The Birthday That Changed Everything

by Debbie Johnson

  Ollie was chirpy as ever, his little round glasses perched on his nose, reading a book with a dragon on the cover. Lucy was uncharacte‌ristically chatty. She’d been into town with Max and his friends the night before, giving me barely enough time to lecture her about the dangers of alcohol before she dashed off.

  There was a lot of laughter and surreptitious shuffling about on the corridor outside before I finally heard the key turn in the lock. I considered bursting out to catch them in the act, but I didn’t really want to see my daughter with her tongue down someone’s throat. It’s like world poverty – you know it’s happening, but you don’t necessarily want to witness it up close.

  She’d wisely kept herself scarce most of the day, knowing the longer she avoided me, the less angry I’d be about the pervert’s parade she’d ambushed me with. I’d spent a good half-hour packing it all up again ready for the airline people to collect, and was fairly sure a few smaller items had gone missing.

  Still, seeing her smiling and laughing at breakfast made it impossible to stay mad. In fact, it had totally thrown me – that boy must be a heck of a kisser.

  ‘So anyway,’ she said, between bites of toast, ‘turns out that Max is really cool. I know he seems total surfer boy, but he’s read all The Walking Dead graphic novels, and runs an online forum on classic horror, and he’s really into The Smiths as well.’

  ‘Are you sure he’s not just gay?’ Ollie asked, peering up from his page.

  ‘Shut the fuck up, John Lennon,’ she answered, reassuringly. Glad to see that love hadn’t quite tamed the beast.

  ‘He says that you can wear Billabong boarders and still listen to My Chemical Romance, because why should we judge people by what they wear? It’s just so true – people make assumptions about me all the time because I wear black and have this hair—’

  ‘But all those assumptions are true,’ said Ollie, bravely. ‘You are a freak of nature who eats babies and never appears in sunlight—’

  ‘And, Mum,’ she continued, ignoring him, ‘he thinks you’re awesome ’cause you allow me the freedom to be myself, and don’t try to make me into what you want like most parents.’

  I knew these weren’t her words, or her thoughts, and should probably have been worried that her Svengali was brainwashing her. But it was all so nice to hear that I conveniently put those concerns to one side to think about later. Just the day before she’d been screaming at me for allowing her too much freedom. Hey-ho.

  ‘He also said, and I totally don’t get this, let me add, that you’re pretty hot for an old lady. Weird or what?’

  ‘Gross,’ said Ollie, flatteringly.

  ‘Well, that’s very nice, dear,’ I said. ‘Tell Max thank you. Now, this old lady needs to go off to the tennis courts – time for a lesson!’

  The two of them exchanged disbelieving looks.

  ‘Are you sure?’ asked Ollie.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘what could possibly go wrong with a game of tennis? Even for me?’

  There was no answer, so I left them to it and ambled over to the tennis block. There were four courts, and each had a coach standing outside. Some people were in proper tennis whites, but most, like me, were in normal shorts and T-shirts.

  My suitcase had come home and I almost wept with joy when Tarkan the receptionist delivered it to the door. Mr and Mrs Smith’s had been dispatched in return, probably minus the few items that Lucy had filched. And me, to be honest; if my hormone level continued to rise, I might need a bit of mechanical help. It was the least they owed us for the trauma, and they could always claim back on the insurance – if they dared.

  As I waited, I watched the others warming up and playing. Allie had a super-cute pleated skirt on and was hitting balls like a rocket. Jenny and Ian were playing doubles against Rick and Marcia, who were both surprisingly good. I don’t know why I was surprised, except all I’d seen Rick do was file his nails and ogle men’s arses, and Marcia seemed permanently tanked up. On court they rocked.

  James was there too, ignoring my warning about taking it easy while his head was healing. Every time he stretched to hit a high ball, his white T-shirt rode up and flashed his perfectly flat, perfectly golden tummy. And if I stood to one side, I got a fabulous rear view when he was crouching to receive serve.

  Mortally embarrassed by that one comment in my bedroom the day before, he’d been a perfect gentleman ever since. He’d carefully averted his eyes from my chest whenever I was around, and switched his flirting to low. I didn’t know whether I was relieved or disappointed.

