Wishful Thinking

by Jemma Harvey

  He went into the shower and emerged with a towel round his hips. His chest was on the thin side, his arms wirily muscular, his legs rather skinny. But then most men look better with their clothes on, Georgie reflected, and whoever came up with the kilt must have been blind to the impact of Scotsmen’s knees. Of course Cal, who was slightly more solid, always looked good to her . . . But she mustn’t think of Cal. That was history. Neville – despite his legs – was attractive, and available, and rich; she couldn’t possibly have a problem with that. When she was at college she had once had three members of the rugger team on successive nights – or perhaps two of them on the same night; she couldn’t remember precisely. She had always maintained she liked sex, lots of sex, with lots of men. Now wasn’t the moment to become choosy.

  (What was that song? Something about you’ve got a nice face but not the right face . . . )

  She went into the shower in her turn, and came out in a bathrobe, covered from neck to calf.

  Neville was dressed, a state of affairs which showed him at his best. ‘If you like, I’ll wait for you in the bar,’ he said. ‘Give you a bit of privacy. I want to catch up with some friends. We all know each other here. We come back year after year: it’s like a club.’

  ‘Who did you bring last year?’ Georgie asked with a smile.

  ‘All you need to know,’ he said, ‘is that she wasn’t as attractive as you.’

  The smile faded. Neville gave her directions to the bar, which she immediately forgot, and left her alone.

  I’m here for a week, she thought. Seven nights. I’m going to have fun. I always have fun: it’s what I’m good at.

  She dressed in cropped trousers, a skimpy top, and an embroidered cardigan which wasn’t really necessary, but she didn’t intend to expose her legs and arms in the evening until they were considerably browner. Outside the room, the corridor stretched unhelpfully to right and left. She couldn’t even recall where the lift was. She turned right at random, and presently found some stairs. Down a flight there was another, almost identical corridor, and a door leading on to a terrace with tables and chairs and panoramic view. It was early for drinks but several people were already there, sipping tall glasses of this and that. Congratulating herself on her unerring instinct Georgie looked round for Neville, and found another door opening on to a panelled room: the bar itself. It was empty except for a young man mixing drinks who glanced up and gave her a Puckish grin. He was, she guessed, about thirty, with eyes all sparkle and mischief and black hair that appeared to have been recently rumpled. Georgie cheered up immediately.

  ‘Can I help you?’ the young man said. ‘I am Juan.’

  You would be, Georgie thought. She perched on a bar stool. ‘I’m looking for a friend,’ she said, ‘but he doesn’t seem to be around.’

  ‘You stay here,’ Juan said. ‘I find him for you. But first, I make you a drink.’

  A waitress came in, and removed the tray he had just loaded. Georgie accepted a lavish gin-and-tonic and fished for her purse.

  ‘Is on me.’ Juan waved payment aside. ‘Who is your friend?’

  ‘Neville Fancot. Do you know him?’

  ‘Señor Fancot? Of course. He is a nice man. Every year, he brings a pretty girl.’ He leaned forward, lowering his voice. ‘But you are prettiest.’

  ‘I bet you said that to the girl last year,’ Georgie teased.

  The grin again. ‘Maybe.’

  By the time Neville arrived, unsought by Juan, Georgie was two G & Ts to the good and feeling much happier. They went to dinner with another couple and she was at her most animated, assisted by a quantity of wine and a large digestif. Going up to bed she swayed a little on the stairs and complained of tiredness, and once in the room she slipped into the ensuite and changed into unusually demure pyjamas bought especially for the trip. Then she climbed into bed and fell instantly into something resembling sleep.

