Excess Baggage

by Judy Astley

  She squeezed his tanned arm. ‘Come out with us to see the pelicans, Simon. I’ll drive, it’ll be fun, just you and me and Colette.’

  ‘No, no, you two go on your own,’ he said, frowning out at the benevolent sunlight beating down on the deceptively placid turquoise sea. Lucy couldn’t help smiling. He looked so much as if he was puzzling out a way to get all this complicated weather back under control, make it do what it was supposed to do and be kind to his holiday. She could hardly blame him for his anxiety, whenever it happened the storm could be catastrophic. But, however much Simon fretted, it wasn’t going to happen today.

  Out by the pool, the timid tourists who’d decided to stay put for the duration drifted around aimlessly, already wondering if they’d been overcautious. They’d spend an hour on a lounger staring into the distance but not really focusing. They ordered mid-morning rum punches instead of their usual fruit ones (well, as they weren’t going anywhere, what did it matter?), flicked through paperbacks, too twitchy to read properly, and then got up and stretched and went off to wander a hundred yards along the beach before scurrying back in case Armageddon should strike while they were out of sight of the beach bar. The Steves had taken to wearing their watches again, and to hell with the stripey tan, just so they could keep an eye on the progress of the hours. Perry told Shirley they looked as if they were doing a collective countdown for NASA.

  ‘You’d think the Grim Reaper was waiting behind the big tamarind tree,’ Henry commented as he and Lucy and Oliver banged nails into the boards that would protect the dive shop’s door and windows.

  ‘Too right. You should have seen them all after supper last night, drinking themselves into oblivion in the Sugar Mill bar as if they were about to be called up to fight World War Three. There was a wonderful gospel choir out on the verandah and some idiot with a sort of drunk-reverence voice said it was so much, more appropriate than reggae.’

  ‘Well that’s kinda natural and pagan, don’t you think? Having a crack at appeasing the gods.’

  Lucy laughed. ‘I think it would take more than a few hymns.’

  ‘Yeah, and you know I never thought it was right, the way in churches having a good voice for singing meant like you were somehow closer to being holy. The time we lived in England, my dad used to take me to the local church and I always wondered what it was about the choirboys that made them saintly enough to dress up in angel frocks. I ended up scared that if you couldn’t sing, you were gonna go straight to hell.’

  ‘Yeah, well, don’t forget I’ve heard you sing!’ That first morning, with Henry up the tree, seemed months ago.

  Oliver cut in, ‘He can’t even do happy birthday right!’

  ‘I’ll be able to see if you’re right on Tuesday, Oliver. It’s Becky’s birthday. She’ll be seventeen.’

  ‘And I get to be there for the cake and the singing?’ Henry asked. Lucy hesitated. Somehow Henry had become her friend, one she could now hardly imagine being without. Perhaps she’d gone too far, casually inviting him to join in with a family event. She bit her lip and bent to hammer a low nail so he couldn’t see her face.

  ‘You could come if you like, you and Oliver,’ she said. ‘Glenda too if she’s around. It’s just a cake and a quick drink before dinner.’ She looked up and smiled at him. ‘After all, it’s not as if you don’t know Becky.’

  ‘Sure I do, the little rum punch girl with too much thirst and dangerous taste in men.’ Henry grinned. ‘OK, I’ll be there, see if being one year older is making her a year wiser about men and alcohol.’

  Lucy laughed. ‘At seventeen? I doubt it.’ Or even at twenty-seven, or not far off thirty-seven, for some of us, she thought.

  As she worked, Lucy could hear from the sea’s edge the shrill, tense sound of Theresa taking care of her own children. Marisa had now negotiated for herself a good number of hours off to coincide with those of her smart nanny friend. Lucy had noticed that the two girls seemed to be getting a wicked thrill out of sprawling on loungers within sight of their employers, watching them making a hash of child-care, for the small children seemed gloriously inclined to play up far more to a parent than to a professional. The Norland girl’s family consisted of a pair of serious-faced chartered accountants who tended their baby with meticulous over-concern. It seemed to require both of them to have hands-on (or fingers-on, for they handled this child and its accoutrements with nervous delicacy) input for even the simple task of changing a nappy. Marisa and her friend sat with sly smiles as they peeped over the tops of the hotel’s old copies of the National Enquirer at these two struggling with tissues and lotions, wet-wipes and the wriggling, uncooperative child, and solemnly debating the tightness or otherwise of the nappy’s fasteners.

