What I Did On My Holidays

by Chrissie Manby

  ‘I’m not just interested in him because of his looks.’

  ‘Maybe I put that wrong, but sometimes I think maybe you’re in awe of him because of his attractiveness. I remember, when you two got together, you told me you couldn’t believe it had happened, because he was the best-looking bloke at Stockwell Lifts, if not the best-looking bloke you’d ever seen. Why on earth would he be interested in you? was what you asked me. And all I could think was, Why on earth wouldn’t he be interested in you? You may not be Giselle, but you’re hardly like the back end of a bus.’

  My sister knew how to phrase a compliment.

  ‘You’ve got a lovely face and a fabulous figure, but you’ve got so many other amazing qualities too. You’re kind and you’re funny and you’re generous. Except with your Jimmy Choos,’ she reminded me. ‘It’s bad news to go into a relationship feeling like you should be grateful for whatever reason. It sets up an imbalance and that imbalance means that the partner who feels they have less to offer often becomes all too willing to accept less than they deserve. Take a good look at Callum’s behaviour. I always thought he was a bit mean to you after a couple of drinks for a start.’

  ‘He wasn’t,’ I insisted.

  ‘Well, how about the way he dumped you? He may think that dumping you before the holiday was the honourable thing to do, but you’ve been together for eighteen months. Couldn’t he have tried to make it work for just one more fortnight? He should have given it one last shot and made an effort to turn things round. He should have given you a chance to prove him wrong. You might have gone away and had a wonderful time and all his concerns about your relationship might have been answered. Instead, he selfishly ruined your big summer holiday, not to mention your thirtieth birthday.’

  I nodded.

  ‘No wonder he’s skulking around the office, keeping out of everybody’s way. He knows what an idiot he’s been. I’m not in the least bit surprised they’re all rooting for you. I know I definitely want you to call Callum’s bluff and start looking for someone new. We could set up an Internet profile right now. Why wait? You could have a date lined up for the night you get back from Majorca. Mysinglefriend.com? I’ll write you a reference.’

  I turned down Clare’s kind offer, though I did let her persuade me to look at a few examples of what was out there.

  ‘They’re not all losers,’ said Clare as she clicked through the men who met the criteria she had decided should be my benchmark. ‘They’re solvent. They’re good-looking. They’ve got their own hair and teeth. Well . . .’

  She clicked on the picture of a chap who had either lied about his age or had lived a very hard life indeed. His brave smile revealed some shockingly poor dentistry.

  ‘Perhaps not him.’ Clare clicked him goodbye. ‘But you see what I mean? There are other people out there. Good people. Interesting, attractive men who are looking for a girl just like you.’

  She was probably right, but the thought of casting Callum off and putting myself back in the dating game was not a happy one. No matter how Clare tried to spin it, I wasn’t in the least bit excited by the thought of having to put myself out there and find someone new. I could barely bring myself to believe that anyone would ever look at me in that way again. When I met Callum, I thought I had got my pass out of dating hell. I thought I would never again know the agony of waiting for a phone call. Never again would I have to dodge an unwanted slobbery kiss at the end of the night. I couldn’t bear the idea that I was back at square one, facing the hell of first dates and broken dates once more.

  I turned off my laptop.

  ‘Time for bed, I think.’

  ‘OK,’ Clare agreed. ‘Just one more row for me.’

  She picked up her knitting needles again.

  ‘I am really enjoying this holiday,’ she said.

  Chapter Twenty

  The following morning, I was no closer to being convinced that my split from Callum could ever be for the better, but I did have a headache of post-hen-night proportions, which was not helped by having spent the night on the sofa again.

  Clare seemed to have escaped the worst ravages of her own super-strong cosmopolitans. Or perhaps it was that she spent the entire morning in the bathroom, exfoliating and putting on facemasks and generally primping. That Sunday, she had decided she was having a ‘spa day’. When she emerged from the bathroom, followed by a cloud of fragrant steam, she told me what a treat it was to wallow in the bath without having Evan knocking at the door asking how long she was going to be.

