A Proper Family Holiday (4 page)

Chapter Four

Ronnie

Despite Ronnie having made sure everyone was at the airport a full two hours before the scheduled departure time, things were not going smoothly in Birmingham either: the flight was delayed.

When she heard the news, Ronnie bundled her family into Costa and sent Mark to the counter to get two cappuccinos and two cartons of juice. She had brought sandwiches in her bag, both to save money and because Sophie had lately become incredibly fussy. As it was, Sophie turned up her nose at the thought of her mother’s lovingly made breakfast picnic. She wanted to go off and explore the shops instead. Ronnie told her she couldn’t.

‘The last thing we need is to be unable to find you when the flight is called.’

‘Mum,’ said Sophie, ‘when they call the flight, you’ve still got ages. Everybody knows that.’

‘We don’t know that,’ said Ronnie. ‘We don’t even know which gate we’re supposed to go to yet. It might take a while for us to get there.’

‘You’re being so lame,’ said Sophie. ‘Lame’ was Sophie’s new favourite word.

Ronnie was ready to give her daughter a piece of her mind, but right then Mark signalled that he needed help at the counter.

‘Go and give your dad a hand,’ she said instead.

Sophie got to her feet in a cloud of disdain, banging her chair against the table in protest as she did so. Ronnie closed her eyes for just a second to let the urge to yell again pass. When she opened them, she saw that her daughter had rearranged her mutinous expression into something altogether sweeter for her father – as usual – and by the time the two of them got back to the table, Sophie had somehow persuaded her dad not that she should be allowed to go shopping but that he should give her some spending money with which to do it. Tenner in hand, Sophie skipped off in the direction of Accessorize.

‘Ten pounds?’

‘I got a tip from that job on Monday,’ Mark explained.

‘Still, I told her she couldn’t go. We don’t know when our flight will be called.’

‘The girl at the check-in desk said at least an hour. Do you want her sitting there with a face like thunder for the next sixty minutes? She’s got her phone,’ Mark continued. ‘And we’re going on holiday. Let’s start having a good time right here. Eh, Jack?’

Jack was busy playing a game on his DS. He looked up.

‘Shall we go and get a
Simpsons
comic for the flight?’ Mark suggested.

‘Yeah!’

Jack handed the DS to Ronnie for safe keeping and, like Sophie, skipped off in the direction of retail heaven without so much as a backward glance. Mark was right behind him.

Alone at the table, surrounded by her family’s bags and the untouched sandwiches, Ronnie tried to regain her sense of humour as she sipped her coffee. Alas, the coffee was so hot it burned her tongue. She was tired and she was anxious and suddenly her eyes were stinging with the effort of holding back tears. It was all right for Mark. He was always the good guy, dispensing gifts and overturning Ronnie’s sensible decisions. Surely the first rule of parenting was not to undermine each other? Mark had no idea how hard it was for Ronnie to impose any kind of discipline on the daughter he called his ‘little angel’ when he contradicted everything she said. Lately, it seemed almost every row they had began with something Sophie had done.

And now, just as Ronnie had feared they would, they were calling the Lanzarote flight. Ronnie stood up at once and scanned the terminal for her family. She had known this would happen. The hour-long delay had turned out to be only half an hour in the end. She looked at the departures screen. Seconds after the new departure time was revealed, their flight flashed in red for final boarding. Final boarding! They’d only just announced that boarding had begun.

Ronnie phoned Mark. She phoned Sophie. Neither of them picked up her call. She kept one eye on the departures screen and the flashing red gate number. If they missed the flight, she would never forgive Mark. Her parents had spent a fortune on this holiday. They had to get there. She could feel her blood pressure rising. She phoned Mark again. Then Sophie.

‘All right, Mum,’ said Sophie. ‘
All right
. I’m standing right behind you.’

Mark, too, was striding through the crowd towards her, with Jack perched high on his shoulders.

‘Come on,’ said Ronnie. She was starting to panic. She couldn’t hold back any longer. ‘We need to hurry up. Has everybody got their things? Sophie, where’s your jacket?’

‘Er, I’m, like, wearing it?’ Sophie had the jacket from Hollister, a birthday gift that had cost way more than Ronnie wanted to pay for something that already looked so worn, tied carelessly round her waist.

‘Jack, where’s your rucksack?’

‘It’s on my back.’

