‘Lovely!’ said Ven. At least that way she could be on her best behaviour and prove to the Captain that she was quite normal and not a drug addict really.
‘So you all have a nice day now. Are you going ashore?’ Nigel asked.
‘We most certainly are,’ said Eric. Ven nodded too, as Nigel looked for her answer also.
‘Remember – plenty of suncream on. It’s going to nudge the high nineties,’ said Nigel, giving her a friendly salute and a smile warm enough to nudge the high hundreds.
‘I will,’ replied Ven. ‘Bye, Captain Ocean-er . . . nessy.’
As he turned to go, Ven could have sworn she saw Nigel repeat the words ‘Ocean Sea’ and grin to himself.
Ven spotted Olive, chewing absently on a piece of toast at a table by the window. She was so absorbed in her thoughts that she didn’t even notice Ven until she had sat down opposite to her at the table.
‘What’s up with you?’ asked Ven.
‘Nothing,’ said Olive, too quickly. ‘More to the point – how are you?’
‘Right as rain. Thank goodness.’
‘Good, I’m glad,’ said Olive, her face a mask of stress.
‘Come on, out with it,’ prodded Ven.
And, without further prompting, out it all came. ‘Oh Ven, Roz and I had words last night. Big ones and many of them. And I told her about Frankie. I couldn’t help it. She was going on about her and Manus again, and I lost it and told her the lot and I walked off and left her. I’ve had a shit night’s sleep because—’
‘Ol, Ol, shhh,’ Ven interrupted, squeezing her friend’s hand. Olive was on the verge of tears. ‘Do you know what? I’m glad.’
‘Are you?’ asked Olive, not convinced that Ven wasn’t just being her nice, kind self.
‘I am,’ replied Ven. She didn’t say any more because coming into the restaurant, behind Olive, were Frankie and Roz. Together. ‘Bloody hell, Olive. What have you done?’
‘What?’ said Olive, turning to see what had made Ven go so wide-eyed.
‘Morning, you two,’ said Roz with a smile. ‘How are you feeling, Ven?’
‘I’m not well and hallucinating,’ said Ven.
Olive couldn’t meet Frankie’s eyes. Frankie knew why and ruffled up her hair.
‘I’m sorry I opened my big fat mouth,’ said Olive. ‘And I’m sorry to you as well, Roz. I was out of ord—’
‘Ol, shush,’ said Roz. ‘I’ve been a bit of a twat, haven’t I?’
‘I think that honour goes to me,’ said Frankie, speaking directly now to Ven and Olive. ‘Ol, you did the right thing last night.’
‘If only you stood up to the Hardcastles like that,’ said Roz, and winked. ‘I didn’t know you had it in you.’
‘Thank God it’s all out in the open,’ Ven sighed, feeling the weight of four long years fall from her shoulders.
‘Anyway – less of that. Frankie and I had a mega talk while you were snoring, Ven,’ said Roz.
‘We had to have a half-time break and ordered chocolate fudge cake from room service at quarter to one,’ laughed Frankie.
‘We’re sorted,’ said Roz. ‘We’re all sorted, I hope.’
Ven burst into tears and threw her arms around Frankie, then around Roz.
‘This is the best birthday present I could have wished for.’
‘Oy, it’s not your birthday till tomorrow,’ said Roz. ‘Anyway, how are you feeling, Amy Winehouse?’
Ven didn’t care any more about what had happened last night. It faded into oblivion beside this. All she cared about was the here and now, Frankie and Roz friends again. Froz was once more an active term. And the Fabulous Four were reunited.
‘I honestly and truthfully couldn’t be better,’ she replied.
Chapter 41
Dubrovnik promised to be very busy. There was a huge Italian ship berthed at the side of them, plus a Norwegian one and three massive American ships nearby. And another little vessel in the distance just sailing in which was probably huge but, when compared with the moored giants, looked diddy.
‘Royston and Stella are off to a beach today,’ announced Frankie, approaching the breakfast-table with her bowl of Granola and side order of two hash browns. ‘Roz and I passed them on the stairs on our way up here. He’s got nice sober navy-blue shorts on. I nearly didn’t recognise him.’
