Excess Baggage

by Judy Astley

  Six

  SIMON HAD FORGOTTEN his sunglasses. He kept forgetting things and seemed to be constantly plodding the cool terracotta-tiled corridor between the lobby and his room collecting his book, his hat, the suntan lotion or cash. The rest of the family were annoyingly quick to catch on to this which meant he was also asked to remember to pick up Plum’s book or a CD of Becky’s as well, and then got shouted at when he came back to the pool or beach without them. His brain was being addled by the sun, though the rest of him seemed to be in remarkably pert working order. Even walking felt different here, springy and light, though his breath was running short, gasping in the heavy, humid air.

  The worry about Luke had unsettled all of them so much the day before that the afternoon trip to the rain forest had been put off till the next morning. As minutes and then an hour passed after Glenda had told them the boys were missing, the possibility that something dreadful might have happened started to become real. When she’d calmed down and done a little thinking, and just as they were all starting to feel the beginnings of panic, Glenda had concluded that the dive boat must have picked them up: so many hotel guests were out on the sea swimming or racing about in sailboats and jet skis that someone would be sure to have spotted a couple of floating bodies.

  Later, Plum had spent most of the afternoon in the sea, snorkelling slowly over the reef and avoiding contact with both the gold lady and Shirley. And then she hadn’t wanted dinner at the hotel but had taken Becky to the pizza café in the precinct across the road. Simon assumed the idea was to get her alone and give her a bit of a talking-to about the dangers of drink and men in hot climates, but the two of them had returned mildly plastered and giggly in the kind of way that made him think he (and probably All Men) been a major part of the evening’s jokes.

  The door to his room was open. Outside was the trolley full of towels, sheets and cleaning equipment which always seemed to be parked somewhere in the corridor. In the room, the maid, whose name badge said ‘Carol’, was stripping the bed. Carol moved around in an unnervingly slow way, as if she might come to a permanent halt at any second, suiting energy conservation to the climate. She smiled at him and said a cheerful hello, asked him his plans for the day. Simon mentioned the rainforest and she laughed and told him she’d never been there, just as London residents will admit, often to their own surprise, that the Tower of London is somewhere they’ve never got round to visiting.

  The sunglasses were in the bathroom. Simon rinsed stray specks of toothpaste off the lenses then looked at himself sideways in the mirror – how paunchy did this loose shirt make him look? Should he tuck it into his shorts or would that just draw attention to his waistline? His hand went up to his hair, for the usual quick run-through to see what fell out, but just as fast came down again. Why give himself the grief? He switched off the light and came back into the room. Carol was now bent over the bed, tucking in a sheet. Her broad round bottom, with the shiny pink uniform overall pulled tight across it, was pointing at him, almost wagging in invitation. Simon caught a glimpse of the back of a gleaming black knee beneath the skirt as she leaned further over to deal with an awkward corner. His hands didn’t feel part of him and his head was swimming with thoughts that were too lasciviously fast and furious to have any real form. This was how it was when the body was lively but the brain was limp (and how often, in the dull drab forever-February days at home, had it been the other way round). Without conscious awareness of how it happened, his hands found themselves stretched over an expanse of taut slippery fabric, and his body squashed against the outline of malleable flesh beneath. The shock of contact as he realized what he’d done coincided with Carol’s shriek of surprise.

  ‘I’m so sorry!’ Simon backed away instantly, his hands in the air. ‘I tripped on the rug! I’m sorry!’ Carol stood upright, her hand on her hip and a knowing grin on her face. ‘Tripped huh?’ She didn’t even pretend to believe him. Simon waited to be clouted across the face, for her to storm out and holler for Security, for even as he’d spoken the words he’d recognized them as pathetic, inadequate and patently untrue. Instead she stood still, considering, with a seen-it-all smile. One hand rested on her ample hip. Simon saw her suddenly as a big, motherly, cushiony creature, someone he could weep on, confide in. His heart was racing, wondering if he was right to think like this.

  ‘I’m used to you English guys, smouldering in sexy heat ya don’t get back home,’ she told him, her expression switching terrifyingly fast to a formidably stern one. Then she prodded him hard in the chest with a pointing finger and he backed towards the open door, praying to escape. ‘But if I hears anything, just one single word about you losing it with one of the younger girls, you’re gonna be outa here and off this island so fast. Got me?’

