by Judy Astley
‘North Terminal, sir?’ The driver interrupted Simon’s thoughts.
‘Oh, er … Gatwick already. Yes, North Terminal, thanks.’
‘Oh and look, there’s Lucy and Colette by the luggage trolleys.’ Plum leaned forward and shoved her arm past Simon, pointing through the windscreen.
‘She looks as if she’s arguing with someone,’ Perry commented.
‘No change there, then,’ Shirley muttered, watching, as their Volvo pulled up, her younger daughter furiously crashing her bag onto a luggage trolley that was being tugged at by a stout young man in an orange tracksuit. Colette was a few yards away, staring at the sky.
‘God, is that Ross? Her new bloke? He doesn’t look her type. Or anyone’s come to think of it.’ Becky sat staring while around her Simon and Penelope unloaded the bags.
‘What new bloke? She’s not bringing a …’ Simon craned past the throng of holidaymakers.
‘A what? An outsider?’ Plum murmured to him. ‘If she has, that’s her choice and her business. Just because she hasn’t had the marital luck you and Theresa have had. Please don’t you start picking fights too.’
* * *
‘You only picked on me because I’m female,’ Lucy hissed at the man as she wrenched the trolley away from him.
‘I only picked on you because you nicked my fucking trolley. I’d bagged that. I’ve got a family of six over there.’
‘Oh, that gives you priority, does it? The nuclear family, the nation’s pride and joy. Me, I’m just a lone parent, bottom of the social heap,’ she sneered.
‘Take it, lady. You deserve it for being a nutter.’ He gave way, hands up in surrender, let go of the trolley and walked off.
‘We didn’t need it, Mum.’ Colette was looking embarrassed. ‘We’ve hardly brought any stuff. We could have just carried it.’
‘No way. I got there first, it’s mine. You have to learn to stand up for yourself when there’s no big fix-it super-hero taking care of you.’ She giggled suddenly. ‘But it’s got a wonky wheel.’
‘Lucy! Don’t rush off, we’re all here!’ Simon caught up with her and Colette. He looked, she thought, flustered and already exhausted.
‘You OK, Si? You look knackered.’
‘Tricky journey. Moody kids and I’m sure Mum’s coming down with something.’
Lucy leaned on her trolley, conscious that they were obstructing the busy corridor. ‘How tricky can a twenty-mile trip in a chauffeured limo be? You should try the Gatwick Express, matey. Clapham Junction is a delight in the rush hour.’
‘I thought you were bringing your van.’ Simon’s brow wrinkled. ‘Dad booked you into long-term parking. And paid for it.’
‘Change of plan. Not mine, the local clamping mafia. They’ll tow it away and scrap it while we’re sunning ourselves and I’ll never have to see the sodding thing again. The only bit that was any use was the roof rack and that’s stashed in Sandy’s shed with my ladders.’
‘Lucy! Well done, pet, you got here nice and early!’ Shirley emerged from the stream of travellers and hugged Lucy.
‘Did you think I wouldn’t, Ma?’ Lucy grinned at her and then reached across to kiss her father.
‘Punctuality was never your strong point,’ Perry said as they walked towards the check-in desks.
‘When I was twelve. But I’m all grown-up now, Dad, I can do VAT returns, tile a bathroom and check tyre pressures all by myself.’
Shirley looked Lucy up and down. ‘I suppose that old sweatshirt’s all right, for the back of the plane. And what have you done to your hair? It’s all short and spiky.’ She lowered her voice, ‘It makes you look as if you’re fishing from the other pond.’
Lucy counted to ten and plastered on a smile. ‘Well, you won’t have to look at me, Ma, lording it up front in club class.’