  ‘He complains that I take much too long,’ she said, ‘but somehow it’s perfectly all right for him to lock himself in there while he reads the entire Sunday Times from front to back. Some weekends he is in there all morning.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, dashing past her. Once again I found myself having some sympathy for Evan. Clare had been in the bathroom for the best part of two hours and I had drunk three cups of tea while waiting for my turn.

  Back out of the bathroom, I set to work on a pile of mending jobs I had discovered (or rather rediscovered) while tidying up my wardrobe. I sewed a button on to a skirt that had lost that fastening almost three years earlier. Finally getting the job done made me rather proud of myself. Meanwhile Clare spent the rest of her morning online, looking at the Daily Mail and bitching about the people bitching about the poor unfortunate celebrities who had been snapped in their bikinis.

  ‘I can’t believe some of the comments people leave,’ she said. ‘You just know that none of those people is an oil painting and yet they feel free to be so nasty.’ Having said that, she crafted a pithy comment of her own to leave at the end of an article about Ashley Cole. For some reason my sister felt an affinity with Cheryl – hence the goldfish – and never missed an opportunity to point out the star’s ex-husband’s shortcomings.

  ‘According to the Daily Mail, Fern Britton is in Majorca,’ Clare shouted as I was in the bedroom ironing a duvet cover. ‘Shall we pretend we saw her on the beach?’

  ‘No,’ was my reply.

  ‘Are you sure? Mum would love it?’

  ‘Mum would tweet it,’ I reminded her. ‘We don’t want to find ourselves in a situation where we’ve claimed to have seen Fern Britton when she’s already flown back to the UK to record some charity chat show.’

  ‘Good point,’ said Clare. ‘No celebrity namedrops.’

  So the morning passed quietly, but of course Evan and Mum were not going to be content with one view from our hotel window. And neither was Hannah, who had seen the view because Mum had tweeted it. She told her Twitter followers that she had spent all day learning how to put up a TwitPic just so she could share our virtual postcard with the world.

  ‘She’s going to blow our cover,’ I wailed.

  ‘Stay calm,’ said Clare. ‘If Hannah had figured it out, we’d know all about it by now.’

  I hoped Clare was right. Anyway, now that we’d set a precedent, everyone in our virtual loop expected to see more photographs. Specifically, Evan wanted to see that there was a decent lock on the inside of the hotel-room door. Clare sent him a text saying he was being ridiculously paranoid and she was not going to indulge him with a photo of the back of the door, but yes, there was a decent lock and yes, of course we used it whenever we were in the room.

  ‘He’s such a worrier,’ Clare complained.

  ‘I wish someone would worry that much about me.’

  Mum wanted a picture of me, to make sure that I really was still alive and not wasting away to nothing in my heartache: ‘I won’t be able to rest until I see she’s OK.’

  ‘You know she won’t,’ said Clare.

  ‘But how are we going to do it?’ I asked.

  ‘Come here.’

  Clare took a photograph of me standing against the background of a white door.

  ‘That’s not going to work.’

  ‘Why not? Hotels always have white doors,’ she said.

  ‘And they always have those fire instructions.’

&nb
sp; ‘Hang on.’

  She rifled through my post and chose a bank statement that, when it was turned over so that you could only read the usual Ts & Cs, and slightly blurred by some dodgy photography, looked like a plausible list of hotel rules and instructions.

  ‘Look more institutional to you?’ Clare asked.

  I agreed. ‘It could be a hotel. Send it off.’

  It wasn’t the most flattering shot, but Mum responded that it would help her to get a decent night’s sleep. She said she hadn’t stopped worrying for a minute since Clare broke the news that Callum and I had split up. She had even found it impossible to get into the meditation at Urban Goddess. Achieving anything like a state of bliss was but a distant dream.

  ‘I feel bad lying to Mum,’ I said.

  ‘Then don’t think of it as lying. Think of it as protecting her from unhappiness,’ Clare suggested. ‘Like the time I told her that school wasn’t doing end-of-term reports as part of a paper-saving eco-drive.’

  ‘Was that the year you were caught with vodka in a water bottle?’

  ‘That’s the one,’ said Clare. ‘See, Mum didn’t need to know about that, did she? She’d only have worried.’

