by Sonia Paige
As we huddle together, our breath hovers and disperses in the bitter air. Debs asks me, ‘So was that it, then?’
‘What?’
‘With the blond guy on the beach.’
‘Sort of,’ I say, hoping to leave it at that.
‘You’re going to tell us, ain’t you? It was just getting interesting.’
‘You really want to know?’
‘Blow by blow,’ says Mandy, ‘We want to hear all the juicy bits.’
‘It was a long time ago,’ I say.
‘Bet you can remember. I bet if I’d been with a bloke in Greece I’d remember.’
When we get back to the cell, Beverly is still asleep under the bedcovers. Debs goes to the toilet to throw up. Mandy watches her go and says, ‘She’s been in longer’n me. She’s clucking bad.’
I think I’ve mis-heard. ‘Clucking?’ I ask.
‘Coming off. They cut her dose more. I’ll be like her soon.’ Mandy produces two apples and offers me one.
‘Where did you get them?’
‘Nicked from the kitchen.’
‘Just now? Coming down the corridor?’
‘Been a professional shoplifter for eight bloody years, ought to be able to pick up a couple of apples when a door’s open.’
Debs comes back from the toilet clutching a towel, and lies on her bed in her shoes. Brown ankle boots with a tiny sharp heel. ‘Come on, help me take my mind off it. All the sexy details.’
‘This is my life we’re talking about, not a peep show,’ I protest, taking off my boots. The pounding in my head comes back when I bend over.
‘Yeah, but you’ve lived it already,’ says Mandy, ‘It’s past and gone, init? Can’t hurt to run over it to give us a bit of entertainment.’
‘It’s embarrassing. It’s not something I normally talk about.’ Particularly the next bit.
‘What’s normal in here?’ says Mandy. ‘Anyway, people are too stuck up about all that stuff. Everyone does it, don’t they? Just too scared to talk about it.’ She eyes me evenly. Her face is flat and indifferent. It isn’t cold, but you get the sense that any feelings she has are wafting around the edge of her vision. Brushed aside like the odd flyaway strand of peroxide hair.
Dr Johnson once said of someone, ‘She has some softness, indeed, but so has a pillow.’ Mandy has some hardness, but so has a mountain rope.
I climb back onto my bed and decide to bite the bullet. ‘OK. So I was lying there in my bikini, and he was next to me. The gold neck chain he always wore was resting on his chest in a coil among the fair hairs. He seemed to be asleep. I drifted off again and my daydream mixed with a feeling that soft feathers seemed to be trailing over my body. Rivers of sensation spreading over my skin. I opened my eyes and found Joris was running his fingers over me. I sat up sharply and looked at him.
‘“You do not like it?” he said, and took his hand away. His eyes did not meet mine. “I thought that you maybe like it. Give you good dreams while you sleep. It not matter.” He turned and started to move his towel away.
‘It had been months since I had let anyone touch my body. “It’s OK,” I said, “I do like it.”
‘I lay down and shut my eyes again. A bit of comfort couldn’t hurt. This time I could feel his fingers everywhere. On my legs and my arms. Around my neck. On my face. Gentle as air. It was a long time before they strayed onto my breasts. I couldn’t seem to move to interfere. I felt the strap of my bikini top sliding off my shoulder. I think I must have groaned because he said something in Dutch and then, hoarsely, in English: “Be free.”
I felt his fingers circling my nipples, then squeezing them. Next thing I felt a finger down below, pulling my bikini bottom aside and wriggling into me. Then two fingers. I felt his gold chain fall onto my chest and smelt a whiff of sweat as his weight came on top of me. Then the two fingers pulled out and I felt three fingers coming in. Cramming against my sense buds. I felt stuffed full. He knew what he was doing. I remember thinking that I had missed the moment when I could find it in myself to stop him.
I tell them, ‘He started with fingers, and then it was…’
‘His slab of meat?’ says Mandy.
‘Language,’ says Debs.
‘Whatever you call it,’ I say, ‘sounds like an anatomy lesson or an insult.’
