Here Come the Girls

by Milly Johnson

  ‘. . . belly-dancing class,’ finished Roz.

  ‘Ah,’ said Frankie, with an understanding smile. ‘Right, well, I’ll see you later then.’

  ‘Are you joining us?’ asked Harem Woman, spotting Roz striding towards her. ‘Brilliant, another member.’ Then she set off with very wiggly hips up the grand staircase which led from the reception area up to the shops.

  ‘Come on, ladies – to the Flamenco Room two decks up. You’ll all be walking like me before the end of the cruise!’

  Roz followed on, unable to sneak off. There was nothing for it. She would have to endure an hour of belly dancing just to avoid looking at Frankie over a breakfast-table. As if she didn’t despise Frankie enough already.

  Frankie bumped into Olive and Ven outside the Buttery, one of two huge self-service restaurants on deck sixteen. They’d gone up for a slice of toast and ended up marvelling at the spread of breakfast available and had almond croissants filled with crème patissière instead.

  ‘I was just coming up for a coffee,’ said Frankie, ‘but I’ll tag along with you instead if you’re going shopping. I’m not that hungry in the mornings.’

  There were four huge shops mid-ship on decks six and seven, ranging respectively from posh to less-posh: Gallery Mermaidia, the Boulevard, Pall Mall and Market Avenue. Outside them today were racks of tuxedos and evening gowns and stalls of costume jewellery being raked over by interested passengers, including Royston, dressed in a pink vest, flowery shorts and lime-green Crocs. He was surprisingly lean and toned for a man of his age and because of that didn’t look half as daft as he should have done.

  ‘Morning, girls,’ he said chirpily when he spotted them.

  ‘Morning,’ they returned.

  ‘Tried sunbathing, but it’s bladdy freezin’. I’m just going to warm up with an Irish coffee instead. See you at dinner if not before. Remember the posh frocks!’

  ‘We will. Have a nice day,’ Frankie returned.

  ‘Come on, you,’ said Ven, pulling Olive into the shop and towards the beautiful long gowns in sumptuous colours.

  ‘Wonder if Roz is up yet?’ said Olive.

  ‘She’s gone belly dancing,’ smirked Frankie.

  ‘Get stuffed!’

  ‘She has, I tell you no lies. I bumped into her in Reception this morning. It was either come to breakfast with me or pretend she was interested in the belly-dancing class. I suspect she might have tried to sneak off had I not kept staring at her to make sure she went in with them all.’

  ‘You evil sod,’ laughed Ven.

  ‘Not at all,’ grinned Frankie. ‘I’ve done a bit of belly dancing myself. It’ll do her the world of good. Might even start to defrost her knickers.’ And with that she gave her friends a big knowing wink.

  Chapter 22

  ‘Good morning, ladies,’ said Harem Woman in a very Welsh Wales voice. She then introduced herself as Gwen and went on to amaze everyone by telling them all she was sixty-seven. She had a figure like a nineteen-year-old. Flat-stomached, small-waisted, good legs and not a hint of a bingo wing on her arms.

  ‘I’m warning you now, just in case anyone tells you that belly dancing is a lot of fat women wobbling their stomachs – you’ll be crawling out of here, ladies,’ promised Gwen.

  Great, thought Roz. This could possibly be the longest hour of her life then.

  ‘Let’s begin with a nice warm-up,’ said Gwen, switching on a CD behind her. Jangly music started up and Gwen began to gyrate her hips in a figure of eight, encouraging the class to follow suit. Grudgingly, Roz started to move. Then Gwen shifted to rotating her hips first one way, then the other whilst keeping the top half of her body still.

  ‘Belly dancing is about learning to isolate parts of your body,’ she explained as her hips undulated easily and hypnotically.

  It was a lot harder than Gwen made it look. That’s what hooked Roz in, because she hated to be beaten on anything. Then Gwen thrust her hips forward and back.

  ‘You’re doing great, girls!’ she smiled.

  Crikey, haven’t done this movement for a while, thought Roz, as the pensioners giggled at either side of her. She was quite puffed when the music stopped. And, though she wouldn’t admit it to herself, strangely exhilarated.

  ‘Right, now,’ Gwen went on. ‘Who wants to tighten up some thighs?’

