All Inclusive (7 page)

‘OK, to the floor now everyone – feet straight out in front and
stretch
down, head towards knees.' Sam looked around the room. ‘No, it's bending from the hips I want, not your shoulders, honey,' he called to Delilah, crossing the floor to take hold of her arms and pull them gently forward towards her toes.

‘That's as far as I go,' she complained, though obediently wrapping her hands round her feet and wriggling her hips down for more leverage.

‘That's fine, much better, give it time and relax down now.' Sam grinned at her, returning to the front of the class where Gina, supple as a cat, had parted her legs in order to nestle her chin all the way to the floor. Beth glanced up, watching Gina effortlessly fold herself in half like a Marmite sandwich.

‘Hey look now folks, this is what you're aiming at!' Sam told the rest of them, as one by one the group raised their heads to admire Gina's suppleness.

‘She always does this,' Beth muttered to Delilah. ‘You wait, at the end she'll be staying behind to practise her splits and getting Sam to “help” her.'

‘Gross,' Delilah said, rolling back flat to the floor for the next exercise.

Beth pulled her knees up towards her chin, wrapped her arms round her legs and rocked gently as instructed. Her spine snuggled itself into the mat and
the floor beneath as she languorously uncurled, sent her right leg to lie on the floor and raised the left one high, grabbing hold of the back of her calf and pulling down. She felt as if her blood was coursing fast into every sinew, and that muscles were loosening properly for the first time in months. In front of her, she caught sight of Gina's left leg, rising high then going all the way on down till it lay against Gina's ear. How did she get to be so bendy? Had she been a child star gymnast – did she represent the USA in some long-ago Olympics? Or was it from years of highly adventurous sex? Impossible not to think about that, what with Gina so obviously taunting poor Sam, and her crotch practically pushed into his face.

Unwelcome thoughts about Ned and his mystery woman came to mind, however much Beth tried to stop them by concentrating on getting her hands over the baby-pink soles of her feet. She was doing her best; she honestly believed Ned when he promised it was all over months back, and she'd promised herself, after the initial fury and a cool spell of only the crispest communication between them, that she wouldn't rake it all up again. What would be the point? Delilah and Nick would be bound to pick up the atmosphere and worry they were about to become maintenance children. She especially didn't want to drag it into this holiday – the one where everything was supposed to fall back into place. So no pressure there.

All the same, as she watched Gina effortlessly change legs and haul her other foot down so far she could kiss it, if she, Beth, was able to do physical tricks like that, would he have felt the need to go off and experiment with someone else? Or was the urge to copulate on extra-mural premises so very much more basic than a matter of having fantastic sex: some thrill
sparked off by a different perfume, different shape, different conversation? And if it was conversation, was it down to the fact that much of Beth's evening chat repertoire involved sharing with Ned World Wide Wendy's unpalatable plans for buffalo fricassee, or wondering if they should opt for
Newsnight
or
Satan's Supermarkets
?

‘And . . . relax now, legs down together on the floor. Lying flat out and still, close your eyes, just concentrate on breathing and feeling the peace.
Melt
that body into the ground.'

‘Mmmm,' Gina moaned voluptuously. Sam switched off the music and everyone adjusted their limbs into flat relaxation. There was no sound but the gentle swoosh of the drapes, the soft splash as the stream from the hillside met the water of the ornamental lake over which part of the pavilion was built, and the deep, even breathing of at least six different nationalities gathered together to doze on this dark wooden floor. Then came a loud snort like a huffing horse and the bride's mother shook herself awake with a start, sitting up abruptly and staring around, wide-eyed.

‘Yo, we have a sleeper!' Gina sat up and pointed at the woman. ‘Here's the snorer, everybody!' No-one, Beth thought, could ever describe Gina as quietly spoken.

The bride tittered and her mother glared around her as everyone turned to stare.

‘You're
supposed
to be totally relaxed,' she hissed at Gina. ‘That's if you're doing it properly and not just here to
show off
and flex your muscles at the hunky instructor.'

