KATE

  

THOMPSON

Photo: Peter Orford

 
 

Quiet Quarters

  
     

QUIET QUARTER 1

Published by New Island Books

 in the Quiet Quarter Anthology of New Irish Writing, 2004

  
 

My mother loved to remind me of an incident from my childhood. As she passed the bathroom door one evening, she heard me talking to myself. I was, most likely, soaking in bubble bath, picturing myself in some ‘Hollywood starlet’ scenario, because the sentiment that was being given utterance from behind the bathroom door went thus: Money… to buy… champagne…

I have always hankered after luxury, and I’m convinced that it’s because, as a child, my parents used to take us on camping holidays. Not the kind of camping holidays that are commonplace today, you understand - the kind of holiday where you pitch up in a site with ‘facilities’ such as showers and laundries and restaurants and shops. Oh, no. Our camping holidays would have made the Royal Marines look like My Little Pony Camp. Our tents were ex-army, as were our camp beds. My mother heated up tins of dubious stew over a primus stove, and gathered water from rivers. When you saw a family member heading into a thicket with a spade and a pained expression, you just - didn’t ask. My father despised namby pambyism. When he sent me and my brother off in the rain to chase after lambs up Mount Errigal, instructing us to bring one home for dinner, we didn’t realise he was joking. We really feared for those lambs.

Each time we went away on one of our so-called ‘holidays’, one of my chores was to go to the local farm with a jerry-can for milk. So was it any wonder, as I grew up that I hankered after ‘money to buy champagne’, and fantasised about talcum powder beaches and palm trees and sun loungers? There appeared to be only one job option open to me that would earn me enough money to finance my perfect holiday, so I joined Trinity Players and set about becoming a film star.

Later, when the man who became my husband and I were struggling actors, any holiday was a rare luxury. Ironic, because when you’re ‘resting’ (to use that fey thespian term), you have all the time in the world to take off on holiday, but never enough money to go anywhere exotic.

We did get to head to the West Coast of Ireland a lot – my mother-in-law has a mobile home in a glorious situation overlooking Clew Bay – but that never seemed like a proper holiday. We still had to cook and clean and keep an eye on our daughter Clara and the hoards of friends who would join her - and the mobile home is hardly the last word in luxury. It’s been there for thirty years now, and has what might euphemistically be described as a ‘lived-in look’. While beauty board, swirly acrylic carpets and crimplene curtains may have been le dernier cri in caravan furnishings back in the seventies, I understand that mobile homes these days come with jacuzzis, teak decking and state of the art entertainment systems for your amusement in the event of rain. We have Cluedo - with Mrs White and the lead piping missing - some jigsaws, and a couple of decks of cards.

My father might applaud our austerity. I still hanker after luxury…

  
 

QUIET QUARTER 2

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When I signed my first book deal, the priority for us was not a new car or a conservatory or a spending spree. It was, unsurprisingly, a holiday: a proper holiday. So that Christmas, Malcolm and Clara and I flew to Jamaica to stay in a resort where bougainvillaea trailed over pale pink stucco and humming birds hummed and tree frogs sang, and where the louvred windows of our villa opened onto a picture-postcard perfect beach, raked every morning by a beautiful, lazy-limbed boy.

Here, at last, was everything I had fantasised about while lying on my childhood camp bed on holiday in Donegal, inhaling the smell of wet groundsheet. We breakfasted, not on rashers that had been cooked on a pan over a primus, but on fragrant mango and watermelon and guava and papaya, followed by cup after cup of rare Blue Mountain coffee. We quaffed cocktails by the pool, and watched the sun set over the Caribbean Sea as we sipped pre-prandial champagne on the veranda. We spent hours scuba-diving over reefs so beautiful that we wanted never to come up again, we swayed to the rhythm of reggae on the sand under midnight-blue skies, and we swam in a lagoon, in water so blue that when you emerged you half expected to drip gloss paint.

We had heard stories from seasoned travellers about the pitfalls of staying in resorts. We’d been warned that you tend to forge instant friendships with people on the very first day, then spend the next two weeks trying to avoid them when you realise that if you met them back home you would never in your wildest dreams invite them to your house for dinner; and that further association with them during your holiday was likely to turn your bougainvillaea-splashed Garden of Eden into a living hell. We were lucky. We met up with a Dutch woman who had a daughter of Clara’s age, and an adventurous spirit. Lounging by the poolside like a privileged prisoner wasn’t for her, and when we looked around at the peevish expression on the faces of many of the dripping-with-gold types who never sortied beyond the swimming pools or the sybaritic spas, we could understand why.

So we broke out a few times, and hooked up with a Rasta who took us fishing on his scarily un-seaworthy boat, who cut down coconuts for us with his machete and who coaxed a sting out of Clara’s foot when she stood on a sea urchin. He invited us to his little sister’s birthday party where we ate goat soup and lollipops, where we danced to Reggae blasting from gigantic speakers, and where ours were the only white faces.