  Roz was quite interested to find that by vibrating the muscles of her thighs, her bum trembled in classic belly-dancer fashion. After a track-length of that, she felt like her quadriceps had quadrupled in size.

  ‘I feel like I’ve done an hour on the leg press,’ said a pink-faced passenger in Roz’s ear. But she was euphoric at the same time.

  ‘Okay, ladies, that’s all for today,’ called Gwen after some snakey arm dancing. ‘We’ve got a lesson tomorrow here at eleven, so I hope you come again.’

  ‘That’s never an hour gone already,’ said Pink Face.

  Roz checked her watch and found, to her surprise also, that an hour had indeed passed.

  Even more surprisingly, Roz knew that she would be here for that second lesson and that she’d be practising in front of the mirror before then. She would nail that isolation move if it killed her.

  Olive felt like a shoplifter as she paid for three beautiful gowns, a pair of pink cropped trousers, some blingy paste jewellery and a pashmina with a mere flourish of the pen.

  ‘You sure this is all on account?’ she asked Ven. ‘I’m having real problems believing that.’

  ‘Yep,’ said Ven, ‘and I have a signed agreement to say so.’

  ‘So what’s to stop us buying everything in the shop then?’ said Frankie, who was equally reluctant to believe any firm would be so stupid as to let four women loose with a free budget. Especially in shops with jewellery and clothes and handbags.

  ‘I’m presuming that they trust we won’t go barmy and start buying all the Swarovski we can lay our hands on,’ said Ven.

  ‘You’d better let me have a look at that agreement,’ said Frankie, ‘before we get into trouble.’

  ‘No need,’ trilled Ven. ‘It’s really all above board’cos I’ve checked all the small print. Plus I’ll go over it yet again if I must with the Figurehead rep when I see him. Even though I know there is no point. They made it perfectly clear we had carte blanche to spend.’

  ‘I would have thought he might have been in contact by now,’ said Frankie. ‘Didn’t he leave you a note or a message on the cabin phone answering machine?’

  ‘Oh, never mind how they do or don’t organise things,’ said Ven confidently. ‘He’ll be in touch, no doubt. Right – I’m going on ahead to the Café Parisienne to grab a table, so see you in five. I can’t believe I’m saying this after only having breakfast an hour and a half ago, but I’m peckish. It must be the sea air.’

  ‘Sea air?’ joked Frankie. ‘Don’t use that as an excuse. You’re just a piglet!’

  Chapter 23

  Doreen was in the toilet when David got up. He’d never seen his mother move as much as she had done in the past twenty-four hours. It hadn’t taken her long to dispense with the pretence of needing a mighty effort to rouse herself when she realised that Olive wasn’t around to fetch and carry for her. David thought back to all the times when she’d been ‘caught short’ and Olive had had to clean her up. It appeared she had a lot more control over her bodily functions than she had let on, and it suddenly came to him how hard life must have been for his wife with such a demanding and devious mother-in-law. But a thought like that was far too near to the bone, and he shut the door on it quickly.

  Kevin was buttering toast in the kitchen. He had fancied a fry-up but there was only one egg left, no bacon, two squidgy tomatoes and no sausages. Someone would have to go food shopping today. David needed to stop being so stubborn and find out where Olive really was, drag her home and let them all get back to normal life, thought Kevin. He was built for love and pleasure, not skivvying.

  ‘So why has Olive left you, Dave?’ he asked, s
loppily chewing the toast. ‘Haven’t you been looking after her properly?’ He winked.

  ‘What’s “looking after her properly” and a wink supposed to mean?’ David replied with more than a touch of impatience. That toast smelled gorgeous and it was the last bloody slice of bread in the house. And Kevin had put the only remaining Dairylea cheese slice on it as well.

  ‘In the bedroom, of course. At “sausage o’clock” time,’ said Kevin, crunching down again onto the toast and making David’s stomach howl with hunger. ‘I find that women who are looked after in the bedroom don’t usually run away.’

  ‘Of course I look after her in the bedroom!’ snapped David.

  ‘Well, I haven’t witnessed much action since I moved in,’ said Kevin. ‘The only noise I’ve heard through your walls is you farting.’

  ‘You’ve been listening?’ David’s jaw dropped open.

  ‘No – listening and hearing are very different things,’ mused Kevin, with the air of a great philosopher.