It was important to be patient. She’d promised herself she wouldn’t rise to the slightest crumb of bait, wouldn’t revert to the third-child, baby-of-the-family petulance that seemed to overtake her whenever she spent more than a few hours in the company of her parents. As they scanned the departure screens to find out where to check in, she wondered if the same thing happened to other people who’d assumed, wrongly, that by their mid-thirties their relationship with their parents would have stopped being so ludicrously immature. At what point did parents realize it was not their place to worry about whether you’d renewed your TV licence? When did they start pouring you more than a token half-glass of wine when you came for Sunday lunch? Perhaps it was simply because Lucy hadn’t actually married anyone and therefore had not been handed over to be someone else’s responsibility. Or perhaps it was something to do with being what her mother so coyly used to call the ‘little afterthought’ of the family, meaning, Lucy only realized as she’d entered her teens, the little mistake, little contraceptive failure, or, as she’d squeamishly recognized as she in her turn discovered sex, the little night of passion that was just too hot for considering consequences.
‘It says that desk over there in Area B, but that can’t be right because there’s the most ghastly queue.’ Theresa appeared at Lucy’s side. ‘We’re all there by that pillar, waiting to see where we’re really supposed to go.’ Lucy looked at where she pointed and saw Theresa’s children, swinging energetically from Marisa’s hands and looking ready to make trouble. They were bouncing up and down and laughing and making grabs at the doughnuts Becky and Luke and Colette were munching. Mark was observing them rather uncertainly from a little apart, as if wondering whether he was supposed either to join in and play with them and risk being blamed for getting them overwrought, or do nothing and be accused of copping out.
The queue that so distressed Theresa was a long snake of overburdened baggage trolleys and vividly dressed people, many already kitted out in holiday garb with shorts and flip-flops, sleeveless vest-tops and straw sunhats that were too awkward to pack. Fractious, shrieking children were scrambling up and over the mountains of luggage and women in cotton floral dresses and pale bare legs were handing out sweets and crisps in an attempt to keep them still. Theresa looked deeply puzzled, as if the process of the holiday exodus of her fellow humans was one that had passed her by till now. This was, Lucy recalled with a quiet smile, the woman who’d once confessed that the best day in her life was the one when Sainsbury’s started doing home deliveries and she no longer had to queue at a check-out with ordinary mortals. She was wearing a knee-length black linen skirt, white shirt and a long cream knitted jacket (Joseph, she was sure), a choice that Lucy suspected had been made with the fervent hope that she might be (surely would be?) selected for an upgrade to club class. It certainly wouldn’t stand up to nine cramped hours with three small children.
‘This is the right place, Theresa. We just have to join the riff-raff, you see. It’ll be an experience for you.’
‘One I could well do without.’ Theresa stood awkardly, her hands resting warily on her trolley rail, the set of matching leather bags gleaming expensively among the cartloads of sports bags and chainstore suitcases. ‘And so many people are eating. Why?’ She moved backwards a little, avoiding the sticky hands of a small boy with a bag of lurid-orange crisps.
‘They’re hungry?’ Colette suggested pertly.
‘Surely they could wait for some proper food in a proper place. I’d never let mine scoff on the hoof like this. Even Becky and Luke are chewing disgusting doughnuts, full of additives and sugar and God knows what rubbish.’
Colette tugged at Lucy’s sleeve, pulling her a couple of steps back. ‘Is she going to be all snobby like this all the time?’ she whispered.
Lucy grinned at her. ‘Yes she is. By the end of the flight she’ll have mentioned at least six times that we should all have gone to Tuscany and complained that the airline food isn’t organic. We’re going to have a wonderful time.’
* * *
‘A cocktail party! That’s the last thing I feel like!’ Theresa sat on the edge of the bed, prodding the mattress to check it w
asn’t too soft. She rather liked the room, which was large and light and furnished with bleached wood and blond cane fittings. The bathroom had no suspicious stains, leaks or creeping wildlife either, which was more than could be said for the last holiday they’d taken, where all the creepy-crawlies in the Dordogne seemed to have homed in on their particular gîte.
‘It’s just the management handing out a welcoming drink.’ Mark propped the invitation up by the television set and opened a couple of cupboards, looking for the minibar. ‘You’ve got time for a bath.’
‘So I should hope. Though I don’t know what I’ll wear, everything will be creased.’
