Here Come the Girls (14 page)

The food arrived quickly. Everyone had a mouthful of Ven’s scallops, which were divine. Olive had gone for pasta, Frankie for Croque Monsieur.

The puddings looked delicious in the glass display cabinet, but none of them could fit one in. In fact, Frankie was already regretting eating all that ham and cheese. She felt very full. Too stuffed even for a coffee.

‘Ready for your rub-down?’ Ven teased Olive.

‘Oh, give up,’ said Olive, growing pale before their eyes.

‘You’ll love it, you silly bugger,’ said Frankie. ‘And I can’t wait to see your new highlights. You haven’t chickened out, I hope.’

‘No, sir!’ said Olive, saluting, as Frankie laughingly pulled her to her feet and they set off for the spa.

The Sanctuary Spa was situated at the front of deck sixteen or
forward
as it was in ship’s parlance. As soon as the four entered, the relaxed perfumed air stole into them and their shoulders dropped six inches. Well, three sets of shoulders dropped anyway. Olive was still nervous about the prospect of being fondled by a complete stranger, as she saw it. Her shoulders were so high they had clouds on.

They announced their arrival to the receptionist and took a seat for a few minutes.

Then to Olive’s horror, a young, broad-shouldered man with Slavic eyes and a white uniform with strange flappy trousers called out her name, introduced himself as Leo and asked her to please follow him.

‘Oh shit, not a man. I can’t have a man!’ she whispered to her friends. But she found no sympathy. Frankie pushed her forwards with a chuckle. Olive found herself, as always, unable to make a fuss and followed Leo into a white room with a central narrow bed.

‘If you will take everything off to your pants, then lie on your front with the towel over your legs. I will be back in a little time,’ said Leo, after warmly introducing himself and telling Olive that she was going to have a lovely massage and feel wonderfully relaxed afterwards. She doubted that. Her nerves were stretched to snapping point.

Olive quickly took off and folded up her clothes and put them in a neat pile on the top of a cabinet. She had just climbed onto the bed and covered herself up to the back of her neck when there was a knock at the door and Leo entered.

‘Do you have anywhere you wish me to concentrate on?’ he asked, as he pulled down the towel and tucked it in the back of her pants, and Olive just knew the crack of her backside was smiling up at him.

‘Er no,’ she said.
Just get this over with
.

She heard Leo’s hands rubbing together and a flood of lavender perfume drifted towards her. Then his fingers started to work on her shoulders and back.

‘You are very tense,’ he noted. Which was a bit of an understatement. But that only made him knead her muscles more. ‘Let me know if I am too hard.’

Olive could imagine what Roz or Frankie would have said to that and stifled a giggle.

It took her a good five minutes to slowly let her muscles start to relax. Flaming heck. No wonder David wanted her to rub his ‘poor aching back’ so much. Leo had very strong hands. She felt the impact of his massaging all the way down to her bones.

‘You work hard,’ said Leo after ten minutes. ‘Much lifting, I think. Your back is in need of a lot of er . . . loosening up.’

‘Urrr . . .’ nodded Olive. At this stage she was not capable of intelligent speech. She was tempted to let herself drift off, but she didn’t want to miss anything. Then Leo started on her legs and her feet, and Olive thought that if this was a taste of heaven, she would go and jump off the top deck and do away with herself now. No one had ever touched her feet before, give or take the woman measuring them up in the Clark’s shoe shop when she was little. But she had lost track of the countless times when David would stick his rough size tens on her lap for a bit of attention. She was going to ask Leo to marry her in a minute.

Then she thought, how sad it was that she had been married for thirteen years and her husband had never once rubbed her feet or her legs or her shoulders.

After not long enough at all, Leo left her to get dressed and drink a glass of water. Olive was totally cabbaged. She struggled off the bed like Doreen did out of her chair. Her limbs wouldn’t function properly. And she felt more light-headed than the lunchtime ice wine had managed to make her.

She veered out of the treatment room like an alcoholic with a gammy leg who had just discovered a bottle of cooking sherry in his pocket.

Ven emerged from the next room. ‘Enjoy that?’ she grinned.

‘Urrr,’ said Olive.

‘I’ll take that as a yes, shall I?’

‘Urrr.’

‘Now for your hairdo. The others will be out in a minute. We’ll meet them in the salon, okay? You’d better go in ’cos you’re going to take the longest.’

‘Urrr.’

