What I Did On My Holidays

by Chrissie Manby

  On the beach . . . What a lovely thought. When I got that email, I was still safely tucked up beneath my duvet in my Laura Ashley flannel pyjamas. I could not have looked less like a beach bunny if I’d tried. Still Hannah’s email was enough to give me the encouragement I needed to get up and splash some water on my tear-stained face. I’d made the mistake of looking at some photos of Callum on my iPhone and had a little weep, but I had to stay strong. The story of Callum and me was far from over.

  Throughout the day Hannah and Alison sent me more mini-bulletins. Apparently, after Alison’s loud observation about my likely holiday routine, Callum was avoiding the staff kitchen, but he had been spotted looking ‘fed up’ as he exited the stationery cupboard with two reams of A4 paper at around half past two. Candace reported that he definitely hadn’t seemed his usual self when she spoke to him on the phone at three o’clock.

  ‘It was such a good move to go to Majorca,’ Hannah said again when she emailed me around four o’clock. ‘I have no doubt that he thinks he’s made a mistake and it serves him right big time.’

  Good old Hannah. I’d never much rated the friendship of my workmates before, but now I longed to hear from her. I basked in the warm feelings I got from their emails detailing my ex’s woes. They kept me going. Hannah didn’t seem to care that she was getting nothing back from me, but then I knew she liked to hold court whether in person or virtually. I was happy to let her do it.

  While Callum mooched around the office, looking satisfyingly glum, I spent the day in my pyjamas, eagerly watching my in-box for more emails.

  But at six o’clock, I knew that all the girls at the Stockwell Lifts office would be going home and that would be the end of the daily news feed about my lost love. I imagined Callum clocking off too and it crossed my mind that maybe he was only so grumpy during the day because all the girls in the office seemed to be watching his every move. Would he break into a grin as soon as he disappeared into the Tube station at Stockwell? Did he have plans for that evening? I wondered. Plans with a girl?

  There had to be someone else. Had he met someone while working up in Newcastle? Though he had told me that there was no one else, it seemed the most likely explanation for what was, to me at least, a very sudden change of heart. I had visited the Newcastle office of Stockwell Lifts and didn’t think I had much competition there. Candace, Callum’s PA, was a middle-aged mum who played in her local semi-professional darts team and had a figure to match. Building sites were, generally speaking, a very masculine place to work. It was unlikely that Callum and some gorgeous girl had locked eyes over a girder. But of course Newcastle was full of clubs and bars; maybe he had met someone there. Callum had always had a thing for Cheryl Cole. Maybe he’d fallen for someone with her accent.

  I tortured myself further by making an inventory of Callum’s female friends from school and college. Over the time we’d been together, he’d introduced me to most of them and they’d all been friendly enough, but there was at least one, Shelley, who I knew harboured a crush on him. She’d made drunken passes at him in the past. What about her? Had she finally got her way? I imagined Callum getting as rat-arsed as he normally did on a night out but without me there to make sure he got home OK. He would be a sitting duck for Shelley in that state. Had he seen her in London on those weekends when I thought he was so hard at work?

  That was especially tough to take: the thought that he had been actively avoiding me, hiding from me yet all the while pretending that everything was OK. To think that I had felt sorry for him having to work so very hard! What a joke that had turned out to be. I wondered who else was in on that particular secret. He must have seen some of his friends during those weekends when I thought he was in Newcastle. He wouldn’t really have spent the whole weekend indoors with the curtains drawn, would he? I couldn’t believe it. Callum loved to hang out with his mates. Did he stick to his neighbourhood or venture into the centre of the city? What would he have said if he’d bumped into me while he was supposed to be up north? Had he already prepared his excuses, or would he have told me there and then that he no longer wanted to be with me? I shuddered as I thought of how close by he had been while I went about my business down in south London quite unknowing. I could picture his friends laughing when he told them what was going on. His pretending to be in Newcastle in order to avoid having to see me was the nastiest thing I could imagine anyone doing to me apart from being unfaithful.

  By seven o’clock my mood was back at rock bottom. And then I heard the key in the door.

