Excess Baggage

by Judy Astley

  As Lucy lay in the water, relaxed, floating, wondering if she was doing the right thing with the BCD, the vision of her clamped van sneaked into her mind. She tried to stop the inevitable express train of thought: by the time she got back the van would have been towed away and scrapped, crushed and pounded to a foot-square parcel of junked metal. The local council was hot on that sort of thing, trying to pass the area off as being a newly desirable one, with hiked-up council-tax banding and generous laxity on the planning rules for extenders and improvers. That would mean she’d have no transport. She’d have no way of getting her ladders and brushes and dust sheets and the rest of her equipment from job to job. No car, no work was the full awful equation. She couldn’t tell the family; Theresa would only raise her eyes to heaven in mock despair. Simon would start to flap and worry that she’d turn up on his doorstep seeking refuge, clutching a small bag of worldly goods and Colette’s hand. Her mother would mutter about her getting a ‘proper job’. Worst of all, her lovely devoted father, still sure that for his younger girl he was the only man in her life to matter, would get her on her own and offer her a spanking new van. It would be so hard to resist, so hard these days to insist that the principle of personal independence mattered.

  Henry appeared, swimming elegantly in front of Lucy, his thumb pointing up. His eyes behind his mask looked bright and eager. She was about to make the same sign back – after all, she couldn’t recall when she’d last felt so physically relaxed even if her mind was racing – when she remembered the instructions about communicating underwater. An upturned thumb meant your dive-buddy was heading for the surface. She flipped her body over and headed slowly upwards alongside Henry. Mark was already there, partnered with Henry’s assistant, Andy. Down at the shallow end, a small collection of swimmers eyed them warily, as if all the equipment attached to their bodies turned them into bizarre water life worthy of only remote scrutiny.

  ‘It all looks a bit Heath Robinson, this stuff, doesn’t it?’ Mark commented as they peeled off their tanks and weight belts and buoyancy jackets beside the pool. Lucy looked again at the collection of straps and hoses and Velcro and gauges. It did all resemble the kind of contraption that only a crazed inventor with too-easy access to a scrapyard could come up with. In spite of all the Velcro and neoprene, en masse it was ugly, clumsy stuff, emphasizing how dreadfully out of place humans were in the sea. It was pushing their luck, really, to try and intrude into undersea life where fish needed only a set of delicate rippling fins and simple primitive gills to get by.

  ‘It looks as if it’s all long outdated, like really old hospital equipment. Shouldn’t someone have come up with a streamlined version of all this kit by now?’ Lucy asked.

  ‘This is the streamlined version. You should check out old movies of underwater divers. This is state-of-the-art, man, no worries.’ Henry squeezed Lucy’s shoulder. ‘You wait till you’re out there in the great ocean. Feel yourself floating on the current, at one with the barracudas. Pure grace, amazing grace.’

  ‘I’m not sure I like the thought of sharing the sea with barracudas.’ Mark looked doubtful as he gathered his equipment together. ‘And are there sharks?’

  Henry laughed. ‘For sure there’s sharks, man! But not great whites, not here, just ordinary little nurse sharks and blue ones and hammerheads and stuff. They’re just big swimming pussycats quietly minding their own, you’ll see.’ He winked at Lucy, who grinned back. Henry moved a bit closer to her and spoke more quietly as they all set off along the beach to return the equipment to the dive store. ‘OK, so have you got time now for a drink with me? The bar just down the next beach has the best rum punches on the island and I got the afternoon off.’

  ‘Oh. Well, I’d love to, but Mark and I have to rush off and get a cab into Teignmouth to meet the others for lunch. We’re in enough trouble with my brother for skiving off to learn to dive as it is.’

  ‘You’re crazy. Today there’s three cruise ships in and the whole town will be heaving. How about tonight then, after you’ve eaten with the family,’ he teased.

  ‘Ah, that would be great but, well, there’s my daughter, I shouldn’t just slope off …’ Lucy cursed herself for such pathetic hesitation. Henry was friendly but not pushy. He was about her age and he was fun and he had no connections with home or work or family. What bliss it would be to slip away from the rest of them (already, only the third day in) and spend an hour or two in a bar with an unrelated (and don’t forget attractive) grown-up. Colette would say she didn’t mind her going, but she would be sure to give her that look, the one that rivalled Shirley’s in Conveyed Meaning. Colette’s version involved the eyes in raised-to-heaven mode and invariably meant, ‘Oh Mum, not another dead-end date.’