‘Hey, sorry and all!' Gina pulled her hair free of her elastic band and shook it out, flicking her head right
back so the hair cascaded prettily across her shoulders. ‘No big deal, lady – don't wreck the chill vibes!' But she was talking to a broad hunched back as the bride hustled her decidedly un-chilled mother out of the building and in the direction of breakfast at the poolside restaurant.

Beth could feel Delilah giggling beside her, and Gina came over to the two of them. ‘Come on you guys, let's get breakfast,' she murmured. ‘We'll take a seat close beside that uptight witch and I'll give her the bad girl's guide to eating a weenie.'

Oh God, please don't, Delilah prayed silently, hoping and hoping that a weenie was only a sausage.

42 ml light rum

14 ml Triple Sec

14 ml each of lemon and lime

dash of sugar syrup

14 ml grenadine

Oh the bliss of being so idle. Beth lay stretched out on her lounger with her eyes shut, her book face down on her tummy. The huge cream canvas parasol shaded her face against the ageing ravages of the sun and factor fifteen was slicked all over her body and limbs. She could hear the nearby slap-slap of flip-flops on concrete, a hard, rhythmic splash as someone being sporty in the pool swam up and down, and the rise-and-fall ripples of chatter from the tables by the Sundown bar. She could smell the sweet coconut tang of suntan lotion and taste a hint of sea salt on the breeze.

Better than work, this, definitely, she thought. Far, far better than spending the morning experimenting with herbal seasonings for Savoy Cabbage Flemish
Style (
Savooikool op Z'n Vlaans
) to a background chirruping of Wendy detailing how effectively HRT was boosting her libido. Why was it, Beth wondered, that whenever Wendy stirred a gloopy, steaming sauce, she felt compelled to discuss bodily fluids of some kind? From a past medieval existence, was she missing the arcane visceral contents of a cauldron? Ned had a theory that she'd hit on her winning formula for international extreme cuisine after casseroling her own babies' placentas. If that was the case, Beth fervently prayed she wouldn't return to her original inspiration and expect her to help testing out concoctions such as caul pâté or umbilical soup. Surely there was only so much the nation's couch cooks could take?

‘Hot, isn't it?' Lesley, alongside with a Jilly Cooper and sipping a glass of iced water, wafted air in front of her face with her sunhat. ‘Think of all the poor souls back home, bundled up against the cold and the day getting dark before the afternoon's half gone. Hee hee!' she chortled gleefully.

‘I'd rather not think about home,' Beth told her. ‘We've left Nick and his Felicity floozy in charge of the house. I hope they're OK.'

Would they be? Suppose there was a sudden wintry freeze-up and all the pipes burst, sending water from the loft tanks cascading through the ceilings? Suppose a gang of vicious burglars followed Nick home late at night and beat him to a pulp for the plasma-screen telly?

‘They'll be all right. Don't you worry about it.' Lesley waved away her concerns. ‘Anyway, there's not a lot you can do about anything from here, is there, even if they have trashed everything you own. Just relax and forget about home. That's what you're paying for.'

‘I'm trying, I'm trying!' Beth insisted, wishing domestic arrangements hadn't crossed her mind. That was the problem with the one-in-charge role, it was so hard to switch off. ‘But I can't help imagining Nick making a late-night bacon sandwich and forgetting to turn the grill off. We could be going home to a pile of cinders and an insurance company wriggling out of paying, on grounds of leaving an irresponsible teenager in place of me.'

‘Well you can stop that right now or you'll worry the whole fortnight away. Beats working, this, though, doesn't it?' Lesley echoed Beth's earlier thoughts, stretching her arms into the breeze and yawning. ‘It's just after lunch, home time. If I was back in Guernsey I'd be ironing a whopping great pile of pillowcases. What about you? You're still working for World Wide Wendy, aren't you? What's she up to?'

‘Oh the usual,' Beth told her. ‘Wendy's now working on the cuisine of Belgium. There's a new book on its way, with a TV one-off called
Horses for Courses
.'

‘You're joking!' Lesley spluttered. ‘The woman gets worse!'

‘I wish I was joking,' Beth sighed. ‘But it seems the more crazily off-putting the title, the more people rush to buy it. I think we're only doing one horse recipe though; the Belgians seem keener on endless endive and vegetable soups.'

