Erika shushes me. ‘Let it go, princess. Let it go. We’re late.’
We hurry onto the minibus, and I’m faced with an assortment of the holiday reps I saw cavorting last night. Unlike Erika, they look sickly and hungover, like they have been sleeping rough under a decommissioned city-centre bridge for the last year, without a hairbrush or a wet wipe between them. They are yawning and complaining about the heat and, fortunately, not one of them cares that I look just as crumpled.
‘Jesus. I can barely breathe for all this smoke,’ booms Erika as we stand at the front of the minibus. ‘Someone open a window. And put those cigarettes out for Pete’s sake!’
There’s a lot of grumbling followed by a half-hearted attempt to extinguish cigarettes on the floor of the bus or by flicking them casually out of windows.
‘This attention-seeking missile is Garry Gee from Bodrum South.’ Erika nudges him with her foot. ‘Very high opinion of himself. Tends to look over your shoulder as he’s talking to you in case there’s someone more interesting – and by that, I mean more sexually available – on offer.’ Garry does not respond. He is slumped comatose across a double seat. His eyes are closed. His skin is grey as though not a single piece of fruit has crossed his lips in a decade. The sort of gravestone-of-a-child-who-died-of-tuberculosis-in-the-1800s kind of grey. His thin ponytail hangs limply over his face. It makes me want to be healthy and drink gallons of water every day. ‘Not much of the Geemeister now, are you?’ Erika says frostily.
He prises open one eye. ‘It’s the Gee Man. How many times do I have to?—’
‘Oh, do fuck off with all that Gee Man shit, Garry. No one wants to use your self-inflicted nickname. It’s not even cool. Just like that ponytail of yours. And your gold chain. And your fake Rolex. And button up that shirt. You look like a washed-up, syphilitic seventies porn star.’
Garry looks fuming, opening and closing his mouth before straightening up in his seat. Erika turns to me and bursts out laughing. ‘You’ve got to be firm with that one, princess, otherwise he’ll walk all over you.’
We walk up the aisle and I’m told who is who, until Erika points to a seat. ‘Sit.’
I sit down gingerly next to a grumpy-looking Astrid (moody drama queen, wearer of too much metallic-blue eyeliner, inconsistently competent and rather too fond of intense eye contact). As if to illustrate Erika’s point, her gaze is laser-trained on a spot in front of her to the left. When I slide my eyes over to where she is looking, I see a very content-looking Tiffany (horsey, well-heeled, floats through life without a care, avid avoider of food) snuggled up to Shaun (boyishly handsome, terrible gossip, once appeared onThe Hitman and HerTV show four years ago as a backing dancer and has been dining out on it ever since). Shaun’s head is thrown back against the headrest, his mouth gaping open, and he is gently snoring. ‘Excuse me,’ says Astrid, clambering over me to hang out of the back window. I hear her gulping in air, dry heaving.
Erika stands with her hands on her hips. ‘Wake up, you lot!’ she screams at the top of her lungs. ‘Look at the state of you. You’re not here on bloody holiday. This sort of nonsense has got to stop.’ We are being told off like naughty schoolchildren.
I glance around to see people bolting upright and shifting uncomfortably in their seats, attempting to show a modicum of respect for the employment they are in. Erika is right. We need to show some professionalism.
‘It’s not a hangover,’ explains Astrid as she climbs back over me to her seat. ‘I’ve got something seriously wrong with me. I think it’s an overactive immune system.’
‘Oh dear. I’m sorry to hear that,’ I say, trying to forget she was the root cause of many passengers being upset on the transfer from the airport. She definitely has an overactivesomething. Vague memories come back to me of her laughing maniacally on stage at Halikarnas, swivelling around every two seconds to check that Shaun was watching her, as he and Garry pursued what I would describe as a very aggressive hip-thrusting schedule. I nod understandingly.
She blinks rapidly and wipes at her mouth. ‘I might also be allergic.’
‘Allergic to something you ate?’
‘No. To Turkey,’ she says, holding a hand to her forehead. ‘I’m never like this in Spain.’
Tiffany lets out a monumental huff. ‘You always have to go one better, don’t you?’ She twists around in her seat to face Astrid. ‘What was it last week? Early onset Creutzfeldt-Jakob’s disease? And the time before that it was bird flu.’
‘Itwasbloody bird flu!’ Astrid says. ‘Ask Shaun. I was really ill, wasn’t I?’
Shaun has woken suddenly and coughs into his fist, looking extremely caught between a rock and a hard place. ‘Or it may have been food poisoning. You know what this place is like,’ he says.
Very diplomatic.
‘Alcohol poisoning more like,’ says Erika, sitting down as the bus hurtles away from the hotel. ‘Now listen to me, Bodrum South. You need to get your shit together. No more boozing like darts players at a semi-final just because it’s two pence a pint. We’ve got head office coming in to talk to us for God’s sake. What are they going to think?’
The short journey to the Sunrise Five Diamond Beach Hello conference centre takes place in silence with Erika exuding frosty stares to everyone in turn. She is not happy with this ragamuffin bunch. And when we arrive, I see why. Standing at the entrance is a neat row of impeccably dressed LoveIt Holiday reps ready to welcome Erika like a member of the royal family visiting the Commonwealth. She walks the line greeting each one as she inspects them from head to toe, and when she gets to the end she sweeps her arm over towards us. ‘Bodrum North team’ – she pauses to give a disappointed shake of her head – ‘meet Bodrum South. You can all get acquainted during the break but for now we must hurry?—’
‘Excuse me, Erika?’ I say hurriedly. ‘I’m not Bodrum South. I’m going to work at head office, remember?’ I puff out my chest. There’s no way I want to be lumbered in with this shower of misfits. ‘I’m the new account manager. I’m not with these.’ I thumb discreetly towards Garry Gee and his shambles of a team.
Erika gives me a hard stare. ‘Yes, about that…’ I wait for her to finish her sentence, but she doesn’t. She swivels on her heel and leads us into the building. Once in, the Bodrum South reps crowd around a buffet table as though they’ve not eaten for weeks. I just have time to grab a cup of coffee before Erika crooks her finger and beckons me to the other side of the hall where there is a table laden with piles of forms, adding machines, tons of small rectangular receipt books with their familiar white sheets on the top for original customer copy and the blue carbon sheet underneath to print the details onto the yellow copy below for head office records. I admire the neat towers of various colourful flyers for trips and excursions. Unfortunately, Erika has a head teacher air to her which instinctively makes me feel as though I’m in trouble.
‘Maddie Summers. We’ve received a record number of complaints about you.’
I gulp.
‘From the airport driver?’
‘Fortunately, no. He can’t speak or write English, so all of his complaints were in Turkish and weren’t included. No…’ She exhales heavily. ‘The bulk of the complaints are from the holidaymakers who took umbrage to the hole-in-the-ground toilets at the roadside café you stopped at, and some are from those who claimed they got food poisoning from eating there, but the most objectionable ones are from the passengers you left stranded at the airport and, of course, the Bodrum South reps themselves.’ She rolls her eyes towards the ceiling. ‘We’ve even had a death threat which is unusual but then… you did lose the gentleman’s luggage and leave him at the wrong hotel.’
Oh no.I’m going to be sacked, and I haven’t even bloody started yet. I can’t go home. I simply can’t. The humiliation of facing my mother. Her greatest joy in life is being proven right. Not to mention the pub full of locals who hate me. Dillon and bloody Denise rubbing my nose in it, scoffing at what a failure I am. No. I can’t. They cannot sack me. Just as I’m about to protest, Erika laughs.
