Chapter 48

[The following chapter contains strong language. Reader caution is advised.]

Monday 16th August 1999

With surprising speed, the first day of our holiday arrived. Not enough to catch me by surprise, of course: I’d packed everything I needed the previous evening. Unfortunately, while I was on top of things, there was still stuff to sort out before we could head off on our new adventure… Chiefly, we still only had one car to get there in. And since nobody wanted to squeeze themselves into the boot of the Paintermobile, it was down to Zahid to find a vehicle with which to put his brand-new driving license to the test.

So, having said goodbye to my parents and sister half an hour earlier, I found myself standing with Dakota and Kitty in Zahid’s uncle’s driveway as our friend bartered for use of his relative’s car.

“And if you get so much as a ding on it, you’ll be in the deepest trouble!” he was being warned sternly.

“Ah, really? I was gonna try and get into as many crashes as possible, but I guess I’ll live up to my license and drive sensibly.”

“Don’t be smart with me!”

“Don’t state the obvious,” Zahid shrugged, and turned away from his uncle, throwing and catching the car keys lightly as he strolled towards us.

“I’m telling you now-!”

“I know, I know… just have a little trust in me…” he grumbled while unlocking the vehicle. Wordlessly, a little uncomfortable in the presence of this exchange, Dakota, Kitty and I began putting our luggage in the boot of the car.

“You make it impossible to trust you!” Tanveer shouted after his nephew.

Zahid’s response was a good ol’ British two-finger salute, and with that, he disappeared into the driver’s seat.

“Uhm… thanks for the car, we’ll make sure he doesn’t do anything crazy or whatever,” I waved to Tanveer awkwardly while shuffling my way into the back of the car. Dakota joined me from the other side – I glimpsed her giving an appreciative smile to Zahid’s uncle – while Kitty got into the front passenger seat. We barely had the chance to buckle up before Zahid reversed sharply into the thankfully-quiet road.

“I’m tempted to crash his fucking car just to piss him off…” Zahid informed us tensely as he spun the steering wheel, setting us off in the right direction down the road.

“Don’t do it yet, your uncle’s still watching us,” Dakota observed, staring out of the window as the car drove away from the house and onwards to the beginning of our journey.

Okay… right now, we’re about halfway through this holiday, and I’m not going to go through every detail of every day. Consider this the highlights reel, part 1 of 2!

Maybe ten minutes after we set off, we convened with Bao, Kendal and Harriet at a petrol station, where Kendal and Zahid filled their cars’ tanks and we all bought snacks for the trip, since it’d take two or three hours to get there. Dakota and I managed the map – we were following behind Kendal’s car, where Harriet was likewise meant to be playing navigator, but Zahid insisted we shouldn’t rely on a car with Bao and Kendal in it to lead the way. In his defence, we did actually lose them down a weird path for several minutes…

“That road… goes back here…” I traced with my finger, trying my best to make sense of the map spread across the middle back seat. “So, they should pop back up in… a minute or so, I guess…”

“And if they don’t, we’re screwed,” Zahid remarked from the driver’s seat. “Wait, no… they’re screwed.”

“Harriet’s the one reading the map, they’ll be fine,” Dakota assured him sweetly. And yet…

“And Kendal’s the one driving the car,” he grunted back.

“She seems like a good driver…” Kitty muttered in front of me, earning an abrupt burst of laughter from Zahid.

“You’ve got more balls than me. I feel like she’s gonna start playing dodgems with passing cars at any moment when she’s behind the wheel.”

“Should be this next roundabout… I think…” I noted. Sure enough, ten seconds later (or thereabouts), the Paintermobile slid into view, with Kendal giving us a cheerful thumbs-up through the window. Zahid raised his hands at her questioningly, and she shrugged with a grin; he pinched his brow and she laughed heartily; and then the miming session ended as both of our cars kept on moving.

Our journey continued down busy motorways and quiet country lanes, past open fields and retail parks, before the sea finally came into view, and suddenly it all felt real. Even packing bags and making the voyage hadn’t quite made it sink in, but now we were mere minutes away from our destination and I found myself grinning like an idiot just thinking about it. I rolled down my window and felt the warm breeze flow through as we passed the hill carving of a man on a horse. Almost there now.

A short drive through Weymouth brought us to our destination.

“Maaaaan…” Bao groaned, stretching his arms wide after stepping out of Kendal’s car for the first time in a couple of hours.

“As soon as you’ve uncrumpled yourself, you’re in charge of signing us in,” Dakota reminded him, right before letting out a cute squeak as she herself stretched out.