  ‘Though Becky could keep an eye on her …’ But Henry’s hands, one holding a weight belt, the other an empty air tank, were already raised in amiable defeat.

  ‘It’s OK, I’ve got a son, ten years old. I know what it’s like when you’re supposed to be spending time with them.’

  Well, that changed things, Lucy thought, feeling an unreasonably and unexpectedly large surge of cross disappointment – after all, he’d only invited her for a drink and she wasn’t looking for anything more, definitely not. In spite of herself, though, she felt her voice go hard, as always when the W-word loomed, as it so very often did with attractive men of the right age. If you didn’t quite trust your luck when you seemed to have met a good one, you were probably right and the wife-factor would surely be lurking around to wreck things.

  ‘Absolutely,’ she agreed, adding, ‘and your wife?’ They’d reached the dive shop by now and Lucy was glad to get inside, into the cool shade. Glenda was just inside the door and she let out a blast of husky laughter. ‘Some wife! Scuttled off to Jamaica when little Olly was two. Visits once a year, always manages to forget the poor kid’s birthday. Henry misses her as much as you’d miss a dose of herpes.’

  The blast of clammy urban heat that hit Lucy as she climbed out of the viciously air-conditioned taxi almost knocked the breath out of her. The small town, with its narrow hilly streets and its prettily dilapidated Georgian buildings in the soft colours of children’s party cakes, seemed to be completely crammed with people. Well, Henry had warned them.

  Mark had barely turned from paying the driver before traders scuttled across from their market stalls and started in with the sales pitch. The same question came from several directions: ‘You from the ship?’

  ‘No, we’re not,’ Lucy told a man who was offering to show her the best shop for bargain duty-free emeralds.

  ‘We picked the wrong day for this,’ Mark said as he took her arm and tried to get them through the crush without becoming separated and lost. ‘Those cruise ships out there in the bay are massive and the whole lot must have descended on this place at once.’ He chuckled. ‘And I thought Simon had done his homework …’

  ‘So all these are the thousands of passengers, all with nothing to do but race around having a frantic shopping opportunity. It’s like one of those crazy supermarket trolley-dashes,’ Lucy commented. Across the road and up the hill past the inevitable Barclays Bank she could see the big plaster statue of the blue dolphin at the restaurant where Simon had booked a table. Customers clutching drinks spilled out of the doors and across the pavement. Much of the crowd could only be American tourists, the men in baseball caps and fluorescent shirts picked up at the market stalls of other ports and the women dressed to shop in their best shore-going easy-pack viscose trouser suits trimmed plentifully with gold.

  ‘Up here! Lucy! We’re up here and we’re just about to order!’

  Lucy and Mark shoved their way through the crowd and raced up the stairs. The family was at three tables upstairs on a balcony shaded by a palm-thatched awning. The smallest children were with a rather sullen-looking Marisa, well out of sticky grabbing-distance of their mother, an arrangement which seemed to suit Theresa enormously as she was, for the first time, smiling happily and chatting
to Simon. Marisa’s face, Lucy noticed, was the lurid pink colour of Paignton rock.

  Lucy grabbed a seat beside Shirley and took a quick but careful appraisal of her to check if she looked overheated or otherwise out of sorts. The air was so humid, it drained the stamina from even the youngest and most energetic. The night before, Shirley and Perry had gone off to bed early, claiming they needed catch-up time with their sleep. Simon had immediately worried they might be overdoing things and aggravating whatever dire condition one or both of them might be suffering from. It had taken Theresa’s astute suggestion that they might just want a bit of peace away from the rest of them to stop him fretting and speculating.

  ‘It’s chicken and fries or burger and fries I’m afraid,’ Theresa said to Lucy. ‘I don’t know what on earth the children are going to be like when I get them home if I let them eat this kind of stuff here. They’ll be wanting McDonalds next.’ She gave a fastidious little shudder.

