Up with small hearts, small bottoms, small breasts!

Shall we talk about it again one day, Chjara?

A long time from now, a very long time, because at the moment you’re the one whose making the auction rise. And the stakes are already high, very high.

The beautiful Italian has returned to her towel after walking around it three times like a suspicious cat. Cervone, who is also hiding among the pines, hasn’t missed a shred of this display, his hand stuck to the resin of the tree-trunk. The cyclops has frozen Egyptian-style, facing his goddess (Bastet, the cat goddess, my ignorant reader!), and even my Nico, my indifferent, handsome brother with his Ray-Bans, has moved his neck almost imperceptibly.

He’s lost, too.

Once upon a time …

Once upon a time there was a little Calabrian princess

With a hot little treasure

You know where.

*

*     *

He looked at the poster, and thought about tearing it down.

What would be the point, there were so many others, dozens along the road.

Tonight. 10 p.m. Oscelluccia beach. Tropi-Kalliste Discotheque.

He would be there.

Not to hear Maria-Chjara sing.

To shut her up.

20

16 August 2016, 3 p.m.

The posters had been taped up everywhere, even on the doors of the shower blocks, the barriers at the car park and the local dump. Valentine stopped by the one opposite their pitch. She had wrapped a sarong around her waist, and her flip-flops were clacking against the soles of her feet as if they were stilettos on the parquet floor of a ballroom; the baguette under her arm made her look like a majorette. Clotilde stood beside her daughter, anxious to move on; she was carrying the rest of the shopping, and the melons, grapefruits, oranges and the half-watermelon weighed a ton in the plastic bags she was holding in each hand.

Valentine looked up and read.

Eighties Night

10.00 p.m. Tropi-Kalliste Discotheque

Oscelluccia beach

On the poster, multicoloured foam spilled from a huge plastic swimming pool that had been placed on the beach. A girl in a bikini leapt from it under a shower of gold sequins.

‘Apparently it’s a great tradition at this campsite,’ Valou insisted, staring at the girl. ‘Nobody’s talking about anything else. She used to spend her holidays here, and since then she’s become a star in Italy.’

Amazed, Clotilde took her eyes off Valou’s sparkling expression and concentrated on the poster. The siren’s face was unrecognisable beneath the heavy make-up, her perfect body was like the thousands of others that would appear if you tapped ‘starlet’ or ‘bikini’ into the internet, but her stage name provoked another explosion of childhood memories.

Maria-Chjara.

The plastic handles of the shopping bags cut their way into Clotilde’s fingers.

‘Cervone even told me you knew her, Maman! He said you spent five or six years together and that Uncle Nico knew her well too.’

Uncle Nico. So she’d suddenly remembered she had a family.