What I Did On My Holidays Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Epilogue

  Also by Chrissie Manby

  About the Author

  WHAT I DID ON MY HOLIDAYS

  Chrissie Manby

  www.hodder.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Chrissie Manby 2012

  The right of Chrissie Manby to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 444 71307 7

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.hodder.co.uk

  To Isabella Abigail Davis

  With thanks as usual to all the team at Hodder and my agents Antony Harwood and James Macdonald Lockhart. Thanks are due also to my family, especially my sister Kate. And finally to Mark, my dearest dear, without whom I’d have to make my own tea. Milk, no sugar.

  Chapter One

  Back when I was a child, a summer holiday meant three things. It meant loading up the caravan with enough tinned food to see a family of four through a nuclear winter. It meant starting out at six in the morning to spend eight hours in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the motorway to the South Coast. And when we finally got where we were going, it meant rain. Traffic jams, tinned food and torrential downpours. No wonder my sister, Clare, decided to lie when she got back to school the September she turned nine and ‘What I Did on My Holidays’ was the subject on the board.

  Forget a soggy fortnight in Cornwall; my sister claimed we’d spent three weeks in Florida as special guests of the Disney Corporation. She said she’d had an early birthday celebration with Mickey and Minnie. They gave her a special present, she claimed. Alas, she left it on the plane. Everyone in her class was impressed. When the truth came out – another mum on the school run expressed surprise that we had taken such an exotic trip so soon after Dad was made redundant – my sister was sent straight to bed and had to forego her birthday party. ‘But holidays are meant to be about fantasy,’ said the precocious nine-year-old when Mum asked her why she’d lied. It stuck with me, that thought. Holidays are meant to be about fantasy. And finally, aged 29 and 357 days, I was going on a holiday worth fantasising about.

  So how did I end up spending the second day of it nose to nose with a dead mouse? Ugh, you must be thinking. I should have sued the holiday firm for thousands! But the dead mouse was the least of my worries. I hadn’t even made it to the luxury hotel I’d chosen oh so carefully all those months before. No, I was inhaling deceased-rodent dust and spider droppings beneath my own bed, in my own little flat in south London, wondering how on earth everything had gone so horribly wrong.

  Shall I tell you why everything had gone so horribly wrong?

  Callum Dawes, that’s why.

  My name is Sophie Sturgeon and no one deserved a holiday more than I did. I’d had a stinking few months in the office. Make that a stinking few years. I wasn’t a big fan of my job as a PR officer. Sounds wonderful, eh? A career in public relations is pretty glamorous. A career in public relations for a company that makes lifts and escalators? Not so much.

  My employer was a company called Stockwell Lifts. They were based, as the name suggests, in Stockwell, south-west London. It was by turns a tough and boring job. Largely boring. There are only so many stories you can persuade the national press to feature on lifts and escalators, and most of them aren’t good. My job was to ensure that the public read about our biggest development projects and safety innovations, and not about the people who spent their bank holiday weekend stuck between floors eleven and twelve. I ran a company blog called Going Up and tweeted as @liftlady. I had eleven followers. All of them worked at head office apart from my mum.

  It was very dull, but it paid the bills and it paid for me to have a really good time on those few precious weeks off each year. Right then, after yet another wet and miserable June, there was nothing I needed more than a fortnight at a fabulous hotel with an infinity pool and a sea view. I was especially looking forward to this break for several reasons. Firstly, we had been having one of the worst summers I could remember. Everything had been rained off, from Wimbledon to Glastonbury to the swimming gala at my local outdoor pool. It was that bad. Secondly, I could not wait to have fourteen days away from my desk-mate, Hannah – the only other member of the Stockwell Lifts PR team – who had been driving me nuts for months with her wedding-planning woes. Her big day was still a whole year away, yet to judge by the constant state of low-level stress she had induced in herself, and the rest of us, you would have thought that no one in the world had ever got married before. Finally, I was looking forward to spending my thirtieth birthday with my wonderful boyfriend, Callum.

  Callum Dawes. The moment our eyes locked across a box of serving-sized UHT-milk cartons in the staff kitchen, I knew that my crush on Daniel Craig was so over. As Callum nodded towards the cartons I was carrying and asked me, ‘Can I have one?’ his smile lit the room (which had been in a state of perpetual darkness since the fluorescent tube blew some three months earlier). Unfortunately, on that very first meeting, I was sporting a time-of-the-month pimple the size of a ping-pong ball and I was wearing my second-worst suit. It was an unflattering grey number in some cheap synthetic fabric and probably six or seven years old, but I was loath to throw it away, because what was the point of spending my limited wages on work clothes when I worked at a company where ‘paunch’ was part of the job spec for all the male employees? Or at least it had been up until that moment.