  ‘Got you.’ The words fell out in one fast, frightened breath. ‘Sorry, very, very sorry.’ Simon nodded so hard he thought his head would roll over the floor. He stumbled backwards through the door, desperate to be with Plum and the children, be a good husband, a good parent, a good son again.

  ‘And watch out for those rugs, take care where you’re walking.’ Carol’s grin was back in place, and as he walked away he heard a whooping cackle of laughter, possibly, he thought as he trudged towards the lobby, at the thought of sharing this sorry tale with the rest of the staff during their coffee break.

  Lucy relaxed against the headrest and closed her eyes. It was cool and peaceful in the minibus, without Theresa’s brood and their constant nausea-provoking flapping that Sebastian might get carsick. ‘Hey, don’t go drifting off to sleep, you might miss something.’ Lucy snapped her eyes open again and marvelled at the spooky parental sixth sense that had her mother, way down at the front of a twelve-seater minibus, knowing that Lucy was thinking of snatching a quick doze four seat rows away at the back.

  ‘You were always the same,’ Shirley went on, though this time smiling at Victor the bemused driver, including him as if he’d be thrilled to hear their family reminiscences. ‘Even as a baby, the minute you got in a car when you were little, off you went. Some nights, we’d drive round the block a few times in the Rover (remember the Rover?) just to get you off.’

  ‘She’d always bloody wake up again when you put her back in the cot.’ Perry was joining in now. Lucy smiled but said nothing. If she encouraged them, they’d be well away, recalling aspects of potty-training unfit for public hearing and moving up through her infant food fads and the time she got threadworms. She wondered sometimes how many other afterthought children ended up being forever cast in the role of The Eternal Baby. Only a few months ago, visiting Shirley and Perry in Cheshire, she’d amazed her mother by cooking and serving spinach along with other Sunday-lunch vegetables.

  ‘But you don’t like spinach!’ her mother had declared, put out that Lucy had dared to change her tastes, colour in her mother’s picture of her in a different way. She smiled again as she thought of that spinach and how she’d managed not to retort that she certainly would still hate spinach served in Shirley’s boiled-to-the-death way which bore no resemblance, apart from the colour, to the leaves she’d barely warmed through in sizzling butter and then dusted with nutmeg.

  The bus was climbing, up away from the coast and into the densely wooded hills. Lucy opened the window and could smell warm wet scents of musky leaves. There were few houses now, but here and there she could see glimpses through the trees of homes painted in the island’s characteristic turquoise, pink or vivid blue, the fronts set on stilts to accommodate the steep hillside. Some were simple, barely more than slatted huts knocked together from aged, mismatched planks with rusting corrugated iron roofs and windows with louvred shutters but no glass. Others were more substantial, still low-built in the local, almost bungalow, style but constructed from sturdy brightly painted concrete. Every house, even the smallest, had a verandah with wicker chairs, tubs of flowers and a couple of snoozing cats, and frequently a sleeping man, face obscured by a hat, as well. They passed thatched shady stalls set
up on the roadside selling fruit, vast bunches of bananas, breadfruit, grapefruit and watermelons, everything so much bigger and more lush than at home.

  ‘Imagine living here,’ Lucy muttered to herself. The thought of her soon-to-be-homeless state had burrowed its way back into her mind. She pondered gloomily the dismal prospect of looking over dingy, neglected west London flats. They would be so far towards the outer edge of her price range that the cost of tarting up the rooms to an acceptable level of pleasing decor would be pretty much out of the question. They would smell of stale cheese. The carpets would be shredding at the edges and stained with old sour wine and spilled ground-in food. What looked like shadows in the ceilings’ corners would every time be darkened paint, discoloured by smuts of neglected dust and the greasy webs of countless long-dead spiders. Perry would offer her money, as he did every time she moved flats, in the hope that she’d buy a place of her own. She would refuse, as she always did, on the increasingly shaky grounds that she was far too old to be relying on her family for handouts and preferred to be independent. Perry would sigh and tell her she was stubborn and he was only thinking of Colette. Shirley would also sigh and say ‘It’s high time you settled down with a nice man’ (as if it was that easy …), a situation that ideally required someone with enough of what she called Sterling Qualities to keep her in the manner of Theresa and Plum. As far as Lucy was concerned, she was settled (apart from the ending of the flat’s lease and the demise of the van, which she certainly didn’t want to think about now). Adding a Mr Possibly to the equation wouldn’t necessarily help.