While Bao and Harriet headed into the reception, I took in my surroundings, rows of caravans standing on sloping grassy terrain. The entire place seemed to be in a valley of sorts, the land steadily rising at either side like the sides of an enormous bowl. The sea lay out ahead, and with the town sprawling behind us, it felt like the park was being kept secret from the rest of the world. This was a precious jewel we’d managed to uncover, vibrant and enticing.

That said, it was kind of weird for a bunch of teenagers to choose a place like this to go on holiday. The only groups I’d spotted so far were families with children (sure, we’d only been here all of two minutes, but still). I couldn’t help but feel a little conspicuous…

Signed in and with the key to our caravan, we jumped back into the cars and drove up the hillside to the right… and took a few minutes driving around trying to find exactly where we were looking… finally reaching the caravan the Thomson family had booked for us. Number 155, right where the earth levelled out at the top of the hillside; a reasonably-sized caravan, complete with a little wooden decking in front of one of its two doors and a little set of steps for the other.

“I hope there’s enough room in there for all of us…” Dakota murmured as Zahid parked up behind the Paintermobile, leaving enough room in between for Bao, Kendal and Harriet to get their luggage out.

“Unless it’s tiny inside, I think we’ll manage,” Zahid shrugged.

“I meant sleeping,” she clarified. “I could see Bao not thinking about that…”

“Heh…” Kitty huffed in amusement from her seat. I was sure I glimpsed a little smile on her face in the wing-mirror.

Out we got once again, with Bao swinging the key around his finger by its keychain loop.

“We ready to open this bad boy up?”

“‘Bad boy’?” I repeated. “It’s a caravan, not a Ferrari, man.”

“Alright, we ready to open this… good boy up?”

“Now it’s a dog,” Harriet smiled next to him.

“Open this… uhm…”

The key-spinning stopped as Bao became lost in thought.

“Just open it,” Zahid sighed, brow furrowed.

“Yeah, I’ll do that,” Bao nodded, hurrying to the door and fumbling to unlock it. Once he managed it, he headed inside and the rest of us followed eagerly (or at least in our own variations on and levels of eagerness).

I’m not going to make out like it was some five-star hotel suite crammed into a static caravan. It wasn’t, and I didn’t expect anything like that in the first place. But for what it was, it certainly had its charm. A brown corner sofa to the left as you entered, with windows behind it, and then a cabinet stretching across the wall facing us with drawers, little cupboards, a TV, a heater. Another window was placed to its right, and then a second, smaller corner sofa surrounding an octagonal table. Beyond that, the kitchen area and the rest of the caravan past it.

A unique smell entered my nose, not unpleasant and certainly unfamiliar.

“This is cosy, I like it!” Harriet spoke first, taking a seat daintily on the open sofa.

“Hrm…”

Kendal walked around the space a little, inspecting here and there.

“Yeah, it’s not too bad,” she concluded with a shrug and a smile as light as one-another. “But next year, we need to go to California or Cyprus or Cairo or something…”

“I’ll get out an atlas and look for places starting with C,” Bao responded with a thumbs-up.

A quick exploration of the rest of the caravan revealed two bedrooms with two beds each, a master bedroom with a double bed, and a small bathroom. Keeping with the main living space, it was all quaint and welcoming. If anything, it simply felt too small for the seven of us.

“Does someone want to sleep on the sofa, or are two people gonna share a bed…?” I asked the others as we stood in the master bedroom. Bao plonked himself down on the double bed, as if to assert his ownership of it. Made sense, since he’d (co-)arranged the whole thing, but I was so used to Dakota having the big bed that I couldn’t help but feel a little snubbed.

“The sofa might unfold into a bed,” Dakota mentioned. “Someone should take a look while the rest of us get the luggage in here.”

“I’ll probably be the one who uses it, so I’ll check it out,” Zahid spoke even as he headed back across the caravan.

Bao bounced back off of the bed and fished the key out of his pocket.

“Part, my people!” he commanded us, complete with his best Moses gesture.

For whatever reason, all five of us remained where we stood; like some greater comedic power willed us not to obey him.

“Make us!” Kendal challenged him after a couple of seconds had passed.

Don’t worry, dear readers; we let him through after about an hour.

(I kid, I kid, it was pretty much immediately.)

Zahid confirmed that the sofa was a sofa-bed, and we all unpacked in our chosen rooms before heading out to see what the place was like.

Ah, I’m still on the first day… Okay, lemme blitz through this! Highlight reel, double-speed!

