A landscape change again.
The long road we drive down now feels like an aisle: Van Gogh’s favourite plane trees – Aurelia’s knowledge, not mine – reach over from each side, stretching like students in a yoga class to meet each other in the middle.
‘Fear?’ she says. ‘A reluctance to dig up the past? I don’t know.’ Her head snaps up. ‘Oh shit. Turn around. We missed the road.’
I mutter under my breath. We can’t afford to waste time.
I find a place to do a risky three-point turn and head back to where we need to be and try, really hard, to ignore the pressure of my own tears. I remember something Loll said last week: they aren’t helpful, Steffie. I don’t think she was being callous; only realistic. Save your energy for the stuff we need. There will be a lot of it.
But those tears exist. They need an outlet somewhere.
‘Fuck, fuck, FUCK,’ I mutter, wishing I wasn’t in a contained space and in charge of a vehicle so I could shout, swear, punch a wall.
What is happening now?
Are we too late?
And where, as her mum and I drive through the French countryside, is Loll?
I look out of the windows at a young couple coming out of a small, boutique art gallery.
At a teenage boy having a breather and a can of Coke as he leans up against his bike in the blistering heat.
And you, Romilly? Where are you? Are you getting a breather from whatever you are doing?
But there is nothing I can do. Not yet. I look at my hands, gripped tightly to the steering wheel.
I think of how I’ve never heard Ella mentioned. Of how, really, I never hear any part of Marc’s past mentioned. There was a visit, once, I think, that Romilly and Marc made to his mother on the South Coast … Romilly didn’t talk about it though.
Odd, in retrospect. We talk about everything.
Ro’s mum reaches into her bag.
I imagine Loll at home now; kids’ clothes ironed and lined up for the next day on the radiator; a bedside table with night creams in a row, floss sticks in a jar, dusted twice a week.
But something hums. If that’s the picture, why are you not answering your phone, Loll?
I feel the pain in my neck again. Move it around to release it. Outside there is a queue at a van for rotisserie chicken. The smell drifts through the window and my stomach reacts and I realise it has been eight hours now since I have eaten.
For five minutes or so, we drive in silence. I start to feel like I have a hangover and I don’t know if it is the gin, the hunger, the weight of all of this or the fear: what next? What now?
When we are static at traffic lights, I turn to Aurelia, wrap my fingers around her forearm. Squeeze.
Sweat makes its steady way down the back of my T-shirt. We drive through a village that blooms at the start of the summer season; outside the car, tourists peel off layers and shove them in wheely cases that thunder along behind them over rickety stone even though it’s after 6 p.m. A heaving market wraps up its brie, takes in empty paella vats.
Kids clutch tight to bobbing horses on carousels, rainbow colours jump in the corners of my eyes.
I put the window back up. It’s doing nothing except letting in hot air and happiness. I’m not sure which is worse.
The air con fares no better.
The dashboard of the car tells me that it is thirty degrees outside.
The sweat runs down my back.
And I feel a shiver run from my head down to my toes.