17
‘So how old are you?’
Mercedes counts up in her head. She still can’t do the English numbers above ten without doing that. Same with the days of the week. ‘Twelve,’ she replies. ‘You?’
‘Thirteen,’ Tatiana says, proudly. That single year makes all the difference. ‘When’s your birthday?’
‘December.’
‘Ah! Sagittarius! I’m a Gemini.’
This information means nothing to Mercedes. She decides she’s best just nodding nicely.
‘And how many brothers and sisters do you have?’
‘One. Donatella. She nearly sixteen.’
‘I,’ Tatiana declares proudly, ‘am an only child. So have you always lived here?’
Mercedes nods.
‘And where else have you been?’
The question surprises her. ‘Nowhere.’
‘Not even Sardinia?’
Why would she go to Sardinia? It’s full of monsters. Everybody says so. Fedi Bastiani was stabbed in a dockside bar there three days after he went away to make his fortune. They brought his body back in a coffin and made them all go and look at his bloodless corpse before they buried him.
She shakes her head.
‘Oh, my God,’ says Tatiana, ‘I’ve been everywhere.’
‘Everywhere?’
‘Well, I’ve been to thirty-seven countries,’ she says, proudly.
Thirty-seven! Are there that many countries? Mercedes realises that she knows very little about the world. She’s only heard of maybe fifteen countries altogether. She strains to think of more.
Tatiana reels off a list of names that sound impossibly exotic.
‘I’ve been to all the continents,’ she finishes, ‘except Antarctica. And Daddy says there’s nothing to see there anyway.’
Mercedes determines to learn better English. She wants to drink it all in. Tatiana has shown her what the sea looks like beneath the surface, and that is everything.
Tatiana is talking again. Something to do with her school and something called skiing.
Mercedes cuts in. ‘But where you live?’ she asks.
Tatiana stops short, and frowns, as though she’s never considered the matter before. ‘I – England, I suppose.’
‘You suppose?’
She sighs. ‘We have houses everywhere, and we’re hardly ever there. But I go to school there, so … but I’m half American, of course. Mummy was American.’
Mercedes can’t stop herself competing. ‘We have two houses. One in the town and one in the country.’
Tatiana blinks like a chameleon on a rock. She doesn’t like being interrupted, thinks Mercedes.