Excess Baggage (26 page)

‘’S’like eating a sweet with the paper on,’ he said, swigging the last of his beer. ‘And they’re not that safe. They break. Sometimes they break and then you’re really in it, real live biological bug trouble.’ He was almost slurring his words by now. Becky frowned at him. What was he saying, exactly? What had he caught? He was hinting at something, for sure. Perhaps it was one of those diseases that everyone thought had died out, like syphilis. Bits of him would fall off, he’d go mad (or mad
der
at any rate), he’d get pustules and die – they’d talked about it in history at school, even the back-row yobs had been fascinated.

‘Mark,’ she said, having worked herself up into a state that bordered on pity for him, ‘Mark, come on, let’s go back to the others.’ With difficulty, for he was heavy and not particularly steady, she pulled him up from the sand and led him back towards the hotel. She waved to Ethan, who grinned back at her. However much she resisted it, she wasn’t going to ignore completely what Mark had said. It had only been an illusion, the idea that she was more than just a notch on Ethan’s shag-list, but Mark’s words were clearly basic lousy truth, and, well, somehow Ethan didn’t have the same appeal. How sad would she have to be to be
that
desperate?

The last-day-on-earth feeling continued through to the afternoon and increased when one of the tour reps let it slip that the airport was now closed and wouldn’t reopen until the storm had passed. Six people who had been waiting forlornly with their luggage in the lobby for a taxi after lunch had been scheduled to fly back to Manchester early that evening but discovered that because of concern about possible storm damage, their plane hadn’t even bothered to leave England. There was a general vagueness about arrangements for places for them on flights later in the week.

‘There’ll be a logjam at the airport. There’ll be stranded folks all over the island,’ Perry, the poolside philosopher, predicted grimly. ‘It’ll be chaos.’

‘There’ll be queues for miles,’ Shirley agreed. Neither of them seemed too concerned, Lucy thought as she listened. If anything, the prospect gave them a certain amount of glee, being a chance to demonstrate that The Brits knew how to deal with mayhem and would show any panicking Johnny Foreigners that patience and the ability to wait your turn triumphed in the end.

Luke was bored. He and Tom and Colette couldn’t think of anything to do and were starting to get tetchy. No-one was allowed in the swimming pool because the hotel staff were collecting all the chairs and tables from the beach bar and lowering them into the water to store them safely from the wind. The bar-football and table-tennis tables from the games room were also off limits, having been folded and fastened securely to a pillar in the centre of the room.

‘Couldn’t all this wait till later?’ Plum complained on his behalf.

‘I don’t suppose many of the staff will
be
here later,’ Lucy said. ‘They’ll all want to get home and be with their own families.’

‘I suppose so,’ Plum conceded with a sigh. ‘I must say this is getting awfully tedious. First none of us can go out, then some people can’t even go home, and now the facilities we
have
got are being gradually run down. Strange sort of holiday.’

‘I think it’s rather exciting,’ Shirley said. ‘It’ll certainly give us something to tell them back home. Better than the usual “Yes thank you, we had a lovely time”, with nothing else to report.’

Plum got up off her lounger and stretched her arms. ‘Well, I think I’ll go and get a bit of sleep. I don’t suppose we’ll get much tonight.’ She walked off slowly in the direction of her room. Luke and Tom sat on the grass near the pool, watching the white ironwork of the gazebo to see if there were any lizards they could torment.

‘There was a big one down by those rocks on the headland yesterday. It went into a hole so it might still be around,’ Colette told them. ‘We could go and look.’

The two boys considered, looking bored, then Tom decided, ‘I suppose we could. And after that I want to get some supplies for tonight. Sweets and stuff, though Mum went off for a drink with some bloke after lunch and I don’t know where she is and she’s got all the cash.’

The three of them sauntered off along the sand towards the headland where the villas were. The dogs that lived on the shore had disappeared and the small black birds that scavenged beneath the trees seemed to have gone as well. Colette had the feeling that wildlife, better equipped with instincts than stupid humans, had gone into hiding till the storm was over. The sea was now quite definitely rougher than before and the surf was racing further up the beach.

‘Is it high tide, or is this the start of the hurricane?’
Colette
asked. She looked at her grandparents’ villa, up on the promontory, and wondered if it
was
going to be far enough out of the water when everything got really rough. She felt a tingle of something that wasn’t quite fear, but wasn’t comfortable enough to be just excitement.