  It was Clare again. Crikey, my sister was being diligent about this plant-watering favour. Even though she’d said that she would water my plants every day, I had expected her to manage once a week at the very most, but here she was again already. The plants had not had time to dry out since the previous day. I could only hope she wouldn’t drown them. It was quite the opposite problem from the one I had envisaged.

  I still didn’t want to see her. This time, the moment I heard my sister’s key in the door, I knew what was coming and took care to hide properly. I had got away with standing right behind the bedroom door last time, but I would not take any more chances. At some point, if she was taking her job as seriously as she seemed to be, she was bound to come into my bedroom to check that everything was as I had left it, so I quickly scrambled under the bed. The gap beneath the iron frame looked big enough, but getting beneath it was nowhere near so easy a trick as it had been when I last tried to hide under a bed, approximately twenty years earlier. I just about made it out of sight as Clare reached the kitchen door.

  Bloody hell, it was horrible under there, face down on the Wilton twist. I had always considered myself to be a fairly good housekeeper, but the carpet under my bed, which was supposed to be a nice bright cream colour, as in the rest of the room, was absolutely grey with dust. There were dust bunnies down there that looked almost as big as the real rabbits my sister and I had kept as children. I tried not to think of the damage all that filth would be doing to my favourite pyjamas. And then I turned my head to the other side and saw the mouse . . .

  Chapter Ten

  It took everything I had not to scream. As it was, I hit my head on the bed-boards as I instinctively jerked my face away from the tiny eyeless corpse that loomed in front of me. It lay on its back with all four paws stiffly in the air. I inched as far from it as I could without getting out from beneath the bed altogether. This was the worst possible moment for me to discover that rodent. While Clare pottered about in the kitchen, taking her own sweet time about watering my plants, I itched to get out from my filthy hiding place.

  My eyes crossed as I tried to focus on a little black thing a couple of inches from my nose that may or may not have been a flea. Please, God, don’t let it be a flea, I thought. Had it come off the dead mouse? I had turned away from it, but the thought of that thing behind my head – empty eye sockets staring at my hair – made the skin prickle from my crown to the soles of my feet. How long had it been there? Did it have friends, and where were they hiding? Soon my whole body was overtaken by a crawling sensation. My skin quite literally crept. I thought of dead mice and maggots and other things that inhabit the grave. Still I stayed beneath the bed and silent. I had to stay hidden. I dreaded my sister’s pity that much. After Hannah, my sister was the smuggest fiancée I knew.

  Out in the kitchen, Clare’s mobile phone rang.

  ‘Hi, darling,’ she said to the caller. It must have been Evan. ‘I’m there right now. Of course I’m safe. I’m just having a cup of tea.’

  Tea? Oh, no. I heard her put the kettle on. Damn. I was under the bed with a mouse corpse and she was having a cup of tea?

  ‘I’ll see you later. Of course I’ll lock up properly as I leave. Bye-bye.’

  Clare sighed as she finished the call.

  My bedroom door was open, giving me a view of the hall. I craned my neck in an attempt to see what my sister was doing now. She took her tea and walked into the living room. What was this?
She seemed to be settling in for the evening. I had expected her to be in and out of the flat in ten minutes – another splash of water for the plants and then off – but I was sure I had just heard the television go on . . .

  I had heard the TV go on. Clare turned up the volume. She was watching Coronation Street. The one thing that Clare had in common with our mother was an obsession with that soap. She claimed she never missed an episode, so I suppose it made sense that she would watch that day’s instalment at my flat, rather than miss it while she travelled home.

  Oh God, I thought. If Clare was watching her favourite soap, it meant that I was facing at least another half an hour under the mattress. Another half-hour with Mickey the Corpse. That was assuming that night’s episode wasn’t one of the super-long editions the Corrie producers seemed so keen on. Half an hour with a dead mouse. I was sure that flea was inside my waistband now too. If Callum and I didn’t get back together, I was going to find some way to put that dead mouse in his lunch.

