What I Did On My Holidays

by Chrissie Manby

  I hoped so. Callum and I definitely needed some quality time. On a couple of occasions when I’d called him that week, he’d seemed a little disinterested in hearing the latest developments in the detailed itinerary I had been putting together with Hannah’s eager assistance. I put that down to his feeling tired after a month of non-stop work. He had every right to be exhausted as the Newcastle project drew to a close. I’d been working hard back at head office too. We had earned every day of our trip.

  I hoped Callum and I would have at least as good a time as we’d had in Crete the previous year. How magical that holiday had been. The resort was perfect. The weather was perfect. We soon fell into a daily rhythm of long mornings cuddling in bed, afternoons lazing by the pool and evenings spent dancing in the cocktail bar. When we came back from that holiday, so happy and relaxed in each other’s company, I felt that we had grown much, much closer. ‘It was like we were Siamese twins,’ was how I’d heard Callum describing it to one of the lift engineers when I happened upon them in the staff kitchen. Actually, ‘bloody Siamese twins’ was what he said, but I knew that men sometimes like to play down their feelings in public. Anyway, it had been a mistake to let so much time elapse since then without even so much as a mini-break. I hoped that as soon as Callum got on that plane, he would start to perk up and feel excited again. Unbeknown to him, I was planning for our holiday to start long before we got to the airport.

  Chapter Three

  I had everything organised to the last detail. Since we were flying from Gatwick, it made more sense for Callum to come and stay in my south London flat rather than spend the night at his own place in Kentish Town. He would catch the train down from Newcastle as soon as he could get away that afternoon, swing by his place to drop off his work gear, pack his suitcase for the holiday and get the Tube to mine for a delicious supper and an early night. We would have to be up at the crack of dawn the following morning to get a minicab to the Gatwick Express at Victoria. Charter flights always seem to leave really early. I had booked the cab two weeks in advance to make sure we didn’t get stranded.

  Having done my holiday shopping and packing during the lonely weekends while Callum was stuck up there in Newcastle, I had plenty of time to prepare a really special meal for our last night in Inglaterra. (See how well my Spanish was coming along?) I was going to cook something with a Spanish theme, of course. That last day at work, I spent my lunch hour in Sainsbury’s, buying everything I needed. To begin with, stuffed olives, chorizo and Manchego cheese, plus four bottles of Spanish beer to wash it down. For a main course, I was going to make chicken rice from a recipe I’d found on a Spanish tourism website. For pudding, a traditional Spanish lemon tart. OK, so I bought a ready-made tart . . .

  Back at the office, I spent the afternoon tormenting Hannah with the thought that the following day I would be in her favourite place on earth, while she would be in my least favourite place in the universe, and dealing with my calls to boot.

  ‘Don’t forget to send us a postcard,’ she said as I prepared to leave at five on the dot without so much as a goodbye tweet from @liftlady.

  ‘You’ll be lucky if I have time to send a text,’ I said.

  I had no intention whatsoever of spending my fortnight away corresponding by postcard, text or otherwise with the people I had been so looking forward to getting away from. As I walked out through the revolving doors, I was a free woman. At least for the next fourteen days. Fourteen days! I didn’t even care that when I came home, I would no longer be in my twenties. Two weeks with no work more than made up for that. Two weeks with nothing to do but concentrate on my dearest, darling Callum. It was going to be heaven.

  As soon as I got home, I changed into something much more ‘holiday-like’. I checked that my passport was in the right place: in the outside pocket of my special black travel holdall, which I’d carefully chosen to fit in an overhead locker. There was no reason why it wouldn’t be. It had been there for most of the week.

  Next, I went into the kitchen and put on some suitable music while I prepared our Spanish feast. The Gipsy Kings seemed appropriate. I would only later find out that they were French and not Spanish after all. Anyway, for now their frenetic guitars and catchy rhythms fit the bill. My mood was as high as a helium balloon. I wiggled to the beat as I took the packaging off the cheese and the chorizo and arranged both on a plate as though for a TV cookery show. I danced across the room to put the beer bottles in the fridge. I jigged from foot to foot as I sent Callum another text – my fifth since leaving the office – to find out how he was doing. Was he at King’s Cross yet?

