Excess Baggage (10 page)

‘Why were you looking after Colette?’ she asked. ‘Where was Lucy?’

‘
Out!
Like Becky. Everyone’s bloody out having a
great
time. ’Cept me, of course. Being as how I’m just a
kid
, and just a
mug
.’ He turned and stalked away. Plum heard him getting back into bed, thumping his pillow as he turned it over and sighing as loudly as he possibly could. She’d have to deal with him in the morning, talk him through his grievances which might well be justified. For now, though, Becky needed some care and attention.

‘What did you drink, Becky? Just tell me the truth and I won’t be cross.’

Becky wiped her damp hair across her face and tried to focus. ‘Rum stuff. Cocktaily things. Not many though, truly. I wasn’t out that long. Ask Lucy.’

‘Oh I’ll ask her, trust me.’ Plum went to the minibar and found it denuded of all soft drinks except water. She poured some into a glass and took it to Becky, who had recovered enough to sit on the side of the bath.

‘Thanks Mum. And … Mum?’

‘Yes?’

‘Don’t tell Gran will you? Please? I don’t want them to think—’

‘Think you’re a drunken slag who gets totally off her face?’ Luke’s grumpy voice interrupted.

‘Yeah, something like that. And Dad …’

‘I’ll deal with your father, don’t worry.’ Plum grinned. ‘If he gets difficult I’ll remind him of something he told me about one of those precious bloody Devon holidays, the key words to which are fairground, rifle range and a bottle of Scotch. Now try and get some sleep, and till you do, just sip at the water a bit from time to time. This will pass.’

‘It’d fuckin’ better,’ Luke growled.

Lucy could see a selection of the Putney Mothers running in stages from their rooms towards breakfast, first
to
the shelter of the big tamarind tree by the gazebo and then making a fast onward dash with their small children across the open area past the pool, heads low against the stabbing rain. They were doing what Colette called girly-running, awkward in strappy little sandals or flip-flops and with their hair flopping free from slides and into their eyes. At the section where the aromatic turpentine tree and hibiscus overhung the path, the children squealed and giggled as the sodden leaves brushed against their bare arms. Under shelter on the dining terrace the mothers flapped uselessly at their children with tissues, trying to mop the worst of the water from their heads so it wouldn’t drip into their breakfast cereal. The dads, Lucy noticed, simply headed straight for the buffet.

Shirley and Perry, looking as calmly accepting of the state of the weather as only those used to living close to Manchester and accustomed to holidaying in England can, were already sitting with Simon and Plum at the enormous table which had been moved away from the edge, out of reach of the water that still cascaded from the palm-thatched roof and gushed down onto the huge fat greedy leaves of the philodendron plants below.

‘Oh. Hi you two, slumming it with us today?’ Theresa arrived towing Sebastian and the twins. She looked tousled, as if she hadn’t slept much. Her sun-streaked hair was twisted and pinned up loosely, making her almost indistinguishable from the other half-dozen London mums in the hotel. Shirley approved. She’d heard those strident Home Counties voices – well, you couldn’t miss them – commanding their children’s activities on the beach and she liked the idea that Theresa, her most socially ambitious child, could now be taken for what she defined as a
Surrey
Lady. If she only paid a bit more attention to her nails, proper manicures and some shiny polish …

‘We thought it might be a good idea to come over and join you for breakfast so we could all plan the day together. Otherwise everyone skitters around not getting organized,’ Shirley said.

Mark, arriving with a big plate full of watermelon and pawpaw for the children, grinned at her. ‘Lucy and I have got our first open-water dive later this morning. So that’s us fixed up I’m afraid, for now.’

Theresa frowned. ‘Well I don’t suppose we’ll want to do much anyway, if this rain keeps up.’

‘Oh it won’t,’ Perry decreed. ‘Rain before seven, fine before eleven … Oh good, here’s Lucy and Colette.’ Theresa noticed how much his face brightened at the sight of them. Scanning back towards her childhood she couldn’t recall his face ever lighting up that much at the sight of
her
. Probably all the delight he’d felt at having a new child had only lasted with the final one of the three of them. Ridiculous, she told herself, still to mind.

‘Hi Dad, morning Ma.’ Lucy sat down beside Perry and kissed him. ‘I’m not sure the sayings of north country English shepherds count over here. Someone in reception said there was a big storm coming next week and that this is the beginning of it.’

