by Polly Samson
Gordon turns his profile like one used to being lit. The backdrop is the black sky and stars. He throws back his shoulders and starts to read, and read, and read. An entire chapter goes by as a man who is blessed with a prodigious penis has a pretty boy come to stay.
‘Peter’s sex leaped and quivered before him, the head as taut and smooth as ripe fruit …’ Gordon delivers his lines as he might a Shakespearean sonnet.
‘He anointed his sex liberally, as always slightly in awe of it …’ I see Charmian throw George several eye-rolls as Gordon’s honeyed tones continue through pages more of vigorous thrusting and splashing semen.
Beside me Jimmy is thumbing at his poem.
‘Don’t be nervous, we’re among friends,’ I whisper and he grins at me.
‘That’s precisely why I am nervous,’ he says.
Leonard has buried his face in Marianne’s hair; her feet have found their way to his lap. Greg Corso appears to have passed out among the cushions, with trailing hand in an attitude of the death of Chatterton. Gordon pauses to take a drink and Charmian and George start to clap, so we all join in and Göran leaps up and announces that he will read his new poem in Swedish.
Göran adopts the position of a great orator, a handwritten page dramatically aloft, but he manages only a few lines before Leonard cuts in with a splutter, ‘Hey, that’s my poem,’ and Göran bounces back laughing and bows deeply before him.
‘I admire it so much I had to translate it into Swedish,’ he says, reaching down as though to shake Leonard’s hand but pulling him to his feet and giving him a push towards the stage. ‘Now, you.’
Leonard shambles, looking reluctant and patting at his empty pockets, perhaps made a little shy by Göran’s enthusiasm. He’s certainly not born-to-performance like Gordon, who was once upon a time a matinee idol on Broadway.
Leonard gives a bashful cough before he begins, says he thinks he’d do better to tell a story than read one of his poems. His demeanour is apologetic, but the lamp catches the twinkle in his eye.
‘So, I was looking at the back of True Story this afternoon. And I saw …’ He looks at us and gulps. ‘I saw, about twenty ads for unwanted hair. The hair was a …’ Marianne starts to giggle and he waits, shrugging and deadpan, for her to stop.
‘A lot of people were offering to get rid of hair. They were offering to sandpaper it away. Shave it away. Pull it out. Cut it. Dissolve it with cream. Electrocute it.’
Marianne’s giggle is infectious; even Gordon, whose bruised ego is in the process of being eased by Chuck’s foot massage, snorts. Leonard continues. ‘I mean, you’re very concerned with unwanted babies but nobody cares for unwanted hair.’
He lopes on, his face set to doleful, almost pleading. ‘I think there should be a place for unwanted hair in this society. I think, at the very least, there should be a hair museum. I mean, there should be somewhere, a hair asylum. There should be somewhere where, um, middle-aged ladies’ moustaches reign …’ His scenarios become ever more ridiculous as he breaks into a gallop. Eventually he leaves the stage, but seems unable, even then, to pull up, muttering, ‘College beards abandoned for careers. I mean, a man should be able to go into one of these hair asylums and, you know, review his whole life,’ until George silences him by shambling on to the stage.
George unfolds some pages and holds them to the light, clears his throat. ‘I was thinking I’d read to you from the book I’m currently writing, but it’s about thousands of Chinese refugees starving to death, fleeing the Japanese, so it doesn’t seem quite the thing for this happy occasion.’ He has brought his glass of brandy to the stage and raises it to Gordon. ‘Keep on keeping on, Gordon, and congratulations on the film. I hope it makes you lots of dough,’ he says, and we all cheer, apart from the guest of honour who is still passed out among the cushions.
‘Damn, I was hoping he’d read his bomb poem,’ Jimmy grumbles, as Corso’s snoring grows louder.
George is giving his glasses a quick polish with his handkerchief. He looks like someone’s uncle about to tell a dirty joke. ‘So I’ll read to you from the galley proofs of Closer to the Sun instead. It’s set among a group of cosmopolitan misfits on an Aegean island not unlike this one … but, I hasten to add, any similarities to living people end there.’
I hear a sharp intake of breath from Charmian. I daren’t look at her. It seems we all sit up a bit straighter as George adjusts his specs. Marianne whispers, ‘Please, not this.’
