by Tracy Bloom
‘It’s a Knockout, you mean!’ I can hardly believe my ears. ‘It was utter genius.’
‘What are you talking about?’ asks Ellie. Clearly my outburst over the nature of my birthday party twenty years ago has fought its way through the cyber-babble.
‘Only the best birthday party of all time,’ I tell her, determined to share a piece of my misspent youth, in stark contrast to the pathetic excuse of a birthday I seem to be experiencing now. ‘When I was a holiday rep in Greece.’
‘Please, no stories of nakedness or shagging or anything,’ she replies, reeling in horror.
There were most certainly both of those going on at the time but they are not the aspects I want to dwell on with my daughter.
‘My boss, Clare, refused to give me the night off so we planned this epic party instead for all the reps after we’d finished work.’
Ellie looks vaguely impressed.
‘We did It’s a Knockout on the beach!’
Ellie looks blank.
‘People in stupid costumes going over obstacles whilst getting fired at with foam machines and water guns,’ Mark informs her. ‘It was a TV show from the seventies.’
‘Me and my mate Karen pulled in favours from all over to set it up,’ I tell Ellie excitedly. ‘We wangled a private bit of beach from one of the hotel owners and we had twelve inflatable banana boats, fourteen ringos, twenty sumo suits, three water cannons, five foam guns, a smoke machine and a massive drum of custard. Oh, and a karaoke machine as well as Dave on his decks. Have you ever seen twenty people dressed as sumo wrestlers playing British Bulldog whilst being pelted by custard pies?’
I lay this down before her with utter confidence that she hasn’t and that I am absolutely certain it is the best fun ever. End of.
Ellie stares back at me and I watch as she tries to work out how to turn this dream night against me.
‘At about four in the morning Karen brought out this enormous birthday cake with twenty-five sparklers on it and everyone went mental,’ I babble on. ‘I mean, they went crazy, and then all the lads got me up on their shoulders and I was bouncing up and down and everyone was chanting my name like this – “Jen-ny, Jen-ny, Jen-ny, Jen-ny, Jen-ny” – and then Dave put Oasis on and we were shouting the lyrics to “Cigarettes & Alcohol” at the tops of our voices.’
I’m pumping my fist in the air and singing Oasis like I’m right back there in 1996. And I am, just for a moment. I’m twenty-five again. I can smell the sea and the sand and feel the cigarette smoke prickling my eyes and I’m laughing my head off, six foot off the ground without a care in the world, Mark hovering somewhere below, adding an extra romantic frisson to the night.
Then I’m back in 2016, sitting in a Mexican-themed restaurant, aware that Ellie and George are staring at me in horror whilst Mark looks around to make sure no one else is observing the spectacle he clearly thinks I’m making of myself.
I lower my fist.
‘Like I said, best night of my life.’ I bite my lip.
‘Then all your mates threw you in the sea,’ adds Mark.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘And you rescued me.’
‘Well, what could I do? You were a damsel in distress.’ He smiles at me again. A flicker of memories of happy times flashes between us. The smile fades fast. Is he thinking the same as me? That we haven’t managed to make many of those lately.
‘They left me lying there in the water,’ I tell Ellie and George. ‘Your father came over and offered me a hand up.’ I stop.
‘And?’ asks Ellie.
I glance over to Mark. He’s shaking his head and looking down at the dessert menu.
‘Well… the rest is history.’ I clear my throat.
‘You shagged, didn’t you?’ spits Ellie.
Mark’s head jerks up to look at me in an accusing manner.
Yes! I want to cry. Yes, yes, yes and it was glorious!
‘How long had you known each other?’ she demands when both of us reveal our guilt by failing to answer her question.
Mark shakes his head again, then shrugs as if to say, ‘You got yourself into this one, you can get yourself out of it.’
I close my eyes and mentally count in my head.
‘Nine days,’ I say when I’ve worked it out.
‘Jenny!’ gasps Mark. ‘You could have lied.’
