The Birthday That Changed Everything

by Debbie Johnson

  More to the point, they were all dressed in nice, normal clothes. Colourful swimwear, sarongs, shorts, bright T-shirts – nothing more outrageous than a straw hat at a rakish angle. Their suitcases had obviously been packed by smart-casual beachwear experts.

  Mine, on the other hand, had been packed by a pair of perverts from the West Midlands – which explained why I was wearing a Naughty Nurse Nancy costume, complete with shiny white plastic miniskirt and a name tag that said ‘Sister Slut’.

  All in all, it was a less than perfect start to my allegedly perfect holiday.

  Chapter 6

  As the meeting ended, I stayed put at the table for a minute until I took the first few mouthfuls of my gin and tonic.

  The bar was surrounded by a luscious loop of garden, dripping with riotously coloured flowers and fringed with broad-leaved palm trees that edged down to the beach. I could see right out to sea from where I was sitting. The midday sun was blazing down, and the waves rippled gently into the horseshoe-shaped bay.

  Out on the water I could see windsurfers and sailors bobbing around in the distance. Idyllic. If only I wasn’t dressed like a comedy prostitute, it would be perfect.

  As soon as I felt confident enough, I flip-flopped my way across the garden and over to the water’s edge. It was lined with a pristine row of sun loungers, each with its own umbrella.

  It’s quite hard to gracefully arrange yourself into a horizontal position when you’re wearing an outfit designed for swingers’ parties. Even though other women were letting it all hang loose in string bikinis with bare boobs akimbo, for some reason I felt even more exposed than them.

  At least I’d been able to borrow some of Ollie’s flip-flops and dump the Timberlands. Lucy was no help, and very much enjoying it. Short of kicking the door in, there wasn’t much I could do, except vow to get my revenge when we were home.

  Ollie was far more willing to share but, much as I tried, I couldn’t squeeze myself into the surfer shorts he offered. I couldn’t even pull them up over my ‘womanly’ hips.

  So here I was. Naughty Nurse Nancy catching a few rays. I was getting a bit itchy. And the top half – complete with a blue cross on the chest, presumably to show I was a medical professional – was rather too tight for comfort as well.

  Still, I was caring less and less about that, and pretty much everything else, by the minute. The combination of sun, alcohol and hysteria was sluicing around to make me feel quite merry.

  Before long I’d be up and dancing, leading a conga round the pool and flashing my matronly breasts at the waiters. Believe me, it had happened before. A few decades ago, to be fair, when my breasts were a lot more perky and the waiters a lot more interested. If I did a topless conga now I’d be in danger of breaking my own kneecaps.

  I closed my eyes, loving the sensation of heat on my face. I listened to the lapping of the water as the tide crept in, and the occasional high-class horsey tones of the Sloane Ranger sailing instructors further along the shore. I was finally starting to relax, and wished very hard for another drink to magically appear next to me so I wouldn’t have to run the gauntlet back to the bar.

  ‘You look like you could do with one of these,’ a woman’s voice said, jolting me back to reality as she sat down on the lounger next to me. There were probably many things I looked like I could do with right then, including a mental-health assessment and a whole new wardrobe, but blessedly she was bearing a long tall glass clinking with ice and lime.

  ‘Mehmet at the bar said you were on G&T. And possibly also some type of magic mushroom, but he was out of stock. I’m Allie, by the way. Allie Garrity.’

  Allie was long and slim, maybe in her late forties, but clearly very fit and active. She had those lean yoga muscles in her arms and legs that went on for ever. Her hair was curly and cropped close to her head, and her gorgeous green eyes crinkled all around the edges as she smiled.

  ‘Oh thanks! I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that!’ I said, almost salivating as I took the chill-frosted glass from her. ‘Not that I’m an alcoholic or anything…but it’s been the day from hell.’

  ‘I thought so, from the amount you were drinking, and what you’re wearing,’ she replied, stretching out and turning on her side to face me, shading her eyes from the sun with her hand.

