Дельфины и киты
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So where was he? Lucia wondered, going through her nightly routine of getting ready for bed in the freezing caravan by piling on more clothes. If Luke was still in Cornwall he was probably tucked up in a nice warm room at the Grand by now—with the blonde. Ack! And if he thought about Lucia at all it would only be to wonder if she was ready to go home yet.
‘No, I’m not ready,’ she snarled, glaring at Luke’s poster. ‘And I’m not giving up. I can’t give up. I can’t go home. Not like this….’
Their nice, warm kitchen in Argentina, where the roof never leaked and the floor was never cold, and she had never once had to pick ice off the insides of the windows …
Unscrewing the top of the flask of hot chocolate that Margaret left on the table each night, she scowled at Luke’s centrefold as she gulped the warm liquid down. She tried not to think about the list of goals she had intended to achieve by now—goals Lucia had been so confident were achievable when she was fourteen.
Reaching beneath the bed, she drew out the precious tote full of memories and extracted the battered notebook in which, as a dreamy-eyed teen, she had written down her innermost hopes and dreams. She didn’t often do this. She saved it for when things were really bad. The bag of dreams, as she called the old canvas tote, was her comforter. It contained her journal from when she was fourteen, and her rather more neglected journal from now. She pulled the old one out and started to read.
It is imperative to follow this list to the letter if I’m ever going to break free from Conan the Barbarian and his gang of galloping gauchos—otherwise known as my brothers …
Lucia smiled as she read the messy list, with all its scribbles and crossings-out. It was hard to believe she had ever been so na"ive. Most of her ideas had been based on articles she’d read in teen magazines, which of course were essential reading for fourteen-year-olds with everything to learn. She would have to completely re-jig the list. Get a wax after she’d got a man? Well, that was wrong to start with. And, the way she felt right now, getting a wax could be number two-hundred and thirty-six on next year’s list. Yes, Luke was gorgeous, but …
No. She couldn’t.
She just couldn’t, that’s all.
But just out of curiosity, and because trips down memory lane seemed to be in vogue right now, she straightened out the much-thumbed pages and began to read.
1. Get a job!—preferably promoting a bar, which is a great way to meet new people, according to ROCK! magazine
2. Get a flat!—something gorgeous and stylish in the best part of town. N.B. V. close to the bar!
3. Get a wax!
She remembered that last entry being based more on dreading what her rapidly changing body might do next rather than any horrific hirsute happenings. And how many times had that entry been deferred? And why did she still shift position nervously when she read it?
She pulled a face as she got up to check her top lip in the mirror. Flopping back down again, she remembered her mother’s pale face when a visit to the beautician loomed. Perhaps that was the answer to her waxing phobia. She could still hear her young self asking, ‘Are you all right, Mama?’ And her mother’s response: ‘You’ll understand one day what it means to be a woman, Lucia, and what we have to go through for our men …’ Hefty sigh at that point.
All sorts of images had flashed into Lucia’s young brain—nostril-hair-plucking, blackhead-excising, even earwax-removal with one of those long, pointy things—but never had she imagined that her mother was referring to that most delicate of regions, let alone that some stranger was going to view her private bits close up prior to coating them in molten wax like some medieval torturer. And it didn’t finish there—as Lucia had discovered in that invaluable teenage self-help tome known to one and all as ROCK! Magazine. Then this female Torquemada was going to rip away at those nether regions without so much as a by-your-leave.
Youch!
No way, Jos'e!
Back to the list. The next entry after wax, was
4. Get a tan
Lucia remembered a columnist in ROCK! insisting that this must be subtle—a mere sun-kissed whisper that would fool any man into thinking it was natural.
5. Get a cool new wardrobe!
One that did not include a bobbly polyester uniform in a shade that might once have been white, presumably.
6. Get a hairdo
This prompted another visit to the mirror, where she lifted up her haystack hair. Most people complained that their hair was too thin or too straight. She was currently experiencing the opposite problem, known as The Inexplicable Explosion of Frizz. Without her styling products and gadgets, and without money to get it done in a salon, she was on her own.
7. Get a gym membership
First off, gym memberships cost money. And there was a more important consideration: without the hairdo, the tan, the wax and the cool new wardrobe, she was never going to make it through the door of a decent gym.
8. Get a good dance teacher—for the Samba, preferably. Someone like the old gaucho Ignacio, on Nero Caracas’s ranch. Judging by the way Ignacio vaulted the fence when I decided to ride Nero’s fire-breathing monster stallion bareback, Ignacio has still got some moves in him!
9. Get a gag for her polo-playing brothers—so they can’t share any embarrassing secrets with any men I might attract once I’ve completed all of the above.
10. Get a (non-polo-playing) man
And there the list ended. Lucia smiled as she remembered Ignacio teaching her to dance the Samba, and quite a few other dances as well, bringing his ancient ghetto blaster, as Ignacio had called his battered radio, to the hay barn, where she’d been able to blunder about undisturbed. Okay. Looking on the bright side. She was still podgy and in need of a suntan with a frizz ball on her head, but this babe could dance.
‘Cheers, Margaret,’ Lucia murmured, wrapping her frozen hands around the warm flask of chocolate. This small, kind act of someone who had so little made Lucia more determined than ever to help her elderly friend.
‘And hello, Luke,’ she added, addressing Luke’s smouldering poster just inches from her bed.
Hopping out again, she took a closer look. Wow hardly covered it. Lucia’s brothers frequently featured on billboards, but always in full polo rig and usually mounted on a horse. They were certainly never caught half-naked, sluicing themselves down, in a shot Lucia couldn’t imagine strait-laced Luke agreeing to in a million years.