A warm Sahara wind was blowing and by late afternoon the western sky where it met the sea was the colour of golden sand. Surfers bobbed like seals on the milky ocean, waiting for a wave. It stretched like a sheet of silk all the way to the golden horizon.
Lying by the hotel pool facing the seafront, I was watching the surfers, the fishing boats, the palm trees waving on the promenade, and something else.
‘John, I just need to be honest with you,’ said a glamorous, buxom, pink-lipsticked blonde lady in her sixties wearing a leopard-print sarong, sitting on a sunbed sideways facing the back of a slim, frightened-looking man, also in his sixties.
She spoke in a soft Scottish accent, coquettishly stirring a cocktail in a poolside cardboard cup.
This is what I came to Tenerife for, I thought. Why waste money going to the Maldives when I can fly three-and-a-half hours from the south of Ireland to somewhere I can wear a yellow wristband and watch the soap operas of our times?
‘John, are you listening to me? If we can’t talk, we can’t have true intimacy…’
John looked like he wanted to kill himself. He stared at his feet, sitting sideways on the lounger with his back to her.
‘If you hadn’t seen that text on my phone last night…,’ she said and didn’t finish. There was nowhere for that sentence to go.
Two silver surfers in their prime having a romantic winter break… only she had someone else on the go and he hadn’t signed up for that. He stared down at his man sandals gloomily.
Twenty minutes went by with her lecturing him about openness and honesty and him staring at his feet. I was lying behind while apparently asleep in sunglasses.
Poor, poor John, I thought. He looked like such a lovely man.
He spoke eventually to mutter a few words, revealing a northern accent. He just wanted to enjoy his holiday. I was with him on that. This was my first foreign holiday since lockdown.
I didn’t travel for years because the builder boyfriend and I didn’t want the Covid vaccine, and then we sort of gave up on holidays.
Now I was on holiday with a friend who had had the vaccine so that she could travel. At the time of my refusal, she had sat in my house one Sunday lunch and told me I was stupid. Oh well.
After I’d enjoyed a few hours watching the buxom lady FaceTiming another man while poor John was upstairs in the room, my friend and I went for lunch on the seafront and she raised the fraught issue of health again.
She wanted to talk about how her eyes were degenerating. I had wondered why she was wearing shaded glasses even indoors and at night. She said she had to wear them due to macular degeneration. She’s my age, 52.
‘I’ve got floaters,’ I said to console her. I ate my tuna salad and said nothing. ‘So English,’ she said, acidly, eyeing my meal. ‘Chips with salad.’ And she laughed, which I felt was putting me down.
It felt like we had been sparring with each other relentlessly since we got here. She’s in the media, but left-wing in outlook, and kept telling me she was used to fancy hotels and the finer things, mixing with top people and at better places than this, a resort I had chosen.
‘Well, I’m from the working classes,’ I said, ‘and I like these people. I feel comfortable with them. They’re the people who keep the world going round.’
Anyway, it was her who kept ordering garlic bread, I pointed out. Salt came out of her bag at one point – classy. But I’m just an ignorant right-winger who likes Donald Trump – what do I know about anything?
‘Have I offended you?’ she said.
‘No, no,’ I lied.
I didn’t say that three years ago she offended me more than I had thought possible. A friend of 25 years shouting at me that I was ‘one of the stupid people’.
I had hoped this holiday would heal something. But it felt like she was still angry with me, and I couldn’t work out why that should be.
At a bar a few nights later, we got into a crowd of people. A man had paid to bring his brothers on holiday and told me that this was because they were a family in crisis: one of their wives had dropped dead of a brain aneurysm two months ago, his older brother was dying of terminal cancer, and he himself had recently had a stroke.
How is that… possible? I thought, swapping numbers with the man after inviting them to Ireland. I texted the builder boyfriend and he said he hoped I wasn’t on their return flight. ‘With their luck the plane will go bang! Foggy here this morning.’ He knows how to stop my mind obsessing.
On the second to last night after dinner, as we arrived back at our rooms and put our key cards into the slots, I said goodnight to my friend and out of nowhere she said: ‘I love you.’
I felt like crying. I said: ‘Love you too.’ And then we went into our separate rooms and shut our doors.
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