Cathy Kelly 6-Book Collection: Someone Like You, What She Wants, Just Between Us, Best of Friends, Always and Forever, Past Secrets

The three women had spent a blissful afternoon sunning themselves on the top deck, reading, chatting, sipping mineral water and listening to the endlessly replayed disco classics record that emanated from the boat’s speakers. Whoever was in charge of the music on the boat had a limited selection and veered between seventies disco hits and songs from old musicals.

‘If I hear “Disco Inferno” one more time, I’ll kill someone,’ Leonie said, finishing her Fuzzy Navel and wondering if she’d have another before dinner.

‘At least they’ve lowered the volume,’ Emma interjected.

‘Only because it was frightening the cows,’ Leonie pointed out.

In places where the river widened, there were isolated grass banks surrounded by water, where cows grazed serenely, none of them appearing concerned that there was no obvious way back to the land.

‘There must be strips of land back to the bank, a pathway we can’t see,’ Hannah said, peering at the latest batch of cows on a marshy island, her eyes peeled for a walkway. ‘They couldn’t swim, surely? The crocodiles would get them.’

‘Sobeks would get them – descendants of the crocodile god, Sobek,’ said Leonie, who loved hearing about the Egyptian gods and studied her guide book every night to learn more about the sights they were going to see the next day.

‘Teacher’s pet,’ teased Hannah, lobbing her drink’s cocktail umbrella over at her.

‘You’re just jealous,’ retorted Leonie good-humouredly, throwing the little umbrella back. It bounced on the table and flew off over the side of the boat. ‘I’m going to get a gold star on my copybook for figuring out the great mystery of the fish sacrifice.’

‘That was a marvellous piece of deduction,’ Hannah admitted.

They’d all laughed heartily the night before when Leonie had come up with a reason why fish were never shown as offerings to the gods on the various temple carvings. Flora, the guide, usually left them with an unanswered question at the end of a tour and told them that she’d explain it the next day.

Yesterday, Flora had answered the question about why Hatshepsut was the only queen buried in the Valley of the Kings and had posed another conundrum – about the fish sacrifices.

Leonie, who was fascinated with Egyptian myths, decided that the answer to the question lay in the story of the god Osiris. Hannah and Emma, sitting in the comfort of Hannah’s cabin sharing a bottle of peach schnapps as a nightcap, laughed so much at her solemn explanation that they nearly fell off the bed.

‘When Osiris’s evil brother, Seth, killed Osiris and dismembered his body, scattering it around Egypt, Osiris’s distraught wife, the goddess Isis, found all the pieces and put them back together,’ Leonie explained enthusiastically. ‘The only part she couldn’t find was his penis, which had been eaten by a fish. So that’s it.’

Hannah crowed with laughter. ‘You’re telling us that fish can’t be used as a sacrifice because a fish ate Osiris’s willy?’

‘Yes, it’s perfectly sensible to me.’

Emma, who had discovered that she really liked peach schnapps, got a fit of the giggles. ‘But we had fish for dinner tonight,’ she managed to say, between laughs. ‘I think I’m going to puke!’

‘You’re a right pair of cultural illiterates,’ Leonie said loftily. ‘I don’t know why you came to Egypt at all. You should have gone off to Ibiza with a couple of blokes with tattoos and a ghetto-blaster.’

Emma fell off the bed with a resounding bump. She put a hand over her mouth and giggled at the noise she’d made.

‘Your father will be up in a moment to haul you off to bed,’ Hannah squealed. ‘I’ll tell him I’ll set Seth on him…geddit, set Seth…’ She roared with laughter and Emma joined in.

‘I’d like to see his face with his willy gobbled up by a fish,’ roared Emma.

Leonie, who’d been so intent on her ancient Egyptian theory that she’d only had a quarter as much peach schnapps as the other two, gave up. She hauled Emma back on to the bed and then poured herself a huge drink. If you can’t beat them, join them, she decided.