  ‘No worries. I’ll eat anything, I’m starving,’ Lucy replied, and Theresa’s eyebrows flicked upwards a good couple of inches.

  ‘No worries! Doesn’t take you long to pick up the local vernacular! How was the diving lesson?’

  ‘It was great.’ Mark answered for both of them and shuffled out of his chair and made for the stairs. ‘Order me chicken with the salad please, Tess, I’m off to the boys’ room.’

  ‘No better then?’ Theresa glared at him.

  ‘No, no better, darling, thanks so much for your concern.’

  Becky felt as if she was with a school party. It was so embarrassing, trailing round the teeming market with her dad chivvying at them all to stay together. He lacked only a games teacher’s whistle. Shirley and Perry took no notice of his attempts to keep everyone rounded up, Becky was pleased to see, wandering off together to admire the stalls as if they were in a nice Cotswold village at one of the quieter times of the year. Browsing contentedly, they picked up and inspected samples of the vast ranges of spices and vegetables and leather goods, wooden carvings, jewellery and coconut-shell etchings. Whichever direction Becky turned, steel bands were playing fast thrilling rhythms, patterns of sound that she couldn’t quite get the hang of. As she walked between the stalls, men made low, hissy noises at her as if she was a stray tiger cub. She turned in all curious innocence to look at the first few, surprised to catch sight of looks of unexpected hostility. More alarmed than she’d ever thought she would be, for after all she and her mates were well-practised at the sassy ‘piss off’ rejoinder, she hung on to Luke’s arm. He pulled a face but didn’t try to extricate himself.

  ‘It’s your own fault, you shouldn’t have worn those shorts,’ he said, eyeing her cropped T-shirt and tiny pink towelling shorts that showed curved little quarter-moons of her bottom as she walked. ‘Theresa was right, they’re just like knickers. She said little Amy and Ella wear bigger ones than that. Look at the local girls, they’re all covered up.’

  ‘Shut up, Luke, you sound just like Dad. How was I supposed to know?’

  ‘I sound like Dad? Shit.’

  ‘Yeah, well.’

  ‘AMY! Where the hell is she?’ Theresa’s shriek cut across the babbling market noises and her face was frantic with panic. ‘Becky, Luke, is she with you?’ Theresa was in front of them, clutching Ella’s wrist tight, her eyes scanning the crowd in terror.

  ‘She was with Marisa and Seb, I thought.’ Becky couldn’t see Marisa, but Sebastian was holding Plum’s hand and kicking at a squashed mango under a stall beside him.

  ‘She was, but Marisa lost sight of her. Stupid girl, she let go of her! You don’t do that!’ Theresa was close to tears.

  Mark appeared with a sulky Marisa. ‘Can’t see her around this bit of the market. I think one of us should go back to the restaurant. Amy might just remember where we were and there was that big blue plaster dolphin thing outside that she liked.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m not feeling so good. Is heat.’ Marisa’s face was blotchy with sunburn and she was fanning her face with her hand. There were oily beads of sweat above her eyebrows and she was breathing too fast.

  ‘And of course you don’t get much bloody sun in bloody Montreux do you?’ Theresa hissed. ‘I did tell you: cover up, use the sodding cream, put your hat on, but oh no you had to lie there like a roasting pig …’

  ‘Tess, this won’t help,’ Lucy cut in gently. ‘I’ll go and see if Amy’s at the restaurant, it’s only across the square. You stay here with Mum and Dad and if she’s not there, Simon and Mark and the rest of us can go round the market and look for her.’ She took a few steps and then called back, ‘Colette, stay with Becky and Luke.’ Colette glared, but Lucy had had to say it, just in case.

  She surely couldn’t have gone far. A six-year-old child frightened and all alone was surely more likely to stand still and wail and howl than to run off into even stranger territory. There were just so many people: tourists jostling and meandering with no real sense of where they were going, market traders accosting all and sundry and shouting about the quality of their T-shirts and sarongs, their crafts and paintings. Lucy’s eyes hurt with the effort of peering through the throng for small, pale Amy in her pink gingham hat. All the worst things crossed her mind, just as they clearly had with Theresa’s. Suppose the lost, crying Amy had been noticed and been led away to a car by someone who sounded kind? Suppose one of those comfortable plump cruise-passengers had more sinister holiday interests than deck quoits and minor shipboard gambling? Or what if she’d strayed as far as the docks and fallen in the water …

  ‘Hey Lucy! I think this is one of yours!’ Just outside the restaurant Henry was sitting on the big blue dolphin, Amy weeping quietly on his lap. Next to him was a miniature version of himself, a young boy with his streaky blond-and-black hair braided into dozens of tiny plaits. ‘We told you if we just waited, someone would show up, didn’t we Amy? And we were right!’

