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‘Like a gift or something?’
Donatella nods. ‘Yes.’
‘Foreigners are weird.’
‘They are,’ says Donatella. She tucks the money into her bra. ‘Don’t tell Dad,’ she says. ‘That’s five dollars I’ve got now.’
On her day off, she goes up to the new pharmacy and buys a tube of black stuff with a brush in that you paint all over your eyelashes, and a bottle of Pepsi-Cola for her sister. Mercedes drinks the whole thing all herself, in the garden at her grandmother’s house, and nothing has ever tasted so good.
A whole new city rises from the cliffs as the harbour wall rises from the sea. A huge hotel with a fountain in its lobby. Apartment blocks with balconies, one, two, three – then five, then fifteen. A plasa that will be surrounded by shops, and a funicular railway that will lead directly to it from the marina, so the rich don’t have to use their feet. She’s learning new English words, new phrases, that the school has never thought to teach them. High-end. Six-star. Premium luxe. Bidet. A huge glittering restaurant is built across the end of the Via del Duqa, cutting it off to pedestrians: glass walls and terrace looking out on marina and ocean. Sergio spends hours each day watching it rise, a gleam in his eye.
‘I must talk to el duqa,’ he says. As though such a thing has ever happened before. ‘They’ll need someone to run that.’
‘We already have a restaurant,’ says Larissa. ‘You’d still be making food for strangers and cleaning up their shit.’
And then she closes her mouth, for she’s seen his eyes turn dark, and she’s had enough of his discipline for one lifetime.
On the eastern cliff, a magnificent house begins to form with a commanding view of the whole Mediterranean. Glass doors the size of walls and a tower of its very own. He’s going to paint it yellow, says the grapevine. Imagine! A yellow house! But then the apprentices descend on Kastellana Town, and one by one the crumbling façades are stripped and sanded and coated with fresh new stucco, and each one is painted a different colour, and some are yellow, some are turquoise, some are pink like salmon.
It’s lovely, say the young ones. Our capital is like a rainbow! And the solteronas purse their lips and the old people mutter that they might as well be in Italy.
And Mercedes grows, and Donatella grows, and Larissa gets sadder and angrier, and three St James’s days pass them by, and the Yacht People begin to arrive. And with them, the summer holiday when she is twelve, the girl who will change her life.
