Chapter 19
19
‘This has been the absolute best holiday,’ Marni says as we all line up on the dock to say goodbye.
‘It’s been a dream, truly.
’
Marni and Paul’s boys all look adorable in matching red T-shirts and navy-blue shorts, stood in a row behind their parents to shake all our hands.
‘The food was incredible and you all went above and beyond,’ Paul says.
‘The film, the picnic, Sóller,’ Marni adds.
‘The cake! We really can’t thank you enough.
’
Paul tells us they’ll be back and hope to see us all again and then he gives a fat envelope to Captain Liz and they leave, the children turning to wave until they’re almost out of sight.
‘They were adorable,’ Captain Liz says.
‘Now everyone get changed and meet me in the salon for the tip meeting.’
They’ve given us the best tip we’ve had so far – almost two thousand euros each – so everyone is in a buoyant mood as we pile into two cars and head into town for our night off.
I end up sitting next to Adam, unintentionally, but he did save my life so I can’t be too annoyed about it.
‘How are you feeling?’ he asks me once we’re on the road.
‘I’m all good,’ I tell him.
I shift slightly so I can look at him.
‘Thank you. For, you know, saving my life and everything.’
He smiles, almost shyly, and my heart thumps.
No matter what, I think I’ll always love him at least a little bit.
‘It was nothing,’ he says.
‘All I ask is that you nominate me for a Pride of Britain Award.’
I laugh and despite everything it feels good to laugh with him.
‘I’ll get right on that,’ I tell him.
The restaurant is in a town square that’s buzzing with both tourists and locals.
Children run around squealing and giggling, riding bikes or driving tiny electric cars.
Elderly Mallorcans line a row of benches along the edge of the square.
White-haired men in pastel shirts and Bermuda shorts, walking sticks propped against the bench between them, women wearing pinafore aprons over patterned cotton dresses, watching the children and smiling, sit either side of tourists in sunglasses, bumbags worn across their chests, holding their phones up to photograph the rows of frilly white bunting stretching across the square and dancing in the breeze.
Adam is sitting at the opposite end of the table, next to Liam, and Berry is next to me.
She’s wearing loose, black, wide-legged trousers and a hot pink vest.
Berry and I both turn our chairs a little so we can watch the happenings in the square without having our backs to anyone.
We order wine and a selection of tapas, and the waiter brings us small glasses of a traditional Mallorcan aperitif called Palo.
I wince as I sip it.
It’s thick and bitter and tastes like burnt caramel.
‘Oh, yikes,’ Berry says, her voice low.
‘Liquid liquorice.’
I watch her tongue as she licks it off her lips.
‘That is . . . something.’
‘Tastes like the stuff my mum used to make me drink for constipation,’ Nico says, leaning towards us.
‘She had to hold my nose to get me to open my mouth and sometimes I’d still spit it out after.
’ He downs the rest of his drink.
‘Important to keep regular!’
‘Here.’ Berry pours me a glass of Rioja.
‘Take away the taste of Nico’s poop meds.
’
‘I can already feel it working,’ Nico says, rubbing his stomach.
‘Gross.’
The food arrives and we all pounce on our preferred dishes, spooning some onto our plates before passing them along and waiting for the next one.
Chunks of Mallorcan bread with wafer-thin slices of Iberico ham, Mahón cheese and pear; charred Padrón peppers, crunchy with shards of salt; meltingly soft calamari; burrata on a pile of basil leaves, glistening with honey oil; fat prawns, sizzling in garlic butter.
‘This totally makes up for the . . . what’s that drink in the UK that motorbike gangs like?
’ Berry asks me.
I shake my head.
‘Motorbike gangs?’
‘Yeah, I think so. Traditionally. It’s like a black syrup thing.
I think you can drink it with something else too .
. .’ She screws her face up in thought.
‘Nico.’ I bump his arm with my elbow.
‘What do bikers drinkback home?’
‘J?ger?’ he says immediately.
‘Love a J?gerbomb.’
