Excess Baggage

by Judy Astley

  ‘Where’s Mum?’ Simon hissed at her. ‘Perhaps she’s not feeling—’ Lucy nudged him hard to shut him up. Shirley’s head could just be seen over the back of a sunlounger. She peered round as they walked across the cool tiled floor.

  ‘Hello, you two! What do you think of our palace? Two bedrooms, two bathrooms and a kitchen! Far too big for just the pair of us but your dad insisted on treating us to the best. Have a look round. Our first house in Wythenshaw was only half the size of this.’ Simon went outside and sat with his parents on the terrace but Lucy padded around the villa, admiring. There was the same pale golden cane-woven furniture as in the regular hotel rooms, and the curtain fabric was the same large patterned flowers the bold shades of a bowl of mixed citrus fruits. But here the ceilings were high and vaulted, lined with bleached wood slats, and instead of rather industrial air conditioning there were elegant brass ceiling fans whirring gently. It was a mock-colonial heaven. Lucy peeped into one of the bedrooms and saw mosquito nets draped from the ceiling round a four-poster bed. The bathroom was marble-lined and equipped with towels twice the size of those in the hotel’s main rooms. Her parents were certainly getting a treat and a half.

  ‘It’s lovely,’ she said, coming out to the terrace.

  ‘You know, it’s plenty big enough for you and Colette as well if you’d rather join us in here,’ Perry suggested.

  ‘Oh, well actually …’

  ‘I expect she’d rather be over there in the main block with the others. And I’m sure Colette wouldn’t want to be away from her cousins.’ Shirley was giving her husband what Lucy and Simon used to call The Look. Lucy grinned, grateful for once that her mother had accidentally got it right. She’d always found it hard to say no to her father. He’d always looked so anxious offering her anything, even small things like extra potatoes at supper or a lift to school, as if by refusing she was turning down the offer of his soul.

  ‘Mum’s right,’ she told him, ‘the others would be none too pleased if I came and played Queen Bee up here with you two.’ She gave Simon her own version of The Look before he could argue, and went to the edge of the terrace to survey the beach. A tall rangy man was hauling out yellow canoes from a wooden shack and arranging them on the sand below them, and further along by the water’s edge she could see a couple climbing aboard a jet ski. ‘That must be the dive shop the man I met was telling me about. I think I’ll go and check it out, see how much snorkelling equipment is to hire. I could teach Colette.’

  ‘Anything you want, Lucy love, just charge it to the bill,’ Perry said quietly. She kissed his cheek. It felt dry, like warm cardboard, and she wondered for a second or two if Simon might be right to worry. And the attitude to money was new too: they’d been generous parents, but keen on value for money and being careful not to splash it around. Now they talked about not being able to take it with you. Only the year before, Perry had joked about being way past the threescore years and ten. ‘Well into extra time now,’ he’d said. They’d all laughed but Lucy had looked around for wood to touch.

  Lucy ran down the steps to the shore and found Mark at the water-sports shop, pale, tired-looking and unmistakably English in beige linen shorts with a rigidly ironed crease down the front. She imagined Theresa back home in her cream and old-rose bedroom, packing as if she’d learned it, like her table manners, from a manual – tissue paper between each fold. Mark was inspecting a price list pinned to a wall of the ramshackle shop which was decorated with a flaking sea scene – badly in need of repainting – of vivid, cartoon-like pink and brown divers splashing in a turquoise fish-filled sea wearing scarlet flippers and outsize snorkels.

  ‘Hey, it’s the early one!’ Henry greeted Lucy from a hammock under another low tree in front of the dive shop, shaded from the strengthening sun by lines of ropes from which hung souvenir sarongs and T-shirts for sale. Lucy wondered if there was any of his time that he didn’t spend horizontal. He slid to the ground and stood with his hands on his hips, inspecting Mark. ‘This your husband?’ He put on an expression of brazen mock-disappointment. Lucy laughed. ‘No, this is my sister’s husband. Mark, this is Henry.’ Solemnly Henry and Mark shook hands like a pair of new business associates.

  ‘Come in the dive shop, let me do my job and talk you into parting with money. You got your PADI?’ Henry asked Mark. Henry, Lucy noticed, had his hand on Mark’s shoulder, guiding him into the cool shady shop like a spider trapping a big juicy fly. She followed, grinning at Mark who was looking at her with one inquisitive eyebrow raised.

  ‘No, I’ve never done any diving, though I’ve often fancied the idea. Can I do it here?’

