‘Yes. And we talked, and she was very calm, and, you know, I just think, she’s all right, a good girl, and—’
‘Is she mad at me?’ Luis interjects.
‘We didn’t talk about you, actually,’ CJ admits. ‘Not directly.’
Luis narrows his eyes. ‘So what did you talk about?’
CJ shrugs.Of courseLuis can’t comprehend not being their focus. Of course. ‘Just … life,’ she says. ‘Stuff, you know. She played with Jorge, the guys told her about their house-buying plans, that kind of thing. And then she went home.’
‘By herself?’
‘Yes, by herself. You’re asking me alotof questions here, Luis.’
‘Because you are stealing my girlfriend,’ Luis replies, and CJ can’t tell if he’s kidding or not. His face is impassive.
It occurs to her that he might not be wrong. Is she trying to get Ash on side so Ash relinquishes her desires for Luis? Could CJ really be that cunning, even without admitting it to herself?
‘She’s not your girlfriend,’ CJ responds, refusing to unpick the notion any further.
‘Is she yours?’
CJ opens her mouth to speak, can’t decide what to say, closes it again and then takes a breath. ‘You told me to be friendly, so I was friendly,’ she reasons. In a split second, she makes a choice. ‘I won’t get in the way of what you two have going on, but I don’t feel comfortable advocating for you, or whatever. I’m Switzerland, OK? I am attending only to myown borders – you two can figure out your little tryst between you. But yeah, Ash and I might hang out again, if she wants to. I think you’ll find that’s allowed.’
Luis smirks, but doesn’t speak. What is it with all these handsome men smirking today?
‘Do you need to say anything?’ CJ asks. ‘Because that half-smile is …’ She waves at his face, searching for the word and coming up blank.
‘No, no,’ Luis says. ‘I appreciate you making sure she was OK. I will do the same today.’ He touches his fingertips to his chest, where his heart is, and bows his head slightly, before South African Jonno shouts him over from the mess and he is pulled away to attend to an Ultimate Frisbee enquiry.
CJ organises staff rotas and checks in on two rooms that have been vacated and cleaned, ready for new guests tomorrow. She does a stocktake for coffee, tea and biscuits, and pays invoices from the greengrocer and laundry service. She gets to inbox zero on the staff email, and calls Luis’s grandmother just because, filling her in on CoLab’s social calendar and saying she can’t wait to catch up properly at Luis’s birthday party in a couple of weeks. And the whole time, in the back of her mind, she thinks of Ash and wonders where she is, if she’s come down from her studio yet, if they’re in the same building, or if Ash will bound up the stairs from another touristy adventure and say hello. CJ finds herself concocting follow-up questions to some of the things they talked about last night: if Ash was a ‘good girl’ at school, who were her friends? Was she a geek, a theatre kid, a sporty kid? And why doesn’t she have a kid alone, if she’s so desperateto become a mum? CJ wants to ask her how she came to earn so much money, what she’s going to do with it all, what her plan is after Lisbon. Last night was supposed to have been about answers to some of Ash’s more questionable behaviours, but, CJ concludes, she’s actually been left with more questions than she started with. Could it be that CJ is actually making a friend?
By the time it gets to two-thirty and CJ has to start thinking about heading out to collect Jorge, she still hasn’t seen Ash. She must be out. CJ doesn’t deliberately set out to go over to the members’ board, she simply finds herself there, in front of all the information about group events, and if she tells herself she’s just curious to make sure the fado night tomorrow has got a good number of CoLab-ers signed up, then she also tells herself checking each name is only due diligence, making sure that it’s a nice group, that the atmosphere will be a friendly, fun one.
She runs a finger down the list of names and lingers when she finds Ash’s. Huh. CJ wasn’t going to go tomorrow – fado is sort of a Portuguese version of the blues, but not as cool. It’s mournful lyrics and melancholic reflections on lost loves and the difficulty of being, and although the food is often great, fado can, to CJ’s mind, be a bit of a bummer – even if it is occasionally also beautiful. But if Ash is going … well. CJ said they should get her out of her head and have some fun together, right? They could have fun tomorrow, with a bonus of CJ also getting to ask these questions she’s amassing.
