An Almost Perfect Holiday

by Lucy Diamond

  ‘Happy New Year,’ Aidan said to her with a grin before they kissed again.

  ‘Two kisses in two years,’ she’d joked, feeling fizzy and dizzy, as if rockets and bangers were shooting all over her body as well as up in the sky. Aidan Brearley had kissed her!

  Good times, she thought now, remembering the cold dark night, frost on the car windscreens as he walked her home later, hand-in-hand, both of them wondering what the new year would bring. Optimistic times. ‘You were a bloody good kisser,’ she said quietly now into the warm summer air. ‘I haven’t forgotten, you know.’

  Next on her little tour was their old sixth-form college, out towards Kergilliack; really the first place where she had felt it was okay to be herself, after years of doubt. Secondary school had been an anxious period for her; she’d felt weighted down with the confusion and self-prescribed guilt of her mum having vanished, and had not felt able to care about making friends or studying or trying to get into any school teams. But at college it was as if her time had finally come – she had clicked with a few people in her classes: Nina, Beth and Spencer; she enjoyed the subjects she had chosen to study, and had discovered the excellent trinity of loud music, black eyeliner and crimped hair, assembling a whole new identity for herself. The world began to open up beyond the estate where she lived, to reveal bright and exciting horizons. All of a sudden she had started feeling upbeat about what the future might hold.

  She walked around the buildings now, trying to orient herself, almost able to smell the chips from the cafeteria, the patchouli oil she and her friends had sprinkled on their hair, feeling the ghostly memory of a rucksack of library books on Tsarist and Communist Russia thumping weightily against her back. If her home life had left her feeling lost, it was here that she had found herself again.

  Aidan had enjoyed sixth form too; maths and physics were his favourite subjects and he dreamed of being an engineer, leaving a legacy of beautiful constructions around the world. He could talk at length and with great enthusiasm about hydraulics and suspension, the beauty of geodesic domes, the science of pendulums, his hands flying around as he described and explained. Picturing his animated face made her smile now, but she was wistful too, because it had been from a time when they were so mad about each other, so completely entwined. Before she had been the one to oscillate like a pendulum herself, in fact, swinging uncertainly between Aidan and Pete Westgate, the guy in her history class with the brownest eyes she had ever seen.

  One thing at a time, she begged her memory as it began peeling open the part of the story she most would have liked to remain closed. Don’t start getting ahead of yourself.

  She gave the college one last appreciative look, her hand on the gate. ‘We were happy here, weren’t we?’ she murmured. ‘Before it all went wrong.’

  And then she went back to her car and drove away. Keep it together, she said under her breath.

  Olivia had been meaning to head into town next, to the bar where she and Pete had met up that fateful day, but her subconscious must have had other ideas, because she realized after a few moments that she had missed the turn and was in fact heading in the opposite direction, towards the stretch of road where Aidan had died. The steering wheel wobbled under her hands as this occurred to her. Oh gosh. Was she ready for that? Could she really bear to go back?

  In the days leading up to the accident, a prickly sort of mood had settled on her. Since the afternoon in the pub with Pete, it was as if a filter had dropped down before her eyes and she was suddenly seeing things in a new light. Aidan was irritating her in ways that she had never previously considered, for starters. He was so sensible. So reliable! Would it kill him to be spontaneous once in a while? Rebel against his nicey-nice parents and the world?

  Driving along now, thinking about this made her want to turn right round and scuttle back for the safety of Lorna’s cottage, where she could hide under the duvet until the memories receded again. Because this was the terrible twist in the tail, the horrible guilty secret she had never ever told anyone – not even Mack, not even her brother. She had buried it in her mind for so long that she was scared of what might happen if she began excavating.

  She was getting close to the spot.

  ‘Aidan, I’ve been thinking . . .’ she had blurted out that night in the car as he drove her home. They had been to see a band in Truro and he was driving them back, because – being sensible and thoughtful – he had been drinking orange juice all night and – being hard-working and practical – he had saved up enough money from his Saturday job, plus birthday and Christmas, to have bought a car a couple of months earlier. A deeply uncool white Renault 5, which still smelled of an old lady’s handbag, but it was his pride and joy.

