The Perfect Holiday

by Cathy Kelly

  Then she woke up and into a nightmare. Chloe was snoring in her bed and the sun was streaming into the room through a chink in the curtains. Finn’s photo on the bedside locker seemed to be staring right at her, saying, ‘What have you done?’

  The craziness that had come over her every time she’d seen Lucas had gone. To be replaced by a black hole of guilt.

  What had she done? She’d ruined everything.

  ‘Do I have to put things like shampoo in two plastic bags?’ demanded Chloe from inside the room.

  Susie gave her zebra bikini one last shake.

  ‘Unless you want shampoo to spill all over your clothes, I would,’ she said in a resigned voice. It was time to go home to the rest of her life with this big lie hanging over her. The lie about Lucas.

  Chapter Five

  ‘You’re thinking about Lucas again, aren’t you?’ asked Chloe.

  They’d just got on to the plane and were sitting in a middle and a window seat.

  ‘No,’ Susie said, ‘I’m not thinking about Lucas.’ She was thinking about darling Finn and how she’d betrayed him.

  ‘You are. I can tell,’ Chloe insisted. ‘Listen, Susie, there’s no point telling Finn what happened. What would that achieve?’

  Chloe’s point, delivered every day since Susie had slept with Lucas, was that Finn should never know. ‘What a person doesn’t know, can’t hurt them,’ Susie said wisely.

  It did sound wise. But it also sounded wrong somehow to Susie. She and Finn were going to be married and surely the whole point of that was honesty? Why get married if you had loads of secrets?

  But the time for telling had passed. Finn phoned often. He phoned on his way to work the morning after Susie had slept with Lucas.

  ‘Hello, fiancée,’ he’d said. ‘How are you? I miss you.’

  Susie didn’t think it was possible to feel more guilty than she already did. But hearing Finn say that he missed her moved the guilt up a level. She hated herself at that moment. How had she betrayed lovely Finn for a few moments with Lucas? What sort of a terrible person was she?

  It had been a crazy holiday game, she realised. Lucas was the most gorgeous guy around and he’d liked her. Her self-esteem had soared. Instead of leaving it at that, she’d gone further. She’d wanted to prove that he really fancied her, that she wasn’t a nobody from Galway as Finn’s mother seemed to think.

  Chloe settled her duty-free purchases under her seat and picked up the flight magazine to see what else she could buy. Chloe’s credit card was nearly always stretched to its limit. That was another difference between them, Susie realised. Chloe was a great believer in worrying about things tomorrow: credit-card bills, holiday flings. It would all work out somehow, was her motto.

  Sitting in the window seat, her heart heavy, Susie realised she was very different. But she could see no way out of this dilemma except to follow Chloe’s rules. She couldn’t tell Finn about Lucas. He’d be devastated, and then he mightn’t marry her. And Susie couldn’t bear to think of a life without Finn. Lucas had been a moment of madness, but Finn was the one she loved.

  By chance, Tricia, Pat and the children were in the seats beside Claire and Anthony. Tricia sat with the children and Pat sat on the other side of the aisle, with Claire in the middle seat and Anthony at the window. Claire hated sitting near the window. She was a nervous flier and the less she saw of the clouds and the earth far away, the better.

  She sat back with her eyes closed and Pat and Anthony chatted over her head. Pat was fascinated to learn that Anthony had a motorbike.

  ‘I’ve always wanted one, but you can’t get one with kid seats,’ he joked.

  Claire could well imagine Tricia raising her eyes to heaven at this. She could hear her busily settling her daughters for the journey.

  ‘Here’s your colouring book and when the plane is high in the sky, I’ll put down the table and you can colour,’ she was saying brightly. Eyes closed, Claire smiled. Tricia was such a wonderful mother. Perhaps Claire could be that sort of mother, the sort who went everywhere with a big bag of toys for the children to play with. She let herself float off into a fantasy world where she, Anthony and their two beautiful children were on a plane.

