Dad came home as a centaur that day. He rapped his hooves impatiently on the front door for someone to let him in. Me and my sister Anne were playing rats on the kitchen floor, running around the table legs and ticking Mum’s legs with our whiskers as she fixed tea.
“Go see to your Dad,” Mum snapped at me, “and you should be past these silly games. You know how much I hate those long pink tails.”
I wandered grumpily down the hall, climbing back into human form as I did so. Dad’s horse-and-man shape loomed through the frosted glass. He hurrumphed at me when I opened the door as though I’d been a long time coming, then pushed past and trotted into the lounge. He tried to sit down on the sofa, gave up, and clumsily bent his four legs to lower himself down on the carpet.
“You should be doing your homework,” he said as I stood watching from the doorway.
“I’ll do it all straight after tea.”
“Well just don’t expect...” he winced. The long joints of his equine legs were hurting in the position he was sitting. As he changed into the shape of a large labrador, I stood waiting for the end of a sentence I knew by heart. “...don’t expect to play football afterwards.”
I nodded. If I hadn’t already known what he was saying, his dog’s vocal chords would have given me few clues. Dad was a physically clumsy man. He often changed shapes on the way home on the train when he’d had a bad day at work to try to get it out of his system. But no matter what shape he took, he was never able to make himself either well understood or comfortable.
At tea, we all came as ourselves. Only babies did otherwise, squirming from half-formed shape to shape as I could still (and with some disgust) remember Anne doing in her high chair.
Mum said, “I went to see Doctor Shaw today.”
“Oh,” Dad said, not looking, chasing a few stray peas around the plate with his fork.
“He says they’ll need to do more tests to see what the problem is.”
“You can get the time off at the shop?”
“They have to give it, don’t they? It’s the law.”
“I told you when you started there, it’s a mistake to work anywhere where there’s no union.”
“Well, I’m going to go anyway, day after tomorrow. I’m sick of... sick of this thing.”
Mum was gazing down at her plate. She’d only given herself baked beans on a slice of toast instead of the gammon and egg the rest of us had. It had been the same now for two or three months, since her problem had started. She really couldn’t face up to meat, and would have been happier – if she could have faced the indignity – climbing trees and nibbling at bits of green stuff out in the garden. Anne and I had caught her doing just that on a couple of occasions when we were home all day at half term. Hanging upside down from the almond tree with her apron flapping over her face. She’d shooed us all the way out of the house, her face flushing between anger and embarrassment.
“You’ve got rights,” Dad said. “Just you tell me if they cause you any trouble.”
Mum said nothing. She dropped her fork onto the tablecloth with her good left hand, leaving a streak of tomato. I knew even then that she was going through a bad time, what with her right hand. At the moment, she had it hidden beneath the table, not so much because she didn’t want us to see it – she’d given up after the first few weeks wearing gloves and bandages except when she went out of the house – but because she hated having to look at it herself. Her right hand was hairy; hairy with hairs that only petered out around her elbow. And it had the three long hooked claws of brandypus griesus, the three-toed sloth or ai. It had been a mystery to us all how she’d even come up with that shape in the first place, as Mum wasn’t a great changer and was never very imaginative about it when she did. But it had happened in the night when she was asleep, which was always more difficult because you didn’t have the normal control. She put it down to the cheese she’d had before she’d gone to bed, and some wildlife programme she’d been watching – which was odd, because all the rest of us could remember seeing that night was a quiz programme, some football and the news.
“Well anyway,” she said. “Tomorrow’s another day.”
“That’s right,” said Dad. “And I’m due some overtime from all the supplementary bills we’ve had to send out. How about we get a baby sitter for these two here and go out for a few drinks.”
Anne piped in, “Please, not Mrs Bossom again.”
But Mum shook her head anyway. “I’m sorry dear. I’ve promised to take the kids over for tea to see Grandma. Of course, I’ll leave something nice for you to microwave.”
Dad nodded and chewed his food, glaring across at the microwave.
I finished homework at about eight, and ran out to play football on the balding patch of grass in front of our houses. Anne came too, and the rest of our gang were there, apart from Harry Blaines, whose parents were having marital difficulties and were always taking him off with them to see some counsellor as though the whole thing was his fault.
There was a problem; the last time we’d played. Charlie Miller had lobbed our plastic ball over the high fence into the Hall’s back garden. The Halls were a mad and angry couple, and spent most of the time at home rowing and flying around the place as birds, pecking at each other, and at anyone who dared to ring the doorbell.