George is enjoying the tension, he almost swaggers as he begins: ‘Poseidon’s Playground. The element of surprise was in fact that the newcomer was not nearly as young as expected …’
It takes a few sentences before we can breathe. George has chosen a scene about a suave but ageing theatre designer named Janáček who arrives on the island. Janáček has ‘the teeth of a dentrifrice advertisement and a cared-for complexion’. Impervious to panic, this Janáček is cared for and fussed over by the younger Kettering, who wears a garishly striped Mykonos shirt and who George, with a little devil perched on his shoulder, is busy describing as a diminutive man with a chestnut-coloured spade beard ‘who fluttered around Janáček’s feet like a hummingbird’.
It’s hard to tell if Chuck and Gordon fail to see themselves; they manage well if they do, unlike the rest of us.
Thank goodness Charmian’s got something she wants to read. She’s swaying a little as she stands on Chuck’s platform but her voice is steady and clear. She has only a couple of typed pages and she holds them so close to the lamp that her face has an almost ghostly luminosity.
‘I wrote it, quite suddenly, this afternoon,’ she says. ‘It’s about a visit to the family of a sponge-diver, a proud man with neither work nor money because it’s been declared that he has the evil eye. I’ve no idea what it’s to turn into yet, but here goes …’
It’s incredibly vivid, the short passage she reads. I can see it all. The diver’s wife, Irini, with an entire set of stainless-steel teeth that glitter when she speaks, ‘as if the silver ikon above the bedpost was making a pronouncement’. The hungry and sick children piled up on the bed shelf like grubs.
Jimmy’s poem is about the rats in the sewers beneath the Houses of Parliament. When it comes to his turn to read, we are all so drunk he might be P. B. Shelley.
Nineteen
It has rained overnight and the marble streets around the port are gleaming, the air fresh with the scent of quenched white flowers. I walk with Jimmy and Bobby. We link arms and for once Bobby doesn’t shake me off, as though a sprinkling of rain has freshened him up too. The light has returned to his eyes and the shadows receded. He doesn’t silence me when I find myself remembering a song about a fair young maiden and the blue, blue sea that Mum used to sing to us and he even joins in with the chorus.
We’ve left the others sleeping, didn’t try to rouse them, though Bobby’s done Edie the kindness of leaving a jug of water beside her head. Such messy slumberers. There were ants crawling around the rims of sticky glasses and lumps of sweating cheese among the fallen, some of whom were daubed in paint.
The pharmacy has become like a magical sweet shop to many of our friends on the island.
‘I think count me in next time,’ Jimmy is saying. He got back late from fishing to find them dancing to Trudy’s records on the terrace and he says everyone looked phantasmagorical in the moonlight, like they were underwater and dissolving.
‘And Leonard was saying the other night that he can work for twenty-four hours straight on the Benzadryl.’ Jimmy is enthusiastic about pills. I am always too scared.
Bobby hops over to where Elias waits in the shade behind the marketplace with his bulging goatskins of water. Bobby fills our cans and shoulders them cheerfully, as though they are empty instead of full. He doesn’t even moan about Elias’s ratcheting up of the price of the water for foreigners and flips a spare coin to skinny Stomasis, the candle-maker’s son.
The sun has chased away the last of the rain as we thread our way
through strings of waiting donkeys, with nothing much before us but a boat ride to the western end of the island where the Swedes have set up camp at Bisti Bay.
We buy the last four loaves of bread at the bakery and Bobby bumps smack into Charmian as she comes with her tin of meat and potatoes, calling hasty Kalimeras and looking with disbelief at the empty bread shelf behind Kyria Anastasia.
‘Here, take this,’ Bobby says. ‘No, no. I insist.’
Kyria Anastasia checks that the nametag is stuck fast to Charmian’s tin and slides it alongside the other dinners that are slow-cooking over the embers. I have failed to take advantage of the bakehouse oven, and vow to become better at this sort of thing once Jimmy and I are settled.
‘It’s only a loaf of bread,’ Bobby is saying, as Charmian kisses him on both flaming cheeks.
‘Well, I’m glad of it, so thank you,’ she says. ‘George has been in bed with a fever but I’m hoping he’ll manage a little gruel today.’
I hold out my hand to relieve her of one of her baskets. ‘Oh, poor George. I hope it’s not serious? Will you let me know if there’s anything I can do?’
