The Perfect Holiday

by Cathy Kelly

  She wished there was a naughty dog to steal food from her plate. She almost wished a burglar might try to break in, just so she would have someone to talk to.

  She found herself daydreaming about it. The burglar would be young and Jessica would talk him out of his life of crime. And then she realised she couldn’t talk anyone out of anything. She was nothing but a crazy widow-woman, she decided. Fifty-five-years-old and going slowly mad. Any sensible burglar would take one look at her and leave. She hadn’t been to the hairdresser’s in months. When Jack had been alive, she had a shiny brown rinse put in her hair. Now, she had nothing put in. Her hair was shoulder length and mousy grey. She never wore make-up any more and without mascara, her eyelashes were pale.

  On her last birthday, the second one since Jack had died, she stayed in bed all day. Her sons had phoned and she’d lied to them.

  ‘Yes, I’m going out to lunch with Lizzie,’ she’d said. Lizzie was her best friend and had asked her out to lunch. But Jessica had said no, and Lizzie had given up. She’d asked Jessica out to so many things and Jessica always said no. There was only so much a friend could do, short of dragging her out.

  Jessica didn’t feel guilty about lying to her sons. It was better to lie and make the boys think she was fine. Would it help if Liam and Marty knew she was wrapped in her duvet, crying? No. They’d worry. They didn’t deserve to worry. They were young men with their lives ahead of them. It would be wrong to let them know that their mother’s life was over.

  On the second wedding anniversary without Jack – it would have been their twenty-ninth wedding anniversary – Jessica got out of bed and went to the shops on her own. She even had a cup of coffee in the cafe beside the supermarket. This was progress, she felt. She didn’t have any cake, though. Cake would have felt like celebrating, and Jessica had nothing to celebrate.

  On Jack’s second birthday since his death – he would have been fifty-eight – Jessica went for a walk on the pier near her home.

  What astonished her was that everyone else looked so normal. People laughed. Small dogs still ran madly after seagulls. The seagulls still appeared to taunt the dogs. Mothers pushed huge pushchairs and toddlers still roared to get out of the pushchairs. Once they were out, they yelled to get back in.

  Life was going on. Jessica felt huge rage against the whole world for enjoying itself. Didn’t they see? Her life was over because her beloved Jack was gone. How could life continue? There simply was no life without Jack.

  She had started to cry and she could barely see as she rushed back along the pier to her car. It was Jack’s old car. Soon, it would be an antique, Marty joked. They’d never had much money. Jack had been a carpenter and they’d always had food on the table, but there hadn’t been money for luxuries.

  At home, she sat in front of the big family picture taken the day Marty had got his place in veterinary college. It was hard to remember such happiness. They’d been in the garden beside the old apple tree. Jack loved the garden. They’d bought the old council house he’d grown up in and his father had planted the tree when he was a kid. The family had grown vegetables. Jack’s pride and joy were his raspberries. For such a gentle man, he’d waged a fierce war against the birds to stop them stealing his precious fruit.

  Sarah and Stavros grew fruit alongside flowers in the garden at the back of the hotel. Jessica had wandered there one day and had found Sarah on her knees weeding a flower bed that was set in a sunny area between the lemon trees.

  ‘This,’ said Sarah, pulling on a wild green stalk, ‘is like a virus. Once it gets in, you can’t control it. It destroys flowers and vegetables.’

  ‘The soil seems hard,’ Jessica said, for want of something else to say.

  ‘When I came here first, I couldn’t believe how hard it was to grow things. It’s tricky when you’re always thinking of how to water everything,’ Sarah went on. ‘So different from home.’

  Jessica sat on a cracked stone bench under the nearest lemon tree. ‘How long have you lived in Corfu?’ she asked.

  ‘Thirty years. Can you believe it?’ Sarah wiped her hands on the apron around her comfortable waist. ‘It’s home to me now.’