That was the real Jamaica. The downside was that that while the countryside beyond the elegant stockades of our resort was quite stunningly beautiful, and the hamlets and townlands were what might be described as ‘picturesque’, the poverty was hard to handle. Every time we returned to our pink stucco-ed palace with its platoons of maids and waiters and porters and gardeners we felt awash with guilt at how privileged we were. And when we said our farewells at the end of the holiday, we tipped lavishly in an attempt to assuage that guilt.

I’m ashamed of myself. The guilt didn’t kick in hard enough to stop me dropping into a travel agent’s shortly after we arrived back in Dublin, where I helped myself to a stack of brochures. Hell. I’d had my first exotic holiday, and I was hooked. I wanted another one.

  
 

QUIET QUARTER 3

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  Since we’d blown a small fortune on our Jamaican holiday, it meant that we couldn’t go anywhere madly exotic on the next one, so we opted for Malta, which was not too far away, not too expensive, and where we’d heard there was great scuba diving.

Because our flight left at some ungodly post-midnight hour, I had rung the airport in advance to make sure there would be a bookshop open, and had been assured that there would be. They lied. I set off on holiday with nothing to read. This was a mega disaster! Perhaps there’d be a bookshop in the hotel, Malcolm soothed. There wasn’t. The only bookshop that stocked English titles was miles away in Valetta, the capital, and because we had dives booked for the next few days, getting there was an impossibility. So I sat by the pool on the first day of our holiday, enviously eyeing all those lucky holiday-makers cracking the spines on their airport novels, hoping that someone amongst them would speed-read their way through one of the fat volumes and bestow it on hapless, bookless me. In the meantime I had to make do with my dive manual, which is a book I can heartily recommend to any insomniacs who may be listening. Dip into that manual and I guarantee that you’ll be asleep before you get to the end of the first module, thrillingly entitled ‘The Principals of Buoyancy’.

Buoyancy, shmoyancy! Having been buoyed up by the prospect of some fantastic dives, we soon realised that diving in Malta at that time of the year was production-line, and way over-crowded. Divers would go into competition orbit to see who could don their gear and get into the water first, leaping off dive boats like neoprene-clad lemmings. I went into a huff, and hardly dived at all for the rest of the holiday.

We finally made it to the bookshop in Valetta and returned to the hotel laden with reading material. However, we discovered that reading by the pool was difficult because people called animators kept coming up to you, bizarrely inviting you to come and play games and do exercises with them. I took to reading on the balcony of our hotel room to get away from these perverted animators, and as I stared bleakly out over the scutch grass to the Mediterranean, I decided that I didn’t actually like Malta very much. In fact, half way through the holiday I phoned our travel agent in Dublin and asked if I could come home. Not a chance, she said. No flights available.

On the last day of our so-called ‘vacation’ we visited Gozo, Malta’s sister island. There, we happened upon a hotel called Ta Cenc - which boasted a library and stray kittens to ooh and ah over and two beautiful pools with no animators – and as we sat having lunch on a terrace dripping with bougainvillaea, we all three looked at each other and knew at once that this was where we should have come.

On the way back home, when I read in the inflight magazine that Condé Nast had voted Ta Cenc one of the top hundred hotels in the world, I wasn’t surprised. The sybarite in me that was denied expression on the drear camping holidays of my childhood can be relied upon to sniff out luxury everytime.		  
 

QUIET QUARTER 4

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  I’d just finished writing my fourth novel. I had spent the entire weekend in the attic working flat out, and I slid down the ladder on Sunday evening feeling wrung out. ‘I need a –’

‘Holiday,’ Malcolm finished for me. ‘Why not go on the holiday to Thailand that our dive group’s organised? Someone’s dropped out, and there’s a place going.’

I considered. The dive outfit we belong to was heading off soon to Ko Phi Phi, an island in the Andaman Sea which boasted what was reputedly the most beautiful beach in the world, on account of its eponymous starring role in the Leonardo di Caprio movie. I pictured palm trees and white sands and cocktails on the beach. In other words, I pictured Paradise, and I knew that Malcolm was right.

Getting there took some doing. We flew from Dublin to Heathrow, from Heathrow to Bangkok, from Bangkok to Phuket. And then we took a two-hour ferry trip to Ko Phi Phi.

The first thing we did on hitting dry land was to dump our bags in our beach resort and plunge into the tide. I felt the strain and the grime that I’d accumulated on that endless journey dissolve into the ebb and flow as I lay on my back gazing up at a cerulean blue heaven – but hang on! – heaven wasn’t up there! It was right here, on earth! I’d landed in Paradise, and I was going to be there for two whole weeks!