‘The sea’s crashing on the rocks quite a lot too. It’s spraying right up to the wall,’ Tom said. ‘I wouldn’t want to spend the night up there.’

‘Thanks, Tom. Just a great thing to say,’ Luke hissed at him. Colette’s eyes were looking alarmingly round and afraid. And nothing had even happened yet.

‘Yeah, well, it’ll be even worse in the dark, won’t it, ‘cos you’ll only be able to
hear
it, won’t you.’ Tom was enjoying being persistent with the gloom.

‘Tom, just
shut up
will you.’ Luke pushed him to emphasize his point and Tom slid over in the sand.

‘Hey, thanks! Well if you’re going to be like that I’ll just go off and find my mum for some cash. You can stuff your fucking old lizard.’ Tom turned and strode off angrily, hands in his pockets and his head down.

‘Now you’ve hurt his feelings,’ Colette said.

‘Don’t you start … Oh sorry, hey I’ll apologize to him later, OK?’

Colette giggled. ‘If we live that long.’

‘Look, we’ll be OK.’

‘I know.’ Colette laughed again. ‘After all, Gran keeps saying “It’s only a bit of wind.”’

‘Yeah, like it’s some giant fart in the sky or something.’

The two of them were still laughing as they climbed up the rocks to find where Colette had seen the big lizard. The sea was pounding hard against the rocks, sending jets of spray high in the air. Colette moved along so that more of the water splashed onto her. ‘It’s
lovely
, like a warm shower,’ she told Luke.

‘So where’s this huge iguana thing?’ he asked, peering into rock crevices.

‘It wasn’t an iguana, but nearly as big as that,’ she said. ‘And it was kind of blueish.’

‘Can’t see anything. Let’s go down to the other side.’ He moved a bit closer to her and lowered his voice. ‘And we might see the Great Celeb, sunbathing out on his or her terrace.’

‘They’ve probably put special screens up.’

There were voices, though, and someone doing some low giggling. Instinctively, Luke and Colette started creeping slowly and carefully along the rocks in the direction of the murmurs.

‘They sound … naughty, like they’re up to something,’ Colette whispered.

Luke agreed, though the word he’d have used was ‘sexy’, which was probably because he was a couple of years older. He was desperate to see what was going on, but also wondered if Colette perhaps shouldn’t. Then suddenly there was no choice. Across the next rock, immediately below them, was the vision of a couple celebrating their not-so-hidden liaison with a bottle of champagne. The woman’s bikini top was on the rock behind her and the man, as they watched, poured the bubbling liquid down her neck and leaned to lick at it as it trickled onto her breasts. Her head went back as he made his way up towards her throat, and some movement from the two teenagers caught her eye.

‘Run!’ Luke hissed at Colette and she scuttled backwards behind the rocks.

‘Spying little bastards!’ The woman’s voice rang out after them. There was a crash of glass breaking and the man swore loudly. Colette and Luke, barely able to
move
from laughter, managed to hurl themselves across the promontory wall and into Shirley and Perry’s villa garden, where they collapsed on the spiky grass, gasping for breath. ‘The gold lady!’

‘And one of the Steves! Oh yuk!’ Colette pulled an appalled face.

‘Double, triple yuk! I mean she’s someone’s
mum
!’

Abruptly Colette’s laughter stopped. She stared out over the wall towards the sea.

‘I suppose she is. So’s my mum,’ she said.

‘What do you mean?’ Luke was puzzled. Of course Lucy was Colette’s mum, what did that have to do with anything? His mum was a mum too.

‘Oh. I get it,’ he said. ‘You mean that she might … like that …’

‘Well, she probably does.’ Then Colette added quickly, ‘But not with just anyone.’

Another snort of laughter escaped from Luke. ‘And not in public!’

‘No, not in public.’ And the giggling started again.

‘It’s like being summoned for nursery tea,’ Mark grumbled as he and Simon walked up the steps to the terrace restaurant. It wasn’t even six o’clock yet and Mark was beginning a dry-mouthed hangover that could do with a bit of sleeping off, but the staff were eager to get the hotel guests fed early and despatched to their rooms to wait for the storm to hit. The latest forecast was that it was due sometime between nine and ten, but it was anyone’s guess how long it was likely to go on after that. As guests wandered in from the beach and the poolside, staff collected the sunloungers and piled them up, roping them in heaps together and tying them to the big tamarind tree beside the pool or to the turpentine tree beside the beach bar.

