SUNLOUNGER 2: Beach Read Bliss (Sunlounger Stories)

by Belinda Jones

  ‘I can’t do this for the rest of my life,’ she said. ‘I can’t let this become my life! I barely have time to comb my hair anymore let alone see my family.’

  So Katy quit and after a few months of temping, she gathered up the courage to make her hobby her vocation. She rented the corner of a studio and bought herself a second-hand potter’s wheel. Now her ceramics were for sale in London’s best galleries. She had recently been featured in The Sunday Times magazine as an artist to watch out for.

  Meanwhile, Melanie had stayed at the law firm, rising steadily through the ranks, accumulating a swanky flat, fancy furniture and a car she never had time to drive. The flat was pristine. She hadn’t put a single picture on the walls. The only sign that anyone actually lived in the place she called home was the elegant porcelain fruit-bowl on the coffee table: a gift Katy had made especially for her.

  As the taxi neared Heathrow, the billboards on the side of the road were increasingly taken up with advertising holiday destinations. Melanie let her BlackBerry rest idle in her lap for just a moment and gazed up at some of the boards as though they were actual views. Barbados with its golden sand and azure seas. Lapland with its pristine snow. Rainforests and deserts. Ancient cities and modern metropolises. There was so much of the world she hadn’t seen. But it was a picture of a stunning, half-moon beach on the west coast of Wales that affected her most. It was so close. She could have got on a train from Paddington and been there in half a day, but she hadn’t really been anywhere for years on end. When she did manage to get out of London, it was to see her aging parents in Surrey – visits that left all parties feeling slightly worried. Melanie worried that she didn’t spend enough time with her father and mother. They worried that she looked tired and seemed to have entirely lost her enthusiasm for life.

  But New York would change all that! The city that never sleeps. A move to New York would be the shot in the arm Melanie needed. It would reenergise her. It would renew her enthusiasm about her profession. She would make new friends.

  Although, Melanie didn’t quite have time for her friends in London. Katy was endlessly understanding and kept on sending invites to dinner and Sunday lunches despite the number of occasions on which Melanie had stood her up at the very last moment to finish a deal involving eight lawyers all on different time zones.

  The West Wales billboard was repeated several times on the last stretch of motorway to the airport. At one point, the taxi waited at a traffic light right beside the picture and Melanie gazed at it until she could almost feel herself there, with the clean white sand beneath her feet and the soft salty sea-air around her. So far from the concrete jungle she passed through now and yet so near. She could be there in three hours by train.

  Melanie checked her watch and went on-line to make sure her flight was still on time.

  ‘Where do you really want to be?’ the little voice in her head asked her.

  She’d been asked that question for real the previous week. The secretaries at work had been doing a quiz in the back of a magazine one lunch-time. Lorraine, Melanie’s favourite, had thrown the question at Melanie as she passed by. It was a multiple choice question and the answers were a) Ibiza, b) Barbados and c) a windswept beach in Wales. The secretaries, who had all plumped for the Caribbean, were astonished when Melanie chose c.

  ‘For the solitude, the peace and the majesty,’ she said.

  The other women nodded in incomprehension.

  ‘Here we are,’ said the driver, as he pulled up to the kerb outside the BA Terminal.

  Melanie got out and tipped him a tenner when he handed her the overnight bag she had neatly and efficiently packed with just those things she would need for her two nights in the Big Apple. A perfect capsule wardrobe in black and grey. Concrete grey, not the ever-changing grey of the Atlantic.

  Despite being so worried about getting to the airport on time, now Melanie stood on the kerb until the taxi driver asked if she was OK.

  ‘Of course,’ she said, shaking herself out of her trance. ‘Of course. Thank you for getting me here so quickly.’

  ‘You take care, love,’ said the driver. ‘Wherever it is you’re going.’

  Melanie had not discussed the details of her trip with her driver. She didn’t like anyone to know how far she was going and how long she would be away for, imagining that they would send a team of burglars around to her house the second she was in the departure lounge.

