TOÄD

Mack descended the steps from the Hotel Grottella a full twenty minutes late. She was wearing big Audrey Hepburn sunglasses, a screen-printed t-shirt knotted high on one side to flash a triangle of gym-membership flesh, and yoga pants with a Technicolor Day of the Dead motif leading down to bare ankles and white trainers.

Duncan and Gianluca were leaning against the Punto, having long ago chewed through all they felt like saying at that hour of the morning. They exchanged looks, shared a wavelength.

Duncan cleared his throat. ‘You know we’ll be going into a bunch of churches today?’

‘And?’

‘And, well, look at your t-shirt for starters. A burning skull, eating a— what? A surfboard?’

‘Look closer, babe.’

He should have kept his mouth shut. At least she wasn’t wearing that fucking coat. But there he was, hitting the marks, delivering the lines, just as she had scripted. There were three kinds of people, he thought. Those who dress for aesthetics, those who dress for comfort and those who dress to set up their own dumb jokes.

The t-shirt was standard heavy-metal fare, black with the word TOÄD — a band he’d never heard of, though he wasn’t that into metal — in gothic font above the skull, but on closer inspection there was another line of text in a smaller, more angular font:

THE WET SPROCKET.

He laughed on cue.

‘Right?’ Mack said, smiling. ‘I mean, how great to have a band so easily dismissed as limp nineties radio rock colliding with —’ she ran fingers down from chest to navel — ‘this.’

‘Only a handful of people would take the time to get it back in the States. But here? Do you get it?’ he asked Gianluca, who pushed his hands forward to say, Don’t bring me into this. ‘In Italy,’ Duncan continued, ‘in a friggin’ church, they’re just going to see the red glowing eyes, the string of blood from the skull’s mouth and think you’re, I don’t know, Satanic?’

‘What about your outfit?’

He was wearing blue jeans and a white button-down shirt with faint grey stripes, the only flourish coming from one of the hand-tooled leather belts his grandfather used to wear.

Mack: ‘I can’t decide if you’re going for too-old-to-be-an-intern intern, or Latter Day Saint.’

‘I was going for respectful comfort.’

‘Satanic?’ She looked down at her t-shirt and made a tsk sound. ‘Do you think the devout prefer Satanists to atheists? I mean, they have more in common with Satanists, on one level at least.’

Duncan wasn’t sure if they were still on script or not, if he was winning or losing. ‘Well, you might be able to ask them today if you, like, change your t-shirt. And maybe those leggings.’

‘Fuck that. This is the start of our road trip.’

Duncan groaned. Road trip. Just the phrase made him feel a million miles from Motta.

‘Here was I thinking you might be cool about this,’ she said, ‘for once in your life?’

‘Like Toad The Wet Sprocket cool? Or Scandinavian Death Metal cool? Coz I’m getting mixed signals.’

Her expression. Was it seething? Had he won that round?

The silence in the Punto as it shivered toward Lecce wasn’t awkward, just silence. Mack was immersed in her phone in the back seat. She and Gianluca were tired, no doubt. It felt odd to be leaving Giuseppe’s birthplace already. What did he really have? A couple of gigabytes on a memory card. Two dozen pages of measurements and observations in his notebook. What had he learned? Plenty about Gianluca. And, perhaps, a glimpse of a different Mack. Footholds for a future heart to heart, if that’s what the situation demanded. But Giuseppe? He’d decided, at least, to call him by his given name from here on out, rather than the Anglicised Joseph.

When in Rome.

Also, having been to Copertino, it now bugged him when it was changed to Cupertino in English, like the town in California, home of Apple’s HQ. Such confusion was best avoided. And, besides, he was an Android guy.

Outside the rental-car outfit, hugs exchanged, luggage in hand, Gianluca turned back to Mack. ‘It was a pleasure meeting you, Felicity.’

‘Babe,’ she said, grabbing for the back of her head.

‘And Duncan,’ he said, ‘drive safe, okay, my friend?’

