by Lindsey Kelk
After a couple of cocktails, a mountain of Hawaiian pork and a vegan veggie bowl prepared especially for Lily, everyone seemed a lot more relaxed than they had when they arrived. Sitting on a sun lounger by the pool, I stared off at the pitch-black horizon, wondering how far away the next closest human being might be.
‘Angela Clark, you should go to bed,’ James stated, walking straight into the end of the sun lounger and snapping me out of my sleepy stupor.
I looked up to see his trademark curls were flopping all over the place and, for some reason I didn’t care to know, his Hawaiian shirt was unbuttoned halfway down to his belly button.
‘Do you need me to carry you, you messy bitch?’ he asked, slurring every single word.
‘No, do you need me to carry you?’ I replied, picking up the key that had dropped to the floor the second he pulled it out of his pocket.
‘Yes please,’ he said with a hiccup. ‘I’ve no idea where my room is.’
‘Starting as we mean to go on,’ I said, using all of my five feet and five inches to support all six feet six of him. I looked around for someone to help but Jenny was AWOL, Paige had gone to bed ages ago and Eva was deep in conversation with one of the French girls, leaving me to drag the nominee for Best Actor in a Drunken Stupor back to his room all by myself.
‘Don’t mind me, totally OK here on my own,’ I muttered, stumbling under the weight of the giant man. ‘Thanks, friends.’
‘Word of warning, I might vomit,’ James whispered.
‘Thank you for letting me know,’ I replied, pulling away from his boozy breath as we staggered back towards the villas.
It took fifteen minutes to find his villa, which, we discovered after trying every single lock on every single door, was directly opposite mine. Once I’d run James through practically all of Alice’s evening routine (save the nappy change) I left him snoring with a glass of water and bottle of Advil on the bedside table, along with a note that said I’d taken the chocolates Jenny had left in his room as penance.
Back in my own villa, I locked the door behind me with a happy sigh. Someone had been in to turn down the giant bed and leave a pair of beautiful white cotton pyjamas with my initials embroidered on the chest pocket.
‘I’m living in an Instagram story,’ I whispered, yanking my dress off over my head and pulling on the pyjamas as fast as humanly possible. Free PJs, two boxes of chocolates and a massive bed all to myself. Women had killed for less.
With James’s chocolates in one hand and my phone in the other, I slid open the doors to my terrace and settled down to resume my staring. The sky and the sea were completely black with nothing but a slim streak of reflected moonlight running across the waves to cut through the night. I couldn’t imagine how anyone wouldn’t be completely in love with this place and understood entirely why Delia was so upset at the idea of Bertie Bennett selling up. Who would willingly let this place go? It was the closest I’d ever come to heaven on earth and I’d been on the Cadbury’s and Ben & Jerry’s factory tours.
It was midnight in Lanai, five a.m. in New York. Alex would definitely be asleep now. A sudden pang hit my heart as I swiped through my favourite photos of him and Alice, wishing they were with me. With a tiny sigh, I snapped a shot of the sky and sent it as a text along with a half-dozen heart eyes emojis, hoping he knew how much I already missed him. Hoping he already missed me.
With a yawn big enough to swallow the entire island, I shuddered in my seat and a wave of complete exhaustion slapped me right in the face. My second wind had died down, there was no third wind. It was time for bed.
‘Hello, jetlag,’ I muttered, eyes still skyward. I might have missed travelling and jumping on planes over the last couple of years but the debilitating tiredness that had taken me over was not something I’d been especially yearning for. Alex and Alice were five thousand miles away but, as I trudged back inside with legs like lead, my bed felt even further.
I rolled my head from side to side, hoping to loosen the tight muscles in my neck but it was definitely a job for a professional. One of the girls from Précis had said something about an onsite masseuse. Maybe I could do that instead of the First Annual Lopez Games. Sliding underneath the cool, crisp sheets, I plugged in my phone and set an alarm to make sure I had time to call home before my day began. Now, hopefully I wouldn’t have any trouble falling asleep and all would be … my eyelids slipped over my dry eyes and everything else disappeared.
Pitch black, absolute silence, pure bliss.