‘You’re all right,’ says Mandy, ‘we know what you’re talking about.’
‘I hadn’t had sex for a long time. He worked his way into me slowly at first. Took his time. I kept my eyes shut. I didn’t want to know what I was doing. There was only one man in the world I wanted to make love with, and he was a thousand miles away. I felt this guy probing and his tight body pressing on top of me but I couldn’t picture his face. I wondered what would happen if someone came along the beach.’
‘Fucking in broad daylight,’ says Mandy, ‘That’s always the best.’
Gradually he started to wind like a spring. I could feel his muscles tense. His hands were pinning down my long hair on the sand on either side of my head. So I couldn’t move even if I wanted to. I lay still. He pushed like he was trying to reach through me to something he’d lost long ago. I couldn’t even hear his breathing.
‘He never lost his cool,’ I tell them, ‘right up to the moment of truth when he let his juices fly. With a final flourish. As he rolled off, I stirred and caught a glimpse of gingery hairs under his arm. It was only then I realized there had not been one kiss.’
‘They don’t get it, do they?’ says Mandy.
‘They just think of themselves,’ says Debs.
‘When I opened my eyes fully I noticed Sigurd’s rucksack bulging with food outside his tent. I wondered when he had got back and what he had seen. I felt uncomfortable. I put my bikini top back on and went to swim in the sea.’
‘But was it good, babe?’ asks Mandy.
‘I don’t know what that means. You could say he was good at it. But I didn’t come. I never came with him. Not all the times he rolled onto me in the sand or in the tent at night after I moved down there. It was as if there was a wall inside me, and I was watching from the other side.’
Waiting for the one I would never see again. As if my body wasn’t mine any more. Joris never asked me if I came. He was polite and careful not to hurt me. He even laughed sometimes when we were all three high on the hash tea, but he never kissed me and he never looked me in the eye. Maybe he had his own reasons for being blank. Perhaps he had his own memories. I never asked him. His English wasn’t that good anyway.
‘So you shacked up with him?’ says Debs.
I shrug. ‘I had nothing better to do. I moved out of my rented room and brought my few possessions down to share his tent. Summer dress, shorts, and most of the rest was books, all tucked at the far end next to the sleeping bag, in the wicker basket I had brought from Athens.
‘“You come to Greece for a picnic?” Joris asked me once with his slow smile.
‘Sometimes they talked about their travels. Joris had been at university and dropped out. They knew each other from their home town of Nijmegen. Sigurd worked there as a car mechanic. They had set off together, ten months before.
‘I asked them why they left. Joris replied “In Nijmegen, everything is the same. Every day is the same. Work, house, family. No. No. That is not for me.” He looked up at the sky. “Ik wil vrijheid. Want free.”
‘They had worked here and there as they travelled, and saved a bit of money. They had brought the dope with them from Turkey, the stash was kept in a plastic bag inside the bottom of Sigurd’s sleeping bag. Sigurd, the younger one, spoke even less than Joris. He had even less English. But sometimes when he was stoned he made practical jokes. Like putting the billy can on his head and pretending to be a policeman finding us on the beach. That was because they had a dictatorship, a junta of colonels, in Greece at that time. They sometimes cut tourists’ hair by force, so it was a joke with an edge. Sigurd liked to find different ways to get into the sea, like rolling down the beach, running backw
ards, hopping on one leg. Sometimes he blew the campfire smoke into my face with a childlike smile.
‘We were all so brown we couldn’t get any browner. My hair was a bit darker blond than theirs and my skin was pinker, so I was a slightly different colour. Every so often I would peel, like a snake changing its skin. Day by day as the angle of the earth shifted, the sun got hotter. They dedicated hours to sunbathing, could have been studying for a degree in it. At night Joris’s capable hands moulded my body, then he drove his message home, if you know what I mean. There was a neatness and precision about the way he deposited his sperm. In the daytime no look or touch acknowledged this private transaction. Mostly we just lay there all day and drank tea and ate occasionally and swam. Time passed like a boulder rolling slowly across a desert.