  Lucy, the boarding-up of the windows finished, sat on the sand next to Henry and sipped at a can of orange juice. She watched Theresa skipping about in the waves with her three giggling infants and wondered if Colette ever felt she’d missed out by being an only child. She’d always seemed to be such an independent girl, content to read or draw by herself rather than slop about being bored and pouty and whining for perpetual entertainment in the classic only-child manner. In school holidays, she’d never complained about being hauled out of bed early in the morning to accompany Lucy to whichever house was being painted, often to spend the day in a draughty unheated room, huddled cosily beneath dust sheets with a pile of apples and a book. It crossed Lucy’s mind, too, that Colette hardly ever watched television at home, partly because of the mountainous quantity of homework the school liked to set, but also because if the TV was off, it simply didn’t occur to her to switch it on when she was absorbed in a book.

  ‘Oliver, do you watch television a lot?’ she asked him. He looked puzzled for a moment, as if she’d asked him something weird like did he spend time looking for aliens in the sky.

  ‘Cartoons and stuff, sometimes, not much, movies I like. Oh and cricket when it’s us.’ He shrugged. ‘Glenda thinks it’s, what does she say Dad? Oh yeah, “a sorry waste of youth”.’ He exaggerated Glenda’s English accent and he and Henry laughed.

  ‘Just do it in the sea, Ella!’ Theresa’s voice cut through the laughter. Ella wailed something incomprehensible.

  ‘No, just where you are, just sit in the sea, Ella sweetie. No, really, we don’t need to go all the way back to the room.’ An even louder wail from Ella told those on the sand that she didn’t agree. The naked child, palely tanned all over now in spite of the Factor 25, splashed away from her mother to the edge of the sea. ‘Sweetie, just sit down and do it there, do a wee-wee now, darling, it’s all right, no-one will know.’

  ‘Apart from the whole beach.’ Oliver grinned at Lucy.

  Denied her request for bathroom facilities, Ella, still sobbing, finally squatted on the sand and sat for some moments concentrating hard while Theresa watched her and smiled gently, sure that she’d won the kind of battle Marisa never seemed to have to put up with. Lucy turned round and could see Marisa and the Norland girl smirking over their magazines at the little scene. There was a sudden appalled shriek from Theresa, who came dashing out of the sea. ‘You should have said! Oh, you dreadful girl, why didn’t you say you needed a poo?’

  Ella’s roar of protest, an infant’s version of ‘Well, you didn’t ask’ was almost drowned out by the delighted cackles from the two nannies. Theresa glared. Lucy tried to keep her face straight, glad it wasn’t down to her either to clean up the sand or to warn Marisa that back in England, a cheap flight to Switzerland for the au pair might be Theresa’s next Amex purchase.

  Lucy wondered if it was her imagination that the air that afternoon seemed just that touch more sultry than before. The canvas roof of the Jeep was stowed behind the back seat, but the speeding wind that flicked Colette’s hair across her face wasn’t making her feel any cooler.

  ‘It’s sticking to my skin,’ Colette complained, pushing snaky tendrils of it behind her ears.

  ‘Tie it back then. Haven’t you got a scrunchie w
ith you?’ Lucy was concentrating on avoiding ruts and potholes in the road.

  ‘Yeah, somewhere.’ Colette delved into Lucy’s basket in front of her, rummaged around and pulled out a green baseball cap. ‘There’s only this.’ She crammed it on her head, shoving her hair up inside it, then moved the rear-view mirror and pulling a face at her reflection. ‘Whose is it? Did you buy it?’

  ‘Oh that? No it’s Oliver’s, I think. I must have picked it up on the beach.’

  Colette giggled. ‘Good excuse to see Henry again then, to give it back.’

