The kids came back from the pool barking and raving with hunger, so she stuffed them full of ham before they were even out of their togs. They ate it from the packet, dancing and jigging around the open fridge door.
‘I thought we were going to eat out?’ said Dec.
‘Listen,’ she hissed with sudden rage. Then put her hand over her face and went into their bedroom. There was nowhere to stand in there, so she sat on the bed.
‘Will you dress them?’ she said, quietly through the wall.
And he did.
It was past bedtime when they finally got to the crêperie and the kids were beyond themselves. Impossible. It was like talking to a pair of junkies.
‘I don’t want a proper crêpe! I don’t want a proper crêpe, I just want ice cream!’ Dec suddenly white around the mouth, saying, ‘Do you want to go home? Do you want to go home right now?’
Of course, the ice cream just jizzed them right up again, and it was ten o’clock before they were finished bouncing off the walls. They had to be caught and forcibly stripped and put in their pyjamas, one kicking leg at a time, and it was nearly eleven before they had stopped writhing around in their sheets, like souls in torment.
Peace. Dec opened the fridge.
‘Do you know how much this beer cost?’
‘No.’
‘Have a guess.’
‘Just open it, would you?’
‘How much?’ he said, holding up a bottle of Leffe.
‘I don’t know,’ said Michelle.
‘Guess!’
‘Oh dear God give me patience,’ said Michelle.
‘One euro forty-nine. For a bottle of Belgian beer. One euro forty-nine!’ and, now that she was duly impressed, he cracked the top off and poured her a glass.
‘We should have brought Scrabble,’ she said.
After the second beer they went to bed and had sex, in utter silence; staying so close and tight for the first while, Michelle thought she might shout if he drew back an inch. But she didn’t shout and, when they were finished, the children were still asleep.
‘Christ,’ she said. ‘What did you say your name was again? Christ.’ Then she dragged herself off the bed and into the living room. It was odd being naked in this little space — everything was too near, the ceiling was very low, and there was a ghost sitting at the table as she walked past to the bathroom. At least that was what she called it at the time, though she was sitting on the toilet before she thought to wonder at the fact of it. A ghost. And when she got up, it was gone.
The next day there was patchy sunshine in the morning, so Michelle draped a few things outside, and packed up the still-wet swimming gear, and they headed for the beach.
‘I don’t like the beach,’ said Emmet. ‘I don’t like the beach!’
The beach was beautiful. The kids ran down the slope of it, shedding clothes, and could not stand still for the suncream.
Michelle didn’t get into her own togs. She wondered if she ever would again. She sat on the edge of the dunes and pulled back her skirt to let the sun get at her legs.
‘The thing is,’ she said to Dec. ‘From here, right? They look OK. The way the fat falls down, I can’t actually see it. From where I’m looking, is what I am saying, everything looks OK.’
‘So it’s not that you’re fat,’ said Dec. ‘It’s just that your eyes are in the wrong place.’
‘Well, exactly.’
‘Come on. Have a swim.’
‘Oh, I don’t know.’
‘Come on. It’ll do you good.’
‘In a minute.’
She sat on the sand watching the shapes of her children, black against the glittering sea; Dec running down to the wave’s edge for buckets of water to throw on them, making them run and scream. It was all so delicious: the squirm of Katy’s shoulders away from the flung water, the heavy splash of it on the sand; it was all so like a picture of a family having fun that Michelle found herself thinking about the caravan ghost — the way it was like a picture too; flat-looking, almost a bit creased. A woman. Young or old, it was hard to tell. But really horrible. Seething. She was sitting on the banquette behind the little table, and Michelle got the strong impression that she couldn’t leave — that she was just stuck.
There was no trace of her when they got back from the beach. They had been chased off by the rain and the clothes left out that morning were wet again. Michelle picked them up and draped them back on pelmets and hangers, and in the middle of lunch she got up to hang some stuff from the spokes of the big umbrella outside. Nothing had dried, inside or out. She gathered yesterday’s clothes and threw them into the plastic box under the shower.
While she was rubbing and wringing, Michelle thought maybe it was this that brought the ghost on. She was a hand-wash ghost — some woman who had wrung out clothes all her life, and moved them round from place to place, and failed to get them dry. But Michelle didn’t mind the work, as work goes. There was something else about this woman: the set of her face; there was some other wreckage in her that Michelle did not yet recognise.
The kids were rattling around the place; pulling the cushions off the banquette, unscrewing the plastic catch on the bathroom door. Kids got in everywhere. How many of them had been through this one mobile, over the years? Every inch of it had been touched and pawed and used. Michelle made room for the new wet clothes beside yesterday’s damp clothes, and rigged another few hangers in the shower. Across the way, the woman with six children and a good pair of legs was packing up, in the rain.
The perfect girls arrived. They sat outside under the umbrella and the kids played with them, quite formally, like ladies having tea. Michelle brought out some white French peaches, and she kissed the hard, round foreheads of both her children, whose soft skin still smelt of the sea. The perfect girls looked at her as she did this, in a polite sort of way. Perhaps they were not much kissed. Maybe that was her problem — too much kissing — maybe that was the thing Michelle was doing wrong. Ten minutes later the perfect girls were still perfect, while her own two were drenched in peach juice and once again, she had to find something clean and strip them down.
Around four o’clock, the sky began to clear and Michelle took the least wet clothes outside. She put them in the sunny spots, and the wetter things in the shade. She wondered if she was doing this the wrong way around — did she want a few dry clothes, or a lot of damp ones? How many days were left anyway? She had to use her fingers to count. She stood in front of the kids’ wardrobe, touching shorts and dresses, saying, ‘Wednesday, Thursday …’ and then starting over again.
The ghost, she decided, was a woman who had actually died in the mobile. Some stiffening kind of death. She died rigid, sitting on that banquette, playing solitaire. Michelle was bizarrely convinced of this. She could feel the sandy slither of the cards on the table, as she set them down.
‘How old are these yokes, would you say?’
Dec considered it. ‘Ten years? I dunno. Twelve?’
That was it. She died playing cards while her children slept, within hands’ reach, in the room next door.
Knock knock.
Michelle tapped on the thin little wall.
Knock knock.
On the sunny side of the little road, the adulterers, with all their brood, drove off for the last time. Michelle was over there in a flash, stealing the bit of sunshine they had left behind. She spent the next while ferrying the rest of the stuff over, checking the sky, turning Emmet’s shorts like a slice of toast under the grill. She thought, as she did all this, of the next family that would come here, and the one after that; the fattening wives and the steadfast husbands and all the beautiful children; the thousands of beautiful children, growing in the rain. It was a while before she noticed that she couldn’t hear her own pair, hadn’t in fact heard them for some time. She looked down the little road, and she started to run.