Charmian flaps me away. ‘Goodness, Erica, you are kind. But it’s his own fault. I think he hit the grog rather hard the other night at Chuck and Gordon’s, don’t you?’
‘We all did, and that’s the truth,’ Jimmy says, adding with a snort, ‘Oh, but Gordon’s novel!’
We walk down the lane together, milking our memories for every last drop.
Charmian quotes with gusto: ‘“His sex swelled and rose heavily before him. He had to step back to give it room …”’
I beg her to stop. My sides have only just given up hurting.
‘Oh man,’ Jimmy says, ‘do you think he and Chuck seriously failed to see themselves in George’s thing?’
‘It’s as well to know that George can be exceedingly cruel,’ Charmian says, and returns to Bobby before I’ve had a chance to tell her how much I enjoyed the passage that she read.
We weren’t expecting all the marrieds with their children to be part of our group. The Goschens have come down from the hills with their brood; the curly-haired girls have their baby brother toddling between them and Angela is wearing one of David’s nightshirts to cover her bump. Demetri and Bim are outside Tassos with Police Chief Manolis who is tapping a finger at a sheaf of documents on the table. Carolyn and Demetri’s pretty young housemaid, Angelika, waits at the mole with their baby while Demetri, slumped back in his chair and laconically bored, interprets between the policeman and Bim.
‘Oh, it’s probably the usual business with visas,’ Charmian says. ‘They can make it such a bother, especially if they think you’re not behaving yourself,’ and I guess by the look that she throws him she knows something of Bim’s ways after dark.
Demetri slopes over to ask her if she can find the time to take a climb through Kamini to view a ruin with him and Carolyn. ‘I know you’ll tell us straight if you think it’d be mad to attempt to rebuild it,’ he says and it amuses me that this grown man with Greek blood in his veins, an American family and the beginnings of a paunch, appears to need the approval of our island Queen as much as the rest of us.
Charmian beams, ‘Oooh, kaloriziko! Have you fallen in love?’ and starts looking around for a drink with which to toast but stalls when she sees Leonard ambling towards us, strung with bulging bags, two sacks of laundry, and Axel Joachim asleep, head lolling against his shoulder.
‘Well, well,’ Charmian says. ‘Our Canadian friend has been left holding the baby. Quite literally.’
She calls out to him. ‘My goodness, whatever is that you’re using for nappies?’ And Leonard looks down as though surprised to find a baby in loosening wrappings and joins her laughter, shushing himself, trying not to wake him, then shushing and patting and doing a jig.
Charmian scoops up her basket. ‘Will you excuse me, I think I must help him out.’
Charlie Heck is waving at us from the mole as Manos’s boat hoves into view around the headland. Charlie has wide-eyed and fresh-from-the-ferry Francine beside him and Jimmy can’t seem to help an impressed whistle as we gather our things.
Francine is a dancer from Paris, almost as young as me. ‘He tells them he’s an African prince,’ I snap and as I turn to mask my bad temper I catch sight of Charmian and Leonard and the gentle choreography as he decants the sleeping baby into her arms.
‘Hey, where’s Marianne?’ I ask but everyone’s rushing for the boat: Jimmy and Bobby hefting the water-cans, Robyn and Bim swinging a basket between them, children scattering.
‘Marianne’s in Athens with Axel,’ Angela tells me as she scoots by, calling to the Gassoumises’ pretty maid.
‘Angeliki! Angeliki! Please hold Mariora’s hand. Look, the boat is docking.’
We sit around Manos at the tiller with our backs to the rail. Bim and Demetri have rushed to the prow where it’s quieter and they can stretch out on the mats. Charlie Heck has brought a large bag of pumpkin seeds which we split between our teeth. We are all laughing and being showered with rogue spray, whooping at the prismic flash of flying fish from a sea so bright they are like shards of its own dazzle.
Charlie holds on to Francine like she might fly overboard, and despite the noisy putt-putt of the engine I catch enough of what he’s telling her to know it’s the usual routine: ‘Nearly blew my own brains out in Korea, matter of fact …’ and on through his wanderings. ‘But this island is right for me. You know, Hydra is the only place I’ve rented a house where I haven’t been given bother about my race.’ Francine shrieks as the boat hits the bow wave of the incoming ferry.
