Excess Baggage (7 page)

‘You’ll get cancer,’ Theresa had hissed into her face. ‘If you smoke you’ll die.’

‘It’s one Silk Cut, not a whole habit,’ sophisticated Michael up-the-road had sneered.

‘If you start now you’ll never stop.’ It had felt like a challenge at the time. Lucy remembered looking very carefully at Theresa’s face, trying to work out whether it was real concern for her young sister that made her so angry or whether she just wanted to pick a fight and put Lucy in the wrong, spoiling her fun. Theresa had
been
twenty-two at the time, well into grown-uphood by Lucy’s reckoning, and her anger had puzzled her. Perversely, it had also put Lucy off cigarettes. She was determined, till Theresa left home a year or so later, that she wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of sniffing the air around Lucy and scenting out the hint of smoke, nor would she ever be caught with her finger-ends stained ochrous with tobacco.

‘OK, who was the fruit punch and who was the pina colada?’ Simon took a tray of drinks from the waiter and started handing them round at random so that the drinks ended up being passed back and forth across the table.

‘Mine’s the Diet Coke.’ Plum reached across and claimed her glass.

‘And mine looks like a pina colada but it’s without rum,’ Theresa said. ‘I don’t know how people can drink alcohol in this heat.’

‘Oh I can.’ Shirley chuckled, taking a large gulp of rum punch. ‘A lot of what you fancy, that’s what holidays should be about. Especially this one. We need to celebrate being all together – such a treat. With you all down south and us stuck back in the frozen north, we only ever get to see you all together at Christmas. There’s not even a good family wedding on the cards.’ She took another sip and a breath then went on, ‘Talking of which, Lucy, what happened to that young man you were seeing, the one you said might have come here with you. What was his name, Joss?’

‘Ross.’ Lucy felt cornered. They’d all stopped, mid-munch, to listen. Even Sebastian’s small round mouth hung open, waiting, showing an unattractive mush of hot-dog.

‘Nothing happened. I suppose he changed his mind.’

‘About coming here or about you?’ Shirley was
smiling,
as if they were simply having a jolly general conversation about nothing that could possibly be considered remotely personal.

Lucy shrugged. She was too old to have to give love-life explanations to her mother but trying to be private made her sulky. ‘I don’t know. Does it matter? He isn’t here and I don’t particularly mind, I mean if he could pass up the chance to come to a place like this—’

‘So you won’t be seeing him again? When you get back?’ Shirley interrupted.

‘Mum, give me a break will you! I’m sure no-one wants to hear about my failed romances!’ Lucy forced out as much of a laugh as she could manage.

‘And so many of them,’ Theresa added.

‘Yes, give it a rest Shirley love, you’re embarrassing the poor girl.’ The pat on the wrist that Perry gave his wife looked quite a firm one.

‘Woman.’ Lucy cursed herself for not keeping her mouth shut. ‘I haven’t been a girl for a long time now.’

‘Well, I expect that’s all Mum’s on about,’ Simon cut in, using what Lucy recognized as his let’s-sort-this-out voice. ‘You’re old enough not to have to put up with disappointments from men. I expect she’d just like you to meet someone.’

‘Oh she has already! Haven’t you Lucy?’ Theresa’s voice was bright and sharp. ‘That man you met up a tree in the middle of the night? Why don’t you tell Mum all about him?’

‘Leave it Theresa.’ Mark’s voice was like a low warning thunder rumble.

Lucy stood up. ‘Whatever I do I can’t get it right, can I? I don’t get myself neatly married off and that’s wrong, but when I do chat to attractive strangers, that’s wrong too.’ Colette was sitting with her elbows on the table, fingers in her ears, looking at the sky and
tunelessly
singing an old Spice Girls song. Lucy watched her with sympathy, wishing she could do exactly the same. There was a small, waiting silence then Simon briskly rustled his collection of lists and leaflets.

‘So, tomorrow then. I thought we could go out and look round Teignmouth in the morning …’

‘Er … not Lucy and me, we’ve got our first diving lesson in the pool at ten.’

‘With the hunky tree-dweller.’ Theresa smirked.

Plum leaned forward and touched her arm, then said very quietly, ‘Admit you’re just a teensy bit envious, Theresa, I know I am.’

Theresa gave her a queenly smile and lowered her voice to something close to a hiss. ‘If you’re suggesting there’s something missing in your life in that department, Plum, then please take it up with Simon, not with me. I certainly don’t envy Lucy.’