Two swimming pools, one inside and one outdoors with water slides, both of which we’ve made plenty of use of already. There’s only been one day where we didn’t go swimming at some point. I feel like we might be absorbing chlorine into our bodies at this point. They had a little playground area, with a small zip line-come-swing that Kendal spent a little while trying to gain maximum momentum on. A restaurant area – well, I suppose a restaurant, diner, bar sort of place – which we ate in a couple of times (good food, too!). An adjoining venue with a stage for the park’s mascots to perform…

Yeah. Curiosity got the better of us after a few days. We may or may not have had fun in the Tiger Club.

An arcade and a sports court that we’ve hung out at, and even a couple of vending machines that I may have invested just a little more than I’d like to admit in (can’t be helped, Cadbury’s chocolate is great). And that’s just in the park itself, because the town has loads of shops and some fast food places, and the beach is fantastic. We spent a good chunk of Saturday just chilling on that beach… Bao and Kitty competed in building sand castles – particularly surreal ones – while Kendal attempted to surf despite the waves not really working with her. I spent twenty solid minutes just watching Dakota sunbathe and wondering how I got so lucky to be with someone like her… don’t get me wrong, we were chatting too, but I was taking her in the whole time. (We’re a couple, it’s my privilege.)

Anyway.

By Monday night, we’d exhausted holiday-specific ideas, and Harriet proposed we play strip poker.

Yeah, Harriet Evans. I would’ve expected Kitty to suggest strip poker before Harriet, and she wanted nothing to do with it.

Let it be known, I’d never played poker before, so it was going to be a risky (and risqué) learning curve. And it turned out that Dakota, Bao and Kendal hadn’t played it before either, so we wound up going for strip snap instead. Since we didn’t know when a game like this was meant to end, we settled on stopping when one person was naked, and everyone would have to stay in whatever state of undress they’d ended up in until we went to bed.

Half an hour or so into the game, Bao was the only one who’d only had to remove one item of clothing. I was topless and barefoot, as was Zahid, while the girls were all down to their underwear (they’d started off barefoot anyway, so, counting socks together, we’d all begun four items of clothing away from complete nudity). The loser of this latest round was…

“Awh man… I didn’t think I’d suck this much…”

Kendal proceeded to fold her lips, nervously, maybe just a little excited. Her hands moved up to her bra.

“Gotta snap faster if you wanna stay dressed!” Bao grinned triumphantly.

With nothing more than a little exhalation to prepare herself, Kendal moved her bra around and unclipped it, unveiling her chest to the rest of us. I’ll be honest with you; I didn’t know where to look. It’s not like I wasn’t interested on one level, but she’s also my friend and I wasn’t sure if she was even comfortable with us looking…

“I’m lucky this isn’t gonna mean anything,” she remarked while flinging her bra over her shoulder. “Alex, stop blushing, they’re just my boobs.”

“I’m- erm-”

I chose to stare fiercely at the cards instead, at least for the moment. Dakota giggled. Zahid cleared his throat.

“Keep your head in the game, Alex!” Bao spoke up. “Two more slip-ups and you’ll be getting your dick out!”

“I know, let’s just play…” I replied.

Kendal flashed me a smile, as if to tell me not to worry. Sat there bare-chested like it hadn’t changed the atmosphere of this game, made it that much more real and daunting.

Maybe all of that spiralled together in my mind, or maybe I just had bad luck, but I managed to lose the next round.

“Shorts off, shorts off, shorts off!” Bao chanted, in a way that felt so smug. Gritting my teeth, I rose up (as best as I could in the small space between the table and the sofa) and slid my shorts down to reveal my boxers. Kendal decided to wolf-whistle.

“You better play it safe!” I was warned by Bao.

“Yeah, I’m aware,” I told him bluntly while sitting back down.

“Bao-bear, don’t tease him,” Harriet advised, gathering up the cards to prepare for the next round.

“I’ll just sit on your lap to hide it if you have to strip,” Dakota purred at me. I could tell she was trying to cheer me up (and probably turn me on, too), but it didn’t really help. It was Bao making such a big deal out of it that was ticking me off.

Cards were dealt out, and another round began. I tried to focus as much as possible, and for the first few minutes, I was back in the game. And then, Zahid and I both called out the same snap, him half a second before me.

“Uh-oh, Alex! Be careful!”

It wasn’t just that Bao said it, but the glee he said it with. Almost like he knew he shouldn’t.

“Bao, shut the fuck up,” I growled, shooting him a glare.

“Here we go…” Harriet sighed to herself. As irritated as I already was, that pushed me over the edge.