  ‘We do . . . all sorts,’ grumbled David, very unconvincingly. ‘We just don’t make a noise about it. I don’t want my mother hearing.’

  ‘All sorts? You and Olive?’ Somehow Kevin found that a bit hard to believe, and he mischievously pressed on with his line of questioning. ‘What, different positions and toys and role play?’

  ‘We weren’t supposed to have positions in my day,’ called Doreen from the downstairs bathroom. ‘It was lights off and nightie up only.’

  ‘Chuffing hell, she’s got the ears of a bat!’ called David, trying to knock the picture out of his head of his mother and father having sex in the bedroom upstairs.

  ‘Although,’ Doreen went on, ‘my Auntie Maud always used to say, “You’ll never be truly happy, married to a man who doesn’t want to explore all your orifices”.’

  ‘Mam!’ screamed David, slapping his palms to his ears.

  ‘You give her lots of foreplay then?’ Kevin probed even deeper. ‘You don’t just tell her to brace herself and then jump on, do you? Women have to be teased for ages and ages to get them truly going. They should be dripping wet and begging for it by the time you climb on.’

  ‘Of course I—hang on, why the hell am I giving you details of my sex-life? I don’t exactly see your ex-birds lining up outside for your attentions!’

  ‘Oh, don’t you worry about me,’ smirked Kevin. ‘I don’t go short. Now I’m unattached, I can give a lot of ladies a good old service without having all the hassle of having to stay overnight or be tied to one person. Although that’s okay sometimes, if you know what I mean.’ He gave a smutty laugh.

  David thought of a few of Kevin’s harem and shuddered. Julie Two-Teeth; Ketherwood Kathleen – the footie-mad one who couldn’t get to see any of the matches because her arse was too big to fit through the turnstile; Caroline with the cauliflower ear – and nose; fishy-smelling Diane who had just been up in court for shoplifting from the local Rhythm and Booze off-licence, and his latest ex Wicked Wendy who was actually quite a good-looking woman, give or take the Nigel Mansell moustache. Ugh. He couldn’t go on. Pictures of them were worse than the ones of his mum and dad in a clinch.

  ‘Your dad, God rest him, was a lovely man but he didn’t know what foreplay was until he was in a home,’ called Doreen again, after a far from ladylike parp. ‘He saw it on a film where a couple were eating loads of things out of a fridge. Before that, he thought it meant “extra thick tissues”.’

  ‘Someone needs to go and get some shopping done,’ said Kevin, popping the last of the toast into his mouth.

  ‘I’ll go,’ David quickly volunteered. Anything to get away from this line of talk. And before his stud-cousin with his fancy bedroom tricks cottoned on to the fact that he knew even less than his father did about pleasuring a woman.

  Chapter 24

  Olive returned to her cabin to find her bed had been made, the sink and shower washed down, and fresh folded towels had appeared. Jesus must have flown around the room like Will-o’-the-Wisp. And to add to the magic of the day, she was now the owner of three new beautiful evening gowns which she took out of the bag and hung up: a long red one with shoestring straps and a matching shrug, a silver and black one with floaty cap sleeves, and the most gorgeous dark green one that cost as much as the other two put together.

  Olive allowed herself a single thought of home and then cast it out, to be replaced with the quandary of whether she dare have a wanton lunchtime glass of wine or not in Café Parisienne?

  When Roz joined Ven at the table in Café Parisienne, she was actually smiling.

  ‘Crikey,’ said Ven, at the rare phenomenon. ‘What have you been up to?’

  ‘Can you believe belly dancing?’ said Roz.

  ‘Was it good then?’

  ‘To be honest . . .’ Roz was about to confess that she had only gone along to avoid Frankie, but she didn’t want to see a look of disapproval on Ven’s face so she tempered what she was going to say. ‘Yes, it was great.’

  ‘Wouldn’t have put you and belly dancing together,’ said Ven.

  ‘Me neither, but it was like an aerobic workout. I wasn’t much good but I’m going for the second lesson tomorrow.’

  ‘Well done!’ Ven waved as she spotted Frankie. She expected Roz’s smile to wither then. She was right.

  ‘Hi, girls,’ said Frankie cheerfully, throwing herself into the seat next to Roz. ‘Plenty of toilets on this ship, thank goodness. How was the belly dancing?’