We all stood around arguing in the twilight. But then I remembered something – there was an old leather football in our garage. Cracked and deflated, it had been there for as long as I could remember, tucked out of sight and reach behind the old paint tins. On the off-chance that it might be of use, I went in, found the steps and pulled it down in a shower of rust and cobwebs. The odd thing was this; when I managed to fit in the nozzle of my bicycle pump, it began to wheeze and expand even before I started to inflate it.
I played in the side attacking the goal towards the brick wall by the row of garages. We all sprouted tentacles on our heads to distinguish us from the other side. As usual, I was centre forward. So were the rest of the team – Charlie, Bob, Peter, the two Ford sisters – apart from Anne, who was the smallest and ended up in goal between the piles of trainer tops and pullovers. For some reason, she decided she could do the job better as a baby stegosaurus. I had to go over and have a quite word with her after we had let in five quick and quite unnecessary goals.
“Saw your Mama in that shop today,” John Williams came over and said to me as stood rubbing a bruised feeler and catching my breath. “The shirt department. That’s where she works, isn’t it?”
“What if she does?” I said.
“You should have seen her. There was this man wanted his shirt taken out of the wrapper. You know, all the bits of card and the pins. Jesus H. Christ, your poor Mum was all over the bloody counter. Hasn’t got two proper hands these days has she?”
“At least she is my Mum,” I said, which – as John Williams had a family who were all be step-this-or-that – was a good below the belt swipe. I followed it off with a good below the belt kick.
When we’d finally finished fighting, we both felt better, and pleased with ourselves for being tough. I’d turned into a grizzly bear by then, and John was a tiger. But as always when you were fighting, you could never really manage the shape well enough to do any damage. That was probably a good thing, as I didn’t really hate him anyway. He was just a loud-mouthed prat.
We got back to the game. The final score was Side The Tentacles, 14: Side Without, 17. In my view, at least five of the latter goals would have been disallowed if there had been a referee. An argument started over whether we should settle the thing on penalties.
That was when Mum came out. She was in her old blue dressing gown and I could tell that something was the matter from the way she didn’t try to hide her hand. Without saying a word to anyone, she walked out beneath the widening pools of streetlight and bent down to pick up the football. She said something to it, and held it close to her. Everyone just stood staring as she walked back inside.
Me and Anne followed her back into the house a few minutes after. It was getting dark by then, and penalties were out of the question anyway.
Next day at school was pretty ordinary. Steven Halier got into trouble in Maths for changing into a porcupine, and was hauled out to the front. We all laughed when Mister Craig pulled off Steven’s shoe before he’d had time to properly change back into it and plonked it there on the desk, bits of shoe-leather, flesh and spines all mangled up together. As punishment, he made Steven leave class without the opportunity to get the thing back on, and he had to hobble around the playground all through the lunch break with only half a foot.
I always kept well away from Anne at school. She was four years below me, and beneath my heights of third form dignity. The girls in her year were all crazy about horses, and took turns to change into one so that the others could take rides. The whole thing looked incredibly stupid from where I was standing by the goalposts on the playing fields, talking about the mysteries of the universe and whether Jane Jolly in the year above us had really got glandular fever or had actually been missing all term so she could have an abortion. Still, I recognised my little sis as she lumbered past me along the touchline, hoofed and on all fours. It was generally easy enough to tell someone you knew well no matter what shape they were in. She was stumbling with a cheap-looking plastic bridle, having trouble with the weight of the fat girl classmate on her back.
After lunch, just as history was starting, Anne and I were both called to the headmaster’s office. The headmaster was sitting behind is desk in the form of a big teddy bear. We both let out a sigh of relief to see him that way – Mister Anderson often assumed that shape, but only when he was in a good mood and wasn’t after your blood. It wasn’t a terribly attractive teddy bear – the eyes really did look like glass buttons – but he entertained the idea that it made him appear friendly and approachable.
“I’ve had a phone call from you Father at work,” he said. “He’s had to go off to the hospital now. It’s your Mother, I’m afraid. She’s been taken ill. Your Grandmother’s coming round here to the school to pick you up.”
