by Judy Astley
‘You’re so harsh on people,’ she snapped back at her brother. ‘You don’t know how they feel. They might have medical reasons for keeping still or they might be really embarrassed at the idea of being seen flobbing around in the pool in public.’
‘Huh! Doesn’t stop them stripping off in the sun, does it?’ he countered, nodding towards the vast tattooed artwork that was Fred Flintstone’s corpulent stomach.
‘Enough sizeist prejudice, Nick. I’m out of here.’ Delilah flung down her book and climbed off the lounger.
‘Are you doing this class?’ Nick sounded surprised, watching her unfasten her sarong and hang it over the sunshade’s struts. ‘Wouldn’t have thought it was your sort of thing. At school you usually skive off games.’
‘You’re my brother. You haven’t a clue what’s my sort of thing!’ Delilah tweaked the bottom of her bikini into place. Why did it happen, the pants riding-up-your-bum? She was forever sorting a wedgie like a little ballet girl tugging at a leotard. It must be since the glandular fever – her body had shrunk. She wasn’t filling the bikini top as well as she had in the summer. She’d never exactly been voluptuous but she did long to have her pre-illness shape back.
‘You joining us, Delilah darling?’ Sam was setting up his sound system as Delilah dropped down into the water in front of him. He looked down at her and smiled. Devastating, she thought, oh just so fit.
‘Hooowf!’ was all she managed to gasp, taken by surprise by the sudden chill of the water on her sun-warmed skin. ‘Um, I mean, yes.’
Bugger, she thought, that went wrong. If Kelly and Sukinder were watching they’d be in fits at her hopelessness. She’d intended to slide gracefully into the pool. Now she felt a total twit, covered in sudden goose pimples and a certainty that her instantly chilled skin had gone a horrible rice-like shade of dull pale.
‘Hey come and hang out by me at the front, sweetie!’ Gina swam up alongside and began bobbing up and down, limbering up. ‘We can show all the losers at the back of the class how it’s done!’
Delilah had intended to be at the front all right, but definitely not beside this leather-skinned, lemon-haired cheer-leader with those silicone tits cascading over the front of her bikini top. What kind of an unfair contents did that make it? Sam would look one way, then the other and make a choice – skinny pale flatty or impossibly tanned, Jordan-esque over-hang. Shit, bugger and sod.
The music started and a tidal wave rippled across the pool as Sam, instructing from the poolside, had them all jogging on the spot as a warm-up. ‘Come on folks! Get those knees higher and higher!’ he called.
‘Exactly what he was saying to me last night!’ Gina sniggered, leaning over to yell close into Delilah’s ear above the thumping, pulsing music.
‘What?’ Delilah stopped bouncing and faced Gina, who carried on jogging up and down in the water. Bounce-bounce-bounce went her breasts, surely only seconds from escaping their white Lycra bonds.
‘Oh after you’d gone to bed last night, I was just saying . . .’ Gina’s grin broadened. Such big teeth she had, all levelled off in that American way to look exactly the same in a long flat-edged row.
‘I heard what you said. I didn’t get what you meant.’ But she did. What lay beneath Gina’s insinuation was all too clear. Gina stopped bouncing, grabbed Delilah’s arm and pulled her across to the edge of the pool.
‘Come on girls! Don’t give up on me now! Keep it going, keep it going!’ Sam called down to them.
‘Did he say that as well?’ Delilah demanded.
‘Oh I get it! You like him!’ Gina laughed softly. ‘I sorta sussed that – I can see these things. Hey, I just gave him a little road test for you! Your turn next and you’ll be fine with him, baby. Gentle or what?’ She reached out and stroked the side of Delilah’s face. Delilah flinched back. Gina didn’t seem to notice and continued, ‘Sam’s a real hundred per cent cutie. So, like, considerate.’
‘And . . . star jumps!’ Sam was jumping now, arms out then in. The wash from the jumping class crashed against the pool wall and almost knocked Delilah over.
‘Oh fuck you, you cow!’ Delilah shrieked at Gina, then without really being aware of what she was doing, she grabbed a handful of Gina’s long smooth yellow mane and pulled her under the water. There was a lot of splashing and thrashing but Delilah held on tight.
‘Oh-oh, cat fight! Go, girls!’ Nick called from his lounger, getting up for a better view. Many others were doing the same. The class came to a halt as everyone gawped at Delilah and the flailing Gina.
