Excess Baggage (6 page)

‘So what are we going to do? Shall we go to this plantation and see how rum’s made?’ Colette ran her finger down the list. ‘Or what about going into the rain forest in a Jeep and swimming in the waterfall?’

‘Do you fancy that?’ Simon asked, making mental notes. They’d need a fleet of Jeeps; he must check on car-hire rates.

‘I do. And I want to do snorkelling. Mum and Mark are going to do proper diving though, real scuba diving with air tanks. They’re going to do a course. She told me.’

‘A course? What, lessons? Here?’

Colette shrugged. ‘In the sea I suppose. I mean it’s where you’d go, isn’t it, for diving?’ She gave him the kind of smile that told him she pitied his idiocy and ran off towards the pool. Simon borrowed a pen and some paper from the receptionist and copied out the list of events, wondering if he was wasting his time.

Becky could see Lucy a few hundred yards along the shore, walking back from the water-sports shop. She could see her holding up the edges of her sarong and wafting it to make a breeze as she walked in the shallow waves that broke so gently on the shore. Lucy had a very cool short fluffed-up haircut as well as good legs for an Old Person, Becky conceded, as she calculated how very few minutes she had before Lucy reached her and inevitably stopped to chat.

‘Quick! My aunt’s coming!’ Becky hissed to the stocky boy rolling the fattest joint she’d ever seen in the shade of a low-growing tree. He sold jewellery and
wind
chimes as well as ganja, carrying a basket with a selection of shell necklaces, shark’s-tooth bracelets and strings of tiny beads in the Rasta colours of yellow, red and green. She’d have to pretend to Lucy that she was choosing presents for all her poor friends flogging away in school back home.

‘No problem,’ he drawled, grinning at her and handing it over. ‘Five dollars.’

Becky fumbled in her string bag for her purse and handed over the note. ‘Thanks, that’s great.’

‘No problem!’ the boy said again and sauntered away up the beach to offer his wares to sunbathers. Becky hid the joint in her make-up bag and prayed her eye shadow wouldn’t melt over it and ruin it. Five Eastern Caribbean dollars wasn’t a vast amount, but she didn’t know yet how many of these five-dollars’-worth she could get through in a fortnight. Lots, she hoped, especially if she found someone to share them with, some gorgeous boy who would look impressive in the photos she’d be showing off at school. She’d have to make some serious effort to find one fast, otherwise the gruesomely embarrassing high point of her seventeenth birthday, less than two weeks from now, would be blowing out the candles on some hotel cake while her family sang ‘happy birthday’ and all the other guests watched and clapped as if she was only six. She pictured herself on the deserted night-time beach, nestled into the soft sand under a sky with an impossible number of too-close stars, curled up with an unknown someone, smoking, kissing, stroking, touching …

Lucy, thigh-deep in the warm shallows, watched as a cruise ship, about the size of an entire housing-estate’s-worth of high-rise blocks, offloaded its passengers onto
a
flotilla of smart little launches to take them into the island’s capital for a day’s sightseeing and shopping. The scuttling boats reminded her of the kind of wildlife programme where fat creamy larvae slither away from a bloated mother insect, the queen of the nest. The town, which looked dwarfed by the vast liner, was called Teignmouth, a fact which her mother admitted had influenced her choice of island when planning the holiday. Monserrat had Plymouth, Tobago had Scarborough and one of the Caicos islands had Whitby, but these had never been among childhood holiday destinations. Back then it had been Torquay or Dawlish, places accessible by train (‘Your dad deals in cars for fifty weeks a year. He doesn’t want to take one on holiday as well – we’ll hire when we get there’) and with just enough going on to keep children and adults entertained. Although they’d lived, then, just south of Manchester, their holidays had never been taken in the more usual northern resorts. It had seemed something of a matter of status to Shirley to make the long journey south, to have further-reaching holiday ambitions than her neighbours. (To venture overseas, other than to the Isle of Man, would have been ostentatious.) In the end the ambitions had backfired as one by one each of her children had gravitated towards London and its outskirts. Lucy didn’t know, didn’t risk asking, if pride in their independence, in being able to say, as Shirley could of Theresa, ‘My daughter that’s married to a banker,
lovely
house in Oxshott,’ had been enough to compensate for being two hundred miles from her grandchildren rather than the round-the-corner, popping-in distance that her less adventurous neighbours and friends had.