  ‘Or maybe you always walk round half cut and dressed for an orgy – I’m not one to judge. It’s caused quite a stir among the menfolk, though. My husband Mike’s had to retire to his room for a cold shower. Men and their penises – show them a busty nurse and they all want to cry matron…’

  ‘Oh my God,’ I muttered, taking a quick restorative gulp of my drink. What a way to start my first holiday as a single mum.

  ‘I don’t know quite how to explain this,’ I said, ‘and it sounds ridiculous considering what I’m wearing, but this was the best I had. I got my suitcases mixed up. I’ve spoken to the airline and they’ve found mine, but it won’t be here till tomorrow. All I had to wear was a really thick fleece and jeans, sticky and icky beyond belief. And you wouldn’t believe the stuff that was in that case. Pervert’s paradise.

  ‘My other choices included a rubber dominatrix costume and a French maid thing I thought wasn’t too bad, until I saw the six-inch black dildo in the front. I tried to pull it off but it wouldn’t budge…but, well, yeah…with hindsight maybe I should have just used a bath towel, or done something less noticeable like come down stark naked doing the hand jive…’

  Allie was quiet for a few moments. She was busy wiping the tears of laughter from her eyes, and snorting with hilarity. Sister Slut, stand-up comedian.

  Once she’d stopped shaking with mirth, she said: ‘Look, under the circumstances you probably made the right choice, and I’m sure it’ll all seem hilarious one day. A crowd of us have been coming here for the last few years so I know a load of people. I’ll ask around. You won’t have to wear that all day, don’t worry. Although the dildo thing could be fun in the buffet queue, I have to say…Where’s the rest of your group, anyway? Is your hubbie hiding upstairs wearing arseless lederhosen and nipple tassels?’

  ‘No, although spookily enough, I think both those items are up there somewhere if you want to borrow them later. It was only my stuff that went missing,’ I said. ‘And, as for the rest of my group, well, that’s another story. But as I had practically a whole bottle of gin in that last drink, I might as well tell you – my husband isn’t here. He’s fallen madly in love with a Latvian lap-dancer who’s only three years older than our daughter. They’re shacked up in what the papers would call a “love nest”, three miles away from where we live, presumably having nonstop sex. The bastards.

  ‘So tell the other women to lock up their menfolk, I’m here unchaperoned. I’m not technically on my own, but my kids are both teenagers, so I might as well be.’

  ‘Yep, I know just what you mean,’ she replied, seeming to take my tale of woe in her stride. Maybe this kind of thing was the norm where she came from. Maybe she was a marriage guidance counsellor. Maybe she was secretly shitfaced and hadn’t taken in a word I’d said.

  ‘Teenagers are like that,’ she said. ‘Mine’s one of the good guys in private, but he still cringes every time I walk into the room, especially if he’s with a girl he wants to impress – which seems to be all of them.

  ‘I’m here with my husband,’ she went on, ‘the aforementioned Mike, and Max. He’s seventeen, and if you keep that thing on, he’ll probably try and seduce you with the first instalment of his six pack. He’s very proud of it.

  ‘But for a while I was on my own with him, so I know exactly how you feel. It’s weird, isn’t it? We split up when Max was twelve and I did the single-mum thing. Holidays are tough. It feels like you’ve sprouted two heads when you sit down for dinner and everyone else is in couples.’

  ‘So what happened? Is this your second marriage?’ I asked. We’d probably have swapped entire life stories by the time we finished our first drink together. It’s a woman thin
g. Men can see each other in the same pub every night for thirty years and find out nothing more than what football club they support.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘second marriage, but to the same man. He saw the error of his wandering ways, and I still loved him. So we gave it another go; got married again the day after the decree absolute came through. Sometimes they need to know what they’re losing before they realise how much they want it.’

  That, of course, was only true if the man in question wasn’t besotted with another woman. I didn’t know if Simon would ever realise what he’d lost. At the moment he didn’t seem to think he’d lost anything at all, other than a millstone round his neck. A burden of guilt that he was trying to carry: sending me odd enquiring texts, checking up on me, attempting to be mature despite his immature actions.