  ‘This is the opportunity of a lifetime. Who wouldn’t want to live in New York! All that energy. All that excitement. All that…’ Melanie started the self-talk again.

  At last Melanie had reached the front of the queue for the check-in desk. She reached into her briefcase for her travel document wallet. She pulled out the printouts of her e-ticket and ESTA and details of the car that would meet her and the hotel where she would stay. She handed the e-ticket over. The check-in clerk continued to look at her expectantly.

  ‘Passport?’ she eventually said.

  Passport! Melanie’s passport was not in the document wallet. She checked the outside pocket of her briefcase. She sometimes put it there so that it would be easy to reach when she needed it. But it wasn’t there either. Neither was it inside the briefcase. Or in her overnight bag. She emptied both out onto the floor and checked every nook and cranny. Her passport was nowhere to be found.

  A queue was growing behind her. Seeing Melanie’s distress, the check-in clerk stepped out from behind her desk and helped her to repack her bags.

  ‘I can’t believe I forgot my passport,’ Melanie wailed. ‘I feel like such an idiot.’

  ‘It happens all the time,’ said the check-in clerk. ‘You’d be amazed how often. The funny thing is when you see how relieved some people become as the realisation sets in, as though their subconscious had worked out a way to keep them from having to get on the plane.’

  ‘But I’ve got a job interview,’ said Melanie. ‘I have to be there tonight.’

  ‘And you still can be, if you really want to. Your ticket’s exchangeable. There’s another flight at nine o’clock.’

  Melanie took the Tube back into London. As she passed through South Kensington station, she saw the poster for that beach in Wales again. When she got to her pristine flat, she found the passport on the console table in the hall, where she had put it so she wouldn’t forget. How had she managed to walk by without picking it up? Why?

  Katy had sent her a text message.

  ‘Bon voyage. Hope everything goes well, career-girl.’

  Melanie emptied her overnight bag and hung up the black and grey clothes in the black and grey wardrobe. She took off the black and grey ensemble she had been wearing to take the flight and pulled out her one pair of jeans.

  She phoned Katy and explained about the missed passport.

  ‘Couldn’t you get on a later flight?’ Katy asked her.

  ‘All today’s flights were full,’ Melanie lied.

  Melanie emailed the New York office to say she wouldn’t be coming, then she emailed the HR department of the London office to say that she needed to talk. And two weeks later she did leave the city. But not to go to New York. She headed instead for Wales.

  It all happened so suddenly and so easily. One of Katy’s artist friends found Melanie a place to stay in Newgale, a village which could not have been more different from New York. And that was what Melanie wanted. The bright lights of the world’s big cities had left her cold and lonely. Here was a place that enveloped her with true warmth. Standing on that pristine beach from the poster for real at last, Melanie breathed sea-air deep into her lungs and smiled up at the lemon-yellow sun, knowing that if she never got on an aeroplane again, she would be perfectly happy with that.

  About the Author

  Chrissie Manby is the author of sixteen romantic comedies including GETTING PERSONAL, THE MATCHBREAKER and SEVEN SUNNY DAYS. She has had several Sunday Times bestsellers and her recent novel about behaving badly after a break-up, GETTING OVER MR. RIGHT,
was nominated for the 2011 Melissa Nathan Award.

  Chrissie was raised in Gloucester, in the west of England, and now lives in London. Contrary to the popular conception of chick-lit writers, she is such a bad home-baker that her own father threatened to put her last creation on www.cakewrecks.com. She is, however, partial to white wine and shoes she can’t walk in.

  Chrissie’s new novel A PROPER FAMILY HOLIDAY will be published by Hodder in June 2014.

  Facebook: Chris Manby www.facebook.com/chris.manby.1?fref=ts

  Twitter: @chrissiemanby

  Website: www.chrissiemanby.co.uk

  Visit www.sunloungerstories.com to discover more about the authors and their story destinations.

  We have everything you need to make this your Best Summer Ever!

  Return to the contents list.

