It hadn’t taken long for the looming spell of drizzle to unfold. After dusk settled over the excited stripes of spume that the waves kept propelling ashore, the fading light compelled the thirty-something Celsius that had been lingering for days to finally recede. Further in the distance the pall of hard light transmuted into a dim assortment of hues to unveil a swelling sfumato horizon. And now the silky rain flutters and feels good.

 

She fancies wide sunshine days and melting temperatures all right. Over half a century of living in Molde had left an unavoidable sharp imprint of pluvial and brumal memories, not many of them particularly enthralling. Still, were the days to embark on a thermal spree, she would rather quickly crave for the sedative relief that only a decent spread of clouds, ideally matched by a proper soggy mist, was bound to provide. Other than that, she was pretty much content with the lot the whole combo of sprawling cliffs, solid sea and reliable flaring sun that nests at the foot of the Supramonte had bestowed on her. How could she not?

 

A most simple plan. Sell that minute, lacklustre, insipid apartment bequeathed by an ephemeral and wholly eventless divorce, hand in the notice and stop showing up at work, get on a budget plane, land somewhere in Sardinia and rush to Cala Gonone. That same Cala Gonone where, if the smog of memory wasn’t mashing up too many loose strips of nostalgia, she’d felt one remote day the closest to full bliss she’d ever been. In actual fact, it involved slightly more – the aforementioned plan. It required her savings account to possess a degree of elasticity more commensurate with faith and delusion than the mundane outlays and expenditure the statements came to reveal, gambled heavily on a steady string of books flowing straight from her most creative flair into the swooning crowds of avid devout readers, and was built on the hope that, were all else to fail, the fragrance of serendipity would never stop hovering close. What’s in a plan?

 

Overpriced, the houses in Dorgali, particularly the ones purchased on a sudden whim. The money left afterwards was just about enough to keep the kaleidoscope of plumbers, plasters, electricians, window glaziers, tile installers and the like, content for a while, along with the full panoply of assorted wishful help that would loiter for months, hooked on the easy flow of those euros with a faint whiff of Norwegian krone. No wonder that, by the time of the accident, the saving account had long stopped working its magic. Even if her legs were persuaded to start walking again a few gloomy months afterwards, most of the rosiness that had greeted her when landing in Cagliari never truly left the wreckage unhurt. Her back never acquiesced to the full consequences of the impact of the bare flesh against a nearby stone wall and keeps complaining to this day. As a consequence of which, the bucolic Panda she took to driving everywhere had turned now into a painful cage that her savings wish but cannot afford to replace. More than anything, though, it’s the loss of the sea that she regrets. The days of swimming endlessly for hours had converted into a sombre mirage. In a way the sea had reconfigured itself again as the one off Molde, an across-the-street ocean for contemplation only.

 

In the end it was the books. An artless proposition that conjured a weave of Nordic stupor-fuelled melancholy and southern ebullience in the guise of a fast and loose Gallurese poliziotto, hatched as the hybrid of a decadent Wallander interspersed with a comatose Montalbano. Carlo Varfjell at your service. Overly prone to dally with all sorts of vices, long married to the tumid obese Firmina, an ever-nagging former low-life Brazilian actress, and loving father of Nina, an amber-eyed basket-case nympho with a recurrent propensity to happen upon corpses on her bed in the morning.

 

It was simply too late when the jumble of platitudes became glaring because by the time she had eventually sobered up the whole apparatus had grown roots of its own which she didn’t know how to let go of anymore. The writing was assuredly chaotic, the story-lines, drafted in a bastardised form of English infused with spurious bits of Norwegian, Italian and Sardu, metamorphosed, somehow, into a final rendition depurated over late-night Google sessions. All enveloped by an unhealthy grammar structure and a propensity for flashbacks, non-linear narratives and pedantic over-wordsmithing. The stakes were high, success less so. Not that she was one to throw in the towel. In reality, over the years she thought herself confident enough to start translating her novels into Italian (even if they end up lavishly speckled with Sardu pretty much at random seeing that most of the time she struggled to tell the difference). She was totally clueless as to whether or not anyone ever enjoyed reading any of the books at all, but it did become part of the established rituals in Gonone, come summer. Religiously, every year, just in time for the dawn of the season, Commissario Carlo Varfjell has his hot-off-the-press A4 novella printed off the fatigued old HP, a novella which she then spreads throughout the string of restaurant terraces and hotels that populate the pine-dotted promenade. For some reason that she has yet to fathom, the Italian version appears to be the most popular. Tomorrow, if the drizzle stops, she’ll bring down this year’s edition. For now, the water feels just great against her face, and her body doesn’t sense any hint of pain.