  Callum Dawes changed everything when he started work at head office. Here at last was a colleague worth brushing my hair for. I certainly wished I had dabbed on some concealer before I left the flat that morning. Callum seem
ed to focus right on my spot while he introduced himself as the new operations manager for the north of England. I leaned on the staff microwave and propped my chin on my fist, cunningly hiding my pimple in what I hoped looked like a pose of casual interest in Callum’s story. But I didn’t feel in the least bit casual. This man was gorgeous. He was much younger than the guy he had replaced – two decades younger, in fact – and much better looking. He was definitely paunch-free. Later that day, someone said he looked a bit like the actor Christian Bale and the nickname stuck. Well, ‘Batman’ did for a while.

  Callum’s arrival at the company was like a rainbow at the end of a long, grey summer’s day. With his slim-fitting suits (a rumour went round that they were Hugo Boss) and his colourful ties, he was an exotic fish in a tank full of guppies. He caused such excitement. All the girls in my office straightened up when Callum walked down the glass-walled corridor en route to the canteen. Even Hannah couldn’t help flicking her carefully highlighted hair in his direction.

  Yes, Callum turned even Hannah’s faithful head. He was that good-looking. It’s true that he didn’t have much in the way of competition at Stockwell Lifts’ headquarters, but I was pretty sure he could have seen off most of the competition at a male-model agency too. Which was why I was surprised that my in-box was soon fit to burst with jokes that he had forwarded and that he always seemed to appear in the staff kitchen when I was making the tea. It’s why I was astonished when we ended up snogging on a fire-exit staircase at the next staff Christmas party. And it’s why I was absolutely flabbergasted when that drunken snog turned into an actual date and that actual date became the beginning of a proper relationship.

  It was such a thrill. At first, we tried to keep things quiet, because we weren’t sure how our colleagues would react or even if our budding relationship might have breached some code of conduct that could lead to our dismissal, but I can’t tell you how happy I was to go to work during those months when Callum and I were fresh and new and we would try to snatch the odd moment in the stationery cupboard. Such a cliché, I know, but it was the only room in the entire 1970s building that didn’t have at least one glass wall.

  Callum and I managed to keep our increasing involvement with one another our little secret for almost four months, but eventually we were outed by Alison, the company chairman’s PA. She saw us crossing Oxford Street hand in hand one Saturday afternoon. She was almost killed by a bus as she ran across the road to confront us. Callum quickly dropped my hand and pretended to be looking in a shop window, but his evasive action came much too late. Alison was gleeful as she imagined what trouble she could cause. We had been seen looking ‘coupley’. We had to fess up.

  Telling Alison anything was like making an announcement on Twitter. Even before we got to work the following Monday morning (staggering our arrival by a couple of minutes, as was our habit) the news was out. Our relationship wasn’t a sackable offence, thank goodness – we were both single and both grown-ups – but after the story became public, we had to make a special effort to appear professional and that meant no PDAs (public displays of affection) in office time. Not even so much as a friendly glance over the staff kettle. There would definitely be no more sneaking off to the stationery cupboard. That was a shame, but I was glad to be able to tell everyone that Callum was my boyfriend at last. Even if it did raise a little in-house envy.

  ‘If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes,’ said Alison to Hannah, when she thought I was out of earshot, ‘I never would have believed it. Him and her? I would have said he was out of her league, wouldn’t you?’

  Hannah agreed. ‘Right out of her league.’ The cow.

  If I was honest, however, I couldn’t quite believe it myself. Callum was handsome and clever and funny and definitely going up in the world of lifts. (Alison sneaked a copy of his appraisal my way one afternoon.) He probably was out of my league, but it didn’t seem to matter to him, and eighteen months after Callum and I shared our first kiss at that Christmas party, we were still very much a couple. This long-planned fortnight in Majorca was to be our third holiday together. Since we started going out, we had spent a weekend in Malaga and a week in Crete. I couldn’t wait to go to Majorca for my thirtieth birthday celebrations. I just knew it was going to be special.

  Chapter Two

  I had chosen Majorca on Hannah’s recommendation.

  Hannah and I had a love-hate sort of relationship . . . What am I talking about? It was much more ‘hate-hate’ than that. Since we held the same job title in a department that was overstaffed by 100 per cent (and there were always rumbles of redundancy), there was, of course, a certain amount of professional competition, but there was also a horrible degree of personal competition, which naturally focused on our success in relationships. For a brief period after my relationship with Callum came out into the open, I was on top – Callum, the hottest man at Stockwell Lifts, if not the hottest in lift engineering full stop, was considered a serious catch – but then Hannah and her ‘sainted Mike’, the management consultant, got engaged. ‘Fiancé’ trumps ‘hot boyfriend’ every time.

