Here Come the Girls

by Milly Johnson

  And then he had suddenly remembered how Jonie always tended to home in on boys who were with someone she could steal them away from. Probably the reason she had never been truly interested in young single Manus at college.

  He had drawn away before her lips touched his skin and thanked her for a lovely evening. Then he had walked home.

  Olive had a moment of bravery as the taxi drew up outside 15, Land Lane. She almost told the taxi driver to ‘carry on’. But carry on to where? Turn left at the bottom of the street and straight on until you reach Cephalonia. Yeah, right.

  She paid the taxi driver and stood outside the front door. She had a cheque for nearly half a million pounds in her handbag which would allow her to abandon everything she had in that house and make a fresh start, so why was she back here? She knew now that she didn’t love David and she didn’t know when she had stopped. If he met her at the door with a bouquet of red roses, would she stay with him because she daren’t say the words ‘I don’t love you and I’m leaving’?

  She hardly dared walk inside, because if Doreen was in a pickle and David was incapacitated, she knew her stupid ingrained sense of guilt and duty that bound her to them would tighten and hold her, however many digits there were on that cheque.

  She pushed the door open, expecting the smell of smoke and dirty, sweaty clothes to engulf her, but was shocked to find her nasal senses being assailed by the floral tones of Shake ’n’ Vac. Shoes were in pairs by the door – only David’s shoes, she noted; the telephone table in the hall polished, the mirror above it free of dust, the carpet runner devoid of white bits. Likewise the lounge was perfectly tidy, the dining table clear, except for a beautiful display of perfect-petalled red roses in a vase in the middle of it. Doreen’s chair was now in the back corner of the room by the sideboard. There was absolutely no sign of her at all.

  ‘Hello, stranger!’ said David, popping his head out of the kitchen. He looked remarkably calm for a husband whose wife had buggered off sixteen days ago without a word. He came forwards and they gave each other an awkward hug, because they didn’t usually do demonstrative affection.

  ‘Had a nice time?’ he asked, wiping his hands nervously on his trousers. Clean trousers as well, she noticed. He’d never learned to use the washing machine, had he?

  ‘Lovely,’ said Olive.

  ‘You look well.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  They were talking to each other like strangers on a first date. And that, Olive realised then, was because they were strangers. They had lived in the same house, slept in the same bed, but they didn’t know each other. The David she did know was long gone. This man in front of her might have had a bad back or not, she didn’t know what he spent his slyly-earned money on or what he did whilst she was working. He might have known his mother was as big a health-charlatan as he was, or he might have been in ignorance. All questions and no answers, which wasn’t the sign of a healthy relationship.

  ‘Where’s Doreen?’ asked Olive, nodding towards the chair.

  ‘She’s left,’ smiled David. ‘And so has Kevin. The house is ours and ours alone.’ He thumbed towards the kitchen. ‘I’ll just brew us some tea.’

  Brew us some tea? She remained in a state of shock whilst he faffed about in the kitchen humming ‘If I Were a Rich Man’.

  ‘You’ll never believe this,’ he said, eventually appearing with a teapot, a carton of milk and a sugar bowl on a tray. Am I in the right house? said Olive to herself. She didn’t even think he could pick out a teapot in an identity parade of that, a mop and an Alsatian!

  ‘Well . . .’ he began, pouring the tea straight out. It must have only brewed for seconds and was as weak as witch pee. Then he sloshed milk into both cups and two sugars into each. He didn’t even know she liked it strong, black and sugarless. After thirteen years of marriage. ‘It turns out that Vernon Turbot at the fish shop is my real dad. And his wife died. And it turns out – this is the funny bit – that he and Mum have been waiting for over forty years – forty years – to be together! He’s moved her into his big house in Kerry Park Avenue. She’s springing around like an Easter lamb.’

  He took a huge slurp of tea and Olive shuddered at the noise. David was incapable of taking a drink without sounding as if it was being sucked down a drain.

  ‘And guess what . . . he’s handed over his fish empire. To me! We. Are. Rich!’

  Olive shook her head to test she was still conscious and not in a coma somewhere, dreaming this.

  ‘Your cleaning days are over, love. We’re the ones with a cleaner now!’ He spread his hand out towards the front room. Ah, so he hadn’t done it himself. He’d got a woman in.