  ‘Did you stay because you fell in love with Stavros?’ Jessica couldn’t believe she’d just asked such a personal question. She rarely spoke to people any more: clearly she’d lost the ability to have normal conversations. ‘Sorry,’ she said quickly. ‘That was very personal…’

  ‘No, I prefer that. I hate those “pleased to meet you, isn’t the weather lovely?” talks,’ said Sarah, smiling. ‘Life’s too short to waste on such rubbish. Stavros came back to England with me, but he never settled. Norfolk is very pretty but it wasn’t Greece. His heart wasn’t in it, although he’d have stayed for me.’

  She paused and bent to pull up another bit of weed.

  ‘What happened then?’

  ‘His mother became ill and we came back here to run her hotel. At the time, I was afraid I was making the biggest mistake of my life, but now look at me: I love it. You never quite know what’s around the corner, do you?’ Her shrewd gaze seemed to look into Jessica’s very soul.

  For the first time in a long time, Jessica didn’t feel annoyed at another human being stepping into her mental space. Sarah was a bit like Diana, the counsellor: both women were interested in helping, rather than interested in watching a widow fall apart.

  ‘You don’t know what’s around the corner,’ Jessica said. ‘You hope it’s a winning lottery ticket, but sometimes, it’s a ten-ton truck.’

  She began to laugh in astonishment. She’d made a joke. She simply hadn’t joked since Jack died.

  ‘What if it’s the ten-ton truck of your dreams?’ Sarah said, going along with the joke.

  ‘That’s the key,’ Jessica said.

  Sarah sat heavily down on the stone bench beside her. ‘Stavros says I shouldn’t get on my knees to weed,’ she said. ‘It’s my arthritis. But I like it, it’s peaceful.’

  ‘I liked to weed too,’ Jessica began, and she started to tell Sarah the whole story.

  Since that time, talking to Sarah in the garden behind the hotel, she’d felt very happy in Hotel Athena. She’d found peace there. The question was whether she’d find peace when she flew home.

  She’d cross that bridge when she came to it. One more day, Jessica decided, and she’d know what to do.

  Chapter Three

  Chloe and Susie woke up at exactly the same time on the last day of their holiday because someone started singing outside their door.

  ‘What?’ groaned Chloe, her head appearing out of the nest of sheets for a moment.

  ‘Singing,’ said Susie, puzzled.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘Shut up,’ croaked Chloe at the person who was singing.

  Susie tried to sleep again but it was no good. Once she was awake, she was awake. She lay in her cosy single bed in Hotel Athena and worried.

  It was all Chloe’s fault.

  ‘Let me look after the booking,’ she’d said confidently two months before.

  Susie should have known better. Chloe had been the one in charge of the Metro in Paris and they’d spent three hours getting lost one day. Three whole hours. But Chloe was one of those people who sounded as if they knew what they were doing. In the office – Reilly Insurance – she was very convincing at it.

  The supervisor in charge of the Motor Department believed every word Chloe said. Even when she said things like: ‘I had shellfish last night for supper and I have food poisoning. That’s why I’m sick and have to go home.’

  Susie and the rest of the staff would be watching open-mouthed at Chloe’s performance. Surely nobody would believe such outright fibs? Any idiot could see that Chloe was suffering from having had too many tequilas after the football match the night before. But no, Chloe would be believed and would get sent home.

  They’d been friends for four years. Four years in various departments in Reilly Insurance, and
now they were climbing the ladder in Motor. They were twenty-seven. They had nice clothes, several designer handbags apiece, and rented a lovely mews apartment together. They knew each other’s families. Chloe had been to Susie’s home in Galway many times, and Susie had visited Chloe’s mother’s house in Cork. They took care of each other and vetted each other’s boyfriends. They went on diets together. WeightWatchers was the best. They shared a pair of roomy black jeans for fat days. Size fourteen. They were both twelves now, but you never knew. It was a good idea to have a back-up outfit for emergencies.

  Hotel Athena was lovely, Susie knew. Sweet, really. If she’d been here with Finn, she’d have loved it. They could have had a room with a double bed. They might never have got out of the bed.

  But as a holiday for two single girls wanting to have fun, it was a total disaster.

  It was a simple mistake, Chloe kept saying.

