AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘Well, villas,’ says Donatella. ‘Big-face rich people’s villas.’
‘How do you know all this?’ asks Larissa.
Donatella shrugs. There’s a library at the school, filled with books and magazines discarded by the castle. Donatella has read almost everything in there. She’s a great reader. A great dreamer, too. Mercedes worries that she will end up disappointed by life.
And the army of Chinese labour he has imported builds more roads – into the empty wastelands on the cliffs on either side of the town, and from the western road another branches off and runs up to the abandoned quarry that built both the temple and the castle. The islanders are to get a desalination plant. A reverse osmosis. The children, who are learning English for two hours a day in the hope that the skill will pass on to their elders, mishear the phrase, and what they tell their parents is what it becomes: the Rivers of Moses, bringing running water to Kastellana Town for the first time since the Romans.
And still Mercedes gets up at six to prepare the restaurant for breakfast before she climbs the hill to the school.
‘But where will they live, the rich people?’ asks Mercedes.
‘He’s going to build houses. Big ones. And a second harbour, so they can even moor up in winter.’
‘I see that,’ says Sergio. ‘We can’t have them mooring out in open water any more, if they’re going to be coming.’ Last January, a big storm had carried a yacht the size of their house up onto the rocks on the edge of Ramla Bay when her owners were staying at the castle. A specialist team was flown in from Monaco to refloat her, but still it took the combined efforts of most of the men on the island to get her back out to sea, a great hole in her hull and pumps running hot to keep the water out.
‘But if they’ve got boats, why do they need houses?’ asks Mercedes.
‘Oh, good grief,’ says Sergio. ‘The Marinos have a house, don’t they? Are you saying they should live on their boat?’
Men who wear suits below their hi-vis jackets and hard hats walk about busily and stare at their homes and businesses and take notes, or ride the new roads with Matthew Meade in his fat man’s golf buggy, and gaze down on their rooftops from the cliffs above.
One day the ferry comes three days in a row, and the Chinese army unloads a bewildering array of heavy goods. Huge petrol-driven machines that need construction once they’ve been positioned on the shoreline, networks of metal frames rising like arms into the air above. Cranes, says the harbourmaster self-importantly. Forklifts, diggers, pile-drivers … and then he drops the list, because he doesn’t know what the others are, just that they are for the new harbour wall, which will be five times the size of now! And Matthew Meade stands on his deck and smokes his cigar as metal beams and sacks of cable block up the quayside, and the boom! of dynamite echoing across the land soon becomes just another part of the daily landscape.
‘Maybe we could have a dry dock,’ says Larissa. ‘That would employ a lot of people.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Larissa,’ says Sergio. ‘That’s not what he’s got in mind.’
‘Well, I don’t know, do I?’ snaps Larissa. ‘They must need to get their stupid boats serviced somewhere. Why not here?’
‘Didn’t you listen to what he said at all? He’s got ambitions. The sort of people who’ll be coming here won’t want cranes and welding arcs disturbing them.’
Even at ten years old, Mercedes knows that the way her parents speak to each other isn’t right. That the contempt in Sergio’s voice is not how a man should speak to his wife.
And still: same-same, but different. Donatella is taken out of school to help at the restaurant. They’d like to do the same with Mercedes, but the law says she must stay until she is thirteen. And Donatella cries in her bed at night, quietly, because she loved the learning, and now the reality of life as a Kastellani girl is coming home to roost.
The boys are training up in the old-new skills – in plastering and painting and plumbing and glazing – for the town is to be given a facelift to make it look as though it’s always been that way. They’re learning skills that can keep them earning here or carry them away across the world; their choice. For the girls, same old-old skills: scrubbing floors and washing clothes, hoeing and digging and cooking and chasing children until they’re grey. Only now it will be other people’s houses they will be cleaning. Other people’s children they will be raising with unacknowledged love.
Same-same. But different.
The old Auberge de Castile, the island’s only hotel, is so full for so long that they can soon afford to install bathrooms. Two new bodegas and a café open on the harbour but don’t dent the Re del Pesce’s trade one bit, and every house with a spare bedroom becomes a bed-and-breakfast. A real, proper doctor’s surgery opens on the square, for all to use, at the duke’s expense. The pharmacy attached sells a cornucopia of goods for people to spend their new-found incomes on. Shampoo! Little bandages that stick to your skin! Shoe inserts for flat feet! A whole shelf of pretty colours to paint your eyes, your toenails, even your lips! Disposable sanitary towels! Who knew the world contained such luxury?
One day Mercedes sees Donatella standing by a table whose diners have just left, holding something in her hand and frowning.
‘What’s up?’ she asks, and comes over to look.
It’s an American dollar. No, two American dollars.
They don’t get wages in the restaurant, because, obviously, the restaurant is their whole family’s living. So two American dollars is something of an event in their lives.
‘It’s weird,’ says Donatella. ‘This is, like, the third time this has happened.’
‘Did they just forget it?’
‘No,’ she replies. ‘I caught them as they were leaving this time, and tried to give it back.’
‘And they didn’t take it?’
‘No! It’s weird! They just waved me off and said, “No, it’s for you!”’