I shrug – I don’t see the point. Ellie clearly can’t decide whether to be impressed or horrified and George’s chin is back in the top of his sweatshirt. Honestly, he’s like a tortoise.
‘All the lectures you give me about respecting my body and saving myself for the right person and you sleep with someone you’ve known for nine days!’ says Ellie, staring at me accusingly.
I note she is not blaming her dad for our promiscuity. Oh no. And she has the audacity to call herself a feminist.
‘We were twenty-five,’ I shrug again. ‘And we, well, I at least, just knew, somehow, that it meant something. That we were going to stay together.’
Mark isn’t looking at me. His head is bent low as he studies a picture of some churros. I spot the beginnings of a thinning patch of hair on the top of his head and it feels like another lifetime since we began our lives together on that beach.
Four
I first laid eyes on Mark at Corfu airport on the 17th June 1996. It was just before midnight, I was tired and I still had to get fifty-three overexcited holidaymakers into seven different hotels.
His particular crowd were going to be the difficult ones to handle, I could already tell. I’d closed my eyes and gripped my Sunseeker clipboard as they approached me. The noise they were making was unbelievable and I’d prayed they’d walk past me to harass some other poor rep from another company waiting for the latest batch of lilywhites to arrive.
‘Well, if this is the standard, then we are in for a bit of all right, aren’t we, boys?’ said a stocky lad, draping a drunken arm around me.
‘Trust you to grab the first thing you lay eyes on,’ said another. ‘We haven’t even got to the hotel yet.’
‘You can never start too soon,’ replied his mate. ‘We only have fourteen days and I intend to pack as many in as I can, if you know what I mean.’
He squeezed my shoulder several times as he said this and I could clearly feel the sweat from his armpit on my bare skin.
I removed his hand deliberately and applied my authoritarian voice.
‘Right, can I have all your names please, and then you can take your luggage over to the coach in bay fifteen.’
‘Aye, aye,’ continued the rather short but very round lad, ‘she’s already asking my name. I’m in here, boys,’ he said, laughing.
‘Enough, Stubby,’ said a tall slim man, stepping forward to stand between me and this appropriately nicknamed idiot. ‘Please let me apologise for my so-called friends. They don’t get out very often. You lot,’ he shouted, turning to the rest of the group, ‘bay fifteen now, off you go.’
To my amazement, with some mumbling and gentle ribbing, they all shuffled off.
‘I’m Mark,’ he said, holding his hand out. I looked down at it and realised he wanted to shake my hand. Something which, in my three years of being a holiday rep, had never happened in an airport. I looked up as he shook it vigorously. He was smiling with his mouth and his eyes. I was smitten.
Throughout the following week I’d be hurtling here, there and everywhere but, if he was ever present on one of the trips I was running, or if we bumped into each other in one of the bars along the beachfront, then he would always insist on buying me a drink. Not to get me drunk and get in my pants, which was of course an occupational hazard, but just to show his gratitude for the job I was doing. Which I guess still had the effect of him getting into my pants by day nine, but there you go.
‘A Design for Life’ by the Manic Street Preachers always reminds me of those early days of low-level flirting. Mark liked to talk to me about his design for life. He was training to be an accountant whilst working for a building firm. He
came from a working-class background and so university just hadn’t been on the radar, but he was determined to get to a ‘graduate-level lifestyle’, as he called it.
‘I want to be the Finance Director for a medium to large private company,’ he explained, as we shared a goldfish bowl full of margarita. ‘You need to be in finance, it’s the only position in a firm that knows exactly what is going on,’ he continued, as one of his mates danced topless on a podium next to him to The Prodigy’s ‘Firestarter’. ‘If you can get a job like that then you can make all sorts of things happen. Help grow the firm, get some shares, sell to an investment company, or go for private equity. That’s how you make serious money.’
I nodded in awe as if I knew what he was talking about.
‘Sorry, I must be really boring you,’ he added. ‘I know I can be really dull about this stuff sometimes. It’s just I find it really interesting and people have to remind me that not everyone does.’
