Iceberg Ahead

By the time it was chocks away, I was in love and hysterical at the idea of being separated. Apart from bullying a friend of mine into knitting a jumper in a hurry - chessboard pink and white squares to wear in 40 degree heat - I played the single he had sent me in the post over and over.

 “I’m gonna KEEP  on lovin’ YOU and it’s the ONLY thing I’ wanna  DO ……..”  

 It had a black and white photo of him inside the sleeve. He is wearing his tennis whites and is pouting beautifully while pretending to serve a killer volley. I arranged to meet him on the day of the flight. Like all country people we got off the bus with our cases and marched straight  into McDonalds for a burger at breakfast time. Then we went to meet my love and his wing man. 

Suffice to say a veil will be drawn over proceedings but that a lot of imbibing in various hostelries all day culminated in me singing on top of a piano in Casper & Giumbini’s  in Wicklow Street that night, watching as the barman placed the phone on the counter. Through a fog of drink I heard the wing man mutter and slur, over and over into it,  that he was in fact, in no fit state to say evening mass, and could one of the lads in the house take one for the team.

In the airport I did a bit of wallfalling, a bit of crying and a lot of messing about with a security guard and a hat. I have no idea how I was allowed on the plane. I spent the entire flight in the tiny stainless steel toilet poking tomato skin down the vacuum and leaning my tear stained face against the mirror while the stewardess banged on the door. A combination of alcohol poisoning and turbulence do not good bed fellows make.

 There was a smell of Marlboro as soon as the door of the plane opened and the heat hit us like a wall. We never felt heat like it. Which was true. We gasped our way onto the coach and drove through the sleeping volcanic country side and I marveled at the sights, the villas, the whole glittering Island displaying herself like a debutante, teasing us with coquettish glimpses of impossible flowers and plants, orchids and succulents, flashes of blue, azure, aquamarine  and tourquoise from the pools and the flickering sea.

 Our apartment was small and aptly named for the Bougainvilla that hung from every available inch. I laid all my stuff on the bed near the wall,  unceremoniously claiming it, as there was the tiny matter of someone sleeping on the floor, or balcony. It was not going to be me and that was for damn sure. I spent the first morning of my sun holiday nursing the hangover from hell and writing a 5 page letter home about the flight. We explored and came up with the general consensus that the place was the size of Rosslare with a couple of beach bars and a supermarket.

 It was on the 3^rd day we realized the whole town was just around the next corner , the one we had stopped walking to because of the heat.

 We were young Irish girls let loose on an island with sun, sea, and sangria. I will let you do the math. I met a  ginger Scottish postman who wore about 50 gold chains and he  gave me a string of spectacular love bites in a ring around my neck. I spent a lot of time alternately holding in my stomach in my togs and trying not to get thrown in the deep end of the pool. It used to come between me and my sleep and I would hyperventilate at the thoughts that one of the random gangs of marauding British teens would hurl me by wrist and ankle into the pool to screams and applause.

 I was persuaded though to go on the water slide. It took about half an hour to get to the top and they positioned me in the middle so as I could land on someone,  the one behind would take up the slack by pulling me up by the hair. At my insistence , we practiced the maneuver of this many many  times on the way up, as the man checked our wrist bands. 

The fatal flaw was my friend deciding to do it facing front down, and she tore the hips off herself on the seams the whole way down, and was in agony by the time she hit the water. I sank like a stone and the thought that flashed through my mind as I plummeted past all the legs was – this is it and I became serenely  calm. A stunning Spaniard pulled me up by the straps  and I lay  flopping like a mackerel on the warm tiles gasping and heaving up lungfuls of blue water. 

As soon as I could breathe I said “Again!”

We had made friends with sisters  from the apartment above us who holidayed together a couple of times a year and were addicts for the sun, darkening till they looked Spanish themselves. They laid out all day come sun or shade beating the Germans to the loungers and flinging  towels into the shrubbery. They were also addicted to Barry’s Tea, Black Pudding, Rashers and Superquinn sausages and had a veritable feast of vacuum packed meats in their cases.

 They even brought butter and bread and YR sauce for the sangers. They had actual dressing gowns and took off their make-up and sat around wearing moisturizer and conditioning their beautiful hair like mermaids.   Their names were Christine and Gertie  and all they ever said all day every day was 

“Fuck off, no WAAAAAY” -  whether we were telling them the time or the third secret of Fatima. 

 I invited the pair of them and their partners to my 21^st which was happening during the festival in October.  And before that I went and stayed in their house on an estate in Crumlin, drinking in the Workingmans club with all their Aunts and Uncles. In Crumlin too, they sat around in their nighties, spending the livelong day constantly shaving their legs,  plucking their eyebrows and eating rasher sandwiches with cups of scald.

They were great women for the grub and scourged a steak and pepper sauce with a bottle of coke every night before they went out on the tear. 

There was something weird on my plate, it looked like cabbage and tasted like water. 

It was to be my first time doing lots of things. Getting on a plane, burning to a crisp and eating Iceberg lettuce. In Ireland we only ever had a huge dark green lettuce with a copper spade mark across one leaf,  and on it we placed the following –

-       A slice of ham (rolled)

-       A slice of corned beef (rolled)

-       An egg cut with  an egg slicer with paprika shaken on it

-       A spoonful of potato salad from a tin

-       A scallion

-       Half a tomato.

The Spanish Salad was an eye opener although it would be another year before we started putting a single clove of garlic into a Bolognese sauce. It was more likely to be Aromat , or half a packet of Oxtail soup and it was still considered normal in polite society to give someone bread with Sandwich Spread on it

Excerpt from Little Missus Up & Down - MDM Sept. 13.