by Judy Astley
‘His parents were from different cultures, too, one black, one white; one from here, one from England. They mixed,’ Colette pointed out.
‘Yes but …’
‘Yes but … not in our family? Is that what you mean?’ Lucy said quietly.
‘No, I don’t mean that, of course I don’t,’ Shirley insisted, smiling to lighten the mood. ‘Actually, it’s just me being purely selfish. We’re looking forward to seeing a lot more of you, help you get your life-sorted a bit. It’s not the colour thing, of course it’s not.’
‘Funny that,’ Lucy said. ‘But when people say that it’s like when they’re saying “It’s not the money, it’s the principle.” You can tell immediately it’s the money.’
‘Listen. The wind’s dropped right down,’ Mark interrupted. Perversely, the small children at last started to stir and wake.
‘You’re right, it’s almost gone,’ Simon said. ‘And we’ve survived.’
‘Have we, Simon?’ Lucy said. ‘I’m glad you think so.’
Fifteen
LUCY WAS AWAKE again as soon the night sky faded to a sulky grey. The rain was still falling, but more gently now, as if the sky was exhausted, and the wind had calmed to a brisk warm breeze no worse than on any English beach in July. Her body was aching and stiff from lying on the hard stone floor and there seemed no point in trying to get any more rest. If her own room had survived the storm, perhaps later she could catch up on sleep.
In the bathroom, the loo flushed successfully but she couldn’t hear the tank filling. She turned on the basin taps, but only a sad trickle emerged. She was reluctant to open the villa doors, afraid she would find that most of the hotel was lying flat beneath sand and rubble and fallen trees. There might be bodies out there, people caught running from tumbling buildings and then struck down by falling trees. She smiled, recognizing in herself a streak of Simon’s doom predictions, and padded back into the drenched sitting room. The towels that had once been so plump and white were lying crumpled on the floor, filthy and soaked with mopped-up rain. The room was steamy and hot now that the fan couldn’t work, and mournful drops of rain were still plopping from the ceiling onto the table. One of the sofas, for which they hadn’t been able to find a large enough section of dry roof, was sodden and stained with reddish-grey patches from where the rain had soaked through the remaining roof tiles.
‘Have you looked outside yet?’ Simon unrolled himself from the dry sofa.
‘No. Too scared. I had this awful half-dream that this is the only building still standing and that we’re the only people left alive.’
‘Oh it can’t be that bad, surely. We’d definitely have heard if the other villas had collapsed into the sea. Come on, let’s look together.’
Simon unlocked the front door and they took their first look across the bay towards the rest of the hotel.
‘Oh those poor trees,’ was Lucy’s first reaction. Not one of the magnificent palm trees had its leaves intact. All that was left on each was a pitiful stubby plume of tattered, broken stems. The remaining leaves hung miserably, as if they were clinging desperately to the trunk. The grass and the beach beneath were carpeted with shattered foliage, coconuts and shards of twisted fronds.
‘The hotel looks as if it’s still standing, or at least it does from here.’ Simon peered across the bay to the hotel’s three main blocks. The big stone sugar mill bar was still in its place on the far headland, where it must have faced a good couple of centuries of storms. It had probably seen far worse than this in its time.
‘We can’t see much from here. What I can see though,’ Lucy pointed to the grass a few yards away, ‘is our water tank. It must have been wrenched off the roof.’
The ground beneath was sodden with lakes of rain that had nowhere to drain to, and mud had swept down from the hillside behind the beach, depositing an oozy slick across the ground, but the sea had retreated, leaving a new covering of fresh wet sand across the first ten yards of grass at the top of the beach. Huge boulders and pebbles now lay scattered on the foreshore where only smooth silvery sand had been the day before.
‘Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me!’ Becky sang, joining Simon and Lucy at the doorway. ‘Where are my presents then?’
‘Happy birthday Becks.’ Lucy kissed her. ‘I have got you one actually. It’s in my emergency bag.’ Lucy went back into the bedroom to find her basket and returned with a small package. ‘It’ll remind you of being here – though you might not think that’s a good thing.’