‘No, no,’ I insisted. ‘It’s nice to hear someone talk about how much they love their work. Most people are here to escape a job they hate and refuse to talk about it or, worse, have a good cry about it on my shoulder at four in the morning.’
‘I don’t know how you do it,’ he said. ‘Did you always want to be a tour rep? Was that your plan?’
I told him I only planned as far as which resort I wanted to work in next season. I wanted to travel the world one resort at a time. That’s why I had become a tour rep. The only trouble was that the places I really wanted to see, like Africa and India, weren’t on the typical Sunseeker circuit. And what I did was very poorly paid so I was mostly stuck in Europe until I worked out how to get myself to some more exotic far-flung places.
‘I really want to see the world too,’ he told me earnestly. ‘But I’m going to do it when I can do it properly. After I’ve made my fortune.’
‘Well, I’ll drink to that,’ I said. ‘Maybe one day I’ll see you in Bali. Watch out for me walking by with my backpack as you’re coming out of your five-star hotel.’
I remember wishing I had a bit of his forward planning. I was more a live-in-the-moment, fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants kind of girl. I had things I wanted to do but no idea of how to get there. He was the exact opposite. I’d never met a man like him before. A man with a plan beyond how many girls he could pull that night. He was the Clark Kent of Corfu in a sea of wannabe playboys.
By halfway through his holiday he’d made no move. None of the usual flicking of hair or touching of knees or even wearing my best pulling top appeared to be working. In desperation, I told him about my birthday party, swearing him to secrecy as I didn’t want word to get out and there to be an influx of gatecrashers. I told him it would just be other reps and no other guests, hoping this might give him the hint I was interested. But he just nodded and calmly wrote the details down on a piece of paper, not committing either way whether he would come.
That night, when Karen whispered in my ear that Mark had arrived, I whisked round at speed, my heart pumping like a steam train. I’d forgotten I was holding a water cannon at the time and instantly soaked his crotch. We both collapsed laughing and I think I knew then how the party was going to end.
We laughed a lot that night, I remember. By the time we got to the kissing part in the early hours of the morning, my cheeks were aching with laughing and smiling so much. I was leaning against a palm tree and I thought I was going to burst with happiness. Never had a night gone so well. The party, my party, had been amazing, everyone said so. And to put the cherry on the cake, here I was, under a palm tree, being kissed by moonlight by a man I had totally fallen for whilst George Michael sang ‘Fastlove’ in the distance.
A romance with that kind of start had to end well, didn’t it?
Five
‘I wonder what would have happened if you hadn’t have got the sack?’ asks Mark, looking up from his dessert menu. He says it as though he is musing on the destiny of an old school friend, rather than the woman he ended up marrying and who bore his two children.
‘So why did you get the sack?’ asks Ellie. ‘For sleeping with a guest?’ she sneers.
Mark laughs. ‘Christ, there wouldn’t have been any reps there by the end of the season if that had been a sackable offence,’ he says. ‘They were all at it.’
I ignore him. ‘I got the sack because my boss found out about the party and fired me for inappropriate use of company property. I think someone also told her that a picture of her face had been taped to the back of the urinal,’ I add. ‘I knew it was Dave but I couldn’t let him take the blame.’
‘She came crying to my hotel room that night,’ added Mark with a sigh.
‘I didn’t know what to do, I was upset.’
Mark had been so kind, so caring. He’d sat and listened as I sobbed out Clare’s cruel cutting off of the job I loved. He told his mates to go out without him and we sat on his balcony, drinking a bottle of ouzo, whilst he tried to plan my new future for me. My new design for life.
He put the ‘Do-Not-Disturb’ sign on the door whilst we made love in that desperate passionate way you do when you feel that the only thing good in your life is the person in your arms. And that is pretty much where we stayed for the next four days, only leaving the room to buy food and alcohol and to carry Mark’s roommate’s mattress next door so he could bunk up with two others in the crowd. Not a popular decision but, to my delight, Mark didn’t seem to care.
On the morning that he was due to leave, Mark went out for coffee and when he came back, he sat on the edge of the bed looking nervous. This is it, I thought. This is the ‘It’s been nice, have a good life’ speech.
