Excess Baggage

by Judy Astley

  Henry led them all through what looked at the front like a dilapidated beach bar, constructed from loose rough slabs of multicoloured corrugated iron. There was a patchy bird-chewed palm roof and the name ‘Yellow Poui’ roughly painted over the doorway. Shirley eyed the place with deep suspicion and gave Lucy one of the famous Looks, but she followed Henry through the dark tatty little bar room and out to a shaded garden behind.

  ‘You wouldn’t have known all this was here, would you?’ Shirley said, looking round with surprised delight and marvelling at the array of immaculately arranged cacti, the eponymous yellow poui flowers, enormous agaves and low-growing palms set into cool gravel. Tables were arranged around a small pool with a fountain in the centre.

  The only other customers were from the hotel, the young couple that Simon called the Gropers. Their fingers were interlocked on the table and Lucy managed (just) to resist looking at their legs to see if they too were twined like twisted hazel twigs. It was a long time since she’d had someone wanting to be so literally attached to herself. She smiled across at them, hoping they couldn’t read a reluctant flash of envy in her eyes. That kind of never-let-me-go pop-song clinch was strictly for those under twenty-five, fresh new lovers, the ones who hadn’t been worn to cynicism by disappointments and failed false starts. Rotten Ross, as she now thought of him, had preferred a distinctly hands-off arrangement, never so much as putting a friendly arm round her crossing a busy street in the pouring London rain. Lucy had assumed it was because he thought they were both a bit past all that surface affection, that it was too teenage and smacked of insecurity. Now that she’d been so casually jettisoned from his life she realized it was simply that he hadn’t liked her enough. Sitting opposite Henry, watching the easy relaxed way his body arranged itself between her and Oliver, she wondered what the hell had ever made her think she and Ross had even liked each other at all. At a table in the local Pitcher and Piano, where the noise level had made conversation something that you had to get seriously close together in order to enjoy, he’d sat looking round, his left leg flicking up and down restlessly like a drummer in a very bad rock band. His eyes had been forever darting about watching women coming into the bar, eyeing up the short-skirted groups of them before turning back to her and asking (as if it was simply noise level that drowned her out, as if he was almost interested), ‘You were saying?’ No wonder Colette had come up with her most cynical yawns when she’d put on make-up and fluffed up her short yellow hair for dates with him. She should have listened when her daughter had written him off (in a brutal ten minutes) as ‘not bad-looking but won’t last’.

  ‘It’s so lovely to have all the family together like this. I can’t think when Perry and I were last on holiday with the children. And never with all the grandchildren, unless you count Christmas or Easter get-togethers, that sort of thing,’ Shirley was saying to Henry, drinking her lime and soda through a red and white straw as contentedly as a child having a teatime treat in McDonald’s.

  Lucy experimented with a bit of mental distancing. If anyone had told her a year ago that her mother would be happily chatting in a Caribbean bar in the middle of an afternoon with a young(ish) attractive dreadlock-haired black guy, she’d have dismissed the prophet as totally nuts. Shirley’s usual afternoon companions tended to be a collection of golf widows, real widows and ladies heavily involved in charity committees and the few Masonic jollies that women were allowed to attend. They were women who dressed for respectability, never omitting a lace-edged silky slip beneath a skirt, even in the height of summer because it didn’t do to risk showing a leg-outline against the sun’s glare. Saggy upper arms were always covered with discreet cardigans or a smart pale jacket from Country Casuals. Now, though, Shirley was leaning against the back of her chair, fanning her warm face with her straw hat. She’d removed the silk scarf from the brim and given it to Oliver to use to tease a small tabby cat that reached up and grabbed as he dangled it just out of reach of its unsheathed claws. If Becky or Colette had played like this back at home, they’d have been told pretty firmly to find something a lot less valuable to mess about with.

  ‘There’s just Glenda, Oliver and me,’ Henry was telling Shirley in answer to a question about his own family. ‘Pa died a couple of years back.’

  ‘Did your mother ever think about going back to, well, home?’ Shirley wanted to know.