Becky ripped the paper off and scattered it on the floor, pulling out wind chimes made of blue ceramic fish. ‘Oh, it’s so pretty!’ she said, ‘I love it, thanks! I’ll hang it at my bedroom window and think about last night’s ultimate wind.’
‘Henry’s mother made it. She’s a painter really, but she does these too.’
‘An all-round talented family!’ Becky gave her a suggestive nudge and Simon frowned. ‘Becky, no smut please …’
‘Hey, I’m seventeen, I know about these things.’
‘I sincerely hope you don’t.’ Becky and Lucy looked at each other and laughed.
‘I’m seventeen, Dad.’ Becky hugged Simon. ‘Now isn’t seventeen a very significant age? Isn’t there something you’re supposed to be able to do at seventeen? And I’m not talking “smut” as you put it.’ Simon extricated himself and grinned at her. ‘Wait till your mother wakes up. I’m saying nothing about your present till she’s here, so don’t ask me.’
Only the small children had slept properly. The others woke after too little sleep and grumbled about aching backs and necks and feeling like wrecks. Perry reminded them that they could be feeling a lot worse.
‘I’m starving. Shall we get breakfast?’ Luke suggested as soon as he was awake.
‘If there is any.’ Mark felt as if he had a hangover but couldn’t remember whether this was likely to be true. A part of his barely functioning brain told him that if he really couldn’t remember, then the hangover was a probability.
Lucy and Colette set off with Simon ahead of the others, making a detour, at Lucy’s request, to check on the damage to the dive shop. The shop itself seemed to be intact, with only a small piece of the boarding ripped away from the door. ‘Probably one of the bits you did, Mum,’ Colette teased. The pedalos and jet skis had fared less well: the tarpaulin that had covered them had ripped away, taking with it a couple of canoes and one of the jet skis, which lay on its side nearby pinned down by a fallen almond tree. Lucy could see a bright pink pedalo floating upside down on the churning sea about fifty yards from the shore.
As they walked along the path above the beach the extent of the hotel’s damage became clearer.
‘Look at the games room!’ Colette yelled as she got close to it. Sand had been washed up the beach and in through its open sides, far enough to half-bury the football table. Next to it, the beach bar’s semicircular roof had completely disappeared. ‘Jesus,’ Simon said, ‘what kind of strength did it take to blow it clean away? There’s no sign of it.’
‘It’s probably in the middle of the ocean by now,’ Lucy told him. The sea had swept through, easily pushing aside the carefully laid sandbags that had proved so inadequate a barrier. A dead fish lay by the bar, a sad, poignant casualty. ‘Red mullet, I’d say,’ Simon said, looking at it.
‘You don’t really know,’ Colette teased him. ‘You just think you should pretend you do because you’re a man.’
Simon sighed and gave her a woeful smile. ‘You’re too young to be such a cynic,’ he told her. ‘Though, OK, I don’t know for sure, but it does look like a red mullet.’
Closer to the central building, Lucy tried to work out what was missing, what had changed. The whole landscape seemed different in ways that were confusing. At first it was hard to tell whether there was a huge gap in the view or whether the pool terrace had always been so open. She had to think, to refamiliarize. Then she realized: the huge tamarind tree that had stood beside the pool had gone. Mos
t of the tree, they could now see, was upended in the pool, which was muddied and full of leaves and sand. Flagstones on the terrace had been ripped out and cracked apart as the tree’s massive roots, which were now almost obscenely exposed to the air, had been hauled out of the earth. The white gazebo was another casualty, crushed to useless sad scrap beneath a slab of corrugated iron that must have flown from a roof nearby. The small speedboat that was used for water-skiing and which had been tethered to the turpentine tree was upside down, the branch it had been tied to stabbed through its windscreen.
Other guests wandered in the drizzle, staring about them, dazed like people in shock who’d stepped unscathed from a dreadful car accident. No-one spoke: there was too much damage to take in, as well as growing amazement at their own survival. The more Lucy – looked around her, the more awe-stricken she felt at the power of the elements. She gazed up at the terrace. Most of the dining-area roof was still there, though there were a few gaps and holes. Staff were already up ladders, fixing palm fronds back into place and improvising with thick polythene to keep the worst of the rain out.
