The Following Girls (30 page)

‘We will fight them on the beaches,’ growled Bob Baker.

He did try boycotting the pool entirely on the second morning, but the nearest seaside had black volcanic dust instead of sand which dirtied your feet and left a sooty mess in the seams of your beach bag – ‘like putting up deckchairs on a slag heap’ said Bob – and so it was back to the pool after lunch where the only three remaining sunbeds were round behind the paddling pool.

The Germans had clearly devised some kind of rota for their daily colonisation of the poolside. Bob Baker didn’t get up as early as they did (or was it stay up as late?), but after two further days of sitting in sunbed Siberia he simply nipped out of the dining room while they were still downing their breakfast bratwurst, gathered up the artful litter of personal possessions, folded them neatly and put them in a pile by the spare beach umbrellas, before selecting a poolside lounger and stretching out on it.

‘
Das ist mein platz
.’

A large red-faced blonde was pointing crossly at the trio of beds. Bob Baker, conscious of a group of watching English tourists on their way to crazy golf, pantomimed looking about him in search of a name tag.

‘
Nein
.’

This refusal to play by German rules made him a huge hit with the other English families – with their dads anyway. They stood him drinks in the poolside cabana thingy (thatched, Malawi-style) where the cocktails were served in hollowed coconuts garnished with slices of uncertain fruits –
yam
, probably. He wasn’t a great reader – give or take
Wisden
and the
Fuchsia Breeder’s Handbook
. Other dads were wading through airport thrillers, but when Bob Baker wasn’t infra-red grilling himself on a sunbed he preferred propping up the bar with his new friends, asking them which airline they came on and cadging cricket scores from their English newspapers.

‘Ne-ver!’ he was barking yet again.

Defeated Germans, thriftily downing alcohol brought from home, looked on disappointedly from their blue-glass balconies.

‘You were very funny today being.’ A blonde woman in a bikini had undulated by and begun making conversation. Spam was under her umbrella, reading, so self-contained, so detached from this good-looking, sunkissed Englishman in his tight blue briefs that the chatty fraulein hadn’t made the connection and didn’t trouble to lower her voice, so that both Baker and her stepmother were able to tune in.

‘Only kidding,’ Bob Baker suddenly fearing that his Churchill act would make him appear unsophisticated.

‘Kiddink?’ She made her blue eyes go comically wide.

‘I make a leedle joke, yes?’ Dad was saying in that silly sing-song English he always used for foreigners.

Her breasts were very large for someone so slim and Bob Baker was finding it hard not to gawp. They were the colour of hazelnuts apart from the tiny white triangles where her bikini top was out of line. Pam wore a one-piece. Pam preferred not to tan. He thought with distaste of his wife’s pink and peeling chest and brilliant white belly.

‘You make
ex-cellent
joke. Helga, my name is Helga.’

Helga leaned forward and Bob Baker suppressed a gasp as she put a brown hand on his thigh just as his daughter got up and walked past the bar to join Pam at the poolside, her scrawny teenage body encased in a long orange nightdress thing she’d been wearing since they arrived. He saw Helga sizing her up with a glance.

‘Enklish girls. Zay do not like the sun.’

‘Who’s that woman Dad’s talking to?’

‘Where?’ Spam put down her book (
War and Peace
? On holiday? Fooling nobody.) and raised the brim of her floppy hat to squint across to the bar. ‘Dunno. Some kraut.’

‘She had her hand
on his leg
.’

Spam raised one eyebrow and retrieved her book from the concrete lip of the deep end.

‘In this heat? Rather her than me. Have you had your tablet?’

Baker had been on Dr Sexton’s diet of tablets for nearly a fortnight now. The nightly mandies were having less and less impact on the daytime uppers and she was getting hardly any sleep. Her mind remained manically alert and the small hours were taken up with devising a bedroom farce written entirely in useful phrases gleaned from Spam’s little book.

