Tales of Sin & Fury, Part 1

by Sonia Paige

  ‘As I sat on that boat, I looked at the blue sea and the sky and all I saw was rejection. Like a veil hanging between me and the world. I couldn’t see the point in anything, least of all myself. Not after I’d lost him.’

  Those strands of black hair hanging down in front of his face, his face like a stern mask. And his frown casting me out of the land of the living.

  I look up at Mandy. Her eyes are fixed on my hand. I realize it’s my right hand that’s resting on my lap. Debs hasn’t noticed. I slide it back under the cover. ‘I was rock bottom,’ I say. ‘I just wanted something to stop the aching inside.’

  ‘I know some stuff can do that,’ says Mandy.

  ‘He sounds a right git,’ says Debs.

  ‘C’mon,’ says Mandy, ‘Every woman loves a bastard.’

  ‘He wasn’t a bastard,’ I try to explain. ‘People who are in pain cause pain. When it was good with him, it was paradise. I felt loved to my bones, to the marrow in my bones. When it turned bad, he dragged me into his private hell. The colour drained out of the world.

  ‘So this American guy scribbling, all I could see was the futility. The vain hope of making things better. And I realized that’s what people go to Greece for. Going back to the beginnings. What they call the birthplace of civilization. Like a melting pot they can dip into and come out new. Thinking they’re going to find what they need. There were hippies there hoping to find freedom. Commuters looking for excitement. Scholars wanting knowledge. Rootless people looking for history. Americans searching for authenticity. Because they don’t feel they have any. Trying to catch it in their cameras and take it home to show the folks. This boy was trying to write his way to becoming someone he wanted to be.’

  ‘Where d’you learn to talk like that, girl?’ Mandy rolls her eyes. ‘You think too much.’

  ‘And look where it’s got me,’ A laugh slips out but then it turns into a retch.

  There’s a pause. ‘So then what?’ asks Debs.

  ‘So then the boat arrived at the island. The engines gurgled into reverse. There was a lurch as it hit the rubber tyres along the side of the jetty. The American boy dropped his journal and quickly picked it up again. He dusted it all over. From the deck we saw figures running up and down on the jetty, catching ropes and fastening them, shouting in Greek. Then people started to pour off with children, bundles, goats. There was a crowd waiting on the quayside. Old lorries beeping. Henry Miller wrote that the Greeks always got as excited as if they’d never seen a boat before. Experiencing everything as if it was the first time. Back then I thought it was a great gift. I lived my life like that. Now I’m not so sure. Everything hurts fresh and raw too.

  ‘I realized then that I believed Greece would make me better as well. Help me forget Hayden’s haunting face. Help me get over it.’

  Greece a place of beginnings. Of re-beginnings. Odysseus gets to hell over the Rivers of Fear. How to return? He got back, but Persephone never got free from the Lord of the Underworld, not completely.

  ‘So it was all about this bloke Hayden who did you over?’ asks Debs. When she raises her eyebrows in a question her face softens.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘But I think rejection is like cutting a pack of cards. In your fingers you’re looking at one card. The one on top. That’s the rejection staring you in the face. But underneath there’s a lot of other cards. Previous rejections stacked up behind in the wadge in your hand.’

  ‘You made a bum cut,’ says Mandy.

  I can’t help smiling. ‘I think he’d be the Ace of Spades.’

  That gaunt figure in the black velvet jacket. I can see him brooding in that old armchair in the cottage. I can see him striding through the Dorset countryside, his frozen wrath casting a shadow over the hills. Refusing to speak to me, his face set like a corpse. It was like talking to the dead.

  I take a deep breath. Might as well tell the whole story. ‘But behind him in the pack there was an older rejection.’

  ‘Another bloke?’ asks Debs.

  ‘Worse,’ I say. ‘A rejection going right back. To when I was little. Nestling behind him was the Queen of Diamonds. She glittered. She dazzled. She still does. But she never wanted to be my mother.’

  She never wanted me born. She’d rather be without the stretch marks.

  ‘Queen of Diamonds?’ says Debs. ‘What’ya talking about? Always looking over her shoulder?’ She grimaced sideways like a playing card.

  I shake my head. ‘The Queen of Diamonds doesn’t look back. Nor did my mother.’

