Excess Baggage (11 page)

‘Yeah, fuckheads! Come
on
!’ Tom was competing, Luke realized, determined to be more insulting than he was. The couple got up and strolled away, holding hands and talking close together.

‘Jeez! You stupid git!’ Luke accused Tom. ‘Now you’ve driven them away!’

‘Great, blame me.’

‘Well …’ There wasn’t any point. They were going to need their breath for the long swim. Luke was sure he could make it to the shore, just so long as no monster, no jellyfish, giant octopus, shark or devastating undertow got to him. He was worried about Tom though. It would be a hard slog for someone so much smaller than him, for someone who’d been ill enough to need a holiday to recover. But there wasn’t any choice. ‘OK, Tom, let’s go. If we hang on we’ll drift further away.’

Tom looked at him and grinned. Luke’s stomach turned over, recognizing an awesome and terrifying expression of trust.

‘All the way to the Falklands?’ Tom said.

‘Quite bloody possibly. OK, one, two, three, JUMP!’

‘So they’re not with you?’ Glenda, in her flowing dress made out of a pair of sarongs printed with repeated
heads
of Bob Marley in black and red, stood in front of Shirley, Simon and Theresa as they sat beneath an almond tree on the beach. The gold lady, sprawled close by on a lounger, lit another cigarette and listened.

‘Well no, Luke wandered off in a sulk soon after breakfast. Haven’t seen him since. I don’t know if he was with anyone.’ Simon could see no reason to be agitated. This woman seemed to be implying that Luke and another boy had stolen a pedalo, unless he’d misunderstood. How far could they go on it?

‘Well, he was. He was with a smaller, gingery boy. They took the wrong pedalo, a leaky one that I’d specifically told them not to take, and no life preservers. I
told
them.’

The gold lady sat up, suddenly anxious. ‘Was the gingery boy about twelve, in navy shorts?’

‘He was.’ Glenda had her hands on her hips. She was angry, Shirley could see, but there was more than a trace of worry. She gave Glenda her most reassuring Cheshire smile.

‘Oh, they’ll be all right. I’m sure they can both swim. I expect they’re lurking about on the beach somewhere, plucking up courage to come and admit they’ve sunk your boat,’ she said. ‘Boys are like that.’

Glenda’s temper snapped. ‘God, how can you be so complacent! People like you remind me exactly why I left England! They’ve taken a leaky craft out on the sea. They’ve been out for hours and all you can say is “boys will be boys”! I bet you wouldn’t be this bone-headed if they’d gone missing off Newquay. You’d have the bloody coastguard out before your sodding ice cream had melted.’

The gold lady glared at Simon and pointed her cigarette at him. ‘I shall blame you,’ she accused, ‘if anything’s happened to my Tom it’ll be all your fault.’
Hotel
guests who had been at the sea’s edge were now drifting closer to listen. Earpieces from personal stereos of apparently comatose sunbathers were being removed for better hearing. Theresa slunk further down on her lounger, mortified. She felt as if they were collectively accused of being the holiday family from hell. Surely that was what happened to Other People, the sort who had drunken fights on planes and stripped down to their cellulite at ghastly vomit-laden theme nights. And once again, where was Mark when he could be useful? Out on the sea, or under it, with no cares in the whole bloody world.

‘Now we’re not going very deep, no more than ten metres this first time and it’s only for half an hour, though you’ve got enough air for much longer. That’s because you’ll be nervous and when you’re nervous you use a lot more, gulping it in like you can’t get enough.’ Henry was going over the lessons again as Andy sped the boat away from the shore. Lucy and Mark grinned at each other, both apprehensive, both excited. The boat swerved round the end of the headland sending waves skittering into hotel guests dawdling along in canoes or taking the chance to get the hang of windsurfing in sea that didn’t half-kill you with cold if you fell into it.

‘Look at those kids on the half-sunk pedalo,’ Mark said. ‘What the hell are they doing? Abandoning ship?’

‘Where? What kids?’ Henry looked out across the boat’s prow. ‘I told Glenda not to let anyone have that one!’ He tapped Andy’s arm and pointed. Just then, the two boys jumped into the sea and Andy swerved the boat round fast after them.

‘One of them looks a bit like Luke,’ Lucy said, peering over the sea. Seconds later, the two boys were
being
hauled over the side onto the boat and they stood dripping and grinning cockily at the divers and crew.