‘Ladies! Please, stop this!’ Michael, moving faster than anyone would have thought possible, leapt nimbly down from the terrace into the water, manhandled Delilah out of the way and hauled the spluttering Gina back up for air.
‘Now what was all that about?’ he asked Delilah as Nick offered a hand down to Gina and pulled her out of the pool, sitting her down on his lounger and patting her back as she spluttered and coughed, his eyes on her formidable chest which heaved deeply as she fought to regain her breath.
‘It was nothing. Just something. She . . .’ Delilah couldn’t stop the tears overflowing. She put her hands on the pool’s tiled edge and dragged herself out of the water, rudely ignoring Michael even as he flung a towel round her, patting her dry and doing his best to be comforting. Delilah shrugged him off and padded quickly past Gina, muttering, ‘I’m sorry Gina. I didn’t, like, exactly, mean to . . . you know . . . Maybe I overreacted . . .’
‘ ’S OK honey, I’m sorry too. Hug?’ Gina opened her arms out wide.
‘Um no thanks, if you don’t mind.’ Delilah wasn’t, she decided, going to be bought off that easily. She slumped down on her lounger, hunching herself into a moody heap with her arms wrapped round her knees.
‘That’s OK, I so totally understand,’ Gina sympathized. ‘Feelings run high at your age. I guess I’d forgotten.’
Well you would, Delilah privately bitched to herself as she wrapped her wet body in her towel and lay back under the sunshade, feeling utterly miserable. For you it was such a very, very long time ago.
11
Hot Pants
42 ml tequila
14 ml liqueur of choice
2 mint leaves
1 tsp caster sugar
Beth accepted it was a form of divine retribution, being landed with Gina’s mother Dolly to take care of on the trip over to Dragon Island for the afternoon. She could hardly refuse when Gina asked her to keep an eye on the wiry old lady, not after the way Delilah had behaved. The girl was lucky not to have been hauled up for attempted murder.
‘I’d love to come along with y’all, but I’ve made plans,’ Gina explained after lunch as she handed Dolly over to Beth and Ned like a parcel being hand-delivered. Gina was keeping to herself exactly what those plans were. She was, at handover time, wearing a demure pink linen short-sleeved dress and a cream straw hat, so Beth guessed she had a secret someone to meet in the town, though she could be quite wrong. It was possible that Gina just fancied a spot of shopping followed by a quiet nap somewhere under a tree. Maybe she had booked herself in for the Cellutox Aroma Spa Ocean Wrap – who knew. If her plans involved Sam, at least she was having the grace not to mention him.
Beth hadn’t yet had an opportunity to deal with Delilah. She’d prefer to do it somewhere out of shouting range of other people. Delilah had given the poolside sunbathers enough entertainment for one day without throwing in a mother–daughter slanging match as an extra. Since the incident in the pool Delilah, slippery as only a teenager could be, had made sure she hadn’t found herself alone with her mother. She’d kept well out of the firing line for the rest of the morning and then avoided any chance of attack over lunch by sitting firmly between Sadie and Mark and opposite Angela, using her, to Beth’s suspicious eyes, as a formidable guard dog.
Now, as the snorkelling party boarded Carlos’s boat, Beth seized her chance, along with Delilah’s arm, and hauled her to a pair of seats down at the front where the
y could be alone.
‘I want a serious word with you, Delilah,’ Beth began.
‘Yeah but, Mum . . . look, I said I’m sorry to Gina. Like, is it my fault she’s not coming?’ Delilah challenged.
‘Probably,’ Beth replied sharply. ‘After all, she’s hardly going to want to go out snorkelling with a girl who tried to drown her, now is she?’
‘I wouldn’t have killed her,’ Delilah said sulkily. ‘It was just the way she wouldn’t stop going on and on and on.’
‘I should damn well hope you weren’t going to kill her! And going on is what Gina does. She’s all mouth. And she’s also all-American, don’t forget: you’re bloody lucky she hasn’t threatened to sue. You shouldn’t have taken any notice of her, and while we’re on the subject . . .’
‘Which you’re never going to let go of . . .’ Delilah muttered.
‘No, too right! Not ’til I’ve got to the bottom of what this fight was about.’
