“I’m not talking about them,” he said. “I’m talking about my bloody family. Boxing Day takes enough grit and mettle to survive—why would Will want to impose this on us?”
“Because. He’s. Not. Been. Here. For. Most. Christmases,” said Rachel, punctuating each word with a kiss on Jack’s lips. “So, maybe this is his way of making up for it; a chance to get the family to spend some quality time together.”
“But four days in Portugal,” he moaned, sounding like a spoiled child.
“Oh, for God’s sake!” Rachel laughed. “Listen to yourself. Your family will be there. I’ll be there—if Noah and Paige come, we’ll have a good laugh.”
He’d looked at her petulantly.
“You never know,” Rachel had said. “You might actually enjoy yourself.”
Now, as she looks at his obvious frustration and the strained greeting he gives Paige and Noah, she feels she’s manipulated them all into doing something they don’t want to do.
“Okay, we’d better get checked in,” Jack says briskly, grabbing hold of two suitcases and wheeling them away.
Rachel abandons her half-drunk coffee as she follows him—and a sense of foreboding—across the concourse.
2
Despite Rachel trying her best to deter Ali from drinking on the plane, by the time they arrive in Lisbon two and a half hours later, she’s four gin and tonics down and has trouble negotiating the steps onto the tarmac.
“I’d have to drink three times as much to behave like she does,” Paige says to Rachel as they follow a swerving Ali onto the waiting bus.
“That’s because you’re hard core,” says Rachel, smiling.
“No, it’s because she’s putting it on.”
Rachel looks at Ali as she swings herself around a pole. If this is what she’s like when she’s pretending to be drunk, what on earth will she be like when she really is inebriated? She remembers Ali telling her that she’d once spent a lost weekend in Amsterdam, going out on the Friday night and not remembering anything until she woke up on Monday morning. She’d boasted that she had to rely on her friend to tell her that she’d danced in a podium cage in a nightclub, tried to put herself in a shop window in the red-light district and had almost been arrested as the first person in the country’s history to consume too much space cake.
“It was the most fun I’ve ever had,” Ali had said, although it sounded the exact opposite to Rachel. She couldn’t think of anything worse and suspected that Ali would probably agree if she were being honest, but she liked to shock. There was never a simple story where she was concerned. Even an innocuous visit to the dentist recently had resulted in her talking a man out of jumping off a bridge—apparently.
Rachel pulls herself up, ashamed of herself for thinking, even for a second, that Ali may have lied about something like that. But then she remembers what Jack had said after listening to what he was convinced was yet another tall tale. “I think we can safely say she embellishes the truth,” he’d said.
Half of Rachel wondered where the harm was in that. Perhaps she did see a man who looked like he was about to take his own life, otherwise where would such a story come from? But maybe instead of talking him out of it, she’d merely seen emergency services in attendance and wished she’d been an instrumental part of the action.
“She’s had four G&Ts,” she whispers to Paige, giving Ali the benefit of the doubt. “I might start pole-dancing after that.”
Rachel knows that would be the last thing she would do. She’d have been leaning her head back on a toilet-cubicle door until that swaying feeling passed, or splashing herself with cold water well before now. She hates to admit it, because it makes her sound boring, but Noah’s right: even when they were at university together, she was never a great drinker.
“She’s had two,” says Paige, without worrying who can hear her. “The third she took to the toilet with her and came back mysteriously empty-handed, and she spilled most of the fourth onto Noah’s trousers.”
Rachel can’t help but laugh. “I didn’t know you were keeping such a close eye on her. What are you, the fun police?”
Paige pulls a sarcastic grimace. “You’ve got to have eyes in the back of your head with that one.”
“Aw, come on, we were young once,” says Rachel.
“You make it sound as if we’re ancient,” says Paige brusquely, her advancing years always a bone of contention.