She shoots me a small I-got-you-back smile and I find myself swallowing because it gets me in a way that I don’t want to think about.
‘How’s the map reading going?’ Apparently she hasn’t noticed that her smile made me feel… I don’t know, weird.
I blink and then collect myself and look at Google Maps again.
‘Yeah, no reception here,’ I say. ‘This has no idea where we are.’
‘Okay, I’m going to keep driving until it finds us.’
The ensuing driving around and fruitless where-are-we-going discussion are good in the sense that they’re a distraction from where I think my thoughts might have been going.
Eventually we’re in a street with slightly lower buildings and a better signal.
‘We’re literally one road away from where we started.’ I point at the phone. ‘And we’ve been going for forty minutes.’
We have to turn left into a very narrow road with very tall buildings because it’s no right turn, and we’re back to no reception.
‘Google Maps has us again,’ I finally say after more seemingly aimless driving around. ‘Right, left, second right and we’ll be onto a main road.’
‘Perfect,’ she says while I think about how much more time we’ve wasted. I’m really hoping we’re going to be sticking tomotorways and main roads for the rest of the trip, otherwise at this rate we’ll be going into a third day on the road.
Fifteen minutes later, we’re still queuing to turn into the enormous line of traffic on the main road.
‘It’s obviously full rush hour now,’ Emma says, not sounding remotely upset. ‘I quite like traffic jams,’ she adds – more of the chat she cannot help herself starting.
‘What? Who likes a traffic jam?’ Turns out I can’t help engaging.
‘They’ve very low stress,’ she explains.
‘In what way?’
‘You aren’t going to have a crash when you’re in a jam, are you? And you don’t have to worry about changing lane and doing roundabouts and stuff.’
‘But you’re only in your car because you want to go somewhere. And once you get going you’re still going to having to do the lane changing and roundabouts.’
‘In themoment, though, it’s nice. You can just watch the world go by.’
‘More fun doing that in a café with coffee and cake, though?’ I suddenly register the more salient point of what she said. ‘Are you…? Do you…?’
I don’t want to be rude but how novice a driver do you have to be to find roundabouts so stressful that you’d rather sit in a traffic jam? Hasn’t she just been on a big road trip?
‘When did you pass your test?’
‘In April, a couple of weeks before I left for this holiday.’
Wow. It’s July. So she’s been driving for three months. That is… not long. Although, obviously, she’s got a lot of miles under her belt now, and the van’s bodywork looks great so she’s clearly had no mishaps to date.
So all good. I’m very lucky to have this lift and we will obviously get back to London in one piece.
‘Oh my goodness, what’s he doing?’ Emma points to where a man’s just driven from behind us down the wrong side of the road, thus blocking entry to where we need to go, and is trying to turn out into the traffic. The driver next to him opens his door wide, scraping the other man’s car, and they both get out and start yelling and gesticulating. A couple of other drivers get out of their cars and join them, followed by a couple more, and soon it’s total chaos. They move round the corner onto the main road, where more drivers join in.
Emma leans forward, her forearms on the steering wheel, her eyes dancing, looking like she just needs popcorn and she’s all set for as long as the show lasts.
I’m a lot less happy about being stuck here, but somehow, as she laughs and then rolls down her window to talk in extremely minimal but surprisingly effective Italian to a woman standing next to the van, I find myself almost enjoying the whole thing.
And then Emma says, ‘Are you coming?’ and gets out and walks off down the road.
I do not want to join her. This is ridiculous. It’s getting hot, there are fumes everywhere, this is aworkday, for God’s sake. I don’t want to get involved in mass road rage in a not-that-nice neighbourhood of Rome. Except Emma’s now in the middle of it. Literally: she’s standing in the middle of the group, now gesticulating at least as much as everyone else.
