Sunrise By the Sea by Jenny Colgan

Chapter Thirty-eight

Just do something, Marisa told herself. Just get to it. You don’t have to go anywhere, you don’t have to do anything. Just do it.

And by the light of the candles – and the lightning strikes, which turned the sky into a fireworks display – she pulled and kneaded the dough, turned up the oven, used up the very good olive oil and the bright crystals of sea salt.

She baked cakes, little yoghurt cakes, and she made focaccia, as well as she could in the hottest part of the oven, sprinkled with rosemary and salt and smelling like heaven; and she wrapped everything up in tea towels and wished she had a flask, but took a full teapot and some cups anyway. Then she stood at the front door. And she knew she couldn’t open it, and at the same time she knew that she could.

What did she have for lunch two days ago? she asked herself desperately. Could she get herself out of her own way?

She held her basket closer and put on her raincoat, all the while saying to herself, ‘Lunch two days ago. Lunch two days ago.’

It had been halloumi, she thought. Grilled with sun-dried tomatoes and rocket leaves. It had been delicious; she had added a tiny amount of balsamic vinegar, not too much, because it had a tendency to drown everything out. Nonna had sniffed as she disapproved of ‘foreign’ cheese no matter how much Marisa inveigled on her to try it. Halloumi. Yes. Get out of your own way.

She pulled open the door. There was a maelstrom beyond; a vision, in fact, as close to the idea of hell, of the sandworm vista that her brain could have conjured up for her.

And the day before that, what had she had? Leftovers, probably; she’d roasted a chicken and normally she would have saved it for Alexei. That was probably what she was planning when she had bought it but of course now he wasn’t talking to her because of his stupid pages, so she had ended up . . .

She had one foot on the top step. This wasn’t like charging out in a fit of fury, or going to the top of the road. She was going somewhere. She was going somewhere to talk to people.

Chicken. Roasted chicken, with the waxed lemons from her care box rubbed over the skin; with far more cloves of garlic roasting than she could possibly need, just for greediness and the fact that, for all its hardships, it wasn’t a bad thing you weren’t going to run into people at close quarters when you’d eaten half a bulb of garlic.

Two steps. She was shaking all over.

And the night before. What had she had with the chicken, on a Sunday night when Nonna wouldn’t let her watch television because it was unholy on the Lord’s day and they’d had to listen to hymns and chat instead but somehow it hadn’t mattered so much because although in English she felt so awkward, such a failure, a mental health problem, someone off work, in Italian she felt simple and secure and basic. She could talk about food, and weather and listen to Nonna slag off the neighbours, which seemed a bit worse on a holy day but woe betide mentioning that.

And she was on step three.

Food. Food was helping. She thought hard. Back to a big plate – one of her earliest memories, truly a big plate of steaming seafood, in shells, that had seemed wondrous and a little frightening to her and Gino, and her grandfather had shown her how to scoop out the mussels with a little shell, hot and scented with garlic and lemon; and they had both discovered the delicious chewy strings of the deep-fried calamari, which they liked immediately, making squid faces at each other; too hot to eat, greasy, slippery and salty, but chewy too, exploding like sunshine in their mouths as their mother fussed around putting on sun cream and hats and forcing them under umbrellas and everyone went quiet and lay down for their pisolinos, and a drowsy peace would descend over the beach and everyone there, and full of seafood and with the promise of an ice cream later if she lay quietly, curled up next to her beloved grandfather, Marisa would drift off . . .

She was in the road. The rain was pelting her, hard, the thunder still roaring overhead. She concentrated on the sound of the sea, the salt, even rough and ferocious as it was, provided her with the thinnest silvery line. Get out of your own way, she whispered to herself. Get out of your own way.

She kept that thinnest line between her memories, pulling her down the hill towards the water. Memories of happy meals with lots of people. Wonderful dinners when they’d all crammed round tiny student tables, everyone bringing a dish. Although as soon as they realised how much better Marisa was at cooking than the rest of them put together, they had eventually left her to it. A fragrant fish stew with the best part of a bottle of white wine in it. A perfect, plain-cooked salt cod eaten in Ischia with her last boyfriend but one. The rest of the holiday had been a disaster and they’d broken up but it was almost worth it for that fish, in her opinion. In fact it absolutely was. Just remember the happy things. Just think back. Get out . . . get out of your own way.

Her foot plunged ankle-deep into the running stream of the road, but she didn’t stop.

She clung tightly to the boxes she was carrying; inhaled their scent. Bread. Fresh bread on a camping trip with her family when they’d been washed out and had to spend the night in the car, turning up to the bakery as soon as it opened and the warm fragrance of the warm focaccia after a sleepless night. The slices of wedding cake that turned up weekly in the office, as grateful newly-weds remembered their ministrations – Nazreen hated fruit cake so the rest of the office normally got all of it, and Marisa loved marzipan, all year round.

The croissant marmalata that made them know that they were on holiday, the first things they always got, sometimes even at the airport as soon as they disembarked at Genoa, filled with sweet orange jam that you could never find at home; the announcement that you were here, where her mother would relax and feel at home, even though to her and Gino it was a foreign country.

Lucia had left Italy to make money and do well and raise her children and she had done all of those things.

But she had done them in the rain; in winters when the dark seemed to settle for months; where everyone worked all day and scurried home to lock themselves in sealed houses and watch television. When her mother first learned she got forty minutes at school for lunch, she thought it wouldn’t be physically possible. When one of Marisa’s friends came round for dinner and announced that she normally ate in front of the television, Lucia’s eyes nearly bugged out of her head; Marisa had heard her telling Nonna that night on the phone, who was convinced that doing that kind of thing would lead you straight to hell. Her father had said, before he left, that the British knew how to make money, but they didn’t know how to live.

But she, Marisa, loved her home country.

She loved Mars bars and Dick and Dom and going to Nando’s and eating fish fingers at six p.m. at her friends’ houses and talking about going to college and nobody remotely concerned about marrying a nice Catholic boy the family knew and settling down next door to everyone you’d ever known. She loved the amazing music and TV and the grand history and the jokes and all sorts of different people living hugger-mugger together; the beauty of the countryside, the down-to-earth people; her mother’s amazement that the DVLA actually worked.

She loved to visit Italy – but she was British. And while this saddened her mother, it delighted her grandfather, who was overjoyed at his proud independent grandchild, and would always squeeze her hand and tell her he was proud of her.

Marisa could see the villagers now down at the docks, hauling at rocks and sandbags, digging, and doing their best against the rising tide of water.

She had done it.