Excess Baggage by Judy Astley Page B

them about as naturally as a posh wedding outfit.’
    Plum followed her gaze across the pool. The turquoise man’s wife had a lilac cardigan dangling from the back of her lounger, as if she didn’t quite trust the sun to hang around reliably. ‘Only with older people, surely. Like the kind of men who wear long socks with shorts. The younger ones look all right.’
    Lucy didn’t comment. Plum presumably counted Simon among the ‘younger’ men. Simon had been of the student generation that had worn ball-gripping loon trousers and skin-tight T-shirts and now still habitually bought clothes that looked as if they were for someone at least a size smaller. Lucy’s contemporaries, on the other hand, had absorbed enough of the punk era to feel at their most comfortable in anything that her mother would think was only suitable to be put in the duster box.
    Lucy leaned her head back and pointed her face straight to the sun. ‘Put this on if you must blast your skin,’ Theresa said to her, passing over a tube of the children’s suntan lotion.
    ‘Give me ten minutes, Tess,’ Lucy said, closing her eyes.
    ‘You’ll fry.’ It was like a curse. Lucy sat up straight and glared at her.
    ‘And if I do, who’s to care?’
    ‘You will when your nose is purple and peeling and your eyes are swollen shut.’
    ‘My risk.’ But the moment was spoiled and she pulled a bottle of lotion from her bag and smeared it on her face, catching sight as she did of Theresa’s little smile. It was just like when Theresa had caught her behind the rhododendron down by the shed in their parents’ garden all those years ago. She’d been twelve, smoking her first cigarette with the boy from the classic Cheshire half-timbered house on the corner, the boy Shirley had always encouraged her to play with when she was little because he’d been sent off to boarding school at nine and might be lonely in the holidays. Theresa had crept up, known almost before they did what they were up to and had pounced before Lucy had even managed to inhale the sweet rancid smoke.
    ‘You’ll get cancer,’ Theresa had hissed into her face. ‘If you smoke you’ll die.’
    ‘It’s one Silk Cut, not a whole habit,’ sophisticated Michael up-the-road had sneered.
    ‘If you start now you’ll never stop.’ It had felt like a challenge at the time. Lucy remembered looking very carefully at Theresa’s face, trying to work out whether it was real concern for her young sister that made her so angry or whether she just wanted to pick a fight and put Lucy in the wrong, spoiling her fun. Theresa had been twenty-two at the time, well into grown-uphood by Lucy’s reckoning, and her anger had puzzled her. Perversely, it had also put Lucy off cigarettes. She was determined, till Theresa left home a year or so later, that she wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of sniffing the air around Lucy and scenting out the hint of smoke, nor would she ever be caught with her finger-ends stained ochrous with tobacco.
    ‘OK, who was the fruit punch and who was the pina colada?’ Simon took a tray of drinks from the waiter and started handing them round at random so that the drinks ended up being passed back and forth across the table.
    ‘Mine’s the Diet Coke.’ Plum reached across and claimed her glass.
    ‘And mine looks like a pina colada but it’s without rum,’ Theresa said. ‘I don’t know how people can drink alcohol in this heat.’
    ‘Oh I can.’ Shirley chuckled, taking a large gulp of rum punch. ‘A lot of what you fancy, that’s what holidays should be about. Especially this one. We need to celebrate being all together – such a treat. With you all down south and us stuck back in the frozen north, we only ever get to see you all together at Christmas. There’s not even a good family wedding on the cards.’ She took another sip and a breath then went on, ‘Talking of which, Lucy, what happened to that young man you were seeing, the one you said might have