Christmas Without Holly Read online

  I don’t think Clive has ever given me a massage in all the time we’ve been seeing each other. Isn’t that what couples are meant to do? Sometimes, at least? I gave him a book on sensual massage a couple of Christmases ago – just as a subtle hint, you understand – but I don’t think I ever saw it again. He probably didn’t read it. Maybe he binned it.

  James is moving up to my neck and shoulders now and it’s even worse. As he hits a knot the size of The Titanic, I allow myself the luxury of shouting ‘Ow!’

  ‘Sorry. We’ll come back to that area later on.’

  ‘It’s alright. I was enjoying it.’

  ‘That’s what they all say.’

  He places the towel over my back and moves down to the soles of my feet. I’m terrified it’s going to be ticklish and I’m going to make a fool of myself by laughing, but the pressure is so firm that it bypasses the tickle zone altogether and feels great.

  The back of the legs is another matter altogether. I don’t think that the muscles there are used to this sort of treatment and it’s pretty painful at first, but the warmth and, well, sensuality seems to over-ride that, and I get used to it fairly quickly. I decide that I could live here, as long as I could get Domino’s to deliver once a week!

  I’ve completely lost track of time and melt into a sort of bamboo-sage haze. He works on the back of my thighs and on the sides of my hips, this time using a different, thinner stick, which he also uses on my arms and hands. He moves the towel from place to place so that only the area he’s working on is revealed. I’m feeling so drowsy that I only just notice that he’s stopped.

  ‘I’m just going to return to your knots and give them a little extra pummelling, then we’ll have a bit of a break if you’re still alive.’

  I can hear him moving around and look up to see him returning with a shorter, but thicker bamboo stick.

  ‘This might hurt a bit, but it won’t last long.’

  ‘Aw.’

  ‘I’m going to start on the left and move across to the right, OK?’

  I grunt weakly to show I’ve understood and brace myself. It feels like he’s using the rounded end of this thicker stick and he slowly pushes it against one of the knots near my shoulder blade. Oh god it hurts. The movement isn’t rapid; more like a slow but firm push against the offending area. He does the same thing to several other knots and then, thankfully, stops before I pass out or start blaspheming like a docker.

  ‘Very good. I’m just going to pop out of the room now, to give you a break and to allow you to turn onto your back. I think we’ll leave those knots for today and have another assault on them tomorrow.’

  ‘Assault’ is the right bloody word. When I hear him leave, I sit up and take a few deep breaths. I just hope my newly energised lymphatic system rewards me with a huge box of chocolates and a bottle of Baileys when I get home!

  I notice that the Japanesey muzak is still churning away in the background. I’m sure that real Japanese music doesn’t sound anything like this at all. I read somewhere once that instant coffee isn’t really coffee at all – it’s a coffee-flavoured hot drink. By that reckoning, this is music-flavoured silence!

  I have a big stretch (my bones cracking several times to punish me) and lie down on my back, carefully draping the towel across my boobs. My hair must be a mess from lying face down on that padded thing, so I run my hands through it and then rub my face. I really must stop thinking such negative thoughts about Clive! It’s all I seem to be doing since I got here. Maybe I’m too busy to think them in normal life. Maybe all it needs is your thoughts to flow free and everything starts falling apart. Perhaps this place could use that for their next advertising campaign. ‘Come to Willows Health Farm – everything in your life will start falling apart!’

  There’s a knock on the door. I say ‘OK!’ and James comes back in. He smiles at me and checks the electric blanket that the bamboo sticks live in. He’s got a nice smile, but it’s a professional one. It must be constantly on your mind to detach yourself from any sort of friendliness when you’re doing a job like this, particularly when most of your clients are scantily-clad women and particularly when you’ve got women like Rebecca cruising around like some predatory spa shark.

  He rubs some oil into my legs and starts on them with the bamboo.

  ‘What’s that smell? The oil, I mean.’

  ‘Cedarwood and lime. Sounds an unlikely combination, but they seem to go well together.’

  ‘You’re right, it’s nice.’