Ven linked Olive’s arm and pulled her along. They’d use the lift to the next floor down, she decided. She wasn’t sure that Olive’s legs could carry her that far.

Chapter 25

David Hardcastle huffed off the bus with three bags full of shopping. How Olive managed five or six was anyone’s guess. Mind you, she didn’t have a bad back like he did. Then he remembered that he didn’t actually have a bad back and came full circle to wondering how Olive carried so much shopping home.

Doreen was dozing in her chair when he went in. Kevin was out – probably servicing one of his women. Though ‘women’ was pushing it a bit. Most of them belonged in the zoo behind very strong fencing. This was bloody ridiculous. Where was his wife?

He threw the shopping down on the table and heard the crack of eggs from within one of the carrier bags. That really was the last straw. He picked up Olive’s address book, which she kept by the house telephone, and flicked through it for Ven’s number. He rang it, but all he got was an answering machine and he didn’t leave a message. Then he rang Roz’s number and got yet another answering machine. Didn’t anyone ever pick up the bloody phone these days?

Then David had a brainwave. He got out the
Yellow Pages
and looked up Manus Howard’s garage. If this was another answering machine, he was going to smash the phone against the wall.

But it wasn’t. Manus picked up after two rings.

‘Oh hello,’ said David. ‘I’m wondering if your Roz is about. It’s Dave . . . Hardcastle. Olive’s husband.’

Crikey, thought Manus. He didn’t know that David had enough gumption to use a phone. He felt himself smiling mischievously.

‘Er no, mate. She’s gone on holiday. With Olive.’

‘Has she?’ gasped David, in a voice higher than Joe Pasquale’s. ‘Oh, er . . . Olive never said Roz was going as well.’

‘And Ven,’ added Manus. He wondered from David’s tone if he even knew anything about the cruise at all.
Well, well, well
. So Olive had managed to escape her drudgery and think about herself for once. Go Olive, he thought.

‘So . . . have you heard from them?’ asked David tentatively. He didn’t want Manus to think that he didn’t know where they had gone.

‘Well, they’ll be in the middle of the sea, I expect, and so I doubt they’ll get phone reception.’

‘The middle of the sea?’ squeaked David.

‘Yes. They’ve gone on a cruise, didn’t you know? For sixteen days.’

‘Oh, er . . . Oh sorry, I’ve got to go. Mother’s calling me. Be right there, Mum.’ And David put the phone down quickly and let out a long double lungful of breath.

‘What’s up with you?’ said Kevin, suddenly appearing in the kitchen doorway and grinning beatifically after a nice little lunchtime session with Julie Two-Teeth and her performing knockers. His cousin’s face was the colour of uncooked pastry.

David slumped onto the kitchen chair. ‘Olive’s gone on a cruise. For sixteen days.’

‘Eh?’

‘You heard.’

‘You are joking!’ said Kevin.

‘Do I look like I’m joking?’ snapped David. ‘Do I look like a man who wants to chortle about his wife leaving him to cook, clean, shop and care for an infirm old lady?’

‘Where’s she got the money from, to go on a cruise?’ asked Kevin.

Then both men jumped as they heard feet thunder up the stairs. Doreen was in a panic, crying out as she raced to her bedroom, ‘I need to check . . . oh my God, she hasn’t, has she?’

‘Auntie Doreen, what’s up? You all right?’

‘Mum?’

There was a big thump from above and then silence – then Doreen laughed, almost hysterically.

‘Yes, I’m fine – no need to worry. I’m fine now.’

‘So, you were about to tell me how she’d got her hands on that sort of money,’ said Kevin.

‘How the hell do I know?’ growled David. Cruises cost thousands. Olive cleaned for peanuts. People like Olive didn’t go on ships for their holidays. People like Olive didn’t go on holiday. None of this was making sense at all. And just to add to the surreality of the situation, he reached for a can of beer from the shopping bag and plunged his hand into the tip-tilted eggbox instead. Immediately after yet another cracking sound, a fat yellow yolk slid out and landed on his lap.

Chapter 26

Olive looked in the mirror but it wasn’t her reflection that was staring back at her. This Olive had trendy poker-straight hair and was infinitely blonder than Olive Hardcastle was. Many platinum streaks were woven in between her natural gold, and that, plus a good cut, made her green eyes shine out.

