by Judy Astley
Shirley and Perry, looking as calmly accepting of the state of the weather as only those used to living close to Manchester and accustomed to holidaying in England can, were already sitting with Simon and Plum at the enormous table which had been moved away from the edge, out of reach of the water that still cascaded from the palm-thatched roof and gushed down onto the huge fat greedy leaves of the philodendron plants below.
‘Oh. Hi you two, slumming it with us today?’ Theresa arrived towing Sebastian and the twins. She looked tousled, as if she hadn’t slept much. Her sun-streaked hair was twisted and pinned up loosely, making her almost indistinguishable from the other half-dozen London mums in the hotel. Shirley approved. She’d heard those strident Home Counties voices – well, you couldn’t miss them – commanding their children’s activities on the beach and she liked the idea that Theresa, her most socially ambitious child, could now be taken for what she defined as a Surrey Lady. If she only paid a bit more attention to her nails, proper manicures and some shiny polish …
‘We thought it might be a good idea to come over and join you for breakfast so we could all plan the day together. Otherwise everyone skitters around not getting organized,’ Shirley said.
Mark, arriving with a big plate full of watermelon and pawpaw for the children, grinned at her. ‘Lucy and I have got our first open-water dive later this morning. So that’s us fixed up I’m afraid, for now.’
Theresa frowned. ‘Well I don’t suppose we’ll want to do much anyway, if this rain keeps up.’
‘Oh it won’t,’ Perry decreed. ‘Rain before seven, fine before eleven … Oh good, here’s Lucy and Colette.’ Theresa noticed how much his face brightened at the sight of them. Scanning back towards her childhood she couldn’t recall his face ever lighting up that much at the sight of her. Probably all the delight he’d felt at having a new child had only lasted with the final one of the three of them. Ridiculous, she told herself, still to mind.
‘Hi Dad, morning Ma.’ Lucy sat down beside Perry and kissed him. ‘I’m not sure the sayings of north country English shepherds count over here. Someone in reception said there was a big storm coming next week and that this is the beginning of it.’
‘Bit of rain, what a fuss.’ Shirley tutted. ‘We didn’t used to let it spoil our plans in Devon, now did we? There was always a museum to see or some nice shops to look at. You’ll see, by the time we’re loaded up and halfway to the sugar plantation or the rainforest or wherever we’re going it’ll have stopped. We’ll go this afternoon. You divers won’t want to be out in a downpour in a boat for too long.’
Lucy looked across at Mark and grinned. ‘Hey, it’ll take as long as it takes and maybe a little bit more. It’s a local saying, Ma.’
Luke still felt aggrieved and childishly pleased that the glowering skies matched his mood. Becky had woken up late with no hangover and no regrets and, amazingly, was her usual maddening bumptious self. ‘It’s the best way, drink what you like then sick it all up, the way bulimics do only with them it’s food,’ she’d said. She shouldn’t be like that, he thought. She should be sorry for keeping him awake all night, sorry for leaving him with Colette (whom he was quite happy to be with, apart from when he’d rather be watching Death Wish 2 on the movie channel), and sorry for having a good time that she hadn’t let him join in with.
He sat on the damp stone with his feet dangling over the end of the small jetty at the end of the beach, the opposite end from the headland where his grandparents’ villa was. He’d taken a bread roll from breakfast and was breaking off bits to hurl into the sea. Fish were gathering to feed on the crumbs: bright, luminous creatures that reminded him of the crazily vivid colours of children’s drawings. With what felt like a mighty clout of nostalgia, he could visualize and almost smell the present his gran had given him when he was ten, a set of a hundred multicoloured felt-tip pens, all arranged in a circle in their pale wooden box, a delicious spectrum. He’d kept the colours in the exact order that they’d arrived in, thrilled by the barely visible progression of one shade into the next. Once, Becky had got at the box when he’d been out at a Sea Scouts event, and she’d muddled them all up. He’d pretended to be furious, as if she’d destroyed something, but he’d lain on his bed for hours, rearranging them into their proper order, amazed and fascinated to be so nearly caught out so often by the minute differences in shades.