  ‘Glenda? Back to the cold? Are you serious?’ Henry laughed and banged on the table. ‘My dad was fine working in London when they got together, he’d saved for just about ever to get there and then he meets her and she wants to drag him back to live here.’

  ‘Succeeded, though,’ Lucy teased.

  ‘Wasn’t it ever difficult though, being … er …’ Lucy recognized Shirley’s generation’s difficulty with the vocabulary of sensitive race relations.

  ‘A mixed-race family?’ Henry supplied for her. ‘No. If you want to make it a problem, if you’re that kind of ignorant, then you can. Same as the rest of the world. We do have one thing that’s the other way though. Glenda paints – you should come and see her work, there’s a lot of hers in the big gallery in town. Living here for thirty years doesn’t count you in as a Caribbean artist. The big attention’s on ancient lifetime residents like Michael Paryag or Canute Caliste who’ve hardly been further than the next island. Look around you here though, there’s Hispanic, Asian, European, African. Most of us here are imports one way or another. There’s hardly any Carib Indians left.’ He chuckled. ‘Blame the Brits, the slave importers and the sugar trade that’s rotting the world’s teeth.’ He grinned, showing his own perfect set. Oliver’s were the same.

  ‘I just wish our Lucy could find a nice young man to settle down with. Then it would all be perfect,’ Shirley leaned forward and confided to Henry.

  ‘Mum! Do you have to?’ Lucy laughed but felt furious inside. It probably hadn’t crossed Shirley’s mind that she sounded exactly as if she was angling to make Henry her son-in-law before the fortnight was out.

  ‘Parents!’ Lucy grumbled to him, glad she was tanned enough to cover a blush. ‘At what age do they stop being so embarrassing?’

  ‘Hey, Glenda’s just the same. “When you gonna get that boy a little sister?” she says, just when there’s the maximum number of single women around.’

  Shirley smiled, pleased with herself. ‘You see? It’s what we’re for, all over the world. You two will be just the same with your own children.’

  Henry and Lucy looked at each other and grinned. ‘I doubt it, Ma,’ Lucy said. ‘After all, aren’t we supposed to learn from experience?’

  At the time it had seemed like a good moment. The children were splashing happily in the paddling pool with Marisa (in her new straw hat and thickly slicked with Factor 24) and Theresa had actually said she’d had a lovely day. After he’d told her, he’d planned, they could have a drink alone together at the beach bar, watch the sun go down and start getting on with the good times again, the way cleared, forgiveness and contrition in the air.

  He held her hand as they walked along the beach and down to the end of the pontoon to watch the brilliant fish feeding just below the sea’s surface. Two of the Phonetech Steves were racing and yelling on jet skis out in the bay. Below there was a school of the stripey sergeant majors, barely visible, rippling with the current, just letting it take them with no effort. Mark wished he could be like that, give himself up to a life with no striving. There were just too many things that had to be kept up. Not only the mortgage, which wasn’t as hefty as those of many of his friends: working for a bank did have some perks. It was more a question of that dreaded word: lifestyle. Way back when he was at school – studying for A levels he supposed he was, looking back – he’d assumed that you simply fell into whatever kind of existence you could afford. It had seemed obvious, then. Really rich people lived in whopping great houses, sent their kids to smart expensive schools and drove cars so new they never had to think about checking for tyre-wear. Non-rich people did
n’t, but they just got on with life. Simple. But he’d reckoned without Theresa who had Aspirations in the same way that some people had eczema: usually dormant but lurking ready beneath the surface to flare up at the slightest provocation.

  It had been all right before the children, at least for him. There’d been two incomes, a peaceful, chic home, long French and Italian holidays savouring food and wine. For Theresa, though, the years she’d put in working at the Ministry of Overseas Development were almost entirely years of lost time, of disappointment. The worst days had been those when she’d trailed home and reported, tearfully, that yet another junior colleague had just gone on maternity leave. Of course with two good incomes they could afford the IVF treatment. What they couldn’t really afford, on Mark’s income alone, were the resulting children, wonderful though they were.