Do you speak English? I don’t speak English. I am on holiday (I am on business). Is this seat taken? My wife is ill. I need a room with a large bed. I want more wine. The paella is very good. No thank you, I don’t want any more paella. That is enough paella. Yes, it is very good. Just a small helping. My wife is in London. You have very beautiful hands/hair/eyes/buffet dishes. I don’t understand. My wife doesn’t understand. My room has a view of the sea. Please bring me an ice bucket and a bottle of your finest champagne. Yes, I slept very well.

Your husband is very nice. He speaks English very well. He is very tall. My wife has telephoned. I have spoken to the night porter. Can you direct me to a chemist? This woman is known to the police. What kind of a hotel is this?

Sleep, if and when it ever came, was kept busy with feverish dreams, most of them featuring Mrs Mostyn in a very small Fawcett-blue bikini.

There were still nearly two weeks to go of the holiday and the Bakers had got into a routine at the hotel: same table, same sunbeds, drinks poured before they’d even ordered them (local beer for Dad, rum and coke for Spam, coke for Amanda).

Spam, who’d helped herself to prawn cocktail and sauteed squid at the buffet, hastily scrambled off her lilo to make an emergency sprint for the powder room, leaving her untouched Cuba Libre on the pool’s edge. Baker manoeuvred herself onto the vacant plastic mattress and picked up the abandoned glass (shame to waste it).

Dad’s German bint had been dragged away to the ping-pong table by a rather proprietorial countryman (Bob Baker despised table tennis). She had pulled a zebra-print T-shirt over her tiny bikini in case of spillage and Baker saw both men’s eyes home in on her breasts the instant her head disappeared. Bintless Bob grumbled over to check up on his daughter.

‘You all right? Pam having a siesta?’ He noticed the now empty glass and clicked his fingers at a passing barman: ‘Same again over here, Paco, and a
cerveza
,
por favor
.’ Like a native.

‘Cheers,’ said Baker when her highball arrived. You couldn’t even taste the rum when you drank it through a straw.

Dad opened his throat to receive the contents of his beer glass, like a snake inhaling a rat, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand as he looked around him to see if the coast was clear.

‘Had your tabs?’ Not a whisper exactly, but a sort of chuntering undertone like he was telling her that her flies were undone.

Spam finally returned from the loo and he ordered yet another round.

‘I might take mine up with me, Bob. It’s about time to get ready.’

They met again by the lift an hour later, Bob in a short-sleeved golf shirt, Spam in a khaki-coloured catsuit thingy with gold chains down the front. Baker was wearing a mortifyingly drippy cheesecloth dress Spam had probably bought for a joke but there hadn’t been time to take back to the shop.

Before dinner, guests – guests who weren’t downing thrifty tooth mugs of schnapps on their balconies – could sit in the piano bar overlooking the empty pool, drinking gins and tonics. The white artex-y walls of the terrace were all festooned with bougainvillea, the impossibly pink blossom looking like some primary school noticeboard display made out of scrunched-up tissue paper and thick dabs of map glue. ‘They’re
leaves
, not petals,’ said Dad, in greenhouse mode.

Dad ordered ‘the usual’ and Paco winked at Baker as he placed her glass on its white paper daisy – her third rum in an hour. She thought again of the small print on the chemist’s label. Did a piano count as machinery? Just as Baker was wondering whether to trip across to the white baby grand in her flowery flip-flops and vamp her way through ‘
Imagine’
or ‘
The Entertainer’
or the school song, the real entertainer arrived in his toothpaste-bright dinner jacket and began adjusting the stool and flicking through the handful of request cards that Paco had left on the lid underneath his water glass.

Baker sipped her drink as her parents chatted, uncomfortable to be eavesdropping on them being happy. A normal conversation because for once she was not the subject of it.

‘“
Moon River”
?’ suggested Mr Baker, eyeing the pianist.

‘“
Born Free”
?’ giggled Spam.

Both wrong: “
Strangers in the Night”
(what were the chances?).

