Excess Baggage (12 page)

‘Imagine living here,’ Lucy muttered to herself. The thought of her soon-to-be-homeless state had burrowed its way back into her mind. She pondered gloomily the dismal prospect of looking over dingy, neglected west London flats. They would be so far towards the outer edge of her price range that the cost of tarting up the rooms to an acceptable level of pleasing decor would be pretty much out of the question. They would smell of stale cheese. The carpets would be shredding at the edges and stained with old sour wine and spilled ground-in food. What looked like shadows in the ceilings’ corners would every time be darkened paint, discoloured by smuts of neglected dust and the greasy webs of countless long-dead spiders. Perry would offer her money, as he did every time she moved flats, in the hope that she’d buy a place of her own. She would refuse, as she always did, on the increasingly shaky grounds that she was far too old to be relying on her family for handouts and preferred to be independent. Perry would sigh and tell her she was stubborn and he was only thinking of Colette. Shirley would also sigh and say ‘It’s high time you settled down with a nice man’ (as if it was that easy …), a situation that ideally required someone with enough of what she called Sterling Qualities to keep her in the manner of Theresa and Plum. As far as Lucy was concerned, she
was
settled
(apart from the ending of the flat’s lease and the demise of the van, which she certainly didn’t want to think about
now
). Adding a Mr Possibly to the equation wouldn’t necessarily help.

‘Hey, surely that’s not a grave, is it? There in that garden?’ Mark, just in front of Lucy, leaned across and commented quietly to her as the bus slowed for a road junction. Lucy peered through the foliage into a neat garden planted with exuberant geraniums and a mass of tangled plumbago and the kind of lobster-claw flowers that she’d only previously seen in the most exotic London florists. Chickens were scrabbling around. A litter of half-grown puppies, the colour of dusty camels, was dozing between the house’s stilts, and just as the bus started moving again Lucy caught sight of a dark wooden cross marking a patch of raised earth that did look exactly like a grave.

‘I’ll ask Henry when I see him,’ Lucy said to Mark. ‘It might be a local tradition to keep your loved ones on site or it could just have been a specially loved dog.’

‘Bloody big dog,’ he muttered.

‘A cow then.’ Lucy giggled.

‘You don’t bury a cow, you eat it.’ Mark was now chuckling too, but slightly nervously as if he’d sensed that the Grim Reaper himself might be hanging around the premises, keeping an eye on his investment.

‘I’m starving. Anyone got any chocolate?’ Luke, up at the front close to Shirley, was getting fidgety.

‘You can’t last five minutes without an input of junk can you?’ she teased him.

‘I’m just hungry, s’all. What’s the problem?’ The driver turned and grinned at him, swerved the bus rather abruptly to the edge of the road and stopped. Saying nothing but still smiling, he opened the door and leapt out, disappearing among the trees.

‘See, now look what you’ve done Luke, whingeing like that.’ Shirley poked Luke hard in the ribs, laughing at him. ‘Now we’re stuck.’

‘’S’not my fault. Anyway he’s probably just gone for a slash.’ Lucy sensed his irritation, watching his teenage body hunching down, the shoulders rounding and his head hanging. If she could only draw that attitude, that posture, she thought, capture so exactly the awful adolescent shrinking of confidence mixed with angry bravado, she’d give a copy to every insensitive grandparent on the planet, just to remind them …

‘So you’re hungry, man. Who else?’ The driver jumped back into the bus clutching a handful of neat small bananas, which he handed round the family.

‘Thanks. Oh, they’re so dinky!’ Becky unpeeled one delightedly and ate most of it in one go.

‘Special, extra sweet, extra small and straight off the plant. We call them rock figs. You don’t get so many of those shipped overseas. We keep the sweetest here for us!’ Victor laughed, starting the engine again.

The road became a track, bumpy and narrow, climbing through the trees. It was deeply shady and there was a constant smell of slightly rotten sweetness. As he drove, Victor identified trees and shrubs, stopping to pull a piece of bark from a tree (‘Mmm, cinnamon on the hoof!’ Theresa said, inhaling the fresh sharp scent) and to pick fresh nutmegs, peeling off the pulpy yellow flesh and exposing the scarlet net of mace surrounding the nut.

‘So if this is a rainforest, where’s the rain?’ Becky asked Victor as the bus lurched now over ever-narrower, more bumpy track.

