by Judy Astley
As she walked on Lucy thought about the rented holiday flats they’d stayed in where the decor of each of them merged in her memory into a mess of dull sage green and old-mac beige. Those colours now starred on all the smartest paint charts, with names like ‘Norfolk Herring’ and ‘Sphagnum’. Her heart sank, remembering those apartments that smelled of a thousand fry-ups, every time a client sought colour guidance and brought up the term ‘historical shades’. Why didn’t they travel to places like this, or even just look at photos, and choose clear bright tints that thrilled the heart like this ludicrously vivid sea, the colour of a bleached peacock? No wonder the British middle classes suffered from SAD, she thought, considering the dismal gloomy shades they thought it so tasteful to live with. Perhaps if they painted their surroundings with the translucent colours of life, rather than of the worst-weather skies, their winters would be a lot less miserable.
‘Coming to get some lunch?’ The slim shadow of Lucy fell between Becky and the sun. ‘I know it’s a bit early, but I feel like I’ve been up for days and now I’m starving.’
Becky thought for a second or two about the effort of moving off her lounger again. If Mark had been asking, or her mother, or Theresa, she’d probably have said no. But this was Lucy, the one she liked, the one who she instinctively felt knew what it was like to be always in the wrong inside the tender cage that’s called a family. She scrambled to her feet and wrapped a tiny scarlet skirt round her hips. ‘Yeah, I’ll come with you. Where are we going?’
‘There’s a bar by the pool. They do lunch-type food like burgers and sandwiches and salads and stuff.’
‘Oh good. Chips.’ Becky giggled.
‘Definitely chips. I can smell them from here. Just like home.’
Becky looked out at the sea. ‘No, thank God, not a bit like home.’
Mark, walking under the trees, could see them all lying like pale pink sausages, grilling on loungers by the pool. Theresa was talking to someone, a straw-blonde deep-tanned woman with a gold swimsuit and a wrist-ful of bracelets that glinted in the light. She was lighting a cigarette, offering one to Theresa who shook her head. Shirley was fussing with Sebastian, pulling his blue gingham hat down firmly over his ears. Sebastian was fighting back, wrenching the hated thing off his head the moment his grandmother let him go.
Mark watched as Theresa stood up, stretched lazily and adjusted the bottom of her swimsuit. It was a sexy, artless little gesture. He’d have liked his fingers to be the ones brushing gently just inside the fabric, but there was a horrible problem getting in the way of sex. His penis was sore, aching with a flinty, constant pain. He couldn’t even dull it with a drink, for the clinic nurse had been pretty emphatic that these particular antibiotics just didn’t go with alcohol – the combination would mean instant vomiting. He remembered her face as she told him, handing out this small piece of gleeful punishment. She’d had that careful look, the professionally indifferent, seen-it-all-before one that everyone in clap clinics (or ‘sexual health’ centres, as they were now called) had. Somehow, in the over-deft way she’d wielded the needle when she took a blood sample from his arm, there was a judgement, and a small not-quite-suppressed sigh that told him she was having to do this far too many times to too many men for her liking. She’d spent a long time washing her hands, vigorously sluicing away every trace of his tart-borne infection. Nice men don’t pay for sex. Mark knew that. He was no longer a nice man. On five furtive and deliciously seedy occasions now he hadn’t been a nice man at all and was about three hundred pounds and a nasty, persistent dose of NSU down on the deal. The nurse needn’t have bothered; Mark’s own remorse was punishment enough.
