Guilty Feet Read Free

till six o’clock, the place usually started to wind down at five, and with a bit of luck Marco would have time to flirt with me. Since my break-up with Dan I often went there for this very purpose. It was a bit of cheap therapy, really, having a big hunky Leeds Italian calling me ‘Bella Joanna’ and begging me to go out with him. I guessed most women over sixteen and under forty-five received the exact same treatment, but as long as he didn’t do it when I was around I felt pretty special for a while. Giovanna, Marco’s mother, was singing ‘Volaré’ when I entered the café. It was such a big cliché of a song and she sang it so often that at first I thought she was a pretend Italian. Especially since she had very pale skin and corn-coloured hair, which she always swept into an elegant plait at the back of her head. But it turned out that I was wrong. She was completely authentic, first generation, moved here from Milan when she was just nineteen. When she wasn’t singing ‘Volaré’, she liked to talk a lot in a rather loud, still heavily accented voice that used to alarm me. It made her sound fierce, but in fact she is anything but.
    Over the time I’d been going in there I’d learnt quite a lot about her life. I now knew that Marco’s father was an Englishman whom she’d met and fallen madly in love with when she was working here as an au pair.
    ‘ Ciao bella! ’ Marco cried, as he emerged from the kitchen behind the counter. By now Giovanna had stopped singing ‘Volaré’ and was asking me how things were going at Pisus as the big old-fashioned and noisy, all singing and dancing coffee machine frothed up my cappuccino.
    Marco came round from behind the counter and squeezed the breath out of me. I’d asked him once about his father and he told me that he ‘wouldn’t piss on the bastard if he caught fire.’ Which gave me a pretty good indication about his feelings for the man who’d turned out to be married and had abandoned both mother and child when they needed him most. It seemed the world was full of lying, deceiving and bullshitting bastards!
    ‘I expected to be out of a job by now,’ I said when he let me go, ‘but it looks like we’ve weathered the storm for another day.’
    Giovanna patted my hand as she placed my cappuccino on the counter. ‘You mustn’t worry, Joanna. A pretty, clever girl like-a you will soon-a find work.’ Then she threw up her arms in a gesture of dismissive flamboyance. ‘Anyway, you waste-a your time in that office. With looks like-a yours you should-a be in the movies!’
    I could see where her son had learnt some of his lines.
    ‘Thanks, Giovanna,’ I said with a wide, silly grin. ‘And I don’t know about that but I do feel quite cheerful today. Quite optimistic.’
    Marco beamed as he picked up the huge cup and saucer and took it to a table near the window. The place looked as if they’d had the theme-makers in but, just like Giovanna, the café’s decor was completely authentic—chrome and sky-blue Formica Fifties kitsch. It was perhaps fortunate that someone like Giovanna had taken over the café all those years ago, when she’d been left in the lurch by her English lover. She wasn’t the type for fussy new fads. She was of the if-it’s-not-broken-why-fix-it school and, fashions being what they are, the café’s decor was once again the very height of cool.
    Marco sat down opposite me. He was a dangerously handsome man, but because I knew him so well, and because he really wasn’t my type, I couldn’t bring myself to fancy him. Unlike his mother, he had dark hair and skin, like Italians are supposed to, but he spoke with a marked Leeds accent. His toothpaste-ad smile matched impossibly white shirts, and I kept meaning to ask Giovanna what her secret was—not about her son’s teeth but the whiteness of her wash, which I was fairly certain she would be responsible for. My own so-called whites varied from just a little bit ‘off’ to