Revelry Read online

  I felt another rush of euphoria after we’d done the lines and Randy seemed to too, as he grasped my shoulders and started kissing me, tracing the inside of my mouth with his tongue. It felt great and I responded in kind, offering little resistance when he slid my dress off my shoulders and onto the floor, leaving me standing there in my bra and knickers. He undid his board shorts, which also fell to the floor. He wasn’t wearing anything underneath and his cock was impressive. He pushed me against the wall, and tried to get my knickers down, but we were both hampered by the garments around our feet. We laughed, and kicked them aside.

  Realizing that in such a confined space there was no other option, Randy sat down on the loo seat and pulled me down on top of him. He’d already managed to get a condom on (something told me he’d done this before). I felt his great American cock going deeper inside me, as I manoeuvred myself up and down on him, turned on as much by the naughtiness of it all as by his calloused thumb rubbing my clitoris. God, it was good.

  But when I told Ben that I’d lost Randy in the crowds, I was lying about that too. When we eventually emerged from the loo, with me in the towel the barmaid had lent me, he kissed me, apologized and said he couldn’t be seen with me in case his friends told his girlfriend back in Santa Barbara. Bastard. It was the first time he’d mentioned a girlfriend.

  You know what though? I’ve been treated worse. God, the hours I’ve spent agonizing over why some chap or other hasn’t called, what I might have done to put him off me. What it is that other women have that I don’t; something that keeps the opposite sex interested in them for more than just a few cheap shags. Endless, painful self-analysis. At least Randy had the decency to tell me to my face immediately after the event. OK, so decency is probably not quite the right word, but you know what I mean. It’s that being kept hanging on for weeks, sometimes months on end – because they don’t have the bloody courage to tell you to your face – that really hurts.

  Here, in the beautiful sea that surrounds this beautiful island, Randy’s nothing more than a delicious (if somewhat seedy) memory. Ships that pass, and all that. I do a backward somersault, then swim out towards the horizon for a bit, going deep underwater like a fish before heading back to the shore. It’s time for another drink.

  The jetty that sticks out into the sea in front of the bar acts as a kind of catwalk. The rocks that account for the very clean water make it difficult to get in and out of the sea without using the jetty, so every time you have a swim you know that at least someone will be observing, and quite possibly commenting on you. In the old days I’d have been horribly selfconscious hauling myself out of the water in front of such a pulchritudinous crowd. Today, emboldened by the five bottles of wine we seem to have got through with our lunch, I am the picture of insouciance. I may be nowhere near Poppy’s league of beauty, but I scrub up OK and am feeling happily confident in my fuchsia and orange halterneck bikini, my long dark hair dripping down my back. It’s great how sexy sunshine and booze can make you feel when there are no mirrors around.

  Lunch was to die for. Griddle-blackened tiger prawns pulsating with garlic and parsley, fantastically crunchy chips to soak up the juices and a lovely fresh salad to make us feel virtuous. The food, wine and swim (not necessarily in that order) have certainly sorted out my hangover, I think, as I weave my way through the bodies on the sand back to our table.

  ‘How was the water?’ asks Poppy.

  ‘Absolutely gorgeous! So refreshing, I feel like a new man. What’s the wine situation?’ I pick up my empty glass.

  ‘Don’t panic, we’ve ordered a couple more bottles,’ says Ben, laughing.

  Looking around the table I feel a moment of pure joy. I’m with three of my favourite people in probably my favourite place on earth, mellowed with sun and wine, with nothing but more pleasure to look forward to until we leave this magical island. It’s so hot I’m drying off already, salt crystals forming on my sunbaked shoulders, my wet hair keeping me cool. Whichever direction I look, I am confronted by sunshine, beauty and laughing faces. It seems as if nothing can pierce my bubble of happiness.

  And then I see him. Walking up the beach towards us, skinny brown legs in way-too-short denim cut-offs, barrel brown chest revealed by a batik silk shirt left open to the waist. His shoulder-length hair is thick and grey, his chest hair white and wispy. A shark’s tooth dangles from a leather string around his neck, above which his strong mahogany face is etched with deep vertical grooves. He is carrying – oh God – a guitar in one hand and what looks like a spliff in the other.

  ‘Bella,’ says Damian, following my gaze. ‘Isn’t that …?’

  Yes, the ageing hippy openly checking out all the topless babes on the beach is my much-loved but thoroughly disreputable father.