‘That’s a parrot fish, that blue one.’ There was a shadow on the water. Luke looked round at the speaking boy and recognized the ginger-haired son of the gold lady, the one whose bracelets jingled so you knew where she was without seeing her, like a cat with a bell. He was about twelve but had the kind of know-all authority in his voice of someone much older. Luke guessed he was hated at school for being clever and could only practise it on strangers like himself.
‘How do you know?’ Luke asked.
‘Easy. All these bright ones here are parrot fish. Then there’s the little black and silver striped ones, they’re sergeant majors, and the yellow and blue things are angel fish. There’s a chart in reception. I learned it.’
‘You must have been really bored.’
The boy shrugged. ‘Not really. It’s something to do.’
‘You sound bored,’ Luke ventured. The boy was dressed head to foot in Gap Kids, he noticed. He could imagine the gold mother coming home with the dark blue bags, chucking them on the boy’s bed and saying, ‘Put these away now, Oscar,’ (or Algernon or whatever poncy name he’d been given), ‘they’re to wear on holiday.’ No choice, no say, as if he was still six.
‘Well I am a bit bored. There’s just me and my mum and she lies around reading all the time. I’ve had mumps.’ His face cheered up as he said it.
‘So’ve I.’
‘Yes but badly, and recently. The school didn’t want me back yet. It’s all boys, and boarding, so you can understand them.’
Luke couldn’t. At his school (comprehensive, his mum being posh enough to believe in state education as a principle), a bus ride away and a swirling sea of both sexes, if you were ill you stayed off for as long as possible and had to fend off the school secretary ringing up all the time to see if you were bunking off. They certainly didn’t encourage convalescence on a Caribbean island. And what was special about mumps and boys? He’d have to ask Becky, if they were ever on talk-terms again.
‘We could take a pedalo out if you want.’ Luke stood up and shoved his hands deep into his pockets, trying to look diffident. It might be quite good to hang out with someone else, be independent. It would show Becky, anyway, plus give her a chance to do a girls-together bonding stint with Colette.
Together, Luke and Tom (whose hand had twitched out as if to shake Luke’s as he’d introduced himself) sauntered back along the soggy beach to the water-sports shop. Lucy and Mark were there, having their pre-dive briefing in the room at the back with Henry and Andy and the rest of that morning’s pupils. The shop smelled of damp wetsuits. Glenda was outside hanging up sarongs under the almond tree, now that the sky was safely cerulean again.
‘OK boys, what would you like? Are you taking a Sunfish out, or a canoe? There’s plenty here, most folks have gone into town.’ She laughed. ‘They don’t understand island weather. A grey sky in Tunbridge Wells, that can be a day’s worth of misery. Not here though!’
‘Could we just have a pedalo please?’ Luke thought he should take charge, make it clear he was easily the elder.
‘Sure, help yourselves. Not the blue one though, OK? Oh and take snorkel vests just in case …’
Tom raced ahead to the line of pedalos on the sand, eager and puppyish and Luke wondered if he should have asked Colette to come instead. She was calm, not so childishly excitable. She didn’t wear him out and knew when to keep quiet and just let him think.
‘She said not the blue one,’ Luke reminded him.
‘This isn’t blue, it’s purple,’ Tom said. ‘And it’s the best one, it’s the biggest, a real two-er. Most of the others are just singles.
We’ll go faster in this.’ It was true. Probably someone else had already taken the blue one away, perhaps it needed fixing. This one was definitely purple, or at least purple-ish. If he was fitting this colour into his spectrum wheel of pens, it would be just as close to the red ones as to the blue. Together they pushed the big plastic thing down to the sea and launched it, splashing into the shallows in their trainers. Tom looked down at his feet as if remembering something his mum had told him, but said nothing.
‘We haven’t got the float things, the snorkel vests,’ Luke said as they clambered aboard. ‘Can you swim OK?’
‘Course I can. Anyway we’re not going that far, are we?’
It was amazing how fast they left the shore behind. With both of them pedalling they quickly picked up speed and aimed the craft round the headland out of sight of the hotel’s beach.
