The road was winding and narrow, goats on the hills and a friendly sea to the right. An old man with a long stick saluted the car, and when I stopped to ask how far ahead the village was he answered in American English that I had only to go on till I saw it, which was plain enough to me.
The hotel, as simple and clean a place as could be found, welcomed me with a room. By five o’clock I was sitting on the terrace, a breeze cooling blue water lapping the stones below, not a cloud from one end of the sky to the other. I had stumbled onto a cushy billet to beat them all, as Bill Straw would have said. Two bottles of icy Fix beer stood on the table, and I could drink away till the time came for supper. The proprietor had promised fresh fish, rice, salad, and his best wine. Over coffee I would light up a Havana and celebrate the good fortune in getting to my first nightstop in Greece.
I would wake from a long night’s sleep to the rusty pump braying of a donkey, and after a leisurely breakfast swim in the briny before heading south to deliver the briefcase, and take up the packages from the quayside beyond Pireus. All was arranged and mapped out, perfect clockwork on the cards. Just one more day to do.
As for the return journey, I would high-tail it up through Arta, board a ship at Igoumenitsa for Italy, and steam up the Adriatic coast to call on Sophie near Ancona. We would tumble each other about for a couple of days, and make enough memories to last every mile of my way back to hearth and home. I didn’t have a home, but why spoil the fantasy?
Never so relaxed, with another guzzle of the delicious Fix, I blessed my luck in having been sent on such an interesting and responsible mission. However much I disliked and distrusted Moggerhanger there was a lot to be grateful about for his confidence in my abilities. Tomorrow I would phone and tell of my complete success, but this evening I’d let him fry, so that I could have my supper and then sleep undisturbed.
A touch of the cramp in my legs from so much driving, I bubbled out more beer to oil it away. If this was heaven I could believe in immortality, except I had no intention of dying yet. A boy came by with newspapers, such a smile that I bought one, though it was all Greek to me. If it weren’t for Moggerhanger having me on a string I would stay at least a week. Let him fume for a few days, anyway, because as long as I got the stuff back he would have no reason to complain. As for his wigging when I did phone, well, my ear hadn’t so far stuck fast to any plastic.
Was I hearing right? “You fucking bastard. We’ve got you now,” someone yelled. How crude the English are when they’re abroad. Some poor wife seemed about to get a pasting from a brutal yobbo of a husband because she’d parked the car too much in the sun. You can’t escape them, I thought, unless you go to the arse-end of Turkey, where they’re afraid to be seen. The scum who can afford to travel these days have no notion of good behaviour.
Reaching for another ambrosial bottle I saw the little black hatchback sitting in its own shadow at the end of the road. Two men came for me in a pincer movement. What sounded like a revolver shot turned out to be a well aimed stone, which splattered beer and bottle over the table. I dived for the gravel, my last useful thought being that I was going to have to fight for my life, and wouldn’t end up in paradise after all.
Chapter Nine
I’m taking the narrative out of Michael Cullen’s hands, for the moment, because he’s in no condition to write anything, unless it’s his final will and testament. Not only that, but there are happenings that even a picaresque hero can’t be trusted to put satisfactorily on paper. Another thing is that it’s time my own life had another look in because, as will be seen, it has some bearing on what consequently occurred to my erstwhile bastard son.
Mabel told me I could not at this stage write Michael’s story. “Whyever not?” I demanded. “Didn’t Doctor Livesey pull the tale from Jim Hawkins well into ‘Treasure Island’?” This allusion puzzled her, as ought to have been expected, because she’d never read the book, or any other to my knowledge, being one of those who was sent to a good school but came out of the experience more ignorant than before they went in.
I was in an unusually jovial mood on getting out of bed, because a whole novel which had nothing to do with Michael’s was unravelling and reassembling in my head in a very satisfying fashion. Mabel rolled into the warm patch I had left, lying on her back like a Crusader’s lady in a rustic church. Looking at her fondly, I pulled the duvet off as a hint that she should get into the kitchen and make my coffee. When she showed no sign of doing my bidding I opened the curtains and let in daylight to encourage her, but it brought no change to her somnolent posture. My invective was always somewhat tame in the morning, and I said, in response to her murmur that she would like to lie in for another half hour: “You’re so lazy it’s a wonder you don’t have ingrowing fingernails.”
I felt proud of my restraint, human, you might say, not unmixed with some affection towards my darling for bringing it on, which reflection encouraged me to yank away the duvet, lift her flannel nightdress, and place a warm kiss on her resplendent left flank. “Now rise and shine, my lovely Aphrodite.”
I walked out to get my clothes off, and set the bath running to a third full and fairly hot. The steam gave a wholesome iron-like smell due to the ancient plumbing, an agreeably nostalgic odour from those distant days when I was a lad at boarding school.
I sent three plastic union-jack battleships afloat for company, a fleet of Dreadnoughts from Jacky Fisher’s navy. Lowering my body in for a scrub, the displacement set off miniature depth charges, sending the flotilla into rough water. One thing I liked in the morning was to give my head a thorough wash, since my troubles in life had come from that area, and I wanted it to look sparkling clean for the next awkward hand Fate would deal me. Usually I let the shower play there, but this time, thinking to give a treat to such a noble shape, I got on all fours and bent down till it was beneath the tap, in such a position that a forceful rush of warm water could wash away the soap. Finding the process restful — as who would not? — I closed my eyes, the sound blocking off the outside world so completely as to put me back into a somnolent phase.
Now, being tickled in the testicles as a mark of love and affection can be an extremely erotic experience to a man in a big fluffy bed where he may, by the blink of an eye, even invite such a tender caress from his mistress; but when it comes, as it did now, as an unwelcome intrusion and an outrageous shock, the reaction is apt to be catastrophic.
My darling Mabel, unable to foresee the consequences of her fey intention, thought she would return the tender kiss I had planted on her pale delicious flank, not out of malice, you understand, which I could well have seen the point of, but because she imagined such a sensual touch to be the one thing I deserved and required above all others, the utmost she could do to please me at the moment, something which would be vastly appreciated by one such as I. It was rather sad to believe, that after ten years of living together, she knew me not at all.
The upshot of her subtle touch was that the lower back part of my head jerked against the solid metal tap, a distance of a couple of inches or so, but at such speed as to produce the equivalent of a footpad’s bludgeon descending from behind on a dark night in Soho.
The edges of the tap were in no way blunt, but the oval metal hole for the water to rush through was hard enough. After my shout, followed by words which disgraced me for lack of subtlety, the water turned rapidly carmine, so close to crimson in fact that by the time I pulled away I looked as if standing in the water tank of a Roman suicide, blood so copiously pumping from the wound I had to flannel it from my eyes, to make her presence clear enough for the most heartfelt punch of my life into her lower jaw.