by Judy Astley
His eyes were glinting at her. ‘I ain’t wasting nothing, babe, don’t you worry.’
Lucy quite liked the enforced inactivity. Although sure that she had a lot of major back-home decisions to consider (where to live, how to afford it, and then what to do about Colette’s dull-girly school?) she did feel they could legitimately be postponed at least till after the storm. She and Plum sat side by side on loungers by the pool, reading. Lucy had found a selection of ancient Agatha Christie paperbacks on a shelf in the games room and was savouring the almost sinful indulgence of working her way through a snug country-house murder starring Miss Marple. Plum preferred Hercule Poirot and was deep into Death on the Nile.
‘It’s never really the butler who did it, is it?’ Lucy commented.
‘Certainly not. The lower orders knew their place!’ Plum agreed. ‘Though possibly the butler might have done it, if he was really the long-lost adopted son in disguise.’
It was an odd, antiquated notion, Lucy thought, ‘knowing one’s place’. It implied you really hadn’t any choice about where it was. That could be comfortable, just as she was now, lazy on a cushioned lounger knowing she couldn’t even leave the hotel area – so this, in the literal location sense, had to be her place. It also meant that you had few tricky choices to make in life, less chance to get things completely screwed up by pitching your aim too far outside your allotted circle. Henry had said she should trust her instincts more to choose what she wanted and believe it was for the best. ‘Ask yourself,’ he’d said as she mopped away her embarrassing tears the night before, ‘who is this mythical Other Person you’re trying to please?’ She hadn’t been aware there was anyone, but even as his words were out, she saw, in her mind, her family gathered in a group like a wedding photo, staring and smiling at her, persuading her to Be Like Them.
‘I do please myself,’ she’d told Henry. ‘I get positively accused of it. I’m told I’m selfish quite often, so I assume I must be. Though,’ she’d paused to think, ‘I don’t know what’s so selfish about raising a child by yourself, or about not getting married to some safe but unlovely man just for the sake of a suburban town-house, or about not giving up a job you like just so you can wear a smart on-the-knee skirt in an office and have your mother proudly tell her neighbours that you’re some old sod’s secretary.’
‘You’re right. We’re the same, I don’t want to wear a skirt either,’ he’d agreed. That was just before he’d kissed her, which she certainly hadn’t expected, not after the night of the unrequired condoms. And of course that had been exactly the moment she’d been reminded that there was more than herself to think about: you couldn’t lose yourself in a moment of passion when your child is giggling with her friend in the next room.
‘Trusting my instincts will have to wait,’ she’d said, reluctantly pulling away from Henry.
‘For now maybe, but there’s time.’
‘Not much of it.’
‘Like I said, there’s as much as you make.’
‘Plum,’ Lucy said now, ‘have you ever thought your life might have been completely different from how it is? I mean if you’d made other choices?’
Plum looked at her. ‘Doesn’t everyone?’
‘But do you think it might have been loads better?’
Plum frowned. ‘If you’re trying to get me to tell you I think Simon was one of life’s consolation prizes then you’re going to be disappointed. I rather like him, actually. And I like my job, which I rather think I should have stayed at home and got on with, not lazed about here. Anyway,’ she yawned and stretched to emphasize her point, ‘think of the sheer bloody upheaval of buggering off to start something else. It’d have to be severely worth it.’
‘But suppose it was.’
Plum shrugged. ‘It wouldn’t be.’
Lucy closed her eyes. The brightness of the sun left the back of her eyelids shining brilliant pink for a moment. When she opened them again, Shirley was standing in front of her.
‘I’ve just seen Becky wandering off with that beach trader,’ she said to Plum. ‘Don’t you think you should go and see if she’s all right?’
Plum smiled lazily. ‘I don’t suppose she’ll come to any harm,’ she said. ‘After all, she can’t go far.’
‘It depends what you mean by far,’ Shirley said dourly, parking herself on a lounger next to Lucy. ‘Girls need watching.’ She turned to Lucy. ‘You wait till it’s Colette.’
Lucy looked up at her and smiled. ‘I will, thank you. I’ll do just that. I’ll wait.’