‘Don’t swear,’ said Ven. ‘I’m declaring the word “stairs” illegal.’ She had been determined to walk up and down them instead of taking the lift, but her resolve was getting weaker and weaker each day.
‘What shall we do?’ said Olive. ‘We are getting off, aren’t we? I’m dying to see the city.’
‘Me too. Apparently it’s lovely,’ said Frankie.
‘It’s going to be heaving,’ said Roz, calculating that if these ships had at least two thousand passengers each, then that was an awfully big influx on a port.
There was a shuttle bus at the portside to take them to the old city walls of Dubrovnik. It was a pretty drive there. The bus rose up a steep road flanked by lush green hills which were crowded with orange-roofed dwellings and shops. Narrow twisty lanes veered off at either side, crying out to be explored.
Fifteen minutes from the harbour, the bus deposited them alongside the old city walls, which looked remarkably intact and impenetrable. Ven would have liked to have dragged a certain firm of tradesmen out here to see what good craftsmanship meant after they made such a cock-up of her fireplace.
They walked over the slatted wooden drawbridge to one of the city entrances – the Pile Gate – where two brightly dressed sentries stood in ceremonial guard stance and silently withstood the photographs being taken of them. It was very busy with all nationalities of visitors: lots of Americans and Japanese tourists strung with cameras like comedy caricatures, and Italians with loud expressive gestures.
There were two parts to the Pile Gate, they discovered. After they had passed through the outer arch, there was an inner narrow gate which was very busy with people both entering and leaving. It took a frustratingly long time to step through as the crowds shuffled forwards, but it was worth it to see the city stretch out before them. Whilst Ven was appreciating the lovely Onofrio Fountain, Frankie and Roz were giggling at a waterspout-gargoyle set low into a nearby wall which looked the spitting image of Bruce Forsyth. There were no cars in the Old Town, which was just as well because there was no room on the road with the number of tourists who were sightseeing.
They wandered slowly down the main street – the arterial Stradun which was apparently under the sea until the Middle Ages, its stone cobbles polished by years of tourist-shoes to marble smoothness. To the left, a narrow road led off to a high bank of intriguing steps that Olive wanted to explore, but it was far too hot to climb up to scary heights. Olive said it looked like Harry Potter’s Diagon Alley, but still no one volunteered to go with her and discover if there was a Flourish & Blotts present there.
The British tourists were obvious from their reticence to push their way through knots of crowds like the other nationalities. Two people shoved in front of Ven in the ice-cream queue and she was too soft to do her British, ‘Excuse me, I think you’ll find it’s my turn.’ Frankie, however, wasn’t. She placed Ven out of the way first then claimed the shop assistant’s attention with a very loud and impossible-to-ignore order. She was smiling when she came out of the shop with the four large cones.
‘I’d forgotten how much fun it was to be bolshy,’ she said. Events of the past few years had made her far meeker than she was ever put on earth to be with Italian blood flowing through her. A few spats with some rude tourists had awakened something dormant inside her.
They sat on the steps of St Blaise Church people-watching for five minutes, whilst they ate their enormous ice creams. Two bronze jacks in the form of soldiers struck the big bell in the clock-tower, resulting in a pretty peal, a lovely sound in the hot, clear air. Then they took photographs of each other outside the Sponza Palace – it took a few attempts as to
urists kept walking in front of them. Thank goodness for digital cameras, thought Frankie, as she deleted two pictures of a portly Japanese man’s bum which had got in front of her as she snapped away. They wandered around the labyrinth of alleyways and through a bustling market, where Frankie bought two bottles of grappa for her dad and a huge lavender bag into which she buried her nose. The scent took her back to school Christmases, sewing lavender pockets to take home for presents. She loved the smell – it was so reminiscent of happy times.
The sun was boiling in the sky; Ven half-expected to look up and see it melting. Typically a load of British people she recognised from the ship passed and moaned about the heat, which made her laugh to herself. They came to places like this to be hot then couldn’t stand it, but then went home and bragged about how fabulous the weather had been, and wished they were back here as soon as they sniffed winter.
It was difficult to find anywhere to eat as all the cafés seemed full. And the shops were bulging with visitors so it was hard to get in them and look around.