I’m thrown closer to Bobby who puts an arm out to steady me. He’s talking to Jimmy about Edie. ‘You know, I feel so much better since I worked out that I can’t keep her for myself,’ he’s saying as again the boat thumps down and we are showered with spray. ‘It’s as Dinos said, something of a relief not to be constantly watching her.’
I wait until Manos steers a less bumpy path. ‘Dinos? The sponge-factory guy I met at George and Charmian’s?’
Bobby has pulled off his T-shirt and is rubbing the water from his hair. His eyes are as blue as airmail paper. ‘Yes, that’s my man. He’s pretty cool, actually; lets me use his kiln up at Episkopi. Tell you the truth, doll, I’ve been unburdening myself to him like he’s some sort of head doctor.’
I’m astonished to think that Bobby has talked to anyone, let alone that now he’s discussing it with me. I’ve become so accustomed to his gruff pronouncements and brooding silences. He continues talking as we drift in the lee of the sleeping man of Dokos island.
‘Thing is, I met Edie right after Mum died and I’ve been clinging to her ever since. It’s not fair on the chick,’ he’s saying and I look across at Jimmy and catch him enjoying the sight of Francine as she stands to grip the rail, very pert in pink checked shorts and a tiny fluttering handkerchief of a top, and wish that he’d go blind.
Manos steers the boat closer to the island. The smells of wild thyme and diesel and the rhythmic thumping become so soporific we all fall into a lull.
Now we are beyond Palamidas, the shoulders of the island grow sparse. We pass the sheer cliff where the old people used to go to die – sometimes, Manos says, in a basket which was rolled off the edge, sometimes by leaping. ‘They’d say to their family, why waste a good basket?’
Soon a landscape that includes the occasional olive tree or pine gives way to nothing but bold muscular rocks. It’s hypnotic watching the striations and marblings pass us by, dusty bronze and dusty grey and ironstone where sudden great rivers of malachite green and butcher’s red flow. We pass pirates’ caves, one with an old hermit who guards its entrance, and Manos tells us the story of the pink chapel in a bay where red wine is used to mix the whitewash in remembrance of an ancient wrecking of a wine boat, when all the souls along with the barrels of wine were miraculously washed ashore.
You can’t help but gasp when you see Bisti Bay for the fir
st time. It’s a perfect horseshoe with steep pine forests rising up around a jewel box of pebbles. The water flashes blue as a million kingfishers. When you look down into it from the boat it’s rippling with gold. The clearest water in the whole of Greece. Closer to the beach, the reflections of pine trees stipple it with scarab-green iridescence.
We are met by Lena who comes splashing and cheering, wearing little more than plaited seaweed that hangs in tendrils from her waist. ‘Hey, hey, ahoy there!’ A white shell flies on a cord between her brown breasts as she throws up her arms to catch the rope.
The others come scootling from the trees when they hear her shout. It’s like being greeted by a particularly golden gang of savages as they wade towards us to help carry the supplies ashore. The boys have all grown beards, Ivar wears nothing but a crown of feathers in his yellow hair, one of the Dutch girls has painted petals around her nipples. Bim’s foot barely touches the shore before he’s shedding his shorts.
Albin and Ivar have been out spear-fishing and their catch of three lugubrious-faced grouper fish are being prepared by Göran, who has paused beneath the pine trees with his knife in the block to scribble in his notebook. He is crouched over, transfixed by the fallen fish scales that glitter up at him from among the cross-hatching of pine needles.
A couple of hammocks hang between the trees and the sailmaker has done a good job with the tents which have kept out the overnight rain and are now steaming in shafts of sunlight beneath the pines. Albin shows us around. There’s a neat stack of logs for their fire and a pole roped between trees for gymnasium. At the shore the water barrel and the wine casks are kept cool beneath a wet mound of towels. Albin reckons they’ll stay all summer if they don’t get thrown off.
Some of us swim out with a mask. A seal lives in one of the caves but he’s making himself scarce today. Beneath the trees it isn’t too long before Jimmy and Bobby start competing with the other men, doing every sort of pull-up, Göran keeping count in Swedish. No one can match Jimmy, not even Ivar. Demetri and Charlie go haring back to the water to swim with Francine who has discarded what tiny clothing she arrived in. Angelika stands in the shade of a salt tree, with the babies. She’s talking earnestly to Manos. I see her make the sign of the cross across her buttoned-up blouse as her boss splashes naked into the shallows.
