Summer Holiday

Lucy, mind you. Chip off the old block. Miranda tried out her singing voice along to some god-awful rackety piece of music.

The weather was getting worse. The rain was sluicing down as though a pipe had been uncorked. There was little traffic on the roads and she made it to the rendezvous within an hour, parking between a muddy old Fiat and a yellow VW Beetle. After she’d struggled into her brand-new, state-of-the-art Gore-Tex anorak, with zips under the armpits for letting off steam, she emerged from the car with a modicum of decorum and tiptoed to the boot in her trainers to get her wellingtons. Four people were watching her from under umbrellas. Their clothing looked like it had been stolen from a tip. They were filthy.

‘Hi,’ said Miranda, brightly, stuffing her new gloves into her jacket pocket.

The assembled group smiled and nodded, drinking tea from a flask and chatting about the work in hand. A man in a high-visibility jacket, with teeth that might have been thrown into his mouth by a blind parsnip-tosser, introduced himself as Will. ‘We’re basically going to be getting rid of the undergrowth and stuff on the towpaths so that the dredger can get through to clean out the canal,’ he said. ‘At the moment, as you can see …’ he looked around and amended that ‘… as you can’t see through this atrocious weather but I assure you is the case, the canal is all silted up and full of algae bloom and duckweed. The dredger can’t do its work until we’ve done ours.’ He waved a hand in the direction of the sky. ‘Now, apparently the good folk at the Met Office are predicting that this rain is going to blow through pretty quickly. Since we’re all here, with the exception of Alex, we may as well get cracking. At least nobody’s cried off with the “flu”.’ He made quote marks in the air as though that was a usual excuse for someone not turning up. Miranda shook her head in disgust.

He walked towards the Land Rover and bent over, his large trousers gathering in an elephant’s bottom of grey as he rummaged. ‘I’ve got a collection of implements in here. Come and take your pick. Not literally.’ He laughed – it was obviously a line he’d used before. Miranda smiled. Might as well show willing.

The others had obviously done this work before, since they showed no hesitation in lunging for the tools, leaving her with nothing but a pair of enormous leather gloves and the job of picking up litter. ‘It’s like being at home with children,’ she commented to the woman in front of her. Her name was Teresa: she had hair like a newly shorn sheep and a wart near her nose.

‘What? Walking along wearing protective gloves?’ Teresa asked, with a confused expression.

‘No, having to pick stuff up. All their toys and things. Socks. Although usually I didn’t wear big leather gloves to do it. Do you have children?’

‘Cats,’ responded Teresa, briefly.

‘Lovely. Hairy ones?’

‘Yes. Well, one short-haired and two long-haired.’

‘Rescue cats or pedigree?’ Like she really cared.

‘Rescue.’

‘Lovely.’ Bloody hell! She had to stop saying ‘Lovely’ – she was beginning to sound like a game-show host.

They stopped speaking as they reached the rest of the group.

‘Here’s where we left off last week.’ Teresa nodded to a newly cut section on a bush.

Will was hunched over, talking to one of the men, but turned and said something to Teresa, who moved forwards, leaving Miranda standing alone. She sniffed the air appreciatively. The rain had stopped, leaving a damp, green smell. It reminded her of finding a little patch of camomile in the corner of the garden and lying on it to see how comfortable it was. When Nigel had found it, he had covered it with weed-killer.

‘So, Miranda,’ said Will, ‘you’ve picked the short straw, and are doing the tidying up. It’s one of the most important jobs, but also one of the most unloved as it plays havoc with your lower back.’ He rubbed his own and grimaced, his lips slightly parted to reveal one of his yellowy parsnip teeth. ‘I’d recommend that you stand up and stretch it out frequently or you’ll wake up tomorrow unable to walk. And try not to get too close to the cutters – they can get a bit carried away, if you know what I mean.’

Miranda nodded, although she wasn’t sure she did know what he meant. She added a smile, then turned quickly as loud running was heard through the gloom, followed by the sudden appearance of a superbly scruffy man with dreadlocks, wearing a jumper with so many holes that it resembled a string vest.

‘Alex!’ exclaimed Will, warmly, clasping his outstretched hand and clapping him on the shoulder. ‘We were wondering where you’d got to. Thought you must have been struck down with summer flu or some other lurgy.’

‘Camper van sprang a leak in the middle of the night. I’ve been doing emergency repairs. Couldn’t leave until I’d made sure it was watertight. Don’t want to get back and find all my Armani pumps wrecked, do I?’