Becky didn’t mind stripping off her bikini, or at least she wasn’t going to let Ethan think it was any kind of big deal. They’d chosen a secluded spot high up the beach in a patch of sun between clumps of trees. There were quite a lot of people below them closer to the shore, though as they’d walked past she hadn’t heard any English voices. Ethan didn’t seem to be about to remove any clothes. Becky was surprised but didn’t comment, determined not to express anything other than mild blasé boredom. She put on her sunglasses, spread out her sarong on the sand and sat on it, staring at the naked bodies down by the sea. It seemed strange how different they could look, simply by discarding a few square inches of swimwear. There were a few prune-fleshed elderly folk, but most of the beach’s occupants looked as if they spent a lot of leisure time in the gym. There was a predominance of fair-haired men with extra-long limbs and torsos, giving the impression that their heads had stopped growing quite a long time before the rest of them. They reminded Becky of professional tennis players. Even the young women seemed to be built like Steffi Graf, all muscle and sinew. But then, she supposed, no-one would want to show off a mottled, dimpled backside, even if you did think a tan would improve things. A group of the more active people were playing volleyball which, she thought, involved a rather unnecessary amount of stretching and leaping and rolling about. Perhaps, for some people, being naked brought on an attack of true exhibitionism. As far as she was concerned they might at least have the manners to keep their flesh still. She lay down on the sand and closed her eyes.
‘You want me to rub on some lotion?’ Ethan’s shadow was blocking out the sun.
‘If you want to. It’s in the bag.’
She rolled over onto her front. Ethan knelt across her and started massaging the factor 10 into her shoulders. ‘No-one can see us up here by the trees,’ he said as he smoothed the lotion into her body. He was good at it. Becky felt as if her insides were melting away like a warmed choc ice. If he’d only done some of this the other night …
‘Hello Becky. Didn’t expect to see you here.’ She hauled herself up instantly, throwing Ethan onto the sand. Mark was standing above them, carrying a bottle of Carib beer and still wearing shorts and a shirt, which, she felt, was definitely cheating. He was grinning down at her and she pulled the sarong across her body.
‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’ she spat at him.
‘Same as you. Enjoying the beach. Some nice views here, some not so.’
‘You’re overdressed,’ she snapped. ‘And where’s Theresa?’
‘Who knows or cares?’ He started to remove his shirt. ‘Can I join you?’
‘No! Stop! Mark, this isn’t … Just go away will you?’ He was drunk.
‘Yeah, man. We need, like, some privacy.’ Ethan lit a spliff and Becky glared.
‘Oh, great. Pass that round.’ Mark sat down next to Becky. Ethan handed him the joint and he inhaled deeply. ‘Haven’t had any of this for a while. Should do it more.’
‘No you shouldn’t. You’re old and you’ve got kids and stuff.’ If he’d just go away, Becky thought. Go away and not tell anyone.
‘Oh and that means I’m banned from all the fun?’ His head wheeled round to face her. It moved, she thought, as if it wasn’t really in control, as if it might loll off his neck. That drunk. That was good. It meant he wouldn’t tell anyone he’d seen her, in case she told as well.
‘So you’re the guy who sells narcotics and ne
cklaces. I’ve heard about you.’
Ethan grinned. ‘You’ve heard good things?’
Mark thought for a moment and frowned. ‘Depends which way you look at it. I’ve heard you collect women by nationalities.’
‘Mark, what are you on about?’ Becky interrupted.
‘Yeah, you’ll like this, Becks. He has …’ Mark waved the joint in the direction of Ethan and then took another deep drag. ‘This bloke, your boyfriend here, has like one English girl and then, say, a Dane, then another English girl and then maybe a German and so on. English girls in between because they’re just so easy.’
‘Perhaps there’s just more of them,’ Becky suggested. She could see where this was leading. From her father she expected lectures to keep her in line. From Theresa, even, she wouldn’t be surprised at the odd criticism, but from Mark she expected only a stranger’s detachment. What she got up to simply wasn’t of any concern to him.