Which Plum took to mean quite the opposite.

LUCY LAY OUT
flat as close to the bottom of the pool as the air tank strapped to her back allowed, figuring out the workings of her buoyancy control device. She felt like Dustin Hoffman in
The Graduate
, hiding under the water from his family. She looked up at the legs of a small child paddling away like duck feet above her. He was way out of his depth and the automatic parent in her scanned the rest of the pool for a set of larger, stronger limbs that would indicate the presence of a responsible grown-up. The child’s feet stopped moving and he let his plump legs dangle, trusting his orange inflated armbands for support. He bobbed comfortably, splashing his small hands up and down, the ripples bending the sunlight above her.

It occurred to Lucy that she could do with some support herself. Support of the financial kind, for sure, as ever, but also of the commiserating kind. Colette was far too young to sit with her in the bar or on the beach and sympathize about life’s sundry unfairnesses. That was the huge problem with being a lone parent: you had to be wary, make sure you kept some kind of balance about how much emotional sharing-out you inflicted on your child. You had to see-saw between a foolish rosy-outlooked pretence that everything was
fine,
really, things always turned out OK, and the truth – that life on your own with a kid was a hard, complicated plate-juggling act where you were the only person whose fault the many difficulties, failures and mistakes could ever be. To inflict on Colette the knife-edge day-to-day burden of simply getting by, the constant money-and-work worries, the men (like bloody Ross) who disappointed, and the ever-present rather shameful mild envy of luckier friends and siblings with what seemed to be wondrously sorted lives, would be a dreadful blight on the poor girl’s childhood.

‘She’s only got you, so you’ll always have to be the strong one. You mustn’t let her see you cry, not ever,’ had been her mother’s formidable (and hardly realistic) advice the day after Colette was born. Lucy, hormonally poleaxed and already sore from her baby’s greedily chewing attempts at breastfeeding, had promptly burst into tears. Shirley had shaken her head slowly, as if Lucy had already earned herself an eternal D-minus for mothering, and then conceded, ‘Well I’m sure Plum will always help you out, if you’re stuck for advice.’ Just as Lucy had been figuring out the implication that her mother
wouldn’t
be available for helping out, Shirley had added, ‘And there’s always me, as a last resort, though when you’ve ever taken any guidance from me I can’t recall. If you had …’ and she’d sighed, stroking Colette’s baby fingers. Lucy, still sniffling into a tissue, had finished the sentence for her: ‘If I had, I wouldn’t be here now, all alone with a baby.’

‘That’s not what I meant at all.’ Shirley had smiled. ‘I know at the time I said you were too young and silly to go producing babies you didn’t need to have, but…’ and she’d paused to swallow and collect her words,
‘maybe
I was wrong. Prove me wrong, Lucy, I know you can, even if it’s only to be bloody awkward.’

As Lucy lay in the water, relaxed, floating, wondering if she was doing the right thing with the BCD, the vision of her clamped van sneaked into her mind. She tried to stop the inevitable express train of thought: by the time she got back the van would have been towed away and scrapped, crushed and pounded to a foot-square parcel of junked metal. The local council was hot on that sort of thing, trying to pass the area off as being a newly desirable one, with hiked-up council-tax banding and generous laxity on the planning rules for extenders and improvers. That would mean she’d have no transport. She’d have no way of getting her ladders and brushes and dust sheets and the rest of her equipment from job to job. No car, no work was the full awful equation. She couldn’t tell the family; Theresa would only raise her eyes to heaven in mock despair. Simon would start to flap and worry that she’d turn up on his doorstep seeking refuge, clutching a small bag of worldly goods and Colette’s hand. Her mother would mutter about her getting a ‘proper job’. Worst of all, her lovely devoted father, still sure that for his younger girl he was the only man in her life to matter, would get her on her own and offer her a spanking new van. It would be so hard to resist, so hard these days to insist that the principle of personal independence
mattered
.

Henry appeared, swimming elegantly in front of Lucy, his thumb pointing up. His eyes behind his mask looked bright and eager. She was about to make the same sign back – after all, she couldn’t recall when she’d last felt so physically relaxed even if her mind was racing – when she remembered the instructions about communicating underwater. An upturned thumb meant your dive-buddy was heading for the surface.
She
flipped her body over and headed slowly upwards alongside Henry. Mark was already there, partnered with Henry’s assistant, Andy. Down at the shallow end, a small collection of swimmers eyed them warily, as if all the equipment attached to their bodies turned them into bizarre water life worthy of only remote scrutiny.