  Oh, Aidan. If she had just kept her mouth shut. If she had just kept her head!

  The coroner had recorded a verdict of accidental death. The local newspaper had described it as a tragedy, with the chief reporter at the time calling for safety barriers to be put up at the side of the road. We must never allow a senseless accident like this to happen in our town again, he had written at the start of a passionate think-piece, alongside a picture of himself, stern-faced, standing at the edge of the road where it had happened.

  No notice had been taken of his words, by the look of things, because she was approaching the bend now, for the first time in twenty years, and it all looked exactly the same. No barriers. No warning signs. Tears smarted in Olivia’s eyes as memories bombarded her. ‘Is he okay? Is he okay?’ she had screamed at the paramedics when they finally came to cut them out of the mangled vehicle. Even though she knew the answer. Even though she’d been lying there beside Aidan in the wreckage and his face had already become quite waxy. Quite cold.

  The thing was, only she knew the truth: that he wouldn’t have died if she hadn’t been sitting there next to him. It was all her fault.

  She pulled over in the next lay-by and lost herself in a storm of weeping.

  Some time later Olivia wiped her puffy red eyes, blew her nose and swigged from an ancient bottle of water that she found in the passenger footwell. Okay. Enough crying. What right did she have to cry when it came to Aidan, anyway?

  Planning to head back to the cottage, she started the engine and drove away, but once she was on the other side of town, she realized she was approaching Swanpool, her and Aidan’s favourite beach, a place they had both loved. Perhaps she had the energy for one last stop after all.

  The beach was always heaving with tourists in summer, but she and Aidan had gone there loads of times in winter too with their friends, lighting big fires on the sand at night-time and playing music, or breaking into derelict beach huts and telling ghost stories by torchlight. She smiled to herself briefly, recalling how spooky it had been, with the boys surreptitiously making scratching sounds against the wooden boards to unnerve the girls, and how jumpy they had become as a result. A gust of wind had banged the door suddenly, right at the tensest moment of one story, and they’d practically screamed the place down, clutching at each other in hysterical fright.

  She would go there again, she decided, slowing so that she wouldn’t miss the turn-off. Remember the summer that Spencer had worked at the ice-cream stand, and had dished out so many freebies to his mates that he’d been sacked within ten days. Remember the warm September night that she and Aidan had come here, just the two of them, for some starlight skinny-dipping, the first and last time she’d ever done such a bold and thrilling thing. Remember—

  Shit!

  Olivia slammed her foot on the brake as she rounded the bend, punching the horn in alarm. What the hell . . . ? There was a girl on a bike right in the middle of the road, so close Olivia could see the whites of her eyes, the sudden panic on her face. Time seemed to slow down, but the car wasn’t slowing fast enough. Could she swerve away? She was going to hit her. She was going to hit her!

  Chapter Fifteen

  All okay? Ring me if you want a chat, any time. I’ll keep my phone next to me in bed j
ust in case.

  Morning! Hope you slept well. Thinking about you. Hope you’re having fun!

  How’s it going? Let me know if you want me to pick you up earlier. Miss you. xx

  Maggie’s unanswered texts were piling up in her phone like litter on a beach. Every time she glanced over and saw that there was still no message of reply, it felt like a rebuff. What did it mean? Was Amelia having such a wonderful time with Will that she didn’t have a spare minute to glance at her in-box? Or was she desperately miserable, but too proud to say anything?

  More than once her finger had hovered above the Call key, only for her to wrench it away again. Amelia seemed to resent her mother full stop these days and would almost certainly resent any intrusion into her Newton Abbot stay, however desperate Maggie was to hear from her. Oh God, how she wished this wasn’t happening. Why had she allowed herself to be bulldozed into the situation, without more of a fight?

