Everyone laughs.
‘Just don’t call him Tom… please…’
All the sisters suddenly mute their chuckles. That was not my intention. It was a joke. Please keep laughing. I pout my lips at having sledgehammered the atmosphere.
‘Why?’ Beth asks.
‘I know two people now who’ve named their babies after him. I mean, he’d love having all these namesakes but…’
‘It’s his name,’ Meg says. ‘Like if I had a really yappy dog that dry-humped everything then I’d call it Lucy but that would be funny.’
Emma finds this particularly hilarious. Meg gives me a look from her sunlounger and winks at me. Thanks for saving that moment.
‘You’re such a cow,’ Lucy says. ‘If I had a cow, I’d call it Meg.’
‘But you’d never own a cow so basically you’ve stolen my joke and the moment is gone.’
‘Girls, girls…’ Emma says, mimicking Meg from before. ‘Well, I am thrilled, B. I can’t wait to meet him.’
It is a thing, our brood of family. This empire we seem to be building and calling our own.
Lucy suddenly jumps up from her sunlounger. ‘YES! Girls, the bitches who were hogging the hot tub have gone. Let’s do this! I’m going to bagsy them.’
She canters off, getting the attention of a lifeguard who blows his whistle for running on the poolside. Don’t swear at the staff, Lucy. He seems to let her off because that bikini offers little support for her ample assets. She sees another lady heading for the hot tub and stands her off, literally swan-diving into that thing and spreadeagling herself across it to safeguard it for her sisters. I won’t lie. We see her do this a lot. Whether it’s the roundabout in the park or a table in a pub, that girl can secure you territory like no other. She should be a wrestler or perhaps a foreign diplomat.
‘Can you get barred from a spa?’ Emma asks me.
‘I don’t think so but you guys can go back to London when this is all over. I need to live in this town.’
As Meg hauls Beth up, Emma and I are the sensible ones who make sure we’ve left no belongings behind. You can tell which part of the hot tub Lucy is sitting in from her face. Enjoying those jets, are we, Luce?
‘You look stressed, hun. Are you OK?’ Emma asks me, as she sifts through Lucy’s pile of things. Sunglasses? Really? I think she’s also just dropped a thong.
‘There’s just a lot going on. I’m not sleeping again,’ I tell her.
She reads my face in the way Emma does, with due concern. As our family doctor, she worries about those basic physical and mental constructs that keep her sisters functioning.
‘Do you need a prescription?’ she asks me. ‘How about that counsellor? Are you still seeing them?’
‘Not any more. I don’t know. It comes in waves.’
‘And this month must be like a tsunami.’
She knows. Emma is like me in many ways. She went through an awful divorce about six years ago now with a man who was a serial liar and cheat so I think both of us can lay claim to having been through some of the worst life can throw at you. Our personalities sorted through the debris as best we could and we threw ourselves into other endeavours, but we understand what it is to climb out of the dark holes that can be pain and grief, clawing at the ground and just trying to wake up every day and breathe.
‘Well, you know where I am if you need my help. Speaking of waves…’ she mutters to me. ‘Lucy, for the love of all that is healthy, do not do that please.’
Lucy is paddling in the hot tub, doing poses reminiscent of an unclassy Esther Williams. Please don’t do a handstand in there.
‘I’m not getting in there, I don’t think I’m supposed to with the baby,’ Beth says. ‘I’m just going to dangle my feet. No one look at my bush.’
Emma, Meg and I disrobe and enter hesitantly. I never quite see the attraction of these things. It’s always reminiscent of being boiled, like a vegetable. I take a seat and watch as Emma examines the water for things that shouldn’t be in there, like pubes and panty liners.
‘I had sex in a hot tub once,’ Lucy boasts. ‘It was on a yoga retreat with a man actually called Chakra.’
We are all curiously po-faced.
‘Was his surname Khan?’ Beth asks. ‘Because that is a yoga-disco niche worth investing some money in.’