  ‘We’re seeing him tomorrow,’ Lucy told her. They’d arrived at the east shore now and she pulled up beneath a clump of trees close to the sandy edge of the beach. The sea was much rougher here, crashing up the beach and ebbing back, leaving angrily bursting bubbles of foam burying themselves into soaking sand. She could hardly hear her own thoughts. She switched off the engine and turned to Colette. ‘We’ve been invited to Henry’s house, to have supper. Is that OK?’

  Colette looked at her, puzzled. ‘Well of course it is. Why wouldn’t it be?’

  Lucy climbed out of the car. ‘No reason,’ she said, ‘I just thought you’d like to be consulted.’

  ‘That’s because it matters,’ Colette muttered, jumping over the side of the Jeep. Then, louder, she said, ‘You like him.’

  Lucy waited for Colette to come round to her side of the car and then she put her arm round her. ‘Of course I like him. Don’t you?’

  ‘You’ve liked men before.’ Colette was looking worried, fearful.

  ‘Well, this time we’re only on holiday.’

  ‘Yeah, shame.’ She glanced up suddenly and grinned. ‘Look! Out there by the rocks!’

  About twenty pelicans sat in a row on a rocky promontory, just above the reach of the spray, like a gathering of ancient ragged witches. Their huge beaks preened now and then into their feathers and they stretched their great wings, flapping lazily but going nowhere.

  ‘They look like they’re waiting to pick over a dead man’s bones,’ Colette said.

  Lucy laughed. ‘If your gran heard you say that, she’d say you’d been over-imagining.’

  Colette frowned. ‘How can you over-imagine?’

  ‘Don’t ask me! It’s a Gran thing. Though I do think it’s possible to do too much imagining the worst.’ They both laughed and then said together, ‘Like Simon.’

  They were the only people on the great wide beach. Lucy looked in the guidebook and read that tourist hotels weren’t built on this side of the island because of the sea’s roughness and the tides in early winter, which shifted the sands around and brought in great troughs of seaweed. Holidaymakers liked things reliably clean and calm and comfortable. This wasn’t the kind of sea that you could trust with a pedalo or a jet ski and a group of teenagers overexcited by rum punch and too much sun. As she watched the pelicans swooping to the sea, scooping out fish, Lucy caught herself thinking that this would be such a perfect spot to come to at the end of a working day, just to sit and collect her thoughts before the evening. They had four days left of their holiday. She couldn’t remember being in any other place where she’d felt so reluctant to go home.

  ‘What do you miss most from home?’ she asked Colette.

  ‘Nothing.’ Colette didn’t even hesitate.

  ‘No-one from school?’

  ‘School? No!’ Colette pulled a face. ‘I haven’t even sent anyone a postcard.’

  ‘Not even Isabelle?’

  ‘No.’ Lucy waited but Colette went on staring out to the sea. She clearly wasn’t going to say any more but Lucy could tell that this kind of silence was covering something that troubled her. Colette did this sometimes, keeping her problems to herself as if she was making sure she didn’t load them onto Lucy. Was it, Lucy wondered, something that lone-parent children, or even just lone children did? Or was it because Lucy tended to be pretty vocal when things in her own life went wrong, sharing her problems as if Colette was more of a best friend than a young daughter. Colette was probably protecting her from having to deal with a double set of unhappinesses, which was far more unselfish than she’d ever been. At least she hadn’t told Colette how hard it was getting, trying to find them a new flat. She would make sure she kept that one under wraps. It wasn’t fair to expect a girl of her age to have to think about anything more serious than problematical homework and finding the right kind of trainers in a size five.

  A car pulled up under the trees, yards from where they were sitting. ‘Never alone for long,’ Lucy sighed. ‘Even here.’

  ‘It’s OK, there’s plenty of room,’ Colette, ever grownup and reasonable, told her.