  ‘Can he do it here! Bless!’ A husky female voice came from the cool and gloomy back of the shop. ‘This is the mother, the great Glenda-of-Chiswick,’ Henry introduced her. Glenda was a tall woman, built for strength, with long grey hair clinging to the last of blond streaks and with half a dozen brightly beaded braids on the left side, hanging and crashing around her perma-tanned face. She was wearing a purple and pink tie-dyed billowing smock which reminded Lucy of Colette’s school production of Hair, for which she had persuaded Theresa to rummage in her attic and drag out the perfect hippyish outfit of multicoloured crochet tank top and flower-patched loon pants. She must have been at least sixty, Lucy reckoned, and with. skin that seemed to have shown only contempt for moisturizer, but all the lines looked as if they were caused by laughter. Lucy speculated on how long she’d lived on the island: she could have come over at least thirty-five years before, perhaps brought back like a souvenir from England by Henry’s father.

  ‘We’ve got one of the world’s most spectacular reefs, just a mile or two round the island,’ Glenda said, waving an armful of silver bracelets in the direction of the south shore. ‘You do the diving preliminaries in the hotel pool then it’s out to sea. It’s all supervised, all safe. Henry’s a qualified dive master.’

  ‘What do you think? Shall we?’ Mark asked Lucy. He was looking eager, thumbing through a rail of wetsuits at the back of the shop. Lucy considered, wondered how much time it would take up. Colette wouldn’t mind, she’d spend most of her time with Luke and Becky anyway. She thought of Simon and his worrying, of Theresa and her stress level and then she thought of the peace and calm of the below-sea world.

  ‘OK, let’s.’

  Three

  THAT YOUNG COUPLE who’d been fondling each other at the cocktail party were in the pool. Wherever Simon went he seemed to come across various romantically inclined young pairs strolling, arms entwined, between the Sugar Mill bar, the Coconut spa and the small arcade of gift shops just beyond the hotel entrance. It was supposed to be the rainy season just now, which he assumed hadn’t bothered them because they looked pretty pale, as if they’d been spending a lot of potential tanning time in bed. The hotel was big on weddings, going by the photos mounted on the board in the lobby. The favoured spot was clearly the elaborate white wrought-iron gazebo under the tamarind tree between the pool and the beach. Shirley said it reminded her of the bandstand on the seafront at Exmouth, but Perry thought it was more like a big version of the fancy kind of thing that smart gardeners bought to grow their runner beans up.

  The pair in the pool had been larking about, splashing and diving and ducking each other and making the kind of shrieky squealy noises Simon usually heard from Becky when she’d got her mates round and they were holed up in her bedroom mucking around with make-up and gossip. It was hard to concentrate on his book, with piercing yells and splashes from those two punctuating every paragraph. Worse, when they went suddenly quiet and he happened to look up to check if they had gone, he saw them locked into a passionate clinch, snogging like kids at a late-night bus stop. The girl had opened an eye and caught him staring, which made him shift uncomfortably and feel an embarrassed extra warmth that was nothing to do with the hot sun. The only other pool occupant was a small boy floating on a lilo, and with the water barely churned up, Simon could see the girl’s thighs wide apart, clenched ti
ght around her husband’s/boyfriend’s body. It gave Simon a jolt of unwelcome sexual stimulation, like casually glancing at a magazine over someone’s shoulder on the tube and finding himself reading scalding porn.

  ‘Couldn’t they go and do that in their room?’ Simon muttered to Plum. She looked up from the Ruth Rendell and smiled. ‘Oh, they’re just happy and young. Don’t you remember what it was like?’ she teased. He didn’t, or at least not like that, not in public. He remembered early sex with Plum (and an inadmissibly small assortment of girls before her) as a deeply furtive, back-of-the-car activity. There’d been her father’s tool-shed (appropriate, he’d sniggered to himself at the time) one Christmas Eve, when he’d nearly knocked himself out standing on a rake and had a black eye till well into the new year. And there’d been the boat on the Norfolk Broads, holidaying with Plum’s hearty out-door cousins who were so scrubbed-clean wholesome that Simon had been sure they thought babies were made by means of some strange practical handicraft as per instructions in a scout manual.