The boat was filling up. At the back, Ned, Nick and Carlos were helping Dolly along the narrow plank from the sand. Dolly was cackling about something and looking very unsteady. Was she sober, Beth wondered. Probably not – she did like a cocktail or six at lunchtime. She was wearing a long, voluminous kaftan constructed from extraordinary silver sequinned fabric and a matching toque. Even her shoes (mules, dangerously high in the heel for getting on and off rocky boats) were silver, the overall effect being that of a kitchen-foil space rocket made by a child.
Len, Lesley, Sadie and Mark were already aboard, settling themselves and sorting snorkel masks and fins. Bradley and Cyn had decided, at the last minute, not to come along with them, and had joined a trip to visit an old plantation house instead.
‘Right. So what’s all this nonsense about Sam?’ Beth cut to the bottom line. ‘Nick tells me you were fighting over him! I mean, how ridiculous is that?’
Delilah stared at the floor, her face pink and furious. Sod Nick, she thought, what did it have to do with him? And where was Gina now? How come she’d conveniently offloaded her mother and gone off on her own? Perhaps she wasn’t on her own.
‘What’s so ridiculous? Sam can’t like her,’ Delilah hissed. ‘She’s like, so ancient. Practically withened.’
‘Withened?’ Beth was puzzled for a moment. ‘Oh, you mean wizened.’ It wasn’t a bad word, withened, it seemed to Beth. A neat mixture of wizened and withered. Not that, in her opinion, you could apply any of the three adjectives to Gina. But she could see it might be how the American woman appeared, from that faraway viewing point of youth.
‘The Sam-and-Gina situation, if there is one – which I doubt – isn’t relevant,’ Beth persisted as Carlos headed the boat past the reef’s end and out towards Dragon Island. ‘The point is that there isn’t a Sam-and-Delilah situation either.’ No response. Beth prodded Delilah’s leg as a prompt. ‘Is there?’
Delilah’s leg started jogging up and down furiously. She did this at home when she was angry, Beth thought. So many times she’d told her off in the kitchen and noticed the tiny vibrations of the table as Delilah’s leg, beneath it, twitched and bounced furiously. The last time had been during the summer, when she’d caught her smoking dope out of her bedroom window with Kelly. Had Delilah really thought the smell wouldn’t waft into the garden, where Beth was picking parsley to add to the Smothered Muskrat recipe? And had she really imagined her ex-punk parent wouldn’t recognize that sweet heady scent?
‘Is there?’ Beth demanded again.
‘Is there what?’ Delilah growled.
‘You know what I was asking you.’
‘I don’t know why; you seem to know all the answers already.’ Delilah glared at Beth. Her eyes were glistening. Beth could see this was more than the effect of the salt wind. Time to let it go, she decided suddenly. It would be too cruel to force the girl to say ‘No’, when Sam was so obviously an object of hopeful teen desire. Nothing would happen. Glamorous Sam must be spoilt for choice among older, more experienced holiday women. He wasn’t likely to waste his time feeding off the lovelorn passions of a naïve teenager. Young girls had to be more trouble than he’d be looking for at the best of times, and this one was encumbered by having her watchful parents in tow. He’d be sure to opt for a far easier life than that.
‘OK, OK, we’ll leave it at that. Just . . . please, no more picking fights, all right?’ Beth smiled at her daughter, who scowled back. Not ready yet then, Beth understood, to let her mother off the hook.
So how come it always happened, she wondered, as Carlos carefully backed the boat up to the soft white sand of Dragon Island, that she ended up being the Bad Party. No mystery. It came free with a mother’s lot, that’s how.
Dragon Island was no more than a quarter of a mile long by a hundred yards’ broad strip of perfect soft sand, the flecking of coral in it sparkling a fierce diamond-white. In the centre was a grove of several dozen mature coconut palms hiding a thatched bar that faced the endless ocean on the island’s far side, a wooden shack laid out as changing rooms and several picnic tables beneath giant sunshades. Oversized burnt-orange hammocks, the colour sun-faded, hung from bent palms. These were usually occupied by loved-up couples who occasionally tumbled out onto the sand, as fondling that they wrongly assumed to be well out of eyeline became over-intense.
On the beach beneath a pair of symmetrically arching trees was the hotel’s wedding venue: a white-painted bower like a seaside bandstand, draped with tulle and twined with jasmine. Beth tried to imagine Mark and Sadie here a week hence, all decked out in full-scale wedding finery, but could only picture the two of them as they appeared now: Sadie in a bikini and matching mini-sarong all patterned like army camouflage, and Mark in a shiny black and white Newcastle United FC vest and lime green board shorts.