  David put his tea on the table, next to the vase of flowers that she now saw were made of cheap plastic. ‘Come upstairs, I’ve got more things to show you.’

  For a fat lad with a documented back problem he didn’t half leap up the stairs. Olive followed, wondering what other revelations he had in store. A helipad on the roof? A Juliet balcony built showing a view of a newly dug moat in the back yard?

  ‘Da da!’ He pushed open his mother’s bedroom door and she walked in to see her cream duvet set on Doreen’s bed. The door of Doreen’s old wardrobe was peeping open and Olive could see her own clothes hanging up there.

  ‘We’ve got the big bedroom!’ said David, as excitedly as if he’d just announced he’d won Britain’s Got Talent. ‘And look.’ He opened the wardrobe door fully and pulled out the three dresses he’d had made for her.

  ‘Olive – you’re going to manage the fish shops! It gets a bit hot in there, so the girls wear these dresses and an apron. The white ones are for during the week, the green one for weekends.’

  He looked so thrilled by the present that, instinctively, Olive tried to arrange her features into a semblance of gratitude. But even she, nice person as she was, had a bit of difficulty with that. The result was a pained rictus expression, seen only on deranged clowns in low-budget horror movies.

  ‘Two minutes. I need a crap,’ David then said, throwing the dresses onto the bed for her to coo over and bouncing to the bathroom next door. Somewhere in the back of Olive’s mind, a lone snapshot of Atho Petrakis arose to torture her. He would never have fanfared his intention to defecate.

  ‘Can you believe Mum, eh? Forty years she’s waited,’ laughed David, talking above a staccato farting salvo that sounded as if a Rocky movie was about to start. ‘She said that some people can’t live properly without passion and how lucky we are that we can.’

  Olive turned to the window. Someone from Ketherwood Club was just putting out two wheelie bins, the dossers from the social security flats were sitting outside clustered around a portable television watching a football match and drinking cans of cider. There wasn’t a patch of green, a single tree, a hint of the sea, a hillside with a goat on it, a pot of white roses . . .

  ‘I’ve been thinking, maybe we could have a little holiday before you start work. There’s a lovely three-star hotel in Bridlington. And what do you think about a really big telly?’ David flushed the toilet and scurried back into his mum’s bedroom.

  ‘I’d definitely leave it longer than five minutes before you go in there . . . Olive?’

  Olive was not there. And when he went downstairs, he found the suitcases she had deposited by the door had also gone.

  Chapter 75

  Ven had just poured herself a cup of tea. Her eyes fell on the clock and she noted that it was the time for going up for afternoon scones and diddy sandwiches in the Buttery. As it was, she would have to satisfy herself with a couple of Jammie Dodgers. But she wasn’t hungry.

  She had just come off the phone from Jen to let her know she was home, only to find that Ethel had died whilst she was away. Fell to sleep in the sunshine and never woke up, poor old soul. They’d buried her in the meadow at the side of the farm and hoped Ven didn’t mind. She didn’t – she knew Ethel loved it there. And she wondered if the ghost of Ethel would wander happily around the fa
rm sometimes, nosying in the barns for the fat mice she was too old and well-fed to chase – she hoped so. Heaven seemed a more believable prospect since she had been on the ship.

  She forced some jollity into her voice as she shared the news of her lottery win with Jen. Only when she was off the phone did Ven let the façade fall and sob into her hands.

  Ironically, the theme tune for An Officer and a Gentleman came on the radio and Ven sipped her tea and wondered whether men in white uniforms really did strut into workplaces, whisk women off their feet and carry them off into the sunset? She closed her eyes as Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes sang about love lifting people up to where they belonged and fantasised that Nigel was opening her gate, striding up the path and getting his thumb ready to press her doorbell.

  She nearly fainted with shock when it then rang.

  Ven poured out an extra cup of tea.

  ‘I know it’s a bloody cheek me asking this,’ said Olive, ‘but can you give me a sub on that cheque you gave me?’

  ‘Only if you’re going to spend it on a plane ticket,’ said Ven.

  ‘I am. I’m doing a Shirley Valentine.’

  ‘What happened to make you change your mind?’ Ven tipped a newly opened packet of Jammie Dodgers onto a plate.

