Page 18 of Sunrise By the Sea

There was a short pause, then the picture jumped and went blank.

Marisa waited. And waited again. Nothing. Had she dreamed it?

She called back on Skype. Even the picture on the tiny icon made her wistful; one of her and her grandfather, hand in hand on the sand.

The phone rang for a long time. Marisa realised she had almost forgotten her terrifying neighbour for a second, then quickly turned the volume down on the laptop.

‘PRONTO!’

Now, there was her grandmother’s face, looming terrifyingly over the full screen. Marisa flinched backwards in alarm. She also sounded incredibly loud. She nervously glanced to the side. At least the bedrooms didn’t share a dividing wall. That really would have been difficult. Mind you, why should she care? If anyone deserved to be disrupted by noise, it was him.

‘Nonna?’

Her grandmother’s voice boomed. ‘Marisa! There you are!’

‘Sit down, Nonna, you don’t need to be so close.’

Reluctantly the old woman moved back and was finally sitting in front of the sideboard, at the huge wooden table, which was also far too large for the house, on which Marisa had eaten so many meals she could remember the blush of the tomatoes; the clink of ice cubes in pastel-coloured plastic glasses; the shape of the netting skirts that covered the fruit bowl, that folded with a snap which she had been fascinated with as a child, until Nonna had smacked her hand away and told her not to touch them. Lucia, her own mother, wouldn’t have hit her in a million years; the child had gone wide-eyed and pale. But she had never touched them again.

‘Can you hear me? I can’t hear you.’

‘I can hear you fine. Turn up your volume.’

‘What is that?’

Painstakingly, Marisa described the right key to press, and was rewarded with her grandmother’s look of satisfaction. She could only imagine the volume she was booming out now. Mind you, they didn’t have neighbour problems. Their walls were about six foot thick. They barely exchanged a word with their neighbours anyway due to some contretemps, decades before, between their Little Carlo – then a child, now a grown man with a family of his own – and one of the smaller children in the playground over marbles which had ended up in a vowed blood feud. Marisa thought about that. She hoped it didn’t run in the family, this type of thing.

‘Well,’ said her grandmother eventually sitting back. ‘Look at me, on the computer.’

Marisa smiled shyly. She’d written to her grandmother, of course, and guessed Lucia spoke to her plenty, but she didn’t . . . they’d never quite had the relationship she’d had with her grandfather, and didn’t really know where to start.

‘How are you doing?’ she asked carefully. ‘Since Nonno . . .’

Hernonnasniffed. She was dressed all in black, her hair lightly pulled back with a great grey streak through it. She looked rather fine, in fact, Marisa noticed.

‘Well,’ said Nonna. ‘He is with God now.’

‘You miss him?’

‘I speak to him every day.’

She crossed herself briefly. Marisa felt herself sadden; she was hoping for a conversation with her grandmother, not platitudes.

‘Well, that’s good.’

Her grandmother’s lips twitched. ‘And sometimes, now, he listens!’

Marisa smiled at this.

‘And I did a computer class!’

‘I see that.’

‘Everyone else said, ah, you are old and behind the times, but Father Giacamo ran a class at the church and now PING! I am on the internet.’

‘You are on the internet.’

‘Everyone is very impressed with me,’ she said smugly. ‘Especially Father Giacomo. And I have more time now. Now that it is just me.’

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