  I suspected I was gazing at him like one of those teenagers in a Jackie photo-story, but was luckily interrupted by my coach, Nathan, who looked about eighteen. I stood to, and entered the arena of dreams.

  I realised as I walked on to the court that I was surrounded by teenagers. The girls were all coy giggles and push-up trainer bras, and the boys all wanted to be Novak Djokovic. I smiled politely, feeling old enough to be their grandmother. Served me right for asking to be put straight into the rubbish group.

  We were paired up, and I was lucky enough to get a young thug called Sebastian. He was about thirteen and built like a brick shithouse. Even at that age he had practically no neck, and the meanest eyes I’d ever seen.

  Sebastian might have been young, but he was way better at tennis than me. I suspect he’d learned it in a juvenile rehab facility where he’d been sent after biting someone’s ear off.

  He was less than delighted to have Granny Summers playing opposite him as well, and growled something that sounded like ‘I’m going to grind you into dust’ as I walked past.

  First shot, I fluked a serve that not only landed in, but which the bulldog opposite couldn’t reach with his junior Bluto arms. Ha, I thought, let’s see who’s in the dust by the end of this, you little—

  ‘Aaaaagh!’ was all I managed to think after that. Sebastian was so peeved at losing a point he whacked the ball with all his force at my head. It hit me square on the eye so hard I thought it was going to come out of the back of my skull.

  The pain was incredible, and I staggered off to the side, dodging other players’ balls as I tried to find the exit gate. The swines showed no mercy, and I suspect some of them deliberately aimed at me as I stumbled blindly around. I could see Sebastian grinning and making a thumbs-up sign as I did my Frankenstein walk straight into the wire fence. Shit. I was trapped on a tennis court with the war criminals of the future.

  Nathan rushed over to help me out, horrified, shouting at the others to stop.

  ‘I’m okay, I’m okay,’ I said, gingerly taking my hand off my eye. Tears were streaming from it and I could already feel it swelling as the bony socket bruised up. ‘But if it’s okay with you, I’m going to call it a day.’

  I walked over to the bar, where there were lots of ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ and a gratifying amount of sympathy from the staff. Mehmet shovelled a load of crushed ice into a tea towel for me and I went to sit by the pool to try and limit the damage.

  Lucy was right. Extreme sunbathing was my thing. Screw all this activity crap – I was on holiday. I needed another way to find a whole new me, because if I carried on pretending to be Sporty Sally, I was going to end up in Casualty.

  ‘Are you all right, dearie?’ asked Miss McTavish, who’d appeared from nowhere and sat down beside me. Today’s colour was peach – a sequined swimsuit that had a frilly skirt that went halfway down her chubby thighs, and a matching peach sun visor.

  ‘I’m fine, Miss McTavish,’ I said, ‘just not much good at dodging balls. I had this idea I’d try to recreate myself a bit on this holiday…but so far I’m just the same old mess.’

  Even to my own ears I sounded forlorn.

  ‘Oh, you poor wee thing. It’s hard when you split up with someone, isn’t it? Everything you thought you knew about them, and yourself, and life, turns out to be wrong. It’s like your whole future’s died, but you have to carry on and pretend everything’s okay for the sake of the kids.’
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  It was so spot-on, so absolutely right, that I felt myself welling up. I figured I could get away with it while I had an ice pack on my face. I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.

  ‘So what went wrong then? In your marriage? Was it the sex?’ she asked – straight back to her favourite subject.

  ‘I suppose that was a big part of it,’ I said quietly. I’d spent hours and days and weeks pondering that same question. Sometimes I came up with a million and one complicated answers. Sometimes I only had one – Simon was a grade-A arsehole.

  ‘Looking back, there was a problem,’ I carried on. ‘Our sex life started with a bang – pregnant after some drunken fumble I can’t even remember – and over the years it just…went missing in action. It’s like losing a sock – you know it’s gone, but you can’t imagine where. And you don’t look too hard because you don’t think it’s that important.’