As she walked on Lucy thought about the rented holiday flats they’d stayed in where the decor of each of
them
merged in her memory into a mess of dull sage green and old-mac beige. Those colours now starred on all the smartest paint charts, with names like ‘Norfolk Herring’ and ‘Sphagnum’. Her heart sank, remembering those apartments that smelled of a thousand fry-ups, every time a client sought colour guidance and brought up the term ‘historical shades’. Why didn’t they travel to places like this, or even just look at photos, and choose clear bright tints that thrilled the heart like this ludicrously vivid sea, the colour of a bleached peacock? No wonder the British middle classes suffered from SAD, she thought, considering the dismal gloomy shades they thought it so tasteful to live with. Perhaps if they painted their surroundings with the translucent colours of life, rather than of the worst-weather skies, their winters would be a lot less miserable.

‘Coming to get some lunch?’ The slim shadow of Lucy fell between Becky and the sun. ‘I know it’s a bit early, but I feel like I’ve been up for days and now I’m starving.’

Becky thought for a second or two about the effort of moving off her lounger again. If Mark had been asking, or her mother, or Theresa, she’d probably have said no. But this was Lucy, the one she liked, the one who she instinctively felt knew what it was like to be always in the wrong inside the tender cage that’s called a family. She scrambled to her feet and wrapped a tiny scarlet skirt round her hips. ‘Yeah, I’ll come with you. Where are we going?’

‘There’s a bar by the pool. They do lunch-type food like burgers and sandwiches and salads and stuff.’

‘Oh good. Chips.’ Becky giggled.

‘Definitely chips. I can smell them from here. Just like home.’

Becky looked out at the sea. ‘No, thank God, not a bit like home.’

Mark, walking under the trees, could see them all lying like pale pink sausages, grilling on loungers by the pool. Theresa was talking to someone, a straw-blonde deep-tanned woman with a gold swimsuit and a wrist-ful of bracelets that glinted in the light. She was lighting a cigarette, offering one to Theresa who shook her head. Shirley was fussing with Sebastian, pulling his blue gingham hat down firmly over his ears. Sebastian was fighting back, wrenching the hated thing off his head the moment his grandmother let him go.

Mark watched as Theresa stood up, stretched lazily and adjusted the bottom of her swimsuit. It was a sexy, artless little gesture. He’d have liked his fingers to be the ones brushing gently just inside the fabric, but there was a horrible problem getting in the way of sex. His penis was sore, aching with a flinty, constant pain. He couldn’t even dull it with a drink, for the clinic nurse had been pretty emphatic that these particular antibiotics just didn’t go with alcohol – the combination would mean instant vomiting. He remembered her face as she told him, handing out this small piece of gleeful punishment. She’d had that careful look, the professionally indifferent, seen-it-all-before one that everyone in clap clinics (or ‘sexual health’ centres, as they were now called) had. Somehow, in the over-deft way she’d wielded the needle when she took a blood sample from his arm, there was a judgement, and a small not-quite-suppressed sigh that told him she was having to do this far too many times to too many men for her liking. She’d spent a long time washing her hands, vigorously sluicing away every trace of his tart-borne infection. Nice men don’t pay for sex. Mark
knew
that. He was no longer a nice man. On five furtive and deliciously seedy occasions now he hadn’t been a nice man at all and was about three hundred pounds and a nasty, persistent dose of NSU down on the deal. The nurse needn’t have bothered; Mark’s own remorse was punishment enough.

‘Hey, Mark! Come and choose something for lunch!’ Shirley was waving a menu at him, smiling. Mark grinned back and started walking towards the group which was now taking over several shaded tables close to the bar. Shirley’s smile showed nothing but certainty that he was still the supremely Nice Man that her daughter had married. Once, years ago when he’d helped her choose the right savings account and explained some complicated banking pros and cons, she’d confided that he was just what she’d always wanted for Theresa, as if he was something she’d started trawling every shop in the land for since the moment Theresa was born: a safe, reliable, secure item that had been at the top of the christening wish-list. ‘There’s no silliness about you,’ she’d said, but hadn’t elaborated, leaving him to work out for himself what ‘silliness’ was. He’d decided it must be to do with deviousness, with what you see being what you get, a concept which Shirley’s sensible Northern origins very much approved of. Now, as he took his place at the sun-bleached wooden table next to Theresa, he was pretty sure Shirley had also been approving his lack of adventurous spirit, a lack of imagination which would keep him faithful to Theresa and give none of them any trouble. He felt almost more guilty towards his trusting mother-in-law than towards his wife.

