Excess Baggage

by Judy Astley

  Shirley frowned. ‘Chances of seeing you in a proper frock. Mind you, if you had the kind of job where you didn’t wear paint-stained old overalls, you might … well, I won’t go on but you don’t do yourself any favours.’

  ‘Come on now, leave her alone, she’s all grown-up,’ Simon pleaded.

  ‘And doing perfectly well without a man in her life,’ Plum chipped in.

  ‘And your hair used to be so long and feminine.’ Shirley, on the outside of three glasses of white wine, was on a roll now.

  ‘Shit, I don’t believe this.’ Lucy flung her napkin on the table and got up. ‘Sorry, but I’m losing my appetite. I think I’ll join Theresa in having a migraine.’

  Colette stared after her, wondering if she should show she was on her side and get up and go with her. She was cross with her grandmother because she was being exactly like Lucy had thought she’d be before they left. Lucy had so nearly said no, had only given in because Theresa had rung up and said she’d be spoiling things for everyone if she didn’t come on this holiday. Colette, though, had seen Tom at the next table eating slices of mango and banana with ice cream and chocolate sauce and she wanted to stay and have some. She leaned across and asked him if it was as nice as it looked and he told her it was loads better than that. His mother, the gold lady, glared at her, which made her feel even more that life wasn’t fair. Luke saw and grinned across the table at her. ‘We’ll have a game of table tennis later, if you want to,’ he offered. She felt grateful but depressed, like she had at school the time Samantha Cotton invited her to her birthday party after Isabelle had been such a cow and told all the class that Colette lived in a titchy flat the size of their dog’s basket and that her mum drove a beaten-up old van. She’d felt quite shocked that anyone could make any big deal of it and realized she’d discovered real snobbery for the first time in her life. Even Theresa didn’t sneer at people for being rich or poor. What had bothered her though was the same as what bothered her now: would Samantha Cotton have invited her to the party if she hadn’t just wanted to get back at horrible Isabelle whom nobody much liked? Would Luke really want to spend the evening playing table tennis with her if he hadn’t been sure the gold lady would hear him being nice to his cousin?

  * * *

  Theresa lay on her bed flicking through the TV channels. She kept veering between hunger and tooth-clenching nausea and if she could get the energy organized she knew she should order something light from room service. She felt like a sulking child: everyone else was in the restaurant having a lovely dinner and here she was pretending to feel awful because she couldn’t face, yet, playing the Happy Wife with Mark. Annoyingly, she could feel a real headache coming on, which might be connected with drinking all the miniature bottles of gin from the minibar and then finding that somehow she’d got through all the little vodkas as well. She wanted to cry and cry, but she was too angry for tears. Each time she managed to feel sad enough to produce some, adrenalin-fuelled fury stopped them coming out and made her stamp across the room and back, like a prisoner pacing out a life sentence, trying to thrash out the bitterness.

  The worst thing was the wondering why, the feeling of being so sort of passed over. She was chewed up inside with curiosity. What had Mark wanted to do with a paid stranger that he hadn’t done with her? Was it leather, bondage, or simply a sleazy in-car blow job, parked where it was public enough for the thrilling risk of being caught? She could have done all that. All she’d needed was the hint that safely marital in-bed sex was getting a bit uninteresting. Or was that true? Perhaps there had been hints that she’d chosen to ignore. Perhaps when she read magazines at the hair-dresser she shouldn’t always skip past the articles that promised things like ‘Scorching sex tips for burnt-out lovers’. It had been easy enough, convenient enough, to assume that if Mark didn’t actively complain then he wasn’t unhappy the way things were. And besides, she didn’t want Bernard, retouching her highlights, to catch her avidly reading (even jotting down notes) about how to slide her tongue round previously unthought-of corners.

  Theresa went to the window, pulled back the curtains and opened the sliding door. Great sheets of rain were pouring from the domed roof of the white iron pergola by the pool, like a power shower off a bald head. There was no-one in sight and, feeling childishly as if she was now so alone that no-one would miss her if she went out and drowned herself, she stepped onto the terrace, climbed over the balcony rail, wandered out into the downpour and onto the beach.