  He rolls the bamboo up and down the side of my legs. There’s more pressure than last time. He’s probably judged how much I can take by now. I start to wonder whether my thighs will be able to support my weight after this. I can feel severe muscle twitch coming on.

  ‘So how long are you here for? Couple of months?

  ‘Just the three days.’ I laugh. ‘I’d come here for longer if I could afford it, but there’s also work. I couldn’t take that long off as I’m off over Christmas as well. Well, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day. Back for New Year’s Eve.’

  ‘What’s it like working in a hospital over Christmas?’

  ‘Same as any other day, in the end. A bit sad, you know, with kids and stuff.’

  ‘Do they make jokes about your name? The kids, that is.’

  ‘If they do, I just punch them, Christmas day or not. Then I take their presents and sell them.’

  ‘Good thing, too. They just don’t know where to draw the line sometimes, do they? What are you doing for Christmas? Anything interesting?’

  This is very similar to hairdresser chat. Is he gay, I wonder? It would drive me mad, having to make small talk with people you don’t know all day every day. I have to do it to a degree, but at least some of the patients are unconscious a lot of the time, or drugged up to the eyeballs, or too ill, or don’t understand English. As I’m about to answer, I get the teeniest twinge of anxiety about the whole Christmas with Clive’s family thing. Why is that? It’s Clive! He’s my fiancé! These people will all be related to me one day!

  ‘I’m staying with my fiancé’s family for a few days.’

  I almost said ‘my future in-laws’, but stopped myself just in time. That’s a horrible phrase that people use! He starts work on my arms with a bamboo that looks like it’s been cut in half down the middle. It only hurts when he gently pushes it into my biceps.

  ‘That’ll be nice.’

  I must have grimaced involuntarily. He smiles at me.

  ‘Not nice?’

  ‘Well, his father can’t keep his eyes off my tits, his mother keeps smiling at me as if I’ve got some terrible disease and only have a few months to live, and his sister giggles like an idiot every time I speak. Apart from that, I’m sure it’ll be delightful!’

  ‘Families, eh?’

  As he works the bamboo into my shoulders, I give a little laugh without intending to.

  ‘Anything you want to share?’

  ‘I just realised that I’ve slagged my fiancé’s entire family off to a complete stranger! What must you think of me?’

  ‘I think that you’re evil, spiteful and not worthy of their charity! What does he do, your fiancé?’

  ‘He’s an investment banker. Don’t ask me what that means. He works in Hong Kong.’

  ‘Hong Kong!’ James raises an eyebrow. ‘That must make it difficult for surprise mid-week lunch dates and spontaneous trips to art galleries! How often do you get to see him?’

  I suddenly realise that I don’t like talking about this. No one at work mentions it anymore; neither do my friends, so it’s a little bit of a shock.

  ‘He comes back when his company sends him for whatever reason. It’s usually every three or four months.’

  Jesus. When you say that out loud, it sounds absolutely fucking terrible.

  ‘Lucky guy!’

  Lucky? Why lucky?

  ‘Why lucky?’

  He puts the bamboo stick onto his little table and uses his fingers to kn
ead my trapezius muscles, where most of the knotting lies. Ow!

  ‘Well – that’s only three or four times a year! A lot of women wouldn’t put up with that sort of appalling, selfish behaviour!’

  He says it in such a way that it’s funny, not rude or insulting. I like him, gay or not. I’m trying to think of a response, but nothing comes to mind.

  ‘OK. We’re finished for today. You’ve done very well. Really. Most clients run away after just a few minutes of that. I’m going to put a blanket over you and leave you to recover on your own for a while. When you’re ready, you can get up and get dressed. Don’t steal the blanket.’ He wags a finger at me. ‘And don’t forget to shower before using the pool! I’ll be checking for droplets of oil on the surface later on.’

  As he closes the door, I close my eyes. Is that true, I wonder? A lot of women wouldn’t put up with that? Perhaps I’m some sort of saint! I take a deep breath. I feel like I’ve been run over by a car. The driver stopped, looked in his rear view mirror and then reversed over me, for good measure. I take another deep breath and turn over onto my side.