‘We could go anywhere. Right round the island,’ Tom said.
‘Or to Barbados, or down to Trinidad.’ Luke felt it was important to establish a wider view.
‘Or Venezuela or the Falklands.’ Tom was getting giggly.
‘Don’t be stupid.’
For a while the two of them paddled hard, each keen to be thought strong and tireless. They kept parallel to the shore, following the beach up towards the next headland beyond the bar which Luke assumed was the one where Becky had got so drunk the night before. It was quiet there now, with just a few holidaymakers sitting under thatched sunshades sipping an early beer.
‘The sea here’s much warmer than it is in Portugal,’ Tom suddenly said.
‘I know,’ Luke replied. He didn’t, he’d never been to Portugal. Plum and Simon preferred holidays in Cornwall or Scotland, places where the unpredictable weather was likely to provide a huge part of the fortnight’s adventures. Competing with gale-driven rain was the thrilling possibility of instant death from falling out of a dinghy into the glacial water of a fathomless loch, or tumbling from the treacherous shifting mud-slide that made up the Cornish Coast Path. On balance, pedalling along on the warm Caribbean, Luke was pretty grateful to his grandparents.
‘I thought you didn’t get your feet wet in these things. You don’t in Greece,’ Tom suddenly said. Luke looked at his own feet. The pedalling was getting quite hard now and Tom was right, the water level did seem quite high, his knees were almost under.
‘It’s sinking.’ Tom peered over the side. ‘We might have to swim.’
‘Yeah I suppose, but …’ They were further out than he’d thought. That must be because of the current. Venezuela no longer seemed out of the question; and Lucy had said that Henry had said there were sharks.
‘OK, stand up.’ Luke pulled his feet up from the pedals and clambered up onto the seat.
‘What?’
‘Stand up and we’ll shout to those people at the bar. There’s canoes and stuff, someone can come out and give us a tow.’ Luke hadn’t been a Sea Scout all those years for nothing, even if most of his practical boat experience had been on the unexotic reservoirs round Staines beneath the Heathrow flight path. ‘And be careful.’ Tom was trying to be too fast, too eager and the pedalo was rocking.
‘I am. It’s the waves, not me.’
‘Hey, you lot! Over here, come and get us!’ Luke waved and yelled and a young couple at the café waved back then went back to their conversation.
‘Oi, you dumbos! Give us a sodding lift!’ The water was higher now, lapping over his toes.
‘Yeah, fuckheads! Come on!’ Tom was competing, Luke realized, determined to be more insulting than he was. The couple got up and strolled away, holding hands and talking close together.
‘Jeez! You stupid git!’ Luke accused Tom. ‘Now you’ve driven them away!’
‘Great, blame me.’
‘Well …’ There wasn’t any point. They were going to need their breath for the long swim. Luke was sure he could make it to the shore, just so long as no monster, no jellyfish, giant octopus, shark or devastating undertow got to him. He was worried about Tom though. It would be a hard slog for someone so much smaller than him, for someone who’d been ill enough to need a holiday to recover. But there wasn’t any choice. ‘OK, Tom, let’s go. If we hang on we’ll drift further away.’
Tom looked at him and grinned. Luke’s stomach turned over, recognizing an awesome and terrifying expression of trust.
‘All the way to the Falklands?’ Tom said.
‘Quite bloody possibly. OK, one, two, three, JUMP!’
‘So they’re not with you?’ Glenda, in her flowing dress made out of a pair of sarongs printed with repeated heads of Bob Marley in black and red, stood in front of Shirley, Simon and Theresa as they sat beneath an almond tree on the beach. The gold lady, sprawled close by on a lounger, lit another cigarette and listened.
‘Well no, Luke wandered off in a sulk soon after breakfast. Haven’t seen him since. I don’t know if he was with anyone.’ Simon could see no reason to be agitated. This woman seemed to be implying that Luke and another boy had stolen a pedalo, unless he’d misunderstood. How far could they go on it?
‘Well, he was. He was with a smaller, gingery boy. They took the wrong pedalo, a leaky one that I’d specifically told them not to take, and no life preservers. I told them.’