  Maybe it could be a plane with four seats in the middle so they wouldn’t be split up. Anthony would be on one aisle, fastening one of the children’s seatbelts. She’d be on the other aisle doing the same thing. Their eyes would meet with love and sheer happiness at being with their family.

  Claire rarely allowed herself to play the children fantasy. It was too painful. So many of their friends had kids now. Each time they were told of another pregnancy, Claire felt a little part of herself wither up and die. There was no way she could come off the contraceptive pill to start a family with Anthony the way he was. There could be no joy with a newborn baby with a father who drank himself to oblivion all the time.

  ‘What’s really awful is that he’s a good man. He’d be such a good father,’ her sister, Louisa said. Louisa was the only person in whom Claire confided. Telling people the reality of how much Anthony drank would be like a betrayal of him. So she lied for him. She phoned the garage to say he wouldn’t be in that day because he had a virus. She went to parties on her own and said he was working. It was easier to say that than to explain that he was lying in bed with a horrific hangover. Or that he was drunk already, only fit to lie on the couch in a haze.

  Louisa knew the truth. That over the past three years, Anthony’s drinking had grown steadily worse. During the day, he functioned normally. But he got drunk at all social events and Claire was an expert at getting him out before too many people noticed. He drank at home several times a week after she’d gone to bed.

  ‘Sorry,’ he’d murmur when he fell into the bed at midnight and his breath reeked of booze. ‘Just a nightcap to help me sleep.’

  He was never angry, violent or abusive. He simply couldn’t stop drinking until all the alcohol in the house was gone. The next day, he’d be so repentant that she’d forgive him. ‘I don’t know why I do it,’ he’d say, bewildered. Looking into those sad, dark eyes, Claire believed him. If only she could release him from the mysterious pain inside him.

  Two months ago, Claire had sobbed down the phone to her sister and told her that Anthony had actually wet their bed the night before. Why this was the last straw, she didn’t know. But it was.

  ‘You should leave him,’ Louisa said.

  ‘I can’t leave him. I love him. What would he do without me?’

  ‘Drink himself into the grave, which is what he’s doing now, even though you’re still with him,’ Louisa answered. ‘You can’t stop him, Claire. You deserve better. A life, kids, a man who’s there for you, not one who’s looking for answers in the bottom of a bottle.’

  Anthony had come home very drunk that night.

  ‘Just a few beers with the lads from work,’ he said lightly.

  Claire knew he was lying. The men from work didn’t go drinking on Tuesdays. More likely, Anthony had gone into The Coral Reef, a dingy pub near the fire station, and had sunk several double vodkas.

  ‘I’m leaving,’ she said. ‘I’m sleeping in the spare room tonight. I don’t want to wake up in your urine.’

  She didn’t know what was harder, saying it or watching his face as she said it.

  ‘I can’t cope any more, Anthony. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life with an alcoholic.’

  There, she’d said it. The word they’d never used. Alcoholic. Once said, it could never be taken back.

  Anthony had sat with his hands over his face. ‘I am so sorry,’ he said, and he began to sob helplessly.

  Claire’s heart ached, but she knew what she had to do.

  ‘Sorry isn’t enough. You say that every time it happens, and it still happens again. I can’t watch you destroy yourself and I can’t fix you. I’m sorry, but it’s over, Anthony. I feel like I’m going mad, watching you doing this to you, to us. Your alcoholism is killing us, did yo
u know that?’

  He looked up with agony in his eyes. ‘I know.’

  Instead of feeling relief that she’d used the world alcoholic and he hadn’t denied it, she’d felt nothing but pain. She had gone to the spare room, locked the door and phoned Louisa.

  ‘I did it,’ she sobbed. ‘It was horrible. I don’t know if it was the right thing, Louisa. If you could have seen his face. He loves me…’

  ‘He loves booze more,’ Louisa said. ‘Remember that.’

  Claire had remembered it the next day as she packed her suitcases and moved into Louisa’s spare room. Louisa told everyone what had happened.

  ‘No more covering up for him,’ she told her sister. ‘Tough love.’

  Two weeks later, Anthony turned up on Louisa’s doorstep. He was thin, pale and utterly sober. Louisa grudgingly let him in.