‘J?germeister,’ I tell Berry.
‘I don’t know if bikers drink it, but my mum drank some by accident one Christmas and we didn’t hear the end of it till New Year.
She thought it was Kahlúa apparently.
I didn’t know what Kahlúa was either.
’
‘Coffee liqueur,’ Nico tells us.
‘Goes in a White Russian. The Dude drinks them in The Big Lebowski .’
‘You are a font of information,’ Berry tells him.
‘I worked as a bartender for a few months,’ Nico says.
Food is still being delivered to the table – anchovies and red pepper on olive oil toast; steamed mussels; and something I think the waiter says is called grandmother’s croquetas – and no one’s even passing it along now, it’s a total free-for-all.
More wine is ordered and the waiters bring jugs of water and top up our tumblers.
The entire outside seating area is full and everyone else seems to have ordered just as much food, and possibly also as much wine, as we have.
Conversation in Spanish, English and German is interrupted by barks of laughter and shrieks of excitement from the children, who frequently run back from the square to their parents to report an incident or ask them to go and watch.
Adam leaves the table and goes inside with his phone in his hand.
I don’t know how many shots he’s had, but when he comes back, I notice he’s already swaying slightly on his feet.
As he sits down, he bumps the table and Liam cheers as the water bottles rattle.
‘It’s like The Fast and the Furious out there,’ Nico observes, gesturing at the square where tiny children are lined up in tiny cars, headlights flashing.
Other kids run around throwing rubber balls that also flash with coloured lights as they bounce.
A guy with a beard and a man bun is playing guitar and singing, despite being drowned out by all the other sounds coming from every other direction at once.
‘This is perfect,’ Berry says, shifting her chair closer to mine to make herself heard over all the noise.
‘It really is.’
Ridiculously, my eyes fill with tears.
‘Are you okay?’
I carefully wipe under my eyes so as not to mess up my make-up and tell her that yes, I’m fine; it’s just a lot.
‘I’m so tired and I miss home.
And I’m worried about my mum.
But this is just . .
. It’s exactly what I pictured when we planned this.
’
‘You didn’t picture cleaning the loos?
’ Berry asks, smiling.
‘Funnily enough, no. Or scraping gunk out of a washing machine filter.’
‘Yeah, this makes it all worth it,’ Berry says.
‘Right,’ Nico says, leaning back in his seat as if he’s about to make an announcement.
‘Never have I ever.’
Pretty much everyone groans.
‘Seriously?’ Louise says, leaning forward to look at the rest of us, as if she’s looking for our support in voting the idea down.
‘You just don’t want to play because there’s nothing you haven’t done,’ Nico says without looking at her.
She rolls her eyes.
‘Fine,’ Berry says.
‘But we need more wine.’
‘Easy one to start,’ Nico says.
‘Never have I ever fallen down the stairs.’
‘Really?’ I say.
‘I thought everyone had done that.’
Nico shakes his head slowly.
‘Nope. I’m very careful and responsible.
’
The rest of us take a drink.
‘When I was a kid,’ Berry says, ‘my dad came home from work and couldn’t find me.
I was lying at the bottom of the stairs with, like, my head on the ground and my body up the steps.
I was going down there to paint – I was taking an art course at the time and thought I was the new Georgia O’Keeffe – and I had a tube of oil paint in my hand and when I fell I smashed it against the wall and it squirted everywhere.
They couldn’t get it off.
They had to repaint.
’
‘Were you hurt?’ I ask her.
She smiles. ‘I was fine. I think I only stayed down for the drama of it all. I told myself I was being safe, you know, in case I’d broken my neck.
But nah.’
‘Adam broke his shoulder falling down the stairs,’ I say without thinking.
When I look over at him he’s looking back at me with this small smile, like he’s happy I mentioned it, and it makes my heart twist – we’ve got so much shared history; I can’t imagine not telling his stories and him not telling mine.
‘I was wearing these Yoda slippers I got for Christmas as a joke.’ His cheeks are flushed and he’s already slurring slightly.