  Chapter 2

  ‘Wow Bella, that smells fantastic. What’s cooking?’ asks Charlie, dipping a slightly podgy finger into the rouille I’ve just prepared. I slap his hand away and smile at him. Thick, sandy blond hair frames his good-natured, ruddy-cheeked face. He’ll have a double chin in ten years’ time, you mark my words.

  ‘Bouillabaisse.’

  After boozing all day yesterday, an early(ish) night was in order, so I got up at the supremely civilized hour of 10.30 to go to the market. There I had a lovely time trading banter with the stallholders and getting their recommendations on what was freshest in. I spent most of my childhood holidays in Mallorca (where Dad still lives in a thirteenth-century hermitage) so my Spanish is passable. I stocked my pretty wicker basket high with prawns, mussels, clams, scallops, red mullet and the scraps of small fish that are so essential for depth of flavour in a good fishy broth. I’m not actually making bouillabaisse, which is of course indigenous to the south of France, but a kind of generic Mediterranean fish stew.

  I love cooking. I’ve chopped onions, garlic and fennel, skinned and seeded some overblown, sun-infused old tarts of the tomato world, and glugged in some Pernod, saffron and thyme. Now the fish is simmering away and I stop for a fag break.

  The insistent chirruping of crickets vies for attention with my friends’ laughing voices wafting through the balmy air from the terrace outside. The old stone floor is cool against my bare feet as I pad about the enormous room, wishing my tiny kitchen in London could compare. There is a huge scrubbed oak table in the middle, piled high with the usual holiday detritus of suntan lotion, shades, hats, wet towels, cameras and unwritten postcards. All the cupboards are finished in the same oak, the walls are whitewashed and the white enamel double sink has elegantly curved stainless steel tap fittings. A fireplace vast enough to roast several ten-year-olds is stacked with currently redundant logs, giving the room an almost cosy feel, despite its size.

  I’m feeling wonderfully wafty in my new multicoloured maxidress, fondly imagining I’m channelling a Seventies socialite, Talitha Getty/Bianca Jagger vibe as I float through the French windows – only to trip over the hem and fall flat on my face at Ben’s feet. Everyone creases up laughing.

  ‘Ow, that bloody hurt. Shut up, you buggers, it’s not funny.’ I sit up and rub my knee, where the skin has split and a purply bruise is starting to form. I pretend to laugh but am actually feeling a bit stupid and in genuine pain.

  ‘Shit, that looks nasty,’ says Ben, crouching down beside me. ‘You need to clean it up. Does anyone have any antiseptic?’

  ‘There’s some Savlon in my sponge bag. Poor love.’ Poppy bends over to kiss the top of my head as she makes her way inside the villa.

  Ben helps me to my feet and I go hot all over. I can’t help it: his proximity is overwhelming, even after all these years.

  ‘Have a drink, darling,’ says my father, pouring me a glass of wine as I sit down at the table. ‘Best anaesthetic there is.’

  It turns out that Dad heard from my mother that we were on the island, so he thought he’d pop over to surprise us. It’s only a short ferry ride from Palma, after all. Feeling mean not to have mentioned it to him, I immediately asked the others if t
hey’d mind if he stayed on the sofa for a couple of nights. Everyone seemed to be cool with it, though I thought I detected some sniffiness in the Alisons’ corner. No surprise there then. As it happened, Dad didn’t need the sofa as he was travelling, as he often does, with his trusty hammock and sleeping bag – ‘I much prefer to sleep under the stars, angel face.’

  ‘Here you go,’ says Poppy, handing me the tube of Savlon, a roll of lint and a packet of plasters. Trust her to come prepared. It just wouldn’t occur to me to bring first aid stuff on holiday.

  ‘Let me do that,’ says Ben, crouching down again, gently pulling my skirt up over my knees. I can barely breathe as I glance over at Kim, but she seems entirely unperturbed, twinkling and laughing at something my father’s just said. She and Dad have been all over each other all day, and while it’s pretty obvious what he sees in her, it’s also, sadly, all too obvious what she sees in him. My father’s a photographer, you see, and a pretty influential one at that. In the Seventies he ran amok with Bailey, Donovan et al., and was never without several pretty girls on either arm. It’s amazing his marriage to my mother lasted as long as it did.

  He’s shot everyone from the Stones to Iggy Pop, Gwyneth Paltrow to George Clooney – and got pissed with them all afterwards too (except for Gwynnie, whom he called ‘lovely to look at, but probably the most boring woman in the world’). He’s stayed for nothing in the best hotels in the best locations, and is endearingly blasé about high-end glamour, preferring to rhapsodize over waterfalls or deserts. When he occasionally emerges from semi-retirement in Mallorca, the glossies fall over themselves trying to persuade him to shoot for them. Kimberly’s in the process of proving herself to be nothing more than a nasty little opportunist, and while part of me is delighted she’s showing her true colours, I’m mortified that my father should be the cause of it.

