Debbie Johnson - The Birthday That Changed Everything - Perfect summer holiday reading!

Perfect.

So perfect, I may possibly have drifted off to sleep for a little while. Or ‘rested my eyes’, as my gran used to say when she nodded off in the armchair.

I jerked roughly awake when I heard Ollie shouting ‘Mum!’ in a tone that implied it wasn’t the first time. I leaped up, opening my eyes to be confronted by his plastic face inches from my nose.

He pulled off his snorkelling mask, laughing away at his little joke, and said: ‘You were dribbling. And mumbling,’ then did a running jump into the swimming pool.

I investigated my face for slobber, slapped on some more cream and turned over. I tan easily, but cooked on one side and not the other is never a good look.

I was just drifting off again when a feeling of discontent started to swirl around me. I knew Lucy was standing there before she said a word – I could sense her dark aura chilling the air.

I turned round, reluctantly, and looked up into the eye of the storm. Her black hair was wet and dripping round her shoulders. She seemed less tough without a coating of hairspray – like a tortoise without its shell.

Her stance, though, was pure street fighter. Hands on hips, glaring down at me.

‘Yes?’ I asked cautiously, racking my brain for something I’d done to annoy her recently. Other than breathe.

‘You know it’s all your fault I don’t fit in here, don’t you?’ she said, in a quietly furious voice. From bitter experience I knew she’d get louder and louder from this point onwards. I should have dispensed earplugs to all my fellow hotel guests as soon as we’d arrived, out of common courtesy.

‘Erm…if I just say yes, can we leave it there?’ I asked, hopefully.

‘I look like a freak,’ she said, as if I’d never spoken, pointing at her own hair and the thick black mascara that was clumping her eyelashes together.

‘I look like a freak and it’s all your fucking fault! What kind of mother helps her daughter dye her hair black? And wear the kind of clothes I wear?’

‘I don’t know, Lucy,’ I said, ‘a supportive one? And to be fair I did draw the line at that tattoo of a spider’s web you wanted for your birthday—’

‘Shut up!’ she shouted – at about fifty per cent capacity, I’d say.

‘You’re a fucking nightmare! I’m sixteen! I need something to rebel against, but no, you’re always too busy being Mrs Fucking Understanding Sympathetic Parent, aren’t you? It’s all “yes, dear, of course you can dye your hair”, “yes, dear, of course you can paint your room black”, “yes, dear, of course you can shoot up fucking heroin at the dinner table!”’

Cranked right up to seventy per cent now, and building to a big finale.

‘For God’s sake, what do I have to do in the madhouse you call our home to break the rules? Go teetotal or join the SAS? It’s a joke. You’re a joke. You’ve screwed up your own life and now you want to do the same to me! No wonder Dad left!’

She stomped off, flip-flops smacking angrily against the concrete as she headed back to our room. Time for a bit more Sylvia Plath, I suppose.

The woman lying on the next lounger was looking on in horror. She was far too polite to say anything, but her face was frozen somewhere to the south of shocked.

‘I know,’ I said. ‘My only consolation is she’ll be leaving home soon.’

I walked over to the pool’s edge and shouted Ollie over. ‘What’s wrong with Lucy?’ I asked.

‘Do you want a list?’ he answered. I put on my no-nonsense face and folded my arms in front of my chest.

‘Okay, okay…I don’t know. She went swimming with Max and then his mates came and it was no big deal but I think one of them might have called her Morticia.

‘Don’t see why that would bother her, she’d normally just break their arm, but I think it might be ’cause she likes Max so she flipped and got embarrassed. It’s girl stuff, Mum – I don’t understand girls. You should go talk to her.’

Yeah, right. Whatever, as Lucy might say. That was not going to happen. She’d said her piece. She currently hated me. I’d been here before, bought a shop-load of T-shirts, and knew she needed time to calm down before I went anywhere near her. A year or so should do it.

Instead, I walked to the bar. Allie was sitting there under an umbrella, her bare feet propped up on the chair opposite her, a paperback that looked to be about serial killers splayed across her lap.

She glanced up as I arrived, and cracked open one of her best smiles.

‘Trouble in paradise?’ she asked, raising an eyebrow and closing her book.

‘Oh,’ I replied. ‘You heard that, did you?’

‘Yes. Because I’m not deaf. Don’t let it get to you – she doesn’t mean it. She’s probably in her room regretting it right now.’

‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ I said, looking yearningly at her cold bottle of Peroni. ‘That would be what a normal human being would do. Lucy, though, will be upstairs plotting evil acts that wouldn’t be out of place in that book you’re reading. But don’t worry – I’m used to it. And I met your Max earlier, Allie – how lovely is he?’

‘On a scale of one to ten,’ she said, smiling proudly, ‘he’s probably a twelve. But that’s what he’s like now – you should have met him when his dad first left, years ago. He was a monster. He was caught shoplifting bags of Wotsits from the corner shop; got into fights at school – the works. I felt so guilty – I knew it was all because of what we, the alleged grown-ups, were doing, messing with his poor little head. I suspect that’s something you understand.’

I pondered it and, while I did so, she kindly pushed her Peroni over and gestured for me to have a swig. True friendship.

‘I do,’ I eventually replied. ‘I do feel guilty. Even though it’s not me who had the affair, or me who walked out. Even though I’d be willing to try and make it work if he wanted to come home. Probably. But…well, it’s complicated, isn’t it? I didn’t walk out – but maybe I switched off. Maybe I didn’t give him what he needed. Maybe I didn’t notice how miserable he was, because I was so busy leading our perfect suburban middle-class life. Maybe it’s at least partly my fault.’

‘And maybe,’ said Allie, grinning across the table at me, ‘he’s actually just a complete wanker.’

‘That is also a distinct possibility,’ I answered, feeling laughter bubble up inside me.

I realised, as I drank my pilfered lager and laughed with my newfound pal, that it was the first time I’d felt genuinely amused, or even capable of anything approaching ‘fun’, for a very long time.

Perhaps the holiday magic was starting to work.

Windsurfing looks really, really easy. I could see loads of people doing it – gliding effortlessly along in the choppy blue bay, like humans who’d been transformed into graceful swans.

All of which made it especially galling that, so far, the only technique I’d mastered was falling into the sea and coughing up litres of salt water. I couldn’t get enough balance to even stand up on the board, never mind heft the sail upright.

I wanted to give up and go for a little lie-down, but my instructor, Mo, was having none of it. Mo was about thirty and must have weighed in at a good seventeen stone, half of which was made up of ratty brown dreadlocks.

‘You can do it, Sally,’ he said, after my third drenching. ‘You’ll get it eventually and then there’ll be no stopping you. Concentrate. Don’t let it defeat you!’

I tried again. And again. All around me, there were giant splashes, occasional shouts of triumph, and the sound of sails whooshing down to hit the water. Clearly this was a class full of people who were probably also picked last for their netball team during PE lessons.