We’ve all worked hard, we were all looking forward to coming out, relaxing, but I’m surprised he’s got drunk so quickly.
‘I skidded,’ Adam continues, ‘bounced down the whole lot and landed flat on my back in the hall. My mum came running so fast she almost tripped over me.’
More wine arrives as Berry says, ‘Never have I ever stolen anything.’
‘Me neither!’ I say.
Adam clears his throat and when I look at him, he’s got one eyebrow raised.
‘What? I haven’t!’
He holds up one finger.
‘San Miguel glass from outside that pub.’
‘That wasn’t stealing!
’ I argue. ‘That had been left outside like rubbish. I took it, but I didn’t steal it.
’
Everyone laughs.
‘It would have gone in the bin!’ I argue.
‘You keep telling yourself that,’ Liam says.
Adam holds up a second finger.
‘A shot glass and a weird little glass that looked like a Petri dish from Prezzo.’
I laugh.
To be fair, I had forgotten about them.
‘Technically . . .’ I start, and everyone hoots, ‘I didn’t steal them, you did.
’
‘Because you asked me to!’ Adam says.
I shake my head. ‘You put them in your pockets; you’re the one who stole them.
’
‘Fine!’ Adam drinks, draining the glass.
‘I once stole a basket of underwear from M it feels soft and easy.
I haven’t kissed anyone but Adam for so long and I was scared it would feel wrong, weird, but it doesn’t at all.
It feels entirely right.
I drift my lips over her jaw, down the side of her neck.
I can taste the salt on her skin and I want more; I want to kiss her until our lips are sore.
The fingers of her other hand touch my jaw gently as I run my tongue over her lower lip, sighing into her mouth.
And then she’s pulling away.
‘Hey,’ she says, her eyes flashing in the semi-dark.
‘So let me just . . . You lied? That night?’
‘Yeah. I was . . .’ I can’t tell her about Adam, even now.
It’s all so complicated now.
And I promised. ‘I didn’t think it was a good idea and I just .
. . I have been. In the past. Into girls, I mean.
Or one girl. And it didn’t go well.
So I wasn’t even sure, because I’d never .
. .’
‘You don’t have to,’ she says.
‘You don’t have to prove anything.
If you want to, that’s enough.
’
I nod. ‘The girl at uni. I told you. But I really blew it with her.’
‘Charlie was a girl?’
I nod again.
‘And I don’t want to do the same with you.
But I just . . .’
My thoughts are so jumbled – things I want to say and things I know I shouldn’t, can’t, say – all crashing and piling on top of each other.
And I’m so, so tired.
‘I just wanted to kiss you,’ I finish, not looking at her.
‘To see if you liked it?’ she asks.
I shake my head. ‘No. Well, maybe. But really just because I like you and I wanted to. I’ve thought a lot about when you kissed me.
’
‘I’ve thought a lot about that too.
’
My stomach lurches to think Berry might have been thinking about me too, the way I’ve been thinking about her.
‘I felt guilty,’ she says.
‘I thought I’d misread.
And I don’t usually.
’
I nod. ‘That was my fault. I’m sorry.
You didn’t misread. I am very into you.
’
She barks out a laugh and then covers her mouth with her hand, eyes going wide.
‘I didn’t mean to say that,’ I tell her.
She steps up to me again.
‘I’m glad you did.’
She’s so close.
I can smell her cherry perfume, the toothpaste on her breath.
If I reach out I can slide my hands over her skin, her bare arms, down to her waist. I could lift her top, push it up over her bra, dip my head down to her breasts.
I shudder, scrunching my eyes closed, and she laughs.
‘I think you really need to sleep.’
I slump, even though I’m still standing.
‘I really do.’
She curls her hand around the side of my neck, fingers pressing into the hinge of my jaw and I shudder again as she brushes her thumb over my lips.
I want to suck it into my mouth.
‘Sleep now,’ she says.
‘We can talk tomorrow.’