  ‘I can’t wait for our holiday to begin!’ I texted as the CD started from the beginning a second time.

  Callum didn’t text me back as quickly as I hoped, but I put that down to his perhaps already being on his way. I snuck a piece of cheese while I waited to hear from him. Hmm. The Manchego wasn’t quite as exciting as I’d expected. Not much flavour at all considering that one tiny lump had cost as much as a paperback novel. I wouldn’t be bothering with that again. Unless Callum really liked it, of course. If Callum liked it, I would definitely buy some more. I had a special shelf in my kitchen for the things that he liked: Doritos, Peperami, beef jerky . . .

  Then I went online and looked at various views of our hotel. I had spent a lot of time on that hotel website while Callum was working away, just looking at the pictures and imagining us together by the pool. Adjacent sunbeds. Holding hands. It was going to be so good for us to get some time together alone again. I don’t think I had ever looked forward to a holiday more than I was looking forward to our fortnight in Puerto Bona. I could almost feel the sun on my face and the sea breeze in my hair.

  Meanwhile, Mum texted to wish us both a happy holiday and me a happy birthday. While wasting time on the Internet, I had already noticed that Mum had changed her Facebook status to ‘Can’t believe my little girl is going to be thirty next week. Have a very happy holiday, Sophie.’ Mum loved her status updates. While many of her contemporaries claimed to find the Internet overwhelming, my mum had moved straight into the fast lane of the information superhighway. She had a Facebook page before I did, and when I told her that I had opened a Twitter account for work, she signed up that very afternoon so she could follow me. Mum tweeted as @hotflushheather and had eighteen followers to my eleven. She updated at least ten times a day and every time Dad made a joke he asked her, ‘Are you going to twit that?’ Apart from me, Mum followed several yoga gurus and her local weatherman. Apparently, he was rather funny and a good deal more accurate than the BBC.

  Anyway, being the type of person who plans ahead, Mum had already sent me my thirtieth birthday present, a silver photo frame, which I’d filled with a picture of Callum and me on Valentine’s Day. It was my favourite photo of us together, though the day itself hadn’t gone quite as I hoped. When Callum told me he’d booked the restaurant where we had our first date for 14 February, I thought he might be planning something special. Unfortunately, he wasn’t, but the chap on the next table (which was less than two inches away – the restaurant was packing ’em in) did choose that night to propose. As we were leaving, I wished the happy couple the very best and offered to take a photo. They reciprocated and it turned out to be the nicest photo of Callum and me ever taken. So I put it in the frame and tried not to think about the argument we’d had later that night. I think it was about where we’d be spending Easter. More importantly, it was about whether we would be spending Easter together, which was what I had very much hoped for. We didn’t. Callum said that Easter was an especially sacred time for his family.

  I texted Mum back, making sure I added ‘I love you’, as we always do when any family member is about to fly. A little morbid, I know, but wouldn’t you just hate for such things to have gone unsaid? After that, I texted my sister to let her know that I loved her too. Most of the time, it was true.

  Chapter Four

  Clare was my big sister. She was just over two years old
er than me and for a long time we had fought like cat and dog. During my teens there were times when I had actively hated her (mostly when she refused to lend me her real black leather jacket or her favourite high-heeled shoes), but now that we were both proper grown-ups and making our way in London, we had become much closer again. The time she pulled the legs off my box-fresh equestrian Barbie was long since forgotten, as was the day I broke her silver charm bracelet. (At least, that incident was only mentioned once every couple of months now.) We had put our childish squabbles behind us and I would say that over the past couple of years Clare had become one of my very best friends.