  ‘I didn’t think you’d be here.’ Even as Lucy said the words she realized they sounded both senseless and ridiculous. Henry obviously thought the same and laughed loudly. ‘Right, so who were you looking for down at the dive shop in the dark and in the pouring rain?’

  ‘Hey, no-one! I was just walking on the beach and I saw the light was on. I only looked in because someone could have been robbing the wetsuit store!’

  ‘And you’d have done what? Fought them off with your bare hands?’

  Lucy didn’t mind him teasing her. He wasn’t trying to score points, to put her down. Ross used to tease her about forever being dappled with flecks of paint. She’d thought he’d just found it funny, endearing even, but then once, in a restaurant with friends of his – glossy air stewardesses and various airline staff – he’d grabbed her hand and held it up to show them all, pointing to traces of the Paint Library’s Elizabethan Red down her nails, saying wasn’t it lucky she wasn’t a surgeon, she’d be coming home covered in patients’ blood. The slick stewardesses had smirked and giggled, putting their delicately manicured hands to their sheeny pencil-outlined mouths in a gesture of calculated prettiness that Lucy was sure must have been taught at flight-crew school.

  ‘I’d have sneaked away and pretended I’d seen nothing,’ Lucy teased back. ‘And in the morning I’d have told you I’d had a strange dream, all about burglars making off with your entire stock. You’d have been astounded at my prophetic powers.’

  ‘Seriously, you’d have done the right thing.’ Henry went to the fridge at the back of the shop, pulled out a couple of Carib beers and handed one to Lucy. She settled on an upturned crate that in the morning would contain the day’s diving equipment for the boat. Henry went on, ‘Theft on this island is usually to do with drugs. There’s a lot of real poverty here, it’s not all just smiling, pretty natives and welcome-to-paradise stuff that you tourists see. When you look at those smart yachts anchored just off the reef, sometimes you have to think about where they’ve come from and what they might be carrying. I don’t ask any questions, I don’t want to get shot.’

  ‘That bad?’

  ‘No, not that bad. Just a little bit close to that bad, just sometimes. Ninety-nine per cent of sailboats are American charters for the vacation trade. But for those few that aren’t for real the holiday trade’s a good cover. Anyway,’ Henry pushed the door open to see how much rain was still falling, ‘most of the yachts are on their way out of here now, heading up to a safer harbour in Barbados before the big storm gets here.’

  ‘How big does a big storm get?’

  ‘They’re talking hurricane level. We don’t get that many, but when they hit … wow!’

  ‘So what do you do?’

  ‘You board up, dig in and wait! All bad things pass.’

  ‘Not as quickly as good things.’

  ‘Well that’s OK,’ he laughed, ‘it means you have every excuse to make sure you really enjoy them while you can.’

  ‘We had a sort of hurricane in England once, back in the Eighties. Colette was a baby. I think it was the first time she slept through the night.’

  Henry laughed. ‘She wouldn’t sleep through the ones we get here, I promise you.’

  ‘Yeah, well you would say that wouldn’t you?’ Lucy mocked him. ‘It’s the “everything’s bigger in Texas” principle.’ But Henry wasn’t smiling any more. ‘Hey, seriously, if we do get a warning, you do what the hotel management tell you, like exactly. You don’t go outside and pick fights with
the bad weather we get here. People die, but they’re usually people who don’t follow the rules.’

  ‘You’re cheery tonight. Nothing but warnings, “don’t do this, don’t do that”, you sound like my dad.’

  ‘Your dad’s cool, I’ll take it as a compliment.’ Lucy groaned and he laughed at her. ‘So that’s why you’re wandering around on the dark, wet dangerous beach by yourself; getting away from the family.’

  ‘That obvious? I love them but …’

  ‘And I love Glenda, but … It’s the same here. Why do you think I’m down here sorting tomorrow’s boat stocks when I could be home watching Glenda teach Oliver how to appreciate the finer points of vintage Flintstones cartoons on channel 48? She lives above her studio just along the street but she’s always stopping by. That’s the way family is here, but sometimes a man just needs peace.’