‘I don’t know what I’m going to tell people when I get home and they ask me who I met in Egypt,’ she said, downing her drink in three gulps. ‘They’ll all think I had this cultured time talking about ancient civilizations with like-minded people, when in fact, I’ve been stuck with two insane, sex-mad alcoholics who think the pyramids are secretly flying saucers.’

‘You mean they aren’t?’ demanded Hannah.

‘Shut up and have another drink,’ Leonie ordered.

The Fuzzy Navels they were drinking on the upper deck the following evening helped with the hangovers.

‘Wave at the waiter and order us another round, will you?’ Hannah asked Emma, who was facing the small upstairs bar where the waiters hung out.

‘I need to go to the loo,’ Emma said, ‘but I can hear my father from here. He’s downstairs and I don’t want to have to go down or he’ll try to make me sit with him.’

‘He’s a bit bossy,’ Leonie ventured. She’d love to have said that Jimmy O’Brien was a domineering bully but knew she couldn’t.

‘You have no idea,’ Emma said fervently. The Fuzzy Navels were going to her head. ‘He has to be in charge and he has to be right all the time. It’s a nightmare.’

‘But you stood up to him earlier,’ Leonie pointed out.

‘And I’ll have to pay later. He hates his authority being questioned publicly.’

‘Do you see much of your parents at home?’ Hannah enquired.

‘I see them all the time,’ Emma explained. ‘They live around the corner from us. Pete and I couldn’t have afforded a house on our salaries so Dad loaned us the deposit, then he insisted on our buying this house he liked. It’s about five minutes from my old home.’

Hannah winced. ‘So he feels he can drop in when he wants to and tell you what to do, on the basis that he’s funded you.’

‘Bingo.’ Emma thought of how her father manipulated things so that she and Pete had Sunday lunch at the O’Briens’ every fortnight, and how the question of what to do for Christmas never came up. It was the family do at the O’Briens’ and that was it.

‘Are you the only child?’ Leonie asked.

‘I’ve a younger sister, Kirsten, the one who got away. She’s married and her husband is very successful. Dad adores her. But she’s managed to get out of all the family stuff. She’s managed to get out of having a job, too, because Patrick, my brother-in-law, is loaded. Basically, Kirsten does what Kirsten wants.’

‘Sounds good to me,’ Hannah remarked. ‘My brother, Stuart, is the same. When we were growing up, I had to look after my mother’s hens in the summer and baby-sit for our relatives. Stuart never had to so much as wash a cup. Lazy pig. He was my mother’s pride and joy, now his wife is the same. Pam treats him like he’s next in line for the throne. We’re not close, I should add.’

‘Kirsten and I get on really well,’ Emma said. ‘She’s great fun and I love spending time with her. It’s a miracle I don’t hate her, really, since Dad is so besotted with her. Do you have brothers or sisters, Leonie?’

‘No, just me and my mother. And we get on really well,’ she added, feeling almost guilty that she wasn’t like the other two, both of whom appeared to have problem families. ‘My father died years ago and Mum just gets on with her own life. She works part-time, goes to the cinema and hill-walks, oh yes, she’s started playing golf. She does more than me, actually. She’s never at home in the evenings, while I catch every episode of every soap on TV. Mum is very easy-going and easy to be with.’

‘Like you,’ Hannah said.

‘I suppose I am easy-going,’ Leonie agreed. ‘Most of the time. But I do have a ferocious temper which explodes once in a blue moon and then…watch out.’

The other two pretended to duck under the table in fear. ‘Will you warn us when you’re about to explode?’ Emma asked in a meek voice.

‘Don’t worry, you’ll see it coming! I’ll be sorry to go home,’ Leonie said wistfully as they watched the sun sink.

‘That’s the sign of a good holiday,’ Emma said.

‘I mean, I’ll be happy to be home, but it’s been wonderful here. And I’ll miss you two.’

Hannah smiled but said nothing.

‘Me too,’ Emma added earnestly.

Hannah spoke then. ‘I know they always say that holiday romances never transfer to the real world when the holiday is over, but it can’t be the same for holiday friendships. We’ve had great fun together. Let’s meet up when we get home and try and stay friends. What do you both think?’