‘About ten minutes away,’ he told her. ‘About the time you’ll be swimming in the waterfall pool. We’re nearly there. But if you want real rain, you be here next
week
. There’s a big storm coming, it’s that time of the year.’

‘Do you get hurricanes? What’s it like?’ Luke was leaning forward, interested in the possibility of a spot of danger. ‘And how do you know when they’re coming?’

Victor laughed. ‘Sure we get hurricanes, usually the tail end of someone else’s bad time, though the last one, Hurricane Georges, that was one destroyer.’ He tapped the side of his nose and grinned back over the seat to Luke. ‘And how we know they’re comm’, man, well …’ His voice dropped and Luke leaned forward, fascinated. ‘Well,’ Victor went on, ‘what we do is this thing. We listen to the weather forecast! OK, here we are now at the waterfall. Take some time, enjoy!’

Mark climbed out of the bus and stretched. Every bit of him ached and he hoped it was simply from being in the minibus as it lurched and juddered over the last couple of miles of track. He’d wanted to do the driving, suggested simply hiring a couple of Jeeps and following the map. It had been Simon (typically) who’d been cautious, lecturing him on the inadequacy of island road signs, doing his usual old-woman what-ifs, running through all potential disasters from a simple puncture to the certainty that the cars’ canvas roofs would be torn apart by crazed monkeys intent on ripping them all limb from limb.

‘Who wants to swim?’ Plum went to the wooden platform at the side of the road and peered down steep stone steps into a dizzying canyon. Over the sound of the cascade she could just make out the shrieks of swimmers in water that fell fresh out of the rocks and could easily be near-freezing compared with the humid soupy air. The thought of diving into such
refreshing
chill was dangerously attractive. It occurred to Plum that if any of the family was harbouring a secretly dodgy heart, an enthusiastic leap from soggy clogging heat into instant cold could be fatal. A small nasty worm of devilment had Plum privately betting with herself as to which of them would be taking the biggest risk. Lucy was all right, being slim and fit and still on the safer side of forty. Theresa, too, although fraught and nervy, never knowingly consumed anything that was going to trouble her cholesterol level and probably had blood pressure that was so used to crashing up and down that she wasn’t going to have her aorta panicking over a splash of cold water. Simon, though, he was another matter. He was becomingly alarmingly apple-shaped around the middle, something she’d read was a dangerous pointer for future heart attacks. And he worried a lot about getting older, too. On the basis that you were sometimes unlucky enough to get what you wished for, it was possible that the gods had lined up for him an imminent opportunity for not actually having to
get
any older. Perry and Shirley would go on for ever, she could tell, in spite of Simon watching for every hand twitch (Parkinson’s), sweating brow (heart failure) or stumbling gait (imminent stroke). They were halfway down the steep and uneven chasm steps now, Simon holding Shirley’s arm and trying to slow her pace, and then he settled her on a bench under a palm-thatched shelter before vanishing with Mark beyond the door of a hut signposted ‘Changing Men’.

‘If only you could,’ Plum heard Theresa mutter behind her as they went in through the ‘Changing Ladies’ door.

‘Could what?’

‘Change men. Just hand one over like something that
didn’t
fit you from Marks & Sparks and get them to give you a better one.’

‘Is Mark really that bad?’

‘I don’t know, Plum. He doesn’t say anything much, just drifts around as if conversation is something he used to do but doesn’t need to any more. I’ve forgotten what he’s like.’

‘Maybe it’s the antibiotics. They can make you a bit down.’

‘Down? He barely speaks. He’s practically comatose. Oh, unless he’s out learning bloody
diving
with bloody
Lucy
. I’ve seen them, with her new friend
Henry
, strolling back up the beach and laughing about this and that and nothing. Never shares the bloody joke. Of course if we’d gone to Italy we’d have the usual things to talk about, things in common. Art and food and stuff. Real things.’

‘Couldn’t you have that here? Rent a car and go out on your own. There’s a couple of galleries in town, I noticed in the guidebook, with some amazing Caribbean art collections.’ Bloody snob, Plum thought as she tugged her swimsuit up over her bottom. Probably thinks nothing worth looking at was painted after the sixteenth century. She could imagine Mark, trailing round Tuscan galleries having museum guides read to him by Theresa in her best Home Counties aren’t-we-cultured whine. He was probably just as uncommunicative wherever he was, but Theresa, woman with self-improvement on her mind, wouldn’t notice.

