A Spot Of Bother

110

Katie was lying in a deck chair on the roof terrace. She was looking down over Barcelona. But the terrace was the terrace outside their room in that hotel in San Gimignano. And she could see the ocean which you couldn’t in San Gimignano. The air smelt of something halfway between sun lotion and really good vanilla custard. Jacob was asleep, or staying with Mum and Dad in England, or just generally absent in a way that didn’t make her anxious. And actually it was a hammock not a deck chair.

Then Ray trod on the Playmobil knight and yelled, and Jacob yelled because Ray had broken the Playmobil knight and Katie was awake and she was getting married today and it was probably a moment you had to stop and savor, but savoring wasn’t really possible because by the time she’d brushed her teeth and washed her face the caterers were downstairs wondering how much of the kitchen they could colonize, so she had to jump-start Mum, and then Jacob was upset because Ronnie had finished the Bran Flakes and instead of apologizing or offering to go out and get some more from the village shop he was giving Jacob a sermonette on not always being able to have what you want, though the problem had been caused by Ronnie doing precisely that. Then Ed turned up and trod in the monumental pile of crap their bloody dog had left in the middle of the path and it was clearly going to carry on in this fashion pretty much till the end of the day.