  Hotel Athena was on page 45 of the brochure. Hotel Athenee was on page 47. Hotel Athenee was close to nightlife, tavernas, etc. It had a disco, three pools and offered a huge range of excursions. The photo in the brochure showed a Greek boat loaded with tanned, gorgeous men and women dancing in the sun. They were holding up wine glasses and smiling. You could almost hear the music blaring out of the boat’s speakers. They looked like people in a Coca Cola advertisement. That was the sort of holiday Susie wanted. She wanted to be a skinny, tanned blonde in shades.

  Well, she’d need to lose a few pounds first. But she was blonde and, after two weeks here, she was tanned. Except that Hotel Athenee was on the other side of the island, along with all the crazy nightlife. Hotel Athena was a quiet family hotel in a family resort. The most exciting thing that happened here was that the banana boat occasionally started to sink a bit under the weight and a few twelve-year-olds squealed as they fell in the sea.

  There were no crazy disco bars, no places with karaoke machines where Chloe could launch into Tina Turner’s ‘Nutbush City Limits’, her mother’s favourite song. Not that she could sing or anything, but she could dance like Tina and if she backcombed her hair, it stood up like Tina’s wig.

  There were no gorgeous single men to look at. There was one fabulous-looking guy, Anthony Reynolds. He was very like Ashton Kutcher, but older, obviously. He was here with his wife and he never so much as looked at Susie or Chloe. Not that they wanted a married guy, but still. It would have been nice to have someone admire them. Chloe, who was between men, wanted some eye-candy for her holiday.

  Even Susie, who had her darling fiancé, Finn, waiting at home, never objected to having a nice guy admire her. It was daft, she knew, but it always made her feel less self-conscious if she caught an admiring gaze. It was proof that the diet had been a success and that she didn’t look too pale in her bikini.

  The first day they’d arrived, they’d been exhausted and happy to lie on the beach with plans to check out the resort that night. At nine p.m., they’d arrived downstairs in the hotel, all glammed up. Susie was wearing her fringed purple T-shirt dress. She’d curled her blonde hair with her GHD irons and she’d lined her eyes with lots of silvery grey liner. Chloe, who’d had a spray tan before she left Ireland, was wearing tight white jeans and a sparkly camisole. They looked fabulous.

  The man on the desk in the hotel stared at them when they asked where the nightlife was.

  ‘Nightlife?’ he repeated.

  He was married to the woman who’d welcomed them, Susie realised. Stavros, that was his name.

  ‘Yeah, pubs, clubs, bars,’ she said, smiling. Old people were a gas, weren’t they? He probably thought this was late. But it was early. Early if you were twenty-seven years old.

  ‘Bars,’ Stavros said, finally understanding. ‘The Kourous, run by a friend of mine, is down the street. To the left.’ He helpfully led them to the door and pointed them in the right direction. ‘There are many restaurants there, too. Anna’s is the place with the red lamps. She is my cousin and a wonderful cook. You must try her dolmades. Wonderful,’ he said, kissing his fingers. ‘And the baklava. All women love it.’

  Baklava. Great – must be a cocktail, Susie thought.

  Baklava was dessert, layers of filo pastry, honey and nuts. Stavros was right: they did love it. It was the most exciting thing about the whole night. The resort was pretty and the dolmades in Anna’s restaurant were marvellous. But the people in the resort were all families or couples. The place was dedicated to families and children. There were no lively bars, no live music. Apart from those three mad old fellas with strange Greek instruments who played music in the restaurant.

  ‘Dance, ladies, dance!’ they urged Chloe and Susie. Even the three mad fellas could see that girls like Susie and Chloe were not made for sitting down in restaurants.

  ‘Do you know any Lady GaGa?’ Chloe asked them.

  ‘Gaga? We are all gaga!’ the oldest of them laughed.

  The next morning, the holiday company rep did her best to help them out. She was a sturdy Kerry girl called Maire and she was used to dealing with anxious holidaymakers. The week before, she’d dealt with a man who’d broken his ankle trying to show his wife that you could climb from the ground up to their second-floor balcony. ‘Any time there’s nobody actually in hospital in a cast getting a morphine painkiller inserted, I don’t worry about it too much,’ Maire said sensibly.

