Here Come the Girls by Milly Johnson Page B

their eyes. But their friend was so stubborn and unbendable where he was concerned. Olive cast a glance at Ven that spoke volumes: Someone has to say something now. Before she and Manus split up for good. We can’t let that happen, not knowing what we know . But for now, all they could do was nod.
    Roz unzipped the suitcase which sprang open with a sigh of relief. She thought of Manus pressing down on it with all his might so she could close it. She really should ring him and say she had arrived in Southampton, then she remembered her own rules of no contact and switched off her phone. She wouldn’t miss the constant voice in her head berating her for how badly she treated Manus. Every time she sniped at him, she heard it pleading with her to grow up and stop pushing him because one day she would drive him too far – and she had now, hadn’t she? She put the phone in the built-in safe until the end of the holiday. She would check it every few days just in case of emergency, but she had no reason to expect any calls; her mother wouldn’t ring an ‘expensive mobile number’ even if she was dying. And then she would turn to one of Roz’s stepsisters first.
    Roz had never had an easy relationship with her mother. Her father left – and disappeared into the ether – when Roz was nine and her mother found solace in bitter tears and cheap white wine. For her first nine years, Roz had grown up with her ears constantly ringing from the sound of marital arguments. For the next nine, all she heard were drunken diatribes about how twisted men were. Any small step Roz put wrong was greeted with the criticism that she was ‘stupid/wicked/selfish – just like your father’. And when she was low in spirits – which was often – Frankie would drag her over to the wonderful, warm and crazy Carnevale household for Lucia’s home-cooked food and Salvatore’s murdering of operatic numbers. Then Roz’s mother met and married a total twerp with two daughters in a whirlwind romance and suddenly didn’t hate men any more, but the poison she had dripped into her own daughter’s heart sat in a dark pool and waited its time to burst its banks.
    Roz moved in with her new step-family but it was clear from the off that she wasn’t welcome and there were no objections from any of them when she said she was going to stay with the Carnevales instead. And not long after, the lean, beautiful young woman she had become managed to attract Jez Jackson’s eye at long last and he moved her willingly into his bed and his home. He was to be the first of many men who would break her heart and reinforce everything her mother had said.
    Roz tried to shake the thought of that all-encompassing, generous, wonderful family out of her head, like an annoying fly that was buzzing in her ear. She didn’t want to remember how Lucia Carnevale would send over enormous dishes of lasagne and home-made ciabatta loaves as big as sheds to make sure she was eating all right. It was painful to think of how she’d had to cut herself off from them because of what had happened between Manus and Frankie. Something else to hate her for.
    When Ven and Roz had finished unpacking and called for Olive to go up to the life-jacket meeting, she was sitting on her sofa having a cup of tea like Lady Muck.
    ‘Made yourself at home, I see?’ chuckled Ven.
    ‘Yes, I most certainly have,’ replied Olive. ‘I just need a servant to pour me a refill and I’m sorted.’
    ‘You should have asked for the room with the butler in it,’ said Ven.
    ‘Yeah, right!’
    ‘Honest,’ Ven went on. ‘You can get rooms on here with your own butler. Costs an arm and a leg though, because they’re the top suites.’
    ‘No!’ Olive gasped. How the other half live, eh? She grabbed her life-jacket and followed the others out, remembering to take the cruise card with her. People were bustling around, everyone carrying orange life-jackets, even children with smaller ones. They were marshalled