  ‘Hey, surely that’s not a grave, is it? There in that garden?’ Mark, just in front of Lucy, leaned across and commented quietly to her as the bus slowed for a road junction. Lucy peered through the foliage into a neat garden planted with exuberant geraniums and a mass of tangled plumbago and the kind of lobster-claw flowers that she’d only previously seen in the most exotic London florists. Chickens were scrabbling around. A litter of half-grown puppies, the colour of dusty camels, was dozing between the house’s stilts, and just as the bus started moving again Lucy caught sight of a dark wooden cross marking a patch of raised earth that did look exactly like a grave.

  ‘I’ll ask Henry when I see him,’ Lucy said to Mark. ‘It might be a local tradition to keep your loved ones on site or it could just have been a specially loved dog.’

  ‘Bloody big dog,’ he muttered.

  ‘A cow then.’ Lucy giggled.

  ‘You don’t bury a cow, you eat it.’ Mark was now chuckling too, but slightly nervously as if he’d sensed that the Grim Reaper himself might be hanging around the premises, keeping an eye on his investment.

  ‘I’m starving. Anyone got any chocolate?’ Luke, up at the front close to Shirley, was getting fidgety.

  ‘You can’t last five minutes without an input of junk can you?’ she teased him.

  ‘I’m just hungry, s’all. What’s the problem?’ The driver turned and grinned at him, swerved the bus rather abruptly to the edge of the road and stopped. Saying nothing but still smiling, he opened the door and leapt out, disappearing among the trees.

  ‘See, now look what you’ve done Luke, whingeing like that.’ Shirley poked Luke hard in the ribs, laughing at him. ‘Now we’re stuck.’

  ‘’S’not my fault. Anyway he’s probably just gone for a slash.’ Lucy sensed his irritation, watching his teenage body hunching down, the shoulders rounding and his head hanging. If she could only draw that attitude, that posture, she thought, capture so exactly the awful adolescent shrinking of confidence mixed with angry bravado, she’d give a copy to every insensitive grandparent on the planet, just to remind them …

  ‘So you’re hungry, man. Who else?’ The driver jumped back into the bus clutching a handful of neat small bananas, which he handed round the family.

  ‘Thanks. Oh, they’re so dinky!’ Becky unpeeled one delightedly and ate most of it in one go.

  ‘Special, extra sweet, extra small and straight off the plant. We call them rock figs. You don’t get so many of those shipped overseas. We keep the sweetest here for us!’ Victor laughed, starting the engine again.

  The road became a track, bumpy and narrow, climbing through the trees. It was deeply shady and there was a constant smell of slightly rotten sweetness. As he drove, Victor identified trees and shrubs, stopping to pull a piece of bark from a tree (‘Mmm, cinnamon on the hoof!’ Theresa said, inhaling the fresh sharp scent) and to pick fresh nutmegs, peeling off the pulpy yellow flesh and exposing the scarlet net of mace surrounding the nut.

  ‘So if this is a rainforest, where’s the rain?’ Becky asked Victor as the bus lurched now over ever-narrower, more bumpy track.

  ‘About ten minutes away,’ he told her. ‘About the time you’ll be swimming in the waterfall pool. We’re nearly there. But if you want real rain, you be here next week. There’s a big storm coming, it’s that time of the year.’

  ‘Do you get hurricanes? What’s it like?’ Luke was leaning forward, interested in the possibility of a spot of danger. ‘And how do you know when they’re coming?’

  Victor laughed. ‘Sure we get hurricanes, usually the tail end of someone else’s bad time, though the last one, Hurricane Georges, that was one destroyer.’ He tapped the side of his nose and grinned back over the seat to Luke. ‘And how we know they’re comm’, man, well …’ His voice dropped and Luke leaned forward, fascinated. ‘Well,’ Victor went on, ‘what we do is this thing. We listen to the weather forecast! OK, here we are now at the waterfall. Take some time, enjoy!’