‘Not swimming?’ Lucy sat on a rock next to Mark and dabbled her feet in the water. It was incredibly cold; in minutes her feet would be numb. Colette, Becky and Luke were tiptoeing in the shallows on the slippery rocks, daring each other to leap into the icy
water
, just as she, Theresa and Simon used to do in the freezing grey sea in Devon.

‘No, no swimming. I’m not up to having my balls frozen off, even if it would be a fitting punishment.’ Lucy looked at him, wary. Clearly there was something on his mind that he might be about to offload on her. ‘Please don’t,’ she wanted to say. He was staring down the path at Theresa, who glared back then dived expertly into the pool. When she came up she didn’t gasp and splutter at the cold as others did, but simply pushed her hair out of her eyes and duck-dived neatly under the water again.

‘Nerveless, isn’t she?’ Lucy commented. Mark grunted. He was looking very boyish, she thought, sprawled on the bench in his linen shorts and baggy black T-shirt, and his mood seemed appropriately tetchy and teenage to match.

‘She might be nerveless,’ he said eventually, fidgeting with a fern leaf he’d picked out of the bank, ‘or she might not. I daren’t test.’

‘OK, I give up. What are you talking about?’ Lucy wasn’t sure if she wanted to know about some row they’d had, but it seemed, just now, polite at least to give him a chance to tell her to sod off and mind her own business.

Mark turned and studied her face. He looked as if he was working out the level of confidence he could trust her with, which rather made her want to get up, run down the remaining steps and hurl herself into the water with the others. Even Shirley was paddling about, carrying her Dr Scholls in one hand, holding her skirt out of the way with the other and enjoying the refreshing chill on her toes.

Then Mark was off again. ‘Have you ever done something bad, not that it would hurt anyone else, not
really
, so long as they didn’t know, and you were sure you’d got away with it, so truly
no-one
was hurt, and then found much later that you hadn’t been quite as lucky as you’d thought?’ Lucy considered. Well of course she had. Wasn’t that what being young and experimenting was all about? ‘Yeah, years ago,’ she laughed, hoping against instinct that she could keep this light. ‘I snogged my best friend’s bloke while she was on the school ski trip and then the stupid sod went and confessed all to her about three months later.’ Lucy chuckled. ‘He said he felt “guilty”. I reckoned at the time he was just showing off. Nobody came out of it too well. Sue and I were never the same after. Silence would have been better all round.’ Was that the kind of thing he meant?

‘Silence isn’t going to work with this.’ Mark himself went quiet for a long moment then added, ‘I’ve caught something.’ Looking down at the water, Lucy for a few seconds thought he was talking about fish. She pictured him with a smart whippy salmon rod, up to his thighs in green waders, a helpful Scottish ghillie standing by with a landing net and a congratulatory smile. Mark wasn’t smiling.

‘Caught what?’ she asked, thinking with dread: please don’t let it be AIDS.

‘A nasty, persistent little bug, non-specific urethritis to give it its proper title. NSU.’

‘Oh.’ Lucy nearly added ‘is that all?’ because compared with The Big One, surely it wasn’t that much of a problem. ‘Not from Theresa presumably.’

Mark let out a blast of laughter. ‘Theresa? God no! Can you imagine …?’

Lucy frowned and looked at him. ‘No, I can’t, but then she’d probably say the same about you. I bet it never crossed her mind that you’d have an affair,
though
only because she doesn’t have enough imagination. It crosses every other woman’s mind.’

‘I haven’t been having an affair. There’s no-one.’

‘Then how …
Was
it a woman?’ Well, you never knew, Mark might well have gone to that kind of school.

‘Yes of course it was a bloody woman! Some hooker, no-one I actually knew.’ Mark was running his hands through his thick fair hair. It was blonder now, after a few days in strong sun. He was looking perplexed, hot and pressured and scared and resentful, now that he’d weakened and
told
. Good, Lucy thought on behalf of her sister, let him sweat for more reason than just tropical heat.

‘So are you going to share this bad news with Theresa or are you going to do the grown-up thing – get yourself fixed and try and keep your dick in your pants from now on?’

Mark sighed and looked at the ground. His feet were now surrounded with shredded fern leaves. He scuffed them into the earth. ‘That’s the problem. I thought that’s what I’d done. Then normal relations, as they say, were resumed with Tess and this bloody sharp pain started up again. Apparently it’s not that easy to fix. I’m on the second round of treatment and I might have given it to her. I’ve got to tell her, otherwise we’ll be reinfecting each other for ever.’