‘Ha-ha. No. You betcha you don’t,’ Will said jovially. He pointed a big square finger. ‘I saved you a machete.’

‘Can I have a machete?’ asked Miranda, moving closer.

‘Ha-ha!’ He laughed again. ‘No, I don’t think so. Not on your first day.’ He strode back to the Land Rover, his boots sliding on the muddy path.

‘Alex,’ said Alex, holding out his hand to Miranda.

‘Miranda,’ said Miranda, shaking it and looking into the greenest eyes she had ever seen. They were leaf green. Ireland green. Ridiculously green.

‘First time, then.’ He smiled down at her.

Miranda was tall, but he was taller still – and what her friends at school would have called ‘well tasty’. Although she wasn’t sure about the dreadlocks. Didn’t you have to be seriously grubby to get them? Not wash for months? She sniffed cautiously. He didn’t smell. ‘Lovely fresh air, isn’t it?’ she exclaimed, to cover herself, and then answered his question: ‘And, yes, it is my first time. I wanted to get out of the city and do something constructive.’

‘Which city?’

‘London.’

‘Which part?’

‘Notting Hill,’ she said semi-apologetically. Ever since the film Notting Hill, she’d felt something akin to embarrassment about living in a place that was synonymous with a romantic comedy starring Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts.

‘Nice,’ he said, as he accepted the machete from Will. ‘Shall we?’

‘“Lead on, Macduff,”’ she said, even though they were already where she needed to be to start picking up rubbish.

‘“Out damned spot,”’ he threw back, as he advanced into the undergrowth, the crotch of his baggy trousers catching on foliage and shooting raindrops in arcs.

Was he flirting, Miranda wondered. How lovely. That bloody word again. ‘Lovely, lovely, lovely, lovely,’ she said, under her breath, to use them all up. ‘Lovely, luvverly. Luvverly bunch of coconuts. Oh, wouldn’t it be lovely? And the new word of the day is …’ she paused, putting a big lump of greenery into the bag ‘… gorgeous. Scrumptious. Handsome. Steady on, Miranda.’ What was happening to her?

She gave herself a stern talking-to. ‘I am a forty-three-year-old woman with two children, one of whom is probably about the same age as he is. It’s disgusting. Nigel’s eyes would literally come out of his head on stalks if he knew what I was thinking. No, not literally – particularly with all that lardy, piggy flesh holding them in.’

Her mind rambled on aimlessly as she bent to her task. She didn’t notice the time slipping by because she had wandered into a rich seam in the creases of her brain and hopped incrementally to a reverie about Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Then she stood up. ‘Ow,’ she squeaked. A searing pain had shot up her back and exploded tiny pinpoints of light through her retinas.

Will ambled back to check she was all right.

‘Yes. And, yes, I know you told me to stand up and stretch, but I got into a rhythm and completely forgot,’ she panted, rubbing the base of her spine.

‘Stand with your feet apart and drop your body forwards from your hips,’ he ordered. ‘Go all floppy. Take the strain off your lumbar region.’

She hung forward and felt her anorak slip up past her nose, so that she was breathing into the zip and smelling something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Was it man-made-fibre scent? She suddenly realised what it was: the smell of hard work, alias sweat, and she had obviously forgotten to put on any deodorant. How very, very … in a weird way, almost pleasant. If acrid.

She stood up to get away from it.

‘Feeling better?’ asked Will.

‘Yup,’ she announced – although, actually, she felt a bit sick from standing up so fast. ‘Onwards and upwards,’ she said, with determination.

She reapplied herself to the task in hand, stretching every few minutes and admiring the clean and tidy state of the path. Well, tidy but muddy and a damn sight better than the view in front, with its branches and undergrowth melding together. She could just see Alex’s dreadlocks whipping to and fro as he sliced the heads off unsuspecting plants.

It felt like days since she’d had her coffee.

She waved Will over.

‘Problem?’ he asked.

‘Er, I hope not. I was suddenly overcome by a wave of hunger but I haven’t brought a packed lunch with me. Which I seem to recall was on the list. A bothersome omission. Is there anywhere I could get something when we stop?’

‘Yes – most of the regulars bring their own because they don’t want what’s on offer from the nearest shop. I’ll warn you now, it ain’t exciting. There might be a pie but it’ll be more pastry than filling. And if the filling’s meat, it might be a part of the animal you aren’t familiar with.’

