Picture Imperfect

Saturday 14th



I wake up and, without opening my eyes, reach across for Mark, but he’s not there. This is unusual. On Saturday he lazes about in bed for as long as he can, while I do most of the tedious housework stuff. I check the time on my alarm clock. It’s 7.44. I can smell coffee and I can hear faint tapping on a computer keyboard. So he’s got up and made himself some coffee without making me one. Well, somehow I’m not surprised. I lie there for a while, staring at the ceiling, until my brain starts to function properly. I only had about half a bottle of wine last night, but that’s enough to give me a slight hangover. My tongue feels it’s made of leather.

I swirl the concept of Mark’s Greek holiday around in my brain for a few seconds, to see if a night’s sleep will have given me a different perspective on the whole thing. It still feels slightly wrong, for some reason I can’t quite put my finger on. I try to put myself in a similar position.

I meet Melissa, a friend from university, whom I haven’t seen for ages. She and her friend – we’ll call her Sue – are planning a holiday in Greece. There are two guys going with them, as well. Unfortunately, Sue breaks her leg and can’t go. I bump into Melissa and she says hey! Why don’t you come! It’ll be fun! I agree and go home to tell my boyfriend that I’m going off on holiday with Melissa and her two man friends (or manfriends, if you prefer).

The most reasonable, laid-back boyfriend in the universe would say ‘Hey! That’s great! Hope you have a great time! Enjoy yourself! Don’t worry about all the plans we’d made. Can’t wait to see you with an all-over tan.’ and he’d mean it.

But most boyfriends wouldn’t take it like that, I suspect. In fact, the most reasonable, laid-back boyfriend in the universe sounds like a bit of a jerk, doesn’t he. Sounds like he doesn’t care about you or what you do one way or the other.

I think a normal boyfriend’s jaw would hit the floor if you announced something like that.

I get up and have a shower. Should I be nonchalant about the whole thing, or would that make it look like I don’t care about Mark or what he does? Who knows? I tell myself that it can’t be that bad. I’m just over-reacting. If anything suspicious was going on, Mark wouldn’t have mentioned it to me in the first place, or at least he wouldn’t have mentioned the girls. Wait. That doesn’t make sense. I’ll be seeing the other three when I drop him off at the airport tomorrow. I could hardly fail to notice that two of them were girls. And besides, he could hardly slip away for a week’s holiday without me noticing. Sorry – not a week – five days.

My brain plainly isn’t working properly at the moment. I get out of the shower and dry myself off. Before I start to get dressed, I look at myself in the mirror. Not bad. Without meaning to seem like an egomaniac, I think I’d look pretty good in a skimpy bikini. Has Mark ever seen me in a skimpy bikini? I don’t think so. We’ve never been on that sort of holiday.

After I’ve had breakfast and four cups of coffee to bring my leathery tongue back to life, I hear Mark calling for me.

‘Chloe? Come and have a look at this!’

I stroll into the living room, where Mark in tapping away on the computer. I peer over his shoulder to see what he’s looking at. I hate doing this. Standing up while bending over almost double to look at a screen which is positioned for a person sitting down in front of it. Personally, I think that the person showing you something wonderful should stand up and let you sit down. Maybe I should write a book on PC etiquette.

‘This is the hotel I’ll be staying at. Fab, yeah?’

I lean forward and take a look. It looks like lots of other place you see in all the world’s various holiday resorts. There’s a picture of an enormous blue swimming pool, but it’s also got those scary-looking flumes that kids like to slide down. Big, long, winding ones. The whole thing looks like it was built about two weeks ago, though I’m sure it can’t be that recent.

There are photographs of spotless rooms with twin beds and bland prints, beautiful, white-sanded beaches, perfect couples sharing a glass of Champagne at some restaurant or other and people strolling down secluded coves. As you’re reading, a slide show of various tourist attractions drifts past. I feel rather light-headed looking at it all.