‘Right, everybody here? Ready to order?’ Simon was ready with a pen and notebook, bustling like a waiter.

‘What all of us, all at once?’ Lucy looked across to
the circular
bar area where one lone barman was concocting fruit punches, taking food orders and directing waiters all at the same time. He seemed to be the only person moving fast.

‘Of course all of us. The hotel accommodates over two hundred people, they should be able to cope with a lunch order for fourteen,’ Simon told her.

‘Now Simon,’ Shirley warned, ‘we don’t want unpleasantness.’

‘Sorry Ma. OK, now food …’ Simon wrote down the order, meticulously checking and rechecking what everyone wanted until Becky started banging her foot backwards and forwards against the chair leg with impatience. He then handed the list over to the waiter who smiled with gleaming politeness before rewriting the whole thing on his own pad using his own code. Theresa smirked and Simon scowled and Luke’s abrupt giggle got him a glare from Perry. Shirley seemed oblivious, looking around her, absorbing the views from all directions. Lucy watched her, saw her gaze taking in the pink and white cake-like buildings, the banana trees with voluptuous purple flowers and bulging clumps of fruit, the massive hibiscus plants that made the puny specimens from British garden centres look like tragic underfed bits of twig.

It was the hotel’s clientele that looked vaguely out of place amongst all the leafy lushness. Most of the guests were British or German, pale and lazy and slightly self-conscious in lurid swimwear. They moved around slowly as if the heat was a burden, glistening with protective lotions and potions and being sure to remind their children constantly to keep their hats on. The Phonetech men, whom Lucy collectively christened the Steves, all kept their chunky steel watches on and wore reflective aviator sunglasses, behind which, she
suspected
, they were eyeing anything in a bikini. She watched a portly man who must have been in his late sixties, buttoning himself into a shirt that he would probably never wear again once the holiday was over, a pattern of turquoise and lemon zigzags that must have come straight from the cruisewear department of a large city store. She imagined him shopping reluctantly with his wife, being dragged round a vast out-of-town mall where his head would grow light in the dried-out air conditioning and his lost sense of direction would make him panic that he would never find the car park again.

‘We aren’t very good at hot weather, are we?’ Lucy commented to Plum as she watched the man making himself respectable enough to join the tables for food. ‘The sun-starved Brits have to have a special separate wardrobe for being hot, and it sits on most of them about as naturally as a posh wedding outfit.’

Plum followed her gaze across the pool. The turquoise man’s wife had a lilac cardigan dangling from the back of her lounger, as if she didn’t quite trust the sun to hang around reliably. ‘Only with older people, surely. Like the kind of men who wear long socks with shorts. The younger ones look all right.’

Lucy didn’t comment. Plum presumably counted Simon among the ‘younger’ men. Simon had been of the student generation that had worn ball-gripping loon trousers and skin-tight T-shirts and now still habitually bought clothes that looked as if they were for someone at least a size smaller. Lucy’s contemporaries, on the other hand, had absorbed enough of the punk era to feel at their most comfortable in anything that her mother would think was only suitable to be put in the duster box.

Lucy leaned her head back and pointed her face
straight
to the sun. ‘Put this on if you must blast your skin,’ Theresa said to her, passing over a tube of the children’s suntan lotion.

‘Give me ten minutes, Tess,’ Lucy said, closing her eyes.

‘You’ll fry.’ It was like a curse. Lucy sat up straight and glared at her.

‘And if I do, who’s to care?’

‘You will when your nose is purple and peeling and your eyes are swollen shut.’

‘My risk.’ But the moment was spoiled and she pulled a bottle of lotion from her bag and smeared it on her face, catching sight as she did of Theresa’s little smile. It was just like when Theresa had caught her behind the rhododendron down by the shed in their parents’ garden all those years ago. She’d been twelve, smoking her first cigarette with the boy from the classic Cheshire half-timbered house on the corner, the boy Shirley had always encouraged her to play with when she was little because he’d been sent off to boarding school at nine and might be lonely in the holidays. Theresa had crept up, known almost before they did what they were up to and had pounced before Lucy had even managed to inhale the sweet rancid smoke.