  ‘God, where to start!’ said Olive. But start she did and told Ven all about the changes in Land Lane. ‘. . . I don’t want to be in limbo for forty years like Doreen was,’ she ended. ‘She took her chance and I’m taking mine.’

  ‘Bloody good for you!’ said Ven. ‘You’re staying here with me, presumably, until you get a flight? You’re not going to chicken out and go back?’

  Olive thought of Land Lane, full of farty smells, a life of luxury managing fish shops and a long weekend in Bridlington on the horizon. ‘I will, if you don’t mind,’ she smiled.

  Ven’s heart didn’t jump when the doorbell went again. But it didn’t half begin to pound when she saw who was on her doorstep.

  Chapter 76

  ‘Nigel?’ she gulped. This was a bit random, to say the least. Especially because he was dressed in whites and looking so handsome that he made Richard Gere look like Quasimodo.

  ‘Venice.’ He sighed. From the way his hands were fidgeting and his lips moving soundlessly over words, it seemed he had something to say but couldn’t find the beginning of the thread.

  Olive came to the door behind Ven, then slipped back discreetly into the kitchen, where she scrunched herself up into a ball to stop herself screaming aloud with joy. She knew he hadn’t turned up because her friend had inadvertently left behind a pair of tights in her cabin.

  ‘Venice,’ Nigel said again. He took a deep breath and launched in. ‘I really enjoyed your company on board and I did think you were one of those guests who I’d be a little bit sadder about saying goodbye to. I also thought I was getting too involved and tried to distance myself some nights, but I found that was impossible. I just couldn’t get you out of my mind.’

  ‘Couldn’t you?’ squealed Venice. Mind you, that was no surprise really. He’d be having nightmares about her floating nipples for years to come.

  ‘No, I couldn’t,’ he said softly. ‘I’m going to the Fjords and Iceland, as you know, in three days. Would you like me to pick you up on the way back down from Ayr so you can join me on the Mermaidia again? See where we go from there?’

  ‘Me?’ said Ven, which even by her standards was a ridiculous thing to say. She heard Olive groan in frustration behind the door.

  ‘Oh yes, most definitely you. I’ll put you in your own cabin, obviously, I wouldn’t want to presume . . . Plus if we don’t get on, you can ignore me for the duration of the cruise.’

  Then he moved forward and his hands came out and cradled her face. ‘It was the lipstick on my collar that decided it all.’

  ‘Oh God!’ cringed Ven. ‘Couldn’t you get it off? I’ve got some Vanish—’

  ‘Never mind that,’ Nigel cut her off. ‘I thought, This woman just can’t get things quite right. The asparagus, the medicine, the Italian . . .’

  What did he mean by ‘the Italian’?

  ‘. . . the shop, the swimsuit – then you stood up for the waiter and I thought you were amazing. But Ven – Venice Smith – when you put that lipstick on my collar, I just wanted to pick you up and kiss you.’

  ‘Er . . . did you?’ She couldn’t work out the connection at all. Why would this big gorgeous officer and gentleman want to kiss a total twerp like herself who ruined his uniform?

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Nigel. His eyes were now fixed on hers. ‘Everything in my life has always been so . . . precise. And you are –’ he grinned a knicker-meltingly sexy grin ‘– a magnificent oasis of chaos. Would you allow me to kiss you, ma’am?’

  ‘Kiss me? Do you really want to?’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ rang out Olive’s voice from behind the door. ‘Don’t bloody ask her, Nigel! Sometimes you can be too much of an officer and a gentleman.’

  ‘Oooh!’ Venice yelped with shocked delight as Nigel hooked his arm behind her legs and swooped her up. Then his soft mouth fell bull’s-eye, with no mistakes, precisely and fabulously onto her own.

  Epilogue

  The Bahamas, Boxing Day, fifteen months later

  ‘“Another shitty day in paradise”, as Royston used to say,’ sighed Frankie, stretching fully out on the sunbed, just as Roz flopped onto the next one.

  ‘Have you checked on the boys?’ asked Olive. ‘Are they happy?’

  ‘Well,’ began Roz, reaching over to steal some of Ven’s mineral water, ‘I’d say the word is more merry than happy. Salvatore is introducing Manus to the joys of getting pissed on grappa.’