  Two

  After I have a shower (nice as it smells, it feels better to get that massage oil off my skin) and get into my swimsuit, I sit down by the side of the pool with a cup of herbal tea. There were three choices in the teabag thingy: Kashmiri Green Thai tea, Goji Berry Rooibos or Scarlet Glow (containing hibiscus and elderflower).

  I decided to go with Scarlet Glow as it sounded nicer than the others. I’ve never been a great fan of herbal tea (McVitie’s Milk Chocolate Digestives don’t taste the same when you dunk them in it!), but this is actually quite nice. Whether it’s a habit I’ll continue when I get home is something else, of course. I’ll probably be back on the Hot Lava Java with three sugars and full fat milk (with an almond biscotti on the saucer)!

  I’ve got two hours before my next appointment (a Tai Chi private session, no less!) and I’m just about to ponder diving in the pool and doing a few healthy lengths when I spot Rebecca wandering around. I didn’t see her come in and I’m not in the mood to talk to her, so I take off my robe and slip into the steam room. She might come in here, of course, in which case I’m sunk, but she doesn’t look like a steam room sort of person to me (whatever a steam room sort of person looks like). She might fall apart like my book did.

  It’s so dense with steam that I can hardly see anything, but after a few seconds I can make out the shapes of two other women and an overweight bald bloke who’s smiling at nothing, which is a bit weird. No one is sitting on the higher bench, so I go up there to avoid making small talk with the others. The downside of this is that it feels like my face is burning off, but that’s a small price to pay for being selectively antisocial. Also, I’ll be more difficult to see if Rebecca decides to open the door and have a look inside.

  I start wondering just how much time someone like Rebecca spends here. She said that this was her eighth time this year. Let’s give her the benefit of the doubt and assume that each stay is more or less a week. That’s about eight weeks. Two months! That can’t be right, can it? What does she do for the other ten months of the year? She obviously doesn’t work, at least not in the normal sense of the word. Maybe she helps with charities, though I can’t quite see it.

  It’s somewhere between a thousand and fifteen hundred to stay here for a week. Could be more, depending on the sort of room you stay in and which advance booking deal you use. Factoring in all the treatments she probably has, she could be spending at least ten thousand pounds a year here! Jesus Christ! And she indicated that her husband, sorry - hubby pays for it. What must his job be when he can throw money like that around on, effectively, nothing? I hope she’s phenomenally good in bed!

  My stay here cost over five hundred pounds and I’d been saving up for four-and-a-bit months for that. I can only hope that if you’re like Rebecca, it becomes less and less of a treat each time you come here and I don’t mean come here in the same way Rebecca does!

  I’m starting to feel dizzy and a little nauseous, so I get out of the steam room, have a lovely, refreshing swim and head back to my room to get changed. Clive said he’d be texting me today, so I check my mobile but there’s nothing. I type in a brief text: How r u? Anything exciting happening today? Xxx and send it to him.

  It’s stupid, but I always expect people to reply to texts instantaneously, as if you’re actually talking to them in real time. I stare dumbly at my mobile but, predictably, nothing happens and I chuck it onto the bed.

  I decide to have a short sleep before my Tai Chi session, but after ten minutes or so I’m still awake. I thought that after the massage, steam bath and swim I’d be feeling a little wiped out, but the opposite seems to be true. Maybe that’s the point of all those things – you have more energy. I can’t have drunk a cup of coffee for at least twenty-four hours, so that might have something to do with it as well. I read that drinking lots of coffee actually creates fatigue rather than prevents it. It doesn’t feel like that’s the case, but I guess it must be true if it was in Cosmopolitan.

  So I stare at the ceiling for a while, dimly aware of a dull pain in my shoulders and the left side of my back where James did his worst. It’s funny – I don’t often have any time to myself to actually just lie down and think about nothing. I decide I don’t like it very much. There’s a host of things that are bubbling at the back of my mind, but usually I’m just able to cut them dead just as they begin to beg for attention.

