SUNLOUNGER 2: Beach Read Bliss (Sunlounger Stories)

by Belinda Jones

  *

  Jack drove and drove along the coast road, watching the twinkling lights of the glitterati’s playground whizz by – Juan les Pins, Antibes, Nice, Cap Ferrat, Villefrance and then finally, as the road climbed up and away from Nice’s sprawling, bustling streets, past the cliff top village of Eze, and twisted and turned in thrilling hairpin bends, Jack roared the Lamborghini into Monte Carlo: the Toytown of the rich and famous. He didn’t really like Monaco. It was all too plastic, too clean, too unreal. But the drive here was such a rush that it made the visit worthwhile. All he needed was somewhere to sit down for a while, have a drink to steady his nerves, and then work out what he was going to do next. He pulled up by the harbour, near a club he’d been to before with Eve. He didn’t know where else to go. Jack shook his head at the line of cars he found himself parked beside. Row-upon-row of Ferraris, Bugatti Veyrons and much flasher Lamborghinis than the one he was driving. Anywhere else in the world, a yellow Lamborghini would be admired, photographed, envied. Christ, if he drove it into his parents’ street there would be a stampede to ogle at the yellow beast! But here? Here, parked among the toys of Europe’s most spoilt rich kids, it looked positively modest.

  There was a queue for the nightclub, and Jack wasn’t one for queues. So he found a bar right on the harbour’s edge, where he could settle down with a refreshing beer, and watch the beautiful and the damned as they spilled out of bars and nightclubs and into limos and onto yachts. They might have impressed him once, these rich, fortunate few, with their high cheekbones and large hedge funds and intimidating sense of entitlement. But that was before Eve. Jack had seen this lifestyle up close now and under the microscope, it didn’t look so pretty. In fact, it turned his stomach. He craved normality. Something tangible. Something of true value. Something real.

  What should he do about Eve? He had calmed down during the drive, and while he was sure the relationship was over, he did concede that the suitcase fiasco was entirely his fault and that he really should reunite her with her beloved belongings before he took an early flight home, or spent a couple of nights in Nice, or whatever the hell it was he was going to do next. He checked his phone. There were five pitiful texts from Eve, telling him she loved him and begging him to come back. Wasn’t it ironic that the minute he stopped loving her, she finally started to love him? Or was she just too used to having her own way to let him go of his own free will? He suspected that it was Eve’s ego hurting right now, not her heart. He wasn’t really sure whether she actually had a heart. Not that it mattered now. He put his phone away.

  He was just about to leave to drive back to Juan les Pins when he saw her, dancing along the harbour-side in a familiar gold dress, followed behind by a whole troop of young men in crisp white shirts and dark designer jeans. She looked like the Pied Piper leading a pack of innocents to their eternal fate. And they were going gratefully. Jack grinned and then he laughed out loud. Fate had finally smiled upon him. There, only a few meters away, was the beautiful blonde from the airport and, better still, she was wearing Eve’s dress. So that was what had happened to the suitcase! He knew it was wrong that she was wearing Eve’s clothes but he couldn’t judge her. Not when the dress looked so good on her and not when she was having such fun wearing it. A dress like that was made to have fun, right? Eve had only worn it once at a very stuffy dinner party and it had hung in the wardrobe ever since. Jack watched her dance all the way to a particularly swanky yacht, moored just along the harbour front, and although he felt sad when she disappeared on board, he knew now that he would see her again. Tomorrow morning in fact, if all went to plan. He couldn’t wait. He didn’t feel jealous of the men following her so expectantly. He could tell, even from this distance, that she was only playing with them – a slinky glamour puss, toying with her mice. She wanted Big Love. She wouldn’t be shallow enough to waste her time on those plastic Ken dolls. Let her have her fun. At least she wasn’t living a little life.