  ‘Oh poor Amy, did you get a bit lost?’ Lucy picked her up and hugged her tightly, almost tearful herself with relief. Over the child’s shoulder she gave Henry a shaky smile. He reached out and squeezed her hand, understanding. Amy, instantly recovered, wriggled round and pointed at the boy. ‘I like him. I like his hair. Can I have mine like that?’

  ‘This is Oliver, the son.’ Henry introduced him to Lucy and Oliver stood up and held out his hand politely, his smile showing the same perfect teeth as his father’s.

  ‘Glenda can do it for you, she’s my Nana. Sometimes she does it on the beach for people,’ Oliver told Amy.

  ‘Can I?’ Amy went on, her small fist thumping Lucy on the shoulder.

  ‘Ouch! You’d better ask your mum.’ Lucy laughed.

  ‘Ask her as soon as you see her, that way she’ll be sure to say yes,’ Henry whispered to Amy. ‘You OK?’ he asked Lucy. ‘You must all be going crazy. The one time I took Olly to London he went down one escalator at Oxford Circus while I went up another. I thought that was it…’ Together they made their way back through the crowd across the market square. A ship’s siren was sounding, rounding up passengers for the journey to the next day’s port. ‘Horrid noise!’ Amy squealed, putting her hands over her ears.

  ‘About that drink,’ Lucy said to Henry as soon as it was quiet again, ‘let me buy you one. You’re owed, big time. We could go to that bar you were telling me about.’ She bit her lip, wondering if perhaps he’d rethought since that morning, changed his mind or met someone else – a holidaymaker with instant sexual fun on her mind and less than thirteen travelling companions to fit in with.

  ‘Sure. About nine? See you in the lobby.’

  Theresa’s hand shook as she applied her eyeliner. This wasn’t supposed to happen. The whole point of taking the au pair was that she and Mark would be able to have some time off, time to be together and recapture – well, something. She wasn’t sure what had gone missing exactly (though lately the sex certainly had) but it was as if when Mark went out of the house to work each day he’d left a bit more of their relationship on th
e train. He was shedding her and the children like a cat moulting away excess summer fur. And now he was always tired too. It was as if the enormous amount of effort that had gone into producing their children had worn his sex drive completely away. There’d been too many years of the mathematical passion-swamping calculation of the ovulation charts, the sex that must be done now and the monthly disappointment. But after all the efforts had paid off and the twins had been born, then later the sweet bonus of Sebastian too, it was as if Mark had decided he was now redundant and anything more than minimal bed-effort was pointless. Theresa recalled other holidays, afternoons of Italian heat, post-lunch, post-wine, lying together in cool shuttered villa bedrooms, snatching fast pleasure while their babies slept. Perhaps it was something to do with food, she wondered; maybe fried chicken and iced water didn’t have the same arousal effect on Mark as pasta Puttanesca and a bottle of Barbaresco.

  Marisa was sleeping now in the adjoining room, her face a lurid pink mess against the white pillow. At least she’d stopped being sick. The taxi driver hadn’t been too pleased, having to stop twice for her on the short trip between the town and the hotel. ‘It was food, maybe, something I eaten,’ Marisa had said, wailing quietly but persistently as if she was gently keening for something lost and making Theresa want to slap the silly suffering girl.

  ‘It was too much sun,’ Theresa had snapped back.

  ‘Leave her, she feels bad enough,’ Mark had said quietly. It was all right for him, he didn’t have to look after the fat Swiss slob. As if absolutely nothing was going wrong, he’d gone off to slaughter Simon at tennis. Where had he been when she was calling room service for all those bottles of mineral water, at the same time trying to supervise the children’s baths and sort out beds for the twins in their room alongside Sebastian? In fact where was he now?