A Proper Family Holiday (15 page)

It wasn’t. Glancing up to check on Jack while Adam went to fetch a bottle of water from his bag, which was still on the other side of the playground, Chelsea saw that her nephew was at the top of the slide. He wasn’t preparing to slide down, however; he was just standing there, delivering some sort of soliloquy to the small group of boys he had gathered around him. Chelsea couldn’t help feeling proud of Jack’s obvious popularity. Now that her babysitting had been rewarded with another chance to get to know Adam, Chelsea felt more kindly than ever towards the little boy.

But there was trouble ahead. Lily, bored of playing house-wife, was climbing up the ladder behind him. It took her a while to get to the top, and when she did, Jack was still standing there, addressing his new ‘friends, Romans and countrymen’. The little girl was not best pleased to find her path to the exciting slide blocked by Jack in full flow. She waited patiently, staring at his back. Well, she didn’t wait
patiently
. She waited for exactly two seconds before she gave Jack an almighty shove that was designed to send him down the slide whether he wanted it or not.

Thank God Jack didn’t just pitch sideways off the top of the slide straight onto the tarmac below. He did at least manage to go down the chute, but the unexpected timing of his downhill ride rattled him. As did the fact that having shoved him, Lily followed seconds later and landed on top of him before he could get up and dust himself off.

A wail went up from both children. Chelsea abandoned her chair and raced to Jack’s side.

‘She pushed me!’ Jack was astonished.

‘He was in the way,’ Lily replied.

‘Are you hurt?’ Chelsea asked Jack urgently.

‘Did he hurt you?’ Adam was asking his daughter.

‘Did
he
hurt
her
?’ Chelsea exclaimed. ‘Didn’t you see what happened? She pushed him down the slide.’

‘She never would have pushed him,’ said Adam. ‘She must have lost her balance and fallen into him. Lily, tell Jack you’re sorry you accidentally hurt him when you slipped.’

‘Sorry.’ Lily tossed the word over her shoulder. She was already headed for the swings. Adam followed her. Jack and Chelsea stared after them, open-mouthed.

‘I hope he’s telling her off,’ said Jack.

Chelsea strained to see what was going on. A little later, Adam returned.

‘I’m sorry about that, Jack,’ he said. ‘Lily says she’s very sorry but accidents happen, eh?’

‘I suppose they do,’ said Chelsea. She was still a little rattled by what she thought she’d seen, but her desire to continue her conversation with Adam soon overrode that uncomfortable feeling. She thanked Adam for his apology.

‘It’s OK,’ said Jack. After Chelsea gave him one more check for bumps and bruises, Jack was ready to go back into the fray and Chelsea and Adam were back in conversation.

Chapter Nineteen

Chelsea

Chelsea and Adam swapped details of their lives back in London. Chelsea told Adam about her job at
Society
. Adam told Chelsea that he was an architect. They’d both lived in Clapham when they first moved to the Big Smoke.

‘We must have passed each other on the street,’ said Adam.

‘And we finally meet on an aeroplane bound for Lanzarote,’ said Chelsea, wishing straight away that she hadn’t said it at all. It sounded a little bit as though she was already mythologising the beginning of a relationship. Not cool at all when they’d only had two conversations.

But if the comment was a little prophetic, Adam didn’t seem to have noticed. He started to tell Chelsea about his university days, which was when he’d played rugby. Chelsea attempted to impress him with reminiscences about her time as an exchange student in France, which seemed so much more romantic now as she looked back on it. At the time, she had been desperately homesick and made very few friends.

While the adults talked, Jack was playing with two of the boys who had attached themselves to him before the Lily incident. They roamed almost the entire playground, but they all avoided the slide. Lily was back in the Wendy House. She seemed to be playing at running a café.

Half an hour passed. A whole hour. Adam was telling Chelsea about his horrible boss. Chelsea sympathised. Davina would definitely fit the same category. Chelsea had no doubt that her iPhone was full of messages from the office but with Adam to talk to, she no longer felt the slightest inclination to check. As Adam and Chelsea shared career horror stories, the incident on the slide was long forgotten. By the grown-ups, that is.

It was almost midday. Jack and his new friends were playing on the roundabout. Jack was standing in the middle, singing at the top of his voice, while the two other boys took it in turns to spin him round.

