ Mum reassures me with a smile.
‘Just not Jonas,’ Tom says under his breath.
I look over my letters from Andrea. Honestly, this feels like it’s from another life, like it was something I saw in a movie. Confusingly, though, I can remember sitting at my desk like it was yesterday, handwriting my letters to her, rambling on about everything and nothing.
I skim her letters, and she talks about her parents, their restaurant, her siblings, her dog. Then I find one talking about her dreams for the future – of becoming a chef like her dad, of having her own restaurant and starting a family. I smile until I realise something – what did I say to her? What were my hopes and dreams? I’m assuming I had them, obviously, but I doubt it was to grow up to work in advertising. And whatever I said, no matter what it was, I can guarantee it didn’t say I wanted to be single, busying my days with overworking and silly rivalries. I think if teenage me could see me now she would think I was old and sad and boring (which might be harsh, but teenage girls can be harsh) and I kind of hate that.
I wonder if Andrea has done a better job than I have, if she has been able to make her dreams come true – even if it’s just landing her dream job, or starting a family. I know she might not still have access to her old email address, but I’m curious enough to give it a go, to drop her a message and see how she is.
I don’t write much – just a ‘hello, remember me, how are you?’ kind of thing – but, after finding one of Andrea’s old emails in the darkest depths of my inbox, I send it.
Right, now that trip down memory lane is over, I need to think of something useful to bring to the pre-meeting drinks tomorrow, seeing as though I’ve talked a big game.
‘Why don’t we watch an Italian movie to go with our pizza?’ Dad suggests.
I look to him, surprised, because that could actually be helpful.
‘I’m thinking The Godfather ,’ he adds.
Okay then, maybe not.
Back to the drawing board it is.