‘You’ll have to come out with us, it’s too late to take you back.’ Henry looked at his watch. ‘I’ve got a snorkel group at twelve. No-one was supposed to take the blue one out. The guy’s coming to take it for repair.’

‘Sorry,’ Luke said, ‘but you’ve got to admit it’s more sort of purple.’ He grinned and Lucy thumped his arm. ‘You could have got yourselves drowned, stupid. This is serious sea.’

‘And you’re supposed to be wearing life vests too. Wait till I get back and see Glenda.’ Then Henry smiled at Lucy. ‘Am I going to spend the whole of this fortnight rescuing your family?’

A turtle was swimming past Lucy and giving her no attention at all. Captivated, she swam after it but the creature, so cumbersome on land, was too fast and graceful for her to chase. Then Henry pulled on her hand and pointed to the seabed as a ray, three feet or so across, fluffed its way out of the sand and rippled slowly away. Nothing down here seemed afraid, Lucy realized, nothing seemed to feel they were a threat. She and the divers were accepted simply as extra sea-life with their own unfathomable and unquestioned part to play. If only the humans in the world were as tolerant. She felt an overwhelming sense of privilege at being allowed this look at the hidden habitat of so much life. Two-thirds of the earth was covered in sea, two-thirds of it a habitat for animals and plants that most people could never hope to see in their natural state like this. Henry was beside her. She knew he was sensing her feeling of wonder. She looked at her pressure gauge – time to go to the surface. She looked at Henry and raised her thumb.

SIMON HAD FORGOTTEN
his sunglasses. He kept forgetting things and seemed to be constantly plodding the cool terracotta-tiled corridor between the lobby and his room collecting his book, his hat, the suntan lotion or cash. The rest of the family were annoyingly quick to catch on to this which meant he was also asked to remember to pick up Plum’s book or a CD of Becky’s as well, and then got shouted at when he came back to the pool or beach without them. His brain was being addled by the sun, though the rest of him seemed to be in remarkably pert working order. Even walking felt different here, springy and light, though his breath was running short, gasping in the heavy, humid air.

The worry about Luke had unsettled all of them so much the day before that the afternoon trip to the rain forest had been put off till the next morning. As minutes and then an hour passed after Glenda had told them the boys were missing, the possibility that something dreadful might have happened started to become real. When she’d calmed down and done a little thinking, and just as they were all starting to feel the beginnings of panic, Glenda had concluded that the dive boat must have picked them up: so many hotel guests were out on the sea swimming or racing about
in
sailboats and jet skis that someone would be sure to have spotted a couple of floating bodies.

Later, Plum had spent most of the afternoon in the sea, snorkelling slowly over the reef and avoiding contact with both the gold lady and Shirley. And then she hadn’t wanted dinner at the hotel but had taken Becky to the pizza café in the precinct across the road. Simon assumed the idea was to get her alone and give her a bit of a talking-to about the dangers of drink and men in hot climates, but the two of them had returned mildly plastered and giggly in the kind of way that made him think he (and probably All Men) been a major part of the evening’s jokes.

The door to his room was open. Outside was the trolley full of towels, sheets and cleaning equipment which always seemed to be parked somewhere in the corridor. In the room, the maid, whose name badge said ‘Carol’, was stripping the bed. Carol moved around in an unnervingly slow way, as if she might come to a permanent halt at any second, suiting energy conservation to the climate. She smiled at him and said a cheerful hello, asked him his plans for the day. Simon mentioned the rainforest and she laughed and told him she’d never been there, just as London residents will admit, often to their own surprise, that the Tower of London is somewhere they’ve never got round to visiting.

The sunglasses were in the bathroom. Simon rinsed stray specks of toothpaste off the lenses then looked at himself sideways in the mirror – how paunchy did this loose shirt make him look? Should he tuck it into his shorts or would that just draw attention to his waistline? His hand went up to his hair, for the usual quick run-through to see what fell out, but just as fast came down again. Why give himself the grief? He switched
off
the light and came back into the room. Carol was now bent over the bed, tucking in a sheet. Her broad round bottom, with the shiny pink uniform overall pulled tight across it, was pointing at him, almost wagging in invitation. Simon caught a glimpse of the back of a gleaming black knee beneath the skirt as she leaned further over to deal with an awkward corner. His hands didn’t feel part of him and his head was swimming with thoughts that were too lasciviously fast and furious to have any real form. This was how it was when the body was lively but the brain was limp (and how often, in the dull drab forever-February days at home, had it been the other way round). Without conscious awareness of how it happened, his hands found themselves stretched over an expanse of taut slippery fabric, and his body squashed against the outline of malleable flesh beneath. The shock of contact as he realized what he’d done coincided with Carol’s shriek of surprise.

