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Katie opens up her suitcase and we go through it together, taking out the thick jumpers, long trousers and coat that Nan insisted she packed. When we’re done, she has three bikinis, lots of T-shirts, a couple of pairs of shorts, and a light dress for the evenings, as well as underwear and a couple of pairs of pyjamas. I take the opportunity to shove some of the insect repellent and sunscreen I’ve bought into the space we’ve created in her case, before retreating to my room to finish off my own packing. I hear the sounds of Nan and Grandad locking up and getting ready for bed, so I stick my head out of the door to wish them goodnight. We’ll be gone before they wake up, so they wish us a lovely holiday and exhort me to take care of Katie.
‘Remember she’s only seventeen, Daisy. I don’t want her out at nightclubs, dancing with unsuitable boys,’ Nan tells me, firmly.
‘I think you’re quite safe there, Nan,’ I laugh. ‘Apart from the fact that my clubbing days are many years behind me, I don’t think nightclubs are really Katie’s scene, do you?’
Katie’s head pops out from her bedroom door. ‘I heard that!’
‘It’s true though, isn’t it?’ I challenge her. ‘I can no more imagine you dirty dancing than I can imagine Nan, here.’
‘I don’t know,’ Nan muses, as she gives a little wiggle. ‘There’s still life in the old girl, you know.’
‘Nonsense!’ Grandad laughs. ‘You’d probably put your hip out as soon as you got onto the dance floor, and we’d have to call an ambulance to take you to A&E.’
‘Well, just be careful while you’re away, that’s all I’m saying. Have a lovely time, but don’t overdo it.’
‘We’ll be fine, Nan. Stop worrying. See you when we get back.’
Nan and Grandad haven’t been abroad since we moved in. To begin with, they had their hands full just coping with me and, as Nan explains regularly, ‘You were difficult enough to handle on home territory, how on earth would we have managed in a foreign country where we had no means of tracking you down at all?’ We are close now, but the first few years were very rocky, and there were plenty of stand-up rows that ended with me storming out of the house yelling, ‘You’re not my mother!’
I finish my packing, double-check that I’ve got all the documents we need, and then get ready for bed. As my head hits the pillow, I allow myself to look forward to the week ahead. Just a little bit.
3
I’m still fast asleep when the alarm goes off at 4.30 a.m., so I wake with a start, and it takes me a moment or two to orient myself. I drag myself out of bed and knock on Katie’s door to check she’s awake, before padding down the corridor to the bathroom. Nan and Grandad have an en suite bathroom off their bedroom, so Katie and I have this one to ourselves. As I wash the sleep away in the shower, I run through my checklist one more time to make sure there’s nothing I’ve forgotten. As well as a morbid fear of needing to wee on the train, I’m terrified of being turned away at check-in or the hotel because of a missing piece of paper.
Half an hour later, our cases are loaded into the boot of my car and we’ve checked the documents several times. I close the door as quietly as I can behind us, and we set off for the airport. Grandad pointed out that it would have been considerably cheaper for us to go by taxi than pay for the parking, but I’m not wild about being driven on the motorway by a stranger in a car of unknown age that’s probably done what Rob at work would refer to as ‘starship mileage’. At least I’m in control if I’m driving. The traffic is very light at this time on a Saturday morning, and we’re on the airport road less than an hour later.
‘Read me the instructions for the car park again,’ I tell Katie.
‘It’s easy. You just need to pull up to the barrier, and it will recognise your numberplate from the booking and print your ticket,’ she replies.
‘No, read me exactly what it says on the piece of paper. I want to be sure we haven’t missed anything, like a button we have to press or something.’
She rolls her eyes but obliges. We manage to get into the car park with no issues, and drag our cases to the bus stop, where there is already a large group of people waiting.
‘Wow, there are a lot more people here than I was expecting for this time in the morning,’ Katie remarks.
‘Mm. I expect it will be heaving in the terminal then. First week of the school holidays, so everyone’s going away.’
Sure enough, the queues in the terminal building are massive, and it takes us a good hour to reach the self-check-in desks. Between us, we manage to work out how to print our boarding cards and baggage tags, before loading our bags onto the conveyor that will take them deep into the guts of the airport and, hopefully, onto our plane. Another long queue snakes its way through security, but we finally find ourselves in the departure lounge just over an hour before our flight is due to take off.
‘Breakfast?’ I suggest.
‘Absolutely, I’m starving!’
We settle ourselves at a table in the terminal pub and order a couple of full English breakfasts. We probably won’t eat again until this evening, so we’ve decided we need something substantial to keep us going. While we’re waiting for our food to arrive, I glance around at our fellow travellers. There are lots of families with children, obviously filling themselves up before the journey like we are, but there are also a couple of groups of young men, already sinking pints despite the fact that it’s not even eight o’clock in the morning.
‘What do you reckon, stag parties?’ I ask Katie, indicating the men.
She wrinkles her nose as the men in one group start whooping loudly, encouraging the guy that I guess is the bridegroom-to-be to down his pint in one. A few of the parents in the family groups make eye contact with each other and raise their eyebrows disapprovingly.
‘I hope they’re not on our plane,’ she remarks.
‘I doubt they’re going to Mallorca. More likely to be Warsaw or Prague, I suspect. Somewhere not too far away where the beer is strong and relatively cheap.’
A last call announcement comes over the intercom for an easyJet flight to Warsaw and one of the men shouts, ‘Fuck, that’s our plane!’ to his mates. I smile as they hastily grab their belongings and start running towards the gate.
‘One group down. Just got to see where the others are going,’ I observe.
