And you think, perhaps, there is one guarantee in life (that it ends) and one fairly safe bet as well (that it is painful), and freedom and property are illusions that can only exist in the mind. And that cleverer people have already thought these thoughts and discarded them and why don’t I stop this rubbish philosophizing already? Oh, look, a woman in a stripey hat walking a champagne poodle.
I don’t mean to make light of these events, but I’m hoping for a little pickup in the terror-sex department at work when I get home. It would do me the world of good. vendredi, le 7 mai
It’s a chalk-bright afternoon and I’ve been walking, listening to music all day the last few days. This helps-no one assumes you can hear them, with the headphones on, so no one speaks to you. This is good. I don’t understand the language very well. When I want to hear the sounds around me, I switch the player off but leave the headphones on. I smile a lot. People smile back. Are people happier everywhere else in the world? Sure seems so.
But I know it’s not the truth. I was in a bar, talking to a man my age. He’d been through three wars before he was twenty-one. Why are men so horrible to each other?” I asked, naive.
“In my experience all people are horrible.”
“So why are we this way?”
“We don’t know how else to be.” And we were quiet. He finished a drink, smiled at my guidebook. It was a smile that said, “Where do you want to go? You know you won’t find it in there.” Not that I’ve used it very much anyway-I like to choose a direction and keep going. In this way I found the Jewish quarter, decimated and abandoned forever ago, like a forgotten film set, and the edge of the water, which I hadn’t figured as being quite so close. His smile, it was so understanding, so accepting, I could feel the waves of goodwill just pouring off him, mixed with a little pity for me.
That, or he may have just been trying to pick me up. We girls have an absolutely appalling reputation abroad. Was there a pamphlet distributed in the last decade to men in foreign countries saying that the small islanders are simply gagging for it?
(I mean, I am, but yo, I’m on holiday, creep. So lay off.) samedi, le 8 mai
Holiday sex is always the best sex. I’ve had it everywhere-Poole, Blackpool, swimming pools.
Someone else makes the bed afterward, empties the bin of spent condoms, even picks up your wet and smelly towels from the floor. If the people below are kept up all night with the noises above, odds are they either won’t know which people were responsible, or they’ll be away the next morning anyway, or you can get away with a mild blush and a sheepish giggle, because you’re on holiday, and only the sourest of pusses could deny anyone a healthy and vigorous bit of holiday exercise.
A1 always took me to the beach when my spirits were flagging. He didn’t enjoy the experience at all-sand gets everywhere, which is anathema to a man as fastidious as he is, and he burns easily, which meant most of the outing would be spent reapplying sun cream to the parts of his back he couldn’t reach. One time we went away and he forgot to put sunblock on his feet, and they burned. For the entire week afterward he couldn’t wear socks or shoes.
But he did it for me, so I could recharge my batteries, he always said. And because he knew he’d be rewarded with an almighty screw in whatever bed-and-breakfast we were staying in that evening.
A2 loved the act of getting to his destination better than the holiday itself. He would drive and drive, and we would cover the entire country in a week, making stops wherever the spirit took us. If we spent the night in the Highlands, you could almost lay money on the fact that within twenty-four hours we’d be holed up in a shabby guesthouse in Devon. He also liked taking pictures out the window of a moving car, which always made me laugh and dive for the steering wheel as he did so.
We stopped and posed by abandoned buildings, funny road signs, and large trees. We laid blankets in stands of trees and had sex as the mosquitoes attacked his backside. I sucked him off in Friday-afternoon bank-holiday traffic going north.
I thought in all our trips we probably never stayed in the same place twice. Until we booked into a hotel one night in the back end of nowhere, attracted by its slightly antique signs. The woman at registration greeted us familiarly. We’d stayed there only three nights before and completely forgotten it.
A3 and I took a trip together once, to look at caves. In the complete dark of underground, in the complete silence in the middle of the earth, he held my hand for the first time. It is difficult to think of a time before or since when I’ve been so thrilled.
A4 and I went on a beach holiday almost the first week we met. His housemate’s girlfriend wanted cockles. We didn’t buy any, but we went to three beaches looking for someone selling them. It was a very hot morning. At the first place we stopped, the water was in a shallow bay and the beach was more like a pile of shells. We walked into the water, which was exactly as warm as the air. It felt like bathing in sweat. We drove on.
At the second village, there was nowhere to park. We pulled off the road and looked at the beach and the water. We were still unsure around each other and didn’t have many topics of conversation yet.
The third beach was perfect, sandy and deserted. It was somewhere Al had been with me often. The wind was coming up and the heat had gone from the day. The water was open for miles and came in strong waves. A4 stripped down to his bathing shorts-I was in awe of his beauty then, and couldn’t stop staring at his body. He dove into the surf and flopped around happily. I walked out to the water’s edge and put a foot in. It was freezing! I jumped back.
“Are you mad?” I yelled out to his bobbing head. “Aren’t you cold?”
“It’s bracing!” he yelled back, and even at that distance I could hear his teeth chattering. I laughed and laughed. On the way home, we went past endless farms and looked at the pigs rooting in the last light of the day. A DJ on the radio was playing old songs, swing jazz, and we listened in happy silence. Sometimes to make me laugh he’d say, “Bracing!”
But the best holiday with him, and we went on many together, was camping. We set up a large tent in the woods next to a cold-water spring and stayed several days. The water was icy in the very hot summer and we bathed naked. A giant dead tree slanted out of the water, and balancing on that, he had me over and over. It felt so wonderfully primal. Until a naturist came along and paddled in the shallow water as if we weren’t even there.
Holiday sex is the best. No one to answer to, no work, no neighbors. And if you’re lucky, no phone reception. Pure sensation. It’s probably exactly what the clients at work are after. lundi, le 10 mai
There were no direct flights back. Spent one night in Rome at a large, central hostel.
The shop around the corner must have been the only one open in the early evening, as it was crowded. Bought bread, tomatoes, ricotta al forno. The markets of other countries are fascinating to me. Walking the aisles slowly, seeing what is given pride of place on the shelves. Single-serving meat pastes in the Czech Republic, screw-top bottles of sangria in Spain sold as if they were soda, the odd variety of things offered in the supermarket queues in North America. Razors, balloons, and dried meat especially.
The kitchen of the hostel was large and well equipped, with loud groups of young people at the tables. I sat on the corner of one, eating sandwiches and reading a newspaper. Wrapped two rolls and some cheese in a bit of paper to save for breakfast.
A few people sat nearby. They were English, but not traveling in a group together. I asked one where he was from. Cheddar, he said. Ah, I said. I knew someone from there a long time ago. Asked what he was doing in Rome. Not much, he said. Meeting a friend but she had gone on elsewhere. Did he like Italy? Yes. He showed me a map of all the places he’d walked in Rome. Someone had left a sweet bread, a loaf of colomba, in the communal food cupboard. We tore it to bits. The buttery flesh was sticky on top with crystallized sugar and candied peel. One of the others asked if we wanted to go for ice cream.