  ‘So here we are, a pair of exiles.’ It didn’t sound too bad, Lucy thought. It was a bit like running away, but only as far as the garden shed when you’re a child with a small but satisfyingly niggly grudge against a parent. You felt safe enough, but just distant enough too. Then Henry was next to her, close enough for her to scent the salty sea on him. She closed her eyes, relaxed and waited.

  The rain had almost stopped and the sand beneath Theresa’s bare feet felt like smooth wet concrete. She couldn’t see very well where she was going and assumed it was a mixture of the rain and the tears which had, eventually, decided to let themselves out. She, like Lucy, was actually quite enjoying herself now. There was something about thoroughly justified grief and anger. This wasn’t some petty row, some silly argument about a triviality like who’d forgotten to pay the Amex bill: this was the real, dramatic thing. It was almost sexy. If Mark turned up on this beach now … if he was just the other side of that row of palm trees, she couldn’t swear she wouldn’t wrestle him to the sand and show him there was nothing he could buy from any lousy impersonal money-grabbing hooker that he couldn’t get for for no price at all from her. Of course he wouldn’t be there, but she’d walk on anyway and look.

  Theresa tripped over the trunk of the first tree, the one that lay almost flat out along the beach, curving gracefully skywards only halfway along. She swore, and lay sprawled on the gritty soaking sand, her leg painfully grazed on its matty leaf-stalk trunk. The tree, in daylight, looked like the sort on every travel poster, half-reclining lazily on the sand, its magnificent spread of vast glossy leaves vivid against a brilliant blue sky. Theresa thought it was a fraud, appealing so gorgeously, grandly upwards like that, luring people to come to paradise and then lying there tripping them up in the dark.

  Theresa lay on her back and let drops of rain, reduced now to lukewarm drizzle, fall into her open mouth. From the circular palm-covered beachfront games area back at the hotel she could hear the click-click of a table-tennis game and bursts of young laughter. There was more laughter closer to her as well. Keeping completely still and concentrating, she identified low, intimate, sexy murmurings, sounds she really didn’t want to hear just now. She rolled over, grabbed the shaggy hostile palm trunk and hauled herself up. It was no way to treat a pale blue linen Nicole Farhi dress, it occurred to her, covering it in wet sand. The rest of her felt dirty too, filthy inside and all over with some unknown, uninvited germ that Mark might have let loose in her. She padded towards the sea and splashed about in the warm cleansing shallows. The soft waves washed over the hem of her dress and she flicked at the fabric, rinsing off the sand. She’d thought the beach shelved gently here but her feet seemed to be pitching steeply forwards. Peculiarly detached, some-how, as she went deeper and deeper, not quite sure what she was doing and unable to aim herself back towards the lights on shore, she started swimming awkwardly as she plunged on out of her depth, hampered by the clinging shift dress that hadn’t exactly a generous width for walking, let alone swimming. So this is how people drown, she thought vaguely to herself, they just drift off into water in the wrong outfit.

  The water felt colder as she moved out deeper, and jolted her senses. Theresa didn’t at all want to drown. She didn’t want Mark to think that for the sake of his bit of tacky off-limits sex she would go to the trouble of destroying herself and her family. She was determined, suddenly, not even to let him see her sulk. She wouldn’t give it the importance it didn’t deserve. How hard that would be she didn’t yet know. What she did know was that it was getting hard to reach the shore. There were lights everywhere: at the hotel, on the end of the pontoon, in the villas on the far headland where her parents were staying, lights out to sea on tankers and cruise ships and lamps swaying high on the rigging of moored yachts in the bay. Further away the town of Teignmouth blazed the night away. She swam in a circle, tired now but warmer and strangely elated. Her head drifted beneath the water and she didn’t fight hard to come back up. When she did surface, there was someone beside her, a girl with flowing yellow hair. She thought of mermaids and smiled. Mermaids never drown. She’d read that on a Cornish gravestone and felt sad about the grave’s occupant, who presumably had. Perhaps the sea was heaven.

  ‘Come on, you thick dumb tart! Swim with us, don’t just give up!’ There was a man as well. Mer-man, mer-bloke? What? Theresa thought. He was pulling at her arm, the girl had the other one and they’d taken her over, towing her towards somewhere safe. She let go and trusted them, floating in her unsuitable, but clean blue dress towards the hotel lights.