‘I’m so sorry!’ Simon backed away instantly, his hands in the air. ‘I tripped on the rug! I’m sorry!’ Carol stood upright, her hand on her hip and a knowing grin on her face. ‘Tripped huh?’ She didn’t even pretend to believe him. Simon waited to be clouted across the face, for her to storm out and holler for Security, for even as he’d spoken the words he’d recognized them as pathetic, inadequate and patently untrue. Instead she stood still, considering, with a seen-it-all smile. One hand rested on her ample hip. Simon saw her suddenly as a big, motherly, cushiony creature, someone he could weep on, confide in. His heart was racing, wondering if he was right to think like this.

‘I’m used to you English guys, smouldering in sexy heat ya don’t get back home,’ she told him, her expression switching terrifyingly fast to a formidably
stern
one. Then she prodded him hard in the chest with a pointing finger and he backed towards the open door, praying to escape. ‘But if I hears
anything
, just one single
word
about you losing it with one of the younger girls, you’re gonna be outa here and off this island so fast. Got me?’

‘Got you.’ The words fell out in one fast, frightened breath. ‘Sorry, very, very sorry.’ Simon nodded so hard he thought his head would roll over the floor. He stumbled backwards through the door, desperate to be with Plum and the children, be a good husband, a good parent, a good son again.

‘And watch out for those rugs, take care where you’re walking.’ Carol’s grin was back in place, and as he walked away he heard a whooping cackle of laughter, possibly, he thought as he trudged towards the lobby, at the thought of sharing this sorry tale with the rest of the staff during their coffee break.

Lucy relaxed against the headrest and closed her eyes. It was cool and peaceful in the minibus, without Theresa’s brood and their constant nausea-provoking flapping that Sebastian might get carsick. ‘Hey, don’t go drifting off to sleep, you might miss something.’ Lucy snapped her eyes open again and marvelled at the spooky parental sixth sense that had her mother, way down at the front of a twelve-seater minibus, knowing that Lucy was thinking of snatching a quick doze four seat rows away at the back.

‘You were always the same,’ Shirley went on, though this time smiling at Victor the bemused driver, including him as if he’d be thrilled to hear their family reminiscences. ‘Even as a baby, the minute you got in a car when you were little, off you went. Some nights, we’d drive round the block a few times in the Rover
(remember
the Rover?) just to get you off.’

‘She’d always bloody wake up again when you put her back in the cot.’ Perry was joining in now. Lucy smiled but said nothing. If she encouraged them, they’d be well away, recalling aspects of potty-training unfit for public hearing and moving up through her infant food fads and the time she got threadworms. She wondered sometimes how many other afterthought children ended up being forever cast in the role of The Eternal Baby. Only a few months ago, visiting Shirley and Perry in Cheshire, she’d amazed her mother by cooking and serving spinach along with other Sunday-lunch vegetables.

‘But you don’t like spinach!’ her mother had declared, put out that Lucy had dared to change her tastes, colour in her mother’s picture of her in a different way. She smiled again as she thought of that spinach and how she’d managed not to retort that she certainly would still hate spinach served in Shirley’s boiled-to-the-death way which bore no resemblance, apart from the colour, to the leaves she’d barely warmed through in sizzling butter and then dusted with nutmeg.

The bus was climbing, up away from the coast and into the densely wooded hills. Lucy opened the window and could smell warm wet scents of musky leaves. There were few houses now, but here and there she could see glimpses through the trees of homes painted in the island’s characteristic turquoise, pink or vivid blue, the fronts set on stilts to accommodate the steep hillside. Some were simple, barely more than slatted huts knocked together from aged, mismatched planks with rusting corrugated iron roofs and windows with louvred shutters but no glass. Others were more substantial, still low-built in the local, almost
bungalow
, style but constructed from sturdy brightly painted concrete. Every house, even the smallest, had a verandah with wicker chairs, tubs of flowers and a couple of snoozing cats, and frequently a sleeping man, face obscured by a hat, as well. They passed thatched shady stalls set up on the roadside selling fruit, vast bunches of bananas, breadfruit, grapefruit and watermelons, everything so much bigger and more lush than at home.