‘Hey, Mark! Come and choose something for lunch!’ Shirley was waving a menu at him, smiling. Mark grinned back and started walking towards the group which was now taking over several shaded tables close to the bar. Shirley’s smile showed nothing but certainty that he was still the supremely Nice Man that her daughter had married. Once, years ago when he’d helped her choose the right savings account and explained some complicated banking pros and cons, she’d confided that he was just what she’d always wanted for Theresa, as if he was something she’d started trawling every shop in the land for since the moment Theresa was born: a safe, reliable, secure item that had been at the top of the christening wish-list. ‘There’s no silliness about you,’ she’d said, but hadn’t elaborated, leaving him to work out for himself what ‘silliness’ was. He’d decided it must be to do with deviousness, with what you see being what you get, a concept which Shirley’s sensible Northern origins very much approved of. Now, as he took his place at the sun-bleached wooden table next to Theresa, he was pretty sure Shirley had also been approving his lack of adventurous spirit, a lack of imagination which would keep him faithful to Theresa and give none of them any trouble. He felt almost more guilty towards his trusting mother-in-law than towards his wife.
‘Right, everybody here? Ready to order?’ Simon was ready with a pen and notebook, bustling like a waiter.
‘What all of us, all at once?’ Lucy looked across to the circular bar area where one lone barman was concocting fruit punches, taking food orders and directing waiters all at the same time. He seemed to be the only person moving fast.
‘Of course all of us. The hotel accommodates over two hundred people, they should be able to cope with a lunch order for fourteen,’ Simon told her.
‘Now Simon,’ Shirley warned, ‘we don’t want unpleasantness.’
‘Sorry Ma. OK, now food …’ Simon wrote down the order, meticulously checking and rechecking what everyone wanted until Becky started banging her foot backwards and forwards against the chair leg with impatience. He then handed the list over to the waiter who smiled with gleaming politeness before rewriting the whole thing on his own pad using his own code. Theresa smirked and Simon scowled and Luke’s abrupt giggle got him a glare from Perry. Shirley seemed oblivious, looking around her, absorbing the views from all directions. Lucy watched her, saw her gaze taking in the pink and white cake-like buildings, the banana trees with voluptuous purple flowers and bulging clumps of fruit, the massive hibiscus plants that made the puny specimens from British garden centres look like tragic underfed bits of twig.
It was the hotel’s clientele that looked vaguely out of place amongst all the leafy lushness. Most of the guests were British or German, pale and lazy and slightly self-conscious in lurid swimwear. They moved around slowly as if the heat was a burden, glistening with protective lotions and potions and being sure to remind their children constantly to keep their hats on. The Phonetech men, whom Lucy collectively christened the Steves, all kept their chunky steel watches on and wore reflective aviator sunglasses, behind which, she suspected, they were eyeing anything in a bikini. She watched a portly man who must have been in his late sixties, buttoning himself into a shirt that he would probably never wear again once the holiday was over, a pattern of turquoise and lemon zigzags that must have come straight from the cruisewear department of a large city store. She imagined him shopping reluctantly with his wife, being dragged round a vast out-of-town mall where his head would grow light in the dried-out air conditioning and his lost sense of direction would make him panic that he would never find the car park again.
‘We aren’t very good at hot weather, are we?’ Lucy commented to Plum as she watched the man making himself respectable enough to join the tables for food. ‘The sun-starved Brits have to have a special separate wardrobe for being hot, and it sits on most of them about as naturally as a posh wedding outfit.’
Plum followed her gaze across the pool. The turquoise man’s wife had a lilac cardigan dangling from the back of her lounger, as if she didn’t quite trust the sun to hang around reliably. ‘Only with older people, surely. Like the kind of men who wear long socks with shorts. The younger ones look all right.’
Lucy didn’t comment. Plum presumably counted Simon among the ‘younger’ men. Simon had been of the student generation that had worn ball-gri
pping loon trousers and skin-tight T-shirts and now still habitually bought clothes that looked as if they were for someone at least a size smaller. Lucy’s contemporaries, on the other hand, had absorbed enough of the punk era to feel at their most comfortable in anything that her mother would think was only suitable to be put in the duster box.
Lucy leaned her head back and pointed her face straight to the sun. ‘Put this on if you must blast your skin,’ Theresa said to her, passing over a tube of the children’s suntan lotion.
‘Give me ten minutes, Tess,’ Lucy said, closing her eyes.
‘You’ll fry.’ It was like a curse. Lucy sat up straight and glared at her.