  Hannah’s request was not so easy for us to fulfil.

  ‘Send me a photo of you on the beach,’ she said, ‘and I’ll “accidentally” show it to Callum tomorrow morning so he knows exactly what he’s missing.’

  Did she mean a bikini shot? Now that really was going to be impossible. Not to mention tacky.

  ‘You should do it,’ said Clare. ‘Send Hannah a picture of you in your bikini to wave under Callum’s nose. You spent so much time at the gym in the run-up to this holiday – you know you look amazing.’

  Clare was right in some ways. I had made a quite incredible effort to get myself looking my bikini best. I had gone to the gym five nights a week and hadn’t so much as looked at a bread roll since Callum was sent up to Newcastle. For a girl who had never knowingly passed up the chance to eat a Greggs’ Yum Yum – and there were lots of chances to eat Greggs’ Yum Yums in my part of south London – this was no mean feat. But I had done it. I had done it for Callum, because I loved him and I wanted him to be proud of me and to love me enough in return that he would want to plan the rest of our lives together. So much for that . . . He had no idea that I’d lost half an inch from my waist since he’d last seen me at the beginning of June.

  ‘Come on, Sophie, put your bikini on and get posing.’

  ‘And pose where, exactly?’ I asked. ‘How am I going to convince Callum to come back to me with a picture of me in my bikini standing against a white door or lazing on this hideous flat carpet?’

  ‘He doesn’t know what the carpet in the hotel is like, does he?’

  ‘But he knows what this one looks like.’

  ‘Trust me,’ said Clare, ‘men do not notice carpet. If the police took Callum into custody right now and questioned him for three hours under a spotlight, he would not be able to tell them the colour of this carpet, or the colour of the wallpaper, or whether you’ve got one or two armchairs on either side of the sofa. They just don’t notice these things. Evan wouldn’t even be able to tell you what colour my eyes are. He’s always singing “Brown-Eyed Girl” in the shower. When I asked him why, he said it was because it reminded him of my brown eyes.’

  My sister’s eyes are light blue.

  ‘So I don’t think there’s any need to worry about Callum recognising the Axminster,’ she concluded. ‘Let’s take some photos. I’ll crop it close, and I can PhotoShop in a background.’

  I put on a bikini. I chose the one I thought would be most flattering to my pale skin, but even that made me look sickly, pasty and cold.

  ‘You’d think you’d have a bit of a tan by now,’ mused Clare.

  ‘Well, I suppose I would,’ I said, ‘if I hadn’t been indoors for five days. Oh, this is stupid. We cannot send Hannah a picture of me in my bikini. I look like I’ve been in a sanatorium, not on a Spanish beach.’

  ‘You just need a little bit of colour.’

  It was time to get working on the fake tan. The bronzing plan was simple. We should approach our fake tanning as we would have approached getting a real tan. We had to work on it for a little while every day, building it up layer upon layer.

  I wasn’t a big fan of fake tan, but there was no choice. The sun was not going to shine inside my flat. Hannah was a devotee of the stuff and often gave off that faint yet distinctive whiff of cat’s pee when she came into the office. I sometimes marvelled at the amount of money that must have been thrown at the problem of getting fake tan to look at least partway realistic. I wondered if they would ever throw any money at the problem of the smell, which made me think of dying leaves and other sorts of decay. When I read that was exactly how fake tan works, by causing a process similar to the one leaves go through every autumn as they change from green to brown, it started to make more sense.

  Still, I had tried it only once and Callum had refused to come near me because of the whiff. He had also insisted that I change the bedsheets, which had been on the bed for just one night, and had complained for days afterwards that he could still smell the horrible stuff. ‘It must have seeped into the mattress,’ he’d said. So I was a little reluctant.

  ‘What else are you going to do?’ Clare asked. ‘Pretend you sat under an umbrella all week?’

  Callum wouldn’t believe that. I was a proper sun worshipper when I got the chance. Perhaps this would work. It has to be said that having someone else help you to put fake tan on makes the whole process rather easier, and we still had plenty of time.