  ‘I haven’t had a drink in eight days,’ Anthony said to Claire. He held her hands and looked ready to cry. ‘I promise I won’t drink again. Please, please will you come back?’

  ‘You’re mad,’ Louisa told her as Claire packed her suitcases to leave with Anthony.

  ‘I can’t help it. I love him,’ Claire said. ‘And he’s not drinking any more. Not a drop.’

  A month later, they’d booked a last-minute flight to Corfu.

  ‘We need a break and you need sun on your bones,’ Claire told Anthony. They didn’t talk about it being a new start, but it was. Without the haunting presence of alcohol, they were like newly weds getting used to each other.

  Spending time with all their old friends at home was difficult. People still offered Anthony a drink. Nobody considered his feelings when they waved their drinks around. Getting away from it all was the perfect idea. And it had turned out that way. Claire would always remember Hotel Athena with something close to love. It had given her back her husband.

  As if he knew she’d been thinking about him, Anthony reached out and put his hand over hers.

  ‘All right, love?’ he asked.

  ‘Great,’ Claire said, smiling. ‘We had a lovely time, didn’t we?’ she added wistfully.

  In reply, Anthony squeezed her hand. ‘Best holiday I ever had,’ he said.

  Claire knew it couldn’t have been the easiest holiday for him. It was only a little over two months since he’d stopped drinking. But together, they’d got through it. Because they were together, it had become the best holiday ever.

  Jessica had three seats to herself. One of the advantages of travelling alone, she decided. She chose to sit next to the window and put her magazines on the middle seat. On the flight to Corfu, she’d been sitting beside two young men who’d slept most of the flight. It was hard to clamber over them when she’d had to visit the toilet. Now, she could wander at will.

  Sarah from Hotel Athena had given her some gardening magazines for the flight.

  ‘There’s something very comforting about flicking through them,’ Sarah said, handing over a big bundle. ‘I get lots sent to me and I reread them.’

  ‘I can’t take these,’ Jessica protested.

  ‘You’ll be back in Corfu. You can return them to me then and bring me new ones,’ Sarah said.

  Briefly, Jessica felt like a cheat. She didn’t know if she’d be back. Tonight, when she got home, she was going to decide. She wanted to see what the house felt like when she went inside. Would the absolute hopelessness of her life swamp her again? Would being in the house she’d shared with Jack make her feel that there was no point being alive? She wouldn’t know until she got home.

  In Corfu, the misery that came over her was less powerful. She felt freer, almost happy. Sometimes, when she was walking along the rocks on the beach near the hotel, she forgot about her pain.

  In the hills, she’d visited an old monastery Sarah had told her about. Despite all the tourists milling around, it was a sacred place. Jessica let the prayerful atmosphere sink into her soul. She sat on stone steps outside a tiny shrine and thought of all the others, like herself, who’d come here hoping for peace. For the first time in a long while, she didn’t feel so alone. Lots of other people had been in pain here. Lots would be again. People still managed to live in spite of the pain.

  In her handbag, pushed carefully under the airline seat in front of her, she carried a small icon she’d bought from a shop beside the monastery. It was a classic Greek Orthodox icon, a vision of a glowing saint with kind eyes. It felt comforting to have it close to her.

  Pat had a couple of bottles of Greek brandy in a plastic bag under the seat in front of him. They clinked from time to time as Pat banged into them with his feet. Claire had a headache and the clinking noise was really irritating.

  Pat was clueless, she decided. He’d had two little bottles of wine with his meal and the scent of wine filled the air. She hoped Anthony couldn’t smell it, and then realised that she couldn’t protect him from the world. People would always drink. The whole planet wouldn’t stop drinking wine or brandy just because he had to. He would have to deal with it.

  Jessica bought an Irish newspaper from one of the stewardesses. All the news was gloomy. Redundancies, bankruptcies, cuts in the health service. After briefly flicking through it, she folded it up and left it on the outside seat. Perhaps that’s why Corfu had been such an escape, it was so far away from normal life. It had only new memories, no old ones.