  First there was the move to a bigger house at the smart end of Esher (though, Mark wondered, did it actually have an unsmart end?) The private obstetrician (‘Such precious babies’ the clinic had said, as if some babies weren’t), the simple delighted abandoning by Theresa of her job (at last with her own baby-swag from the maternity-leave office whip-round) and announcing that she never intended to go back but to dedicate herself to these long-awaited children. ‘It’s the least they deserve,’ she’d said, when he’d tentatively questioned whether child-care alone would be quite as fulfilling as at least a part-time career. The twins were already at a pre-prep school that cost an arm and a leg. His remaining limbs would be on the line after Christmas when Sebastian joined them. He’d suggested checking out the local primary schools and received a Look that rivalled the best of her mother’s specials. ‘Plum and Simon’s are state-educated,’ he’d pointed out.

  ‘That’s because Plum’s inherited peculiar Hampstead principles,’ she’d said. Mark couldn’t see a problem with Principles. They came a lot cheaper than Aspirations.

  ‘But Luke and Becky have turned out all right.’ He tried, weakly, to make a fight of it.

  ‘A matter of opinion,’ she’d stated, leaving him in no doubt that his own didn’t count.

  ‘There’s something I’ve got to tell you.’ Mark started slowly now with a safe enough cliché, he thought. The idea was that she’d guess something far worse than the truth and possibly be relieved. Perhaps she’d react like Lucy. No, of course she wouldn’t.

  Theresa said nothing, just looked at him and waited. She was supposed to say something along the lines of ‘You’re having an affair?’ and burst into betrayed, dismayed tears. He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his shorts and looked at her eyes which were mystifyingly trusting and lacking in foreboding.

  ‘I’ve done something very stupid and I’m really, really sorry.’ At last a flicker.

  ‘Is it money?’ she asked. ‘Have you done a Nick Leeson at the bank?’

  Mark laughed, then abruptly stopped. ‘No, no nothing like that. I’ve, well I’m not, well.’

  ‘Not well what?’

  ‘That’s it, I’m not well. I’ve caught something and, and I know you’ll hate me for this and I don’t blame you, I’d feel the same, sort of disgusted and cheated on and all that, but I do love you, really I do and I’d do anything not to be having to tell you this.’ Mark stopped wittering on and shoved his hand through his hair. He knew his gesture looked ludicrously school-boyish on a man of nearly fifty.

  Theresa’s eyes, when he dared risk looking at them, were quite steely now. ‘You’ve caught something? I suppose you don’t mean a bad cold? So is it herpes, AIDs, what?’ Her voice rose, panic setting in as she voiced the possibilities.

  ‘God no, nothing that bad. It’s NSU. I had to go to the clap clinic and get treatment. NSU’s not as bad as—’

  ‘Not as bad as WHAT exactly? Jesus! I can’t believe this! You said you’d got cystitis.’ Theresa put her hands over her ears, then her eyes, blocking him right out.

  Mark scuffed his feet and looked at his bare brown toes. He felt as if all of him was contaminated, that he sweated toxins.

  ‘Why?’ Theresa howled the word, then added, ‘And who? What filthy little tart have you been having it off with?’

  Mark shrugged, a dangerous gesture but dreadfully appropriate. ‘Er, yes. It was, actually. A tart.’

  Theresa gazed at him, puzzled, not understanding. ‘I haven’t been having an affair,’ he insisted, as if he was giving her the good news. ‘I wouldn’t do that, I wouldn’t …’

  ‘What? You wouldn’t be unfaithful? So you’ve been paying for it? And that’s not as fucking bad? Shit, I feel sick.’ Theresa wrapped her arms across her stomach and stared down at the pretty fish. ‘Always the same one?’ she then asked.

  ‘No. I didn’t even know their names. Only once or twice.’

  ‘Is that supposed to make it all right, because if you think it does …’

  ‘No. No I don’t.’ There was a silence.

  ‘Why weren’t you more careful? I mean haven’t you heard of condoms?’