  Between kids and work and everything else I was always tired and always busy. After spending the day chasing four-year-olds and taking abuse from psychopathic teenagers, I usually felt about as sexy as a spinal tap by bedtime.

  The last thing I wanted when I was drifting off in my flannelette pyjamas was his hand ‘accidentally’ finding its way to my boobs, or to feel Mr Stiffy poking me hopefully in the back. Especially when he’d been out all day cutting people’s knees open for Porsche money, and hadn’t uttered more than a sentence to me since he’d got in.

  I tried not to blame myself, but sometimes I completely understood why he’d run off. Within seconds I was usually back to wanting to saw his balls off with a blunt nail file but, if I was totally honest, he had his reasons. Even if they were egotistical, shallow and cowardly. As the old saying goes, it takes two to tango – and two to step off the dance floor completely. Given my time again, I’d play it differently. I’d try harder. I’d be better. I’d make the damn thing work.

  ‘A missing sock!’ said Miss McT, clapping her liver-spotted hands together in glee. ‘What a marvellous analogy, Sally! I know just what you mean. But what it all comes down to, you know, is you not enjoying sex enough – if it had been as good as it can be, you’d have always found the energy. I didn’t even discover good sex until I was in my late sixties, would you believe! My then husband was a real goer, and he taught me a trick or two, I can tell you.’

  Please Lord, please, please, please don’t let her tell me what any of the tricks were, I thought, especially if they involved thrombosis stockings or Ralgex massages.

  ‘And he was delighted when I got my false teeth,’ she said, popping them out a fraction to demonstrate. She bit her dentures back in, leaned a little closer, and whispered: ‘I could take them out whenever I wanted – made certain acts so much more pleasant!’

  I’d dropped my ice pack and was about to punch myself in the injured eye with my own trainer. Surely that couldn’t hurt any more than listening to this?

  ‘Sally! Come on, you said you were going to meet me for a drink!’ I heard Mike’s voice shout out. A complete lie, but more welcome than a Lottery win.

  I jumped up, told Miss McT that I had to dash, and ran like the wind to the terrace.

  ‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘I’d suggest a stiff drink but it is only ten a.m. I saw her do that thing with her teeth. I’ve already had that one and it leads nowhere good. I can’t sleep at night since I met her.’

  He propped his feet up on the chair opposite, rested his hands on his beer belly and squinted up into the sun. Grizzly bear in holiday mode.

  ‘Thanks, Mike,’ I said, ‘she’s too much, she really is. One minute she’s talking quite normally, and the next you’re in The Twilight Zone. Scary. Like my new look?’

  ‘Yeah, that black eye’s going to look great,’ he answered, scratching his shaggy mess of hair. ‘You should take a leaf out of my book, Sal, and just sit still and drink. It’s only when people move around too much they get hurt.’

  I nodded. My eye throbbed. I reapplied the ice pack.

  ‘They’re all so bloody good. I hate them. All of them. Even Rick was better than me and he’s…’ I trailed off, unwilling to commit a social faux pas.

  Mike rumbled with laughter. His tummy shook, and somewhere on another continent, a new mountain range was formed.

  ‘I know. He is, isn’t he? Or at least he seems to be. None of us can figure it out and we’ve known them for years. They’re solid, though – really kind people. And Jenny and Ian. They had a bit of bad news last year – found out they couldn’t have kids – but you never see them down.’

  ‘Oh that’s terrible!’ I said. ‘It must be like torture coming here and being surrounded by other people’s children…’

  ‘That’s what we thought. But they’re teachers so they need to come in the hols, and they know all our kids so well, they love seeing them, especially the little ones like Jake. Don’t know how they put a brave face on it myself. All sorts goes on here. Take James – looks like he has everything, doesn’t he? In fact he works bloody hard, raising that kid all on his own, no help from the useless lump Jake calls a mother. Don’t know if I’d have had the balls to do that on my own.’

  Mike unscrewed the cap on a bottle of water and poured us both a glass.

  I didn’t want to ponder James, or his balls. It seemed like I’d got the wrong impression about him, and it made me feel distinctly uncomfortable. Simon had turned me into a nutter in more ways than one.

