The Road Trip(12)

‘Is she missing, or what?’ Addie asks.

I think for a moment. ‘She’s whimsical,’ I say eventually. ‘She likes to keep people guessing.’

Addie raises her eyebrows. ‘She sounds tedious.’

I frown. ‘She’s wonderful.’

‘If you say so.’

Grace was with Marcus for most of third year, though neither of them ever gave their relationship any sort of label. She’d flirted with me outrageously after a tutors’ dinner in Trinity term, and Marcus had laughed. Why not? he’d said, when Grace had climbed into my lap and I’d looked at him, drunk, a little lost. We share everything else. So Grace and I became . . . whatever-we-were just before the summer, and then she disappeared. Off to travel, boys, her note had read. Come catch me. G

It was exciting for a while, and it’s given a shape to mine and Marcus’s aimless wanderings around Europe, but we still haven’t found her, and the clues she’s been leaving us – odd texts, late-night voicemails, messages passed on by youth-hostel owners – are becoming briefer and fewer. I’ve been getting rather worried about her losing interest in the both of us and the trail running cold; once that happens, I’ll have no choice but to answer the question of what the hell I’m doing with my life, a question I am at great pains to avoid.

Ahead of us, the road winds its way up the hillside into dark woodland, then opens out again to reveal parched, chalky fields scored with vines. I don’t mean to be critical but Addie is driving far too slowly – these tailback roads are meant for speeding on, but she’s crawling up the hill and braking for every corner like an old lady in a ?koda.

‘You strike me as a man who gets driven more than he drives,’ Addie says. ‘But I can feel you back-seat driving.’

‘My father gets driven,’ I say. ‘I drive.’

‘Well, look at you.’ Addie laughs. ‘Aren’t you just a regular guy!’

I frown, irritated – with her, for a second, and then with myself – but before I can think of a suitable response we round a bend and above us is a village cut into the rockface, so beautiful it distracts me altogether. The rough stone of the cliff is dotted with houses in the same shade of pale, sandy yellow, their higgledy roofs slanting this way and that between cypress and olive trees. A castle sits atop the hill, the slitted windows of its turret turned our way like narrowed eyes.

I whistle between my teeth. ‘This place belongs in a fairy tale.’

‘It’s my sister’s least favourite place around here,’ Addie says. ‘She hates heights.’

‘You have a rather negative outlook on the world,’ I tell her, as we wind our way up towards the village. Fields of olive trees give way to dense hedges and stone walls cut into the side of the hill, with scrubby bleached grass clinging doggedly to the crevices.

Addie looks surprised. ‘Me?’

‘The fairy-tale castle is too high up, my whimsical friend is tedious, my singing voice is not to your liking . . .’

She pauses and purses her lips in thought. That mole shifts. Suddenly looking at her lips is too much for me: I’m gone, thinking about kissing her, thinking about her mouth against my skin. She catches my eye and her gaze seems somehow molten.

I swallow. She turns back to the road, shifting into a passing place as a rattling open-backed truck comes barrelling down the hill.

‘I don’t think of myself as negative. Practical, maybe.’

I make a face accidentally – still tipsy, then – and she catches it and laughs.

‘What?’

‘Just . . . ah. Practical. It’s the sort of thing you say about someone matronly and stout. An aunt with a knack for darning socks.’

‘Oh, thanks,’ Addie says dryly, pulling her sunglasses down from the top of her head as the road twists again, bringing us head-on with the low, fierce sun.

‘It was you who said practical,’ I point out. ‘I’d call you . . . feisty.’

‘Not if you didn’t want booting out of the car, you wouldn’t.’

‘No?’

I admit, I knew that would get a rise out of her.

‘How about bolshy? Sassy?’

She cottons on and a smile tugs at the corner of her lips. ‘You’re trying to wind me up, aren’t you?’

She likes to be teased, then. I file that away.

‘I’m showing you how enlightened I am. After making the mistake with little.’

‘And the judging of my driving.’

‘And that.’

I’m getting somewhere – her tone has warmed. We’re in the village now, and between the houses the view is breathtaking: distant, hazy blue hills behind tumbling fields of olive trees and grapevines. There’s something mythic about it all. It feels like a setting, rather than a place, as if stories are meant to be made here, and the sense of grandeur resettles on my shoulders as I breathe in the husky scent of olive trees on the air.

Addie parallel parks outside a little café. It has plastic tables underneath a bamboo awning; a group of Frenchmen sitting by the door watch us with mild interest as we make our way inside.

I ask the woman behind the till whether she’s seen a tall, hippy-ish young woman with pink hair down to her waist, gold piercings in her nose and a tattoo of an English rose on her shoulder. No, the woman says, so I try purple hair, or blue – Grace goes through hair dye the way Marcus goes through pretty first-year girls who’ve yet to be informed of his terrible reputation.