Sunrise By the Sea by Jenny Colgan

Chapter Three

Inside her little box room – like many of these expensive new builds in Exeter, the main room was flashy and showy with a big glass wall and a balcony, but the smaller bedrooms were done on the cheap – Marisa Rossi sat on the end of her bed, knees up to her chin, headphones on, the clatter beyond the door more or less white noise.

Another party. Another night when the rest of the world was out and about, having fun.

Everyone else seemed fine. Everyone else always seemed fine.

And, in the scheme of things, losing a grandparent was hardly heartbreaking loss. A lot of people lose grandparents. Everyone, when you think about it.

And they all still seemed able to go to parties. Everyone but her.

But somehow, she could only think of her nonno, Carlo: her kind, funny grandfather in Imperia, Italy, descended from generations of shipbuilders – a tradition that had only stopped with her mother, Lucia, who had left for the UK to find a better life, and married a man from Livorno, just down the road. Marisa’s father couldn’t bear the cold and the rain and left England – and Lucia alone, with Marisa and her brother, Gino. Marisa tried not to take it personally.

But her grandfather had stepped into the breach, and then some. Her fondest memories were golden: holidays spent in Italy; long days on the hot windy shores of Imperia, as the great big industrial ships rolled past; late dreamy evenings at restaurants as she ate spaghetti vongole and fell asleep under the table as the adults talked and laughed long into the night; cool hands rubbing in cream to sunburned shoulders; ice creams as big as a beach ball; stones underfoot as you ran into the water; the pungent scent of the exhausts of the Vespas of the young men gunning around the town, a contrast with the smartly uniformed navale stationed there; the long rolling rhythms of Italian summers.

Abandoned in her teens for holidays with her British friends on cheap packages in the Balearics, drinking shots and laughing uproariously, they sometimes, in her memory, felt like a dream; snatches of an older language tugging somewhere at the fraying edges of her brain, another person, happy and free, in big fussy-bowed dresses her grandmother – who was as stiff as her grandfather was loving – liked to buy her, and which she adored and her mother thought were absolutely awful.

Then life interfered, took her to college and on to Exeter and a job she used to love – being a registrar for the council. Births, marriages and deaths, it required a combination of a love for and interest in people, with a fairly meticulous approach to record-keeping, and nice handwriting. Marisa was not a show-offy type of person at all, but she was incredibly proud of her handwriting.

Then Carlo had died.

‘There’s no rhyme nor reason,’ her nice but very harassed GP had told her, when she explained the insomnia, the constant crying and, increasingly difficult for work, her encroaching fear of leaving the house and speaking to people, that seemed to get worse every day. ‘Grief affects everyone differently. It seems to me you have an anxiety disorder, shading into agoraphobia. I would suggest the best course is antidepressants.’

‘My grandfather died!’ Marisa had said. ‘I’m sad! I’m not “depressed”! This is normal.’

‘I’m just saying that they would almost certainly help.’

‘But then . . .’

Marisa fell silent.

‘What if I don’t even miss him any more? What if I don’t feel anything?’

The GP, too, fell silent, wanting to be reassuring; unable to mislead.

‘The wait for counselling is very long,’ she said finally.

‘Put me on it,’ said Marisa. ‘Please. Please.’

‘Okay,’ said the GP.

‘Why?’ said Marisa. ‘Why am I the only person who can’t get on with their life?’

The nice GP shook her head sadly.

‘It only looks that way,’ she said. ‘Don’t be fooled for a moment.’

She hadn’t been able to make it in time. He’d been out pruning in the garden, in the big black hat he wore all the time, probably, and had collapsed. No time to call, no time to say goodbye to the most important man in her life.

People saying he wouldn’t have known a thing about it, that it was better that way, did not, in Marisa’s opinion, know what the hell they were talking about. Did they seriously think he wouldn’t have wanted to say goodbye to the family he loved so much: her mother Lucia, her sister Ann Angela (actually Anna Angelica but quite the mouthful by anyone’s standards), the boys, and . . . well, her?

Somehow, she found the funeral, which she had to dash to, even more difficult. Her nonna, or grandmother, garbed in black, was cross and busy in the kitchen, insisting on cooking for thousands and refusing, in Marisa’s eyes, to face up to what was happening at all. And there was so many people – cousins, family, friends, bloody butcher and baker and candlestick maker – talking about how much they’d loved him (and, by inference, how much he had loved them in return), that the entire noisy family felt overwhelming on that wet October Italian day, and there was so much shouting and noise and Marisa, who had always been quiet, had retreated further into her shell, worrying that, after all, the love she had felt from her grandfather had meant little amid the clamour. He had been quiet too. She yearned for his big hand in her smaller one; couldn’t believe that she would never feel it again. But everyone else’s grief had felt louder, more pressing. And so she had taken hers home, let it sit, forming inside her, more and more layers building up, cementing it in place, holding her down like a ball and chain, and as the months had passed she’d found it increasingly difficult to leave the house at all.