Gran arrived a few minutes later in her little Austin and drove us back to the bungalow that she and Grandad had moved into after he retired from the fire service. Grandad didn’t come, of course; Grandad didn’t go anywhere now, except for walks. It had been a big family story about what had happened to him when he retired, one of those things which had gone past the stage of being sad – or even a joke – and was now simply accepted. After the first few job-free weeks of gardening and sitting around in the pub drinking more than he could afford, Grandad had started to get depressed. He said it was dog’s life, doing nothing every day. Why, he’d ten men under him when he was working, with people’s lives at stake. The Christmas when I was about six, Grandad had changed into a black and white mongrel with a jaunty eye patch, and he had never changed back since.
Gran now accepted Grandad that way, taking him for walks, buying tins of good-quality dog food at the supermarket, sending him to kennels and going off on holidays on her own. And so did we, the whole family. Not that Grandad was a particularly fun sort of dog to have around, the kind that you could throw sticks for and get into scrapes with. He was past sixty after all, crotchety half the time with rheumatism, his muzzle going grey. Still, he came up to me and Anne in the hall of their bungalow with his tail wagging. I patted his head let him lick my hand for a while before Gran took us into the lounge.
Gran made us both sit down. She still hadn’t said anything about Mum. Grandad scratched his ear and curled up in front of the gas fire, which, as always – and even now in the middle of summer – was on, and muttering to itself.
“My dears, you both look worried,” she said – which I suppose we probably did. It hadn’t really occurred to us that Mama might be seriously ill, but once before when Mum had gone into hospital to have something done, we’d had to spend a whole week with them in the bungalow whilst Dad went to work and tried to cook himself spam fritters at home for tea. Grandad and Grandma were fine in small doses, but not to stay with.
“Your Mum’s really not that bad,” Grandma added. “But you know she’s been having trouble with that hand of hers. Now,” Gran leaned forward, as though she was sharing a secret, “it’s started to spread. And she can’t to a thing about it.”
We went to see Mum in hospital that evening. The three-toed sloth business with her hand hadn’t so much spread as taken over. She wasn’t in any of the usual wards, but in a new place at the back of the maternity wing that had bare concrete floors and smelled like a zoo. Mama was behind bars, hanging upside down from an old branch, with big brown eyes staring out. The doctor warned us not to try to put our hands through the bars, because Mum had really lost all control, and although sloths were herbivores, they could give you a nasty bite. Anne began to cry. She thought a herbivore was like cancer. I was older, and I guessed the truth – that Mama becoming a sloth wasn’t that different to what had happened to Grandad, and that even though she hadn’t done it deliberately, it was probably a kind of mental thing.
Mama just hung there, looking at us, her flattened muzzle gently twitching. She had a long shaggy coat that hung down around her, and the doctor explained that in the wild – and if Mum really had been a three-toed sloth – it would have been green with a special kind of algae. It was pretty boring really, and the chocolates and the stack of old woman’s magazines Gran had made us bring were obviously a waste of time. So as Gran wittered on uselessly through the bars about the WI fete, me and Anne opened up the chocolates and started munching them and squabbling over the centres, wandering along the cages to see who else was here.
They were an odd-looking bunch. You can usually spot a shape-changed human from the real thing a mile off, but most of these were different. If it hadn’t been for the medical charts with the names and graphs hanging by the padlocked doors, you’d never have guessed that most of them weren’t what they pretended to be. Even Grandad, who’d been a mongrel for nearly five years now, wasn’t anything like this convincing.
There was a lama, a coyote, a huge insect with mandibles like a lawnmower, and a creature-from-black-lagoon-thing that seemed to be rotting at the fins and smelled like an old canal. There were bubbling tanks filled with fishes. One of them was recognisably a catfish, but was scooting around the bottom of the tank of wheels. At the far end, there was a plastic chair behind a rope that we thought was just a chair until it moved when Anne climbed over and tried to sit on it.
“What’s that supposed to be?” Anne asked, pointing to a patch of turf in a glass case. I looked at the medical charts clipped to the side. It said: Lumbricus terrestris. I’d just done that in science and was able to tell Anne that it meant an earthworm.
Dad arrived soon afterwards. He’d picked up a big bouquet of roses from the caravan that sold flowers in the hospital carpark, and pushed them towards Mum through a flap in the bars. Mum reached out a long, lugubrious hand and took them. One by one, she ate the lot, thorns and all. Between wincing, Anne and I could hardly stop ourselves from laughing.