‘A dollop of testicle, a dash of oink and an earlobe, eh? Beggars can’t be choosers, as they say. That’s what I’m going to have to do when we break. Which is when?’

Will checked his watch. ‘Half an hour. Can you last that long?’

On cue, Miranda’s stomach howled, like a small woodland creature in pain.

He laughed, and jerked his head upwards, revealing hairy nostrils. ‘I’ll take that as a no. If you could possibly hang on for a quarter of an hour, that would be better for us. We’re dealing with a knotty branch and it would be nice if we could get that sorted before we have lunch.’

‘I’ll keep my stomach on a short leash, and tell it to pull its horns in, if that’s not too much of a mixed metaphor,’ she promised. She bent forward and pushed a great wodge of vegetation and sticks into her bag, suddenly noticing a stripy snail stuck to one of the leaves. She picked it off and it retreated quickly into its shell. She held it until it came out again, then gently touched one of its antennae. It retracted. She poked the other.

‘Aw. Leave him alone,’ said Alex, who had arrived at her side without her noticing, absorbed as she had been in the snail’s defence mechanism.

She smiled and put the snail on the side of the path where they watched it unfurl from its shell and make off. ‘Racing home to his wife and daughters,’ she said. ‘Or her husband and sons. Having said that, they’re hermaphrodites, aren’t they?’

‘Yes, they are. And the way they mate isn’t what you’d want to be doing if you were out on a date. They twist themselves round each other and cover themselves in frothy slime. Then they both set off to bury their eggs in a mulchy bit of ground. They cover them with mucus, soil and excrement, and about a month later, bingo, loads of tiny snails are ready to munch their way through your prized garden plants. Some snails live to fifteen and they’re excellent fodder for birds, toads and snakes.’

‘Snakes?’ she queried.

‘And that’s all you’ve taken from that superbly informative lecture?’ he said sadly, shaking his head.

‘Of course not,’ she told him, ‘but I don’t know why, I thought snakes went for fast food. Mice. Rats. Humans, if they were hungry.’

‘And the last time you read about a human in Britain being eaten by a snake?’

‘Yeah, okay, Mr Biology. Although we’ve all heard about the bloke going to the loo and finding a huge great python.’

He smirked.

She blushed.

‘Does a snail really vomit to move, as someone once told me?’ she asked quickly.

‘Well, it’s a gastropod, which literally means “stomach foot”. And I suppose it does essentially secrete mucus, which it slides on. So, yes. Vomit. Slide. Vomit. Slide.’

‘Existing on a liquid lunch. And dinner,’ said Miranda, beginning to walk back along the towpath. She could feel her stomach on the verge of making another announcement. ‘Quite nice, though, to bury your eggs in the garden and let them hatch on their own, rather than spending nine months incubating them and several years saving them from themselves,’ she threw back, over her shoulder.

‘How many have you got?’ he asked.

‘Two. But they’ve gone now. So I’m foot-loose and fancy-free.’

‘No father of the children?’ he enquired, kicking a stone into the grass.

‘He’s gone too.’ She flashed him a smile. Really, she thought, this is going to have to stop.

CHAPTER THREE

It felt very politically incorrect to get into a Jaguar and drive to the shop for her lunch, particularly with the collection of vehicles surrounding it. Alex’s camper van was, as she had expected, a faded orange with a scratchy cream top. How awful, she thought, to have to live in something so small when you were so tall. And where did he shower? Or maybe he didn’t. She had read somewhere that after a while you didn’t smell, that your body was self-regulating. Or maybe that was your hair. Whichever it was, she didn’t believe it for a minute. Otherwise tramps would smell fragrant. Maybe you simply stopped smelling any worse.

She returned with a pie, a packet of crisps and a bottle of sparkling water. ‘Woo-hoo. She went and bought the pie from the local shop,’ Will exclaimed, as she joined them on the groundsheet where they were chatting.

There was a lull in the conversation and they watched with interest as she bit into it. She swallowed and they waited expectantly. ‘Well,’ she said eventually, ‘if I had to describe it, I’d say it was worm, with a hint of parsley. Or loam. Beautifully minced. Anyone else want a bite?’ She held it out.

‘No, you’re all right. Don’t mind if I don’t,’ said Brian, a grizzled veteran of the volunteering sector, who had been getting rid of overhanging branches on the path.

‘Is it supposed to be a meat pasty, or something else?’ asked Alex, peeling a hard-boiled egg.

‘Well, the woman in the shop said she thought it was cheese and onion. But since it appears to be brown and sludgy, I can only assume it’s meat. Are you vegetarian?’