  He sped all the way back to the villa, ignoring the sights this time, and crept back in silently. He checked that Eve was fast asleep and then quietly stole the fake suitcase from the bedroom. He took it into one of the guest rooms, shut the door and turned on the light. The case wasn’t locked. Instead the zips were tied together with a rather grubby pink ribbon. He undid the knot, opened the case and began to carefully unpack the contents. A leopard print bikini, a neon pink thong, three pairs of flip-flops, a fell-thumbed copy of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, a very tired little teddy bear, a tie-dyed sarong, a bottle of suntan oil (factor 2!), lacy bras in rainbow hues, tiny knickers that made him blush… Jack felt a bit like a stalker, as he went through the blonde girl’s clothes, but he had to find what he was looking for. There! Finally, tucked underneath a vintage Nirvana T-shirt (which Jack was both surprised and impressed to discover), he found a very battered diary. He opened the front cover to discover her name, her mobile phone number and her address in Bristol. Jack grinned. Bingo!

  ‘Hello Lara Flanagan,’ he said out loud.

  Jack neatly replaced everything back into the suitcase and then texted the number he had just found.

  Hi Lara, my name is Jack Devlin and I appear to accidentally have your suitcase. I think you might have my friend’s suitcase too, so I was hoping we could meet at the airport in the morning to swap them back over? How about 9am at the café in the Arrivals Lounge? Let me know if that’s OK. You’ll be able to spot me quite easily - I’ll be the one carrying your case! Thanks, Jack.

  He read and re-read the text before he sent it. Was that OK? Would she come? He knew the use of the word ‘friend’ to describe Eve sounded a bit weird but what else could he say? Girlfriend? She wasn’t that anymore. Not in his head at least. Ex-girlfriend? No. That took far too much explanation. It was 2am. Would she think it was weird that he’d got in touch so late? No! She was at a party on a yacht on Monaco. She wasn’t the type to find nocturnal texting weird. He finally pressed send and then tried to get some sleep in the guest room, but his mind was racing. What if she didn’t wake up in time to meet him? What is Eve caused a scene and made him late? What if she was actually a thief and she had no intention of returning the case at all? No, that was silly. He was the one who had taken her suitcase. All she’d done was make the best of a bad situation. Something he suspected Lara Flanagan was rather good at.

  Finally, just before seven, Jack gave up trying to sleep. It was only just beginning to get light. He had a black coffee and a cigarette on the terrace and stared out at the sea. It looked dead calm and almost black in the early morning light. At eight, he left a note by Eve’s bed, saying, ‘Gone to collect your suitcase. Back later.’ And then he left. The air felt eerily still, as if it was holding its breath, waiting for something to happen: something to end or, perhaps, something to begin.

  *

  Tash opened her eyes, blinked at the sunlight and winced.

  ‘Oh my God, what happened to my head?’ she asked nobody in particular.

  ‘Shh,’ a shadow crossed her face and a body loomed above her.

  Tash frowned and stared until the body finally turned into Lara, still wearing the gold dress but carrying her Jimmy Choos in her hand.

  ‘Shhh,’ she repeated, holding her hand out to Tash. ‘You’ll wake them. Come on.’

  ‘Wake who?’ asked Tash, confused.

  Where was she? She looked around uncomprehendingly. Her stomach felt weird, as if the world was moving beneath her. And then she remembered, she was on a yacht in the harbour in Monaco, wearing another woman’s designer dress, surrounded by strange young men she’d never seen before. And she appeared to have fallen asleep on the deck! Oh shit, what would Dan say?

  ‘Don’t worry, Dan never needs to know,’ said Lara, reading her mind as she often did. ‘Now we need to go, Tash. Quickly. And quietly! Before they wake up.’

  The girls tip-toed off the boat, stepping over unconscious young millionaires and trying not to giggle too loudly. Then they ran bare-foot, all the way back up
the hill to the train station, still a little drunk, as they shared flashbacks of the night before. They got the early train to Nice, surrounded by smartly-dressed professional types, and American tourists from the cruise ships docked in Villefrance. The other passengers stared at the girls’ bare feet, crumpled gowns and smudged eye make-up with a mix of judgement and amusement.

  ‘The Train of Shame,’ whispered Lara to Tash. ‘Isn’t it funny? Oh look, here we are. Just in time. We’d better get back to the hotel quickly and repack the stuff. We have to be at the airport by nine.’

  ‘What?’ asked Tash, confused. ‘You didn’t mention anything about that before? What’s going on?’