  I held my breath going into her room when I was little. She faced away from me, sat at her dressing table. She never turned round. She waited ’till I appeared in her mirror. Then from under those perfectly plucked eyebrows she would flick a glance at me. While she carried on with her creams and tubes and powders and lipstick. I looked at her face in the mirror and saw myself hovering at the edge of her reflection. She had eyes only for herself.

  ‘She found me an embarrassment,’ I say. ‘She liked to make money, mix with glamorous people. I can still hear her. “You’re a dreamer,” she used to say, “Shape up, smarten up,” “You’ll never make anything of your life,” “You’ll never be a success like me.” I felt a failure since the beginning. All he did was draw blood from an old wound.’

  ‘Rejection, that’s a fact of life, babe,’ says Mandy. ‘It goes with the territory. Like it or suck it.’

  ‘Wish I could have,’ I say. ‘But all I did was carry it with me. Looking back, I guess it was really all about her. When I got to Greece I hoped the sky like an oven could scorch all that pain out of my life. She didn’t even know I’d left England.

  ‘When they switched off the boat engines I picked up the hamper that held all my worldly possessions. I watched the American pack his notebook into his rucksack and managed to lose him in the crowd as we got off the boat. I felt a clean, healthy tiredness. I went to rent an upstairs room from a smiling Greek lady in one of the whitewashed houses close to the harbour. I had books. I had earned a little money teaching English in Athens. I would eat frugally. I would be alone. I would start again.

  ‘My room wasn’t large. Outside I could see the clear skies of a Greek spring, but inside it was cold. No direct sunshine through the small window in the thick white wall. I had a wooden table that wobbled and an upright chair with a woven rafia seat. I sat and read. I walked to the baker’s for lunch. Down to the taverna for a meal in the evening. The locals stared at me as if I was an unknown species. Then back to my room.

  ‘Nothing in it quite worked. The door wouldn’t shut, the windows wouldn’t open, and the shutter was wedged, it wouldn’t either open or shut. A couple of little handmade cotton rugs on the floor, but the cold of the stone came up through my feet all the same. I was alone. But I was lonely too. You can only do so much reading when the sun is shining outside.

  ‘The first time I went to the beach I called in at the Poste Restante.’

  ‘Talk English,’ says Debs.

  ‘It’s at the post office,’ I say, ‘where they keep letters for people who don’t have an address. There was a letter there waiting for me, I could tell from the writing it was from my school friend. The envelope had a Swiss stamp. I was hoping for a letter from someone else, Hayden of course, but he didn’t know where I was. And he didn’t want to write to me. The man behind the counter noticed my face and smiled behind his moustache.

  ‘“You want more than one? I have not even one letter for one month. When you go back to England, you send me a letter…”

  ‘I tucked the letter into my bag and went down to the sea to read it. The narrow streets were shady. The white houses had little courtyards edged with old tin cans overflowing with trailing plants and red geraniums. On the way I bought bread from the bakers. It was so hot from the oven, you could hardly eat it. It had a scent of herbs. And I bought cheese, creamy white feta, fresh as a kiss. I could almost kid myself that life tasted good again.’

  Some hope. But as I sit here
talking about it, I notice the story’s beginning to tell itself. The sentences are coming easier, picking me up off the floor and carrying me along.

  I tell them: ‘I stepped out from the houses into glaring sun. At the near end of the beach there were people. Bronzed Greek youths hanging around in close-cut bathing trunks. Plump mothers feeding their children at the little café. Flabby middle-aged men drying themselves after a swim. I walked along the beach. Some of the local youths were playing ball and shouting to each other: “Plato!” “Pass over here, Pericles!” It sounded like an ancient Greek discusthrowing contest. I didn’t know how they had the energy to run around in that heat. And it was only the beginning of April. I kept walking until the beach was empty. It opened out into a quiet desert of crumbly sand that stretched in front of me littered with a few bits of driftwood and sea urchins. It scorched my feet. I was alone.

  ‘I lowered myself onto my towel and turned my face up to the sun. Now I could hear the sea. I felt the sand. It burned my fingers, but when I burrowed into it there was cooler sand below. I stripped off to my bikini. I got out my friend’s letter. She was the only person who knew where I was. She said she’d been back to London but because I wasn’t there she didn’t have anywhere to stay. She had the address of a Brazilian musician, the friend of someone she worked with in Zurich. He wasn’t there either, but a friend of his said she could crash for a few days. It was a squat in Hackney.’