‘And if I do, who’s to care?’
‘You will when your nose is purple and peeling and your eyes are swollen shut.’
‘My risk.’ But the moment was spoiled and she pulled a bottle of lotion from her bag and smeared it on her face, catching sight as she did of Theresa’s little smile. It was just like when Theresa had caught her behind the rhododendron down by the shed in their parents’ garden all those years ago. She’d been twelve, smoking her first cigarette with the boy from the classic Cheshire half-timbered house on the corner, the boy Shirley had always encouraged her to play with when she was little because he’d been sent off to boarding school at nine and might be lonely in the holidays. Theresa had crept up, known almost before they did what they were up to and had pounced before Lucy had even managed to inhale the sweet rancid smoke.
‘You’ll get cancer,’ Theresa had hissed into her face. ‘If you smoke you’ll die.’
‘It’s one Silk Cut, not a whole habit,’ sophisticated Michael up-the-road had sneered.
‘If you start now you’ll never stop.’ It had felt like a challenge at the time. Lucy remembered looking very carefully at Theresa’s face, trying to work out whether it was real concern for her young sister that made her so angry or whether she just wanted to pick a fight and put Lucy in the wrong, spoiling her fun. Theresa had been twenty-two at the time, well into grown-uphood by Lucy’s reckoning, and her anger had puzzled her. Perversely, it had also put Lucy off cigarettes. She was determined, till Theresa left home a year or so later, that she wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of sniffing the air around Lucy and scenting out the hint of smoke, nor would she ever be caught with her finger-ends stained ochrous with tobacco.
‘OK, who was the fruit punch and who was the pina colada?’ Simon took a tray of drinks from the waiter and started handing them round at random so that the drinks ended up being passed back and forth across the table.
‘Mine’s the Diet Coke.’ Plum reached across and claimed her glass.
‘And mine looks like a pina colada but it’s without rum,’ Theresa said. ‘I don’t know how people can drink alcohol in this heat.’
‘Oh I can.’ Shirley chuckled, taking a large gulp of rum punch. ‘A lot of what you fancy, that’s what holidays should be about. Especially this one. We need to celebrate being all together – such a treat. With you all down south and us stuck back in the frozen north, we only ever get to see you all together at Christmas. There’s not even a good family wedding on the cards.’ She took another sip and a breath then went on, ‘Talking of which, Lucy, what happened to that young man you were seeing, the one you said might have come here with you. What was his name, Joss?’
‘Ross.’ Lucy felt cornered. They’d all stopped, mid-munch, to listen. Even Sebastian’s small round mouth hung open, waiting, showing an unattractive mush of hot-dog.
‘Nothing happened. I suppose he changed his mind.’
‘About coming here or about you?’ Shirley was smiling, as if they were simply having a jolly general conversation about nothing that could possibly be considered remotely personal.
Lucy shrugged. She was too old to have to give love-life explanations to her mother but trying to be private made her sulky. ‘I don’t know. Does it matter? He isn’t here and I don’t particularly mind, I mean if he could pass up the chance to come to a place like this—’
‘So you won’t be seeing him again? When you get back?’ Shirley interrupted.
‘Mum, give me a break will you! I’m sure no-one wants to hear about my failed romances!’ Lucy forced out as much of a laugh as she could manage.
‘And so many of them,’ Theresa added.
‘Yes, give it a rest Shirley love, you’re embarrassing the poor girl.’ The pat on the wrist that Perry gave his wife looked quite a firm one.
‘Woman.’ Lucy cursed herself for not keeping her mouth shut. ‘I haven’t been a girl for a long time now.’
‘Well, I expect that’s all Mum’s on about,’ Simon cut in, using what Lucy recognized as his let’s-sort-this-out voice. ‘You’re old enough not to have to put up with disappointments from men. I expect she’d just like you to meet someone.’
‘Oh she has already! Haven’t you Lucy?’ Theresa’s voice was bright and sharp. ‘That man you met up a tree in the middle of the night? Why don’t you tell Mum all about him?’