‘Lousy crisps,’ said Dad, grinning, as he swiped a second bowl from the unoccupied next table. ‘Want some?’

No sooner had he stolen the crisps than a guest took the table, an English doctor (‘lady doctor’ as Spam insisted on calling her) who was staying in the hotel by herself. She had ordered a whisky and soda. Very sophisticated, Baker thought, as she slurped up her Cuba Libre: a proper drink, a
bloke’s
drink.

Dad kept looking towards the entrance to the bar – was he hoping for another sight of his German conquest? – Baker saw Spam checking over their neighbour, pricing her silk top and trousers.

‘
Patatas fritas, por favor
?’ Spanish accent and everything. Spam was cringing with embarrassment, hoping the woman hadn’t spotted the two empty bowls on their table’s glass top. Paco almost ran back with the crisps plus a sugar bowl full of olives and a saucer of diced cheese.

‘Didn’t bring us olives,’ huffed Bob, then turned to his daughter in a show of conversation. Barbie’s dad on holiday.

‘So, Amanda, how’s the revision coming along?’

Baker sucked up the last of her drink (as noisily as she could – always drove him mad) then made to lean back against the cushions, but the chair was deeper than she’d realised and she ended up almost reclining, sugary ice cubes slithering over her cheesecloth smocking. The fan on the ceiling of the bar had a small piece of paper streamer attached to it from the previous Saturday’s going home party and Baker watched, fascinated, as the long purple shred fluttered in the artificial breeze.

‘Amanda?’

Spam sounded very far away.

‘Come on, sausage, let’s get to the table.’

Evening meals were served by the open windows of the main dining room where the tablecloths were made of damask so stiff and starchy you could do origami with the matching napkins. Sydney Opera House yesterday, water lilies today. The linen changed colour every meal, same colours as the Mildred Fawcett china: green, blue, lemon, ointment.

There was a bamboo dresser affair by the pillar in the middle of the dining room where the waiters kept the re-corked bottles of Banda Azul and the half-empty litres of Tre Naranjas and flat Fanta, table numbers carved in Biro on the labels. The Bakers always had a bottle of wine with their dinner and as usual Amanda was given a glass, topped up with rubbish jokes about not getting tiddly.

‘Drop of beano tinto?’

Bob Baker nodded to the waiter who filled all three glasses with the vinegary wine.

The hotel menu was full of disgusting things – especially the starters which usually meant ‘ensalata’: parboiled vegetables decanted from jars and doused in oil and lemon juice. Floppy cocks of albino asparagus, palm hearts, tinned sweetcorn and grated carrot. (What kind of person served grated carrot as an hors d’oeuvre? Spam finally got her answer.) Even the carrots came in a bloody jar.

‘Are you not eating that?’ Her father’s fork spearing a sweaty great heart of palm. What had they done with the rest of the tree?

Baker drank most of her wine in one gulp, staring in horror at her main course: something rectangular and grey with a side order of beans and yet more carrots: diced. Goody.

‘Wossis?’

Dad tweaked the menu card from the swan-shaped gadget in the middle of the table and tilted his head back, narrowing his eyes so he could read the typed list.

‘
Lemon sole in a girdle
.’

Would have been funny if Bunty had said it. Or Julia? Maybe.

The smell of fish was wafting up from the plate like the stink of the Upper Shell cloakroom at low tide. Baker lurched forward and as she reached to steady herself, sent the wine bottle flying, a great whoosh of red liquid shooting across Dad’s yellow shirt. In the rush to limit the damage and hurl salt at the spreading purple stains no one spotted that Baker had lost consciousness.

When she came to, she was lying back in an armchair in the deserted piano bar, the cool, slim fingertips of the lady doctor clamped against the inside of her wrist.

‘Lie still. You’re going to be fine. My name’s Jenny. I’m a doctor.’

‘Lay-dee doc-tor,’ drawled Baker.

The woman’s superfine mousey eyebrows met for a kiss.

‘Swot Spam always calls you,’ explained Baker.

‘Pam?’