  I start to think about what James said when I told him that Clive worked in Hong Kong. It all seems so normal to me now that I tend to forget how strange it might seem to other people. Even Rebecca reacted with surprise when I told her that I hadn’t ever been out there. I’ve never even considered going out there, to tell you the truth. For one thing, I couldn’t afford it (and Clive’s company isn’t about to jet me out there for nothing), and for another, I don’t really think of it as a place, just somewhere where Clive works. That’s a bit strange, now I come to think of it.

  I’ve been seeing Clive for just over three years now and we got engaged just under a year ago. It was Clive’s idea, I think. I really can’t remember. I recall that one night we’d been out with some people from the UK branch of his company and he introduced me as his fiancée. Just like that! I couldn’t remember whether we’d actually ever talked about getting married, or whether he thought it would show the people he worked with that he was a stable, heterosexual guy and worth promoting or something.

  Afterwards, he just said he thought it was about time and a month later gave me an engagement ring after we’d been out for a Japanese meal. A couple of years before, I’d have said something like ‘Hey! Isn’t this something that we should have talked about before you went around telling everybody? It’s meant to be a joint decision, you know! Who the fuck do you think you are? Here! Take your ring and you know where you can put it!’

  But I didn’t say any of those things. In fact, I didn’t kick up any sort of fuss at all. Maybe I was just tired! Thinking about it now, it had a sort of lazy inevitability about it. It was the opposite of romantic. It’s like there was some sort of rule book that said when you’ve gone out with someone for a certain amount of days, weeks, months or years, the next step is to get engaged and then, finally, married. No joy, no spontaneity, just ‘this is how it is’.

  A lot of the girls I worked with had gone through this same pattern. They’d had lots of boyfriends, then had one special boyfriend, then, after a while, got engaged or got married. It just seemed like it was the obvious thing to do, unless the boyfriend/fiancé turned out to be a mass murderer or shot your dog something. Time always seemed to have a lot to do with it. The longer it went on, the older you got and the more likely you were to think about settling down.

  A little voice often whispered to me that all of this was a load of codswallop and that we’d all been brainwashed, but, like many others, I ignored it.

  Before I met Clive, I’d been with a guy cal
led Simon, who I was madly in love with. We’d actually lived together for just under two years and it was fantastic. Then something – I’m not sure what it was – changed between us. We’d started arguing over nothing and then after one particularly massive blow-up, we decided to call it a day. I moved out and into the place I’m living in now. It was a relief at the time.

  The stupid thing was that I couldn’t remember what the argument was about or why we’d got like that. It was such a shame. Maybe there’s a certain amount of time some relationships are meant to last and then it all starts to disintegrate. I don’t know.

  But since I’ve been with Clive, there’s always been another little voice at the back of my head (I have a lot of little voices. I haven’t started giving them names yet) telling me that I went out with Clive because I was on the rebound from Simon.

  Now I’ve always thought that rebound stuff was terribly immature and gives the impression of a lonely and needy person, who is so messed up by a relationship failing that they grab anything that goes by. It’s all to do with fear, I thought. Fear of not having a bf. Fear of being alone. Fear of having no social life. Fear of what your friends and family might say or think. I always felt pity for any of my friends that seemed to be in a rebound relationship and never thought it would happen to me.

  But maybe it did. Maybe I’m more in need of security than I’d like to admit!

  I check my watch (still plenty of time!), change into some loose fitting jogging pants and a t-shirt and make myself a cup of decaff with some fake sugar stuff to make it palatable. It still tastes like mud. I ate a lot of mud as a child, so I know what I’m talking about.

  I’ve seen people doing Tai Chi in parks and I’ve seen it on the telly, but I’ve never tried it myself and I’m quite looking forward to seeing what it’s like. Slow, I imagine.

  I realise that this is the first time I’ve thought of Simon in years. I couldn’t honestly say that I’m still in love with him, but I can’t help smiling when I think about his rather crazy, erratic personality. He was the complete opposite of Clive in almost every way and couldn’t keep his hands off me, even in public. He was always touching, stroking and rubbing. He jokingly said it was to keep me in a permanent state of semi-arousal and if that was his intention, it certainly did the trick!