‘Slow walk back to the shuttle bus, anyone?’ suggested Roz, as she had seen everything she wanted to. She was greeted with a flurry of yeses.
They were strolling back to the Pile Gate entrance when a familiar, ‘Hello,’ halted them in front of a café. Under a bright stripy canopy, Eric and Irene were tucking into big plates of pasta and glasses of plum brandy.
‘Drinking at this time, you two?’ teased Frankie.
‘We deserve it,’ said Eric.
‘We’ve just walked around the city walls,’ added Irene, raising her glass and wishing them Cheers.
‘What the hell for?’ asked Roz, wiping the drips off her forehead. ‘Are you mad?’
‘We did it to prove that we could,’ said Eric. ‘See you later, girls. Formal tonight! Best frocks on, remember.’
They wandered off smiling, leaving Eric and Irene to enjoy their well-earned pasta. The nearer they got to the Onofrio Fountain, the thicker the throng of people became. They joined the queue of tourists trying to get out of the city through the inner Pile Gate. The trouble was, there were as many people wanting to come in – and suddenly the crowd became a crush where no one was moving any which way. Ven pushed back against some big bloke pressuring her forward where there was nowhere to go. Roz noticed Frankie’s arms forming a protective cage over her breasts and tried to reach her. It was even scarier for Frankie being short and unable to see over people’s heads. She yelped as someone stepped back and elbowed her in the chest.
‘Roz, I can’t move,’ she cried out.
Roz stumbled and was pushed further away from Frankie by a large, wimpy bloke who was saying, ‘I feel sick, I have to get out of here,’ and flailing his arms like a big girl. Roz wanted to kick him, the selfish bastard. She couldn’t see Frankie at all now but she heard Ven shout, ‘Roz, are you there?’ Thanks to Wimp Man, Roz was now nowhere near her friends. She caught a flash of Frankie swallowed up in the crowd and knew she’d be breathless and panicky. Polite English voices were saying ‘This is ridiculous,’ amongst louder ramblings in other languages.
In the worst of the crush, Frankie was crying. Everyone around her was at least a foot taller and too intent on getting themselves out of the city to acknowledge anyone else’s vulnerability. She was pressed between two solidly-built men and she didn’t have the strength to stop the one behind squashing her chest further into the one in front. Suddenly there was a very English, ‘Whoa whoa whoa!’ and three tall male figures cut between the crowd with determined and considerable force to move the outgoers to the left, the incomers to the right. Two Frankie recognised immediately as men in Vaughan’s party – Freddy and his father. The other, head and shoulders above even the tall bloke in front of her who’d have the imprint of her boobs on his back for a few hours to come, had a cleanshaven face, give or take a thin line of beard at the jaw, gelled-back, shoulder-length fair hair – and a magnificent Celtic tattoo. It was Vaughan.
‘We’ll all move a lot quicker if you don’t push,’ Vaughan warned in a loud booming voice, his tone – if not his words – understandable in any language. He reached over to Frankie and hoisted her towards him, shielding her from people behind with an arm of iron. He didn’t have enough time to say anything other than, ‘You’re okay now.’ Suddenly Frankie felt space around her and Roz grabbing her arm at the other side of the arch. Frankie could breathe again; she stood against the wall trying to still her rasping chest. Then she saw Olive push herself out, followed by Ven deliberately elbowing past someone who’d just stood on her toe.
‘You all right, kid?’ said Ven, who knew that Frankie always hated being closed in, and anything near her chest area panicked her terribly these days.
‘I am now,’ said Frankie. ‘I feel like I’ve just plopped out of a birth canal.’
Two policemen nudged into the crowd now to officially sort out the bottle-neck.
‘I wish I knew the Croatian for “better late than never”,’ tutted Roz to their backs.
‘Come on, let’s get to the shuttle bus and go home,’ said Ven. ‘I need a big glass of ice wine after that.’ Substituting the word ‘home’ for ‘ship’ was an unconscious slip of the tongue.
It seemed that some nations enjoyed a good crowd-push more than others. There was pandemonium as a shuttle bus arrived for one of the other ships and the ordered queue disintegrated as everyone ran for the door. Grown men were tugging at each other’s shirts and gesticulating madly. Meanwhile the queue for the British Mermaidia stood ruler-straight and perfectly calm.