  Clare was living quite close to me. I had a one-bedroom flat in Clapham Old Town. She shared a sweet little terraced house with her fiancé, Evan, an auditor for an insurance company, just two stops down the Northern Line in Balham, though she liked to call it Clapham South. We were always in and out of each other’s houses. I had looked after Clare’s goldfish, Cheryl Cole, while she and Evan went camping over Easter. (Cheryl Cole’s bowl-mate, Ashley, died after making a suicide leap onto the carpet while Clare and Evan were at work. It happened on the day the real Coles announced their divorce, which seemed prophetic.) Now Clare was going to return the favour by watering my house plants while I was away. At least, she would water them if she remembered. I just had to make sure she remembered. I knew Clare wouldn’t let me down deliberately, but she could be a bit dreamy.

  ‘Love you. Please don’t forget my plants!’ I begged her in my text.

  ‘Of course I won’t forget,’ she texted back. ‘I’ll water them every day, I promise. I love you too.’

  Water them every day? I doubted it. But if she managed once a week, the plants would probably survive.

  So everything was set. My case had been packed and ready for the best part of a fortnight. My passport was still where I had put it. The airline tickets and accommodation and car-hire vouchers were with my passport. I had bought a special pink folder to keep everything together. It matched the pink leather passport cover, embossed with my initials in gold, that Clare had given me for my birthday the year before.

  Both my suitcase and my hand luggage were packed with incredible precision. Prior to packing my case, I had made tiny drawings of every item of summer clothing that I owned. I cut these out, like a paper doll’s wardrobe, and mixed and matched until I had worked out the least possible number of clothes I needed to pack to make the greatest number of outfits. There was no room for excess baggage with the budget airline charging more for an extra suitcase than we had paid for the flights in the first place.

  My hand luggage contained an emergency change of clothes, should my checked luggage go awry. It also contained my incredibly flattering new bikini. That was going in my hand luggage because when a girl finds a bikini that she really, really likes, she should take no risks with losing it. A good bikini is as rare as Mr Right.

  My carry-on also contained essential toiletries, which I had decanted into airport-security-approved hundred-millilitre bottles and tucked into a clear ziplock bag. I was very proud of my packing indeed. It might have featured in a photo shoot for one of those ‘How to Travel Light’ articles you get in all the women’s magazines every summer.

  I knew that Callum would be just as careful with his luggage. Callum was a man who appreciated good clothes – hence he bought his suits at Hugo Boss when all the other guys at the office went for drip-dry M&S. He certainly had the body to make the most of them, especially since he started doing boxercise at the gym on a Saturday morning. Anyway, he was the only man I had ever met who bothered to put layers of tissue paper between his trousers to stop them creasing in the hold. He also had a skincare regime that would have made any girl proud.

  ‘Don’t forget your sunblock,’ I texted him as the Gipsy Kings struck up for a third time. He didn’t really need reminding, I knew – Callum was not the kind of guy who would spend his first few days by the pool looking like a lobster – but I wanted to jog him into letting me know where he was. It was strange that he hadn’t texted or called. He generally responded to every sixth text I sent, at least.

  However, by eight o’clock I had still heard nothing from Callum and my holiday mood began to waver just a little. Where had he got to? I had been under the impression that his train from Newcastle would get into London at around half past five. It shouldn’t have taken more than fifteen minutes for him to get from the train station to his flat in Kentish Town, and it wouldn’t take him longer than half an hour to throw some things into a bag. All that meant he could easily have been at my place by eight. But even if he had been delayed, surely he should have let me know?

  Had his iPhone run out of battery? He would never have let that happen. Callum would sooner be without his shoes than his iPhone. Ordinarily, he was a slave to its pings and vibrations. We’d once had a spectacular row after he responded to a text while I was giving him a private viewing of some newly bought underwear. There’s nothing quite so humiliating as standing in the middle of the living room in nothing but a new bra and thong, while your boyfriend lets his best mate know what time the rugby kicks off . . . So it was not like him to have not responded to any of my texts that day and soon the worst-case scenarios began to drift through my mind. I was certain he’d have let me know if he had missed his train or if he’d been delayed, but what if there had been a terrible accident?

