I say: Wouldn’t it be more logical for me to be the spy? Shouldn’t you perhaps be throwing me out of the coach?
The girl Vikram called Sneaky immediately smiles intensely at me, and just as her lips part and I think, Now she is going to speak to me, I see that she is not smiling at what I said at all, but mouthing the words of a song which has begun to come over the coach stereo in a low throb. It’s the song has made her smile at me, one of those songs one hears everywhere and pays absolutely no attention to, so that you only recognize the refrain as a kind of distracting bleep in the background noise. And the refrain is Sei un mito, sei un mito — You’re a myth, you’re a myth — meaning no more in Italian than ‘something wonderful’ on the lines one supposes of ’fabulous’ in English, which I always take as meaning ‘too good to be true’. Sei un mito. She mouths and smiles at me.
It would be much more logical for me to be the spy, I insist.
Why? Colin is chewing gum.
I’ve always thought our demands were over the top, you know that, and then I’ve never believed in Europe anyway. It’s a myth.
I say it with a coy smile on my face.
Vikram Griffiths laughs and the girl next to Sneaky, who can only be described as prettily made-up and entirely uninteresting, very belligerently asks why, why is Europe a myth, on the contrary a united Europe is our only hope for the future. Unity in Europe is our only hope for keeping the fascist nationalists out long-term, she says. Dimitra agrees. You have no sense of history, she tells me, still caressing the dog’s snout in her crotch. So I ask, jokingly, if others present are aware what the divorce rate is in marriages between people from different European countries, and when of course they don’t know, as why on earth should they, of what use are statistics to any of us? I tell them fifty per cent higher than an average of the average in ‘each of the countries concerned. Fifty per cent.
Vikram is looking at me with curious red eyes as if at some oddity he has just remembered never having properly explained to himself — my eager participation in this trip perhaps. He clears his throat and grins: You’re talking about yourself, Jerry boyo.
And about you, I tell him.
Twice fuckin’ over, Vikram laughs.
And me, Georg admits happily.
So that in the space of a moment three men in early middle age have managed to tell a number of twenty-year-old girls that they are divorced and ergo available, though in Georg’s case this is something of a simplification. Rather than mentioning her own separation, Dimitra has got up to return to her seat. You are rather beginning to like Vikram Griffiths, I tell myself. Quite unexpectedly, you are beginning to like him.
Then Colin brags that he doesn’t know why we bothered getting hitched at all. He never has. He wriggles his moustache. Know the word ‘hitched’, love? he asks, turning to the girl with the long legs and quality jeans. Know it or not? Where is your English in the end? Don’t you girls study English? What’s going to happen to you at the exam, I don’t know.
This is Colin’s way
Let me teach you my favourite words, he insists. The girls giggle. Sneaky is still mouthing Sei un mito, and still, quite ingenuously, she smiles at me, bouncing on her seat, and her smiling again makes me ask, What are you going to do about such a young woman who will keep smiling at you like this from great brown eyes (a sort of bright vulnerability suggests contact lenses), who will keep bouncing on her chair and resting her long neck and strong chin on the crinkly white headrest cover — jet-black hair just trembled by the air from her ventilator — and then letting her head cock slowly to one side while the bright eyes hold yours. How am I to behave?
Cuddle, Colin says ominously Anybody know what ‘cuddle’ means?
He hams his Brummie accent, I tell myself, the way so many ex-pats ham their lost identity. The moustache is a pose. Yes, he hams this unpredictable matey belligerence, this curiously Midlands attitude. Colin is home away from home, I reflect, even if not the home you ever really liked.
‘Cuddle’ is p’rhaps my most favouritest word, Colin says. He overdoes it, pouting, twisting his chin from side to side in his collar. You know what ‘cuddle’ means, girls?
The girls, the two in front of me, the two each side of me and the one in front of Georg, all say no, they don’t know. What is the word again, please? Thus the girl with the swollen lips.
‘Cuddle!’
They shake their young heads.
I'll show you then, Colin says in his Brummie swagger, funny and frightening, and, grabbing the girl Vikram called Sneaky, who is closest, he pulls her to his chest. Then exactly as he makes that gesture, that coercive embrace, I feel a pang of jealousy, I feel that somehow this girl (who has been exchanging smiles) belongs to me, than which nothing could be further from the truth, of course, and sitting here slightly off-centre on the big back seat of this racing coach with the stocky Vikram Griffiths up against my knees winking his comedy-hall wink again, and gorgeous Georg laughing his cultured German laugh, and then Vikram shouting (now Dimitra’s gone), Ask ‘em if they know what ‘shag’ means, Colin boyo, give ‘em the direct method on that one! I wonder, Why, why this pang of real jealousy for a girl you met only half-an-hour ago, and young enough to be your daughter? Why are my emotions so inappropriate? I ask myself. Because it’s propriety that we’re talking about in the end. I must remember the word propriety. Why am I reading the slightest signs of complicity as if they were the hallmarks of a fairy tale in the making? What is this immense promise I am always imagining in every woman I meet, as if the girl and I were already in league in a refined and tender and emotionally sensitive way against the Colins and Vikrams and Georgs of this world, the boors the libertines the rakes. And I am reminded, instantly, and with an almost overwhelming sense of derision and loss of faith, of how we used to lie in her sheets Friday evenings feeling deeply in love and infinitely superior to those who just screwed around, and the irony must surely be that with all that happened afterwards, the complicity betrayed and the determination to beat her betrayal out of her, or out of me, yes, out of me perhaps, the irony must be, I tell myself, that I still feel superior, and my superiority lies in the violence of my reaction, which is ugly, in the depth of this obsession, which is crippling and exhausting. Yes, your superiority, I tell myself, if such it is, lies in the fact that all the women you’ve seen since, you’ve seen not for their own sakes but only in order to repeat every gesture and caress you enjoyed with her, which is unspeakably ugly. Your superiority actually lies in your self-derision, your rancour, your inability to stomach yourself, which is ugly and unhealthy So that in my superiority, if that is what it is, I am uglier and unhealthier still than Colin, who is now saying that his next favourite word is ‘squeeze’. ‘Sque-ee-eeze’, he repeats, drawing it out quite obscenely, rolling stale chewing-gum along his lips as he does so. Do they know what ‘squeeze’ means? But before they can say no and hence give him his chance to demonstrate I ask the young girl Sneaky what her real name is and she smiles. Nicoletta.
I’m Jerry, I tell her. Then at my prompting everybody on the back two rows of this coach announces their names, and so we have Margherita on Georg’s left by the window, and Bruna the heavily powdered girl between myself and Georg, and Veronica, tiny, generous lips, to my right, and in front, going from right to left, Maura, belligerent, politicized, and Nicoletta, whose friends call her Niki, and the other side of the corridor Monica of the long legs in quality jeans, and Graziano, a tall lean eager boy with acne and a copy of the communist, ex-communist, newspaper, Unitd.