Meanwhile, Lily had come out of the Wendy House. She hop-skipped her way along the painted hopscotch grid. Next, she picked up a plastic hula hoop and used it to skip round the perimeter of the playground. As she came within six feet of Chelsea and her father, Lily narrowed her eyes at Chelsea. From behind the safety of her sunglasses, Chelsea narrowed her eyes back. Lily wrinkled her nose and skipped onwards.

It was a matter of seconds later that Lily made a beeline for the roundabout. With half an ear still on Adam’s work stories, Chelsea watched. She could see, even from a distance, that Jack was suddenly nervous. He’d stopped singing. His body had stiffened. His facial expression was serious. Lily said something to the two boys who were pushing Jack round. They immediately brought the roundabout to a halt. Jack stepped off and Lily stepped on. Chelsea was relieved that Jack had stepped aside and out of trouble without a murmur. Adam, who had looked up to see what had attracted Chelsea’s attention, was relieved too. He shrugged and shook his head.

‘Good move, Jack,’ he said.

Chelsea had expected Jack to come straight across to her, but he was not hurrying to be back by Chelsea’s side after all. Jack and his two companions were still standing by the roundabout. Lily was sitting in the very middle now. She had taken Jack’s place like a conquering general. She had her arms raised above her head. She was exhorting the boys to do something. Ah. As she watched the situation unfold, Chelsea was impressed by the natural justice of children. Lily wanted the boys to give her a push and they weren’t going to do it. They may have conceded the roundabout, but they sure as hell were not going to become slave labour while they were at it.

Imperious little Lily crossed her arms in a very disgruntled fashion. The boys weren’t pushing, but nor was she climbing down. The stand-off continued. Chelsea and Adam watched. How long would it be before Lily capitulated to the three boys? Surely they had strength in numbers. Lily would have to give up. The seconds seemed to pass like hours. After what seemed like ten minutes but was probably only thirty seconds, Lily got to her feet again. She did some more pointing and some shouting. She put her hands on her hips and leant right over Jack’s face. Jack closed his eyes.

‘Good for him,’ said Adam. ‘She gets what she wants far too often, that daughter of mine.’

Chelsea was impressed by her nephew. He seemed to be doing really well.

However, Jack’s saintly forbearance was in fact wearing thin. Lily continued to shout her demands, growing increasingly shrill and red in the face. What Chelsea couldn’t see from her seat by the fence was that Jack’s hands were now clenched into two little white-knuckled fists. His jaw, too, was solid with the effort of not shouting back.

‘Push me! I said,
Push me!
’ shouted Lily. She pointed to each of the boys in turn. ‘You do it. And you. You pushed him.’ She jabbed her finger at Jack. ‘You have to push me too.’

At which point, Jack suddenly stepped forward. He put his hands on one of the roundabout’s bars and began to push with all his might. Lily, who had not been expecting her demands to be met quite so suddenly, had not been hanging on and the force of Jack’s efforts sent her crumpling against the middle post. That was bad enough, but even after she had fallen to her knees in the centre of the roundabout, Jack would not stop pushing. Then the two other little boys joined in. Soon, the roundabout was a blur of pumping legs and flying hair. Chelsea watched in horror. It wasn’t long before the boys were pushing so fast she couldn’t see which was Jack and which a stranger.

Lily was screaming at the top of her lungs, ‘Stop, stop, stooooooppppppppp!’

Adam dropped his water bottle and ran to the roundabout, shouting instructions as he ran.

‘Stop that at once!’ he yelled.

Chelsea, too, had no choice but to intervene.

‘Jack! Jack! Let Lily get off. Stop pushing!’

The KK coordinators followed suit.

As it happened, the adults didn’t need to stop the roundabout. Before they could get there, one of Jack’s accomplices tripped, causing a dramatic three-boy pile-up on the special soft play surface that turned out not to be all that soft after all.

‘Oh Christ,’ Chelsea swore. There was going to be trouble.

Adam was already scooping his darling from the centre of the roundabout. Meanwhile, Chelsea checked the tangle of limbs on the ground. Total carnage. It took a little time to work out which one was actually Jack. Eventually, he crawled out from the very bottom of the heap. His knees and the heels of his hands were scraped raw. His chin, too, bore a bloody graze. Chelsea helped him to his feet, while other adults dealt with their children, Jack’s friends.