Instead he’d turned to me, his knee twitching up and down at speed, and said, ‘Come home with me.’
I nearly spat my coffee across the room.
‘I’ve worked it out,’ he continued. ‘I have a spare room. I was going to rent it out to a lodger so I can pay off the mortgage quicker but I’d have to advertise and you’re never sure who you’re going to get, are you? I mean, you don’t have to sleep in it, you can sleep in my room of course – if you want to, that is – but you could come and live with me. What I’m saying in a stupid roundabout way is that I really like you and I’d really like you to come and live with me. If you want to, that is. I mean, you might not want to. I know I can be a bit boring when I start banging on about work and I’ve got nothing to really offer you. In fact, I’ve no idea why someone like you would ever leave all this to come with me, but the thought of not seeing you again—’
He stopped abruptly and looked down at the floor, his left knee still bouncing up and down.
‘Or you could see it as a stop-gap if you want,’ he said, looking back up, ‘until you sort yourself out. No pressure.’
I couldn’t believe it. Here was a wonderful man handing me a life on a plate when I thought I’d lost everything. I knew there was no way I would get another job as a tour rep with a decent company, given how I’d been fired. But now Mark had come riding in on a white charger, offering me a new life with a home and maybe even a plan. Who knows, maybe we would even end up seeing the world together one day?
‘Yes, oh, yes,’ I gasped, flinging my arms around him. Moments before, my life had been one massive question mark and now I had a roof over my head, and I was pretty sure that meant that I also had a boyfriend as well, didn’t it?
He hugged me back.
‘Really?’ he said when I finally let go of him. ‘You really want to?’
‘Of course,’ I grinned. ‘I like you as well,’ I said. ‘A lot.’
I think we both blushed a little then. The tentative significance of our words, and our decision, sinking in.
* * *
I wonder how I would be feeling about what I was facing tomorrow if I had lived another life entirely since then. What if Mark had walked away after those four passionate days without a backwards glance? Would I have hung on and eventually bunked up with a waiter or a barman or another tour rep?
Is there someone out there, a total stranger, who, if I had turned a different corner in life, would be sitting next to me tomorrow, clutching my hand and waiting for the verdict on my future?
I look back to Mark. My chosen path. I’ve purposefully not told him what’s going on so far, which might appear strange but I cannot seem to say the words out loud. I cannot even bear to hear them. I’ve tried. I’ve stood in front of the mirror and formed the words in my head and attempted to force them out of my mouth but nothing comes out. I just stare and stare and stare at myself and think, is this really happening? If I don’t actually say the words then maybe it isn’t, maybe everything will be all right.
But there will be words spoken tomorrow. Out loud. I can feel myself flinching at the mere thought of it.
‘I need to talk to you about something later,’ I say quickly to Mark.
‘Is it important?’ he asks, waving at the waiter for the bill. ‘Can we do it tomorrow night? I’m going to have to drop you home as it is and go back to work. The auditors have demanded some more figures,’ he says, throwing his credit card on the table. ‘I shouldn’t be here at all really.’
‘But Mark, it’s really important,’ I say.
He looks at me with a pained look.
‘This deal is important, Jenny. You don’t seem to get that. Let me get this deal done and then you can talk to me about anything you want.’
The waiter arrives with the bill and the card machine already in hand. Mark raises his eyebrows as he checks the total then plugs in his card. He’s already up and out of his seat before the waiter has printed out his receipt.
‘Come on then, you lot,’ he says impatiently. ‘I need to go back to work so I can pay for this overpriced fast food.’
I look at the cactus lights.
Six
‘You ask,’ I tell George.
He shakes his head vigorously at me.
I let out an exasperated gasp and look at my watch. I’m going to be late. This wasn’t supposed to happen. I was supposed to arrive a picture of calm serenity with my supportive husband on my arm. But no, here I am in the Co-op, down the third aisle, desperately seeking some ingredient I can’t pronounce that George has failed to warn me he needs for his Food Technology class.