‘The girls will be in one twin room and me and Danny will be in another. I can’t imagine what it’ll be like sharing a room with Danny. He was quite a big drinker, so hopefully he won’t be up all night talking or anything. I guess we’ll go and check out all the bars and then come back to the room and pass out!’

‘What’ll you be doing in the day, d’you think?’ I’m asking this question, but I’m not sure I care about the answer.

‘Well, it says here that they can organise water skiing, scuba diving and stuff like that, so I might give some of those a go. I tried water skiing years ago, but I’ve never tried scuba. Apparently it’s really good for scuba. Well, you can see for yourself – lovely, clear water. Look – you can see right down to the bottom. I wonder if they’ve got a glass-bottomed boat for hire? Hey, and fishing! Just look at these restaurants!’

When Mark has finished drooling over the hotel website, he starts packing a suitcase. He spends the next half hour asking me where various items of clothing are. I get so involved in helping him find things it’s almost as if I’m going with him. On a couple of occasions, lasting only a fragment of a second, I actually think I am.

He holds various items of holiday clothing up and asks my opinion about the. Is this one too old? Will this be too hot? Is this one too out of date? I get a sheet of paper and we make a list of things that he’s going to have to buy or replace. He finds a pair of Reef flip flops, which look OK until you pick them up and notice one of the straps has broken away from the rubber. He digs out his spare contact lens stuff and realises he hasn’t got any spare lens fluid. There is no suntan lotion in the flat at all. His smart pair of sunglasses are broken.

By the time we’ve finished, the list stretches almost to the bottom of a sheet of A4 paper.

An hour later we’re in Oxford Street, unpleasantly busy as usual, zigzagging from shop to shop trying to find all the stuff he needs. I almost get run over by a bus. The thing that takes the longest for him to choose isn’t clothing, as you might expect, but a carry-on shoulder bag. The one we found in the flat had mould over it, was a bit shabby and he decided it was too short notice to give it a good scrub and dry it out in time, so he’s looking for a new one which is the right height, looks cool and fashionable and doesn’t cost a fortune.

I stand and watch in amazement as he selects various bags, slings them over his shoulder and walks up and down in a cool, fashionable manner, tossing his hair back like a z-grade male model. He says that it’s important how they feel against you when you’re walking. You don’t want to get one that scrapes against your hip or has got too much of a swing. You don’t want to look stupid while you’re wearing it.

You could, of course, not use the shoulder strap and just use the carry handle, but that doesn’t seem to occur to him. Must be a man thing. By the time he’s primping around with Bag 6, I exchange a weary glance with the girl who has the unenviable job of helping us.

The one he buys is the first one he looked at. Or modelled, depending upon your point of view.

After an hour of brain-numbing browsing, we’re only half way down the list. The next stop will be a large chemist where I’m sure he’ll be spending an inordinate amount of time choosing the perfect sun tan lotion/oil/whatever. I’m starting to feel exhausted and depressed and I haven’t even done any shopping. I decide to give myself a break. I tell him I’m going to pop into the café of a nearby department store and have a coffee and a blueberry muffin or something similarly life-threatening. We arrange to meet in the sunglasses department of said store in half an hour.

After he’s chosen some sunglasses (One hour? Two hours?) it’s on to Waterstones to select his holiday reading, probably an armful of Andy McNab novels and some tedious comedy star autobiographies.

I sit down with my coffee and toffee muffin (tastes like…fill in the worst thing you can think of) and take a deep breath. Since this morning, I’ve got so swept up in all of Mark’s holiday arrangements that I have to keep continually reminding myself that I AM NOT GOING WITH HIM.

It’s really difficult to psych yourself into that state of mind. Your brain must assume that as you’re walking around shops looking at suntan oil and sunglasses, you’re about to hop on the next plane to Tenerife or somewhere. Not sure where Tenerife is. Must remember to remind Mark to sync his iPod when we get back. Make sure he packs the charger. And his mobile. And the mobile charger. Find out where Tenerife is on Wikipedia.