‘I never had an Italian one,’ Ethan cut in with a low laugh. ‘Been wanting Italian, would make almost a full set.’
Mark chuckled. Becky scowled: how sordid were these two?
‘So you see, Becky, you want to be careful.’ Mark was back on the theme. ‘Bloke puts it about like the supply of women’s about to run short, well, you could catch something.’
‘Not from me, man, I’m clean.’
Becky climbed back into her bikini, not looking at Mark in case he was looking at her. ‘Haven’t you ever heard of condoms, Mark? They’re what careful people use. Makes everything safe.’
‘’S’like eating a sweet with the paper on,’ he said, swigging the last of his beer. ‘And they’re not that safe. They break. Sometimes they break and then you’re really in it, real live biological bug trouble.’ He was almost slurring his words by now. Becky frowned at him. What was he saying, exactly? What had he caught? He was hinting at something, for sure. Perhaps it was one of those diseases that everyone thought had died out, like syphilis. Bits of him would fall off, he’d go mad (or madder at any rate), he’d get pustules and die – they’d talked about it in history at school, even the back-row yobs had been fascinated.
‘Mark,’ she said, having worked herself up into a state that bordered on pity for him, ‘Mark, come on, let’s go back to the others.’ With difficulty, for he was heavy and not particularly steady, she pulled him up from the sand and led him back towards the hotel. She waved to Ethan, who grinned back at her. However much she resisted it, she wasn’t going to ignore completely what Mark had said. It had only been an illusion, the idea that she was more than just a notch on Ethan’s shag-list, but Mark’s words were clearly basic lousy truth, and, well, somehow Ethan didn’t have the same appeal. How sad would she have to be to be that desperate?
* * *
The last-day-on-earth feeling continued through to the afternoon and increased when one of the tour reps let it slip that the airport was now closed and wouldn’t reopen until the storm had passed. Six people who had been waiting forlornly with their luggage in the lobby for a taxi after lunch had been scheduled to fly back to Manchester early that evening but discovered that because of concern about possible storm damage, their plane hadn’t even bothered to leave England. There was a general vagueness about arrangements for places for them on flights later in the week.
‘There’ll be a logjam at the airport. There’ll be stranded folks all over the island,’ Perry, the poolside philosopher, predicted grimly. ‘It’ll be chaos.’
‘There’ll be queues for miles,’ Shirley agreed. Neither of them seemed too concerned, Lucy thought as she listened. If anything, the prospect gave them a certain amount of glee, being a chance to demonstrate that The Brits knew how to deal with mayhem and would show any panicking Johnny Foreigners that patience and the ability to wait your turn triumphed in the end.
Luke was bored. He and Tom and Colette couldn’t think of anything to do and were starting to get tetchy. No-one was allowed in the swimming pool because the hotel staff were collecting all the chairs and tables from the beach bar and lowering them into the water to store them safely from the wind. The bar-football and table-tennis tables from the games room were also off limits, having been folded and fastened securely to a pillar in the centre of the room.
‘Couldn’t all this wait till later?’ Plum complained on his behalf.
‘I don’t suppose many of the staff will be here later,’ Lucy said. ‘They’ll all want to get home and be with their own families.’
‘I suppose so,’ Plum conceded with a sigh. ‘I must say this is getting awfully tedious. First none of us can go out, then some people can’t even go home, and now the facilities we have got are being gradually run down. Strange sort of holiday.’
‘I think it’s rather exciting,’ Shirley said. ‘It’ll certainly give us something to tell them back home. Better than the usual “Yes thank you, we had a lovely time”, with nothing else to report.’
Plum got up off her lounger and stretched her arms. ‘Well, I think I’ll go and get a bit of sleep. I don’t suppose we’ll get much tonight.’ She walked off slowly in the direction of her room. Luke and Tom sat on the grass near the pool, watching the white ironwork of the gazebo to see if there were any lizards they could torment.
‘There was a big one down by those rocks on the headland yesterday. It went into a hole so it might still be around,’ Colette told them. ‘We could go and look.’