‘I expect you could have a drink, Becky, but make it just the one, OK, otherwise your dad will blame me.’ Lucy watched as Becky selected the largest glass of rum punch from the waiter’s tray. With any luck she wouldn’t actually like it and wouldn’t sneak several more when she thought Simon wasn’t looking. In fact Simon shouldn’t look. If he could try to avoid catching her out for the whole two weeks, they would all have more fun and less hassle.
It was sunset, still steamingly hot and the terrace was crowded with slightly subdued holidaymakers, many of whom Lucy recognized from hanging around the airport’s baggage carousel. The new arrivals were easily identifiable by a pallor that made them look ill and by their air of exhaustion. An exception was a woman she’d seen alone with a young son, buying hectically covered paperbacks in the bookshop at Gatwick, who was now dressed in full-scale cocktail rig of chiffon-layered yellow dress and enough gold bracelets to melt down into a doorstop-sized ingot. Talking to the hotel entertainments manager was an arm-in-arm young couple who might well be on their honeymoon. Lucy could see the back of them. The man was fondling the girl’s bottom, shoving at it gently like a tentative cook kneading dough. The girl’s hand was pushed just inside the top of his trousers, as if she couldn’t bear to have fabric between her fingers and his flesh. There were several of these couples: pretty young pairs who looked as if the only sights they intended to gaze on were those in each other’s eyes. Lucy thought of Ross and worked out that now, at almost England’s midnight, he was probably mid-coitus with her successor. She smiled at the thought: the girl might well be at the stage of gritting her teeth as he got up to full speed, anticipating the supremely irritating (laughable, actually) habit he had of barking like a starving sea lion at the climactical moment. What a prat – whyever had she stayed with him all those months? She went and looked down at the darkening beach from the terrace, conscious that she was being watched by half a dozen of what appeared to be an outing from a computer company’s middle management, standing around in a group close to the source of the drink. They looked uncomfortable, fingering the chestfront area of their polo shirts where their ties would normally be.
‘Steve,’ a voice announced in her ear. She turned. The bravest had peeled off from the others and was standing beside her with his smile ready and his hand out.
‘I’m Lucy,’ she said, shaking his hand.
He looked nervous. Behind him, still at the bar, she could see his companions nudging each other, possibly even taking bets. They weren’t Lucy’s type. Too clean, too neat-haired, too executive. She couldn’t imagine she was their type either, too spiky-haired, too skinny, and, in her fringed skirt, too much of a hippy. But this was holiday territory and the pulling rules, she assumed, in the pursuit of uncomplicated leg-over, were probably more flexible.
‘You on holiday?’ he ventured at last.
‘Well yes, isn’t everyone here? Or are you here for some kind of conference?’
‘Er, well, we’re on a corporate sales jolly, reward for ongoing achievement. We’re the six who most actively processed Phonetech’s mission statement over the last sales period.’ So a Caribbean freebie was what you got if you sold a vast number of mobile phones. It was almost worth considering selling her ladders and brushes. He shuffled a bit closer. ‘You here on your own?’ She smiled past him, indicating Colette running up the steps from the beach. ‘Not exactly. There are fourteen of us altogether. And this is my daughter, Colette.’ His grin wavered but he persevered. ‘And your husband?’
‘I don’t have one,’ she said, adding, in case he got the wrong idea, ‘but I keep looking.’ That should see him off.
Two
SOMEONE WAS SINGING beyond Lucy’s window, out on the beach. She rolled over in bed and squinted at the hands of her watch glowing in the dark. Nearly six o’clock. An hour till the hotel started serving breakfast on the semicircular open-sided verandah above the beach. She was starving already and glad she’d done as Simon had suggested and kept the little packet of custard creams that had been handed out on the plane with tea just before they’d started the descent. It was the sort of thing he would think of – small practical solutions to problems no-one else would waste time anticipating. If he was a woman he’d be the sort who sent in handy domestic tips to the staider magazines and won the odd tenner for suggesting a wedge of lemon down the waste disposal kept the sink drain smelling sweet. She’d seen Mark smirking at him from across the aisle, read his mind as he condemned Simon as a fussy old hen. Mark’s idea of a useful hint would be something like ‘always drive at least fifty miles per hour over the speed limit: that way your attention really can’t wander.’
