LITMIR.BIZ

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later Bobby announced that their annual vacation the coming spring would be in Italy. He hadn’t even asked her opinion. Lianne was quietly hoping for Aruba. All the same, she demurred. It was the best thing to do, and, as it turned out, Rome hadn’t been a bad choice. In fact, she was starting to like the place. Then, that morning, it had all turned worse. Some creepy British academic type had given them a history lecture over buffet break-fast in the hotel. About how this was the day of the dead for the ancient Romans, a day when they would sacrifice a goat or a dog and wipe its blood on the foreheads of their kids, just to make sure they remembered their ancestors. The history link pushed Bobby’s buttons. Fifteen minutes later he was tracking down a hire company, renting the metal detector.

      So now they were in the middle of nowhere, dead drunk, clueless about what to do next. Lianne pined for Aruba and the pain was all the worse because she’d no idea what the place was like. Without letting Bobby see she put a hand on the steering wheel and turned the lurching Clio just far enough away from a boulder coming up at them from the right. The track was getting narrower all the time. There were still mud holes here and there from some recent rain. Maybe they’d get the car stuck and have to walk back to the road for help. She didn’t like that idea. She hadn’t brought the shoes.

      ‘It’s just pure greed, Bobby,’ she said. ‘What else can you say?’

      ‘I mean … what does it matter? If I don’t find the shit it stays right there in any case! It’s not like you see any fucking Italians digging the crap out of the ground.’

      He was wrong there. She’d seen digs all over the place, half of them looking abandoned, maybe because they just didn’t have the bodies to do all that digging. All the same it was best to go along with his gut feeling. ‘They don’t need it, Bobby. They got more than they can cope with already. They got it coming out their ears.’

      They had too. Her mind was still reeling from all the museums they’d visited these past two days. There was so much stuff. And unlike Bobby, she’d read the guidebooks. She knew they’d only scratched the surface. The pair of them were spending an entire week in Rome and would still come away without seeing everything. It seemed excessive. Bad planning. Poor taste. Bobby was right. If they had any manners they’d share it around a little.

      The car headed down into a crater, leapt out the other side, briefly became airborne then slammed onto the ground with a bang. It sounded to her as if something had come loose underneath. She scanned the view ahead. Beyond the funny-looking grass, which seemed more like the kind of plants you got in marshland or bogs than on the beach she was expecting, lay a grey, scummy ribbon of water. The road came to a dead end a little way short of the low bank. Bobby had to get out here, have his fun – or otherwise – and then they needed to take the car back to Avis and scuttle off into the city before anyone noticed the dents and worse she felt sure would be there.

      ‘Don’t you worry,’ she said. ‘You’re going to find something here, Bobby. I just know it. You’re going to find something and when you do that asshole Tom Jorgensen is going to be as jealous as hell. You—’

      He kicked down hard on the brakes, bringing the little car to a sudden halt twenty yards short of the end of the lane. Her husband was now staring into her face with that cold, hard expression she only saw once or twice a year, and hated, more than anything, hated so much that sometimes she wondered whether marrying Bobby Dexter, tubby Bobby, the one all the other girls laughed at behind his back, had really been such a good idea at all.

      ‘What?’ Bobby asked in a flat, dead tone that was supposed to be full of meaning.

      ‘I only, only, only—’ She stuttered into silence.

      He prodded her chest with a stubby finger. She could smell the booze on his breath.

      ‘You really think this is all about Tom Fucking Jorgensen?’

      ‘No!’

      ‘You really think I have researched, booked, paid for this entire fucking vacation, taken you to all these beautiful places, brought you out here to this stinking backwater … all because of Tom Fucking Jorgensen and his shitty piece of marble?’

      She paused before answering. In three years of marriage Bobby had reduced her to tears only once and that was in Cancun over a sexual demand she regarded as irrational, unnecessary and intrinsically unhygienic. The memory still smarted. She didn’t understand why it wouldn’t go away.

      ‘I didn’t. It just seemed. I don’t know—’ All the wrong words tumbled out of her mouth.

      ‘Jesus!’ Bobby roared. ‘Jesus Christ!’

      He gunned the accelerator, rammed the Clio into first and let go of the clutch. The little car lurched bravely forward with a gut-wrenching start, veered to one side and impaled itself on a small dried mud mountain which appeared, to Lianne anyway, to contain the stump of a fence post at its heart. They were now pitched up at an awkward, sickening angle. The front right wheel screamed impotently as the mud mountain levered the entire right front end of the Clio into thin air.

      Bobby stared at Lianne accusingly. ‘Fucking wonderful,’ he grunted. ‘Oh so fucking wonderful.’

      She was crying, trying to choke back the sobs.

      ‘Don’t do this to me, Lianne. Not today. You’re not in Cancun now. You can’t go phone that animal you call a father and get him to come round and threaten to beat my brains to a pulp just ’cos you got a headache or something.’

      Telling her old man had been a mistake. She knew that all along. But Bobby had asked for it. He crossed the line in Cancun. She needed to let him know.

      ‘Bobby—’ she blubbed.

      He stared out of the window at the grey river and the sluggish movement of scum on its surface.

      ‘Yeah?’

      ‘I can smell gas,’ she said, suddenly serious, the tears drying almost instantly under the rising presence of fear. ‘Can’t you?’

      ‘Jesus,’ he gasped and punched at her seat belt then stabbed open the passenger door. She smiled at him, glassy-eyed. He’d done it for her. Before he unfastened his own belt.

      ‘Bobby—’

      He pushed her out of the door. ‘Get out for chrissake. Dumb stupid bitch—’

      Bobby Dexter took one last look to make sure she was safe then turned round, flung a few things from the back seat out onto the ground and rolled out of the crazily skewed car himself. He was so drunk he did a quick one eighty and wound up on the cold, hard earth banging his elbows painfully. Bobby got in a good chunk of swearing about that.

      He pushed himself upright with a weary hand, picked up his things, then checked she’d got herself well distant from the smell of gas. Lianne watched from the side of the road, a good ten yards from the dying Clio, her hands clasped behind her back looking like a schoolgirl waiting to be told what to do.

      He walked over to join his wife.

      ‘You OK?’ he asked. He looked a little worried about how far this was going. That was something, she thought.

      ‘Sure.’ She’d stopped crying. He looked glad of that. It was something.

      There was a sound from the car, a sort of breathy whoosh. They watched as a thin finger of flame flickered out from under the hood and worked its way up the windshield.

      ‘Now that …’ Bobby said, ‘is what I like about rental vehicles. They can do this sort of shit in front of your eyes and you just get to stand back and enjoy the show. Wish I’d hired something bigger now.’

      The low scuttering wind caught the flames, rolled them over the roof of the Clio, sent them swirling inside the window, eating up the seats where, just a minute or so before, Bobby and Lianne Dexter had sat arguing. Then, with a sudden roar and a puff of heat and smoke, the Renault was ablaze, devouring itself in a cloud of black smoke and flame.

      Lianne clung to her husband’s arm watching

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