  It had been almost disappointing to get married and realize that sex was not only permitted but compulsory, and in a safe dull duveted bed. He’d much preferred the days when Plum’s suggestion that they go for a walk in the woods would have him peering through the densest undergrowth in search of a good place to fuck. He rather envied the young couple in the pool, oblivious to everything but their own wants, much as he disapproved of their lack of discretion. In fact, really they were just showing off. He snapped his book shut and looked around. The rest of the family, apart from Lucy and Mark and the older children, was now assembled by the pool, sprawled out lazily on loungers, dozing away their lack of proper sleep or reading under the palm-thatched umbrellas. Even Theresa’s brood were being quiet, all three placidly sitting in a double swingboat in the children’s play area beyond the far side of the paddling pool, waiting with almost unnatural patience for Marisa to abandon her sun-worship and come and push them.

  So much communal lethargy made Simon twitchy – he was surprised his mother wasn’t geeing them up into more action. On the Devon holidays, sitting around lazing on a beach had been something that they were allowed to do only after the day’s quota of sightseeing had been achieved, all those trips to gardens and castles and Paignton Zoo and Krazee Golf. Still, his mother was well past seventy now, surely more than happy not to have the role of family co-ordinator.

  He stood up and stretched. ‘Right, I’m off to find out about excursions and activities and such. Anyone coming with me?’

  No-one replied, though his mother shook her head gently as she reached into her basket for more suntan lotion.

  ‘We can’t spend two whole weeks just sitting around here, you know,’ he went on. ‘Someone has to do the organizing.’

  ‘Hmm. You do that if you want to, Simon,’ Plum murmured. He felt cross immediately; she sounded as if she was indulging the whims of a small boy.

  ‘Simon, we don’t have to trek round everywhere all together like some big school trip, do we?’ Theresa whispered as he strode past her lounger. He stopped and crouched next to her. ‘Well, I rather thought that was the point, didn’t you? For Ma and Pa to be with us all together. This is supposed to be a proper family holiday. Otherwise we might as well be on different continents.’

  ‘God. I suppose so. But please, just not today, OK? We’re all exhausted and it’s enough just to sit around and get used to the heat. I’m not sure the brood are up to cultural visits either.’ She closed her eyes and fanned her face with her hand, dismissing her trouble-some younger brother.

  Simon wandered into the blissful cool shade of the hotel lobby. A tall girl with sheeny skin the colour of the best bitter chocolate was watering a massive potted palm tree. He stood in front of the guests’ noticeboard, turning a little to watch her. She had incredibly elaborate hair, braided into what looked like hundreds of tiny, shiny plaits and then woven into a pattern that must have taken hours to concoct. She wore the hotel’s staff shirt, green with a pattern of white leaves and a slim navy blue pencil skirt that curved out over her high round bottom. White girls didn’t have bums like that. Even slender girls who had any curves and substance at all sagged and wobbled lardily. Plum’s globular bum, he thought with disloyal honesty, resembled an anaemic crème caramel that a child had prodded all over with a spoon and then abandoned. Even in the chill of the air conditioning, Simon found his hands were sweating and clammy with the effort of not reaching across and taking hold of the girl’s flesh. He was shocked at himself, appalled at the scene in his head: himself, drilled hard against her body, his hands roaming round to her breasts, his mouth nuzzling into the intricate hair. He could almost smell her, a mixture of jasmine and pineapple and a tiny thrilling hint of sweat. He never, well hardly ever, had thoughts like this at home. At home he only seemed to have contact with youngish attractive women as mothers-of-patients, discussing their children’s overbites and whether the wisdom teeth would have to go. His receptionist only gave him cups of tea and rich tea biscuits, never a hard-on. Heart thumping, and terrified for his soaring blood pressure, he shoved his hands deep in his pockets where they were safe, turned back to the noticeboard and tried to focus on the lists of activities that the various tour operators had put together to tempt the guests out of their idleness.

  ‘Hi, Simon, what are you doing?’ Colette stood next to him munching on a rapidly thawing yellow ice lolly.

  ‘I’m finding things for us all to go out and do.’ A small traditional part of him baulked at her casual use of his name. Somewhere inside was still the small boy who, like Theresa, but not Lucy later, had to give all grown-ups some kind of courtesy title. Shirley and Perry still had several friends whom Simon had to stop himself prefixing with ‘Uncle’ or ‘Auntie’ whenever he met them. Early attempts to get Becky and Luke to do the same had had Plum ridiculing him for being antediluvian: ‘What’s wrong with their plain and simple names?’ she’d asked. ‘Showing respect isn’t anything to do with silly false prefixes.’ It was different for her though, teaching at the sixth-form college. Her pupils called her ‘Penelope’ whereas at eighteen he’d still been addressing schoolmasters as ‘Sir’ and secretly thought it wouldn’t do Becky and Luke any harm to feel the same kind of mild terror about school that he had.