Two weeks can be a long time in Paradise. While scuba diving is the ultimate leisure activity, all day every day spent on a boat between dives can get pretty tedious. Then there’s all that back-breaking work involved in kitting up before each dive. In Jamaica a beautiful boy had done all that for me. Here, I had to lug tanks and breathing apparatus and lead weight belts around by myself, and if you’ve listened to earlier Quiet Quarters this week, you’ll know that hard physical graft isn’t really my thing.

In the evening, after heaving our gear back to the dive shop and dismantling it and hosing it down, I’d spend a little time in my bungalow ‘relaxing’ before dinner. This quality relaxation time usually involved me hunting the elusive mosquito who had moved in with me, and who I could hear giggling every time it flitted away from me, adroitly avoiding my inelegant lunges. It had succeeded in covering me in bites that were resistant to even the most powerful anti-histamine the drug dealer in the village could supply.

The village was were we gravitated in the evening if we weren’t dining in the resort’s beach restaurant. Incidentally, I’d seen ‘The Beach’, and wondered what had happened to the idyllic island featured in the film of Alex Garland’s book. This part of the island was coming down with backpackers and boho tourists and what would appear to be the occasional escaped convict. There were stalls doing a roaring trade in souvenir t-shirts and the usual holiday suspect tack, there were pavement cafés with obnoxious drunks falling out of them, there were night clubs with garage music blasting at a level that went right off the decibel scale. Why, if it hadn’t been for the palm trees and the monkeys, I could have been back home in Temple Bar.

And soon I was back in Temple Bar – but not before negotiating the trail that took me from Phi-Phi to Phuket to Bangkok to London to Dublin. And after I’d fallen into Malcolm’s arms with relief at being back home, I finally managed to utter between sobs, the following words: ‘I need –’

‘A holiday?’ said Malcolm. 		 
 

QUIET QUARTER 5

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  Since Malta and Thailand had been such disastrous holiday destinations for us, we decided to go back to Jamaica, where we’d been lucky first time round. But the resort we’d stayed in was undergoing refurbishment, and we didn’t really like the look of the other options on offer. How about Mauritius? asked our friendly travel agent. Mauritius, heaven on earth for celebs and beloved of Hello! magazine! We decided to splash out.

The blurb for the hotel read thus: ‘The Residence is considered one of the jewels of the international hotel scene. Its mile-long beach of immaculate white sand fringed by tropical gardens, its refined and deliciously nostalgic décor inspired by turn-of-the-century plantation houses, its butler service worthy of the colonial palaces of yesteryear, its exotic and delicate cuisine, its luxurious spa are only some of the ingredients which have contributed to the hotel’s success.’ How could we go wrong?

As soon as we arrived we were offered iced tea by a smiling waiter, and greeted by the smiling manager. Our luggage was magicked away by a smiling porter, and unpacked for us by a smiling butler, who introduced himself as Asish, and for whom, he told us, with a bow, nothing would be too much trouble. The rooms were divine, as were the gardens surrounding the hotel, and the two pools and the restaurant were divine, and the beach! Well, the beach was – um, divine!

In the evenings Asish would come to our room with the various tools of his trade – ylang ylang to rub on the teak furniture, and scented candles and rose petals and sandalwood oil for the bath he would insist on pouring for me. The couple of times I told him not to bother, he actually looked stricken. And I had to tell myself ‘Either I have a serious personal hygiene problem - or this is what luxury is all about.’

The hotel restaurants were, of course, divine. Every evening smiling waiters unfurled pristine linen napkins for us, and topped up our wineglasses and lifted the domed silver lids on our plates to reveal divine food. Everywhere you went, staff bowed and smiled. I began to avoid them and hide from them because I really didn’t like being bowed to, even though I kept telling myself: ‘This is what luxury is all about.’

On our last evening, Asish packed for me. He laid all my clothes down to my underwear on the bed in colour co-ordinated piles, and meticulously folded them between layers of tissue paper. Oh, God! Being packed for made me feel almost as uncomfortable as being bowed to, but I submitted to the packing, because, after all, that was what luxury was all about.

Not long after our divine Mauritian holiday we headed to the West, to the battered mobile home on Clew Bay where we’d spent all our holidays before we could afford luxury ones. We unpacked our luggage, and I made up the beds while Malcolm slung supper together and opened a bottle of wine. We sat down to our improvised meal at the formica topped table, and while we ate, we gazed through the window at that unparalleled view of Croagh Patrick framed by faded crimplene curtains, and listened to a blackbird singing its twilight song. And when a couple of otters emerged from the sea to play on the deserted shingle below, and the evening star glimmered into life above Ireland’s most mystical mountain, then at last, after all those years of questing for luxury, I finally knew that I didn’t need it. Because this – this was as close to divinity as I would ever get.

  
     
 

© Kate Thompson, 2004

  
 

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