Ben by Kerry Needham Page B

Danny and Stephen went with them was the only thing that upset me. I know I couldn’t go anyway, because of Ben, but my whole family’s having fun and they haven’t even invited me.
    I reminded myself that I had my own family now and settled down for an early night myself. I don’t know how long had passed but it only felt like minutes till I heard Mum and Dad clattering back in. You never got privacy sleeping on the lounge beds but it was as though they were trying to wake me. I rolled over and looked at the bunch of gigglers in the doorway. It took a few seconds before I realised there was one too many.
    ‘Simon?’
    ‘Hello, Kerry. Surprised?’
    So that was where they’d all gone – to pick Simon up from the airport. When my brain eventually woke up, I realised I was surprised: he’d done it. He’d cut our ties back home and come out to start life afresh with me and Ben. In other words, he’d put as much distance between him and his parents as I’d had between me and mine. I honestly never thought he would.
    After showing Simon around our little corner of the island, we settled into a proper family life. Ben treated him as though he’d never been away. Like so many other things, he took Simon’s absence and sudden reappearance in his stride.
    Confident that we were serious and happy about staying, Dad drove us about ten minutes away to a place called Kako Prinari – or the ‘Turkish village’ as it was known. A friend had a small apartment to rent at ‘mate’s rates’ and so for about 10,000 drachmas a month, we got our own little slice of paradise. It was virtually the extension to his friend’s house and it was very basic and small, but if it kept me in Kos then I was happy. There were three rooms – bedroom, living area and bathroom, all divided by a curtain rather than a wall – plus the smallest kitchen I’d ever seen, tacked onto the living space. It had a cooker with one ringand a single baby saucepan. I couldn’t even comfortably warm a tin of soup on it. Mum’s kitchen in the caravan was bigger.
    Size didn’t matter to Ben, or to the army of ants that marched through the apartment each day. Ben thought they were his pets. He loved scooting them along, saying, ‘Hurry up, hurry up,’ or letting them climb up his hand. I tolerated them until the day I realised they were pouring from the sink and the drawers, and even the cupboard where our food was stored.
    Dad helped Simon get a job on a building site and we soon settled down to a proper family life. We both worked, Mum was on hand to look after Ben whenever necessary, and there were even times we could go out together at night. That was a treat we had never experienced when we lived in Sheffield.
    Whether it was my new self-confidence or whether Simon felt out of his depth, the honeymoon period didn’t last long. He began arguing with his employers and was soon seeking a new position. Within a couple of weeks, the same thing happened again and suddenly he was out of work. That was the point at which he seemed to resent me going to Palm Beach every day. The more he sat at home twiddling his thumbs or – worse – looked after our son day after day – the greater the theories of what I got up to grew in his head. Especially when I didn’t return from an evening shift until midnight.
    Almost inevitably, the arguments began. Although Simon started the fights, usually late at night when I came home, I admit I rarely bit my tongue. So what if he didn’t like being stuck with a child to look after? It was his child, and I’d done it for eighteen months. Now it was his turn.
    I could see Simon wasn’t enjoying life in Kos as much as I was but I wasn’t prepared to compromise. I couldn’t be held responsiblefor his failure to fit in. Still, I don’t think I realised how hard he was taking it. The crunch came when I was on an evening shift and I heard a commotion in the hotel foyer. With the open-plan layout, sounds carried, and I