A couple in their twenties sit at the table next to mine. They’ve got a whole bunch of shopping, but it’s nice things, not holiday things or domestic essentials. They seem bubbly and enthusiastic and keep looking at each other and discreetly touching. How long can they have been going out? Six months at the longest, I would say. The man fishes a book out of a carrier bag and rests it on his knee. He’s wearing a watch with a black face and black hands. I try to see what the book is without making it seem like I’m a disturbed lone woman trying to intrude on someone else’s life.

It’s a book about Alphonse Mucha. I love art books (even though I can rarely afford them), and this one looks like it’s really well done. Expensive, too, I would imagine. I remember doing some stuff about Mucha in university. Art Nouveau. A Czech. Lived in Paris. Did posters and jewellery. Sexy girls in flowing robes. Those were the days.

The woman smells strongly of a perfume that I can’t identify. She looks Asian and is extremely beautiful. Very tight jeans. She pulls a dark green velvet scarf out of a bag and strokes it with her hand. She wears lots of rings. In one of her other bags, which is on a spare chair, there’s a very attractive spray of dried flowers. I wonder where he got the book? I wonder where she got the scarf? Will they have sex this afternoon? She looks up, catches my eye and licks her lips. Ooh!

I finish my coffee and automatically look on the floor to make sure I’ve got all my shopping, then remember that I haven’t got any shopping. I leave the toffee muffin. It lies on the plate looking sad, with a solitary bite taken out of its side.

When I get to the sunglasses department, Mark is trying on what is probably his thirtieth pair. These are a pair of grey Oakley Monster Dogs with grey plutonium lenses, which would look cool on a slim, well-toned, nineteen year old extreme sports dude, but look faintly ridiculous on Mark. I hope for his sake that he doesn’t choose them.

‘These are the ones! These are my man!’

Oh well. They cost just over a hundred pounds.

I float into Waterstone’s, barely taking in any of the things on the shelves (books, I believe they’re called). Mark heads straight for the celebrity biographies and is flicking through a Justin Lee Collins book with one hand while holding a Jimmy Carr one under his arm for later perusal. Normally, he’d make a mental note of which books he liked and then go home and buy them for half the price or less on Amazon, but it’s too late for that so he’ll have to buy them at bookshop prices which will really, really hurt.

While he’s doing that, I saunter down to the art book section and automatically look for the Mucha book I saw that guy with in the coffee shop. It’s there, so I pick it up. It’s really heavy, which is always a good sign with these sorts of things and the paper is good quality, too.

I look at the price, but it’s much too much, so I just flick through it. He did the lot, old Mucha. Panels, posters, pastels – and I can’t sell a bloody thing. I’m so lost in it that I don’t notice Mark behind me until he taps me on the shoulder. I hate being tapped on the shoulder. He’s holding five paperbacks and indicates that we should go to the checkout. I put the Mucha book back on the shelf, stroking its spine like we’re an item.

‘What’s that you were looking at?’

‘Alphonse Mucha.’

‘Never heard of him. Come on.’

We head back to the tube station, both of us carrying about five shopping bags in each hand. Even though Mark’s holiday cost was ‘only’ a little over three hundred pounds (apart from the flight, it now turns out, which is £207 RT), I reckon he’s just spent double that in the last hour and a half.

I mustn’t criticise. This is Mark’s holiday and it’s Mark’s money. He can spend it on what he likes. If I’d had to go on a holiday like this at short notice, I’d probably have spent something like the same amount. In fact, I’d probably have spent more on clothes and beachwear than he has, and I’d have bought a couple of micro bikinis, items which I know he would never have bought. I’ve never had a micro bikini. I wonder if I’d have to get a Brazilian? I think I would.

I’m sweaty. When we get back I’m going straight in the shower. I’ve still got the taste of that horrible toffee muffin in my mouth. I’ve got a splitting headache. Mark is humming happily to himself.