  Jack used to love reading the newspaper. He read a broadsheet from cover to cover every day and bought two at the weekends. Jessica liked the magazines that came with the Sunday papers. She read about television stars and their lives. She marked off television programmes they could watch. Their tastes in programmes were very different. She loved films and her soaps. Jack had left school at sixteen and loved watching history programmes.

  ‘This is my education,’ he’d say whenever Jessica found him glued to another documentary on the History Channel.

  ‘Crazy man,’ she’d say lovingly. He might not have gone to college, but he was one of the smartest people she knew.

  Jessica had been to secretarial college for a year. She was the first one of her family to have had any third-level education. She remembered how proud she and Jack had been when both their sons went to college. Her own parents had thought that a degree was something for rich people’s children. The world was a different place now.

  Outside the plane window, the sky was a sullen grey. The blue skies of Greek airspace had been replaced by gloomy clouds. It looked like thunder. Jessica shivered. Being in a plane made her feel very fragile and scared.

  ‘I wish you were here, Jack,’ she said silently.

  Chloe had chosen a perfume gift set with six tiny bottles of Calvin Klein scents from the duty-free trolley. She’d opened them all many times and was dabbing them on her wrists.

  ‘I can’t decide which one I like most,’ she sighed happily. ‘Obsession, I think. That’s my favourite.’

  No matter how much perfume Chloe put on, all Susie could smell was the scent of toasted cheese sandwiches mixed with what had to be a small baby with a dirty nappy. As she did every time she got on a plane, Susie dreamed about having loads of money and being able to fly at the front end of the plane. Dirty nappies and toasted sandwiches probably weren’t allowed up there. It was all champagne and people handing you hot towels. And you had your own TV screen on your seat. There was no twisting your head to see the big screen at the top of their part of the plane.

  Still, watching a film was better than nothing. She put her headphones on and tried to watch the in-flight movie. Jennifer Aniston was in it. Susie liked Jennifer because she seemed normal.

  Susie had been watching only a few minutes when the film was paused and a passenger announcement came on.

  ‘We’ve been warned about thunderstorms ahead and there is the risk of turbulence for about ten minutes. The captain has put the “fasten seatbelts” sign on and we’d ask you not to visit the toilets during this time.’

  The movie went back on. Turbulence, thought Susie. Great. She
wished she’d brought some of those travel-sickness tablets.

  The announcement made Jessica feel even more anxious. Jack had told her what turbulence was and had explained that it wasn’t at all dangerous. He used to hold her hand during bumpy flights on their holidays. Now, she had no one to hold her hand. She quickly took off her seatbelt, got her handbag, and clicked on the seatbelt nervously again.

  From her bag, she took out the icon and held it in both hands. Once, she’d have had rosary beads buried in the bottom of her bag. Her mother’s old wooden ones, worn down from years of praying. Jessica no longer went to Mass on Sundays and holy-days, and she didn’t use rosary beads. They were at home in her bedside drawer, discarded. What had God done for her exactly?

  Susie held on to the arm-rests for the first swooping movement of the turbulence. It wasn’t too bad, she thought, as her stomach stopped rolling. She chanced a smile at Chloe.

  ‘I’m glad we didn’t go out last night,’ Chloe said, trying to joke. ‘We’d be in bits now –’

  She didn’t finish the sentence. The plane swooped again before jerking upwards with ferocity. Susie realised that if this was real turbulence, then she’d never experienced it before. This wasn’t a mildly bumpy ride. This was like the biggest rollercoaster she’d ever been on. She held her breath, wishing it was all over. Pilots knew how to avoid turbulence these days, didn’t they?

  And then came another dive, worse than the previous one. The plane righted itself.

  Nobody spoke. And then, a woman screamed. It was like a signal allowing everyone to yell. Loud sobs could be heard, all the small children on the flight seemed to start crying at the same time. And above it all, one woman’s loud voice, like a mourner at a funeral.

  ‘Help us! Help us!’

  ‘This is some rollercoaster,’ said Pat with bravado.