Читать книгу Sun, Sand & Sequins - Coleen McLoughlin - Страница 4

Ok, so holiday packing can be a struggle. Especially when you’ve got a mountain of clothes and shoes – not to mention an iPod, a camera and a hairdryer – to pack into a case roughly the size of a box of tissues. Oh, and did I mention that this particular suitcase is pink with gold sparkles?

“Mum!” I complained as Mum got my suitcase down from the loft and put it on my bed. “I can’t take this on holiday. I’ll get laughed off the beach!”

“You loved it when you were seven, and I’m sure you can love it again, Coleen,” said Mum.

I sighed and flipped the case open. Then I packed my favourite summer shoes: a pair of sparkly sandals covered in silver sequins. They fitted – with about three millimetres left over. “But I’ll never get everything in!” I wailed, looking at the other six pairs that I’d lined up on my bedroom floor.

“What do you need seven pairs of shoes for?” Dad asked, stopping at my room and staring at my packing. There was something bright orange draped over his arm. “We’re going for a beach holiday, Coleen – tomorrow, ideally, though at the rate you’re going you won’t be packed until Tuesday. Are you planning to paddle in a different pair of shoes every day?”

I rolled my eyes at him. Dads don’t get shoes. “What’s that?” I asked, eyeing the orange thing on Dad’s arm.

“Ta-da!” Dad announced, unfurling the most disgusting pair of orange swimming trunks I’d ever seen and flapping them at me. “What do you think?”

“The fish in the sea’ll think you’re a giant Wotsit, Dad,” I advised. “Think again.”

“At least you lot won’t lose me at the hotel pool,” Dad joked, folding up his shorts again.

“Believe me, Dad, we will,” I muttered as Dad went off to help Mum squeeze everything into their old black case on wheels. “As quickly as we can.”

My little sister, Em, wandered into my room and flopped down on the bed. As usual, she looked a total mess. Football strip (badly in need of a wash), football socks and a pair of trackie bottoms with holes in the knees, not to mention a gap in her front teeth where a tooth had just dropped out.

“And there was me, thinking seven-year-old girls wore pink all day long,” I sighed.

“Yuck,” said Em, as I knew she would. Needless to say, her suitcase had the emblem of her favourite footie team, Marshalswick Park, on it.

“Get out of here, Em,” I begged, trying to decide between three different T-shirts. “Haven’t you got packing to do?”

“All done,” Em smirked.

“What?” I shrieked, dropping my tees. “But you only started about five minutes ago!”

Em shrugged. “Cozzie, T-shirts, shorts, sandals, latest football mag, autograph book because footballers go to the Algarve and you never know, toothbrush,” she recited. “Didn’t take long.”

“What about knickers?” I demanded.

Em wrinkled her forehead. “Oh yeah,” she said, getting off my bed, “I’d better stick in a couple of pairs.”

Holidays in my family usually go like this. Mum goes on at Dad for weeks to book something. The holidays get closer. Dad doesn’t do anything until the last minute, and then he grabs the cheapest thing he sees, which nearly always has flights leaving at four o’clock in the morning. Mum’s left running around like a mad thing, getting Nan to take Rascal our dog and vacuuming behind the couch. Well, this time, Dad has totally outdone himself. He booked us a week in the Algarve this afternoon – and we are getting a taxi to the airport before sunrise tomorrow morning.

“Heaven knows what this place is going to be like,” Mum grumbled as we all grabbed a bite to eat before what was going to be the shortest night’s sleep in history.

“It’s the Algarve, Trish,” Dad said soothingly. “Sea, sand and plenty of sun. I tell you, I can spot the good ones a mile off. When have I ever been wrong?”

“Well,” Mum started, “how about that time we went to Croatia and the hotel hadn’t even been built? Or the trip to Brittany that turned out to be a trip to Britain, which I didn’t want to visit because I already lived there? Or—”

“Well, this one’s going to be different,” Dad interrupted hastily. “Trust me.”

Em and I shared a look. We’d believe that once we got there.

It felt like I’d only just shut my eyes when Mum was shaking me awake again. I whittled my shoes down to three pairs and jumped on my sparkly pink case to shut it. I squeezed another T-shirt, scarf and belt into my hand luggage and put on as many extra clothes as I could. Then I think I actually fell asleep in the taxi, because suddenly it was all lights and bustle and that ding-dong echo you get in airports. Now my eyelids were officially open, it was time to get excited.

Airports are brilliant places. They just smell of holidays. There’s so many different kinds of people to look at, making me wonder about all the different places they must be travelling to. Tall ones, skinny ones, rich ones, ones with tans that make them look like old leather handbags and ones so pale you just know they’ll burn to a crisp on their holiday beach within seconds. And if you ever need fashion inspiration, the mix of colours and styles in an airport is full of it!

