February 15: The rain in Spain…

The week in Spain at dad's villa was booked a while ago. Just dad, me, my middle sister and niece. It is pretty much the last week that I can fly due to the pregnancy (though that was more design than accident.. I didn't know babies stopped you flying). And it's six weeks since my operation. ‘Last blitz of recuperation,’ dad said. ‘A bit of sunshine’.
My boss was more honest. ‘Enjoy it, it will be the last peaceful holiday you ever get before you have a child who wakes you up at 7am, regardless of where you are in the world.’ I hadn’t thought of that.
Sister pulls-up Stig-style at 5am. I am packed (she is scary, you don’t want her to arrive if you’re not packed). I climb in to be greeted by an overly-awake excitable seven-year-old in the back-seat asking why I have packed such a big bag. She is right. It’s ridiculous. I am normally very restrained and just take only hand-luggage on trips. This time, however, I have borrowed mum’s enormous battered old suitcase and thrown in pretty-much everything I own – unwashed, un-ironed. If I had any energy, I'd have felt ashamed - but I don't. I only hope customs don’t check it, I think. They’ll arrest me for being a bio-terrorist.
In my early-morning haze, I don’t even look back at the house as we drive off down the dark street, hurtling over the speed bumps and around the corners we can probably navigate with our eyes shut. This road, the speed humps, the fields, the house – it’s all someone else’s now. By the time we get back from Spain, it will be gone.

Malaga is not sunny. I knew this would be the case due to my telepathic intuition and knowledge of sun spots. I lie – dad had checked the weather forecast. And it said 'rain for a week'. It is not really Spain but some dark, gloomy, uninviting land. There’s not even a peep of sunshine but cold, wet rain lashing down onto the runway and heavy, thunderous clouds hugging the mountains like unruly tufts of old-man hair.
Forty minutes to the villa, then straight past it up the mountain. It’s just not the Spain I’m used to – the red rock and dry soil , prickly gorse and clip-clopping mountain goats. It’s lush green and, despite the rain, somehow more inviting. We stop for a café con leche overlooking our valley of tiered cliffs, banks of avocado and mango trees, rows of tiled roofs upon white and the murky sea beyond. I think of my friend’s wedding in Cyprus in July and how much I’d been looking forward to it. It would have been a week of sun and fun. Me, FTB, our friends, lots of gesticulating Greeks and aunts and grandmas and donkeys. Smashing plates in the fire place. Isn’t that what they do at weddings?
I can’t go anymore, I’ve decided. It’s too difficult. I feel too vulnerable to be exposed among neutral friends. I can’t take Bump, who should have arrived by then. I can’t bear the thought of FTB being there, of us trying to be civilised over our baby’s head as our respective friends pretend they aren’t watching. Isn’t it lovely, they’ll think. Isn’t he good dad. Isn't it good they are getting along. We always knew they would.
It doesn’t work. He can keep them all. Keep our friends. Keep the wedding. Keep the holidays. But cor blimey, it doesn’t half make me miserable. No doubt one of many casualties of this whole sorry affair. I’ll find something else to do in July, I think, as I watch dark swathes of rain sweep in from across the ocean. I’ll come back to Spain, I decide. It will be sunny then.

***

There is something wrong with me – besides the physical pain from the operation - that is making me ice cold and completely exhausted. At dinner that evening in a local pizza restaurant that’s not as good as it used to be, I keep on my bright red fleece-lined Gortex, its hood up over my woolly hat with jester spikes, my body squeezed together for warmth. I’m so cold and tired I literally sleep at the table, slumped over my table-mat, ignoring the others as they jibber-jabber on. I must look a state or I’d have normally been bollocked by at least one of them for appallingly rude and anti-social behaviour. But I simply can’t get warm. I’m a frozen block of ice and exhausted from it. Worse still, the Villa is freezing. And the electric heater I pilfered for my room doesn’t work. Sunny Spain? This may as well be Base Camp Everest.