Lucy
by Nikolaj Vigrim
Published by Nikolaj Vigrim
Copyright 2009-2013 Nikolaj Vigrim
Cover drawing by Louise
If you enjoy reading ‘Lucy’, please take a minute to rate it.
‘Harry’s Pocket Book of Clouds’
‘Princess Rose’
'The Adventures of Blackcat'
'Harry the Cloud'
‘Cabo’
‘Strange Happenings at No 4’
‘Mr Farty Pants’
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/381268
Look out for Nikolaj Vigrim on Facebook
Contact the Author
[email protected] Chapter 1 - Lucy's Island
Lucy's island, Otoric Daska bobs about in the Adriatic Sea not far from Dubrovnik. Although it's not very long nor very wide, it has been a magical place for Lucy and her twin sisters to grow up. In days gone by real princes and princesses lived in the little castle. Soldiers patrolled the walls and fought off Saracen pirates. There must have been a dragon or two and Lucy is sure there's buried treasure. She's searched every corner of the island but hasn't managed to find it, yet. The closest she came was when she dug up some Venetian coins and live bullets in the garden.
The lighthouse stands at the north end. Lucy's Dad is the lighthouse keeper. His job is to keep the light burning and to wind up the mechanism that keeps the lens turning so that the light flashes 3 times every 12 seconds. Not every 10 or 15 seconds but precisely 12. When the fog comes down, he sounds the fog horn every 2 minutes by cranking a little handle at the bottom of the stairs. He used to be a seafarer, sailing to far off places like Peking and Valparaiso but moved ashore when he got married, if you can call living on a little island, sitting like a ship at anchor, being ashore.
A little way from the lighthouse, just far enough that the fog horn isn't too loud, stands the cottage where they live. The flower garden is on the lighthouse side, and the vegetable garden, washing line and grape vines out the back. Lucy and her Dad grow strawberries, delicious sweet corn, and potatoes, lots of potatoes. Her Dad likes potatoes. Her sisters grow melons and pumpkins and great big sunflowers which they save to feed the sparrows in the winter. Beyond the garden is an orchard of orange and almond trees, figs and olives. The chicken run is just behind the melon patch and the pigsty is at the far end of the orchard up against the walls of the old castle which protects the house and garden from the Sirocco winds. Beyond the castle is the wild end of the island, where the cow and donkey graze in the grassy patches between the umbrella pines and fig trees.
Chapter 2 - Candles and Roses
Lucy's Mum was a beautiful woman, tall with olive skin and eyes that sparkled with life. Lucy remembers being engulfed by her long black hair, her warmth, laughter and smiles. Lucy's Mum swam every day to the mainland, just across the bay. Every day, until the day she had a nasty encounter with the Korcula ferry followed by an even nastier encounter with the shark. The town's folk wanted to kill the shark but Lucy's Dad stopped them. He said that it had just been attracted by the blood and that it would be wrong for it to be harmed.
They never found the body. On calm nights Lucy's Dad floats little candles and roses out to sea. He sits and watches them until they go out or drift out of sight. Sometimes Lucy sits and holds his hand and feels sad. Once or twice he's been so intent on his candles that he hasn't noticed that the lighthouse light has gone out. Lucy now keeps an eye on it, just in case.
Lucy also keeps an eye on the twins. They were just babies when her Mum died. Now they run free and wild.
Like the twins, the Cyprus tree her dad planted in memory of his wife is now taller than Lucy. When she's cooking dinner she watches it dancing in the wind outside the kitchen window and thinks of her mum dancing around the house.
Chapter 3 - The Shark
The twins love fishing. In the winter they use fishing lines but in the spring as soon as the chill is gone, they dive in with masks and snorkels, spear fishing. They stay down for so long that Lucy can't bear to watch because she starts thinking they will never come up. They practice by putting clothes pegs on their noses and running from one end of the island to the other. It makes them talk funny too
Sometimes the shark smells the blood from the fish they've speared and wants dinner. They give her one fish but if she's greedy and wants more they prod her with their spears and chase her away. They're never scared as they always watch out for each other. They think a little of their Mum's spirit lives on in the shark.
Maybe it does but Lucy is not so sure about the shark, it has lots of teeth. She only goes swimming when her sisters are near.
They have a little lighthouse service cutter with sails and oars. On Sundays they go across to the market on the mainland to sell pine nuts and olive oil, and buy in food for the week. They don't need much as the garden, animals and the sea provide for most of their needs.
The twins swim while Lucy's Dad rows the cutter. If there's any wind, Lucy steers and her Dad trims the sails to get the little boat skimming along. Sometimes dolphins visit the boat and the twins whistle to them then dive down deep to play.
Once they bought a calf at the market and after a very wobbly moment on the way back everyone ended up swimming, the calf pulling the waterlogged boat along tied to its tail.
The kids in Dubrovnik town all go to school. Lucy and her sisters don't. Their Dad gives them lots of books to read and they always help when he's working. He explains how to do things and why they're done that way. They know lots, all the flags on the passing ships, how to build walls and even the theory of relativity, which is that if your train was passing through a station at the speed of light, all the people on the station would look a bit squished. It sounds a bit weird but if Einstein says that's what happens, it's probably right.
Chapter 4 - The Big Hammer
Lucy is a daydreamer. She dreams that a handsome sailor will anchor his boat off their island, row in and whisk her away to see the world.
She likes to watch TV too.
Lucy falls in love with the man on tele. He's Italian and she doesn't understand a word he says, which makes it even more romantic. He asks people questions. Sometimes they win teles or motor scooters but most of them get squashed by a big hammer.
