He lurches up and opens his fly, pulls his poor dead dick, the old John Thomas, his faithful loannis Tomassis, out into the moonlight. A real man should take it out into a field and shoot it the way he would a lame horse. He pours ouzo over the beaten little bugger and feels it sting righteously. Like a lump of jade in his gut, green and ragged and heavy, he feels his envy for that poor little shit, Scully. Hatred. A stone in him of real hatred for what he has despite it all. The also-rans will inherit the earth, the whelps, the meek and the fucking nice, and that’s what he can no longer stand.
Alex throws his head back and lets the ouzo trickle down his neck, first rate to the bitter end. Voilà!
Twenty
THE ALLEYS WERE EMPTY and the whole town smelt of exhausted geraniums and chalky whitewash as Scully wound his way down the labyrinth of steps to the harbour. Along the waterfront the lights still shone but the last taverna was closing. He bought an ouzo from a sleepy man and his wall-eyed son who swept around him and stacked chairs against the wall. Scully sat half in the light and sipped, listening to the sea chop outside the mole. Caiques and smaller boats tossed lightly and turned at their moorings. Across the smooth flagstones cats went stalking. Scully’s back ached from hauling Billie and his feet were sore, but inside now there was a curious deadening, a rising blank. He had a second ouzo which he drank quickly so as not to keep the men awake any longer. A little tipsy, he bade them goodnight and walked out by the water, where tiny mullet flickered under the lights.
He was dead inside now, but it didn’t stop him remembering. Quiet nights like this back over in the village at Vlikos. Breathless nights with heat still radiating from the stones of the island, when the house was heady with the smoke of mosquito coils and the drapes hung lifeless against the walls, and the little cluster of houses lay in darkness. The only sound the tinkling of goat bells up the mountain. Those nights, under cover of darkness, the two of them left Billie asleep and slipped down naked and giggling to the pebble beach. The water was cool and black. They stroked out between moored boats, stirring up trails of phosphorescence that clung to their bodies like strings of tiny pearls. Old Sotiris, soaking his feet below the local taverna, would puff on his cigarette at the end of his long day and not see them out in the darkness. Some nights he played his battered guitar and sang mournfully, unaware of their presence.
In September, the night she came back from Piraeus with the pregnancy confirmed, they made love down there on a smooth ledge where his back pressed into the rock and the water surged through her slick legs as they clamped about him and her breasts glistened in his face. He held her buttocks in his hands as she rose on him. On the cliff above, mules clattered along the track. She pressed him hard into the rock, hard into herself, the flat of her hand across his face until she cried out like a bird, a surprised, plaintive sound that travelled across the water, across his skin as a sudden burn. Scully was never so happy. He had the life he wanted, the people he loved.
Scully walked up by the old cannons at the head of the harbour and looked down at the roof of the grotto. The sea was fairly placid but a change was upon it. He stepped down over the smooth rocks and found the swimmer’s platform the town fathers had built for the tourists. For a moment, he sat, looking down at the faint light on the water. The sweat of the day, the shock, the worry, the fear and disappointment were rancid on him. There was dust in his hair and grit in his shoes. There was no one about — stuff it, a swim was better than a bath, and he needed something, some good clear sensation to sponge off such a bastard day.
He stripped and hit the water in an ugly flat dive that stung his belly and rang his balls like bells, so it took him ten seconds or more to realise just how cold the water was, and to know suddenly how much booze he had on board. Submarine light, a phosphorescent glow struck the ceiling of the grotto and lit the submerged rocks with a ghostly ice blue that pulsed and surged like the garish pool of a five-star hotel, a blue that slipped further from him the longer he watched.
‘Ugh!’ His shock was audible. He struck out in a frenzied crawl, the hurried stroke of the dam swimmer, the creek scrambler, the Pommie tourist, the pissed and careless idiot. He punched the water. It burned pale in his eyes, and when he rested to check his progress and calm himself, he saw that he’d made no ground at all, and the grotto was slipping to the right. He went at it again, measured and hard, kicking straight and postponing every second breath, stretching himself, making cups of his hands as he raked downward, till lights spattered his vision and the taste of ouzo rose in his sinuses. His breath was gone. He couldn’t do it. God, he couldn’t do it. The grotto slipped further round. He went into a hopeless, panting breaststroke and saw the grotto disappear altogether, swallowed by the black featureless bluff that reared like the face of God. Scully stopped swimming. He hung there, hyperventilating. He turned on his back. That blackness was too much to behold. His nuts felt like snapper sinkers.
Geez, Scully, he thought, you’ve really made a day of it. A class act. Making an arse of yourself in a thousand ways, and now this. Live stupid, die young.
He felt the first twinge of cramp in his toes, up his calves.
Scully, you’re a loser.
That vast field of black towered above him.
Spineless, that’s what. A stumblebum. Of course she left you — there’s nothing to you.
Cold eddies tweaked at his limbs. He could feel his body closing down and he began to shake. There were no stars in the sky anymore and his ears roared with a cruel lapping sound. He guessed this was the moment when you were allowed to feel sorry for yourself. The blow to his head shook him right through and suddenly it was more than he could stand for. He rolled angrily on his belly to face down this last humiliation and saw the otherworldly mass of the harbour mole sliding past an arm’s length away. The flashing light of the navigational beacon blurted in his face, and a small wave picked him up and dumped him splayed and spluttering on the cold glossy rocks where he lay too sick and sorry to be either grateful or amused. He held on and thought glumly of his clothes right around the other side of the harbour and the long naked walk under lights that awaited him.
Twenty-one
FROM A DREAMLESS PIT OF sleep, Scully came to himself alone in bed with the shutters shuddering and his head a stone on the end of his neck.
‘Billie?’
He lurched upright. ‘Billie?’
He saw his grazes and bruises as he dragged on his clothes. He lurched out into the corridor and down to the bathroom, but the communal door was ajar and the smelly room empty. Three at a time he went down the stairs into the courtyard where rain speared in and cats congregated in tiny patches of shelter in the corners of walls where withered grapevines and dripping painted gourds rattled in the wind.
‘Kyria? Kyria?’ he called, his voice breaking.
The heavy oak door to the kitchen opened.
‘Neh?’
The little woman wiped her hands on her apron and narrowed her eyes at him contemptuously. Scully stood in the rain and saw behind her, sitting by the range with a bowl of soup in her lap, his daughter who looked up curiously at him.
‘Oh, oh, good-oh.’
Right there in the rain, across the kalamata tins of battered geraniums and the wall of bougainvillea, he stood aside and puked until the door closed on him.
• • •
IT WAS AFTERNOON when Scully woke again. He showered gingerly, packed their things and went down to collect Billie. The rain had not let up and the wind bullied across the courtyard where his mess was long gone. He knocked at the door and the woman looked him up and down, stepped aside to let him in.