At home it would be midmorning and the populace, apart from students and shift workers, would be starting to think about lunch. Lucy hadn’t slept this late since before Colette was born, when she was living with Jack who had thought it intellectually sexy to sit propped up against the fraying cane bedhead smoking spliffs and talking very slow and muddled politics till the early hours. At the point where she’d allow herself to collapse properly into sleep he’d pounce and pull and shove at her flesh as if trying to bring her back from the dead. Sandy had once told her that some men’s preferred idea of sex was for women to be completely unconscious so that they wouldn’t have to please anyone but themselves, an observation that was certainly true in Jack’s case. Still, for someone who was so slow to get revved up in bed, he’d certainly picked up speed the moment she’d told him she was pregnant. She’d never seen anyone pack and run so fast.
The song outside wasn’t particularly melodious. It sounded like a leisured and contented soul crooning to himself in a bath, snatches of something half-remembered and only half-consciously voiced. It was still dark. In the other bed Colette was sprawled out under the sheet like a starfish, with one pale tender foot hanging out at the side. Lucy climbed out of bed, pulled back the curtain and unlatched the window. She’d never liked living on the ground floor, being nervous of making life too easy for passing crazed murderers and opportunist burglars, but here it was bliss just to be able to slide the window aside and step out onto a terrace surrounded by fronds of bougainvillea, pink papery flowers tickling against the glass. The sky had a yellow-grey tinge to it as the sun began pushing its way up on the east side of the island, and the air was softly warm and humid. She could hear the sea washing lazily over the sand, and the singing was coming from somewhere in one of the low-growing trees along the beach. Lucy peered in the darkness but couldn’t see anyone. Suddenly the song stopped and there was a sharp blast of what sounded like a hunting horn.
‘Hey, early-up there!’ The singer was calling from the branches of the closest tree. Lucy stepped over the balcony rail and padded across the fat-bladed, spiky grass to where the sand started, wondering if the horn-blower gave any kind of toss that he was probably waking the whole hotel. It was possible he was drunk, winding down after a long rowdy night. In London, Lucy never gave unexpected pre-dawn sounds close investigation; she left that to naive fools or other drunks seeking trouble. Here she felt the invulnerability of an outsider.
‘Jet lag, huh?’ a cheery voice called down to her. The man was sprawled comfortably in the tree as if it was a snug sofa, reclining backwards on a forked branch. ‘Where’re you from?’
‘London,’ Lucy said to the figure. There was a scuffle and a
clatter and the singer landed on the sand next to her clutching a giant conch shell, the source, she assumed, of the peace-shattering noise. He was younger than she’d expected, close to her own age. Somehow she’d assumed only the generations way beyond hers liked to sing to themselves – her own tended to hum tunelessly along with their personal stereos. He had streaky short dreadlocks, a mixture of black and fairish, that reminded her of Ruud Gullit in his Chelsea-playing days, and skin the colour of cappuccino, rippling over sinewy well-muscled limbs. His shoulders were as broad as a gangster’s jacket. He beamed back at her. His teeth were so perfectly even that Lucy almost wished Simon was there to admire such an example of either nature’s generosity or a rival orthodontist’s skill. He didn’t seem to be drunk, just happy. Perhaps being up a tree, singing, was how he started every day. Perhaps it was a local custom.
‘London, huh? My pa was an islander but my mother, Glenda, she’s from Chiswick, but not since way back. She sent me back over there to her family for schooling. I didn’t stay long, hated the cold, and I learned a lot more back here too.’ He chuckled, deep and throaty, and Lucy felt suddenly conscious that all she was wearing was a T-shirt and pink lacy knickers. She shoved her fingers through her hair, forgetting she’d had it cut so short and wispy and could no longer hide in it. The man was inspecting her, looking her up and down with interest. She wrapped her arms across her body.