  I’m also pretty sure this is why Ben is being so unusually solicitous, but am not about to look a gift horse in the mouth. Now he tenderly cleans my wound, looking up at me with those delicious blue eyes, and it’s all I can do not to grab him right here and shove my tongue down his throat.

  I am distracted from my lascivious reverie by the sound of Kim squawking, ‘Oh my God, Justin, you crack me up. You’re just sooooo witty,’ and laughing as if my dad were Peter Cook and Dorothy Parker reincarnated and rolled into one. When she smiles, her pink pointy tongue peeps through her teeth, in a cutesy manner she clearly imagines is both endearing and provocative. It might just provoke me into a spot of GBH. Dad smiles smugly and relights his spliff.

  Dad and Kim are both sitting with their legs propped up on the table we’ve laid this side of the luminously turquoise pool, just to the left of the French windows. This is Dad’s default position so it doesn’t bug me too much. For Kimbo it is another excuse to show off the length of her horrible legs. She is wearing a cream backless jersey minidress, cut away at the sides and held together with a large gold ring that showcases her pierced belly button and matches her gladiator sandals. She’s piled her copper curls up in a faintly Grecian style that emphasizes both her height and the swanlike quality of her neck. Her skirt is so short that the legs-on-table pose is a blatant invitation to look at her knickers. Oh well – at least she’s not going commando. One must be thankful for small mercies.

  Poppy’s perched on one of the sun loungers, a very contented-looking Damian sitting on a fat cushion on the ground between her legs. He occasionally turns his head to kiss her slender fingers, which are massaging his shoulders. In denim hot pants and a little white broderie-anglaise camisole, her surfer girl hair streaked white by the sun, Poppy is the picture of butter-wouldn’t-melt gorgeousness (if you discount the fag in her hand and enormous margarita at her feet). Damian is his usual understated cool in long shorts and a close-fitting Superdry T-shirt.

  To the other side of my father leers Neanderthal Mark, resplendent in crotch-hugging Daniel Craig-as-Bond shorts and a grey marl racer-back vest with ‘sit on my face’ emblazoned in neon pink lettering across his enormously worked-out chest. He and Dad have worked together on several shoots and were having a lovely time reminiscing about various tits, arses and pudenda they’ve come across (if you’ll pardon the expression) until Kim appeared, fresh from her ablutions.

  Alison and Alison are in their usual sun loungers, engaged in a crisis meeting as the woman making Skinny Alison’s wedding dress has had the temerity not to be available at the end of a phone twenty-four/seven, even though Skinny is on holiday herself.

  ‘I mean, I’m paying her enough,’ she’s fuming. ‘I just want to know that everything’s going according to plan. That’s not really too much to ask, is it? It’s absolutely vital that we get the second fitting done the minute we get back. Oh God, I shouldn’t have come to this bloody island. There’s just too much to do. And I do want everything to be perfect on my big day.’

  ‘Of course you do, sweetie,’ says Plump Alison, who is awfully wet but the only one showing the self-obsessed hag any kindness, I suppose.

  Indeed Andy seems blissfully unaware of his fiancée’s latest gripe as he sits playing chess with Charlie at the circular stone table in the bar. Andy is quite a good-looking man, in a saturnine sort of way. Tall and rangy, with short dark brown hair and rectangular, dark-framed specs, he looks exactly like the hard-hitting investigative reporter (or ‘proper journalist’, as Poppy puts it when she wants to wind Damian up) that he is.

  Though you wouldn’t guess it given her asinine wedding obsession, Skinny Alison is a high-flying lawyer. She too is tall and dark, with a severe black bob and droopily melancholy features set in a long face. She looks surprisingly elegant with her clothes on, I have to admit, clad tonight in white linen palazzo pants and navy and white striped boat-necked T-shirt, her lips defined with a slash of scarlet that matches the silk scarf wrapped around her narrow waist. The fact that she isn’t pouring with sweat in such a get-up is testament to her reptilian cold-bloodedness. She and Andy must have awfully grown-up, intellectually superior dinner parties, I reflect, as I eye them over my drink and wonder what on earth they have in common with my darling, laid-back brother. I’ve met Andy on and off over the years and he’s always struck me as nice enough. But still.