  ‘You’ll be all right now.’ The girl sounded kind, as if she felt gently sorry for Theresa.

  ‘When she’s sober,’ she heard the man mutter.

  Theresa giggled. ‘I’m glad I wasn’t skinny-dipping,’ she said, pulling her dress down over her thighs as she staggered out of the shallow water onto the beach.

  ‘Aren’t we bloody all?’ said the girl.

  The return of the blazing sun that all the guests felt entitled to made breakfast a slightly overexcited time, shrill with the voices of the bossiest planning the day’s structure for the meeker or lazier. Simon was pleased with himself for having got up early and been busy making arrangements. The family were to go out, for the whole day, on a trip around the island on a catamaran. A barbecue lunch on a deserted beach was included and he was as certain as he could be that no-one would object.

  ‘Not all day!’ Becky screeched. ‘I’m supposed to be—’

  ‘What? Supposed to be what?’ Plum was quick to ask. She’d seen the hunky young jewellery-seller close to Becky on the beach, the two of them giggling with their heads together. He was too old for her, Simon had said, and for once she’d been inclined to agree. The tawdry reputation of some British girls on holiday was common knowledge at exotic destinations all across the world, and Plum was well aware that Becky in her skimpy bikinis and sexy little midriff-baring tops looked exactly like a sweet and tempting piece of easy meat. Plum herself was pretty sure that Becky was still a virgin, though she certainly wasn’t going to ask her. After all, what could she do with a worrying answer?

  ‘I just said I might see someone, that’s all.’ Becky quietened as fast as she’d flared up. For once they were tempting her with something that she might actually mind missing out on and she wasn’t going to argue, and it still rankled that her gran had called her spoilt. ‘I’ll maybe see them later.’ Plum smiled to herself, recognizing the skill with which Becky managed to avoid giving away even the sex of her appointee. Such crafty teenage tricks would be handy to keep for use later in life.

  Simon was relieved to be escaping the environment of the hotel. He’d become highly nervous of accidentally meeting the maid he’d so stupidly (and clumsily) goosed in the bedroom and was sure that behind every staff member’s polite smile was the powerful and terrible knowledge that He was The One. The worst thing was, he couldn’t, hand on heart, swear it wouldn’t happen again. Those high swaying bottoms, the leisurely, provocative walks and the glistening intricacy of the black multi-plaited hair aroused him quite extraordinarily. The pale feeble flicker of a tan that the Europ
ean women lying slab-like on poolside loungers were so pleased with themselves for acquiring simply didn’t bring even the smallest glow of lust to his loins. Plum, bless her, assumed he was simply drinking too much to be capable. A couple of times he’d made a courteous sexual effort and constructed for himself a rather smutty but pretty effective fantasy that involved the room maid, a bottle of baby oil and a locked laundry store, but he could tell that Plum was glad enough to get back to the book she was reading.

  ‘You’ll be coming, won’t you? Not going off diving with your new friend?’ Simon asked Lucy. After she’d stormed out of the restaurant the night before, and with Theresa not even turning up for dinner at all (migraine; since when had she suffered from migraines?), he wondered if he was the only one in the family with a suitable sense of team spirit.

  ‘Yes I’ll come,’ Lucy told him. ‘Though if Mum thinks that by getting me for a full day on a boat she’s got me captive for another dose of nagging about settling for Mr Take-What-You-Can-Get-at-Your-Age then I swear I’ll dive overboard and swim to shore, even if there’s sharks.’

  ‘I don’t think she’ll dare.’ He grinned. ‘Colette told her off after you’d run away. Announced loud and clear something like “Mum’s decided she doesn’t actually like men very much.” That shut her up, you could see the cogs turning while she started wondering if you’d turned into a lesbian.’

  ‘I knew those painting overalls were good for something. By the way, how’s Theresa’s headache? Is she coming?’

  ‘Theresa’s fine. And yes, I’m coming.’ Theresa looked slightly bizarre, Lucy thought, out in the bright morning air with full eye make-up and glossy lipstick. The words ‘brave face’ came straight into her mind. Mark must have told her, but Lucy knew she was the last one her sister would confide in. She rather wished Mark hadn’t either, some things you’d just rather not know.