  ‘You get to know people really quickly here, don’t you?’ I said, taking a sip. ‘It’s like it’s so intense you go on a crash course in each other. I’ve only been here a couple of days, but I feel like I’ve been here for weeks. You all seem so different, but so close at the same time.’

  ‘The bonding power of two weeks on the piss together, that is, Sal. But you’re right. We see each other once a year; a few e-mails or calls in between, maybe a meet-up in London if it suits, but every August we’re here again like we never left. I don’t know if it happens in other places, but we just all gelled straight away – young, old, fat, thin…nobody cares. We might not have much in common in the real world, but here we’re best mates. I bet you and Allie have already started swapping secrets, haven’t you?’

  I nodded, not really knowing him well enough to discuss his previously failed marriage to his current wife.

  ‘And I know women do that better than men – but it’s also this place. I have a secret theory that one day here equals two weeks in the outside world.’

  ‘God,’ I replied, grimacing. ‘I’ll be ancient by the time I get out home! But I know what you mean – it’s intense, in a good way. And we’re relaxed, and maybe a bit drunk a lot of the time, and because it’s not the real world, we feel safe to say and do things we’d think twice about back home. To form friendships that would take for ever on the outside.’

  ‘That’s it, Sal, exactly right. Although calling it “the outside” does make it sound a bit like a prison. And talking about relationships, our Max seems quite smitten with your Lucy, you know—’

  ‘Does he? Why?’ I asked in shock. ‘Sorry, I don’t mean to seem like a bad mother, but she’s not exactly Miss Congeniality, is she?’

  We were saved further debate by the return of the conquering heroes, flushed and exhilarated from the tennis.

  ‘All hail!’ said Mike, as though reading my thoughts, and toasted them with his glass. Allie gave him a big smacker on the lips and said she was off to get changed.

  James sat next to me and stole some of my water. His neck and the bit of his chest I could see were coated in a light sheen of freshly earned sweat.

  ‘Oh dear,’ he said, holding my face in his hands to get a closer look at the eye, ‘maybe I need to offer some first aid now?’

  ‘It’s nothing – by the end of the day I’ll probably have the matching set. There’ll be a freak storm and a rogue pineapple will land on my face while I’m sunbathing.’

  He laughed and removed his hands. I was glad. I’d been worried I was going to start suc
king his fingers. I felt like I was fighting a losing battle: I needed a relationship like I needed viral meningitis, but my lust glands didn’t seem to know that.

  ‘We need a danger-free way to exercise. Tomorrow morning. Meet me here at nine after breakfast and we’ll go for a walk. I promise nothing bad will happen to you.’

  Chapter 15

  By nine the next morning, I was showered, dressed, breakfasted, and fidgeting, waiting for James to drop Jake off at kids’ club and take me on an adventure. My hair was back in a little ponytail, and I had multi-coloured eyes for the occasion – one my normal brown, and one a very fashionable shade of purple.

  Ollie and Lucy were both still in bed. Lucy was snoring like an asthmatic hog and, as I left, Ollie was getting out his phone to video her. He’d probably have it on YouTube before the day was out and have sent the link to the entire school.

  James arrived, wearing a pair of cargo-style khaki shorts and a white T-shirt. His long, muscular legs looked capable of leaping tall mountains in a single stride. Mine, on the other hand, looked more suited to a stroll to the post office to buy a book of second-class stamps.

  We left the hotel, and within a few minutes were already off the beaten track. The further we got, the more the landscape changed – no more holiday complexes or bars, just dusty roads lined with whitewashed houses and the occasional small shop with boxes of melons outside.

  At first I chattered away, but before long started to feel out of puff and went quiet. I was happy enough to listen to James, telling me about his work as an architect, and how he’d returned to Dublin after leaving when he was ten.

  ‘My parents moved us to London then,’ he said, ‘and that’s where I grew up. But they eventually went back, and when Jake was born and I was on my own with him, I went too. London was great when my life consisted of going out on the pull after work, but there comes a time when you have to grow up.’