  ‘But enough of all that, we’re on holiday!’ she said, seeing Mrs Glum take over my face. ‘Try and forget all about your husband for a couple of weeks. Auntie Allie and her friends will look after you. You’re not the only single parent here – you’ll meet James later; he’s been coming with his son on his own for years, and they love it. Max will help your kids settle in as well. He knows the place inside out. I think this year he’s hoping to add a few more bars and clubs to his repertoire, though.’

  She grimaced slightly with the last sentence – but in a mock-rueful way that showed she wasn’t really stressed at all. I, on the other hand, was. If Lucy decided to discover the local bars, I’d have to learn the Turkish for ‘how much is the bail?’ fairly quickly.

  ‘Oh God no – tell him to leave my daughter well alone, she won’t appreciate it. She treats people who are nice like they have leprosy,’ I said. ‘I don’t even defend her any more, and I gave birth to her. For a while I hoped it was just a phase, but I suspect it may actually be her personality.’

  I could tell Allie wanted to protest, and declare her heartfelt belief that Lucy couldn’t be all that bad – but we were spared my hysterical laughter by the sound of merriment approaching from the shore.

  The noise level increased tenfold, as a miniature fleet of bright yellow kayaks headed in and beached right in front of us. It was a gang of kids and nannies, all dressed as pirates, with painted-on moustaches and colourful headdresses made of soggy cardboard.

  An angelic-looking boy of about six or seven spotted Allie and ran over to her. He jumped on to her lap, soaking her to the skin and smudging black paint from his fake eye-patch on to her bikini top. She rubbed his halo of wild blond curls and gave him a quick kiss on the forehead.

  ‘Wassup, Jake?’ she asked, wiping some of the black goo out of his eyes with her fingertips.

  ‘That’s Pirate Captain Jake to you!’ he shouted, leaping back down on to his bare feet and jigging about.

  He looked me over with his big blue eyes.

  ‘Who is this lady and why’s she dressed so weird?’ he asked Allie, his voice slipping out of his fake pirate lingo and into his own soft Irish accent.

  ‘I’m Sally, and I’m a special pirate nurse,’ I said, raising my eyebrows in what I hoped was a roguish fashion, but might have been more tipsy pantomime dame leering at Prince Charming in his tights.

  ‘Well, the nurse at my school doesn’t dress like that,’ he answered.

  ‘But she’s not a pirate nurse. Bet she’s just a landlubber who puts plasters on your knee and checks your hair for nits, isn’t she?’

  He thought about it.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘so…if you’re a pirate nurse, are you wearing those plastic clothes because they’re waterproof?’

  I nodded – it was a better explanation than the real one, that’s for sure.

  ‘And because it’s much easier to get all the blood off after a battle. It gets really messy when you have to chop off a leg or sew an ear back on. The worst is when eyeballs pop out, but at least if I’m wearing this, they just bounce straight off and I can catch them.’

  He giggled a bit at the slightly scary references to gore and guts.

  ‘That skirt is too short, though,’ he said. ‘You’d get blood on your knees. My daddy likes ladies in short skirts. He says it’s very kind of them to let other people look at their legs in the summer, especially grumpy old men like him. One time last week in the shops there was this lady wearing a skirt a bit like yours, but with pointy white shoes that made her really tall, and he pushed our trolley right into a shelf of beans and they all fell off. He was really embarrassed and we pretended we wanted all the cans of beans in the trolley, even though I don’t even like them—’

  ‘Pirate Jake!’ bellowed one of the pert blonde nannies. ‘It’s time to put away your paddle and get your ice cream!’

  He whirled round to give me and Allie a final stab with his stick sword, then galloped off.

  Hmmm. His dad was clearly an old lech, I thought, staring at hapless womenfolk in the shops. I made a mental note to avoid Jake’s dad for the entirety of the holiday – an extra dose of sex maniac was something I could live without. Sex maniacs were at the heart of all my current problems.

  His son, though, was a real cutie. It didn’t seem so long ago that Lucy and Ollie were that age, so responsive and playful. These days they’d sell me into white slavery for a £20 iTunes gift card.