  Debs interrupts me: ‘Here, I thought you was in Greece.’

  ‘I was, it was my school friend who was in Hackney.’

  ‘What’s she got to do with it?’ Debs asks.

  ‘She had a great time with the Brazilian musician’s friend. It’s a good story.’

  ‘How many stories you telling at a time?’

  ‘Her story came into my story. Stories overlap.’

  ‘Later, babe,’ says Debs. ‘I want to hear about the two blokes sleeping on the beach.’

  ‘OK,’ I resume. ‘So there I was lying on the beach reading my friend’s letter. After I’d read about her and the Brazilian musician’s friend, I lay back and shut my eyes. I could feel the sun through my eyelids lulling my mind into a haze. The hot air wrapped itself round me. It made my skin tingle. I fell asleep.

  ‘When I woke up my mouth was dry. I sat up and felt the front of my thighs. They were burnt red.

  ‘“Forty five minutes you sleep.” It was a lilting voice with a bit of an accent.

  ‘I turned my head sharply and saw a Greek boy sitting cross-legged in the sand behind me. I stared at him. “What?”

  ‘“You are from England?” he asked.

  ‘I nodded.

  ‘“Your Prime Minister the Mr. Edward Heath he knows it, that he must give back to Greece the Marbles that the thief Elgin stole?” His face was serious.

  ‘I shrugged, “I’m sorry. But I don’t think that he will.”

  ‘“I waited you to wake up,” he said. “Nearly an hour I watch you. You spoke things in your sleep.”

  ‘I wondered whether to give him the brush-off. Like I’d done with other men who tried to pick me up in public places. I’d had enough of that in Athens. But the sun had dulled my wits, and I didn’t have the energy to be rude. Plus he had the face of a Greek god and a sun-licked body and a ragged smile that wouldn’t go away.’

  ‘Sounds like something out of a magazine,’ says Debs.

  ‘He was,’ I say. ‘What the hell. I decided to be friendly. I asked him “You’ve been sitting there all that time?”

  ‘“Nai, meh!” He twisted his head forward in the Greek version of a nod. “We talked together, very interesting things, while you sleep and speak.”

  ‘I noticed he had a scar on his left cheek which gave him a kind of pirate look.

  ‘“What did we talk about?” I asked.

  ‘“Life and art, most,” he said. “The eruption of Thera, the Athenian Empire. A little little politics,” he held up a thumb and forefinger to show how little, “since there is no policeman who could hear us.” He glanced over his shoulder in an involuntary gesture, I’d seen the Greeks do it ever since I arrived. They were all afraid of the military regime.

  ‘“I hope I held my own?” I asked.

  ‘He didn’t understand that. “I’m sorry?”

  ‘“I said, I hope I talked well.”

  ‘“Yes, for sure,” he said.’

  At this, Mandy turns to Debs, tilts her head towards me as in ‘we’ve got a right one here’ and says, ‘She talks about things in her sleep that we don’t even talk about awake.’

  I reply, ‘He was spinning a line. His next line was “You said you are alone?”

  ‘I started picking my things up off the sand and put on my shorts. “I didn’t, but I am.”

  ‘“You come to Greece alone?” His eyes were darting around me.

  ‘“Yes,” I said. “I’m emancipated.” I gave him a smile. “You know the word?”

  ‘“Oh, yes, I know it,” he said, “I hear it all the time.” He paused. “But I don’t know what it means.”’

  ‘Me neither,’ says Debs.

  ‘Means independent,’ I say, ‘Liberated. It was before Women’s Lib and feminism got so well known. So I said to him, “If you have six hours or so free, I could explain what it means.” I slung my bag on my shoulder ready to go. He put a pair of trousers over his swimming trunks and picked up his shirt. “I have many hours,” he said.

  ‘So we spent the day together. We never did talk about emancipation. Mostly he talked about himself. He was at the university in Athens, studying ancient history. He’d come back to the island to spend Easter with his family. He explained how he’d got the scar on his cheek in a swimming accident as a child. He took me to sit on the seafront and drink Greek coffee – a tiny cup full of strong grains thick with sugar, and a glass of water to wash it down. My skin was still singing where it had baked in the sun. He took me to see the old church.