Before she can question herself, she grabs the sign-up pen and scribbles in her name, two innocent little lettersdenoting her attendance. No big deal. Whatever. She goes to tons of CoLab stuff. It’s her job! And she’s not been to fado in ages. It will be cool to go, to just hang out with everyone. It’s fine. It’s not just because of her new friend that she’s signed up. Because if it was, that would be a little weird, and a little stalkerish.
No. It’s a totally normal thing that she’s done.
16
Ash
‘In the nineteenth century,’ the tour guide says to the dozen or so tourists in her group, ‘Sintra became the first centre of European Romantic architecture. What we mean by Romanticism in architecture is an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century movement focusing on styles that evoke a sense of the distant past …’
Ash looks up and at the town around her, the buttercup-yellow and playful pink three-storey buildings surrounding the huge town square, lush greenery as far as the eye can see climbing the hills behind. A fountain bubbles and babbles delightfully in the background, wide grey cobblestones and dramatic archways framing picture-perfect postcard images every-which-way. All this country-like quiet, just a train ride away from Lisbon. It feels Germanic, almost, like the kind of place you’d expect to find a Christmas market in winter, little huts selling salt lamps and Frankfurter sausages, tiny glasses of mulled wine at inflated prices, perhaps a skating rink nearby, too.
‘Tall windows, numerous gables, pointed domes and stained glass define the building ideal,’ the guide continues.
Ash is distracted by Mona beside her, who is shifting her weight from foot to foot, energy fidgety and unfocused. Ash hits her arm lightly, a teasing gesture of school matron-like scolding, a way to tell her to pay attention. Sintra has been high on Ash’s list of places to visit whilst in Portugal, and she’s done all the reading around the place. To now have the knowledgeable presence of a guide before her is a kind of bliss: Ash likes going somewhere and doing it well, leaving with an armful of new knowledge and a bag full of knick-knacks with which to remember it all by. She won’t be distracted by Mona. Now they’re here, though, Mona doesn’t seem very interested, and she did rather rouse Ash’s suspicions on the train ride out, whereupon she announced to Ash, ‘I’m crap at all this tick-it-off-the-list tourist stuff. I’d never have left the city if you hadn’t asked, doll. Who gives a shit about what some king did two thousand years ago? He was probably an arsehole to his wife, anyway. But ooooh, look! Lovely architecture he sorted out!’
Ash had chosen not to respond to this, mostly because lovely architecture is exactly what all her research has said is in store.
‘I’m sure itwillbe lovely,’ is all she’d said, after a pause, suddenly realising that you never know what kind of adventure buddy you might have got yourself attached to, when you don’t actually know the person very well at all. Ash senses more white wine in her immediate future.
The tour guide presses on. ‘Romanticists rejected thesocial conventions of the time in favour of individualism, arguing that passion and intuition were crucial to understanding the world, that beauty is more than merely an affair of form – rather, beauty is something that evokes a strong emotional response.’ The woman draws a breath here, lets her comment about beauty sink in. She scans her group, and Ash could swear her gaze lingers on her a moment longer than on anybody else, a fact lamented by Mona, who smacks Ash’s arm and wiggles her eyebrows just as soon as the guide has looked away.
The guide says, unaware of Mona’s giggling at Ash’s reddening cheeks, ‘Ferdinand the Second turned a ruined monastery into a castle where this new sensitivity was displayed in the use of Gothic, Egyptian, Moorish and Renaissance elements.’ She points up the hill. ‘You can also see the park, which blends local and exotic species of trees. This unique combination of parks and gardens influenced the development of landscape architecture throughout Europe. Now. If you’ll follow me this way …’