‘They’ll reek of oil after this,’ Perry commented as he watched. ‘You don’t want to put anything too close to that tree, the whiff lingers.’

Lucy smiled at him. ‘I quite like the smell, it reminds me of paint,’ she said.

Mark grunted gloomily. ‘Well, I’m glad you don’t get trees that smell of my job, I can tell you. I wouldn’t want to go on holiday and get smelly reminders of the bank.’

‘Wait till your three are teenagers,’ Plum teased. ‘They think there
are
trees that resemble banks. They think money grows on them.’

The dining area had been transformed. Many of the tables had already been removed and stacked close to the wall to keep them safe. Those that were left had been laid out in long lines (‘like school dinners’, Colette said to Lucy), covered with bright pink cloths and arranged with free bottles of wine from which cheery silver balloons on green ribbons floated in the breeze. Out on the open section of the terrace a barbecue was blazing and reggae was belting out over the PA in the lobby. Everyone was to eat at the same time and all together, children and babies as well. Marisa, determined to have a good time too, handed over her three charges to Theresa and went to the far end of the table where she could sit with her new friend. The atmosphere was of determined party jollity, with people making jokes about being swept away and meeting up again on the Venezuelan coast. The Manchester group who’d missed out on their flights home had recovered quickly from their disappointment and were now crowing about getting more than a free lunch, and even Cathy was happily inviting everyone to her wedding the day after: ‘If the place is still standing, and even if it’s not,’ she declared.

‘Hey, boys, it’s party time!’ the ‘Star’ lady called out to the Steves. ‘Come sit by me and open a bottle!’

‘She’s cheered up,’ Perry said to Lucy.

‘Happy Hour started at four, that’s why. But they’ve closed the bar for the night now, which was sensible,’ Simon told him. He was frowning. He’d got used to the idea that this hurricane was a serious event. Now the atmosphere felt like the last decadent party on a sinking ship. Drunk people could be a liability – they might do stupid things like come out of their rooms and run about in the wind. Those who were sober would have to rescue them and risk their own lives.

‘Lighten up, Simon. We’ll be OK.’ Lucy prodded him gently. ‘Have a glass of wine, relax.’

‘I’m not sure relaxing is such a good idea. Suppose we need to be alert?’

‘Then we will be. No-one’s going to overdo it, they’re all too scared.’

It was almost at the end of the meal, when the brief Caribbean dusk had passed and it was now dark, that the wind suddenly stepped up its force. The edges of the tablecloths started to flick and flap upwards, reminding Lucy of whippy updraughts at underground stations that send skirts swirling. Napkins blew off the tables, then leaves began to appear among the food, blown in from the outside terrace. Rain started pounding on the roof just as everyone was finishing the fruit and ice cream, and there was an all-round breath-intake as the lights flickered in a particularly sharp gust.

‘This is it,’ Shirley said.

‘No it isn’t.’ A passing waiter grinned at her. ‘This is nothing yet.’

Lucy’s thoughts turned to Henry. She imagined him snugly blockaded into his home with Oliver and Glenda and Glenda’s friend Abby who shared her
studio
home. She wondered if they were making a party of it too, fending off the potential disaster with good food and wine and jokes. She wished she was with them, curled up with Henry on the big blue sofa along with Oliver and Colette, just like a real family. She imagined the preparations they would have made, the bath filled with water in case supplies were cut off, the candles and lamps ready for when the electricity failed, the cupboards full of emergency food because the roads into town could be strewn with fallen trees. Henry had said there’d been panic buying at the stores in town, with everyone stocking up for a long period of upheaval. All Lucy had with her by way of emergency supplies was a bag containing her toothbrush, her passport, knickers for the next day and the Agatha Christie book she’d started that morning. It was hardly the stuff of survival.

‘I haven’t got enough cigarettes, I’m sure of it.’ The gold lady, looking nervy, appeared next to Lucy as they went down the steps on their way to their allocated rooms. There was an outbreak of loud giggling behind them and the two women turned round to find Colette and Luke in fits of uncontrollable laughter.