There were two clerks behind the counter, both with straight black hair and dark kohl-rimmed eyes. Strikingly similar but not identical, probably not even related. More like two celebrities who get mistaken for each other when they try to go incognito — Amy Adams and Isla Fisher, Margot Robbie and Jaime Pressley, Julia Roberts and Steven Tyler — a confusion that seemed to irk them equally and which they took out on their patrons. Between the two of them they spoke maybe a dozen words before Duncan was taken out back and shown the small silver Nissan Micra that was to be their car for the remainder of the trip.

Mack, who’d been glued to her phone the whole time in the office and during her zombie walk to the car, finally looked up. ‘Jeez. It’s like a starter car on Gran Turismo.’ She cocked one eyebrow, then went back to what she’d been reading.

‘Excuse me, this can’t be right,’ Duncan said, reaching into his satchel to find the piece of paper. ‘It says here—’

‘Compact,’ the clerk replied.

‘No, no, no,’ he said. ‘Hold on. Alfa Romeo Giulietta or similar, it says here. Intermediate, not, uh, compact.’

‘That is an old version,’ she said.

‘Huh?’ His first thought: this car was somehow an update of the Alfa. Another Italian icon that had been swallowed up by a multinational. Hadn’t he seen something on a doco on Netflix about the guy who designed cars for Chrysler also being in charge of Alfa Romeos? But Nissan was a whole other automotive ecosystem.

‘Your booking was changed,’ the woman said. ‘Two days ago.’

‘Uffy!’

‘Pardon?’

‘Never mind.’

Mack, not looking up from her phone: ‘What’s up, babe?’

‘Motta’s assistant downgraded us.’ He’d noticed one or two of the hotels had changed between the earliest version of the itinerary and the final one, and had assumed it was related to cost. But to have things being changed now, while he was on the ground. It felt treacherous. Uffy was becoming the Newman to his Jerry.

‘A Nissan, though,’ Mack said. ‘Who drives a Japanese car in Italy?’

‘It seems we do.’

Maybe Mack’s my Newman, he thought. Can you have two Newmans?

‘Is it automatic?’ he asked.

‘Manual,’ the woman replied, not getting her tongue back far enough for the English ‘u’, plugging the Italian ‘oo’ in its place. Was it laziness or some physical barrier she’d failed to breach? Maybe this was the source of her bitterness, the blip in her English that kept her working in retail rather than delivering PowerPoints for some pharmapetrochemical hedge fund? He considered placing a hand on her shoulder, consoling her, even though he was the one who hadn’t driven a stick for years. Maybe it was a good thing the car was small.

Once inside the Micra, he handed Mack a page with the various stops they would make along the way, but she was more interested in sorting out the music than plotting their route in Google Maps. The rental car woman stood watch, now joined by her lookalike colleague, there for a laugh. To see him stall or scrape the paintwork. Would he have been this anxious if Gianluca hadn’t made such a big deal of driving in Italy? Perhaps this anxiety would benefit him on the road — a weary vigilance that would inoculate him from the needless, headlong lunacy of the locals?

‘I need to know where to go when I get out of this car park, Felicity?’

‘Don’t you start. I’ve finally got my mother trained.’

‘How is she?’

‘Same old. Turn left.’

‘But you don’t even have Maps up.’

‘Aha!’ Mack said. Music began through the car’s stereo. Toad The Wet Sprocket, Duncan thought. If not for the t-shirt, he might have said Gin Blossoms or Dishwalla — one of those bands he’d never thought or felt much about when they were current and he was growing up, but now, despite himself, could deliver a tingle of nostalgia.

He was crawling forward, conscious of the smirking sentries, the approaching car-park exit, the lack of reliable directions. He heard a knock, like a coffee mug being plonked on to a table. Mack’s eyes went anime wide.

‘You just clipped that pole,’ she said.

‘I can’t have.’

‘Your wing mirror.’

‘It’s fine.’

‘Fucking eh. And you wanted a bigger car.’ She turned to look at the rental-car clerks. ‘We should get outta Dodge, pronto.’

‘Directions?’

‘Left,’ Mack repeated.

Duncan sighed and rolled on to the road, accelerated, changed into second gear as he turned the wheel, and found his lane.

‘You’re doing it, man.’

‘Shut up and tell me where I need to go.’

She sighed, pulled the page out from beneath her thigh and started typing into her phone. ‘Oh,’ she said.

‘Oh what?’

‘Pull a U-ey.’