‘Do you think you need your aura cleansed?’ Caius had said, and she had given him a look, but Caius was one of those people who could never notice when he was being annoying, and probably wouldn’t believe you if you’d told him. He’d been sent from the US to do a very expensive course in something or other near some uncle, but Marisa hadn’t seen him go once.

‘You just need to come out and get pissed up, durr, obviously,’ said her best friend Olive, but she somehow couldn’t face doing that either.

She pretended she had evenings out planned with work colleagues, which was a complete lie, but the other lie would be to pretend she had a date, which she didn’t, or she could be honest and say she was occasionally seeing Mahmoud again, but they all hated his guts for being a lazy cadging loser (albeit a very, very handsome, fit, lazy cadging loser) so she didn’t want to say that either. Aged twenty-nine, Marisa’s romantic history was . . . not patchy exactly. But being an introvert meant that often she hadn’t quite managed to pluck up the courage to tell people she didn’t like them that much, and things could bumble along, or she would lack the courage to make it clear to people she did like that she liked them, and they’d pass her by. When Olive had fancied Keegan, for example, she’d stuck on her false eyelashes and her push-up bra and simply turned up everywhere he was. And now they had bought a flat together and were planning on a baby and Marisa was delighted for them, of course she was, but the world was easier, she felt, on the confident Olives than on the shyer girls. Also, Olive pointed out that Mahmoud treated her like a doormat and the fact that that was completely true didn’t make her feel any better.

Anyway, because she didn’t like going over to his any more to watch him play computer games – Mahmoud was generally too lazy or a bit stoned to come over – that didn’t matter, and gradually, she’d found, as she sat and read over old letters from her grandfather or dug up old photographs of an evening, that it was just easier not to go out, much easier.

She told herself she’d do it tomorrow, or maybe the weekend.

And she volunteered for more and more of the admin work that didn’t mean having to go into the office. Nazreen, her boss, was puzzled – Marisa had always been so good at facing customers – not an extrovert, but calm and reassuring in her dealings with everyone. Now, though, she had become so terribly timid. Facing the public was so much the fun of their job, always had been. But although she couldn’t understand it, Nazreen was too busy to question what was going on. Marisa was still as efficient as ever and she let it go.

Oddly, Caius was the one who didn’t give up.

‘Have you done your ten thousand steps? You know you could probably do with a mantra.’

‘No thanks.’

‘MDMA?’

‘No!’

‘Okay! Hey, what should we have for dinner?’

He looked at her imploringly. When Marisa had moved in he had been pleased: she was nice, tidy, pretty but not his type (which was unusual, as the people who were Caius’ type was just about everybody), and best of all, she cooked. Caius didn’t eat very much – you didn’t stay model-thin and cool if you did – but when he did, he liked it to be the very best.

And now, all of that had gone. She looked tired and sad and miserable and there was never any food. This wasn’t fun in the slightest.

Inside, Marisa was gripped with fear. What was happening to her? She wasn’t crazy, was she?

She just . . . didn’t like going out any more. The world seemed scarier. Nobody would mind if she just stayed in, would they? She wasn’t bothering anyone. Just keeping nice and quiet in the back . . .

And then sometimes at night she would wake up breathless, and panicking, and think to herself, My life is going by, and find it hard to breathe, and think that she must, she must do something, and would go and pour a bath so hot she could barely sit in it, the water fierce against her skin, driving away her thoughts in a cloud of steam, staring out at the dark, thinking, Is this it now?

Christmas had made everything notably worse. Lucia had wanted a big family get-together to remember her grandfather, and the thought of it had made Marisa a bit panicky. In the end, she hadn’t been able to go; to face everyone again, cheery and loud and getting on with their lives.

She’d tried looking for other things to do, and making excuses, but Lucia was having none of it, and in the end there had been a horrible bust-up on the family WhatsApp. Her brother Gino had phoned, then Lucia had, in dramatic tears calling her selfish, and gradually they had ended up in one of those heated family rows. Usually when this happened someone would eventually have to get up and make a cup of tea and, at the end of an excruciating amount of time would have to shout, ‘Anyone else want one?’, and after that everything would be mended. But this time, not being in physical proximity to each other, that hadn’t happened. And so nothing got mended. It had shocked both Marisa and her mother, Marisa thought. Lucia was used to Marisa being a quiet, acquiescent little mouse and now she’d made a stand.

Even though, Marisa knew deep down, the stand was no good for her. She should have been with her family.

But guilt added a new layer of calcification to the stone inside her that was dragging her down and keeping her in; layer upon layer of sadness and grief and worry that was growing too large for her to do anything at all.

She had spent Christmas inside, on her own, fielding increasingly nasty texts from her mother, not so subtly implying she was doing it for attention. She’d gone to working full time from home. Her appointment with the NHS therapist still hadn’t come up. And, three months on, things were looking worse, not better.

The morning after the party, Caius came to a decision that was going to make things worse still.