We didn’t have to stay with Gran and Grandad that night. Dad had taken time off from work. That was a relief – we didn’t even mind the soggy spam fritters too much, although at the same time it was a little worrying. I mean, I thought as the three of us sat in the lounge watching TV afterwards, this in-the-head business must be a lot worse than the secret-down-below business that had got Mum into hospital before. By chance, the people in the soap opera we were watching were sitting around in someone’s kitchen talking about another of the characters who had supposedly become ill a couple of episodes before but was probably leaving the series. They were all in the shape of armadillos – which Dad said was the only way these people could act – and there were subtitles in case you had any difficulty understanding what they were saying. It seemed that the ill character had had a nervous breakdown, and that, like Mama, he was in a special wing of the local hospital. A nervous breakdown, was, I decided, exactly what Mama was having.
Dad was grumpy. He shooed us off to bed like we didn’t have any right to our usual books and baths. He didn’t even ask if we’d done our homework, which at any other time would have been reassuring.
Anne and I both climbed out of bed and squatted of sight in the shadows at the top of the stairs as Dad rang up various relatives to explain what had happened. Mostly, it was an extended version of the stuff he’d told us, with the business about the hand and how Mum had been tired lately. But the last phone call he made to Mum’s sister Joan was slightly different.
“Yeah,” he said, sitting back on the creaky chair by the phone. “I guess it’s all made it come back to her.”
Dad nodded vigorously as Aunt Joan said something to him.
“Funny thing is,” he said. “I thought she’d got over this thing years ago. I mean, you were there then, and I wasn’t.”
Eventually, he put down the phone and went back into the lounge, closing the door, turning up the TV loud as though he was trying to hide his thoughts. What thing, I wondered, lying awake in bed long after the house had gone silent. I was in one of those sweaty, tossy states when you’re not sure whether you’re awake or dreaming. I woke up fully with the figures of my alarm clock showing past two, and found that I had three long black claws on each hand, and that I was covered with hair. Although I changed back with no difficulty, the incident scared me. I knew now that what Mama had was a head-thing, but did that mean it could be hereditary?
Next morning, me and Anne went to school as though it was any other day. The only difference was that Dad dropped us off in the car on his way to visit Mum at the hospital. Word had got around. All the teachers were nice to us that day, and even the other kids. Everyone seemed to know about Mum. I glared at John Williams when he came up to me during break, silently daring him to say the kind of thing that had got us into the fight when we were playing football. But one look at his face told me that it had gone beyond all that – that he actually felt sorry for me. More than anything, I think it was that that made me realise that Mum really was ill.
Gran and Grandad were there with Dad when we went to see Mum at hospital that evening. And Grandad was human. Anne didn’t even recognise him. He looked pretty neat, the way you want your Grandad to look when you’re a kid, not old and stooped and smelly, but with silver hair brushed back and long, in a white colonial suit with a dark blue waistcoat and paisley cravat bulging out at the collar. The only thing he hadn’t changed the jaunty black patch over one eye. It was probably a kind of birthmark.
Dad was very edgy. He’d come as a snake and kept climbing up over the bars as though he wanted to get into the cage with Mum, although at the same time he obviously didn’t want to.
There was a doctor there too. A different doctor from the one we’d seen the night before. He was in a suit, and from the way he talked, I guessed he was a head-doctor, the type that you see in films. I thought, Oh no, we’re going to end up like Harry Blaines, going to family therapy, but he turned out to be young and quite nice, and kept saying that he really thought Mum was doing well. She was eating plenty of leaves and fruit, and hanging there by her long arms the way sloths were apparently supposed to.
Back at home, Dad made us stay at the table in the kitchen after we’d eaten, which was the last thing we really wanted, what with the taste of his cooking and the room still filled with smoke from the blackened frying pan. But we said it was time we had a talk, and we knew from the look on his face (he’d turned back from a snake to drive the car home) that he really meant it.
“Your Mum,” he said, “she didn’t have a happy childhood. Well, she was a woman by then really, the time I’m talking about.”
“But it was before she met you,” I said, and Dad gave me a look as though he guessed that we’d been listening to him on the phone to Aunt Joan last evening. For some reason, the thought of being a sneak made me turn into an elephant. It was embarrassing – but for a while, I just couldn’t help it.
Ignoring me – not even making his usual warning about the strength of the furniture – Dad went on; “Your Mum had a – a difficult time when she was in her late teens.”