CHAPTER TEN
When I woke up on Friday morning, I felt like a new woman. After an entire night of uninterrupted sleep, I couldn’t remember where I was, how I’d got there and really had to think for a moment before I could remember my own name. Who was this decadent madam who slept for nine hours straight with several different kinds of pillows and woke up with her hand in a box of chocolates? Me. It was me. And I had never been happier.
‘Gross,’ I muttered to myself, licking the melted chocolate from my fingers. ‘I am so gross.’
I reached over for my mobile, swiping it out of its slumber to find a text from Alex. Rubbing the last specks of sleep out of my eyes, I opened the attached image to see his mother manhandling Al beside the lake in Prospect Park. My child was wearing a patterned pink outfit that had one hundred percent not been purchased by me and had what looked like a giant blue carnation sprouting out the middle of her forehead.
Gorgeous. I gritted my teeth as I typed. You both OK?
Three dots appeared at the bottom of the screen before swapping places with a thumbs up emoji. Hmm. Alex was not someone who usually went in for emojis.
Can I call and say hi? I said, cradling the phone in both hands as I typed.
Three more dots hovered at the bottom of the screen as I wiggled my toes awake. Quick chat with Alex, nice hot shower then breakfast. All without a tiny human screaming if I didn’t take her with me from room to room, what a bloody treat. For the first six months, if I was home and she was awake, I had to be in Al’s eyeline at all times or she would scream the house down. I couldn’t even go to the toilet on my own without a tiny chaperone. But when she hit nine months, something happened, and now she was constantly trying to lose me. I couldn’t so much as blink without her disappearing behind the sofa or crawling off into another room. For a brief moment, I’d considered putting a bell on her but Alex said it was cruel so I had to take it back to the pet shop.
The three grey dots were still rolling along at the bottom of my screen when I threw back the covers and crossed the room to open up the French doors to the terrace. Oh no, it was even more gorgeous in the morning than it had been in the evening. What a shame.
My phone buzzed in my hand.
Not a great time. I’ll try you later.
‘It’s not a great time,’ I said out loud, placing the phone on my nightstand with a concerned frown. ‘He’ll try me later.’
No point in trying to read too much into it, I told myself, it just wasn’t a great time. To talk to his wife, the mother of his child, the love of his life who he missed so much he couldn’t even breathe. Not a great time. His mum was visiting so it seemed unlikely that he’d filled the house with groupies the moment I’d walked out the door. Unless his mum had a stranger take that photo of her and Al and sent it to Alex who sent it to me to throw me off the scent because he was already embroiled in a sordid affair with Perry Dickson.
‘Definitely not overreacting,’ I muttered to a small red-crested bird that cocked its head at me on the edge of the terrace. With an agreeable chirp, he fluttered his wings and took off, soaring down towards the infinity pool and the beach beyond. Holding my hand over my eyes to shield them from the sun, I saw dozens of men and women running back and forth across the patio, skimming the pool, sweeping up leaves. Someone said Bertie Bennett employed more than a hundred people on the estate, one way or another, and he’d even paid for kids of his employees to leave the island and go to university or found them jobs in hi
s various businesses. Everyone talked about him like he was some kind of saint: Santa Claus but make it fashion. It seemed difficult to believe anyone could love their boss that much but, watching them all as they laughed and smiled and set the table for breakfast, everyone certainly looked happy. Perhaps I’d been working for Cici for too long. It had been almost an entire week, after all.
As the table filled with fruits and pastries and other delicious things, my stomach began to rumble loudly. Mmm, breakfast. I wondered what Alice had had for breakfast. Had Alex remembered to use the yellow spoon? No one had been able to work out why but she always ate more when we used the yellow spoon. I’d know if he’d pick up the bloody phone.
‘Food first, worry later,’ I decided, slapping my growling stomach.
It was a system that had never steered me wrong before.
Replying to Alex with a thumbs up of my own, I decided to turn all of my attention onto Paige. While I had no interest in taking part in any of this, if I was going to be forced into organized fun, I’d rather be forced into it with someone who hadn’t spent a good chunk of the previous evening explaining why Piers Morgan wasn’t all that bad when you got to know him.
