Dubrovnik
Consulting the map Ana had drawn for him, Lloyd skirted the restaurant tables that all but blocked the alleyway and emerged into the square.
Yes, this was the right place; the market was in full swing.
Red and white umbrellas crowded the space, covering tables spread with stacks of plump tomatoes, unruly piles of green beans, and bunches of herbs filling the air with the sweetness of basil and the sharpness of mint.
He wished it was his turn to cook tonight, but Ana had insisted he would be far too busy sorting out the library.
That was why he was heading across the old town early: to collect the books before the streets became too busy with tourists.
Trying not to be distracted by the delicious produce and the hustle and bustle around the stalls, he made it to the far corner and into the relatively calm oasis of Ulica od Puca where the bookshop was.
Much to his surprise, he had actually slept last night, but he supposed he’d been tired after yesterday’s early start.
He’d become a very bad sleeper, but perhaps not being in his and Jenny’s bed would help.
In the cabin he wouldn’t wake half-expecting her to be there, defeated before his day had even begun when she wasn’t.
As he strolled along, he admired the traditional shop frontages on either side of him.
He’d never seen anything quite like them anywhere else.
A stone arch with the bottom half of one side blocked off formed a window, while the full height part on the other contained the door.
They were beautiful in their simplicity, and although most of them were filled with souvenirs, gifts and local crafts for tourists, there was at least a minimarket and a library amongst them.
When he reached the fine stone frontage of the orthodox church, set back a little from the other buildings behind a courtyard where stray cats dozed beneath terracotta pots of plants, he knew he was almost there.
The exact location of the bookshop was given away by a flat, pull-handled trolley in front of it.
Ah, so that was how he was to transport the books.
Just as well Ruth had bought him a gym membership last Christmas and made sure he’d got off his arse and used it.
Although he tried his best, translating the shop’s name, which was painted in gold across the top of the door, was beyond his limited Croatian.
Not that it mattered. This had to be the place.
He pushed the handle, greeted by a welcome wave of cool air and entered a small room lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves.
A blonde girl of about Ruth’s age looked up from counting cash into the till and said “Good morning” in English. Was he really that obvious?
“Hi, I’m Lloyd. I’ve come to collect the library books.”
She reached out to shake his hand. “I’m Claire. Much as the order was a godsend, I’m glad they’re going. It’s getting harder and harder to edge around the boxes in the back rooms. We don’t have much space.”
The red velvet curtain behind Claire billowed alarmingly and a small, dark-haired girl wearing a mini-skirt and startling lime-green top sprung through it.
“Come in, come in. First I must show you how I have packed everything.”
Claire grinned. “Lloyd, meet Luna. Our very own whirlwind.”
He followed her through to a tiny kitchen, where two of the walls were completely lined with boxes, the table pushed back almost to the sink to make space for them.
“I see what Claire means,” he said. “All these books must have made life a bit difficult.”
“Customers never make life difficult,” said Luna. “However, it is hard for me to reach the stove to offer you coffee.”
“Don’t worry, I’ve only just had breakfast.”
Luna nodded. “Right. OK. Well, this is what I’ve done.” She waved at the wall of cardboard. “Books are sorted by language and age group, so not all the boxes are full.” She lifted one onto the table and opened it. “Inside each, there is a list.”
As Lloyd bent over to look, the smell of new books engulfed him.
He didn’t even hear Luna’s next words, or see the piece of paper she was waving; he was back in the dining room at home with Jenny, who was sitting in the light of the patio doors, a multi-coloured bandana around her head to disguise the effects of the chemo, sniffing the paperback by her favourite author he’d just bought her.
The memory felt so real it absolutely crippled him.
Luna touched his arm. “Are you all right?”
It was hard to fight back the tears. He turned away from Luna. “My wife,” he muttered. “I lost her … Cancer… She loved the smell of new books.”
“Oh, I am sorry. If you want a moment, and you can get past the table, you can sit in the courtyard.”
Lloyd balled his fingers tightly into his palms and shook his head. “I’ll be OK. It’s been two years. It shouldn’t still hit me like this but it sometimes does. Let’s get on with loading them up. It looks like it might take more than one trip.”