  ‘How’s that?’ asks Ben as he gives my knee one final wipe and sticks a plaster on it.

  ‘Much better – thanks so much.’ I will him never to stop manhandling my legs. ‘I’ll just have a fag out here, then go back and finish the food.’

  ‘Great, I’m starving,’ says Charlie from the bar. ‘What’s the ETA?’ So they can hear what’s going on from there, then. Interesting.

  ‘God, Charlie, do you ever think of anything but your stomach?’ says Skinny Alison. ‘You really should start looking after yourself. You’re not getting any younger, you know.’

  ‘Well, I love him just the way he is,’ says Plump Alison in a rare moment of defiance. She walks over and gives him a cuddle from behind.

  ‘Thanks babe,’ says Charlie, kissing her forearm. ‘Does that mean I can have seconds?’ He roars with laughter. He’s a pretty good sort, as Sloaney accountants go.

  ‘I’ve never had to worry about my weight,’ says Kim smugly. ‘I guess I’m just lucky – good genes? My mom and grandma both had great skin too? And they both look soooo young for their age? My guru says you get the face you deserve, and I’ve been so lucky I always try to give something back.’ She beams around complacently.

  ‘So, what’s the score tonight then?’ interjects Poppy – who’s never had to worry about her weight either – into the flabbergasted silence. ‘Dinner in – what? – twenty minutes or so, Belles?’ I nod. ‘Cool, then we’ll just chill for a bit, then hit Ibiza Town, then … does anyone have any particular debauchery in mind?’

  We ascertain that Mark wants to hit the Rock Bar, as the Brazilian twins said they might be there, Damian needs to score from some bar in the gay quarter and the rest of us are keen to go to Amnesia as it’s Manumission night. I finish my fag an
d go inside to put the finishing touches to dinner, Poppy hot on my tail.

  ‘Christ, have you ever met such a self-satisfied, vacuous little tart,’ she rants, opening the fridge in search of another bottle of tequila. ‘OK, tall tart.’

  ‘Hmmm … let’s think.’ I put my head on one side and pretend to consider it. ‘Nope, can’t say I have. Surely even Ben must be starting to realize that by now?’

  ‘Well, I don’t think he was ever after her mind.’

  ‘My dad and Mark slavering over her like a couple of randy old dogs isn’t helping much either,’ I ponder gloomily. ‘God, I’d like to wipe that smug smile off her face.’

  ‘Oh well, let’s not let the bitch ruin our holiday.’ Poppy brandishes the tequila bottle. ‘How about a couple of mind-sharpening shots?’

  ‘The shot glasses are in the bar. Can you really be arsed to go through and pour shots for everyone?’

  ‘Nope. But I’ve found the perfect substitute!’ cries Poppy triumphantly, producing a couple of egg cups from one of the cupboards. Giggling, we find the salt and lemon (right next to the stove as I was about to use them to season the stew) and embark on the ridiculous ritual beloved of party animals the world over.

  ‘Eurgh,’ I wince, screwing up my eyes and shoving the lemon wedge in my mouth as quickly as I can to get rid of the taste. Once the gagging reflex has stopped, I’m suffused with a warm glow and set about completing the fish stew with renewed vigour.

  ‘I’ll set the table, shall I?’ offers Poppy, heading back outside.

  ‘You’re an angel.’ I really mean it. The first stirrings of pissed sentimentality are creeping up on me, and Poppy certainly looks angelic tonight, with her lovely smile, big almond-shaped green eyes and perfect, straight nose, all framed by that silky, golden mane.

  When Pops and I were at school, we were inseparable and a trifle eccentric, not part of any of the cool bitchy girl gangs. It was just us against the world – and the world of an all girls’ school can be horribly unkind if you don’t conform. Poppy and I existed in our own little world of make-believe. After our Enid Blyton stage, we became obsessed with the 1920s and 1930s and devoured books by Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford, Agatha Christie and P. G. Wodehouse, dressing in homemade flapper dresses, cloche hats and character shoes. My fourteenth birthday present from my mum was an old gramophone player with a horn and a pile of dusty 78s that we played over and over, dancing the Charleston and giggling till we were breathless. We even spoke like characters from the books. Things were either ‘beastly’ or ‘vile’, ‘divine’ or ‘too, too happy-making’. Our catty, boyband-obsessed classmates had no idea what to make of us, but we were absolutely content in our anachronistic, self-contained bubble. We never felt the need to befriend anybody else in that stuck-up girls’ school.