“A bin chicken?!” he yells. “What’s a bin chicken?”
The driver’s door opens, and Eggo hops in, ringing wet and holding a soggy folder in his hands. He shakes his head like a dog, sending beads of rain water everywhere.
Logan screams with laughter. “Dad, what’s a bin chicken?”
“Nothing. What’s a bin chicken with you?” Eggo replies.
Logan groans. “Bruh, you always say whatsasomethingwithyou!”
The caravan is super cute. It has a wraparound deck and an open-plan kitchen-dining-living area with a little corner sofa and pouffe and a TV built into the room divider. There are two bedrooms. Logan’s, which has tiny twin beds running parallel against the walls, and the master bedroom. Unfortunately, thoserooms are next to one another, and the metal walls are about as thick and soundproof as toilet paper.
I look at Eggo. He glances around the space, evidently arriving at the same conclusion as me. His face crumbles in heartbreak.
We’ve enjoyed two blissful weeks in Newquay while his mum and stepdad were on holiday, but since they’d returned, we’ve had no other option but to resume our sneaking about, stealing moments here and there so we don’t make too much noise. We haven’t had sex since then, and I was kinda hoping this weekend would break our dry spell, but I guess we’ll have to wait until we arrive back in Bath for that.
Eggo checks his watch. “Right, it’s almost teatime. Shall we mooch to the clubhouse and get some scran? I would say we could go exploring, but it’s not the weather for that.”
Rain crackles against the metal roof of the caravan and gushes down the windows. None of us have brollies. Only Logan—well, Jody—had the sense to pack wellies and a raincoat.
“Ahh, come on, we can’t let England spoil our holiday. Let’s see what’s here,” I say.
Eggo and I are soaked to the bone in mere seconds. We walk to the edge of the campsite, but despite Logan’s persistent nagging, we don’t go down the little path to the beach. He wants to swim in the ocean, but we mollify him by ordering pizzas and Cokes from the onsite restaurant and letting him loose in the soft play while the grown-ups hit the beers. Three pints in and Eggo decides it’ll be a fun and financially judicious idea to visit the arcade.
In all fairness, it is fun. We race each other on the F1 game, we blast dinosaurs and aliens and zombies, we turn our fingertips black with the penny pushers, and we smash fifty quid into the claw machines, or as Eggo and Logan call them, “the teddy grabbers.”
We suck at winning any prizes until one of the metal claws becomes stuck on a toy’s paper tag, and through fluke alone, we score a Squishmallow of a shark nomming on half a leg.
It’s still pissing down as we make our way back to the caravan. The rain is warm, and Logan insists on taking off his raincoat because he’s too hot. Eggo lets him. We dress Sharky in his coat instead, sing Natasha Beddingfield’s “Unwritten” at the top of our lungs, and dance in the middle of the holiday park streets. My feet slide around in my thongs, and it’s a sensory nightmare, but the joy on Eggo’s and Logan’s faces more than makes up for it.
In the caravan, we change into dry trackies, and Logan puts his pyjamas on. Then, because he’s not the least bit tired, or so he claims, we whackShrek 2on the TV—one of the caravan’s minimal DVD offerings. Without saying anything, Logan wedges his pointer finger knuckle into his mouth and snuggles under my arm.
Eggo’s jaw hangs open. “He never does that,” he whispers.
It feels as though I’ve been hand selected by a great deity to watch over this precious cargo. I finger comb his blonde curls and smile at Eggo.
At ten o’clock, before the movie’s even over, we carry a sleeping Logan into his room and tuck him and Sharky into the bed farthest from our shared wall.
“Good night, Spider-Man,” Eggo says, bestowing a forehead kiss upon his kid. “Love you.”
“Love you too,” Logan replies, proving my earlier suspicions that all children, no matter where they’re from or what decade they grew up in, will pretend to be asleep just to be carried around.
Eggo checks his watch, and we shuffle into the master bedroom. The bed is small. Wider than the replacement bedwe bought for Leoni’s room, but shorter, and my buddy here is going to have a good half a foot of his body dangling off the end.
“Which side do you want?” he asks me in a whisper.
I shrug. Don’t actually answer his question. “Did it ever seem weird to you how, when we got to your parents’ house in Newquay, we both just took Leoni’s old bed, even though there’s a bed in your old room?”
“No, because that bed was designed for kids and I weigh eighteen stone,” he replies.
“But there are sofas. And I’m sure you mentioned an air bed at one point. Your folks went away for two weeks, so one of us could’ve slept in their room.”
“Barf-o-rama,” he says.
“You know what I mean.”
“Can I tell you a secret?” he whispers. “Don’t hate me, yeah, but I told my mum to throw the air bed away because I thought you might ask to sleep in Logan’s room, and . . . if you’d really wanted to, I would have bought another air bed for you, but . . . you never asked.”
It takes a few second for my brain to process. “That’s what I mean. It never occurred to me until just then, but I got to your parents’ house and it didn’t seem weird that we’d be sharing a bed for a few weeks, when we don’t even share hotel beds.”