As we waited around for our flight to be called, I browsed through the gorgeous duty-free clothes shops and dashed off a couple of postcards to my best mates, Mel and Lucy. I’d barely had a chance to tell them I was off for a whole week. It would be really weird not having them there to gossip with. Then I thought of Ben, Lucy’s big brother, as I posted the cards. I’d had a crush on him for half my life. He’d just had a dramatic and final break-up with his on-off girlfriend Jasmine, and I was hoping that a week in the Portuguese sun would give me the sort of tan that would make him notice me at long last…“Flight TP051 for Faro,” droned the tannoy after we’d been there about two hours. “Departing from gate twelve. Would passengers please make their way to…”

“So far so good, eh?” Dad said as we all filed on board and took our seats near the front of the plane.

Mum muttered something about chickens and eggs. Em clambered across to the window seat and pulled out her new football magazine.

“If you’re going to read that,” I pointed out, “how come you get the window seat?”

“No arguments, kids,” Dad said. “You can have the window on the way home, Coleen. This is our holiday now, and I plan to enjoy it.”

Kids! I scowled at Dad. Ignoring me, he took out his fitness magazine, and I could see him sucking in his stomach as he looked at the muscly bloke on the front cover.

“What do you think of my stomach, Trish?” he asked Mum, sounding a bit anxious.

“Squishy,” said Mum. Her nose was already deep in a pink, sparkly novel that was guaranteed to be all about kissing tall dark strangers. “But nice.”

“Just as well you like it, Mum,” I said, settling back into my seat as the plane started taxiing down the runway. I jabbed the cover of Dad’s mag. “Coz there’s no way it’s ever gonna look like that.”

We flew through a clear blue sky, with Em giving us Fascinating Factoids about Portugal and football practically the whole way. Apparently the whole country is mad for it. No wonder my little sister was excited that we were going there.

“And half the Marshalswick Park squad have holiday homes in the Algarve,” Em said happily, folding up her magazine as the plane started its descent into Faro airport. “That must mean it’s brilliant.”

As I’ve said before, Marshalswick Park are Em’s favourite team. They’d risen up the league like a rocket ever since they’d taken on this new manager, and now they were serious contenders for the top spot – as Em told us most weekends after watching their matches on the telly.

We got through baggage control and came out into the bright Portuguese sun. I whipped out my new sunnies and stuck them on my nose as our rep ushered us all on to a big, air-conditioned bus that stood outside the airport underneath these waving palm trees.

“See?” said Dad smugly as we all settled back into our comfy seats and watched the driver and his mates packing our luggage into the big locker underneath the bus. “I told you everything would be OK.”

The bus wound out of the airport. After about fifteen minutes, it pulled off the dual carriageway into the first resort: a buzzy-looking place with loads of bars and extremely tall hotels.

“Not us,” said Dad as the bus doors slammed shut and we drove on.

“Shame,” Mum sighed. “It looked like fun.”

We stopped off at three more places along the way. The bus was getting emptier and emptier, and still the rep hadn’t read out our names.

“Are we going to Spain?” Em complained after the fourth place came and went.

The bus put on its ticker and pulled off the main road again.

“Castelo do Sol,” I said, reading out the town’s name as we swung past a sign and a bunch of half-built hotels that had Mum looking tense. “What do you think that means?”

“Sol Campbell’s castle!” Em gasped.

Doesn’t that girl ever think of anything but football?!

The bus squeezed down an impossibly narrow lane that had me flinching back from the windows, thinking the mirrors were going to scrape the buildings on both sides. Then it pulled out again on to this long beachfront road. There were three massive hotels all stood next to each other, with pools and sea views across a gorgeous sandy beach. The road was fringed with palm trees, and these brilliant rock formations stood down by the shore like huge golden statues.

“It’s magic!” I breathed, staring at the beach in delight.

“I take back everything bad I’ve ever said about you, Kieran,” said Mum, staring up at the hotels. Their polished marble walls shone in the sun like glass, and their pools winked through the bus windows at us like pale blue sapphires.

The bus dropped three lots of totally ecstaticlooking holidaymakers outside the three hotels. There was only one family left as we swung away from the seafront.

Us.

“Hotel Paraíso,” said the rep, snapping her little notebook shut as the bus gave a very final-sounding wheeze and stopped at the side of the road. “That’ll be you lot, then. Save the best for last, eh?”

We stared at the place the bus had brought us. The water-stained red and white awning over the main entrance flapped at us in an embarrassed kind of way, and the words Hotel Paraíso flickered in blue neon letters across the front of the once-maybe-white-but-now-grey building.

“Paraíso means ‘paradise’,” offered the rep.

There was a beat of silence.

“KieRAN!” Mum yelled.