‘So it is. Now come on.’

Ronnie led the charge for the gate. By the time they got there, Sophie was complaining of a stitch, and Mark, who had carried Jack all the way, said he thought he might be having a coronary.

And so much for last call. The gate area was absolutely rammed with would-be passengers for Arrecife. Despite the departure screen’s insistence that the flight was closing, no one had boarded at all, and there was nowhere for Ronnie and her family to sit down until they did.

‘I knew we didn’t have to hurry,’ said Sophie. ‘I knew it. I could have stayed in the queue at Accessorize.’

Sophie sat down on Ronnie’s carry-on bag with a dramatic sigh.

‘For heaven’s sake. You’ll squash the sandwiches!’

‘Who the hell brings their own sandwiches on a flight anyway? My family is so bloody chavvy.’

Luckily for Sophie, Ronnie didn’t hear her above the announcement that the flight was ready to board at last.

Despite the jam at the gate, Ronnie and her family had slightly better luck with their seating arrangements. Mark somehow hustled to the front of the queue by carrying Jack, whose smile parted crowds before them. Jack was that kind of child, with a face at once angelic and mischievous. Once on board, Mark nabbed four seats in the second row. Ronnie was surprised and pleased when he wrestled the hand luggage away from her so he could put it in the overhead locker while they took their seats. She was less surprised and pleased to find she had ended up in the aisle seat, with Jack next to her in the middle seat while Sophie sulked with her head against the window. Mark, across the aisle, was sitting next to a perky twenty-something blonde who was just a bit too smiley for Ronnie’s liking. Mark didn’t seem to have noticed her, though; he was typing frantically.

‘You’re supposed to turn off your phone when you get on the plane. Who are you texting?’ Ronnie asked.

Mark blushed before he answered, without looking up, ‘Just Cathy next door. About the cat.’

‘What about the cat?’ Ronnie asked.

‘Just telling her where the food is.’

‘She already knows,’ said Ronnie. ‘I told her yesterday.’

‘Yeah. Yeah, of course. She must have forgotten.’

‘Then why didn’t she text me to ask? Why would she have texted you?’

Mark shrugged. ‘I don’t know, do I?’

Sophie also sent a last few messages before a flight attendant asked her to switch off her phone. Three hours without recourse to text was going to be difficult, both for Sophie and for the people who had to sit near her.

‘Can’t you let Jack have the window seat?’ Ronnie asked her. ‘It’s the first time he’s been on a plane.’

‘It’s the first time
I’ve
been on a plane,’ Sophie replied. Ronnie knew Sophie still hadn’t forgiven her for saying she couldn’t join a school trip to Berlin. That they
really
hadn’t been able to afford it had not mattered. All Sophie focused on was how much she would be missing. It was especially hard on her because Harrison Collerick, the boy she had liked for so long – the love of her life (‘So far,’ as Mark always added. Somehow Sophie would take that from her dad) – was going to be on the trip, along with Sophie’s best friend, Skyler. As it happened, Sophie’s ‘best friend’ somehow ended up snogging ‘the love of Sophie’s life’ on the coach on the way back from a day trip to the Jewish Museum. Skyler later claimed it was the heavy emotional vibe of the history laid before them that had rendered her vulnerable to the awful boy’s charms. Sophie had forgiven her best friend and Harrison but it seemed she wasn’t about to forgive her mother. If Sophie had been allowed to go to Berlin, none of it would have happened, after all.

‘I don’t mind having the middle seat,’ said Jack.

Jack was so easy-going compared to his big sister. Perhaps that would change when he hit puberty too, but for now Ronnie was grateful she had at least one laid-back child.

‘It’s still exciting,’ he assured her. ‘My first time on an aeroplane.’

‘Guess what?’ said Ronnie. ‘It’s practically my first time too. And Daddy’s.’

Ronnie and Mark had flown only once before. It was before Sophie was born. Ronnie had joined Mark’s family on a trip to a resort in Portugal (against her parents’ better judgement). It was on that trip that Sophie had been conceived.

The stewards began the safety procedure. Ronnie forced Sophie to put down her gossip magazine and pay attention.

‘Nobody else is watching,’ said Sophie.

‘Nobody else on this plane matters to me except you, your dad and Jack. Will you please listen to what they’re saying?’