  It wasn’t that Georgie made a decision; instead, she put off the moment of decision-making, pushing it away from her, telling herself, in the native lingo: mañana. The problem could wait, the choice could wait, Neville could wait. Mañana. During the day they went to the beach, or lay by the pool, and Georgie hid herself in a book. Fortunately, since she had only brought a couple, the hotel had a good library. She allowed Neville to oil her back but declined his services for any other part of her anatomy. He went out for walks with fellow guests but Georgie didn’t accompany them; it was, she said, far too hot. He also played tennis, but Georgie had never been sporty. She worked out regularly at a gym, and was in consequence fairly fit, but as far as she was concerned tennis was something that happened to other people, preferably on the Centre Court at Wimbledon while she consumed champagne and strawberries. (She had once been skiing, but had sprained her thumb on the first day, apparently by holding the strap of the pole incorrectly, and the doctor had told her that further activity would be inadvisable.) I hardly know him, she thought, with regard to Neville. Of course, she would have sex with him, that was why she had come on holiday, but not immediately. She needed a little time, that was all.

  On the first afternoon, she retrieved her emergency Lil-lets from her suitcase, began to carry them about with her, and explained to Neville that she had her period. During the course of the evening he grew friendly, putting his arm around her and drawing her attention to the stars, telling her, sotto voce, that he really didn’t mind a little blood. ‘I do,’ Georgie said, accepting the arm and duly admiring the heavens.

  ‘You’re still taking your pills,’ Neville said. He must have noticed her keeping the packet in her bag. ‘You shouldn’t be bleeding now.’

  He would be a sodding doctor, Georgie cursed silently. ‘I’m changing to a new one,’ she said. ‘My monthly cycle seems to have got scrambled.’ She was wondering how long she could stretch the phantom menstruation out. Maybe three nights . . .

  While he was out walking, she took the opportunity to wander into Deia. It was, as has been said, picturesque. The main road – such as it was – wound its way through the middle, with a twisty street and various flights of steps zig-zagging up the hill to the church. There was much golden stonework overhung with vines and bougainvillaea, funny little cul-de-sacs ending in tiny courtyards and terraces, gnarly olive trees sprouting from negligible patches of soil. Small boutiques displayed stylish versions of the usual holiday clothing: T-shirts, caftans, embroidered silky things. Cafés offered coffee; restaurants flaunted menus. Off to the right she found the Residency, Deia’s grandest hotel, former owner Richard Branson. There was an exhibition of splodgy abstract paintings in reception and a green lawn lapped at the verandah, but Neville had told her the pool was inferior to the Es Moli’s. Georgie contemplated having a drink there – it was supposed to be a good hunting ground for millionaires – but decided she was in enough trouble. Anyway, she didn’t like the paintings.

  Instead, she climbed up to the church, perched on the hilltop like Georgie on a bar stool, with a cemetery which boasted amazing views of the country round even if the residents couldn’t appreciate them. Robert Graves was meant to be buried there, but although the cemetery was small she couldn’t find him. Perhaps, she thought, he was buried under a nom de tomb. Back in the village, she found a pharmacy and made various purchases.

  ‘Surely you not need this?’ the woman at the counter insisted. ‘Eat much olives. Put more oil on salad. Then these tablets not necessary.’

  ‘I’m allergic to olives,’ Georgie improvised.

  Her fictional period had run out, and somehow, though she had every intention of sleeping with Neville, it wasn’t going to be tonight. Alone in the bedroom, she shook out a couple of senna tablets on to a plate and attempted to pound them up with the base of a tumbler. They were much harder than expected, and in the end she had to cut them into pieces with a knife, which wasn’t at all satisfactory. In films, when people wanted to administer a sneaky dose of laxative, they simply tipped some fluid into a drink or added it to food, but the
pharmacy hadn’t offered a liquid option and anyway, Georgie suspected that in real life a lot of liquid would be required. And then there was the taste factor. She sniffed doubtfully at the pills and sampled one on her tongue, with the wary approach of a TV detective checking for heroin. It had the flavour of All-Bran cut with natural compost. Even in highly spiced food, it would add a certain sort of something which Neville would be bound to notice. And how was she to introduce the tablets (chopped, not ground) into his meal? How many would she need? The recommended dosage was two, so an overdose must mean at least eight. Finally, how long would they take to work?