“It will. When they added Kor?ula to the schedule it almost doubled the order. So many more children there, I guess. I grew up on ?ipan and there aren’t that many; we were lucky they kept the elementary school open.”
Another punch. Right in the gut, and while he was still reeling from the first. Kor?ula … of all the sodding places.
“You’re still not right, are you?” Luna’s face was full of concern.
He did his best to grin at her. “I’ll live.”
And he would. It was a large island, after all.
It wasn’t as if he even knew whether Mirjana was still there.
She could be living anywhere and probably was, given she’d been so desperate to travel.
Or maybe she was not living at all. He shuddered.
He knew the war hadn’t touched the island, but it didn’t always take a war. After all, Jenny…
No. He wouldn’t, wouldn’t succumb to this. Forward motion. That’s what Ruth had told him he needed, and she was right. He picked up the first couple of boxes.
“If you can tie back that curtain, I’ll get these out of your hair.”
* * *
“Right guys, we need to be away first thing in the morning, so let’s take a look at where we’ll be going.”
The briefing. Ana’s first important job as skipper. She watched as Natali reluctantly sat back down on the edge of the banquette.
“It’s OK,” she told her. “You can finish clearing the supper things. I need to fetch the charts first.”
“Sure.” Natali leapt up again. It was more or less the only word she’d uttered all evening.
But on the other hand, she’d cooked them an absolutely delicious vegetable pasta for supper, and earlier in the day had absorbed everything Ana had told her about the boat like a rather skinny blonde sponge.
The girl really was impossibly thin, but she had a healthy enough appetite, so perhaps it was just her constitution.
Lloyd levered himself up too. “Shall I refill our glasses?” They’d seen little of him all day as he’d been closeted in the spare cabin they were using to store the library books, cataloguing everything onto his laptop.
No wonder he looked pale, and it made the lines around his grey eyes seem etched more deeply into his face.
He stood back to let Ana pass through the door to the galley, and while he was busy with the corkscrew and Natali stacked dishes next to the sink, Ana fetched the charts from the drawer in the navigation station which shared the kitchen space.
The dining table now clear, she spread out the first one as Natali slid back into her place next to where Obi was curled, and Lloyd put down the wine.
“Right. I think it’s easier to go through our weekly schedule using the charts, so you in particular, Lloyd, know where we’re going.
We’ve only been given a couple of nights here, so tomorrow we’re sailing for Ston, which is Dida Krila’s home port.
We’ll go back there every weekend because I can hook up to water and fuel easily, and it’s a good place to re-provision. ”
“So where exactly is Ston?” Lloyd asked.
“It’s a small mainland port about four hours’ sailing time from here, but we’ll take it slowly tomorrow as we pass three of the five islands we’re going to be visiting every week. The first is Kolo?ep and it’s only just outside Dubrovnik’s commercial port. I expect you know it, Natali?”
Natali shook her head, which Ana found strange, because most kids who grew up in the city had gone there at some time or other on day trips. She must have sensed Ana’s surprise because she said, “W-we only went to the larger t-tourist islands on the charters I worked on.”
“Fair enough.” Ana shrugged. “So Kolo?ep will be Mondays, in the main village of Donje ?elo. There’s a permanent population of a couple of hundred, but a few more children in the summer as people from Dubrovnik have holiday homes there.”
“We’re talking quite small numbers, then?” Lloyd asked.
“That’s exactly why we’re going from island to island.
Apart from Kor?ula, none of them is big enough to warrant its own library, especially one where most of the books are in foreign languages.
Kolo?ep’s the smallest and it doesn’t even have a permanent elementary school.
But there’s a real push at the moment to encourage children to be as comfortable with other languages as they are our own, and lending them free books to read is one of the best ways to do it.
Hardly anyone outside the country and the diaspora speaks Croatian, and as a nation we need to look outwards. ”
“Some of the books seem quite advanced for reading in a second language,” Lloyd ventured.
“Honestly? A lot of kids are fairly fluent in either English or German by the time they’re twelve or thirteen. And of course you’ve seen the books in Croatian too, for the younger ones.”
“So we’re talking quite a small pool of children, especially when you take out the ones who aren’t into reading …”