It was dark, loud. Where are they? Ahh at last, here was one of the girls. Hi, where’s Matt? She looks concerned and gestured for me to hand over my phone to make a call. She’d lost them too. I passed the phone in to her hand. She looked at me and ………slipped it effortlessly in to her bag. Hang on???
I leaned forward with both hands. As I did, my wrists were grasped tightly by a small stocky guy to the side of me. The girl reached in to my other pocket and took my wallet. (I realised at this point that these were definitely not the nicest girls in the mundo!) What the F***? She removed the 100 or so Euros, calmly sifted though my cards, taking one, before putting the rest back and returning the wallet to my jeans pocket (A caring thief! There is a semblance of good in everybody - is there not?).Suddenly my wrists were free but by the time I turned they had disappeared into the throng. The search was useless and so I switched to finding Matt which took a good half hour. He was dazed and slumped on a chair. ‘Where is everyone?’, his slurring voice asked. ‘They’ve gone, robbed us!’ I replied. To my increasing annoyance - he was struggling to comprehend the gravity of the situation, in fact he didn’t even known there was a situation.
We looked desperately round the club again, outside, back inside again. The crumb of comfort we found in seeing our suitcases, towering proudly over a small round table almost instantly receded when we realised the laptop bags were not in accompaniment.
Matt was still drunk and he slept most of the way on the train to Firenze, leaving me to contend with a conductor requesting 80 Euros - given that we had completely forgot to buy a ticket back in the early Milan dawn. He finally took pity on me as I explained the situation and did not charge us on the proviso we got off at the next stop, Piacenza. He also provided me with the useful advice to get on a train to Firenze - as the one we were on didn’t!!!This gesture was tempered by my increasing fury at Matt. He was leaving me to deal with all the S*** yet he spoke the better Italian. I erupted.... MAAATT’. I shook him. ‘F**in hell, 6-months, working all hours on the business, and we’ve lost f**** everything!’. Matt was incredulous. He smiled smugly and casually told me there was nothing to worry about - everything was saved on backups back in Newcastle.
Arrggghh. I had reached my tipping point and screamed back at him, demanding he shared my pain. ‘Have we, have we. We’ve got the website, but the artworks, the F*** artworks. We haven’t got the F*** artworks saved.’ This for me was the best part of the entire trip. The forlorn, despairing look which enveloped his face, instantly banishing his conceitedness, did at least unload a miniscule part of my heavy burden. Haha you twat. We‘re both F***d!
We stood on the Piacenza platform in the biting cold, reflecting on what had happened. We had been done like kippers. The girls helped us to get drunk, and separated us while the other went to the toilet and made off with... Well, only 2 laptops, 2 digital cameras, 2 ipods, 2 mobile phones (Matt was just realising he didn’t have his) and 1 passport, (typically mine). We had kindly hand-packed all of that in to the laptop bags and trusted two girls who we had met on the street 1 hour earlier with them. Some might say naïve, others preposterously stupid.6-months of intense hard-work had just disappeared. We may have still had a website but we had no product - you cannot print canvasses from small jpeg images and our only back-up of the real images was on each other’s laptops.
Our 2 days in Florence were taken in up in British consulates and police stations. We even tried to convince ourselves that a very expensive meal was beautiful, when all either of us could manage was a couple of mouthfuls of a steak that had already drowned in a rich dark chocolate textured sauce. ‘It might not be for us, but what a restaurant, you cantell it’s quality’ I salvaged. Matt agreed.
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