‘It’s not too cold for Dylan?’ he asks.
Jody meets his eye. ‘Dylan is absolutely fine. Aren’t you, kiddo?’
The boy shrugs. ‘I’m hungry.’
‘We’ll get something soon, once we’re through this bit. We have to show the men our passports first. Look.’
They do look, which is probably a mistake. The queue is long and messy, splitting competitively into three channels at the security kiosks. Some travellers are waved through almost immediately; others are kept for two or three long minutes. Trevor Smug and his wife are way ahead, of course.
A sudden rattle of applause catches Sam’s attention. It’s coming from a small crowd clustered round a doorway at the far side of the hall. Is someone famous passing through, he wonders – maybe from that private jet?
He goes on tiptoe to get a better view, then realises he’s drawn the attention of one of the grim-faced men in the kiosks. Sam quickly turns away.
It occurs to him that all the staff are men, and many are vaguely similar in appearance: short and stocky, with black hair and dark stubble; lots of moustaches but no beards. It’s a look that reminds him of TV clips from the olden days – dodgy adverts for aftershave and cigars. What’s odd is that he can tell they’re foreign. But how?
Further down the room there’s a glass partition, and beyond that another sprawling queue of arrivals. Again he’s pretty sure they’re not British: probably German or maybe Swedish, something like that. He wonders if those people can tell he’s English just from his face, and thinks they probably can.
And do they also get a feel for his background, what social class he’s from? Can they tell that he’s from somewhere near the bottom?
His own view is that he has battled his way on to the first rung of the ladder and now has the second rung in sight. He and Jody are both twenty-six. After more than ten years together they’ve got two kids, the eldest already at junior school, and yet they don’t own a home and they have no chance of getting a mortgage or saving up for a deposit – not when there’s the crippling rent to find every month.
So a holiday like this one – high season, all-inclusive – it feels like they’re broadcasting to the world that there’s loads of cash kicking about. And there isn’t.
I virtually gave up smoking for this, he reminds himself. No new trainers for over a year. Two Fridays in three he didn’t go to the pub after work, and Jody gave up even more than that, as well as working all the extra hours she could at the shoe shop. No new clothes, cheap make-up rather than the nice stuff from Boots, walking instead of taking the bus.
Three years of scrimping and saving (he’s used the phrase many times but still has no idea what ‘scrimping’ means) and this time next week it’ll be over, just like that. Two thousand, seven hundred and fifty-eight pounds: gone.
It scares him, if he’s honest. He doesn’t see how this holiday can ever live up to their expectations, or justify the money they’ve spent. Jody disagrees. She says it’s about giving the kids an experience they’ll be able to treasure for the rest of their lives. And as she keeps reminding him, after what they went through with Dylan, they all deserve something a bit special.
It takes another hour to clear passport control and retrieve their luggage from the baggage area, which has become a bear pit containing over a thousand weary, irritable holidaymakers from four different flights. At Jody’s urging, Sam fights his way through the crush and returns with both of their cases, hard shell Samsonites borrowed from Jody’s parents. They load them on to a trolley, endure a mini-tantrum from Dylan when he’s prevented from clambering on top, and make their way to the arrivals hall.
Jody spots a couple of English girls from their tour operator, Sheldon Travel. After a clipboard consultation they’re directed to the main car park: coach number fourteen.
Outside, it’s even hotter than it felt when they got off the plane. They stop on a wide marble concourse and Jody shields her eyes with her hand, surveying row after row of coaches.
‘There’s Eleven,’ Sam murmurs, and then Grace says, ‘Fourteen! Over there, look!’
This lifts their spirits until Dylan starts crying again. ‘Mummy, I wanted to find it!’
‘You did, in a way. And you’re helping now, by being such a good boy.’
That doesn’t work as well as Jody hopes, so she rummages in Sam’s rucksack for the emergency stash of Haribo. Smiles on the kids’ faces at last.
Crossing one of the access roads, there’s a bus swinging round towards them but they’re looking right instead of left. Sam has stepped off the kerb when Grace grabs his arm. ‘Dad!’
He jumps back, standing completely still until the bus has thundered past. There’s a familiar blankness to his gaze. Jody is only too aware that Sam’s way of coping with stress is to withdraw into himself, and although he doesn’t intend for his reaction to make everyone tense, it nearly always has that effect.
For a second, nobody moves or speaks. Then, to Jody’s relief, Sam breathes out slowly and summons a grin for the kids. ‘Looks like you two had better teach me how to cross the road.’
The coach driver is short and stocky, with greying hair and a moustache. He wants the name of their hotel but Sam’s mind has gone blank. He has to call Jody back just as she’s trying to herd the kids aboard.
‘The Adriana Beach,’ she says, a bit tetchily.
‘Sorry.’ Sam starts to repeat it but the driver has already snatched up a case, which he slings into the luggage bay with an impatient sigh.
Hurrying the trolley back to the terminal building, Sam feels disorientated, not just because the traffic’s on the wrong side, or because of the heat, or the unfamiliarity of his surroundings. It’s more to do with a suspicion that everyone else knows the rules – what to do, where to go, how to behave – as though there’s a set of instructions that was handed out to them but withheld from him.
The signs don’t help. He knew the country had its own language, but he hadn’t imagined that the writing would look so different. The meaningless squiggles bring back painful memories of all the years he struggled with reading, feeling like he was shut out of everything. There was talk of dyslexia, but his mum never did anything about getting him tested.
He still burns at the memory of the humiliation, having to attend remedial classes in the first year of secondary school. That’s when the truancy got out of hand and his life so nearly went off the rails, just as it had done with his brother a few years before. But whereas Carl had been beyond help from the start, in Sam’s case his uncle Paul had stepped in to save him.
Jody and the children are at the back of the coach. Sam settles next to Dylan and takes a fistful of Haribo to share. The driver’s got the engine running, thank God, so the aircon is working.
Dylan is chewing on the gooey sweets while chattering away, and Sam feels guilty when his eyes keep drifting shut. Each time it’s a tougher challenge to open them again, and suddenly he’s in the middle of a weird kind of waking dream. They’re on the plane as it falls into the sea, but it doesn’t break apart. People gather at the windows, pointing at the exotic foreign fish as the plane slowly sinks towards the bottom. Sam is sure they’ll all die once the oxygen runs out but no one else seems the slightest bit worried.