  ‘Then he was keen to take me for a walk up one of the mountain trails behind the village. “The view there, it will surprise you,” he said. As we climbed, the air smelt of thyme and we looked down on the nest of white houses around the harbour, and the curve of the island like a pebble in a huge pond of motionless blue. We sat down there together on a sun-warm stone.

  ‘I only had a few minutes to admire the view, then I realized why we’d come up on this empty mountainside with not a soul in sight. It wasn’t the view that was meant to surprise me. Without warning he was all over my skin: hot lips, hands everywhere. The frenzy of a starved man. Greek girls are brought up very strictly, I don’t think he’d had many chances. He kept murmuring something in Greek.

  ‘“What are you saying?” I asked.

  ‘“Harrisseh moo to soma soo. Gift to me your body. For one hour. That is the all I ask.” His eyes were pathetic, and his hands were feverish.’

  A key rattles in the lock and I hear the door opening. Two prison officers carrying bed linen come in with a tall thickset black woman. She stands and waits while at high speed they change the sheets on the empty bed. Then she puts a handbag and a sponge bag down on it. When the officers have locked the door behind them, she turns round: ‘What’s that you dirty white girls talking ’bout? I hear you when I come in. You know it’s dark in here? You lot sitting here in the twilight, man. Why you not put that light on? They got food outside on that trolley, coming down here, you not going to see to put it in your mouth.’

  ‘I’m Mandy, hi.’

  ‘Beverly.’ She switches the light on.

  ‘How ya doing Beverly?’

  ‘Like shit. My back hurts, I’m coming off a bad habit and I don’t know where my kids are.’

  ‘That’s the worst,’ says Mandy.

  ‘You never do know if they safe. The drugs they kill the pain, but now I’m coming off, my back giving me hell. And I got pulled in for someting I never did do. I’m not guilty.’ Beverly takes a cigarette and lighter out of her handbag and lights up.

&nbs
p; ‘We’re all not guilty in here,’ says Mandy.

  ‘I’m guilty,’ says Debs. ‘My own stupid fault I’m in here.’

  ‘Got any more of those fags?’ asks Mandy.

  ‘You lucky, woman, that is my last,’ says Beverly, passing her one.

  Mandy has hardly lit up when Debs takes the cigarette off her for a drag.

  ‘I’m guilty,’ Debs says again. ‘It’s greed got me in here. My bloke gave me £500 in fake £10 notes. Told me where to stash it where they wouldn’t find it. I counted it and there was £550. So I stashed the £500 safe and took the extra £50 for meself and put it in my knickers drawer. Thought he’d never know. Half an hour later there’s the law at my front door looking for the bent notes, they go through the flat and of course they don’t find nothing except the £50 in my drawer and bang, that’s me.’

  ‘Silly cow,’ says Mandy, taking back the cigarette.

  Debs turns on her. ‘If you’re so smart, how come you’re in here? Thought you said you never got caught in the shops?’

  ‘I never did. Picked me up in the car, didn’t they. Bloody motoring offence. Then they found a load of stuff in the car. “Ay, ay, ay, what have we here?” And I got pulled in.’ Mandy shrugs, ‘Hope Dave’s got the car back by now, he needs it urgent to shift some gear.’

  A trolley clanks in the corridor and I hear the door open again.

  ‘Here’s your tea, girls,’ announces a woman’s voice.

  ‘How come we don’t get to eat in the dining room?’ Mandy asks.

  ‘Too much mess made in there yesterday.’ A tall woman in uniform appears and passes out paper plates of food.

  ‘Call this tea?’ Mandy’s been handed a plate with a small hamburger in a dried-out bun, a limp lettuce leaf and some tired-looking chips. She’s staring at it in mock disbelief. I’m quietly hoping they don’t bring one near me.

  ‘It’s all you’re getting,’ says the officer, dusting down her navy serge trousers with her plastic gloves.

  ‘And it’s only half past five, Officer,’ says Mandy. I can see she’s enjoying herself. ‘I have my tea a bit later. Can’t I stay up with the grown-ups tonight?’