  After leaving Amelia there in Devon yesterday, Maggie had driven away, feeling untethered, unhinged, as if she no longer knew the rules. She felt like weeping with the stress of what had just happened, especially when she passed a trampoline park and imagined the children inside bouncing wild and free, their hair spraying out around them, the shrieks, the laughter. Amelia used to love trampolining, she remembered with a pang. So did she herself, for that matter. They’d had a trampoline in their garden until a few years ago, and they’d ended up bouncing on there together many times. ‘It’s hard for the only ones, when they don’t have brothers or sisters, isn’t it?’ her neighbour Tina had once said sorrowfully, peering over the fence at them. Maggie had felt so winded by this not-so-subtle jibe that she had bounced to a sudden halt and almost broken her knees.

  The holiday just felt all wrong without Amelia. Waking up in the too-quiet cottage this morning had seemed so strange. Maggie had gone into the second bedroom and her throat had tightened as she saw the bed there, unslept in. She’d actually sat down on it for a moment and put her hand on Amelia’s pillow because she felt so bereft. Then, in the kitchen, she’d automatically pushed two slices of bread down in the toaster for her, as she did every day. It was only as she was buttering the toast and opened her mouth to bawl Amelia’s name that she had realized what she’d done. She’d ended up eating them herself, on top of the bowl of porridge she’d already put away.

  ‘I miss you,’ she said into the dead air of the room. ‘I wish you were here.’

  Surprise surprise, she imagined her sister-in-law Helena saying sarcastically, if she could see Maggie now. Helena had never bothered hiding the condescension she felt towards her, and Maggie still bristled whenever she thought about Helena and Ross’s New Year’s Eve dinner last year, when things had really come to a head. Helena was one of those people who intensely disliked not getting their own way and, having tried but failed to talk Maggie into staying over for the night, she then began jokingly calling her boring and a party-pooper – or Maggie had assumed she was joking anyway. But then a mean sort of light began shining from Helena’s piggy eyes and the mood changed abruptly. ‘I knew you wouldn’t stay. You never do. You always use Amelia as an excuse – your cover story, stopping you doing anything interesting with your life. Ross thinks so too. What are you so scared of?’

  Maggie had been so shocked and humiliated by the accusation that she had jerked Amelia away from her cousins and they’d left pretty much there and then, but the moment came back to her now. Helena’s plump, scornful face looming at her, a small shred of bruschetta wedged between her two front teeth, the stale waft of alcohol drifting from her open mouth. What are you so scared of?

  I’m not scared of anything, she had told herself indignantly that night as she drove home, the roads empty as the rest of the country poured another drink and danced the old year out. Of course I’m not, she had repeated once back at the house, alone on her sofa as she watched the London fireworks crack and pop above the celebrating crowds. She’d always prided herself on her competence, how she’d kept her little family going by pure strength of will – as opposed to the strength of Will, you could say. But today her sister-in-law’s unkind words jabbed at her like thorns. They weren’t true . . . were they?

  Look at what she’d done so far that day, though: gone to the supermarket, filled in the newspaper crossword, eaten a boiled egg for lunch while listening to a dreary Radio 4 phone-in about pensions. On her holiday as well. The devil makes work for idle hands, her mum had been fond of warning, and Maggie was starting to think she might be better off – at least better entertained – considering the devil’s options instead.

  Just then, though, she almost jumped out of her skin when she heard a ferocious banging at the front door. ‘Is anyone there? Hello?’ came an urgent voice.

  Well, it didn’t sound like the devil, was her first ridiculous thought, before she snapped out of her strange mood and rushed to answer it, wiping her hands on her trousers. Wait – what if it was Amelia, tearful and heartbroken, having hitched all the way back to Falmouth? Maggie’s mind was instantly teeming with panicky possibilities. If Will had upset her, after all this, if Will had dared make Amelia feel small or insignificant or stupid, she would wring his rotten neck with her own hands. She would kill him!