  ‘It’s simple,’ replied Lara, pulling an exhausted Tash to her feet. Some guy called Jack sent me a text. He has my case. I have his friend’s. So we’re meeting at the airport to swap them back over. No biggie. See? I told you it would all be OK?’

  Tash rubbed her sore head. How did Lara do this? She found herself in the most extraordinary situations and yet she always behaved as if it was absolutely normal.

  ‘Are you sure this is a good idea?’ asked Tash, back at the hotel, as they manically scrubbed dirty marks off designer gowns and shoes, and tried to roll the dresses back up as neatly as they’d found them.

  ‘Of course,’ scoffed Lara. ‘There’s nothing weird about it. We’re just returning the wrong suitcase. There all done! I’ve replaced the lock and everything. No one will ever know a thing.’

  Tash sighed. Could they really have got away with it that easily? They’d deliberately taken a suitcase they knew wasn’t theirs, broken into it, worn several thousand pounds worth of designer clothes and ended up spending the night on a stranger’s yacht in Monte Carlo. Surely something had to go wrong. And then it happened…

  ‘Oh no, I don’t believe it, it’s him,’ said Tash with a sinking feeling, as the girls approached the café, wheeling the suitcase behind them a little guiltily.

  ‘Who is he?’ asked Lara, waving at the really rather gorgeous guy, sitting in the café with her own suitcase. ‘He looks nice.’

  ‘You mean he looks hot,’ scoffed Tash. ‘He’s a sleaze. He was ogling you at the bar in Bristol airport. When you went to the loo, his girlfriend had a massive go at him for staring at you, and then they had a huge fight and she flounced off in tears.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Lara. ‘Whoops! I didn’t notice.’

  ‘No, you wouldn’t,’ said Tash.

  Lara rarely noticed the car crashes she left in her wake.

  ‘He said the suitcase belonged to his friend, not his girlfriend,’ Lara whispered to Tash as they got closer.

  ‘Of course he did,’ replied Tash without even trying to lower her voice.

  The undeniably handsome Jack Devlin stood up and offered a strong, tanned hand to Lara first and then Tash. He was dressed in exactly the same way as all the rich guys in Monaco the night before: stone chinos, pale blue shirt, Rolex, Ray-Bans, Hermes belt, dark hair swept back off his chiselled face with wax. He was a walking cliché of a player by Tash’s reckoning.

  ‘I believe this belongs to you,’ he said, a little nervously to Lara, who was gazing at him adoringly, as if he was the perfect manifestation of all her Christmases coming at once.

  Why was she such a sucker for a player?

  ‘And I believe this belongs to your girlfriend,’ said Tash tersely, handing the real Louise Vuitton back to Jack.

  ‘She’s not, erm, actually my girlfriend,’ mumbled Jack, blushing a bit.

  ‘Sure,’ replied Tash, abruptly. ‘Whatever. Well, we have to go. Thanks for returning the case Jack. Have a good holiday.’

  ‘Can’t you stay for a coffee?’ he asked, hopefully, almost desperately.

  ‘Yes!’ said Lara.

  ‘No!’ said Tash. ‘We have plans.’

  ‘Do we?’ asked Lara.

  ‘Yes!’ insisted Tash, grabbing Lara’s hand and dragging her away from the handsome bastard with the flash watch and the unfortunate girlfriend.

  ‘Bye…’ called Lara, wistfully over her shoulder.

  ‘Bye Lara,’ said Jack Devlin, forlornly.

  ‘Why did we have to go?’ asked Lara, almost angrily. ‘We don’t have any plans today, except to sleep off our hangovers on the beach. He was lovely! I liked him. I wanted to stay for coffee.’

  ‘He has a girlfriend,’ Tash reminded her sternly.

  ‘They’ve split up,’ said Lara.

  ‘What? Since last night? Don’t be so naïve Lara.’

  ‘I’m not naïve, I’m just more trusting than you are. He looked very honest to me actually. He might have been my ‘one’ for all you know – and you dragged me away. Don’t you see, we might have been destined for each other? Why else would he have accidentally taken my suitcase? We were obviously meant to meet. And you just ruined it!’ said Lara, almost petulantly. ‘Where’s your sense of romance, Tash? ’

  ‘Probably hiding under the same rock as your sense of reality, my love,’ replied Tash, trying to be funny and cheer her friend up. ‘Come on. The guy has a girlfriend. Forget him. We’re in the Cote d’Azur – there are hot guys everywhere! And we have the whole weekend to find you one if you’re in the mood for romance. It’s not as if you struggle to attract them!’