I nodded, my trunk swinging slightly and knocking over the bottle of brown sauce before I had a chance to pull it back in. If Mum was late teens at the time, I guessed that it probably had to do with sex and babies. From my experience, there was no much else that kids of that age got up to, apart from maybe doing drugs and stealing cars, and I couldn’t see Mum ever being like that.
“She wasn’t very happy,” I suggested, “and now she’s not feeling happy again.”
Dad nodded, and then he shook his head. “That’s exactly it...”
I thought he was going to say something more. From the way Dad had his mouth half-open, he obviously thought so too. But, looking at us, he changed his mind.
Afterwards, me and Anne decided we might as well go out and play. Dad was shut in the lounge watching TV, one of those wrestling matches where they put Godzilla against King Kong and you can tell it’s just people really and nothing like as good as the special effects you get in films. I looked around for the football, but it had gone from the garage. Dad had obviously hidden it, but I had a pretty good idea where to look – he and Mum were never very imaginative about hiding things. The football was tucked away with the dust under Mum and Dad’s bed.
It was a good game that evening. And close. For once, Anne played out of goal – and she wasn’t bad either, scoring twice, and with only one own goal. We forgot about the time. Dad came out in his vest when it was almost dark and we were just having fun. He went mad when he saw the ball we were using. He put his hand up to hit me, and only just managed to stop himself.
Dad took the ball inside and dumped it in the sink in the kitchen, wrapped up in a towel as though he could hardly bear to touch it.
He found me staring at it when I came down after my bath to get a drink of orange.
“Son, I’m sorry about what happened on the green,” he said, patting my shoulder with a shaky hand. “But under no circumstances are you ever to touch that football. Not you or even Annie. Not ever again.”
I didn’t say anything, and I didn’t sleep much. In the morning, Dad took the football along with him when he dropped us off on the way to the hospital. He had it in on the front passenger seat, still wrapped up in the towel. To stop it rolling, he had put the seatbelt around it.
Grandad picked us up from school that evening. He was still a human, but I wasn’t too keen on the idea him driving Gran’s Austin: normally, he travelled around in it with his head out of the back window, barking at pedestrians.
“Is Mum any better?” I asked, sitting on the front passenger seat beside him, thinking how odd it was to he talking to this smart grey haired gent.
“I think she is,” he said, smiling.
Grandad was keeping his eye firmly on the road. The skin around the dark patch on his left eye was crinkled. I could tell he was working up to saying something more.
“What has your Dad told you?” he asked.
From the back, picking the white dog hairs off her school blazer, Anne chirped, “He told us that Mum wasn’t very happy once.”
“Not very happy.” Grandad shifted into gear as the lights changed. The car gave a jerk and nearly stalled. Grandad was okay at driving, but not that good. “I suppose that’s right. You’re, ah, both very young for the thing I’m going to have to tell you now. But we’ve spoken to the doctors at the hospital, and we reckon it’s the best way. If you want your Mum to get better... you do want that, don’t you?”
We both said yes. We were driving along the high street past the shops now. A couple of salamanders were lounging in the sun outside the new DIY superstore. I recognised them as tough older kids from school.
“Your Mum had a baby when she was... when she was far too young. Before she even met your Dad. You understand what that means?”
We both nodded. I decided it wasn’t worth the bother of letting Grandad know that I’d worked that much out already.
“So we thought we could have the baby adopted. You know, given to some people who couldn’t have a baby, but wanted one. It was a kind of... family secret.”
“That the baby was adopted?” I asked.
“No.” Grandad grated the gears. “That it wasn’t. Even your Dad didn’t know that when he and your Mum were courting. We hid it. I guess now we’re all to blame, I suppose... apart from you kids of course. Your Mum couldn’t part with the baby, and I don’t think anyone else would have had him anyway. The poor little thing wasn’t – isn’t – right. He can’t change shapes like the rest of us. For a while, we didn’t think he could change at all. He was always just asleep, not really growing or living. Then one day, I put him down in the corner of my study, by this old football. When I looked...”
We’d reached the hospital. Grandad parked the car at the far end, but we didn’t get out.
I asked, “Did Dad know about this?”
Slowly, still gripping the wheel tight, Grandad nodded. “Just before they got married, yes. But he always found it hard to take. He couldn’t stand to have Tom around, reminding him. That was why he ended up in the garage. There for years. As a football.”
“And he’s called Tom,” I said eventually.