  ‘It has the added advantage of being healthy,’ said Clare, as she slathered on the St Tropez. ‘No chance of skin cancer from this. Do I smell?’ She offered me her forearm.

  ‘A bit,’ I said. ‘Do I?’

  ‘’Fraid so,’ said Clare. ‘But what does it matter? There’s no one around to smell us, is there?’

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Talking of smelling, the flat must have been getting pretty unpleasant by now. Sometimes, when I came back home after work and the flat had been shut up all day, I noticed a faint whiff of mildew in the air. Something fetid that made me wrinkle my nose in disgust. I’d complained to the landlady about damp but got no joy. I could only imagine how awful the place smelled now that it had been sealed like a time capsule for the best part of a week. Deciding to take a little risk, I opened the kitchen window, which faced out from the back of the house. There was no chance that anyone who knew me might walk by and see it. As I had already established, my neighbours didn’t know who I was. They were hardly likely to tweet ‘Just saw Sophie Sturgeon at her kitchen window. I thought she was supposed to be on holiday.’

  The view outside surprised me. The weather, which had been typical British-summer weather for the past week – cold with thick, grey cloud – was finally beginning to change. I glanced up at the sky. The clouds were broken here and there by patches of pale blue. It was not quite the azure of the Mediterranean sky I had hoped to be basking beneath, but it was getting there.

  Clare joined me at the window. She took a deep breath of the air outside, reminding me of the dog we’d shared as children, who would always stick his nose out of the car window and inhale with such joy you couldn’t help but laugh at his exuberance. That’s how Clare breathed in the fresh air. And then she spluttered. Someone a little further down the street was having a barbecue and with a change in the wind direction, she’d got a lungful of fatty smoke. She gathered herself.

  ‘Gosh, it would be nice to be outside while this fake tan dries.’

  ‘We’re in hiding, remember?’

  ‘Yes, but surely we could go out into the backyard for a few minutes. Nobody would see us. Nobody who cares. Unless perhaps the people in that house over there have a webcam and Hannah subscribes to their Clapham Cuties feed.’

  Clare had a point. If I was going to open windows at the back of the flat at all, then we might
as well go outside.

  One of the things that had attracted me to renting my little flat in Clapham was the fact that it had outside space. The estate agent’s details had talked about a ‘south-facing garden’. The ‘south-facing’ bit might have been true, but in reality the ‘garden’ was not much more than a yard. Whoever had overseen the ‘refurbishment’ of the flat in the 1980s had gone for a truly low-maintenance option and simply poured a layer of rough grey concrete over what might once have been a scrubby patch of lawn. As a result, it was a singularly unappealing kind of space. I kept my bike out there and didn’t go into it for months at a time. Though the outside space had been a selling point for me, I didn’t often feel short-changed, since the weather hardly ever merited making the effort to dine al fresco. Now, however, after five days indoors, for the first time ever the yard did look rather appealing. And I could see a couple of weeds that needed dealing with. I should pull them up. I’d spent so much time tidying up inside the flat, I was rather in the zone.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Let’s go outside.’

  We dragged a couple of kitchen chairs out through the back door and settled down with our legs and arms splayed out to better dry off the fake tan. Whenever the sun found a gap in the clouds, Clare lifted her face towards it and smiled.

  ‘I feel better already,’ she said. ‘I feel like a flower that’s been growing in the dark. Isn’t it strange how much more human one feels for a bit of sunshine?’

  She was right. In spite of my misgivings, I was starting to feel better too.

  While Clare simply soaked up the sun, I busied myself by pulling up the weeds that had bravely pushed through the concrete since I’d last ventured into the yard almost a year before. I hadn’t even been out there to fetch my bike, since the back tyre had a puncture and I had yet to get round to fixing it. I was beginning to doubt I ever would, though ‘mend bike’ was still a permanent fixture on any to-do lists I wrote. Had I a puncture kit, I suppose I would have done the job then, but I didn’t have a puncture kit. Callum was always promising to lend me his. Like fixing the creaky kitchen door, he’d never quite got round to it. Evan wouldn’t have let Clare’s bike get into such a state in the first place.