  Mark climbed out of the bus and stretched. Every bit of him ached and he hoped it was simply from being in the minibus as it lurched and juddered over the last couple of miles of track. He’d wanted to do the driving, suggested simply hiring a couple of Jeeps and following the map. It had been Simon (typically) who’d been cautious, lecturing him on the inadequacy of island road signs, doing his usual old-woman what-ifs, running through all potential disasters from a simple puncture to the certainty that the cars’ canvas roofs would be torn apart by crazed monkeys intent on ripping them all limb from limb.

  ‘Who wants to swim?’ Plum went to the wooden platform at the side of the road and peered down steep stone steps into a dizzying canyon. Over the sound of the cascade she could just make out the shrieks of swimmers in water that fell fresh out of the rocks and could easily be near-freezing compared with the humid soupy air. The thought of diving into such refreshing chill was dangerously attractive. It occurred to Plum that if any of the family was harbouring a secretly dodgy heart, an enthusiastic leap from soggy clogging heat into instant cold could be fatal. A small nasty worm of devilment had Plum privately betting with herself as to which of them would be taking the biggest risk. Lucy was all right, being slim and fit and still on the safer side of forty. Theresa, too, although fraught and nervy, never knowingly consumed anything that was going to trouble her cholesterol level and probably had blood pressure that was so used to crashing up and down that she wasn’t going to have her aorta panicking over a splash of cold water. Simon, though, he was another matter. He was becomingly alarmingly apple-shaped around the middle, something she’d read was a dangerous pointer for future heart attacks. And he worried a lot about getting older, too. On the basis that you were sometimes unlucky enough to get what you wished for, it was possible that the gods had lined up for him an imminent opportunity for not actually having to get any older. Perry and Shirley would go on for ever, she could tell, in spite of Simon watching for every hand twitch (Parkinson’s), sweating brow (heart failure) or stumbling gait (imminent stroke). They were halfway down the steep and uneven chasm steps now, Simon holding Shirley’s arm and trying to slow her pace, and then he settled her on a bench under a palm-thatched shelter before vanishing with Mark beyond the door of a hut signposted ‘Changing Men’.

  ‘If only you could,’ Plum heard Theresa mutter behind her as they went in through the ‘Changing Ladies’ door.

  ‘Could
what?’

  ‘Change men. Just hand one over like something that didn’t fit you from Marks & Sparks and get them to give you a better one.’

  ‘Is Mark really that bad?’

  ‘I don’t know, Plum. He doesn’t say anything much, just drifts around as if conversation is something he used to do but doesn’t need to any more. I’ve forgotten what he’s like.’

  ‘Maybe it’s the antibiotics. They can make you a bit down.’

  ‘Down? He barely speaks. He’s practically comatose. Oh, unless he’s out learning bloody diving with bloody Lucy. I’ve seen them, with her new friend Henry, strolling back up the beach and laughing about this and that and nothing. Never shares the bloody joke. Of course if we’d gone to Italy we’d have the usual things to talk about, things in common. Art and food and stuff. Real things.’

  ‘Couldn’t you have that here? Rent a car and go out on your own. There’s a couple of galleries in town, I noticed in the guidebook, with some amazing Caribbean art collections.’ Bloody snob, Plum thought as she tugged her swimsuit up over her bottom. Probably thinks nothing worth looking at was painted after the sixteenth century. She could imagine Mark, trailing round Tuscan galleries having museum guides read to him by Theresa in her best Home Counties aren’t-we-cultured whine. He was probably just as uncommunicative wherever he was, but Theresa, woman with self-improvement on her mind, wouldn’t notice.

  ‘Not swimming?’ Lucy sat on a rock next to Mark and dabbled her feet in the water. It was incredibly cold; in minutes her feet would be numb. Colette, Becky and Luke were tiptoeing in the shallows on the slippery rocks, daring each other to leap into the icy water, just as she, Theresa and Simon used to do in the freezing grey sea in Devon.