Jack was much more attentive. He wanted to know whether he could wear his oxygen mask regardless of the pressure on the plane, just in case. And when the safety briefing was over, Jack slid his hand across the armrest into Ronnie’s lap. She linked her fingers through his.

‘I’m holding your hand in case you’re afraid,’ he explained.

‘Thank you. Though there’s nothing to be afraid of,’ said Ronnie, more to convince herself than her son. Since she’d last flown, things had definitely changed. The whole business of going to an airport and getting through security had become decidedly grim.

‘I love you, Jack.’ Ronnie kissed her son on the top of his head. ‘You too, Sophie. I love you too.’

‘Right,’ Sophie grunted back. Sophie didn’t do familial love any more. Like so many things Sophie had once enjoyed, these days she considered time spent with her family as ‘lame’. Nevertheless, Ronnie noticed that Sophie had taken Jack’s free hand.

Across the aisle, Mark was still fiddling with his phone.

‘Mark,’ Ronnie hissed. He hurriedly switched it off.

‘I love you,’ Ronnie mouthed across the aisle at him. He mouthed it back. Ronnie had told all her family members that she loved them. Whatever happened now, they would know what they meant to her.

But of course the take-off proceeded without incident. As soon as the seatbelt sign was switched off, Mark reclined his chair and inserted his iPod headphones in his ears. With Sophie sulking and Jack asking questions all the way – ‘If heaven is in the sky, how come we can’t see it now we’re up here?’ – by the time Ronnie and her family were landing in Lanzarote, Ronnie definitely felt a little bit less inclined to tell Mark again that she loved him.

Chapter Five

Chelsea

While Ronnie was in the air, Chelsea was settling in for an unexpected day in an airport hotel. She flicked on the television. Hundreds of channels and nothing she wanted to watch. She stared at her iPhone as if staring might cause it to beep with a new message. It was nearly midday and there was not so much as a single word of acknowledgement from Davina that Chelsea’s hard work on the Eugenia Lapkiss article had been worth it.

After an hour spent watching
The Jeremy Kyle Show
, Chelsea began to think she should have gone back into London after all. She certainly could have done without spending the extra money on this coffin-like room at the Gatwick Shangri-La, but in her panic at the thought of a second early morning with its attendant potential for missing another flight, she had shelled out £100 for the privilege of being just thirty minutes away from the airport rather than an hour and a half. The salesgirl hadn’t mentioned that this particular ‘airport hotel’ was closer to Brighton than Gatwick. Chelsea would still have to get up before seven to get the complimentary bus to the terminal.

Chelsea slumped back against the pillows.

Sometimes it felt like she never got a break. How had she ended up at this place? Not just at an airport hotel but at this place in her life. Supposedly ‘successful’ with her sophisticated London magazine career but somehow still skint and living in a dump and absolutely single. An unwanted memory of Colin the banker, her last boyfriend, came to Chelsea’s mind. What was Colin doing that morning? Not eating stale biscuits from a minibar, that was for certain. His lovely fiancée was probably squeezing him some fresh juice. Yep, that waste of space Colin Webster, who always claimed he would never marry, had recently become engaged to some stick-thin 24-year-old model whose father owned a chain of clothing stores, just three months after dumping Chelsea. How come he got to find love again when Chelsea was stuck in a nightmare of Internet dates that inevitably made her feel worse than getting no dates at all?

Chelsea’s phone chimed. As though someone had read her mind – someone with a nasty sense of humour – she had an email notification of a new ‘fan’ on one of the dating sites she had forced herself to sign up to. Feeling momentarily hopeful that this could be the email that changed her life, she clicked through the link to discover that her new fan was an unemployed IT specialist who still lived with his mother. He looked like Beaker from
The Muppets
. The mere fact that he thought he might have a chance with Chelsea was profoundly depressing.

I must stay optimistic, Chelsea told herself as she deleted her new fan. She needed a new plan. That’s what she would do with her free day at Gatwick: think about her future and make plans. She’d been so busy lately that she’d lost sight of where she was going. That was all. She had a pile of self-help books in her hand luggage (including
From Booty Call to Bride
, a manual dedicated to ‘helping a woman move from one-night stand to wife material’). She could use this time in the airport hotel to do some reading and refocus, the importance of which she had only recently explained to the readers of
Society
in a three-page article illustrated with pictures of £500-a-night spa suites. None of which she could afford to visit …