‘You do seem very good together, though.’ Danika waggles her eyebrows at us. ‘Like a couple. Maybe the monks were fate’s way of giving you a helping hand?’
‘Ha, ha, ha,’ I laugh.
‘Yes, ha,’ Emma says. ‘Yes, we should actually get going now.Solovely to meet you.’
It’s genuinely comical how fast she stands up, suddenly keen to leave.
Obviouslyshe exchanges numbers with Danika, and then there’s a lot of hugging – honestly,insane, how many strangers has she hugged on this trip? – and then we walk off in the direction of the van.
I don’t mention the couple thing, and nor does Emma.
‘Oh my God,’ I suddenly say as we walk back towards the van. ‘What if someone’s parked on the other side again and we can’t get in?’
‘Nooo,’ Emma breathes.
I break into a run and she follows, more slowly.
‘You go,’ she calls. ‘I can’t run in flip-flops.’
‘Bloody flip-flops,’ I call over my shoulder.
I stop running when I get round the corner of the services’ main building and see that all’s well with the parking, and wait for Emma to catch me up.
‘I think I’ll need to take one more break on the journey today,’ she says as we get back into the van.
I nod. She clearly will. I think it’s only another couple of hours’ drive for someone who goes at regular motorway speed, but for Emma it’s going to be at least three hours.
‘I feel good now, though.’ She straps herself in. ‘That was an amazing power nap.’
We do make good progress and again we don’t really talk, other than directions; we just listen to music. Emma starts to sing along, at first just with a gentle ‘la la’, progressing to belting out those of the words that she knows (not many) or just her own made-up words the rest of the time.
She continues like that and I think about how I always used to start singing the correct words very loudly and then we used to sing more and more loudly, over each other, until we were essentially shouting, and it was very immature and probably really irritated anyone who could hear us. We loved it.
And it turns out that I can’t help doing that now and then Emma does her ‘la, la’ thing, and then I sing more loudly and then she does too and there we are.
It’s fun. A lot of fun. Innocent, easy, simple fun.
We end up laughing so much that I’m scared Emma’s going to crash.
‘Good times,’ she says, when we’ve calmed down. ‘When we were young.’
‘Yeah,’ I say.
And then we don’t sing along any more.
We take our next stop in a small town called Arezzo. It isn’t far off the motorway and Emma’s seen online that it’s very picturesque. She thinks it would be nicer than a service station. She isn’t wrong, if your goal is to go to see pretty things rather than get back to England as fast as possible.
We wander around, we exclaim about how truly lovely and historic it is, Emma gets very excited about how we’re about to go to amazingly lovely and historic Florence, and then by mutual agreement we go to a café. (I’m hot and I’ve resigned myself to getting very little work done today; Emma’s just thirsty.) We sit and watch the world go by and talk a lot about not much, and, okay, this isn’t what I wanted to be doing today but if I’m honest I’m really enjoying myself.
As I find myself laughing just because Emma’s giggling about a pigeon strutting backwards and forwards past three Italian girls like it’s trying to impress them, I realise that I could happily spend the rest of the day here, doing, essentially, absolutely nothing.
I haven’t done nothing for a long time. I work, I work out, I see Thea, I relax in a very structured way. That’s the route I went down after I shocked myself – or maybe it was Emma who shocked me – with how out of control my life had got, and I’m happy. I have a great life, I’m entirely in control, I live well.
‘We should probably go, so that we have time to look round Florence properly this evening,’ Emma says. ‘If you want to.I’mgoing to look round. Obviously you might not want to.’ She smiles at the café owner and he immediately comes over.
God, this entire situation’s stupidly awkward with both of us tiptoeing around the other in terms of having to say: ‘You’re welcome to do stuff but only if you want to.’
‘Have you booked a hotel?’ she continues, before I can speak. ‘For this evening?’