  There was barely enough room under the bed for me to turn my head from one side to the other – not that I wanted to turn it back towards the mouse. Further down the bed, an errant spring from the mattress kept catching my shoulder blade. I just knew it had put a pull in my favourite pyjama top. I tried to distract myself by listening to Coronation Street with my sister, but though she had turned the volume up, she hadn’t turned it up so far that I could hear clearly everything that was being said, and even when I did catch the odd sentence, it made no real sense out of context. I only watched Coronation Street if I happened to be at Mum and Dad’s while an episode was playing. I hadn’t seen the show at all since Tracy Barlow came out of prison. Or was she only out on day release? Who knows. I didn’t usually care.

  The distant hiss of television conversations that meant nothing to me quickly started to drive me mad. I crossed my fingers that Clare would decide to make a break for home during the commercial break. Instead, as the adverts began, I heard my sister pad across to the kitchen and put the kettle on again. I could have wept. What I wouldn’t have given for a cup of tea myself right then, face down and cramping with a throat full of dust and hair – when had I lost so much hair? – catching God knows what from that dead rodent.

  Perhaps I could get out from under the bed and have a stretch while she watched the second half of the soap. She was bound to be absorbed. When the show started up again, I began to move, but the bed springs creaked far more loudly than I had expected. I had to stay put. Just fifteen more minutes, I told myself. Less than that if she left the moment the credits started. Evan would be waiting for her at home. She wouldn’t want to hang around. He liked her to come home promptly. She once joked that he would scramble a mountain rescue squad if she took too long coming back from Waitrose. Fifteen more minutes. I just had to approach my confinement with that mouse like a celebrity doing a bushtucker trial. If Kerry Katona could eat kangaroo testicles . . .

  But while the closing theme tune played, my sister moved about the flat dreamily and I realised she was still in no hurry to leave. She made herself yet another cup of tea, and the next thing I knew, she had walked into my bedroom.

  Chapter Eleven

  ‘One day like this a year . . . la, la, la . . .’ Clare sang.

  I lay still and silent as a soldier in a trench, taking as few breaths as I dared without passing out. Peeking from beneath the valance that hid me from her sight, I followed Clare’s flip-flopped feet as she crossed the room to the window. She opened the curtains I had kept shut all day. It was still light outside.

  Clare continued to hum tunelessly as she sat down at my dressing table. I heard the make-up drawer slide open. I heard the rattling of various bottles and compacts as she looked for something interesting. I hoped she wouldn’t help herself to my new moisturiser. Then squirt, squirt, squirt. The cheeky mare was trying out my perfume! A cloud of my favourite eau de toilette – Issey Miyake – filled the room and competed with the dust to make me want to sneeze so badly I thought my head would explode.

  I must not sneeze, I told myself. Forget the perfume. Forget the mouse. I held my breath. I couldn’t even reach up to pinch the bridge of my nose. I almost passed out with the effort of keeping schtum.

  ‘Ugh,’ was Clare’s comment on my favourite scent.

  What? My impending sneeze was somehow dissipated by indignation.

  Clare got up from my dressing table and opened my wardrobe doors. Unbelievable. What did she think she was doing now? I could only watch in open-mouthed horror as Clare rootled through my neat and tidy rails as though she were at the Next sale. I saw the hem of my favourite black velvet dress from Agnès B. swishing around her shins. Was she going to make off with it as she had made off with my new box of dishwasher tablets and a packet of Hobnobs? Was she intending to wear it and sneak it back into my wardrobe before I came home from my hols?

  ‘Naaa,’ she said to herself. ‘Not for me.’

  Evidently, she wasn’t going to take my dress home. Thank goodness for that. But did she put it away again? Oh, no. That would be too much effort for my sister. She threw it onto the bed instead. And she hadn’t finished. A red dress followed. I think it was the one I’d bought from Hobbs for a cousin’s wedding. Clare pulled it on over her leggings but stopped when she got it to her knees and I heard the ominous sound of a stretching seam. Then came the blue wrap dress I’d bought from Zara for my last birthday date with Callum. It was as close as I could get to affording something from Diane von Furstenburg. It was smaller than the red dress. I prayed she wouldn’t bother trying it on. She’d always said blue wasn’t her colour.

