There was the obligatory naked sculpture – the odd bronze wang looming over me as I ambled around. I couldn’t sniff out the picture Salomé had painted with her period clots, thank God, and the old nut job herself held court at the front of the gallery, giving short talks about the pieces in Spanish. She didn’t look insane. She reminded me of Golden Girl Dorothy – tall and stern-looking in a long-sleeved blue silk dress with chunky bead necklace.

I stopped beside a huge ornate wall sculpture of shining gunmetal, formed into a shark with all these tiny suckerfish attached to its back. Two hundred and forty thousand pesos. Next to it was a drawing of a mother and child – the mother holding the infant, both their heads turned away. It was the simplest black charcoal drawing but I couldn’t stop staring at it.

‘Hello, young lady,’ came the voice.

I ventured a peek. Salomé looked right at me, her last customers just leaving. ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘How are you?’

‘Oh, are you English?’ she said. ‘How lovely. We don’t get many English visitors to this area anymore.’

Thank fuck for that, I thought.

‘Did you see anything you liked?’

‘Yes, lots of things,’ I lied. ‘I like this one a lot.’

‘Madre e Hija. Yes, it’s perfectly understated, isn’t it? I noticed you looking at the oil paintings in the window by my nephew.’

‘Rafael?’

‘Rafael Arroyo-Carranza. I’m exhibiting him all this month.’

Of course he would have such a beautiful last name. But there was one flaw at least: he couldn’t paint for shit.

‘They’re… lovely.’ I pretended to study one that looked like a naked chalk Dolly Parton screaming into a bin.

‘Isn’t he magnificent? The passion in them. He’s beginning to share his work more with me, after years of persuasion.’

‘He’s quite something,’ I said, glancing at picture next to Dolly which looked like an irradiated cock and bollocks.

‘His pieces are all reserved but he has plans to do a few more. What brings you to Rocas Calientes?’

‘I’m staying with my uncle. Helping him out. He has a bad arm.’

‘Oh,’ she said, hand to her chest. ‘You wouldn’t be the English girl, would you?’

‘Which English girl?’ I said, mild arrhythmia just starting to kick in.

She burst into laughter. ‘I’m sorry, Rafa said he met this brunette at the airport a few weeks ago and she hadn’t told him her name. He was quite taken with her,’ she beamed. ‘He said she’d introduced herself as a maniac.’

I laughed. ‘Oh, he remembered me?’

‘He certainly did. He said you were beautiful and you made him laugh, two attributes devilishly hard to find in another person.’

‘Well, I don’t know about that.’ Except I did know about that and I swelled with joy. The Hottest Turtle thought I was both beautiful and funny.