Free Excess Baggage by Judy Astley

did with attractive men of the right age. If you didn’t quite trust your luck when you seemed to have met a good one, you were probably right and the wife-factor would surely be lurking around to wreck things.
    ‘Absolutely,’ she agreed, adding, ‘and your wife?’ They’d reached the dive shop by now and Lucy was glad to get inside, into the cool shade. Glenda was just inside the door and she let out a blast of husky laughter. ‘Some wife! Scuttled off to Jamaica when little Olly was two. Visits once a year, always manages to forget the poor kid’s birthday. Henry misses her as much as you’d miss a dose of herpes.’
    The blast of clammy urban heat that hit Lucy as she climbed out of the viciously air-conditioned taxi almost knocked the breath out of her. The small town, with its narrow hilly streets and its prettily dilapidated Georgian buildings in the soft colours of children’s party cakes, seemed to be completely crammed with people. Well, Henry had warned them.
    Mark had barely turned from paying the driver before traders scuttled across from their market stalls and started in with the sales pitch. The same question came from several directions: ‘You from the ship?’
    ‘No, we’re not,’ Lucy told a man who was offering to show her the best shop for bargain duty-free emeralds.
    ‘We picked the wrong day for this,’ Mark said as he took her arm and tried to get them through the crush without becoming separated and lost. ‘Those cruise ships out there in the bay are massive and the whole lot must have descended on this place at once.’ He chuckled. ‘And I thought Simon had done his homework …’
    ‘So all these are the thousands of passengers, all with nothing to do but race around having a frantic shopping opportunity. It’s like one of those crazy supermarket trolley-dashes,’ Lucy commented. Across the road and up the hill past the inevitable Barclays Bank she could see the big plaster statue of the blue dolphin at the restaurant where Simon had booked a table. Customers clutching drinks spilled out of the doors and across the pavement. Much of the crowd could only be American tourists, the men in baseball caps and fluorescent shirts picked up at the market stalls of other ports and the women dressed to shop in their best shore-going easy-pack viscose trouser suits trimmed plentifully with gold.
    ‘Up here! Lucy! We’re up here and we’re just about to order!’
    Lucy and Mark shoved their way through the crowd and raced up the stairs. The family was at three tables upstairs on a balcony shaded by a palm-thatched awning. The smallest children were with a rather sullen-looking Marisa, well out of sticky grabbing-distance of their mother, an arrangement which seemed to suit Theresa enormously as she was, for the first time, smiling happily and chatting to Simon. Marisa’s face, Lucy noticed, was the lurid pink colour of Paignton rock.
    Lucy grabbed a seat beside Shirley and took a quick but careful appraisal of her to check if she looked overheated or otherwise out of sorts. The air was so humid, it drained the stamina from even the youngest and most energetic. The night before, Shirley and Perry had gone off to bed early, claiming they needed catch-up time with their sleep. Simon had immediately worried they might be overdoing things and aggravating whatever dire condition one or both of them might be suffering from. It had taken Theresa’s astute suggestion that they might just want a bit of peace away from the rest of them to stop him fretting and speculating.
    ‘It’s chicken and fries or burger and fries I’m afraid,’ Theresa said to Lucy. ‘I don’t know what on earth the children are going to be like when I get them home if I let them eat this kind of stuff here. They’ll be wanting McDonalds next.’ She gave a fastidious little shudder.
    ‘No worries. I’ll eat anything, I’m starving,’ Lucy replied, and Theresa’s eyebrows flicked upwards a good couple of