  It was no good. These things were all very well in books, but reality threw up so many complications. Writers do all that research when it comes to explosions and poisons and guns, Georgie thought, but no one ever bothers to check up on something like this. She flushed the two chopped-up tablets down the loo and returned to the table, tipping eight more on to the plate.

  ‘What can I do?’ she demanded of an unhelpful providence. ‘There’s no way I can get him to take them.’ She tried dissolving one in water, but the particles settled on the bottom of the glass, leaving an obdurate lump of tablet in the middle. It went the way of the first two. Morosely, she shook another one on to the plate. Then she sat staring at them in search of inspiration which didn’t come.

  There was only one thing to be done, and Georgie did it.

  She took them herself.

  Let’s take a break from the holiday sagas. Back in England, Cal’s tension had reached snapping point: he had virtually stopped drinking and communicated only in monosyllables and the occasional snarl. Lin tried to talk to him, with the true kindness that had rarely failed to elicit a response – until now. ‘Don’t want to discuss it,’ Cal said brusquely. ‘Leave me alone. I said, leave – me – alone.’

  In her lunch hour, Lin resorted to her friend from the chatroom. She had been exchanging e-mails with him for a couple of weeks, telling neither Georgie nor me, on the spurious grounds that we had other things to think about. Georgie was suspicious of chatrooms, saying that with Internet dating people had to register formally, but in a chatroom you could be talking to anyone. (There were plenty of loopholes in this argument, but Lin hadn’t ventured to probe them.) So the correspondence was clandestine, with accompanying guilt and all the pleasure of secrecy. Lin signed off with her own name, thinking it was brief enough and common enough for relative anonymity. Her correspondent called himself Ivor, claiming that this, too, was his real name. Getting the bad news out there first, she had told him from the beginning that she was a single parent with three children, one father dead, the other too busy to take an interest. Being stuck at home most evenings she had a limited social life, but now she was starting to discover how the computer could widen her horizons. Ivor said he was amazingly lucky to have stumbled across her, and he felt instinctively they were going to have a great deal in common. He sent her no jokes, non-PC or otherwise, and no poetry. He didn’t complain about his previous girlfriend, saying merely that it hadn’t worked out; he was looking for a serious relationship but she just hadn’t been the one. He didn’t claim to be especially attractive or clever, sending instead a brief summary: ‘Thirty-six, five eleven, own hair, own teeth, no distinguishing marks. How about you?’

  ‘Thirty-two, five five, no hair, no teeth,’ Lin replied, and then, panicking that he might believe her, filled in the description with a few more details. Ivor said he loved red-gold hair, it reminded him of that painting, the Madonna, you know the one, he couldn’t remember which artist it was. He went on to tell her that he was a teacher in South London, he hoped she wouldn’t be put off: teachers didn’t have a great image, people thought of them as a necessary evil. Lin confessed she was in publishing, and waited for him to tell her about the novel in his bottom drawer. When he didn’t she expressed her relief, and he said he’d always wanted to have a novel in his bottom drawer but there wasn’t room for it: the drawer in question was full of old socks. In any case, the world of inner-city education – or attempted education – was far too scary for any genre but horror. Maybe some day he would get around to writing about it; he had several pupils eligible to star in The Blob, or The Teenager from the Black Lagoon. Lin said her children were pre-teens, but they could be just a tiny bit horrifying at times, while also being completely wonderful, of course.

  Ivor encouraged her to elaborate, and Lin told him about the twins, and how they were doing (or not doing) at school, and how their father was a fairly successful actor who didn’t have leisure to be with them, and how she worried that they needed an authority figure in their life. Then she moved on to Meredith, avoiding details of her more extreme behaviour, simply talking about her exceptional intelligence, and her difficult moods, and the tragedy of her father’s death. Ivor said Lin had obviously had a bad time, and was incredibly brave to try and cope alone, and clearly needed someone to take care of her. Lin, responding instantly to these magic words, insisted valiantly that she could manage, she really could, only it was so difficult to have a Life, and sometimes she was lonely, in spite of the children. Could he understand that?