His name is Gregorio Raviolli and it seems that every girl in Italy is in love with him, every girl in Italy and one in Croatia.
Lucy decides to send her love to him. She carefully soaks the label off a wine bottle and writes on the back of it:
Please deliver to:
Gregorio Raviolli,
The Big Hammer Show,
Italia
Thanks, Lucy
Lucy rolls it up and drops it into the bottle and after a lot of poking around with a stick gets it neatly stuck to the inside. She spends a week making kisses and hugs and drops them carefully in, then she tops it up with love and bungs the cork in. When the Bora wind blows down from the mountains, whipping up williwaws of white spray, she throws the bottle in the sea and off it floats to Italy.
Her sisters laugh at her but are a little surprised a couple of weeks later to find Lucy's bottle bobbing around just off the beach.
It's addressed to:
Lucy,
Across the Sea.
Inside is a whole lot of spaghetti wrapped up in a note. Lucy has to learn a little Italian to figure it out. It's a bit disappointing at first because it isn't a love letter but a recipe for spaghetti alle vongle. They sail up to the river flats to collect clams and cook it up. Very yummy it is too!
Lucy sends more love and kisses and back comes a necklace made of macaroni.
More love and kisses go across the sea and this time the bottle comes back filled with rude pasta shapes. The twins ro
ll about laughing wondering how people could ever get in such a tangle and try to do the same. They laugh until they cry and add it as item 104 to their list of things to do on a rainy day, with item 105 being to untangle yourselves.
There's a wee note saying, 'Please excuse the naughty pasta but my Mamma makes it every 2nd Wednesday. It always fills the house with laughter. Best eaten al-dente.'
A bottle goes out fill of hugs and comes back fill of alphabet pasta. They make rude words then follow the recipe to make alphabet soup.
Then Lucy sends a bottle full of nothing but love. She pushes the cork in extra tight to make sure it all gets there and throws it in the tide.
Lucy finds the bottle washed up three weeks later after a storm. Inside is a ticket to Italy and some Lira.
Chapter 5 - Raffaele Macaroni
Lucy packs her bag, kisses her Dad and sisters goodbye and heads off across the sea to Italy and Gregorio.
Lucy has to wait a long time to meet Gregorio. When she finally gets to see him, he gives her a cheesy smile and banishes a large marker pen ready to sign something.
'Where would you like my autograph?' he demands.
'I'm Lucy,' says Lucy
'I can sign anywhere. Anywhere! It won't wash off for months,' continues Gregorio.
'I'm Lucy, Lucy from Croatia who sent you all the love and kisses in a bottle.'
'Lucy the Menace,' scowls Gregorio, 'You just don't know when to stop. Where shall I sign?' he adds, banishing his pen.
After finding an interesting new use for the marker pen, Lucy runs crying from the room.
She sits in the park across the road and sobs, feeling a little confused and sorry for herself.
There's a tap on her shoulder and there standing behind her is a geeky looking guy, sort of stylish geeky as only the Italians can do.
'Lucy,' he says, 'I'm so, so sorry.'
'My name is Raffaele Macoroni. I always wanted to be in the film industry. Not the idiot at the front but the one behind the scenes making it all happen.
'Anyway, the only job I could get was general dogsbody, bin boy and toilet cleaner on the set of 'The Big Hammer'.
'Emptying Gregario's bin I found your bottle. It was unopened. I shouldn't have, but I opened it and all the hugs and kisses spilled out along with lots of love. It was so romantic that I fell in love with Lucy across the sea. I sent you lots of pasta because I'm Italian and that is what we Italians do.
'Sorry to have made you so sad.'
'Dang Nabit!' curses Lucy and kicks him in the shin. She's aiming a little higher but is so mad that she misses.
Raffaele picks himself up and hobbles away looking all dejected.
'Good!' says Lucy, 'What a horrible thing to do to a girl.'
Then she thinks of the spaghetti alle vongole, the alphabet soup, the crunchy rude pastas that made everyone laugh and the macaroni necklace that she's wearing and a smile comes to her face.
She jumps up and runs after Raffaele Macaroni.
Lucy returns home to Otoric Daksa with Raffaele Macaroni and his dog Tiramasu.
Chapter 6 - The Macaronis
But Italians do not come alone. Family is everything to them, so along they come too. There are Macaronis everywhere, Raffaele's grandmother and his brothers, his aunty and her son, the other cousins, and a couple of Fettuccini that no one knows.
Lucy's Dad doesn't like pasta, he prefers potatoes. But he does like Italian wine and he takes a shine to Vermicelli, one of Raffaele's cousins.
On calm nights he still lights candles and floats them and roses out to sea.
As he sits thinking of his lost wife and watching the candles drifting into the distance, his thoughts turn to the bottles; the bottles which had bought so much love and happiness to his island. He wonders how they had managed to drift all the way across to Italy and back to just the same spot. How was it possible? The gods must have been lending a helping hand.
The sleek phosphorescent shape of the shark glides silently though the dark water in front of him, the tips of its fins just breaking the surface...
The End
If you enjoyed reading ‘Lucy’, please take a minute to rate it.
Also published by the same author at Smashwords
‘Harry’s Pocket Book of Clouds’
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/464755
‘Princess Rose’
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/404176
'The Adventures of Blackcat'
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/285060
'Harry the Cloud'
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/286417
‘Cabo’
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/309911
‘Strange Happenings at No 4’
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/311520
‘Mr Farty Pants’
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/381268
Look out for Nikolaj Vigrim on Facebook
Contact the Author
[email protected]