‘Bit of rain, what a fuss.’ Shirley tutted. ‘We didn’t used to let it spoil our plans in Devon, now did we? There was always a museum to see or some nice shops to look at. You’ll see, by the time we’re loaded up and halfway to the sugar plantation or the rainforest or wherever we’re going it’ll have stopped. We’ll go this afternoon. You divers won’t want to be out in a downpour in a boat for too long.’

Lucy looked across at Mark and grinned. ‘Hey, it’ll
take
as long as it takes and maybe a little bit more. It’s a local saying, Ma.’

Luke still felt aggrieved and childishly pleased that the glowering skies matched his mood. Becky had woken up late with no hangover and no regrets and, amazingly, was her usual maddening bumptious self. ‘It’s the best way, drink what you like then sick it all up, the way bulimics do only with them it’s food,’ she’d said. She shouldn’t be like that, he thought. She should be sorry for keeping him awake all night, sorry for leaving him with Colette (whom he was quite happy to be with, apart from when he’d rather be watching
Death Wish 2
on the movie channel), and sorry for having a good time that she hadn’t let him join in with.

He sat on the damp stone with his feet dangling over the end of the small jetty at the end of the beach, the opposite end from the headland where his grandparents’ villa was. He’d taken a bread roll from breakfast and was breaking off bits to hurl into the sea. Fish were gathering to feed on the crumbs: bright, luminous creatures that reminded him of the crazily vivid colours of children’s drawings. With what felt like a mighty clout of nostalgia, he could visualize and almost smell the present his gran had given him when he was ten, a set of a hundred multicoloured felt-tip pens, all arranged in a circle in their pale wooden box, a delicious spectrum. He’d kept the colours in the exact order that they’d arrived in, thrilled by the barely visible progression of one shade into the next. Once, Becky had got at the box when he’d been out at a Sea Scouts event, and she’d muddled them all up. He’d pretended to be furious, as if she’d destroyed something, but he’d lain on his bed for hours, rearranging them into their proper order, amazed and fascinated to
be
so nearly caught out so often by the minute differences in shades.

‘That’s a parrot fish, that blue one.’ There was a shadow on the water. Luke looked round at the speaking boy and recognized the ginger-haired son of the gold lady, the one whose bracelets jingled so you knew where she was without seeing her, like a cat with a bell. He was about twelve but had the kind of know-all authority in his voice of someone much older. Luke guessed he was hated at school for being clever and could only practise it on strangers like himself.

‘How do you know?’ Luke asked.

‘Easy. All these bright ones here are parrot fish. Then there’s the little black and silver striped ones, they’re sergeant majors, and the yellow and blue things are angel fish. There’s a chart in reception. I learned it.’

‘You must have been really bored.’

The boy shrugged. ‘Not really. It’s something to do.’

‘You
sound
bored,’ Luke ventured. The boy was dressed head to foot in Gap Kids, he noticed. He could imagine the gold mother coming home with the dark blue bags, chucking them on the boy’s bed and saying, ‘Put these away now, Oscar,’ (or Algernon or whatever poncy name he’d been given), ‘they’re to wear on holiday.’ No choice, no say, as if he was still six.

‘Well I am a
bit
bored. There’s just me and my mum and she lies around reading all the time. I’ve had mumps.’ His face cheered up as he said it.

‘So’ve I.’

‘Yes but
badly
, and recently. The school didn’t want me back yet. It’s all boys, and boarding, so you can understand them.’

Luke couldn’t. At his school (comprehensive, his mum being posh enough to believe in state education as a
principle
), a bus ride away and a swirling sea of
both
sexes, if you were ill you stayed off for as long as possible and had to fend off the school secretary ringing up all the time to see if you were bunking off. They certainly didn’t encourage convalescence on a Caribbean island. And what was special about mumps and boys? He’d have to ask Becky, if they were ever on talk-terms again.

‘We could take a pedalo out if you want.’ Luke stood up and shoved his hands deep into his pockets, trying to look diffident. It might be quite good to hang out with someone else, be independent. It would show Becky, anyway, plus give her a chance to do a girls-together bonding stint with Colette.