  An Accidental Proposal

  ***

  Louise Marley

  DESTINATION: New Orleans

  Luca’s phone wouldn’t shut up. He switched it to silent and was tempted to switch it off altogether, but there was something oddly hypnotic about watching notifications bounce past without doing a thing about them.

  He’d had twenty-eight emails from his manager. No, wait…twenty-nine. It was beyond stupid. Because, obviously, if he was not going to answer the previous twenty-eight, he’d definitely respond to number twenty-nine, right?

  Ah, make that thirty.

  Luca turned over the phone so the screen lay flat against the table and picked up his bourbon instead. The humidity had melted the ice long ago, leaving the bourbon warm and watery. He drank it all the same.

  Bourbon on Bourbon Street. He’d been unable to resist it. And while he was wallowing in irony, he’d chosen a hotel room with a balcony overlooking the busiest street in the Quarter too. Half the English-speaking world was looking for him, yet all anyone had to do was look up and they’d see him. Beyond stupid.

  When Luca had walked off stage last night, he’d kept on walking – past the fans, past the tour bus and straight into the nearest cab. The reason was the envelope on the table in front of him, containing a hastily scrawled letter and a thick, chunky ring.

  Dear Luca, the letter began. I know Remy would have liked you to have this ring. He was thrilled by your success and would tell anyone who would listen how he knew you from the old days, before you were famous …

  Unable to continue reading (he’d read the letter so many times now, he knew it by heart) Luca folded it into four and tucked it into his wallet. His old friend had died almost three years ago now and while his widow had explained that it had taken her this long to pluck up the courage to sort through his possessions, receiving this letter yesterday had been a shock.

  And then there was the ring itself – solid silver, big and chunky, shaped like a grinning skull. The rubies in its eyes were real. Luca knew that because he’d worn its twin on his right hand for the past five years. Remy had given him that ring too, to bring him luck, and it had – right from about the same time Remy’s had run out.

  Luca slid the ring onto his left hand to see how it looked. Completely wrong, was the answer to that, so he switched them around. That was worse. So he took Remy’s ring off altogether, cursed and had another swig of bourbon, emptying the glass. The ring promptly slid between his sweaty fingers, bounced against the floor of the balcony and rolled straight through the ironwork to the busy street below.

  ‘Fuck!’

  Tempting as it was to throw himself over the balcony in pursuit, it would have been pointless. At this time of night he couldn’t even see the street for the tourists, let alone one silver ring, no matter how chunky.

  He cursed again, this time in Italian. No one looked up. No one even heard him. Music poured from every window and door in the Quarter, fusing into one endless soundtrack. It should have sounded terrible. Oddly enough it didn’t.

  So he grabbed his phone and headed back through his hotel room, down the stairs and out onto the street. Emerging into a constant flow of people coming at him from both directions was disorientating enough; trying to find Remy’s ring amongst the crap being kicked along the gutter was something else entirely. It would be a miracle if he ever saw it again.

  At which point the crowd parted and there it was, lying on the pavement, glinting defiantly.

  Luca dropped onto one knee and scooped up the ring. There wasn’t a scratch on it. Even the rubies were still there, glittering balefully as he held it up to the light. He was just thinking that the skull appeared to be sneering at him, when someone snatched it right out of his hand.

  The thief was a woman. She was blonde and she was pretty, and when she beamed down at him he was drunk enough to grin right back. So it took a moment for him to realise exactly what she’d said:

  ‘Darling, of course I’ll marry you!’

  And she stuck Remy’s ring on her finger.

  *

  Ten Minutes Earlier…

  As far as Gaby Andersen was concerned she wasn’t running away, she was re-grouping. Reorganising, re-evaluating, rethinking – and lots of other words prefixed with ‘re’, which didn’t remotely mean ‘fired’.

  ‘Of course you’re not fired,’ Jeremy had told her. ‘This isn’t the 90s. In a few weeks it will all be forgotten. Why don’t you take a break and get away for a bit?’

