The Guilt Trip(5)

She’d been about to nod in agreement, but then she’d been struck by how a weekend of imposed purgatory could be turned around if Paige was there too. Instead of spending four days making small talk with strangers, they could eat, drink, dance and pretend they weren’t responsible mothers for once. Suddenly, and selfishly, Rachel could see its potential.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she’d said. “Noah and Paige really like Will and Ali, so I’m sure they’d be flattered to be asked.”

Jack had looked at her with raised eyebrows, silently questioning whether they were talking about the same Paige, who was always so quick to denounce Ali’s shortcomings.

“Why did you have to push for Noah and Paige to come?” Jack had said later, after Will had left.

“Because it might be an opportunity to spend some time with them,” said Rachel. “We haven’t been away together for a while, and faced with the prospect of spending four days with your family, they might be just the distraction we need.” She laughed to soften the sideswipe. “We could all get a villa together and make a holiday out of it.”

Jack groaned. “Why can’t he get married here, where we’d all only have to endure each other for the afternoon before going home?”

“Don’t be such a miserable old sod,” she’d said, going up to him and wrapping her arms around his neck. “Noah and Paige are our friends.”

“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.