  ‘It was okay, thank you,’ replied Roz with lukewarm politeness. ‘Where’s Olive?’

  ‘She bought some frocks in the shops and has gone to hang them up,’ Ven explained.

  ‘Sea feels a bit rougher today than it did last night,’ said Frankie. ‘I noticed some of the stewards hanging sick bags on the staircases.’

  ‘We’re going through the Bay of Biscay,’ said Roz. ‘Apparently it can get a bit choppy.’

  The happy face of Olive appeared and she bounced over to join them. She looked five years younger for a good night’s sleep and a morning doing something for herself for a change.

  ‘So you have posh frocks?’ enquired Roz.

  ‘Oh Roz, they are gorgeous. I’m just a bit worried that the competition people will say, “You can’t spend that much, you cheeky cow”.’

  ‘Relax,’ soothed Ven. ‘Let’s eat.’ She picked up the lunch menu and scanned it.

  ‘I had croissants for breakfast. I shouldn’t really eat lunch as well,’ whispered Olive. ‘I’ll be the size of a house.’

  ‘You’re on holiday,’ winked Frankie. ‘Live a bit. Besides which your massage will burn up all your excess calories.’

  Olive’s face dropped. ‘I’m still not sure about having one of those.’

  ‘Oh Olive, they’re gorgeous – you have to,’ Frankie gushed. At that moment, she saw the long-haired Viking passing by. He had jeans on and a rock ’n’ roll T-shirt with big angel wings on the back. His arms were heavily tattooed, the biceps big and solid. He was studying a map of the ship and obviously going the wrong way because he doubled back, then turned around again and walked off, scratching his head.

  ‘What you grinning at?’ asked Olive.

  ‘It’s that bloke again.’ Frankie pointed discreetly over. ‘I bet it’s his first cruise. He’s making me look like a seasoned traveller by comparison.’

  Roz muttered something which sounded like ‘might have known it would be a man that she was looking at’, but Frankie graciously ignored it.

  ‘I’m having scallops, followed by the pasta,’ announced Ven. ‘And pass me that wine list, will you?’

  ‘What’s that? What did you say you’re having?’ asked Olive.

  ‘Scallops,’ said Ven. ‘Not the Barnsley scallops, shellfish scallops.’ In Yorkshire the fish shops sold ‘scallops’ which were a mashed-potato patty with a layer of fish in the centre.

  ‘I do know,’ tutted Olive with a mock-insulted smile. ‘I have been out of Yorkshire.’

 
‘Hmmm. I never understood why you came back home to Barnsley, saying you’d had the best summer of your life in Cephalonia, you mad bag,’ said Roz. ‘Roast-beef salad for me.’

  ‘Well, Mum rang and didn’t sound too good, and . . .’ Olive shrugged her shoulders.

  ‘And?’ pressed Roz.

  Olive took a deep breath. ‘And girls like me don’t do mad things like marry Greek men.’

  Then the waiter arrived at their table and cut the conversation off.

  ‘Hello, Aldrin,’ said Frankie, recognising him from last night in the Olympia. ‘Working again?’

  ‘We are always working, ma’am,’ he said with a fresh-faced smile.

  The wines in Café Parisienne had, apparently, been chosen by St John Hite, who was the sexiest, most floppy-haired, best wine buff on the TV. He had a weekly page in one of the Sunday newspapers and Ven found the descriptions of his featured wines so charged that she almost had to have a lie-down and a cigarette after reading it. The wine list was on par with his column: a glug-fest of sticky black fruits . . . citrus oomph . . . a spank of raspberries . . . Ven always imagined that St John Hite would be very good in bed.

  ‘This looks interesting,’ Ven said. She had intended to buy some champagne for them all, but her eyes were drawn to a Canadian ice wine. According to the description, the grapes were only picked when they were frozen on the vine, resulting in a honey-smooth mouthful of ping.

  ‘Goes well with fruitcakes, apparently,’ said Ven, reading from the menu.

  ‘It’s a must for us four then,’ giggled Frankie.

  So the ladies ordered food and ice wine when the wine waiter, ironically called ‘Sober’, came over.

  ‘I prefer his twin brother “Pissed”,’ said Roz dryly, making them spurt with laughter.