  ‘Good old Dad,’ smiled Frankie. ‘Any excuse with him. So where’s my lovely groom?’

  ‘Vaughan, Freddy and Atho are on the ouzo,’ said Roz.

  ‘I don’t know, marry a bloke on Christmas Eve and two days later he’s deserted you to bond with the lads,’ tutted Frankie with mock exasperation.

  ‘Atho gets very frisky when he’s had a few ouzos. I’d brace yourself later, Frankie. Vaughan will be hot to trot.’ The six-months-pregnant Olive grinned. She was tanned and glowing and the picture of happiness. She was now Mrs Petrakis with a baby boy and baby girl twin Petrakises growing plump and beautiful inside her. She looked more Greek goddess than ex-Barnsley housewife with her white-blonde hair wet and her olive-green eyes lit with loved-up, contented joy.

  Frankie smiled at her. ‘Do you ever think you did the wrong thing, leaving David?’ They all burst into laughter at that.

  ‘He’s doing all right, trust me,’ she said. ‘I hear Dolly Braithwaite does his downstairs at least twice a week.’ Which raised a chorus of ‘oohs’.

  David had been terrified that Olive would claim half his chip-shop fortune, but had been pleasantly amazed that she had promised – as the deserting party – to walk away with nothing from him if he settled for a quickie divorce. David and Dolly would be happy with a comfortable passion-free life, content within the confines of weekends in Bridlington, and with fish suppers on permanent tap.

  ‘That’s a nice tankini, by the way, Ven,’ said Olive. ‘Where did you get that?’

  ‘Primark,’ grinned Ven. ‘And I’ll tell you what, it doesn’t half do the proper job in keeping my boobs in place, unlike that expensive designer one I brought with me on that first cruise.’

  ‘You can take a bird out of Barnsley, but you can’t take Barnsley out of the bird,’ winked Roz.

  ‘Bet Nigel is gutted,’ said Frankie. ‘I think he liked the old cossy just fine.’

  The money hadn’t changed them one iota. Not where it counted. Ven still liked to poke around ‘Primarni’ for her bargains, Roz was now working with Manus in his newly extended garage. She was now Mrs Howard, after Manus whisked her up to Gretna Green on Valentine’s Day. Olive had bought property in Cephalonia, which she had scrubbed till it shone, and land at the back of the villa on which to grow more olives. She and Atho
had a lot of fun in their olive groves. As for Frankie, she and Vaughan lived totally stress-free in the most beautiful olde-worlde cottage. She now taught ‘baby Italian’ at the local school and Vaughan tinkered around rebuilding bikes and wearing his old leathers. They were, in Yorkshire terms, ‘happy as pigs in muck’.

  ‘My little honeymoon babies,’ sighed Olive fondly, her hand rubbing over her rounded tum. ‘Though I’m not sure about following your parents’ example, Ven, and calling them after the possible places of their conception.’

  ‘Which are what?’ asked Ven.

  ‘“Kitchen table” and “against an olive tree”.’

  Venice laughed. ‘You minx! Well, choose carefully, my darling, because their names could change their lives one day.’ As she knew only too well. If she hadn’t been called Venice, she might never have booked that birthday cruise to go there and met the dashing Nigel O’Shaughnessy. Or been lifted up where she belonged into his uniformed arms on her own doorstep. Or travelled to the Fjords with him, and the Canaries, or been proposed to in a storm of fireworks in Madeira as the New Year blasted in, or married him in – well, Venice of course. Her three bridesmaids flew in with Jen and her family for the weekend and devoured twelve-million-calories’-worth of ice cream in Angelo’s. And she would never have had her interest in writing rejuvenated by Rik Knight-Jones enough to write a book about four friends on a ship, which was due to be published in the spring. It was part of a three-book deal – a series of stories about different people finding love on board.

  And now the four of them were all married and Olive was having babies. And they were on the Mermaidia once again, but this time on a twenty-two-nighter, sailing around the Bahamas.

  ‘So how many cruises have you been on now?’ smirked Ven in a pompous tone. ‘I’ll have you know, this is my fifteenth on the Mermaidia. We did have to slum it for a little while on the new ship Selina. Absolute hell. Only five swimming pools.’