  ‘I suppose,’ sighed Lara. ‘But I really liked that one. There was something…I don’t know…different.’

  ‘No lovely, he was exactly the same as all the other good-looking bastards you’ve fallen for. Except richer and even more handsome. Which makes him a lot more dangerous. Believe me, he was bad news. Anyway, you’ll never see him again so what’s the point in speculating? He’ll go straight back to his glamorous, Versace-wearing girlfriend now and get on with his spoilt, indulged rich kid life.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Lara, thoughtfully. ‘I have a feeling I’ll see Jack Devlin again.’

  *

  Jack slipped into the villa, holding his breath, and waiting for Eve’s high pitched screech. He had been dreading facing her all the way back. But the villa was in complete silence. He sighed and let his shoulders drop a little. Maybe she’d gone out.

  ‘Eve?’ he called tentatively.

  Nothing.

  ‘Eve?’

  Still no reply. Jack allowed himself to relax a little bit. He carried the suitcase upstairs and found the bed still warm, but empty and unmade. A wet towel lay on the floor and the bathroom mirror was still steamed up from the shower. Wherever, she’d gone, he had only just missed her. The Gods were clearly on his side today. Then he spotted a note, written on the back of his own.

  ‘Baby, you are such a sweetie for getting my case. I love you soooo much. Let’s forget all that silly business about the suitcase. No need to apologise. I forgive you. I have no clothes so you’ll find me naked by the pool as a treat when you get back – lucky boy! Be a sweetie and mix me one of your special Margaritas before you come out to play. Let’s party! Xxx’

  He read the note and cringed. What a princess. What on earth had he been thinking? But it didn’t matter anymore. For Jack, Eve was already ancient history. He kicked off his deck shoes, took off his Ralph Lauren chinos and shirt, folded them neatly on the bed and placed the Rolex she’d bought him for Christmas on top. He didn’t know why he’d packed his old clothes from “before” but he had. Beneath the crisp shirts and trousers, he’d hidden an old pair of khaki shorts, a couple of white (ish) T-shirts and his trusty old Birkenstocks. As he pulled on his old clothes it felt as comforting and familiar as a hug from his mum. He looked in the mirror, grinned, and mussed up his hair. Eve would hate this look. She would particularly hate that his ‘vulgar’ tattoo was clearly visible on his left bicep for the whole world to see. He threw some Calvins, his swimming trunks, the other T-shirt and his wash bag back in his holdall and hung the rest of his clothes in the wardrobe. He wouldn’t be needing them anymore.

  And then, with a tinge of regret and a wave of relief, he wrote Eve one final note.

  ‘I�
��m sorry Eve, but I have to go. This was never going to work. We come from different planets. It’s time for me to go back to my own world. I wish you well.’

  There was no point in being cruel. He was free. Jack left her suitcase on the bed beside his folded clothes. She had what she wanted now. He felt sure she would miss him a lot less than she had missed her clothes. He didn’t look out at the pool for a final glimpse of Eve. He had no desire to ever see her again. He slung his holdall over his shoulder, closed the door of the villa, stroked the hood of the Lamborghini one last time on the way past, and smiled. OK, so maybe he would miss the cars! And then, without a backward glance, he walked out of the gates, and down the dusty road towards town, in search of a bus stop.

  As the bus groaned and choked its way along the coast road, Jack pressed his forehead against the window and stared out to sea. He already knew what he was going to do next. He just needed a little time to compose himself, a pause, to drink in this life-changing moment and capture it forever. Jack had been to the world’s most glamorous destinations, he’d travelled first class every time, in limos and Ferraris, helicopters and speedboats, but this rickety bus ride was the most important journey of his life. As the high rise apartments of Nice finally came into view, Jack picked up his phone. It was time to start living the life he was always supposed to have had. Wasn’t it strange that picking up the wrong suitcase, had led him to the right destination in the end?