‘I’d love to come back here when it was quiet,’ said Roz.
‘I bet it’s lovely at night,’ Ven agreed.
Frankie remained quiet. Roz looked at her and noticed how small she was, especially after such a weight loss. Now she was seeing her through different eyes, Roz saw the full extent of the changes in her and it made her ashamed that she had ever thought those changes were down to vanity rather than illness. She vowed to make it up to her – somehow.
The Figurehead shuttle bus pulled up and the Mermaidia passengers climbed on. The air conditioning hit them like a delicious cold shower. Every passenger seemed to collapse onto a seat and then begin twittering about the Pile Gate crush.
But the pay-off was that it was extra-restful to enjoy the journey back to the portside, viewing the mountains plunging straight into the sea, the big ships at anchor, the private yachts showing off their swanky presence in the harbour, the pale-stoned houses with their green gardens and bursts of bright purple blossom on the trees. And it really did feel like coming home when they presented their cruise cards at the ship’s entrance and put their bags through the security machine.
After one glass of ice wine, all four of them stretched out on sunloungers and alternated between light snoozes and book-reading. Frankie was also giving Ven a crash course in Italian so she could find her way to the hotel she was looking for in Venice. Then, at five-fifteen, the ship set sail. Songs from the deck party around the nearby Neptune pool filtered over – ‘La Bamba’, ‘Tequila’. They joined the people lined up at the sides to wave to passengers on the Merry Cruises ship next door. Ven leaned over and watched the Croatian pilot step off the Mermaidia onto a small boat. He looked like an elderly James Bond in his slacks and shirt. He waved goodbye to the ship too as his transport twisted sharply in the water and headed back to Dubrovnik. The Mermaidia blasted a polite farewell to the mainland, which sounded like a ‘thank you for having us’ to Ven. There was a real sense of happiness pervading, as if a fishing net of smiles had been cast over the ship. It was odd, but lovely.
Then Nigel’s soft voice came over the Tannoy with the information that there was a whale on the portside. The four women stood and watched as something too far away to see jetted up a plume of water into the air and made yet another lovely memory for them all.
Chapter 42
That evening, as they took their places at the dinner-table, Ven asked if anyone else would like a t
urn at sitting next to Captain Nigel, but everyone seemed quite happy with the present seating arrangements. So Ven sat quietly next to the vacant seat, waiting for their guest to arrive and hoping she could get through the next two hours without making a total twerp of herself.
‘Have you seen those blokes who helped us through the crowd in Dubrovnik yet?’ Roz asked Frankie. ‘We owe them a drink or twelve.’
‘Nope,’ came the reply. It wasn’t for the want of trying though. Frankie had walked all round the ship a few times since they set sail trying to find Vaughan to say thank you for rescuing them. But she hadn’t seen anything of him or his party at all. It seemed that she only bumped into him when she wasn’t actively trying. She would meet up with him sooner rather than later, she hoped.
Royston was wearing a white shirt with frills down the centre. He looked like the offspring of the Queen’s private bingo-caller and Shirley Bassey. Roz reckoned that shirt must have cost a fortune too.
Ven spotted Nigel coming in from the other side of the restaurant and her leg went immediately into a nervous spasm. He really was totally gorgeous. She reached out for her glass of water, knocked over the wine which Angel had just poured out for her and caused havoc yet again.
Oh dear noises came from Irene, even louder ones from Eric. Buzz ran over with a serviette to mop up the worst of it and Ven wanted to die. Captain Nigel arrived just in time to witness the chaos.
‘Good evening, everyone,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry I’m late.’ He looked at the red-wine stain spoiling the perfect table.
‘My fault again, hey ho,’ said Ven. ‘Can’t blame any medication this time, though.’
‘Glad to hear it,’ said Nigel.
Elvis whispered something to the Captain, probably about changing the cloth but Nigel waved him away with a, ‘No, it’s fine, Elvis. Really. There are worse things at sea.’ He smiled and little crinkles appeared around his grey, grey eyes. Ven felt her heart boom against her ribcage.
Here Come the Girls Page 20