The gold lady sat up, suddenly anxious. ‘Was the gingery boy about twelve, in navy shorts?’
‘He was.’ Glenda had her hands on her hips. She was angry, Shirley could see, but there was more than a trace of worry. She gave Glenda her most reassuring Cheshire smile.
‘Oh, they’ll be all right. I’m sure they can both swim. I expect they’re lurking about on the beach somewhere, plucking up courage to come and admit they’ve sunk your boat,’ she said. ‘Boys are like that.’
Glenda’s temper snapped. ‘God, how can you be so complacent! People like you remind me exactly why I left England! They’ve taken a leaky craft out on the sea. They’ve been out for hours and all you can say is “boys will be boys”! I bet you wouldn’t be this bone-headed if they’d gone missing off Newquay. You’d have the bloody coastguard out before your sodding ice cream had melted.’
The gold lady glared at Simon and pointed her cigarette at him. ‘I shall blame you,’ she accused, ‘if anything’s happened to my Tom it’ll be all your fault.’ Hotel guests who had been at the sea’s edge were now drifting closer to listen. Earpieces from personal stereos of apparently comatose sunbathers were being removed for better hearing. Theresa slunk further down on her lounger, mortified. She felt as if they were collectively accused of being the holiday family from hell. Surely that was what happened to Other People, the sort who had drunken fights on planes and stripped down to their cellulite at ghastly vomit-laden theme nights. And once again, where was Mark when he could be useful? Out on the sea, or under it, with no cares in the whole bloody world.
‘Now we’re not going very deep, no more than ten metres this first time and it’s only for half an hour, though you’ve got enough air for much longer. That’s because you’ll be nervous and when you’re nervous you use a lot more, gulping it in like you can’t get enough.’ Henry was going over the lessons again as Andy sped the boat away from the shore. Lucy and Mark grinned at each other, both apprehensive, both excited. The boat swerved round the end of the headland sending waves skittering into hotel guests dawdling along in canoes or taking the chance to get the hang of windsurfing in sea that didn’t half-kill you with cold if you fell into it.
‘Look at those kids on the half-sunk pedalo,’ Mark said. ‘What the hell are they doing? Abandoning ship?’
‘Where? What kids?’ Henry looked out across the boat’s prow. ‘I told Glenda not to let anyone have that one!’ He tapped Andy’s arm and pointed. Just then, the two boys jumped into the sea and Andy swerved the boat round fast after them.
‘One of them looks a bit like Luke,’ Lucy said, peering over the sea. Seconds later, the two boys were being hauled over the side onto the boat and they stood dripping and grinning cockily at the divers
and crew.
‘You’ll have to come out with us, it’s too late to take you back.’ Henry looked at his watch. ‘I’ve got a snorkel group at twelve. No-one was supposed to take the blue one out. The guy’s coming to take it for repair.’
‘Sorry,’ Luke said, ‘but you’ve got to admit it’s more sort of purple.’ He grinned and Lucy thumped his arm. ‘You could have got yourselves drowned, stupid. This is serious sea.’
‘And you’re supposed to be wearing life vests too. Wait till I get back and see Glenda.’ Then Henry smiled at Lucy. ‘Am I going to spend the whole of this fortnight rescuing your family?’
A turtle was swimming past Lucy and giving her no attention at all. Captivated, she swam after it but the creature, so cumbersome on land, was too fast and graceful for her to chase. Then Henry pulled on her hand and pointed to the seabed as a ray, three feet or so across, fluffed its way out of the sand and rippled slowly away. Nothing down here seemed afraid, Lucy realized, nothing seemed to feel they were a threat. She and the divers were accepted simply as extra sea-life with their own unfathomable and unquestioned part to play. If only the humans in the world were as tolerant. She felt an overwhelming sense of privilege at being allowed this look at the hidden habitat of so much life. Two-thirds of the earth was covered in sea, two-thirds of it a habitat for animals and plants that most people could never hope to see in their natural state like this. Henry was beside her. She knew he was sensing her feeling of wonder. She looked at her pressure gauge – time to go to the surface. She looked at Henry and raised her thumb.
