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

bar was surrounded by a luscious loop of garden, dripping with riotously coloured flowers and fringed with broad-leaved palm trees that edged down to the beach. I could see right out to sea from where I was sitting. The midday sun was blazing down, and the waves rippled gently into the horseshoe-shaped bay.

      Out on the water I could see windsurfers and sailors bobbing around in the distance. Idyllic. If only I wasn’t dressed like a comedy prostitute, it would be perfect.

      As soon as I felt confident enough, I flip-flopped my way across the garden and over to the water’s edge. It was lined with a pristine row of sun loungers, each with its own umbrella.

      It’s quite hard to gracefully arrange yourself into a horizontal position when you’re wearing an outfit designed for swingers’ parties. Even though other women were letting it all hang loose in string bikinis with bare boobs akimbo, for some reason I felt even more exposed than them.

      At least I’d been able to borrow some of Ollie’s flip-flops and dump the Timberlands. Lucy was no help, and very much enjoying it. Short of kicking the door in, there wasn’t much I could do, except vow to get my revenge when we were home.

      Ollie was far more willing to share but, much as I tried, I couldn’t squeeze myself into the surfer shorts he offered. I couldn’t even pull them up over my ‘womanly’ hips.

      So here I was. Naughty Nurse Nancy catching a few rays. I was getting a bit itchy. And the top half – complete with a blue cross on the chest, presumably to show I was a medical professional – was rather too tight for comfort as well.

      Still, I was caring less and less about that, and pretty much everything else, by the minute. The combination of sun, alcohol and hysteria was sluicing around to make me feel quite merry.

      Before long I’d be up and dancing, leading a conga round the pool and flashing my matronly breasts at the waiters. Believe me, it had happened before. A few decades ago, to be fair, when my breasts were a lot more perky and the waiters a lot more interested. If I did a topless conga now I’d be in danger of breaking my own kneecaps.

      I closed my eyes, loving the sensation of heat on my face. I listened to the lapping of the water as the tide crept in, and the occasional high-class horsey tones of the Sloane Ranger sailing instructors further along the shore. I was finally starting to relax, and wished very hard for another drink to magically appear next to me so I wouldn’t have to run the gauntlet back to the bar.

      ‘You look like you could do with one of these,’ a woman’s voice said, jolting me back to reality as she sat down on the lounger next to me. There were probably many things I looked like I could do with right then, including a mental-health assessment and a whole new wardrobe, but blessedly she was bearing a long tall glass clinking with ice and lime.

      ‘Mehmet at the bar said you were on G&T. And possibly also some type of magic mushroom, but he was out of stock. I’m Allie, by the way. Allie Garrity.’

      Allie was long and slim, maybe in her late forties, but clearly very fit and active. She had those lean yoga muscles in her arms and legs that went on for ever. Her hair was curly and cropped close to her head, and her gorgeous green eyes crinkled all around the edges as she smiled.

      ‘Oh thanks! I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that!’ I said, almost salivating as I took the chill-frosted glass from her. ‘Not that I’m an alcoholic or anything…but it’s been the day from hell.’

      ‘I thought so, from the amount you were drinking, and what you’re wearing,’ she replied, stretching out and turning on her side to face me, shading her eyes from the sun with her hand.

      ‘Or maybe you always walk round half cut and dressed for an orgy – I’m not one to judge. It’s caused quite a stir among the menfolk, though. My husband Mike’s had to retire to his room for a cold shower. Men and their penises – show them a busty nurse and they all want to cry matron…’

      ‘Oh my God,’ I muttered, taking a quick restorative gulp of my drink. What a way to start my first holiday as a single mum.

      ‘I don’t know quite how to explain this,’ I said, ‘and it sounds ridiculous considering what I’m wearing, but this was the best I had. I got my suitcases mixed up. I’ve spoken to the airline and they’ve found mine, but it won’t be here till tomorrow. All I had to wear was a really thick fleece and jeans, sticky and icky beyond belief. And you wouldn’t believe the stuff that was in that case. Pervert’s paradise.

      ‘My other choices included a rubber dominatrix costume and a French maid thing I thought wasn’t too bad, until I saw the six-inch black dildo in the front. I tried to pull it off but it wouldn’t budge…but, well, yeah…with hindsight maybe I should have just used a bath towel, or done something less noticeable like come down stark naked doing the hand jive…’

      Allie was quiet for a few moments. She was busy wiping the tears of laughter from her eyes, and snorting with hilarity. Sister Slut, stand-up comedian.

      Once she’d stopped shaking with mirth, she said: ‘Look, under the circumstances you probably made the right choice, and I’m sure it’ll all seem hilarious one day. A crowd of us have been coming here for the last few years so I know a load of people. I’ll ask around. You won’t have to wear that all day, don’t worry. Although the dildo thing could be fun in the buffet queue, I have to say…Where’s the rest of your group, anyway? Is your hubbie hiding upstairs wearing arseless lederhosen and nipple tassels?’

      ‘No, although spookily enough, I think both those items are up there somewhere if you want to borrow them later. It was only my stuff that went missing,’ I said. ‘And, as for the rest of my group, well, that’s another story. But as I had practically a whole bottle of gin in that last drink, I might as well tell you – my husband isn’t here. He’s fallen madly in love with a Latvian lap-dancer who’s only three years older than our daughter. They’re shacked up in what the papers would call a “love nest”, three miles away from where we live, presumably having nonstop sex. The bastards.

      ‘So tell the other women to lock up their menfolk, I’m here unchaperoned. I’m not technically on my own, but my kids are both teenagers, so I might as well be.’

      ‘Yep, I know just what you mean,’ she replied, seeming to take my tale of woe in her stride. Maybe this kind of thing was the norm where she came from. Maybe she was a marriage guidance counsellor. Maybe she was secretly shitfaced and hadn’t taken in a word I’d said.

      ‘Teenagers are like that,’ she said. ‘Mine’s one of the good guys in private, but he still cringes every time I walk into the room, especially if he’s with a girl he wants to impress – which seems to be all of them.

      ‘I’m here with my husband,’ she went on, ‘the aforementioned Mike, and Max. He’s seventeen, and if you keep that thing on, he’ll probably try and seduce you with the first instalment of his six pack. He’s very proud of it.

      ‘But for a while I was on my own with him, so I know exactly how you feel. It’s weird, isn’t it? We split up when Max was twelve and I did the single-mum thing. Holidays are tough. It feels like you’ve sprouted two heads when you sit down for dinner and everyone else is in couples.’

      ‘So what happened? Is this your second marriage?’ I asked. We’d probably have swapped entire life stories by the time we finished our first drink together. It’s a woman thing. Men can see each other in the same pub every night for thirty years and find out nothing more than what football club they support.

      ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘second marriage, but to the same man. He saw the error of his wandering ways, and I still loved him. So we gave it another go; got married again the day after the decree absolute came through. Sometimes they need to know what they’re losing before they realise how much they want it.’

      That, of course, was only true if the man in question wasn’t besotted with another woman. I didn’t know if Simon would ever realise what he’d lost. At the moment he didn’t seem to think he’d lost anything at all, other than a millstone round his neck.