‘One day it was Joris’s turn to go for water and other supplies, and after our hash tea Sigurd and I were lying in the sun. I had finished reading The Great Gatsby and started on Tender is the Night. All the time I lay there sun-bathing I was half in another world, with these rich people leading elegant lives at champagne parties and posh hotels, gilded with angst and self-loathing. The jazz age of the 1920s. They hovered glittering in mid-air somewhere between the sand and the blue sky. Scott Fitzgerald.’
‘Who’s he when he’s at home?’ asks Debs.
‘The author,’ I say. ‘He was part of the jet-set, he moved in those circles.’
‘He’s not important,’ says Mandy. ‘Shut up, Debs, let her get on with the story.’
‘After a while my arm started to ache holding the book. I went into the tent to lie on the sleeping bag in my bikini during the midday heat. I could see the sun high above through the orange canvas.
‘Then Sigurd came in and sat beside me. He flashed the smile. Joris shaved, but Sigurd had only some fluff of a goatee beard starting to show on his chin. I guessed he was about nineteen, that would make him a few years younger than me.
‘“Joris and me,” he began, “In usual, we share everything.”
‘I carried on reading.
‘“You like me?” he tried next.
‘“Yes.” I did. He watched me reading.
‘“You like books more.”
‘I shrugged. There was a silence. Then I felt the paperback being pulled gently out of my hand. He had the corner in his mouth and he shook it like a little dog worrying a bone. I had to laugh. He dropped it and growled at me. I growled back. He seemed to take that as some kind of agreement and next minute he leapt forward.’
He closed his teeth on my nipple, through my bikini. Worrying it. Not hard enough to hurt, but the sudden impact of pleasure was agonising. I tried to push him away; he hung on. I smacked him on the head. He bit harder. I pushed him away but my bikini top came away with him. Hot mercury streamed through my body.
‘He was a mouth man,’ I tell them. ‘Everywhere but on the lips. Licking and breathing, nuzzling and nibbling and teeth and the suck of a hungry baby. I looked down and saw the top of his blond head with some sand in it. He had his tongue in my belly button. His hair was tickling my midriff. He gave me a love bite on my stomach just above the bikini line. I was trying to kick him off but my legs were shaking. He got my bikini bottom off without me even realising. I’ll never forget his mouth between my legs. It was a first for me.’
Where did his tongue learn to do things like that? Where did his nose learn to do things like that? My entrails seemed to be unravelling. I was a pleasure queen in a Bedouin tent. I couldn’t move, I lay there while he sucked away my resolve.
‘When he stopped I opened my eyes to see what was wrong. He was poised for the next bit.
‘“You like it?” he asked.
‘As best I could, I nodded. You bet I like it. Then he was in, speedy and airy, his skinny hips undulating, his breath blowing into my ear.’
He didn’t take much time. My body seemed to stretch a thousand miles long. I remembered the one I was trying not to think about. My vagina was yawning wide as if it was gasping for air. The sweetness of honey and roses. There was the sound of the sea and I drowned in it.
‘Afterwards I must have fallen asleep and the next thing I knew I woke up and he was lying next to me wearing my bikini.’
‘Was that really the first time?’ Mandy asks me.
‘What?’
‘You had a man going down on you?’
‘I was very young,’ I say.
‘Know what,’ says Mandy, ‘I’ll tell you a little story now.
‘A few years ago, Dave was working in graveyards. Wandsworth Cemetery, ever been there? Nice place, trees and that, pity it’s given over to stiffs. How can they enjoy it? He was tidying it up, mowing the lawns, you know. Crappy job, it was pressure from the Social. He blew it out after a few weeks. Prefers not to work if he can help it.
‘Anyway, while he was there, there was a gang of them, they had a hut they sat in when it rained. To have cups of tea. They got talking. There was an old geezer there called Ted. Someone told a sixty-nines joke and they all laughed except him and they was ragging him ’cos he didn’t get it.