The ocean lapped the shoreline lazily with a line of tall, palm trees watching over us as we walked single file down a narrow stone staircase behind the house and across Bertie Bennett’s private beach. It was all too perfect, like a child’s drawing of the seaside. Bright colours, bold lines, happy, smiling faces.
And Jenny Lopez had found a way to ruin it.
Standing with her back to the water, Jenny paced up and down in front of myself, Louisa, Paige, Eva, James and Lily. Before heading off to bed, I’d suggested to Jenny that Lily might prefer to enjoy her time on the island with the rest of the Brits but the rest of the Brits had beat me to it. Seemingly, they’d had more than enough of her on the plane ride over and made Jenny swear to keep her out their way for the entire weekend. Clever bastards. Everyone else had been whisked away on a tour of the island, leaving us at Jenny’s mercy, lined up like we were waiting for the first annual Précis Cosmetics Hunger Games. I would not volunteer as tribute.
‘Good morning, everyone,’ Jenny barked, a sarong tied around her waist and a very shiny whistle hanging around her neck – part drill sergeant, part island princess. Why would she need a whistle for some ‘fun games’? Why had we been separated into teams? And why was I on a team with a woman who the night before had described Piers Morgan as ‘not that bad when you got to know him’? I looked down the line at Lily and frowned.
‘Before we start, I want to introduce you to a very special guest who just arrived here on the island,’ Jenny said, speaking into an invisible microphone. ‘Founder of Précis Cosmetics, Camilla Rose!’
We clapped politely as an exceptionally attractive older woman strode across the sand towards us. If anyone could sell me a face full of slap, it was this human. I quietly wondered whether or not she could teach me how to cover up my permanent dark circles with something other than Polyfilla while she shook everyone’s hand. Good grip, soft skin, top marks. Seemed like a nice woman.
‘Hawaii has been a second home to me,’ Camilla said in an oddly lilting accent that was impossible to place. ‘I hope you’ll find the same joy and inspiration here that has always come to me. To better acquaint you with Hawaiian culture, Jenny and I have come up with a few games to get us all in the vacation spirit.’
‘What kind of games?’ Louisa asked, wringing her hands behind her back. Lou had never been especially fond of PE but you try taking a cricket ball to the head during a particularly agro game of rounders in Year Seven and see how much you like it.
‘Nothing too heinous,’ Jenny replied as she rubbed her hands together.
‘What do the winners get?’ Lily asked.
‘An afternoon of massage and pampering.’
‘And what about the losers?’ James gave me a pointed look for some reason.
‘We’ll think of something dastardly,’ Camilla replied with a wicked grin. ‘This will be fun but it will not be easy.’
With nothing nice to say, I said nothing at all. Imagine dragging people a third of the way around the world and then forcing them to play stupid games when they could be getting shmammered on piña coladas. I was wrong, she was not a nice lady, Camilla Rose was very obviously a sociopath. I once read an article about how sociopaths often had great skin, something to do with a lack of stress hormones, and even though that article had literally no science to back it up this was more than enough evidence to convince me they were onto something.
‘Hula dancing is a traditional Polynesian dance that originated here in the Hawaiian islands,’ Camilla said. Me, Lily and Louisa pulled on blue T-shirts as Jenny handed them out; Paige, James and Eva were wearing pink. ‘Even though it may look improvised, every movement in the hula has a meaning and the dances were passed down through generations as a way of telling the stories of their ancestors.’
‘I’ve always wanted to learn to hula dance,’ Lily said, busting out a few hip swivels in the sand. ‘Do we get a grass skirt as well?’
I was considerably less excited, tortured by inescapable visions of myself thrusting around in a coconut bikini like Baloo in The Jungle Book.
‘No, because we’re not learning to hula dance. Yet,’ Jenny said. ‘First you have to tackle hula hoops.’
I had a horrible feeling she didn’t mean the crisps.
