Excess Baggage Read Free Page A

a twenty-mile trip in a chauffeured limo be? You should try the Gatwick Express, matey. Clapham Junction is a delight in the rush hour.’
    ‘I thought you were bringing your van.’ Simon’s brow wrinkled. ‘Dad booked you into long-term parking. And paid for it.’
    ‘Change of plan. Not mine, the local clamping mafia. They’ll tow it away and scrap it while we’re sunning ourselves and I’ll never have to see the sodding thing again. The only bit that was any use was the roof rack and that’s stashed in Sandy’s shed with my ladders.’
    ‘Lucy! Well done, pet, you got here nice and early!’ Shirley emerged from the stream of travellers and hugged Lucy.
    ‘Did you think I wouldn’t, Ma?’ Lucy grinned at her and then reached across to kiss her father.
    ‘Punctuality was never your strong point,’ Perry said as they walked towards the check-in desks.
    ‘When I was twelve. But I’m all grown-up now, Dad, I can do VAT returns, tile a bathroom and check tyre pressures all by myself.’
    Shirley looked Lucy up and down. ‘I suppose that old sweatshirt’s all right, for the back of the plane. And what have you done to your hair? It’s all short and spiky.’ She lowered her voice, ‘It makes you look as if you’re
fishing from the other pond
.’
    Lucy counted to ten and plastered on a smile. ‘Well, you won’t have to look at me, Ma, lording it up front in club class.’
    It was important to be patient. She’d promised herself she wouldn’t rise to the slightest crumb of bait, wouldn’t revert to the third-child, baby-of-the-family petulance that seemed to overtake her whenever she spent more than a few hours in the company of her parents. As they scanned the departure screens to find out where to check in, she wondered if the same thing happened to other people who’d assumed, wrongly, that by their mid-thirties their relationship with their parents would have stopped being so ludicrously immature. At what point did parents realize it was not their place to worry about whether you’d renewed your TV licence? When did they start pouring you more than a token half-glass of wine when you came for Sunday lunch? Perhaps it was simply because Lucy hadn’t actually married anyone and therefore had not been handed over to be someone else’s responsibility. Or perhaps it was something to do with being what her mother so coyly used to call the ‘little afterthought’ of the family, meaning, Lucy only realized as she’d entered her teens, the little mistake, little contraceptive failure, or, as she’d squeamishly recognized as she in her turn discovered sex, the little night of passion that was just too hot for considering consequences.
    ‘It says that desk over there in Area B, but that can’t be right because there’s the most ghastly queue.’ Theresa appeared at Lucy’s side. ‘We’re all there by that pillar, waiting to see where we’re really supposed to go.’ Lucy looked at where she pointed and saw Theresa’s children, swinging energetically from Marisa’s hands and looking ready to make trouble. They were bouncing up and down and laughing and making grabs at the doughnuts Becky and Luke and Colette were munching. Mark was observing them rather uncertainly from a little apart, as if wondering whether he was supposed either to join in and play with them and risk being blamed for getting them overwrought, or do nothing and be accused of copping out.
    The queue that so distressed Theresa was a long snake of overburdened baggage trolleys and vividly dressed people, many already kitted out in holiday garb with shorts and flip-flops, sleeveless vest-tops and straw sunhats that were too awkward to pack. Fractious, shrieking children were scrambling up and over the mountains of luggage and women in cotton floral dresses and pale bare legs were handing out sweets and crisps in an attempt to keep them still. Theresa looked deeply puzzled, as if the process of the holiday exodus of her fellow