Free Eating With the Angels by Sarah-Kate Lynch Page A

crowd.
    ‘Mary-Constance,’ a thin voice crackled behind me. It sounded just like my mother and I whirled around, startled, bumping into a little girl on crutches and knocking her into the arms of her father who hissed at me in an unrecognisable language. I was sweating, my heart thumping like a jackhammer. ‘Mary-Constance!’ I again heard someone say in my mother’s irritated tone. I spun around again but there were no small, disappointed American women anywhere to be seen. Instead, an overweight elderly man with three cameras around his neck brushed past me, misjudging the width of his enormous hipsand knocking me off balance. I staggered sideways, my legs buckling as my hands flapped blindly in front of me, finding — thank heaven — the warm stone of the bridge’s ancient railing. The fat ribbon of sparkling canal water stretching beneath and beyond me suddenly seemed dazzling; the whole scenario blurred into a golden shimmering haze.
    ‘Marco,’ I cried weakly, because while most things seemed unfamiliar and out of focus, one thing was clear: I was about to faint. And, being me, I would quite likely land on something recently deceased and foul-smelling. ‘Marco,’ I whispered as darkness clawed at the sides of my eyes. I needed rescuing, whether he was an axe murderer or not.
    The world turned black. I was gone.
    When I came back, I was, you have probably guessed it, in his gondola. Well, where else would I have been? Seriously, it hardly surprised me at all, the day was turning out so strange. And you know what, I have since met another woman who fainted in Venice and woke up in a gondola so it’s not even really that far-fetched. Of course she was in the gondola before she fainted but still.
    Anyway, when I woke up I was lying on that blue and gold brocade-upholstered love seat and the gondola was moving swiftly and silently through the busy canal. It took me a few seconds to work out what was happening. At first I thought the buildings were moving and I was staying still. It was an odd sensation: I felt disconnected from consciousness, as though I were flying in a dream. (Actually, it reminded me of the way I felt the time Fleur talked me into a night of tequila slammers.) My hand ran across the gondola seat’s smooth brocade and found a tassel, which I fingered like a blind person reading Braille. I was in Venice, in a gondola, I told myself trying to breathe into the pain in my head. I was with Marco, I reminded myself, as the calming sound of the boat slicing through the city’s waterways comforted me. At least I assumed I was with Marco. I felt less comforted. Well, was I with Marco? Or was someother gondolier I knew even less spiriting me away? I twisted around to find that it was indeed Marco standing behind me, steering us down the canal. He smiled at me and my panic leeched away.
    ‘What happened?’ I asked him, my voice feeble and odd again.
    ‘Don’t worry,’ he answered me. ‘I’m taking care of you.’
    ‘But where are we going?’
    ‘It’s too hot out here,’ he said. ‘I’m taking you somewhere cool.’
    It was okay, he was rescuing me. It occurred to me that had I not drunk wine at 10 in the morning on a hot day in a foreign city without a husband to supervise me, I might not have needed rescuing. But the damage had been done. The wine had been drunk. The husband remained in New York. The gondolier was taking me somewhere cool.
    And so I simply rolled back onto my brocade bed and stared straight at the intense Venetian sun so that it obliterated the sight of everything else. I didn’t want to think about whether this was a good idea or not, going who-knew-where with Marco, a man I didn’t know but somewhere deep inside, down below, wanted to. I knew it was a strange thing to let happen, I mean I was sort of being kidnapped but I didn’t seem to mind. It was just like being an ordinary tourist, I figured, only cheaper as I hadn’t had to pay for the ride.
    We turned off