One of Jenny’s assistants slapped her way across the beach in a pair of Précis-branded flip-flops, carrying six silver hula hoops, and handed them out, one by one. It was so weird. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d held a hula hoop, let alone tried to use one – no, wait, that was a lie. I had a sudden vision of Jenny and I arsing about in FAO Schwartz one afternoon after one too many lunchtime cocktails and being asked to leave. No wonder that place had shut down, they had no sense of humour.
‘When Camilla Rose says “Hula”, I’m going to start the stopwatch,’ Jenny called, brushing a stray curl behind her ears as the breeze blew her hair around her face. She’d only been here a couple of days and she was already glowing with a golden tan, a smattering of adorable freckles over her tiny, snub nose. ‘Whoever is still going after sixty seconds gets two points.’
‘I don’t want to be a bitch about this,’ Lily said, immediately sounding like a bitch. ‘But I really want to win this. So, be good, yeah?’
‘I hula hoop with my little girl all the time,’ Louisa said, dipping from side to side to warm up. ‘No problemo.’
‘And I haven’t hula hooped since I was a little girl so I’m promising nothing,’ I replied, throwing up an OK sign.
‘If you can floss, you can hula hoop,’ Eva called.
‘Floss?’ I was confused. What did flossing your teeth have to do with hula hooping?
All at once, Jenny, Eva, Louisa, Paige and James began swinging their arms and hips in opposite directions, as though they were drying their bum with a towel only the towel was missing. They looked insane.
‘Are they all having a seizure at the same time?’ Lily asked, a worried look on her face.
I’d missed out on so much due to my post-pregnancy mental fug; Pete and Ariana, cold-shoulder tops, the actual royal wedding (slept through the entire event) but I was fairly sure this was one thing I could live without. Camilla Rose held one arm up in the air and all flossing ceased immediately.
‘On your marks, get set, hula!’
Paige, James, Eva, Lily and Lou picked up their hula hoops and began swinging their hips wildly. I looked at the big shiny hoop in my hand and thanked assorted deities that Alex wasn’t here to see this. At some point I wanted Alice to have a little brother or sister and seeing me attempt to hula hoop could be enough to turn him off for life.
‘Angela, you gotta start!’ Jenny yelled. ‘Don’t make me disqualify you.’
‘Oh god,’ I muttered, holding the hoop at waist level and closing my eyes on the scene. How hard could it be? I fli
cked the hoop and began twisting my body as fast as possible. Almost at once, it all came back to me. Sun on my skin, sand in between my toes and a crappy little piece of plastic looping around my waist. This wasn’t so bad after all.
‘Bollocks!’ James shouted as his hoop rattled down his hips and landed in the sand. ‘There, now you all know the truth, I have no rhythm.’
‘There goes the Dirty Dancing remake,’ Jenny said with a fake sad smile. ‘You suck, Jacobs. Everyone else, forty seconds to go.’
Forty seconds.
I closed my eyes again and concentrated, my tongue poking out the corner of my mouth. I’d always been good at this as a kid and now I was in the swing of things, I had a flashback of me and Lou, hula hoops spinning on every part of our body; ankles, wrists, neck. I wondered what had replaced that skill in my brain. Probably some very important Taylor Swift song lyrics or the choreography to the chorus of ‘Single Ladies’ that was always such a hit at weddings.
‘Lily is out!’ I heard Jenny yell. ‘Twenty seconds.’
I can actually do this, I thought to myself, undulating wildly, faster and faster and faster. Maybe I could start a hula hooping exercise class. It had to be good for the obliques and god knows people will pay for anything if they think it’ll make them skinny.
‘Goddamn it!’
I opened one eye and saw Eva’s hoop in the sand.
This is it, I realized, I’m actually a master hula hooper. My whole life had been building towards this moment where I suddenly realized I was always meant to hula hoop. My hips spun faster as Jenny began the final countdown and I threw my hands up over my head, victorious, just as I looked down and saw a name flashing up on my phone.
Perry bloody Dickson.
‘Five, four, three …’
One second was all it took. The momentary lack of concentration broke my stride and, before I could do anything to stop it, my hoop rattled down my hips, sliding all the way down my legs and landing in the sand with a soft thud.
‘Two, one and that’s it!’ Jenny shouted. ‘Louisa and Paige, you’re our winners. Two points to each team.’