  ‘I was.’ He shrugged miserably. ‘One split.’

  Theresa gave a brief laugh. ‘Oh well it would. You always were such a big boy, weren’t you?’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he ventured.

  ‘Sorry doesn’t come close,’ she muttered. ‘Just tell me, what did you go out looking for that you couldn’t get at home?’

  He shrugged again. ‘There’s nothing, just, oh I don’t know. The risk, the secrecy, just different … I won’t do it again, not ever.’ She glared at him, her face full of hate. ‘Why the hell not?’ she sneered. ‘You sure as fucking hell won’t be doing it with me.’

  ‘What’s a clap clinic?’ Colette hoped it was all right to ask Luke, that it wasn’t something that a girl of her age should know by now. She’d known most things ahead of others at her school, probably still did know some stuff that all those nice little good-at-netball girls would never need to find out about, like where to get a pregnancy-test kit in the middle of the night when everything was shut and your mother was tearful and scared. And she also knew that just because your mother had the kind of boyfriend (once, and very briefly) who was really friendly and bought you a PlayStation didn’t mean he couldn’t also be the sort who liked to stroke under your school skirt to the top of your leg just when you’d got to your best-ever level on Final Fantasy Seven. The police had come about that one, and then they’d moved on to another flat, fast.

  ‘It’s where you go to get fixed up when you’ve caught clap,’ Luke told her blankly, as if he could hardly believe she was asking this.

  ‘But what’s clap?’

  He folded his arms and gave her a superior smile. ‘It’s a sexually transmitted disease. Haven’t you done that lesson in school yet?’

  Colette laughed. ‘At my school? I don’t suppose we ever will,’ she told him, hoping, stalling, praying that he wouldn’t ask her why she wanted to know. She’d have to say it was something she’d been reading, not something she’d been accidentally overhearing down on the rocks at the end of the pontoon. After all, she quite liked Mark.

  Eight

  IT WAS RAINING again. Becky complained that if she’d wanted to get soaked right through to her knickers she could’ve stayed in England and walked very slowly to school every drizzly morning without a jacket. Shirley told her, quite sharply and in front of everybody in the bar after dinner, that she was a spoilt brat who didn’t deserve any holiday more luxurious than a cold rainy week in a leaky tent in Wales.

  In the daytime after the clouds opened and rain hurtled to the ground, steam rose when the sun scorched through and the heavy soaking bougainvillea dripped and sweltered. Plum said she could almost see it growing as she watched. She wished her garden flourished like this. At home in Wimbledon, heavy rain followed by generous sun always meant an extra helping of slugs and snails with newly sharpened appetites.

  In the evening the wind became brisker and blew welcome gusts of cooling air across the verandah along with more stinging blasts of rain. At dinner, every table o
ccupied by British guests had at least one question for the waiters about what the weather was going to do the next day. The staff shrugged and smiled and reminded them it was the rainy season. The words ‘What did you expect?’ hovered, politely unsaid. The young couple that Simon called the Gropers were barely on speaking terms. Lucy could read, from their slumped and miserable bodies as they sullenly and silently chewed their jerk chicken and rice, that something in their holiday had gone seriously wrong.

  ‘They’re getting married on Tuesday,’ Plum told Lucy, following her gaze across the dining room, ‘and that’s about when the big storm’s due.’

  ‘What, they’re getting married here? Just the two of them with no family?’ Shirley looked horrified.

  ‘Probably cheaper. A proper English wedding can set you back a fortune,’ Perry chipped in, then added, winking at Lucy, ‘not that I’d grudge it. It’s what a girl’s father’s for, saving up for her big day.’ He patted the area on his chest where he kept his wallet. ‘I’ve had yours gathering interest for a long while. There’s more than enough to do you proud.’

  Lucy’s smile was a strained one. ‘Dad, just do me a favour and lose it on the horses or give it to a cats’ home, will you? You know I’d hate that kind of wedding, all meringue frock and a sit-down rubber-chicken lunch at the Masonic hall.’