  Gaby wasn’t reassured. She knew that Jeremy couldn’t fire her, seeing as she didn’t actually work for him. She was a freelance journalist who earned her living submitting ‘news’ stories to an entertainment website specialising in up-to-the-minute celebrity gossip. Her gift was getting strangers to confide in her and being able to seek out the most salacious stories, usually through some unwitting third party. In short, she wasn’t a very nice person, she had no illusions about that, but after being turned away from two of her favourite celebrity haunts in the space of one week, she had to admit that maybe Jeremy had a point. She could hardly be a gossip columnist who never got to hear any gossip. So she admitted defeat and asked her sister if there was anywhere hot and sunny that she’d like to go on holiday (assuming Pris would choose somewhere obvious like Spain, or one of the Greek Islands) only to have her pick New Orleans.

  It turned out to be hot all right – hot and humid, with the odd monsoon to liven things up. At least they got a good deal on the hotel, presumably because no one else was daft enough to book a holiday here at the height of summer, but she had to admit the French Quarter was stunning. Creole townhouses in pretty pastels with old style shutters, balconies and galleries with exquisite ironwork, hanging baskets trailing ferns and flowers; it was like walking around a movie set. A very noisy movie set, for on practically every street corner there was a jazz band, or someone singing the blues, or dancing, or doing magic tricks. It was utter chaos, and she couldn’t get enough of it.

  The busiest street of all was Bourbon Street, with every flashing neon sign proclaiming yet another bar or strip club. Pris was in her element, intent on visiting every bar she’d written down on one very long list. Gaby was trailing behind, slightly over-awed but drinking it all in, when she saw him.

  ‘Bloody hell!’

  Pris, who had her head down trying to follow the directions in her guide book, promptly walked into the back of her. ‘What?’

  ‘Look,’ Gaby said.

  Pris obligingly looked. ‘The Bourbon Orleans Hotel? It’s pretty enough and quite old. It even has its own ghost. Several, in fact. And I know this because it also happens to be our hotel. The one we walked out of five minutes ago.’

  Sometimes Gaby worried about her sister. ‘No, look up. I was talking about the hot guy on the balcony.’

  ‘What on earth for? Men are pretty much the same whichever country you’re in. We’re here to have a good time and you don’t need a man for that.’

  Gaby begged to differ but it wasn’t the time and place for that argument. ‘That is Luca Corbellini,’ she said. ‘No one has even noticed him. And don’t say it’s because no one ever looks up, bec
ause this is New Orleans and that’s all everyone ever does – look up at the beautiful Creole architecture.’

  ‘And drink, and eat, and listen to music, and party,’ reeled off Pris. ‘Not that I would know anything about that because we’ve hardly walked ten metres from the hotel and—’ She watched Gaby slide her bag from her shoulder and give it to her to hold, while she rummaged about inside. ‘Now what are you doing?’

  Triumphantly Gaby extracted her phone from where it had become wrapped up in her sunglasses. ‘Calling my editor,’ she said.

  ‘You’re supposed to be on holiday! And weren’t you fired after you sold him that story about the footballer, the model and the meerkat?’

  ‘No names were mentioned and the meerkat was a cuddly toy – although no one ever seems to remember that bit. Once it went viral everything got twisted. Anyway, Jeremy can’t fire me, I’m freelance.’ Gaby dug in her wallet and took out a handful of dollars. ‘Here, buy us a couple of drinks.’ She pointed Pris in the direction of a brightly lit bar on the corner of Bourbon and Orleans. ‘There you go, Tropical Isle. Isn’t that one of the bars on your list? Buy me something refreshing and fruity.’

  As Pris reluctantly walked off, Jeremy answered his phone.

  ‘Gaby, darling,’ he said. ‘Why are you calling? Is New Orleans really that boring?’

  It was hard to keep the triumph out of her voice. ‘I’ve got a story.’

  ‘I thought we’d agreed that after the meerkat—’

  ‘Luca Corbellini. He’s right here in New Orleans.’