Grandad nodded. He reached and took both of our hands to help us out of the car.
“Come on,” he said, “let’s see how your Mum is. She’s got Tom with her now.”
We went and saw Mum. She was still a sloth, but she’d changed her face enough to smile, and it was obvious that she was a little better. She had Tom, our old family football, cradled in her arms. Dad was Dad. I could tell he was fidgeting to change into a snake or something, but tonight he stayed himself.
We all stood around with the head-doctor, smiling and talking in big shaky voices. Eventually, Anne started to cry. I was glad when she blurted out the thing that had been worrying me too. I mean, we’d been kicking Tom around the night before. I could still heard that leathery slap he made when he hit the back wall of the garages. But the head-doctor was reassuring. Tom wasn’t really like us. He was a football. He even probably liked being played with and kicked and headed and used to score goals. It was a better, after all, than the years he’d spent hidden behind the paint tins in our garage.
Anne stopped crying, and I took hold of her hand. Now that everything was out in the open, I felt relieved. But Dad was just standing there, gazing down at the concrete. Apart from Mum herself, I suppose this whole thing was most difficult for him out of all of us. It took a week of visits to the hospital before he could bring himself reach through the bars and take Tom from Mum’s incredibly long arms. A few moments later, he had to give him back, but next day, he kept hold. Gran and Grandad were there too, and I suppose we were wondering what Dad was going to do next. But he surprised us all by lobbing Tom gently into the air, then kicking him on the volley towards me. He came over at head height, and I nodded him down towards Anne, and she caught him. It was perfect, one of those miraculous moments that hardly ever happen. And we all started to laugh and pat each other’s back and in the excitement Grandad forgot he was human and started to bark.
That was the real beginning of Mum getting better. Next day, her head had changed back into the person we knew. And the day after that – after we’d borrowed Tom for a big game down at the park against the lot from the next estate – we came late with Gran back to the hospital to tell Mum about it, and found her sitting up on a log in her old house coat. She was complaining about the noise and the smell in her ward, but she was smiling.
They soon moved her to a proper ward. And not long after that, she came home for good. Even her right hand was back to normal. The head-doctor said it had all been a kind of hysterical paralysis. The hand had been a warning sign, but what probably tipped the balance was seeing me and Anne playing football with Tom out on the grass in front of our houses.
When Grandad and Grandad came around for tea on the Sunday after Mum got out, Grandad had gone back to being a dog again. We all felt a little sad to lose him that way – he had been such a nice old man. But at least he’d changed from a mongrel into a red setter, and although he was still old – and he still had the black patch – he was more fun to be with from then on. We used to go around to Gran’s to bring him along with us when we took Tom to play in the park.
Tom stayed a football. I supposed he always will, never changing, never getting old. Sometimes I talk to him, but I don’t think he hears, or understands if he does. One evening that summer when we were playing with him on the green, the inevitable happened and he flew over the fence into the Hall’s back garden. Knowing we couldn’t just leave him there the way we had with all the other footballs, me and Anne went up and rang their front door. Mrs Hall answered. She was shaped as an octopus actually, not a bird at all. And she simply let us in to collect up all the balls and everything else that had landed in their garden over the years.
With all the other balls back, we still always played with Tom. Of course, the other kids knew about him, and were a little edgy at first, passing gently, using side-foots towards goal. But I realised that Tom was finally accepted when John Williams missed a penalty and ran over to the fence to yell down at him as though it was his fault. We all fell about laughing at that, and when I happened to look up at the top windows of our house, I saw that Mum was standing in the bedroom with the net curtains pulled back. She was smiling.
We were well into the summer holidays by then. Dad had had couple of good pay cheques, and we agreed that all of us would go on holiday together, and abroad for a change. Dad, Mum, me, Anne, Gran, and Tom. Even Grandad agreed to change back into a human for the fortnight to save any problems with quarantine.
I can still remember packing my case for that holiday on the night before we took the plane. Filling up with books and shorts and tee shirts and cream for mosquito bites and clean pairs of pants. I could already picture that white beach, the white hotels, the cool old-fashioned streets at the back, the warm sea beckoning in the sunshine. First day, we’d all run out straight after breakfast and kick Tom across the smooth hot sand towards the breakers, changing into porpoises as we did so. Diving down into the stream of the ocean, bobbing Tom on our noses, dancing in the dappled light.
Which, as things turned out, is exactly what we did.