‘I'd always had Belgium down as chips and chocolate. I watched Wendy's last TV series. Len wanted to see it because he thought
Eating about the Bush
sounded rude. How typical is that?'

‘Ha! And what he got was how to cook curried kangaroo tail and emu carpaccio!' Beth laughed. ‘Poor Len, how very disappointing for him!'

‘And you actually had to cook that, the kangaroo
thing?' Lesley sat up and swung her legs down from the lounger to the ground. ‘Wasn't it just gross?'

‘It was a bit – the tails arrived frozen but they were still whole and furry. The viewing public didn't get to see that bit. The producer deemed it a preparation stage too far.'

‘Yuck! I couldn't even touch it.' Lesley shuddered. ‘I like my meat skinned and plucked and cling-filmed, me.'

‘Wendy prefers to get to grips with the essential animal aspect. Like a sort of international Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. We had at least twelve goes at it 'til she was happy. To be honest it tasted like any other strong red meat; venison's about the closest. You just try not to think about Skippy. Roo steak is on every bar-food menu in Oz, apparently.'

Beth wished they hadn't started on this track. Work, domestic routine, these were the things she'd come here to escape. Now her head was full of wondering about Nick, about how he was getting on all by himself back at home. She pictured him slumped on the sofa, the crumpled, slightly greasy, nineteen-year-old length of him, fast asleep in the middle of the afternoon in front of the Disney Channel and surrounded by beer cans and pizza boxes. One could also, she thought as she crossed her fingers, if masochistically inclined, pull the mental camera back from the sofa scenario to include thirty hung-over, post-party teenagers, many broken windows, something stinking and indelible drying all over the stair carpet and the police forcing an entry. Do not, she told herself, go there. As long as Nick fed the cats and remembered to get up for work, that was the main thing. She should
not
worry about him, for in that direction lay mollycoddling and the formation of one of those helpless, bleating men who
ask where their clean socks are. He was past voting age, for heaven's sake, and only a few final saving-up weeks from flying off to spend months fending for himself in Australia. He'd have to survive well enough there without someone reminding him that tee shirts didn't wash themselves.

‘Mum! Mum, I need money!' The long skinny shadow of Delilah fell across Beth's face and she opened her eyes.

‘What do you need money for? You don't have to pay for anything here, it's all included.'

‘For on the beach. There's someone selling sarongs and I really
need
a blue one. She's got the exact right thing to go with my spotty bikini. I've got money, but it's English. And it's miles away up in my room.' Those two clinchers should do it. Beth could almost see her brain ticking along on a mother-manipulation track, holding out the promise that: a) it was only a loan and b) Delilah was being careful not to overtire herself.

‘OK, how much? A tenner's-worth?'

Delilah's lip curled up sideways in her best ‘I think
not
' expression.

‘
Muuum!
Twenty, at least! She's got lots of stuff, shell bracelets and coral necklaces and that.'

‘Twenty then, but I want it back and there'll be loads of chances to buy things . . .' But Delilah had gone, flip-flopping fast down the short path towards the shopping opportunity, stopping only for a second to stroke one of the hotel's many cats.

Lesley watched her go. ‘Gorgeous, isn't she? What I'd give to be sixteen again.'

‘Would you really though?' Beth settled herself back on the lounger. The sun was now blazing under the parasol at chest level, and she'd have to put something over that stretch of thin, delicate skin or it would burn
and shrivel. ‘Would you really want all those exams and the worry about which university and all that peer-pressure competitiveness?'

‘Well since you put it that way . . . no. And I wouldn't want to lose my virginity again either.' Lesley shuddered. ‘Or if I did, I'd want something classier than the school thug and the back of his dad's Ford Escort in the Arndale multi-storey. Somewhere like here would be just perfect, sixteen or whenever.'

That was another train of thought Beth wasn't over-keen to pursue. If Nick's sex life was something she was forced, by way of his bedroom sound effects, to know about, it was quite the opposite with Delilah, who kept her fancies and fantasies firmly between her mobile phone and her circle of mates, and thank goodness for that, in Beth's opinion. There were times when she understood exactly what teens meant when they put their hands over their ears and yelled ‘Too much information!'