  He could. ‘I know all about loneliness. You can be in the middle of a crowd, but if there isn’t someone you can touch, not just physically but emotionally, someone with whom you can share your thoughts and feelings, little jokes, everyday details of your life – then you’re as isolated as if you were in the heart of a desert.’

  Lin was deeply moved, although a typing error meant that he had actually said ‘in the heart of a dessert’, and she couldn’t help a brief fantasy about how it would feel to be immersed in raspberry Pavlova. She thought of mentioning this, but didn’t want to spoil the tenor of their exchanges. She said that was exactly what she meant, and he replied that since he had been e-mailing her he didn’t feel alone any more. Did she know they’d already swapped over thirty thousand words since they started their correspondence?

  Lin said a few more weeks and they’d have a novel of their own. She didn’t think anyone had done a novel entirely in e-mail yet, although it was plainly the literary format of the future.

  Ivor said could she send him a photograph. He knew she was someone special, what she looked like wasn’t important, but he would like to be able to picture her. A photo of him was attached.

  Lin brought up the image on her screen and saw a thatch of dark-blond hair, a normal-sized chin, a smile that cut dimples in his cheek. Even the inevitable red-eye of the flash didn’t make him look demonic. She studied the picture for a long, long time.

  In Mallorca Georgie sat by the pool in her bathrobe, looking pale under her tan. The effect of this was unfortunate, since it turned her face from warm brown to washed out yellow. Even now, she had to bolt to the bedroom every so often in search of the loo. A gallant Juan was on hand to pamper her with cups of tea, expressions of sympathy, and the occasional pat on her towelling shoulder.

  The pool was indeed superior, being very large, very blue, cool though not cold in the heat, and surrounded by enough sun loungers to accommodate a small army, with a choice of sunshine and shade to lie in. This time, Georgie was in the shade. Having wanly declined Neville’s offer of moral support, she had insisted that he go off and enjoy himself (walking, the beach) while she recovered on her own. She had picked out a thriller at random from the hotel library, yet another tale of multiple corpses where the heroine was a pathologist. In modern fiction, she reflected, there seemed to be some kind of rule that all top pathologists must be women. Georgie was darkly suspicious of this trend, probing it for connotations of sexism. Was it that female pathologists were supposed to be more sensitive and caring in their attitude to the dead than male ones? Of course, it was undeniably true that women were generally less squeamish than men, far better at mopping up sick and dealing with bodily functions and malfunctions – aeons of bringing up children and nursing war-wounded husbands had seen to that. But the real motivation for these writers, Georgie decided, was t
o show their masculine rivals that they too could produce lengthy descriptions of rotting, burned or blood-boltered bodies, thus seizing control of a readership with an appetite for gore. The yuk factor. In the past, that market had been dominated by men; lady novelists had only written restrained murders with lots of little grey cells and not much blood. Now, with the advent of the female pathologist in a starring role, authoresses could demonstrate that Woman was caring and superior while simultaneously outdoing the blokes in graphic detail of the body count. We too can churn your stomach, they were saying. Georgie’s stomach had churned more than enough in the last twelve hours. She closed the book on a comprehensive analysis of dismembered limbs retrieved from a sewage tank and turned thankfully to her cup of tea.

  The question was, what was she to do next? ‘Face it,’ she told herself. ‘You don’t want to sleep with him; you never wanted to sleep with him. You just wanted to want to sleep with him, and that won’t work. Now you’ve got two nights left in which not to sleep with him, and you’re running out of ideas.’ She contemplated painting her genitalia with lurid spots to fake a sexually transmitted disease, or going mad, or going home, but knew none of it was any good. He was a doctor: he wouldn’t be fooled by the spots, and putting underpants on her head would ruin her hair, and she couldn’t afford the air-ticket home. Her stomach had ceased churning, and she had a dip and went to her room, in order to dress for dinner before Neville returned. She didn’t feel much like eating, so at least she could pick at her food, look pale (or rather, yellow), and say she was still unwell. There didn’t seem to be any other options left.

  Neville got back early, catching her in her bra and briefs. She snatched a cushion to her bosom, and then realised she was being silly and put it down.