Together, Luke and Tom (whose hand had twitched out as if to shake Luke’s as he’d introduced himself) sauntered back along the soggy beach to the water-sports shop. Lucy and Mark were there, having their pre-dive briefing in the room at the back with Henry and Andy and the rest of that morning’s pupils. The shop smelled of damp wetsuits. Glenda was outside hanging up sarongs under the almond tree, now that the sky was safely cerulean again.

‘OK boys, what would you like? Are you taking a Sunfish out, or a canoe? There’s plenty here, most folks have gone into town.’ She laughed. ‘They don’t understand island weather. A grey sky in Tunbridge Wells, that can be a day’s worth of misery. Not here though!’

‘Could we just have a pedalo please?’ Luke thought he should take charge, make it clear he was easily the elder.

‘Sure, help yourselves. Not the blue one though, OK? Oh and take snorkel vests just in case …’

Tom raced ahead to the line of pedalos on the sand, eager and puppyish and Luke wondered if he should have asked Colette to come instead. She was calm, not
so
childishly excitable. She didn’t wear him out and knew when to keep quiet and just let him think.

‘She said not the blue one,’ Luke reminded him.

‘This isn’t blue, it’s purple,’ Tom said. ‘And it’s the best one, it’s the biggest, a real two-er. Most of the others are just singles. We’ll go faster in this.’ It was true. Probably someone else had already taken the blue one away, perhaps it needed fixing. This one was definitely purple, or at least purple-ish. If he was fitting this colour into his spectrum wheel of pens, it would be just as close to the red ones as to the blue. Together they pushed the big plastic thing down to the sea and launched it, splashing into the shallows in their trainers. Tom looked down at his feet as if remembering something his mum had told him, but said nothing.

‘We haven’t got the float things, the snorkel vests,’ Luke said as they clambered aboard. ‘Can you swim OK?’

‘Course I can. Anyway we’re not going that far, are we?’

It was amazing how fast they left the shore behind. With both of them pedalling they quickly picked up speed and aimed the craft round the headland out of sight of the hotel’s beach.

‘We could go anywhere. Right round the island,’ Tom said.

‘Or to Barbados, or down to Trinidad.’ Luke felt it was important to establish a wider view.

‘Or Venezuela or the Falklands.’ Tom was getting giggly.

‘Don’t be stupid.’

For a while the two of them paddled hard, each keen to be thought strong and tireless. They kept parallel to the shore, following the beach up towards the next headland beyond the bar which Luke assumed was the
one
where Becky had got so drunk the night before. It was quiet there now, with just a few holidaymakers sitting under thatched sunshades sipping an early beer.

‘The sea here’s much warmer than it is in Portugal,’ Tom suddenly said.

‘I know,’ Luke replied. He didn’t, he’d never been to Portugal. Plum and Simon preferred holidays in Cornwall or Scotland, places where the unpredictable weather was likely to provide a huge part of the fortnight’s adventures. Competing with gale-driven rain was the thrilling possibility of instant death from falling out of a dinghy into the glacial water of a fathomless loch, or tumbling from the treacherous shifting mud-slide that made up the Cornish Coast Path. On balance, pedalling along on the warm Caribbean, Luke was pretty grateful to his grandparents.

‘I thought you didn’t get your feet wet in these things. You don’t in Greece,’ Tom suddenly said. Luke looked at his own feet. The pedalling was getting quite hard now and Tom was right, the water level did seem quite high, his knees were almost under.

‘It’s sinking.’ Tom peered over the side. ‘We might have to swim.’

‘Yeah I suppose, but …’ They were further out than he’d thought. That must be because of the current. Venezuela no longer seemed out of the question; and Lucy had said that Henry had said there were sharks.

‘OK, stand up.’ Luke pulled his feet up from the pedals and clambered up onto the seat.

‘What?’

‘Stand up and we’ll shout to those people at the bar. There’s canoes and stuff, someone can come out and give us a tow.’ Luke hadn’t been a Sea Scout all those years for nothing, even if most of his practical boat
experience
had been on the unexotic reservoirs round Staines beneath the Heathrow flight path. ‘And be
careful
.’ Tom was trying to be too fast, too eager and the pedalo was rocking.

‘I
am
. It’s the waves, not me.’

‘Hey, you lot! Over here, come and get us!’ Luke waved and yelled and a young couple at the café waved back then went back to their conversation.

‘Oi, you dumbos! Give us a sodding lift!’ The water was higher now, lapping over his toes.