  Since that moment, Hannah had taken it upon herself to offer me unsolicited relationship advice at every turn. She was constantly checking the temperature of my relationship with seemingly innocuous questions. Had I met Callum’s parents yet? What did my parents think of him? Were we planning to introduce our families to each other? Hannah’s reaction to my answers left me in little doubt that she thought we were making slow progress. I tried to ignore her, but eighteen months in, I couldn’t help wondering what it was about Hannah that had persuaded Mike to take their relationship to the next stage, while Callum and I still spent important family dates, like Christmas and Easter, apart. I’d met his mother only once and that was accidental: I arrived as she was leaving Callum’s flat after a weekend of Christmas shopping. I hadn’t met his father at all, or his sister, and she lives inside the M25. I was always offering to cook Sunday lunch for them all, but Callum said it was too much bother. Hannah said she met all of Mike’s family in their first three months of going out. That was a sign of his intention, she explained.

  It was during one of her relationship pep talks that Hannah counselled me to choose Majorca for our next holiday. She said she had never had such a wonderful time as she’d had on that island.

  ‘You’ve got to go to the north side,’ Hannah told me. ‘Much classier than the south. You want to try Puerto Bona. There’s a great hotel right near the beach.’

  It was in Majorca that Hannah’s sainted Mike had popped the question. She said he had been so overcome by the beauty of the view from their hotel room that he decided he should propose there and then to capitalise on the perfect setting, despite not yet having asked Hannah’s father’s permission or bought an engagement ring.

  I had been thinking about a fortnight in Tenerife – my mum’s best friend had an apartment on the island and we could have stayed there for free – but Hannah soon had me sold on her special resort and I booked two flights to Palma. If a view could move a man to marriage, I wanted Callum to see it. After eighteen months spent shuttling up and down the Northern Line between my flat in Clapham and his flat in Kentish Town, I was keen at least for us to move in together. Callum, on the other hand, didn’t seem to be in any kind of hurry to move things forward, despite the fact that it would make good financial sense – we were neither of us loaded, my lease was coming up, and he already spent four nights a week at my place because it was nearer to work.

  ‘You want to start charging him rent,’ Hannah suggested.

  As our holiday in Majorca drew closer, however, it had been a long time since Callum had spent the night at my flat. He’d been up in Newcastle for the best part of a month, overseeing the installation of six super-long Stockwell Lifts ‘Trojan’ escalators at a new shopping centre on the outskirts of the city. It was a really big deal for the company, which had been losing out more and more frequently on major projects such as this to cheaper foreign man
ufacturers. This Newcastle project was the deal that kept Stockwell Lifts from going under during the Credit Crunch. We all owed our jobs to that shopping centre, especially those of us who worked in the overstaffed PR department.

  Callum often had to go away for a few nights – he was the north of England manager, after all, and he had clients to visit in all the major cities up there – but the time he had spent on the Newcastle project was the longest we had been apart since we first got together. It was awful for me, and for him too, I assumed. He was working so hard he wasn’t even able to come home for the weekends. I missed him terribly during our time apart and was counting the days until our holiday. Though I texted and called several times a day, it wasn’t the same as being able to share lunch at his desk or poke my head round his office door whenever I wanted. I had grown used to being around Callum 24/7. I really couldn’t wait to see him again.

  With the holiday just a couple of days away, I was like a child at the end of term. I was in such high spirits that I happily listened to Hannah witter on about her wedding plans all day long and never once had the urge to stab her with a Biro. Meanwhile, she was more than happy to go over the events of her own holiday in Majorca in real time, reliving Mike’s fabulous proposal with a 40-minute monologue that exceeded the duration of the actual event by, oh, 200 per cent, I should imagine. I caught Alison – my office frenemy (everybody’s office frenemy, in fact) – smirking when Hannah broke into an unaccompanied and somewhat shaky rendition of James Blunt’s ‘You’re Beautiful’, which a live band had been playing in a nearby bar when the sainted Mike was overcome by the view and decided to make his move.

  ‘You are going to love Majorca,’ Hannah assured me. ‘It really is one of the best places on earth. I can’t think of anywhere I would rather be. I’ve told Mike I want us to retire there. Spanish food, all that sunshine, lovely beaches, friendly people . . . the romance . . . Oh, you have to go to this place too . . .’ She scribbled down the name of another club. ‘I can’t believe I forgot to tell you about the Palacio Blanco. We had mojitos there. Best on the island. I am so jealous of you two going to Majorca on Wednesday. You are going to love it, and I just know that Callum is going to love it too.’