  I went back online to check, but there was nothing about a train crash on any of the news websites. Mum, however, had tweeted, ‘Hope Sophie and Callum are having an early night ahead of their holiday.’ Hannah, who was one of Mum’s followers because she thought it was ‘cute’ that I had a tweet-happy mother, had added, ‘I hope they make the most of their time in Majorca because I’m left behind and doing all the work!’

  Alison also followed Mum. She had tweeted, ‘Hear, hear.’

  I found it very disconcerting that my mother and colleagues were Twitter-mates, especially when Mum tweeted about her hot flushes. She thought she was striking a blow for menopausal women everywhere and that one day her insights – such as ‘Standing in front of the fridge with my blouse open’ or ‘Have found a natural alternative to KY’ – would be collected into a best-selling book. For me, knowing that my colleagues had been treated to the thought of my mother chilling her cleavage was just another reason to dread going into work.

  I logged off Twitter and sent Callum another text.

  ‘I thought you would be here by now,’ I wrote. ‘Is everything OK?’

  And then I waited and I waited some more until it was almost nine o’clock. Dinner was certainly ruined. The rice, now overcooked, was as hard and dry as it had been when I poured it out of the packet. My carefully planned schedule had assumed we would be in bed by half past nine. Where the hell was he? I called him and went straight to voicemail.

  ‘Callum,’ I said, ‘I’m really worried now. You were supposed to be here ages ago. Your dinner is in the oven, but it’s completely dried up. The cheese is looking sweaty. The beer is warm. And we’re supposed to be in bed in half an hour. You do know what time we’ve got to get up in the morning, don’t you? Please give me a call.’

  As soon as I put down the phone, I wondered if my message had sounded too brusque. My mind continued to race with visions of train crashes and car accidents. Was he stuck underground in a broken-down Tube carriage? There were so many reasons why he might not have called. Alas, there was one worst-case scenario that I hadn’t thought of. Worse than train strikes and Tube stoppages, worse than Callum being late to my flat because he couldn’t find his passport, worse than just about anything. I mean, why would I have thought of it, given that Callum and I were due to go on a lovely romantic holiday the very next morning? Our future could not have looked brighter.

  ‘I’m not coming over to your place tonight,’ Callum texted at last.

  Well, at least he was alive.

  ‘Why not?’ I texted back. The fuzzy feeling of relief I had felt at seeing his name
in my in-box at last was quickly replaced by annoyance. His dinner had been ready for the past two hours and now he was telling me he wasn’t coming over? What was he thinking? I guessed that he wanted to spend a night in his own flat. After all, he hadn’t spent the night there for a month because of the Newcastle job. But still . . . he was being very selfish having waited so long to let me know. He must have known I would cook for him. I always cooked for him.

  ‘You do know how early we’re going to have to set off for the airport?’ I added. ‘Shall I come to you?’ I suggested before he could text me again.

  ‘No. Don’t come over. I mean, I don’t want to go to Majorca,’ was his reply.

  Well, I wasn’t going to text my response to that one. I called Callum right away.

  ‘Hello.’

  He picked up, thank goodness.

  ‘What do you mean, you don’t want to go to Majorca?’ I asked without preamble.

  ‘I mean, I don’t want to go to Majorca,’ he said simply.

  I was about to ask him if he was anxious about the flight, though he’d never been anxious about flying before, or whether he thought he had too much to do here in London – I knew he must have household admin backing up from his month away – but then he added, ‘With you.’

  Chapter Five

  ‘With you.’

  Those two little words were like a body blow. Before I’d had time to digest them, my stomach was already reacting to the news. He wasn’t saying that, was he? I sat down on a kitchen chair and waited for clarification. Maybe Callum didn’t actually mean what my heart was already mourning.