Send Me A Lover by Carol Mason Read Free Book Online Page B

small bottoms by telling them I liked their bikes, but they saw that as a sign of weakness. Next I attempted to be stern, but they started circling me on their bikes, preparing—obviously—to move in for the slaughter. Serious panic set in. I’d just spent two hundred quid in Debenhams and I was damned if I was going to give them my purchases! On the one hand, there was my pride: I was the adult; they were the kids. On the other, I decided my best option was to just leg it. So I legged it. I ran forever and they set after me on their bikes. When they finally got bored of chasing me, my heart was pounding so hard that I thought I might require hospitalisation. Even now, if I have to pass a group of kids, I walk the other way.
    As I walk past the former train station, my mind goes back over old boyfriends. I honestly think I did date the best-looking guys in Sunderland. Even if they were uncouth, they were always good-looking-vulgar. Yet I was never going to marry any of them. I just somehow knew it. I blew up with pride those few times I brought my Canadian home. When his accent would get the sales girls in M&S falling over him to find him the polo shirt he liked in a forty-two-inch chest. Or when the single mothers on the train would gawp at us, as though they thought I’d bagged somebody famous.
    It’s funny, Jonathan only ever came with me to England twice, yet I can’t even walk around Sunderland without seeing him here somewhere.
    I’m just wondering what the advertising industry is like up North, and whether I could move back here and start up some cracking agency, when I see it. The ad in the travel agent’s window. The photo of an azure ocean, cherry-pink bougainvillea and a whitewashed bell tower perched on a hill. ‘Zante,’ it reads. ‘The third largest island in the Ionian Sea; ‘the green island, of poetry, of song and love…’
    I remember how, several years ago, I told Jonathan I was going to take my mother to Greece when I went back to the UK for my yearly visit. He thought it a great idea. But in the end we never ended up going. It was really Jonathan I wanted to go on holiday with, not my mother.
    The price is a steal. What did Richard say, about how a holiday might recharge me?
     
    ~ * * * ~
     
    ‘Greece?’ My mam glares at me. ‘Why didn’t you book somewhere like Lake Garda, if you were going to drag me somewhere?’
    ‘Do you even know where Lake Garda is?’
    ‘It’s not in Greece! It’s in …’ I see the wheels of her brain turning. ‘Italy,’ she says.
    ‘Good guess. What have you got against Greece, anyway?’
    ‘Well, for starters, it’s full of Greeks.’
    ‘Weird how that works.’
    ‘Plus, you haven’t read about it in the Sunday People ! The hoi poloi and what they get up to in, in Fal-lal-al-a-Fella-Falla—’
    ‘We’re not going to Falariki, Mam. We’re going to some quiet scenic island, untouched by the grubby hand of tourism. A gentle place for mothers and daughters to commune in a state of mother-daughterly grace.’ I slide the brochure across the kitchen table and she pretends not to look. ‘The guidebook says it’s the most romantic place, and has the largest proportion of good-looking Greek men over the age of forty-five in the entire nation.’ I lie.
    She shoots a look at me out of the corner of her eye.
    Although what I’m doing going to a romantic Greek island with my sixty-year-old mother, is, admittedly, a good question.
    She snatches the brochure off me. ‘How much did they hose you for this?’
    ‘Not a lot. Or we’d not be going, trust me. Don’t you remember we were going to go there a few years ago?’
    ‘Only you felt silly going on holiday with your old mother.’
    ‘No I didn’t!’
    Yes I did.
    I point out the asymmetrical white villa amid silvery olive groves with cerise bougainvillea climbing the wall. ‘This is our hotel.’
    She scrutinizes the photograph. ‘It’ll have its own potty, won’t it? I hate having to do a