‘Leave it Theresa.’ Mark’s voice was like a low warning thunder rumble.
Lucy stood up. ‘Whatever I do I can’t get it right, can I? I don’t get myself neatly married off and that’s wrong, but when I do chat to attractive strangers, that’s wrong too.’ Colette was sitting with her elbows on the table, fingers in her ears, looking at the sky and tunelessly singing an old Spice Girls song. Lucy watched her with sympathy, wishing she could do exactly the same. There was a small, waiting silence then Simon briskly rustled his collection of lists and leaflets.
‘So, tomorrow then. I thought we could go out and look round Teignmouth in the morning …’
‘Er … not Lucy and me, we’ve got our first diving lesson in the pool at ten.’
‘With the hunky tree-dweller.’ Theresa smirked.
Plum leaned forward and touched her arm, then said very quietly, ‘Admit you’re just a teensy bit envious, Theresa, I know I am.’
Theresa gave her a queenly smile and lowered her voice to something close to a hiss. ‘If you’re suggesting there’s something missing in your life in that department, Plum, then please take it up with Simon, not with me. I certainly don’t envy Lucy.’
Which Plum took to mean quite the opposite.
Four
LUCY LAY OUT flat as close to the bottom of the pool as the air tank strapped to her back allowed, figuring out the workings of her buoyancy control device. She felt like Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate, hiding under the water from his family. She looked up at the legs of a small child paddling away like duck feet above her. He was way out of his depth and the automatic parent in her scanned the rest of the pool for a set of larger, stronger limbs that would indicate the presence of a responsible grown-up. The child’s feet stopped moving and he let his plump legs dangle, trusting his orange inflated armbands for support. He bobbed comfortably, splashing his small hands up and down, the ripples bending the sunlight above her.
It occurred to Lucy that she could do with some support herself. Support of the financial kind, for sure, as ever, but also of the commiserating kind. Colette was far too young to sit with her in the bar or on the beach and sympathize about life’s sundry unfairnesses. That was the huge problem with being a lone parent: you had to be wary, make sure you kept some kind of balance about how much emotional sharing-out you inflicted on your child. You had to see-saw between a foolish rosy-outlooked pretence that everything was fine, really, things always turned out OK, and the truth – that life on your own with a kid was a hard, complicated plate-juggling act where you were the only person whose fault the many difficulties, failures and mistakes could ever be. To inflict on Colette the knife-edge day-to-day burden of simply getting by, the constant money-and-work worries, the men (like bloody Ross) who disappointed, and the ever-present rather shameful mild envy of luckier friends and siblings with what seemed to be wondrously sorted lives, would be a dreadful blight on the poor girl’s childhood.
‘She’s only
got you, so you’ll always have to be the strong one. You mustn’t let her see you cry, not ever,’ had been her mother’s formidable (and hardly realistic) advice the day after Colette was born. Lucy, hormonally poleaxed and already sore from her baby’s greedily chewing attempts at breastfeeding, had promptly burst into tears. Shirley had shaken her head slowly, as if Lucy had already earned herself an eternal D-minus for mothering, and then conceded, ‘Well I’m sure Plum will always help you out, if you’re stuck for advice.’ Just as Lucy had been figuring out the implication that her mother wouldn’t be available for helping out, Shirley had added, ‘And there’s always me, as a last resort, though when you’ve ever taken any guidance from me I can’t recall. If you had …’ and she’d sighed, stroking Colette’s baby fingers. Lucy, still sniffling into a tissue, had finished the sentence for her: ‘If I had, I wouldn’t be here now, all alone with a baby.’
‘That’s not what I meant at all.’ Shirley had smiled. ‘I know at the time I said you were too young and silly to go producing babies you didn’t need to have, but…’ and she’d paused to swallow and collect her words, ‘maybe I was wrong. Prove me wrong, Lucy, I know you can, even if it’s only to be bloody awkward.’