  She yanked the door open, only to see the woman from the cottage next door standing outside, looking agitated. ‘You haven’t seen Izzie, have you? My daughter. She’s not off with your girl somewhere, is she?’

  The words burst forward in such a torrent, Maggie found herself blinking. ‘No,’ she replied, her heart rate decelerating. ‘Amelia’s in Devon. I . . . Is everything all right? I did see Izzie, about ten minutes ago,’ she added, remembering how she’d been dully washing up her lunch things and happened to glance out of the window. She had seen the whole family coming back a short while before that, and noticed distractedly how cross they all seemed to be with one another. Then out had come the older girl on her own, hooking a leg over a bicycle and pedalling furiously away, shoulders hunched low for speed. No helmet, Maggie had thought in disapproval. ‘She went off on her bike,’ she said.

  The woman – Em, was it? Emma? – sagged on the doorstep. ‘Okay, thanks. Did you see which way she went? Anything else at all?’

  ‘Sorry, no,’ Maggie said, trying and failing to dredge up further details. ‘Can I help?’ she asked in the next moment. ‘Is everything all right?’

  ‘I don’t suppose you—’ Then Em broke off, her mouth buckling as if she were about to burst into tears. ‘No, don’t worry about it. Thank you.’

  ‘Honestly, ask me,’ Maggie urged. At heart she was still a Girl Guide, wanting to do good whenever possible, wanting to please others. ‘Amelia’s not here, I’ve got no plans whatsoever – if there’s anything I can do, just say it. You’ll save me from cleaning the cooker.’

  The woman’s eyes were watery, but she managed a tiny smile. Perhaps she thought Maggie was joking about the cooker. What kind of saddo cleaned the cooker when they were on holiday, anyway? ‘In that case . . . I don’t suppose you could come with me, could you?’ she asked. ‘I’m going out to look for her and I just—’

  ‘Of course I will,’ said Maggie as the woman’s voice got smaller and smaller. ‘Absolutely. Let me just grab my key and I’ll be right with you.’

  So this was an unexpected road trip, she thought, clambering into the passenger seat of Em’s car moments later. Inside, there were stickers all over the dashboard and crisp packets in the footwell, and it smelled like a cheese-and-onion pasty. Maggie wondered if it would be very rude of her to wind the window down. ‘I’ve brought my map of the area; where do you think she might have gone?’ she asked, unfolding it on her knee as Em started the engine. ‘Gosh, it’s warm, isn’t it?’ she murmured as stale air poured out of the vents. She spotted a button for the window and rested a hopeful finger there. ‘Mind if I . . . ?’

  ‘I don’t know – into Falmouth, maybe?’ Em said, answering Maggie’s first question before she could finish aski
ng the second. ‘She just took off. She was upset. There was a . . . a small saga, and she was unfairly blamed. She must have felt disbelieved – I didn’t back her up as roundly as I might have done.’ Her mouth trembled again as she executed a clumsy three-point turn in the car park and stalled. ‘Oh, bloody hell. Sorry. Excuse my atrocious driving.’

  ‘Let’s head for Falmouth then,’ Maggie said. She knew how it was to feel like a rubbish mother, after all – she understood how you could beat yourself up over a badly handled argument. She also knew that teenagers could explode a small grievance into a whole furnace of drama. ‘If she’s on her bike, we might even catch her up. No speeding round the corners now,’ she added, trying to sound as if she were joking, but meaning it too; Em had certainly set off at a far faster lick than Maggie was used to travelling. She pressed the button to open the window and gulped in the delicious cool air that streamed through.

  ‘Good point,’ Em said, slowing as they approached a bend. ‘Talk about adding insult to injury, if I went and knocked her down now, on top of everything else. Injury to injury, more like.’ She shuddered. ‘Thank you, by the way. This is incredibly nice of you.’ She sniffed loudly. ‘I’m sure Izzie’s fine, she’ll just be blowing off some steam, but all the same . . .’ Her voice wobbled on the words. ‘All the same, thank you.’