The two boys considered, looking bored, then Tom decided, ‘I suppose we could. And after that I want to get some supplies for tonight. Sweets and stuff, though Mum went off for a drink with some bloke after lunch and I don’t know where she is and she’s got all the cash.’
The three of them sauntered off along the sand towards the headland where the villas were. The dogs that lived on the shore had disappeared and the small black birds that scavenged beneath the trees seemed to have gone as well. Colette had the feeling that wildlife, better equipped with instincts than stupid humans, had gone into hiding till the storm was over. The sea was now quite definitely rougher than before and the surf was racing further up the beach.
‘Is it high tide, or is this the start of the hurricane?’ Colette asked. She looked at her grandparents’ villa, up on the promontory, and wondered if it was going to be far enough out of the water when everything got really rough. She felt a tingle of something that wasn’t quite fear, but wasn’t comfortable enough to be just excitement.
‘The sea’s crashing on the rocks quite a lot too. It’s spraying right up to the wall,’ Tom said. ‘I wouldn’t want to spend the night up there.’
‘Thanks, Tom. Just a great thing to say,’ Luke hissed at him. Colette’s eyes were looking alarmingly round and afraid. And nothing had even happened yet.
‘Yeah, well, it’ll be even worse in the dark, won’t it, ‘cos you’ll only be able to hear it, won’t you.’ Tom was enjoying being persistent with the gloom.
‘Tom, just shut up will you.’ Luke pushed him to emphasize his point and Tom slid over in the sand.
‘Hey, thanks! Well if you’re going to be like that I’ll just go off and find my mum for some cash. You can stuff your fucking old lizard.’ Tom turned and strode off angrily, hands in his pockets and his head down.
‘Now you’ve hurt his feelings,’ Colette said.
‘Don’t you start … Oh sorry, hey I’ll apologize to him later, OK?’
Colette giggled. ‘If we live that long.’
‘Look, we’ll be OK.’
‘I know.’ Colette laughed again. ‘After all, Gran keeps saying “It’s only a bit of wind.”’
‘Yeah, like it’s some giant fart in the sky or something.’
The two of them were still laughing as they climbed up the rocks to find where Colette had seen the big lizard. The sea was pounding hard against the rocks, sending jets of spray high in the air. Colette moved along so that more of the water splashed onto her. ‘It’s lovely, like a warm shower,’ she told Luke.
‘So where�
�s this huge iguana thing?’ he asked, peering into rock crevices.
‘It wasn’t an iguana, but nearly as big as that,’ she said. ‘And it was kind of blueish.’
‘Can’t see anything. Let’s go down to the other side.’ He moved a bit closer to her and lowered his voice. ‘And we might see the Great Celeb, sunbathing out on his or her terrace.’
‘They’ve probably put special screens up.’
There were voices, though, and someone doing some low giggling. Instinctively, Luke and Colette started creeping slowly and carefully along the rocks in the direction of the murmurs.
‘They sound … naughty, like they’re up to something,’ Colette whispered.
Luke agreed, though the word he’d have used was ‘sexy’, which was probably because he was a couple of years older. He was desperate to see what was going on, but also wondered if Colette perhaps shouldn’t. Then suddenly there was no choice. Across the next rock, immediately below them, was the vision of a couple celebrating their not-so-hidden liaison with a bottle of champagne. The woman’s bikini top was on the rock behind her and the man, as they watched, poured the bubbling liquid down her neck and leaned to lick at it as it trickled onto her breasts. Her head went back as he made his way up towards her throat, and some movement from the two teenagers caught her eye.
‘Run!’ Luke hissed at Colette and she scuttled backwards behind the rocks.
‘Spying little bastards!’ The woman’s voice rang out after them. There was a crash of glass breaking and the man swore loudly. Colette and Luke, barely able to move from laughter, managed to hurl themselves across the promontory wall and into Shirley and Perry’s villa garden, where they collapsed on the spiky grass, gasping for breath. ‘The gold lady!’
‘And one of the Steves! Oh yuk!’ Colette pulled an appalled face.
‘Double, triple yuk! I mean she’s someone’s mum!’