‘Are you all right?’ Chelsea dabbed at Jack’s chin with the edge of her kaftan. It had cost more than three hundred pounds and the last thing she wanted was to get it covered in blood, but … needs must. She had nothing else to hand. She couldn’t
not
try to stop the blood. Could she? She couldn’t. Gingerly, she wiped Jack’s face clean.

Jack’s eyes were glittering. Chelsea waited for the tears, but they didn’t come. Eventually she realised that his eyes were glittering with triumph as he watched the little girl he had unseated so dramatically being carried, crying, back to her father’s chair. Chelsea set her jaw and inspected Jack’s injuries more closely. She brushed gravel from his knees.

‘What were you thinking?’ she asked in a whisper.

‘I didn’t say anything to her,’ said Jack. ‘She was calling me names, but I didn’t say anything back.’

‘Well, that’s good, Jack. Well done. But someone who didn’t know you might think you were pushing the roundabout extra fast because you wanted to frighten her.’

Jack smiled a slightly wicked sort of smile.

That was exactly what Adam thought. Leaving Lily wrapped up in a towel on his chair, he strode over to Chelsea and Jack.

‘That was a very silly thing to do,’ he began to tell Jack. ‘Someone could have broken a bone.’

‘But they didn’t,’ said Chelsea quickly.

‘You should tell your nephew—’

Chelsea cut Adam off before he could say something awful. ‘Everyone is going to be perfectly fine.’

Adam nodded. ‘You’re right but, Jack, you’ve got to be more careful. And Lily mustn’t be so bossy.’

Chelsea seconded Adam’s view. ‘But now I think we had better go and get some lunch, don’t you, Jack?’

Chelsea did not want to stick around for the post-mortem. Wasn’t that how lawsuits got started? Better to pretend it was really no big deal.

‘We’ll see you later, perhaps?’ she said to Adam. But he was already distracted by Lily, who seemed to think that only an ice-cream would cure her ills.

Chelsea walked Jack away from the playground at a clip. ‘Please, God,’ she muttered, ‘let your mum and dad have recovered by now.’

Chapter Twenty

Chelsea

What a disaster! Just when it was all going so well. While Jack was having his ice-cream, Chelsea took the opportunity to phone her sister in her room. Ronnie didn’t answer the first time. Or the second. Or the third. In the end, Chelsea resorted to texting, FFS. Are you dead?

No, Ronnie responded.

Then why the f- don’t you pick up your phone?

Ronnie called Chelsea. ‘You’ll have to call me back,’ she said. ‘I’m nearly out of credit.’

Chelsea did as Ronnie asked.

‘Are you better yet?’ Chelsea began.

‘No,’ said Ronnie. ‘If anything, I feel a bit worse.’

‘Right. So you’re not coming down here to take over the care of your son anytime soon? I’ve got work to do, you know.’

‘I know. But I can’t move six feet from the bathroom … Is Jack all right?’

‘Yes, of course he’s all right. I just—’

‘I’ll be down as soon as I can, I promise.’

‘What am I supposed to do with him in the meantime? I feel like I’ve exhausted all the options.’

‘You’ve only had him for four hours. Have you taken him to the Kidz Klub?’

‘Yes, I’ve taken him to the Kidz Klub.’

‘He stayed there all afternoon yesterday.’

‘I know. But he seemed to take a dislike to one of the other children.’

‘Oh, don’t take any notice of that,’ said Ronnie. ‘That happens all the time. They’ll be best friends before you know it.’

‘I’m not sure …’

‘Why don’t you ask him what he wants to do? I’ve got to go, Chels. I think I’m feeling sick again.’

Chelsea hung up.

Ronnie wasn’t exactly feeling fantastic, but after that call from Chelsea, she decided she could not stay in bed a moment longer listening to Mark belching and farting as the last of the twenty-four-hour bug took its deeply unpleasant course. She got up.

‘I should go and check on Jack,’ she said.

‘He’ll be OK,’ said Mark. ‘Make the most of the free babysitting.’

‘He hardly knows his auntie. He might not be happy. She certainly didn’t seem happy at the prospect of having him all day.’

‘Give them a chance to get to know each other,’ Mark suggested, ‘while you relax. Come on.’

Ronnie snorted at that. How could she relax while one of their children was unwell and the other one was in the care of a woman who would probably swap him for a Gucci handbag if the opportunity arose? Mark tried to pull Ronnie back down on the mattress, but she resisted.