He shook his head. ‘I’m all about sustainability. Eating food that’s in season. Having organic and ethically treated animals. Eating fish that are plentiful and not caught in bloody great drift nets that denude the sea.’ He looked around at the others. ‘Yes, I know, I’m on the well-ridden hobby-horse again. I’ll just dismount over here and take the spurs off.’

Miranda felt now as though she should be apologising for devouring a pie made of indeterminate animal, which had probably been treated very badly and didn’t even taste nice. But bugger it. It had filled the hole in her stomach and it was dead anyway.

Will gestured to the blue sky. ‘I love this country. Pissing down with rain this morning and now it’s like the Caribbean.’

‘Which is like the Caribbean, really,’ said Miranda. ‘Pissing down one minute and baking hot the next? Or, at least, it is at some times of the year …’ She tailed off.

‘A favourite holiday destination?’ asked Teresa, her mutton hair seeming to express rank disapproval.

‘We have friends in Antigua. Very good friends.’

‘Naturally,’ said Teresa.

She really doesn’t like me, thought Miranda. And then, because she could have gone either way, she decided to antagonise her. ‘Um. I also have friends in Switzerland, who I visit on a regular basis. Oh, and friends who have an ocean-going yacht – I join them when I can.’ She noticed Alex shooting a glance at her and stopped. Then added, ‘When I’m not camping in, er, Lancashire.’

Alex flashed her a massive smile. Clearly he didn’t believe her for a minute.

Lunch packed away, they walked back to the towpath. She was gratified to see him manoeuvre a spot beside her.

‘Lancashire, eh?’

‘Yes,’ she said firmly. ‘A huge favourite.’

‘Whereabouts?’

‘Chilterns,’ she threw back.

‘My goodness! I can only assume they must have got up on their tiptoes and shuffled north, then.’

She chuckled. ‘Never was much good at geography. Where are the Chilterns then?’

‘Not far from here – the area near Henley to the south-east. You’d be in the Yorkshire Dales if you wanted hilly near Lancashire. Beautiful part of the country. And you don’t have to camp to enjoy it.’

‘Is that where you’re from?’ she enquired.

‘No,’ he responded. There was a beat before he continued, ‘I’m from loads of places. We moved around a lot when I was growing up and I’ve continued the trend.’

‘Where do your parents live now?’ she asked.

‘They’re divorced. My mum lives on the Isle of Wight. My dad …’ he hesitated ‘… my dad … Last time I spoke to him he was in Spain somewhere. And it was raining.’ His voice held a note of finality, as though that was all he would be saying on the subject. ‘Are you from London?’

‘Yup. Grew up in Camden Town, before it got quite as skanky as it is now. It’s all about ripped tights, piercings and …’ she’d been about to say ‘dreadlocks’ ‘… it’s a bit druggy. You see people coming towards you smacking their gums and looking wild and …’

‘You realise it’s your father checking up on you,’ he finished promptly.

‘Exactly.’ She laughed. ‘Then we moved to Primrose Hill and I spent all my time kissing boys in the park.’ Now, why had she said that? Freud would have had a field day. It was absolutely, without a shadow of doubt, because she had been looking at his lips as he spoke. She went through the routine in her head: I am a forty-three-year-old mother of two. Leave this poor child alone and stop being predatory. Yuk. What was it they called women like her, these days? ‘Cougar,’ she exclaimed aloud.

‘Where?’ asked Alex, pretending to look about in consternation. ‘That would be a very unusual sighting.’

She bit her bottom lip. ‘I was trying to remember something,’ she said. And left it there, since there was nothing else she could say that wouldn’t land her in it.

She realised with a jolt that it had been ages since she’d had such a nice time. Flirting was very therapeutic, even if it did feel wrong with a boy who was barely out of short trousers.

She donned her gloves again and got stuck into the path clearing, finding it satisfying in a way that she had never found cleaning the house. Maybe it was because everyone was working together. If cleaning the house had been a team event instead of a lonely chore, which was only noticed when it hadn’t been done … In fact, after careful consideration – she stretched, hands on her waist, leaning backwards and admiring the blue of the sky – she would have to say that the best time she had had recently was the evening of celebratory divorce drinks with Hannah. They had laughed so much she had almost thrown up a kidney. She had also cried quite a lot. But somehow she had still had a good time. That was a bloody sad indictment of the last few years of her life. She bent down and picked up a load of prickly brambles, which had been thoughtfully cut into manageable pieces. She had taken off her jacket as the day had warmed up, but she was beginning to feel like a cheese wrapped in plastic. The wicking shirt, which was supposed to allow her skin to breathe, was sticking to her back. If her skin was breathing, she imagined it would have its mouth wide open, gasping for air. A drop of sweat fell off her nose.