“Have you got something to say?” I turned on her.

“I knew you were going to get like this,” she replied coolly.

“Sorry I’m so fucking predictable, then.”

“Why do you have to be like this? Why can’t you just deal with things like a normal person?”

The look on her face… I was certain it was contempt. Contempt for me.

“Because I’m not a normal person, am I?” I shouted back at her.

“Don’t raise your voice at me,” she said like she hadn’t started this. Suddenly, she was the calm therapist dealing with a frenzied patient. “And stop acting like you’re so terrible-”

“What?! You’re the one getting on my fucking case-!”

“Calm down! Nobody wants to see you like this. Kitty’s right there,” she added, pointing over to the younger girl on the other sofa.

“Oh, Kitty? You think she doesn’t know? Kitty was a fucking monster when I met her! A literal, terrifying monster that-”

I turned to look at the girl in question; she was clearly uncomfortable, but that really didn’t matter to me in the moment.

“How many people did you scare shitless? Fifty? A hundred?”

And back to Harriet, who now looked ruffled, surprise.

“She was stalking the streets, hunting bastards and she would’ve fucking… killed or done I don’t even know what to her bullies when she found them, if I hadn’t stopped her, but no, poor Kitty can’t be exposed to this, can she?!”

“You’re horrible,” Harriet spat back at me.

“Yeah? Well then all of us are! All of us Painters, Harmony chose us because we’re fucked up! Me, Kitty, your boyfriend, we’re all fucking crazy, so I guess we’re all horrible, huh?!”

“Shut up!” she snapped back at me. “This isn’t about being crazy or about anyone else, it’s about you always taking things the wrong way! It’s like you think the whole world is against you and you’re some poor little boy who’s struggling to accomplish anything. But you’ve got friends who care about you, and a girl who loves you, and you get to be a superhero! You’re way better off than you think and you keep throwing temper tantrums because ‘my girlfriend loves this movie’ or ‘my friend’s teasing me about strip snap’! Grow up, get some perspective and stop taking what Harmony said at face value!”

Shirtless as she was, I could clearly see her shoulders and chest rising and falling as she fumed.

“That’s enough,” Dakota spoke loudly. “Both of you.”

Of course she’d be the one to try and control the situation.

She didn’t have to worry, though. What Harriet said had dug right into me, and in the moment, I couldn’t muster a response.

“Are we going to keep playing, or has he ruined the mood?” Harriet asked the others. None of them replied immediately, uneasy now.

“Fuck you,” I hissed, standing up and leaving the table and the game. I’d barely walked out of the living area when she chose to comment.

“There we go, running off again.”

“Harriet, I will knock your heads together, so help me,” I heard Dakota warn before I reached our bedroom and closed the door behind myself. Still able to hear conversation go on, I blocked my ears as I sat on my bed.

She was right. Whether or not I was actually crazy, I was a bad person. It was probably about time someone called me out on it.

After a few minutes, I took my fingers from my ears and instead rested my head in my hands, mulling over everything. Maybe I shouldn’t have come back? Maybe they were better off without me, anyway? I’d found the most amazing friends and kept on acting like this… what was it in me that I couldn’t help? Why was I like this…?

A light knock on the door preceded Kitty’s head emerging.

“You okay?” she asked meekly.

“Mhm…” I lied.

“I’ve got your clothes… Can I come in…?”

“If you want…”

I was almost surprised when she slipped inside and closed the door behind herself. She placed my bundled t-shirt, shorts and socks beside me, and then sat facing me on Dakota’s bed, cross-legged.

“They stopped playing. Kendal’s still got her boobs out. She rubbed them in Zahid’s face.”

“Sounds like they’re having fun…” I mumbled.

“You’re right about Harriet,” she continued. “She acts like I’m some poor little girl, but I’ve done… like you said, I attacked people and…”

“I dunno what to say,” I told her, “and I don’t really wanna talk about it…”

“Sorry…”

She looked at the floor for a moment.

“I don’t think you’re horrible. You just get angry. You hurt a lot, I guess. So… we’ve got to find a way to make you hurt less, somehow. That’s all.”

The big emotional idiot I am, I felt my eyes welling up at that. This girl seemed adept at making me misty-eyed…

“Thanks…”

“If… if you want a hug, then… put your clothes on and I’ll hug you…” she added shyly.

I put my shorts and top back on, and we shared a comforting hug. Dakota joined us not long after, and the three of us talked until we fell asleep, Dakota sharing my bed while Kitty took the other. Not how I expected the day to end… but the holiday’s not over yet.