‘It all looks a bit Heath Robinson, this stuff, doesn’t it?’ Mark commented as they peeled off their tanks and weight belts and buoyancy jackets beside the pool. Lucy looked again at the collection of straps and hoses and Velcro and gauges. It did all resemble the kind of contraption that only a crazed inventor with too-easy access to a scrapyard could come up with. In spite of all the Velcro and neoprene, en masse it was ugly, clumsy stuff, emphasizing how dreadfully out of place humans were in the sea. It was pushing their luck, really, to try and intrude into undersea life where fish needed only a set of delicate rippling fins and simple primitive gills to get by.

‘It looks as if it’s all long outdated, like really old hospital equipment. Shouldn’t someone have come up with a streamlined version of all this kit by now?’ Lucy asked.

‘This
is
the streamlined version. You should check out old movies of underwater divers. This is state-of-the-art, man, no worries.’ Henry squeezed Lucy’s shoulder. ‘You wait till you’re out there in the great ocean. Feel yourself floating on the current, at one with the barracudas. Pure grace,
amazing
grace.’

‘I’m not sure I like the thought of sharing the sea with barracudas.’ Mark looked doubtful as he gathered his equipment together. ‘And are there sharks?’

Henry laughed. ‘For sure there’s sharks, man! But not great whites, not here, just ordinary little nurse
sharks
and blue ones and hammerheads and stuff. They’re just big swimming pussycats quietly minding their own, you’ll see.’ He winked at Lucy, who grinned back. Henry moved a bit closer to her and spoke more quietly as they all set off along the beach to return the equipment to the dive store. ‘OK, so have you got time now for a drink with me? The bar just down the next beach has the best rum punches on the island and I got the afternoon off.’

‘Oh. Well, I’d love to, but Mark and I have to rush off and get a cab into Teignmouth to meet the others for lunch. We’re in enough trouble with my brother for skiving off to learn to dive as it is.’

‘You’re crazy. Today there’s three cruise ships in and the whole town will be heaving. How about tonight then, after you’ve eaten
with the family
,’ he teased.

‘Ah, that would be great but, well, there’s my daughter, I shouldn’t just slope off …’ Lucy cursed herself for such pathetic hesitation. Henry was friendly but not pushy. He was about her age and he was fun and he had no connections with home or work or family. What bliss it would be to slip away from the rest of them (already, only the third day in) and spend an hour or two in a bar with an unrelated (and don’t forget attractive) grown-up. Colette would say she didn’t mind her going, but she would be sure to give her that look, the one that rivalled Shirley’s in Conveyed Meaning. Colette’s version involved the eyes in raised-to-heaven mode and invariably meant, ‘Oh Mum, not another dead-end date.’

‘Though Becky could keep an eye on her …’ But Henry’s hands, one holding a weight belt, the other an empty air tank, were already raised in amiable defeat.

‘It’s OK, I’ve got a son, ten years old. I know what it’s
like
when you’re supposed to be spending time with them.’

Well, that changed things, Lucy thought, feeling an unreasonably and unexpectedly large surge of cross disappointment – after all, he’d only invited her for a drink and she wasn’t looking for anything more, definitely not. In spite of herself, though, she felt her voice go hard, as always when the W-word loomed, as it so very often did with attractive men of the right age. If you didn’t quite trust your luck when you seemed to have met a good one, you were probably right and the wife-factor would surely be lurking around to wreck things.

‘Absolutely,’ she agreed, adding, ‘and your wife?’ They’d reached the dive shop by now and Lucy was glad to get inside, into the cool shade. Glenda was just inside the door and she let out a blast of husky laughter. ‘Some wife! Scuttled off to Jamaica when little Olly was two. Visits once a year, always manages to forget the poor kid’s birthday. Henry misses her as much as you’d miss a dose of herpes.’

The blast of clammy urban heat that hit Lucy as she climbed out of the viciously air-conditioned taxi almost knocked the breath out of her. The small town, with its narrow hilly streets and its prettily dilapidated Georgian buildings in the soft colours of children’s party cakes, seemed to be completely crammed with people. Well, Henry had warned them.