Right. That was it. She took off her shirt, revealing a decidedly skimpy vest top and a wretchedly ugly sports bra. It couldn’t be helped. It was either that or suffocation. She did an impression of a cormorant drying its wings, then carried on picking up rubbish with renewed vigour.

An hour later, Will called another break and handed out bottles of water. Miranda drank hers thankfully.

‘Hot work, eh?’ Alex tried unsuccessfully not to look down her top.

‘Any hotter and I’ll be down to my pants,’ she said unthinkingly. And blushed. She could feel the heat staining her chest. Even her ears felt hot.

‘Come on, sun,’ he said quietly.

Which didn’t make her feel any cooler.

Driving home, with scratches up her arms and smelling like a navvy, as her mother would have said, she had to confess to feeling satisfied and rather virtuous. She couldn’t wait to tell her friends about it. Her real friends – those who weren’t tainted with a whiff of Nigel, so not Lydia or Estelle or anybody who had set her up with shit dates.

When she unlocked the front door, she wanted to embrace her house. There was nothing quite like a shower after an honest day’s work. It seemed so long ago that she had been standing in this cubicle, trying to activate herself. Naked and still damp, she weighed herself. How depressing, she thought. All that exercise and I’m still fat.

Miranda was not fat. In previous centuries she would have been described variously as ‘voluptuous’, ‘Rubenesque’ or ‘hourglass’. But it was hard to find clothes that fitted – they all appeared to have been designed for flat-bottomed and -chested girls. Or boys, even.

The one decent piece of advice she’d had from her mother was to buy proper bras. Rigby & Peller made excellent, comfortable upholstery for her top half, and after a fitting (‘Madam has a fuller left breast’), she liked to nip into Harrods for tea and to use the luxury washrooms.

She checked her breasts for lumps and idly wondered if she could ever have worked in a strip joint, showing her wares, as it were. In her teens she’d been addicted to a magazine that was almost entirely about girls and women prostituting themselves because of their circumstances. If it wasn’t actual prostitution, it was staying with a hideous husband, or drug-smuggling. It had been a sort of forerunner of Heat magazine, which was still about women marrying for money but now they were famous.

It was seven o’clock on a Saturday night. This was when she missed having someone to hang out with. Even Nigel. It seemed sad opening a bottle of wine with no one to share it. And she missed cooking for two. Or four, when the family had been together. ‘Oh, listen to yourself,’ she said aloud, remembering how she’d complained about being a skivvy, sometimes cooking separate meals for the children because she’d allowed them to become faddy eaters.

She opened the fridge door and ate a piece of celery while debating the options. Omelette. That was about it. She closed the door, grabbed a stash of flyers from beside the phone and ordered a takeaway sushi before flumping down on to the sofa and switching on the television, which felt wrong, considering the bright evening, but she hadn’t got the energy to walk to the shops, let alone gather food there.

The enormous beige linen sofa gathered her in, and a faint breeze from the window stirred the curtains. She half watched The Vicar of Dibley – it was an episode she’d seen a number of times, with Geraldine, Dawn French’s character, becoming a radio star. There was something strangely attractive about the owner of the manor, David Horton. Or was it his house? Or the fact that he was so capable?

The doorbell rang, and a man in a crash helmet handed her the sushi. She couldn’t have worked as a food deliverer, she thought. Couldn’t have coped with the semi-permanent helmet hair. And, luckily, I don’t have to. Yet. Standing in the kitchen, she ate the rice and fish with her fingers, rinsed them under the tap and wiped them on the tea towel, which she then threw into the laundry basket with a Note to Self that she should put it in the wash the next day.

She sniffed her fingers and went back into the bathroom to wash her hands with soap, sniffed again, then slathered on almond hand cream. The mirror reflected a face with a hint of suntan. Miranda leant forward to peer closer at her crow’s feet and the lines on her forehead. She was definitely going to get them done. Botox. That was the answer. All her friends looked so much younger than she did after their bi-annual visits to the doctor in Harley Street. Apart from Lydia, who was old school and didn’t even moisturise, let alone Botox. Hands like a pumice stone and the toes of a tree climber.