  ‘I can see how it went wrong,’ she agreed, once she’d heard their explanation about the hotel mix-up. They were all sitting on the veranda in Hotel Athena, sipping juice.

  ‘My fault,’ said Chloe, for about the tenth time that morning. ‘I’m sorry, Susie. Really sorry.’

  Maire let them flick through the brochure. It was torture. Susie could see all the other fabulous hotels they could have gone to. Ones with discos in the hotel itself, ones with pictures of people partying. Corfu, as it said in the brochure, had something for everybody.

  ‘I’ll make some phone calls,’ Maire promised. ‘See what I can do. I can’t promise anything, though. It’s not really our fault, you see. The hotel’s lovely, there’s nothing wrong with it. Everyone who comes here wants to come back, actually, which isn’t always the case. Sarah and Stavros are marvellous people, but I’ll check it out and see if we can get you somewhere else.’

  By late afternoon, Maire was back with the terrible news that there was nowhere else. It was peak season. All the other hotels were full, and unless the girls paid for two weeks somewhere else, they would have to stay in the Hotel Athena.

  ‘I’m sorry, I really tried to call in some favours,’ Maire said. ‘This isn’t your sort of place, but unless you get taxis every night to other resorts, you’re stuck.’

  Susie and Chloe had no money for taxis every night. Maybe once or twice, but that was it. The whole point of going to a resort was that they wouldn’t have to worry about transport.

  Four days after they arrived, they booked a taxi with the hotel and went ten miles to the next resort. After the quiet of the Hotel Athena, the noise was a shock. The place throbbed with action. The streets were full of girls dressed like themselves. Loud music blared from bars, and men eyed them up. Handsome men and girls stood on the streets beckoning them into bars. It was heaven.

  Even the hangover the next day hadn’t been too bad. They’d lain on the beach and talked about how much fun it had been. They’d made friends with a gang from Chester and they were all going to meet up again in two days. In Club Paradise. Susie had loved Club Paradise. It was where she’d met Lucas.

  And then…Susie had to get out of bed. The person singing outside their room was the cleaner, she realised. The Hotel Athena was spotless, but the cleaners started at about seven in the morning, which was when all the families got up.

  Normally, she pulled a pillow over her head to smother the noise of the cleaners and the kids. Now, she knew she wouldn’t get back to sleep. She was too worried and she couldn’t bear the anxious feeling that came over her when she thought about this. She’d have a fag. They’d bought four hundred in duty-
free on the plane over and they were nearly all gone, with just one day of the holiday left.

  ‘I bet you’ll go back on the fags,’ Finn had said before she left. ‘Chloe’s still smoking, you will too.’

  ‘Honestly, what do you think I am?’ Susie had demanded.

  Susie’s fingers shook as she lit her cigarette. Finn. Oh hell, Finn. Her fiancé.

  She and Finn had set the date for the wedding. It was to be held the following year, in the long summer holidays. Just twelve months away. They’d had none of the trauma other couples had over choosing a venue for the reception. Finn’s mother insisted it be held in their garden. In a marquee.

  Susie’s mother had gone white when she heard this. ‘In their garden, in a marquee,’ she’d repeated, as if she hadn’t heard it right.

  ‘I know,’ groaned Susie.

  Her family home in Galway was a three-bedroom semi. Her father used to joke that the back garden was so small, he could cut the grass with his electric razor. He was a great practical joker and once, when her mother had been sick, he’d cheered her up by pretending to do just that.

  ‘How big is their garden, then?’ Susie’s mother had asked.

  Susie wasn’t sure how to answer without upsetting her mother. She thought back to the first time she’d seen Finn’s house. It was huge, a big grey house set on four acres. It had stables, a herb garden, and there had once been an outdoor swimming pool, but it had been turned into a sunken garden. Finn’s mother, Gloria, had shown her proudly around the house.

  ‘The servants used these stairs, years ago,’ Gloria had said, pointing out a tiny, steep staircase beside the kitchen. Susie didn’t like Finn’s mother much. She felt that Gloria returned the favour. In fact, Susie was sure that Gloria thought she was common. An insurance clerk from Galway wasn’t suitable for her darling boy, even if they worked in the same company. Finn worked in management.