At the island’s southern end, a sign depicting a dancing couple wearing only floral garlands was nailed to a tree, proclaiming the far tip of the beach a clothes-free zone.
‘Gross,’ Delilah commented to Sadie as they padded along the beach towards the bar. ‘It’ll be old people showing off their flab and wrinkles.’
Sadie giggled. ‘Won’t matter: you won’t be able to see their naughty bits for all the fleshy overhang!’
‘Ugh, yuck!’ Delilah shuddered. ‘You’re making me feel sick!’
The party laid claim to a table beneath a thatched beach shade. Hardly anyone else was around. A couple of yachts had moored a little way out to sea along the beach, and a couple lay dozing on a double hammock beneath the trees.
Ned wandered over to the bar to fetch drinks and bottles of water, while Lesley settled Dolly onto a cushioned lounger and made sure she was well shaded from the glare of the sun. With all that silver fabric, its reflection could easily, Lesley considered, set fire to the wooden table and possibly the entire beach bar. The old lady’s weirdly over-white teeth flashed a glinting and intimate smile at her, and Lesley felt a sudden chill of foreboding. Why had Dolly insisted on coming with them? She wasn’t intending to do snorkelling, that was for sure; getting on and off the boat was enough of a struggle for her. It unnerved Lesley that Dolly was so callously blasé about her own death. Going on about how she expected it to happen any minute now was like tempting fate, and made everyone uncomfortable. Fancy going on holiday and reminding everyone every day that the Grim Reaper was on your tail. It was selfish, that was what it was. She should either have stayed at home in Wyoming or left her death demons behind her. Surely people who had really accepted that they were about to die simply took to their beds and gave up the ghost quietly?
‘This is exactly the place I always think of when I listen to Desert Island Discs,’ Beth was saying when Ned returned from the bar.
‘What’s that on?’ Sadie asked. ‘I haven’t seen that. Is it on Beeb Two?’
‘It’s radio, love,’ Len enlightened her with exaggerated patience. ‘Radio Four.’
‘Oh. Right.’ Sadie looked doubtful.
‘Bless her, she’s never heard of it! Radio Fou
r isn’t music, pet,’ Len continued, trying to be helpful. ‘It’s mostly people talking; there are gardening programmes and plays and Woman’s Hour. You must have heard it.’
‘OK.’ Sadie looked as if she was thinking deeply. ‘So, like no music at all then?’
‘Only theme tunes, like this, everyone knows this one, even you! Dum dee dum dee dum dee dee . . .’ Len pranced on the sand, can of beer in hand, belting out the theme tune to The Archers. A pair of inquisitive faces rose from the nearby hammock, grinned at Len and settled down out of sight again. Beth saw Mark raising his eyes to the skies, his finger twirling at his temple in the universal code for ‘mad’.
Dolly chuckled quietly. Beth wondered what she was thinking: you didn’t get much of a clue from someone whose eyes were hidden by such very large, very dark sunglasses.
‘So on Desert Island Discs, Sadie,’ Beth told her, ‘you get to choose your eight favourite records that you’d have with you if you were shipwrecked and all alone. And a book and a luxury.’
‘Eight? Like eight songs? Er, like, why?’ Mark interjected. ‘If you was gonna fall off a ship with some music on you, you could take thousands of tracks on your iPod, no?’
‘Gordon Bennet, yoof of today!’ Len roared. ‘What do they know? It’s just the way the programme is! It’s the format! Has been for donkey’s years, you daft sod! You get eight songs. Not eighty, not eight zillion. You can’t mess with a sacred formula.’
‘Not until,’ Beth laughed, ‘some BBC spark with no sense of broadcast history updates it and we get Desert Island Downloads.’
‘What about them books and luxuries then? That’s definitely more me.’ Sadie lit a cigarette. Beth guessed her luxury would be a fag machine and a smart gold Dunhill lighter.
‘You get to take one book, apart from Shakespeare and the Bible. I keep changing mine,’ Beth said. ‘Just now it’s Colette’s Claudine novels, but Nancy Mitford’s coming up fast on the rails.’
‘I can’t think of a book I’d want.’ Sadie looked worried. ‘Though I liked Harry Potter.’