  I’d been down here for over an hour, and had no idea what they were up to. I nervously did a quick check over my shoulder. The hotel looked peaceful. Its whitewashed walls were still standing. No smoke, no sirens, nobody running out of the building screaming and looking for holy water.

  They must still be in their rooms, then.

  Chapter 7

  Allie took us both off to the restaurant for lunch, steering us towards a table for four. A waiter held a bottle of water for us, opening it with as much aplomb as you would a vintage Bollinger.

  ‘That’s Adnan, the head waiter,’ said Allie, leaning forward to whisper conspiratorially as he left, ‘he’s got twelve kids…that he knows of.’

  ‘Bloody hell!’

  Our scurrilous gossip was interrupted by the arrival of an elderly lady, who stopped at our table and greeted Allie enthusiastically. She was so short and round that she could have passed as a garden gnome. A garden gnome who’d been kicked out of Gnomeland for having terrible dress sense and making the other gnomes look bad.

  Head to toe she was dressed in a shade of pink so vivid I could feel it burning holes in my retinas. Her dimpled knees were peeking out beneath the hem of her shorts, and her freakishly small feet were encased in pink socks and pink trainers.

  Little Miss Pink’s hair was short and snowy white, tightly permed around a tanned and deeply wrinkled face.

  ‘My, my, my! What an interesting outfit you have on, my dear!’ she said, in a delicate Scottish accent. Yes, well. She had a point. So much for critiquing her look.

  ‘Miss McTavish!’ exclaimed Allie. ‘Come and join us for lunch – this is Sally. She’s just arrived and she’s here with her kids.’

  ‘Och, no husband?’ she asked, as she sat down. Her plump pink derrière spilled over both sides of the chair until it was completely subsumed. It looked like she was floating unaided in front of the table, like a levitating pink blancmange.

  ‘Dressed laike that and unchaperoned? How very adventurous of you, Sally! I like your style already – you’ll have to tell me how you get on with all these fit young hunks!’

  She chuckled disturbingly as she helped herself to a breadstick, inserted it into her puckered mouth and started to suck on it. I closed my eyes for a second and hoped the image would go away one day.

  I wasn’t here for fit young hunks, or overheated body parts, or sharing sex tips with the Incredible Glowing Granny. Admittedly from the looks of things she had a better love life than I did, but that applied just as well to Trappist monks who’d taken vows of celibacy. I’d given up on men. I was going to turn into a sexless old woman who wore beige cardigans and got her kicks from walking really slowly over zebra crossings.

  ‘Sorry to disap
point you, Miss McTavish, but there won’t be any of that going on. I’ll be living like a nun for the next two weeks.’

  ‘Now then, that would be an entirely different costume, wouldn’t it? Maybe a spot of leather for that one, with a matching rosary for whipping naughty bottoms?’ she said, her blue eyes twinkling with mischief.

  Allie and I stared at her, rendered speechless, as she continued to fellate her breadstick.

  ‘But if you’re sticking to the quiet life, dearie, won’t you be a wee bit lonely?’ she asked, when we didn’t respond.

  It was a semi-serious question, and not one I was prepared to answer honestly. Because yes, I was lonely. And more than a wee bit. I felt it every time I looked at a couple holding hands. I felt it every time I saw a couple bickering. I felt it every time I saw some harassed-looking bloke putting the bins out, and every time I woke up in the morning and every time I went to sleep at night.

  I felt it pretty much all of the time, in fact, which I didn’t even want to admit to myself. I’d been married to the same man for seventeen years and had fully expected that to continue until one of us popped our clogs. I was so lonely I might sink in a sea of despair if I even let myself acknowledge it. I was functioning purely on autopilot, and flying straight into turbulence.

  ‘Of course not,’ I lied, ‘I’ll be too busy to be lonely, and I’m looking forward to spending some quality time with my children.’

  Assuming they’d had personality transplants, I added silently.

  Right on cue I saw Ollie and Lucy walking towards the restaurant. The need for sustenance must have driven them out into the wild to hunt.

  Ollie was wearing those surfer shorts I hadn’t been able to fit into earlier. They hung so low on his bony hips you could see the waistband of his almost-as-low boxers peeping out.