‘We should check our rooms,’ Simon murmured to her. Lucy nodded.
The worst of the damage to their block was visible from just past the terrace. Lucy stopped and gasped at the scale of it: that mere moving air could do so much. The whole end section of their two-storey building was missing, leaving the corner rooms, upstairs and down, open to the air. The lower one was Simon and Plum’s room, wrecked as if by a bomb. Chunks of plasterboard were strewn across the floor. The chest of drawers was on its side and the minibar had been flung into the middle of the soaking wet bed. Light fittings dangled from the walls. The manager had been right about the louvres in the windows: there was glass everywhere and the balcony from the room above had fallen through the overhanging terrace shelter which was now crushed beneath concrete. A slice of the tiled roof had landed in the centre of the room above and Lucy could only pray that there was no-one beneath it. Simon went as close as he dared, feeling acutely distressed about the little green finch’s nest which could only have been destroyed. There was no sign of the birds, and the creeper where the intricate nest had been was flattened to the ground. Absurdly, he somehow felt it was all his fault. If only he hadn’t lured the lovely Tula in …
‘The wardrobe doors are still on.’ Simon’s voice was shaky. ‘Our stuff should be OK.’
‘It’s being on the corner, this bit must have taken the worst. I expect it’s the same the other end, from when the wind changed direction.’
There were several holes in the building’s roof, from where pieces of tree had crashed through. A branch, with a gouged pale rip along the edge where it had been torn from the tree’s trunk, was lodged through one of the upstairs windows as if someone had picked it up like a javelin and hurled it. The floor in Lucy and Colette’s room was rain-soaked, with broken glass everywhere and sand and leaves blown in, but otherwise the room seemed to have got off lightly. She checked the beds and tested them for dampness. They seemed more or less all right. Perhaps at least Colette could sleep for a while. It looked like the rest of them would be involved in major clearing up.
‘I can’t believe the staff have managed to organize food like this,’ Shirley said, astounded that tables had been set out, with fresh cloths, in rows like the night before. Smiling staff, relieved as the rest of them to be alive, came round to the weary guests with comforting pots of coffee and tea.
‘Did any of you get any sleep?’ Perry asked Tula.
‘No, sir,’ she smiled at him, ‘it was too exciting!’
‘Not the sort of exciting I’d want to do again in a hurry,’ he told her. ‘Still, as long as everyone’s OK.’
They were. Miraculously, no-one had been hurt except one of the Steves who had cut his hand in a drunken fall through his door, landing on broken glass.
Lucy went to get food from the buffet. She felt as if she wasn’t real. It was partly lack of sleep and partly amazement that everyone in the hotel had escaped a messy death in spite of the massive damage. When the gold lady tapped her on the arm and said, ‘You OK?’ Lucy was horrified to find herself in tears. The gold lady hugged her and said, ‘It’s OK, it’s not just you. Everyone’s feeling like this.’ Only Shirley, Perry and the other older guests seemed unaffected.
‘At our age, it’s on to the next day and be glad you’re there to see it. You don’t dwell on things,’ Perry told Lucy as she returned to the table with her toast.
Plum ambled in for breakfast after the others and was pounced on by Becky. ‘OK, now you can tell me about my present,’ she demanded.
‘It isn’t just you older ones who move on fast,’ Lucy said to Perry.
‘Well? Let me guess …’ Becky was eager. ‘Is it something that there’s more than one of and you need a provisional licence to do it?’
‘Well, you’ve been hinting long enough … so here you are.’ Plum grinned and handed over an envelope. Becky ripped it open.
‘Oh, great! A driving-school voucher! For a serious amount of money!’ She frowned. ‘Don’t you expect me to pass, then?’
‘We just want you to be competent. Not rush at it,’ Simon said.
‘Very sensible,’ Shirley approved. ‘You’ve always been thoughtful that way, Simon.’ He looked at her, puzzled.
‘You were always the one with a puncture-repair kit in your bike saddlebag. Don’t you remember?’ Lucy reminded him. ‘I bet you’ve got a cast-iron pension scheme too.’