  Next, Clare drew out one of my most special items, a multi-layered chiffon skirt that was my ‘go-to’ skirt for a posh night out. Nicole Farhi. Even at 60 per cent off in the sale, it had cost me a small fortune. I loved it. It was a dark charcoal-grey colour, spattered with sequins, which gave it the look of a cloudless night sky glittering with stars. It was obviously expensive, and when I put it on, paired with a simple black top, I felt as though I could go anywhere and mix with anybody. It was smart enough for dinner somewhere expensive but boho enough for a night in a Clapham bar. I knew that Clare liked it. She had admired it on several occasions. Now she was pulling it on over her leggings and turning this way and that in front of the mirror to see how she looked. The sequins caught the light as she twirled.

  ‘Nope. A little bit too Strictly Come Dancing.’

  Ow! Obviously, she wasn’t impressed.

  She pulled the skirt off and threw that too in the direction of the bed. However, her aim was not quite true and the skirt slithered off the silky duvet cover and onto the floor. Silently, I gritted my teeth. Was she going to pick it up? She was going to pick it up, wasn’t she? She didn’t pick it up. She left it exactly where it had fallen on the dusty, dirty floor. You know, I really had no idea quite how dirty a carpet can get until that evening when I spent an hour face down on it. And now that I knew I had mice to boot . . .

  Clare had not yet finished. As I continued to watch, she slipped off her tatty old Havaianas. She stretched up onto her tiptoes and I was afforded a view of her filthy soles and cracked dry heels ingrained with dirt. Not nice at all. She could really use a pedicure. And then I realised why she was on tiptoes. She was reaching for the top shelf of the wardrobe, which was where I kept some of my most treasured possessions. My very best going-out shoes.

  Oh, please, no . . .

  First out of the wardrobe were my purple satin Kurt Geigers. I remembered the day that I bought them. I had just moved up to London and started my first proper job as PR to a plumbing-supplies manufacturer. I bought those KGs with my first pay packet. It seemed important to mark such a special moment in my life with a serious treat, especially since my new job was so dull. I’d been admiring those shoes in the window of the shop for months by the time I got my hands on them. Nearly seven years on, I still thought they were gorgeous. Purple had seemed like a daring colour to buy at the time, but th
ey were surprisingly versatile. They looked just as good with a black dress or jeans. I had kept them in perfect condition. And now my sister was shoving her filthy feet into them! I could hardly look.

  Thankfully, she didn’t like them as much as I did. Soon the KGs were discarded, alongside (but not in, I noted with annoyance) their box. My Russell & Bromley pumps came next. They were the footwear equivalent of the perfect little black dress. I’d bought them the previous Christmas. They were a wonderfully flattering shape and made even my fat little feet look elegant and narrow. They had a very slight platform, which gave the impression that they were higher than they really were, and they were made from a black patent leather that was as shiny as the bonnet of a freshly valeted Porsche. They were classics. I was so pleased to have found them. I intended to have them for years to come and was looking after them accordingly.

  As my sister hurried to shove her big feet (which were even fatter than mine) into the Russell & Bromley pumps, her ankle turned over. I closed my eyes tightly. Never mind her ankle. Please don’t let her have broken the heel. When I dared open my eyes again, Clare had already tossed the pumps in the direction of their purple satin shelf-mates.

  ‘Boring,’ was her verdict. The cow.

  There was only one pair of shoes left for my sister to find up there. Unfortunately, of all the going-out shoes I had, these were the most precious. They were only a couple of weeks old. I had bought them as a sort of birthday present to myself, having decided that if I wasn’t going to be a millionaire by thirty, I should at least have some millionaire’s footwear. They were my Jimmy Choos.

  Oh, how grown-up I’d felt as I’d walked out of the Choo boutique on Sloane Street with that pale purple carrier bag swinging from my wrist. How sophisticated. The carrier bag itself was so lovely that I had decided to keep it, folded carefully and stashed alongside the shoes in their box.