was off to Egypt on a holiday she couldn’t really afford: to stave off the pangs of loneliness while the kids were away. That and because she had to break out of the cycle of her humdrum existence. An exotic holiday away seemed like a good starting point for a new, exotic life. Or at least it had.
The phone on her bedside table rang loudly. Leonie sat on the bed and picked up the receiver, straightening the silver-framed picture of herself and Danny beside the roller coaster at EuroDisney as she did so. Nineteen-year-olds didn’t go on holidays with their mothers any more, she reminded herself, knowing there’d be no more holidays with the four of them ever again.
‘I hope you’re not having second thoughts,’ bellowed a voice down the phone. Anita. Loud, lovable and bossier than a First Division football manager, Leonie’s oldest friend could speak in only two volumes: pitch-side screech and stage whisper, both of which could be heard from fifty yards away.
‘You need a break and, seeing as you won’t come to West Cork with the gang, I think Egypt’s perfect. But don’t let that damn dog put you off.’
Leonie grinned. ‘Penny’s very depressed,’ she admitted, ‘and I have been having second thoughts about going on a trip on my own.’
‘And waste your money?’ roared Anita, a coupon-snipping mother of four who’d re-use teabags if she could get away with it.
Leonie knew she couldn’t bear another holiday in the big rented bungalow with ‘the gang’, as Anita called the group who’d been together for over twenty years since they’d met up as newly weds all in Sycamore Lawns. Gangs were fine when you were part of it in happy coupledom, but when you were divorced and everyone else was still in happy coupledom, it wasn’t as easy.
Being the only single member of the gang was sheer hell and would be worse now that Tara (briefly unattached) had remarried and was no longer keen on sharing a room with Leonie where they could moan about the pain of singledom and the lack of decent men. After last year’s group holiday where one husband had surprised her with a drunken French kiss and an ‘I’ve always thought you were a goer’ grope in the kitchen late one night, Leonie had promised herself never again.
When she and Ray had split up ten years ago, she’d been so hopeful about her future. After a decade of a companionable but practically fraternal marriage, they’d both been hopeful of the future. But Ray was the one who’d come through it all with flying colours, happy with his string of girlfriends, and Leonie was still longing for the one true love who’d make it all worthwhile.
She hadn’t been on a date for six years and that had been a blind one Anita had fixed up with a college lecturer who was a dead ringer – in every sense – for Anthony Perkins in Psycho. Needless to say, it hadn’t been a success.
‘Leonie, there’s always a bed for you in West Cork,’ Anita interrupted. ‘We’d all love to have you with us again, and if you’re having second thoughts – ’
‘Only kidding,’ Leonie said hurriedly. ‘I’m looking forward to it, honest. I’ve always wanted to go to Egypt. I can’t wait to buy some marvellous Egyptian jewellery,’ she added with genuine enthusiasm. Her collection of exotic costume jewellery took up most of her crowded dressing table already, filigree earrings tangled up with jangling metal Thai necklaces, most of it purchased in ethnic shops in Dublin and London instead of in their original, far-flung homelands.
‘Watch those souks and markets though,’ warned Anita, a distrustful traveller who believed that anywhere beyond the English Channel was off the beaten track. ‘They love big women in the East, you know.’
‘Oooh, goodie,’ growled Leonie, instinctively reverting to the Leonie Delaney: wild, sexy, earth goddess image she’d been projecting for years. If Anita guessed that the image was all fake and that most of Leonie’s hot dates were at home with the remote control and a carton of strawberry shortcake ice cream, she never said anything.
After a few more minutes’ chat where Leonie promised to enjoy herself, she hung up, privately thinking that if any white-slave trader wanted to whisk her away to a life of sexual servitude, he’d have to be bloody strong. At five eight and fifteen stone, she was hardly dancing harem girl material and was powerful enough to flatten the most ardent Egyptian bottom-pincher.
Anita was sweet to say it, she thought later, examining the effect of her saffron Indian skirt worn with her favourite black silk shirt and a coiled necklace of tiny amber beads. Black wasn’t really suitable for travelling to a hot country, she knew that, but she felt so much more comfortable wearing it. Nothing could hide her size, Leonie knew, but black camouflaged it.
Rich colours suited her and she loved to wear them: flowing tunics of opulent crimsons, voluminous capes in soft purple velvet and ankle-length skirts decorated with Indian mirrors and elaborate embroidery in vibrant shades. Like an aristocratic fortune-teller or a showily elegant actress from thirties Broadway, Leonie’s style of dressing could never be ignored. But black was still her favourite. Safe and familiar. As satisfied as she’d ever be with her reflection, she started on her face, applying the heavy panstick make-up expertly.
If she hadn’t been a veterinary nurse, Leonie would have loved to have been a make-up artist. She hadn’t been blessed with a pretty face, but when she’d worked her magic with her pencils and her brushes and her eyes were hypnotically ringed with deep kohl, she felt she looked mysterious and exotic. Like the girl in those old Turkish Delight adverts who sat waiting in the dunes for her sheikh. Certainly not too big, too old and too scared of a lonely, manless future.
Her mouth was a lovely cupid’s bow that would have looked fabulous on some petite size-eight model but seemed slightly incongruous on a tall solid woman. ‘A fine hoult of a woman,’ as one of the old men who brought his sheepdog into the vet’s used to call her admiringly.
Her face was rounded with cheekbones she adored because, no matter how fat she got, they stayed defiantly obvious, saving her face from descending into plumpness. Her hair, naturally rat-coloured as she always said, was golden from home dyeing because she couldn’t really afford to have it done professionally any more.
But Leonie’s most beautiful features were her eyes. Huge, naturally dark-lashed, they were the same stunning aquamarine as the Adriatic and looked too blue to be real.
‘Your eyes make you beautiful,’ her mother would say encouragingly when she was growing up. ‘You don’t need to speak, Leonie, your eyes do it for you.’
Her mother’s attitude had always been that you were whatever you wanted to be. Glamorous herself, Claire told her daughter that stunning looks came from the inside.
Unfortunately, Leonie had decided at the age of nineteen that her mother was wrong and that lovely eyes weren’t enough to make her the beautiful woman she longed to be, a Catherine Deneuve lookalike. This realization had come about when she went to college after years of being educated in the closeted female environment of the convent school. At University College Dublin, she discovered men for the first time. And also discovered that the ones she fancied in biology lectures were much more keen on her less intelligent but smaller classmates. Her long-distance paramours asked Leonie if she’d join in their Rag Week mixed tug-of-war team, and asked other girls to go to the Rag Ball with them.
Miserably, she concluded that she was nothing more than a plain, fat girl. Which was why she’d decided to reinvent herself. Leonie Murray, shy girl who was always at the back at school photographs, had become the splendidly eccentric Leonie, lover of unusual clothes, wacky jewellery and plenty of war paint applied as if she was ready for her close up, Mr De Mille. As she was physically larger than life, Leonie decided to become