  ‘So what are we going to do? Shall we go to this plantation and see how rum’s made?’ Colette ran her finger down the list. ‘Or what about going into the rain forest in a Jeep and swimming in the waterfall?’

  ‘Do you fancy that?’ Simon asked, making mental notes. They’d need a fleet of Jeeps; he must check on car-hire rates.

  ‘I do. And I want to do snorkelling. Mum and Mark are going to do proper diving though, real scuba diving with air tanks. They’re going to do a course. She told me.’

  ‘A course? What, lessons? Here?’

  Colette shrugged. ‘In the sea I suppose. I mean it’s where you’d go, isn’t it, for diving?’ She gave him the kind of smile that told him she pitied his idiocy and ran off towards the pool. Simon borrowed a pen and some paper from the receptionist and copied out the list of events, wondering if he was wasting his time.

  Becky could see Lucy a few hundred yards along the shore, walking back from the water-sports shop. She could see her holding up the edges of her sarong and wafting it to make a breeze as she walked in the shallow waves that broke so gently on the shore. Lucy had a very cool short fluffed-up haircut as well as good legs for an Old Person, Becky conceded, as she calculated how very few minutes she had before Lucy reached her and inevitably stopped to chat.

  ‘Quick! My aunt’s coming!’ Becky hissed to the stocky boy rolling the fattest joint she’d ever seen in the shade of a low-growing tree. He sold jewellery and wind chimes as well as ganja, carrying a basket with a selection of shell necklaces, shark’s-tooth bracelets and strings of tiny beads in the Rasta colours of yellow, red and green. She’d have to pretend to Lucy that she was choosing presents for all her poor friends flogging away in
school back home.

  ‘No problem,’ he drawled, grinning at her and handing it over. ‘Five dollars.’

  Becky fumbled in her string bag for her purse and handed over the note. ‘Thanks, that’s great.’

  ‘No problem!’ the boy said again and sauntered away up the beach to offer his wares to sunbathers. Becky hid the joint in her make-up bag and prayed her eye shadow wouldn’t melt over it and ruin it. Five Eastern Caribbean dollars wasn’t a vast amount, but she didn’t know yet how many of these five-dollars’-worth she could get through in a fortnight. Lots, she hoped, especially if she found someone to share them with, some gorgeous boy who would look impressive in the photos she’d be showing off at school. She’d have to make some serious effort to find one fast, otherwise the gruesomely embarrassing high point of her seventeenth birthday, less than two weeks from now, would be blowing out the candles on some hotel cake while her family sang ‘happy birthday’ and all the other guests watched and clapped as if she was only six. She pictured herself on the deserted night-time beach, nestled into the soft sand under a sky with an impossible number of too-close stars, curled up with an unknown someone, smoking, kissing, stroking, touching …

  Lucy, thigh-deep in the warm shallows, watched as a cruise ship, about the size of an entire housing-estate’s-worth of high-rise blocks, offloaded its passengers onto a flotilla of smart little launches to take them into the island’s capital for a day’s sightseeing and shopping. The scuttling boats reminded her of the kind of wildlife programme where fat creamy larvae slither away from a bloated mother insect, the queen of the nest. The town, which looked dwarfed by the vast liner, was called Teignmouth, a fact which her mother admitted had influenced her choice of island when planning the holiday. Monserrat had Plymouth, Tobago had Scarborough and one of the Caicos islands had Whitby, but these had never been among childhood holiday destinations. Back then it had been Torquay or Dawlish, places accessible by train (‘Your dad deals in cars for fifty weeks a year. He doesn’t want to take one on holiday as well – we’ll hire when we get there’) and with just enough going on to keep children and adults entertained. Although they’d lived, then, just south of Manchester, their holidays had never been taken in the more usual northern resorts. It had seemed something of a matter of status to Shirley to make the long journey south, to have further-reaching holiday ambitions than her neighbours. (To venture overseas, other than to the Isle of Man, would have been ostentatious.) In the end the ambitions had backfired as one by one each of her children had gravitated towards London and its outskirts. Lucy didn’t know, didn’t risk asking, if pride in their independence, in being able to say, as Shirley could of Theresa, ‘My daughter that’s married to a banker, lovely house in Oxshott,’ had been enough to compensate for being two hundred miles from her grandchildren rather than the round-the-corner, popping-in distance that her less adventurous neighbours and friends had.