  There was the sound of laughter and a young couple ran from the car towards the sea. They hadn’t seemed to notice that anyone else was there. The girl was young, blonde, slim and pretty. She wore a bizarre outfit consisting of a bright pink bikini, a short and sassy bridal veil, long white gloves and white high-heeled shoes. Lucy and Colette watched as she kicked off the shoes into the sea and splashed in after them, giggling. Her new husband was wearing swimming shorts and a dark grey morning-suit jacket, nothing else. He was carrying a camera.

  ‘Do you think they got married in just that?’ Colette stared at them, grinning. ‘I think that’s just so cool.’

  ‘Maybe. Or there might be a dress packed away back in its bag.’

  ‘I’m going to think there isn’t a dress. It’s more fun.’

  The couple strolled up and down the beach, paddling and splashing about in the shallow water, jumping the bigger of the foamy waves which pounded up the wet sand. The bridegroom took photos of his new wife as she posed sexily, hands crossed, Marilyn Monroe-style, across her tanned thighs, and then with her perky veil pulled half across her face. Lucy started to feel uncomfortable about their position as unseen watchers when the girl lay down on her front in the surf and posed with her chin resting on the white-gloved hands. She had put her shoes back on for the shot, and her crossed ankles waved up behind her head. There was something vaguely pornographic about the whole scene, Lucy thought, and it became even more so when she rolled over, arched her back and let the veil and her hands trail through the water. The bridegroom stood over the girl, one foot each side of her body, photographing her face as her body snaked beneath him.

  ‘We’d better go,’ Lucy said, pulling Colette up from the sand. ‘We’ll go into the town on the way back, see if we can get a Telegraph for your gran.’ It felt important to keep talking, saying ordinary, even boring things. Colette, who could be just too perceptive, mustn’t pick up any clue that about this couple on the beach, Lucy felt, deep inside, an absolutely crushing boulder of envy.

  The Celebrity had arrived when no-one was looking, slipping in with no fuss and no recognition. Becky and Luke were furious – he or she must have sneaked in by a back gate. They, along with Tom, had hung around the reception area since lunchtime, waiting for the exiles to arrive from the nearby island of Coranna. There, the New York-based owners of an astoundingly upmarket hotel, an internationally renowned last word in hedonistic luxury, had decided not to risk having their guests see the place at even one roof-tile short of perfection and had closed the place down till any hurricane damage was put right.

  ‘It might not even hit Coranna. It’s barely the size of a small field,’ the gold lady had complained as the hotel staff dealt brusquely with their current guests’ enquiries, which interrupted the intense concentration needed while the staff huddled together over computer print-outs and clipboards, allocating suitably luxurious rooms to the new arrivals. The gold lady had waited at the reception desk for twenty minutes, just to ask for an extra bin liner to put her suitcase into on the night of the storm. ‘I’ve got a lot of baggage,’ she’d explained, ‘I need more bags.’

  The deputy manager, a woman of usually textbook politeness, had frowned at her and dismissed her with a glare, snapping, ‘We’re busy right now. You can buy them at the store across the street.’

  �
�Oh ho, the strain’s beginning to tell,’ Perry commented, overhearing.

  The new arrivals came from the airport in small groups. ‘Private planes,’ Luke had a go at impressing Tom, ‘they can only take a few at a time.’ The three teenagers stood around in the lobby, pretending to check out the noticeboards and looking at the postcards. Shirley, reluctant to admit to an almost equal curiosity, found she was dropping into the hotel’s gift shop more than once and spending a lot of time making up her mind between a hibiscus-flowered sarong and a pink straw hat, neither of which she would ever wear. A flurry of activity out by the reception desk had all of them peering round at a trio of American women, all well past sixty but clearly keeping up the glamour quotient.

  ‘Jesus, what is she like?’ Becky whispered to Shirley as they took in the sight of a blonde woman with a round chunky body and spindly bare legs, wearing turquoise shorts, high silver sandals and a tight translucent black top with the word ‘Star’ emblazoned across the front in silver rhinestones.

  ‘Do you think that’s her? The big celeb?’ Tom said.

  ‘It’s no-one I’ve seen before,’ Becky told him.

  Shirley giggled. ‘It certainly isn’t Madeleine Albright,’ she said.

  ‘It’s not even Elton John,’ Luke spluttered.