Her hairdresser was a Romanian girl called Ulga. She was going out with one of the waiters on the ship, but it wasn’t very serious because he was going home to Mumbai at the end of the summer and she was going back to Romania to open up a coffee shop. Coffee was where her heart was at, apparently. Olive thought she was a borderline idiot to give up hairdressing, if she could make other women feel as if they had just been given fifteen hours of intensive plastic surgery just for a bit of colour and some sweet scissor action.

‘So you have a gown ready for tonight?’ asked Ulga, as she razored in some layers at the back.

‘I don’t know what colour to wear – I have a red, a green and a black.’ Olive felt quite good saying that. It was a first, saying she had a choice of posh frocks to choose from.

‘There is a black-and-white dinner in the second week of the cruise,’ said Ulga. ‘Maybe is good to wear your black dress both at the very beginning and the very end of the cruise.’

‘A black-and-white night sounds lovely,’ smiled Olive.

‘It is,’ said Ulga. ‘All the formal nights are very much loveliness.’

From the corner of her eye, Olive saw Frankie bolt from the hairdresser’s chair. Next to her, having a blow-dry, Ven mimed a sickie action to explain where she had gone. The ship was rocking quite a bit today.

‘Your poor friend is sea-sick, I think,’ said Ulga. ‘It’s very awfuls feeling. I was very sick when I first came on the ships.’

‘I wonder why I’m not ill though,’ said Olive, who had been expecting she would be very sea-sick but wasn’t at all.

‘It’s about being out of rhythm with ship movement,’ explained Ulga. ‘It’s really awfuls.’

In the spa toilet, Frankie was wondering how she could get off this ship and die somewhere on a quiet shore, because she couldn’t escape the rocking motion. And it didn’t help that the salon was at one end of the ship and high up and not in the more stable lower-middle.

There was a gentle tap on the door and Ven’s voice filtered through.

‘Frankie, are you okay in there?’

‘No,’ was all Frankie managed before retching and groaning with the pain of her stomach muscles trying to throw something up from a now empty stomach.

‘Shall I go and get you some sea-sickness tablets from the shop?’

‘I’ve had some and thrown them back up,’ said Frankie. ‘I took them as a precaution earlier. Cock lot of good they did me.’

‘My hair lady said that you can go to the medical bay and get a sea-sickness injection. Apparently they’re very good.’

Frankie was just about to say that she would curl up in bed and miss the formal night when her stomach lurched again with the ship. It might be worth trying to get an injection because she couldn’t sit back and wait for this hellish feeling to subside naturally. She opened the cubicle door.

‘Where’s the bloody sick bay?’ she croaked.

There were two middle-aged men seated and waiting to see the doctor in the medical centre on deck four, also with sea-sickness if their grey faces were anything to go by. They smiled sympathetically at Frankie and tried to look composed as she sat down on the opposite side of the waiting area. At least the bay was mid-ship and low down, the best place to be for sea-sickness sufferers.

Outside the medical bay a female voice was heard saying, ‘Dad, get in there.’

‘I just need a lie-down and I’ll be fine,’ returned a male voice.

‘Dad, you have been lying down and it hasn’t worked. Get in there now or you’ll spoil the evening for yourself.’

‘You’re far too bossy for your own good.’

‘Get in!’

The Viking man appeared in the doorway as a pretty younger woman pushed him in.

‘Do you want me to stay with you?’ she asked.

‘Who’s the parent and who’s the child here?’

‘I sometimes wonder,’ sighed the woman. She turned to Frankie. ‘Would you do me a favour and make sure my dad doesn’t escape before he gets a sea-sickness jab?’ she asked with a twinkle in her eye.

Frankie nodded. ‘I’ll do my best,’ she replied.

The Viking had just sat down next to her when the first patient was called in.

‘Bit rough out there, isn’t it?’ the Viking said; his voice had a surprisingly soft West Country burr to it. ‘I’d never have let anyone drag me on a ship if I thought I was going to feel like this.’

‘You’re doing the best thing getting an injection,’ called the man on the opposite side of the room. ‘They work like magic. I’ve tried wrist bands and every tablet ever invented and nothing does the trick like that injection.’

‘I hope you’re right. Someone told me to get some ginger biscuits from the shop, but they didn’t have any,’ the Viking replied. ‘I found out that Highland Shortbread doesn’t work as well.’ A fresh wave of nausea hit him and he groaned. ‘Don’t think I can stand much more of this.’