Page 111 of The Island of Lost Girls

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‘What can I get you?’

Tatiana doesn’t look at her. Didn’t look at her when she came in and sat down at her choice of table without asking, hasn’t looked at her since.

‘Coke,’ she says. ‘Not Diet.’

Mercedes hesitates. Waits for an acknowledgement, for any sign that they are more than strangers, but none comes.

She turns to her companions. The new girlfriends. Not paid, presumably, for their clothes fit and they don’t turn to her for affirmation. ‘And for you?’

‘Cappuccino, yah,’ says the little blonde one. Mercedes doesn’t know her name. She doesn’t know any of Tatiana’s friends’ names. Why would she? None of them was here last year.

‘I’ll have a citron pressé,’ says the other little blonde. They’re all blonde. Even Tatiana now. It looks terrible with her sallow skin, but it seems it’s this year’s hair colour. Bouffant, with silk scarves designed to look like old rags tied round the head and jewellery layered upon layer. Donatella has taken to wearing her hair like this too. Her wrap has been fashioned from the see-through kaftan. Everything comes in useful in the end.

‘I’m sorry,’ says Mercedes, ‘I don’t know what that is.’

‘Yah, Cressy,’ says Tatiana, ‘we’re not in France now. You’ll need to go a bit more basic.’

Mercedes feels herself bridle. Fuck you, Tatiana. Doesn’t show it on her face. A customer’s a customer, and, ever since the big hotel opened up on the cliffs, they haven’t been seeing as many of these.

‘Oh,’ says Cressy. Looks at Mercedes as though she’s probably a lilu. ‘Lemonade?’ she speaks very, very slowly, enunciating every word. ‘You make lemonade? Fresh?’

She pauses. Goggles at Mercedes, unsure whether she’s been understood.

‘Limonade?’ she translates, and Mercedes realises that she is ferociously stupid. But amiable, she thinks. No need to be irritated.

The girl searches her inner resources. ‘Fresca?’ she comes up with.

Mercedes mines sudden comprehension. ‘Ahh! Limonada! Si! No fresco. Pero Fanta!’ she replies. Sees a twitch of annoyance on Tatiana’s face so small that only someone as finely trained as she is would see it. She grins. See? Now I’m free of you, I can take the piss all I want.

Cressy looks blank, like Princess Diana. She casts about the table for help.

‘They haven’t got fresh,’ says Tatiana. ‘They’ve got cans.’

‘Oh. Okay. Oh, Fanta! Yes! Thank you!’ says Cressy, and beams. ‘Merci!’

Mercedes beams back. ‘You speak Kastellani!’ she congratulates. ‘Very good!’

Again the look of confusion. Potty-training that one must have taken a while. ‘Oh, no, that was French,’ she says. ‘It means thank you.’

Mercedes smiles and drops her empty order pad into her apron pocket. ‘De nada,’ she says.

‘You don’t need the whole please-and-thank-you thing,’ Tatiana says in her ringing voice as she walks away from the table. ‘We literally pay them, yuh?’

Donatella sees the rage on her face as she comes indoors.

‘Jesus! What did she say?’

‘Nothing,’ replies Mercedes. ‘Literally nothing.’

There is a Kastellani phrase for that moment when a girl turns woman, when she blooms in the light of day: jimán de xabuesos. Hound-magnet.

There is a fleeting moment when a girl starts to glow. It heats her up inside and makes her give off a scent that attracts the dogs for miles around. Dogs literal – a girl who shows any affinity for dogs will always raise an eyebrow – and, of course, metaphorical. When the boys start hanging about in the hope of seeing her, a girl is deemed ripe. The women pursue her with shawls and rosaries and cautionary tales, and the race is on to get her married off before disaster strikes.

A boy in the same phase is called a kabalero de vaqas. He is allowed to go to the bar in the market square without his father, and is given a hunting knife of his very own. But that’s another story.

This year, Donatella is attracting the hounds the way a windfall fig attracts flies. She is no longer a teenage waitress in a two-bit island café: she’s Sophia Loren. She’s the Queen of the Sea.