‘Well of course,’ he told her. ‘Haven’t you?’
Lucy laughed ‘Oh, Simon, you haven’t a clue, have you?’
* * *
Theresa wanted quite desperately to have a bath and unpack something else to wear. She felt as if she’d worn the same blue linen dress for weeks, though in reality it was only on its second day. It had been the one she’d worn during the evening of the drunken swim (both seawater and alcohol drenched away in the shower) and, what with that and the horrendous storm, she now decided that it was a bad-luck garment and would have to go. Perhaps Lucy would like it. Theresa bit her lip and felt herself tingling with guilt. She’d been horrid to Lucy, really awful. The dress would hardly start to make up for it. And, too, would she be passing on the bad luck with it?
As soon as the children had finished breakfast, she intended investigating whether her room was habitable, dragging all her clothes out of the bloody wardrobe and soaking away all the night-time fear and sweat and mud in a deep and scented bath. In a big block building like that, surely there wouldn’t have been any damage to the water supply. And if there was, perhaps the high-paying guests in the villas would be priority to have their accommodation repaired, so she could use Shirley’s bathroom, once the muddy water had been swept out.
What she didn’t intend to do, she thought as she sipped her coffee on the dining terrace, was wander about aimlessly in the rain gawping at the damage like so many of the other guests were doing, clad in enormous white plastic bags with holes cut out for arms and legs, that the management had provided. It was rather late, she thought, those would have been handy the night before to protect the sofas and beds. One or two people seemed to find it amusing to attempt some kind of design statement with the bags, fashioning hoods, belting them and showing off childishly to others too exhausted to tell them to go away. At least Marisa was on the kind of form they were paying her to be on this morning. She was being wonderful with the children, cheerful and chatty and almost delirious with the joy of being alive. In contrast, Theresa could see Cathy and Paul slumped in a corner, arms around each other and Cathy clearly sobbing inconsolably. Paul caught her eye and she felt she had no option but to go and talk to them.
‘Cathy, what’s wrong? You didn’t get hurt or anything did you?’
Cathy blew her nose loudly and Theresa stepped back a little.
‘My wedding! How can I have my wedding?’
‘Why can’t you?’ Theresa was puzzled.
‘It’s a
ll ruined! The white thingy’s all broken and the tree’s in the pool and everything’s spoiled,’ she wailed. Theresa looked round, feeling embarrassed and at a loss. Lucy was across the room and Theresa beckoned to her.
‘What’s the matter?’ she asked. She looked at Theresa nervously, as if expecting a new set of long-held grudges to be unleashed.
‘Cathy says she can’t get married because the marrying place by the pool is all ruined. What do you think?’
Lucy thought for a moment. ‘Well, first of all, is your dress still OK? And how’s your room?’
‘The dress is fine, the room’s not too bad, it just needs sweeping out and stuff,’ Paul said.
‘Couldn’t you get married on the beach? With everyone from the hotel? We could all do with some celebration. And the one thing hotels don’t run short of is booze.’
Cathy sniffed heavily but the sobbing had stopped at last. ‘It was supposed to be this morning.’
Theresa took hold of her hand, which surprised Lucy. Theresa had never been the tactile sort, never comfortable with people who hugged at random and pulling herself in when trapped next to anyone who tended to emphasize conversational points with nudges and touches.
‘So, OK, today’s not really on. But if you go ahead tomorrow,’ she told Cathy, ‘just think about it: you’ll have one hell of a story to tell. “My hurricane wedding nightmare”. It’s almost sellable.’
Paul’s expression perked up enormously ‘Perhaps it is sellable. We could get some great pictures …’
‘There you are then. So much better than some ordinary dull old wedding.’ Theresa smiled. Lucy was suspicious. Theresa sounded mildly patronizing and manipulative, as if she was successfully getting her own way with a grizzly child. She couldn’t work out what she was up to. As they headed back to join the others she pulled Theresa out into the lobby where no-one could hear them. She had to ask.
‘Theresa, why do you care so much whether they get married or not? I didn’t think you even really wanted the girls to be bridesmaids.’