‘A bit later, him and Dave were walking along a big row of tall trees where Dave liked to go. Keep moving around, look busy, right? The others weren’t there to take the mick, so Dave goes and explains the joke to him. “What?” Ted goes, “You mean people do that? With their mouths? That’s disgusting. People really do that?”
‘When Dave got back from work, we was laughing about it. Can you believe it, that Ted, he was like fifty or whatever, he’d gone all through life and he’d never gone down on a woman. Or vice versa. Talk about a wasted life.’ Mandy looked from Debs to me. ‘We think we’re in a bad way, but that is what you could call sad. That really is sad.’
There’s a silence, a moment of mourning for Ted’s loss.
‘So what happened when the other one got back?’ Debs asks me. ‘Did he mind you shagging his mate?’
‘When Joris got back with the shopping, Sigurd and I were outside. I’d got my bikini back off him. He didn’t want to part with it. Insisted on prancing round the tents pretending to be on high heels. I put his clothes on and chased him round the beach to get it back.’
‘Kinky,’ says Debs.
‘We’ve all got a bit of both in us ain’t we?’ says Mandy. ‘If we’re honest.’
‘At the time I thought he was weird,’ I say, ‘but he made me laugh. When Joris got back we were lying on our towels in the afternoon sun. As he was unpacking the bags of shopping, his eye fell on the love bite on my belly just above my bikini. He smiled and looked at Sigurd.’
‘He didn’t say nothing?’ Debs asks.
‘No.’
‘If that was my bloke, he’d go beserk. I got bruises to prove it.’
‘They weren’t like that,’ I try to explain how it was. ‘Things were different then. It was all “free love”. People felt different things. Or nothing. Or who knows what.’
‘With all this screwing around,’ says Debs, ‘how come you didn’t catch nothing or fall pregnant? Must of had a charmed life.’
‘We had the Pill already. And HIV hadn’t come along. They were clean boys. Beyond that, I didn’t care enough to worry.’
Debs has more questions: ‘Something else. On the beach there, where did you go toilet?’
‘We used to walk off behind the beach and find a bit of scrubby bush and dig a hole.’
Mandy turns and gives Debs a look. ‘Any more questions? You training to join the Force? What’s with all the details?’
Debs screws her face up. ‘I like getting a picture of things, Dirty Sentences like a photograph. Those little bits matter.’
‘You’re holding up the story. Go on, mate.’
I carry on. ‘After that they took to sleeping the two of them in one tent and I slept in the second tent. Sometimes after we’d turned in, one of them came over and joined me for the night. Sometimes it was the other. Sometimes I zipped the door of my tent shut and then they left me alone.’
/>
I remember their different styles, Joris solid and studied, Sigurd playful and balletic. I used to wake to find Joris’s hard brown back beside me, with his gold chain nestling at his neck and a big mole on his left shoulder, or Sigurd asleep sometimes latched onto my breast like a ferret. In the daytime we carried on just as usual. Catatonic days, pole-axed by the sun, staring at the sand.
‘Taking turns, eh?’ says Debs, wrinkling her nose.
For a moment the old shame comes back up. I have no reply. I don’t try telling her that sometimes in life you do what you have to in order to survive. She knows that already. ‘I offered to cook,’ I say, ‘but I was glad they didn’t want me to. I hate cooking. All they wanted was sex. It was a relief.’
The one I was with before in Dorset, the one I loved, Hayden, he wanted more than my flesh. He took my soul.
‘Sounds like you had your work cut out,’ says Mandy.
‘Sometimes I went off for a walk,’ I say. ‘I used to go further down the beach on my own. They never seemed to register my going, or my coming back. They were never curious where I’d been. Every so often I put on my blue cotton dress with the white frill round the bottom and took my turn going into the village for supplies: fruit, vegetables, bread, water, oil, toilet rolls. I tried to avoid Lefteris’ father’s shop and I kept my head down.
‘Then one night in the tent when Joris and I were in the middle of it, I heard a noise at the door. I was startled and I looked over Joris’s shoulder. I saw Sigurd crouched at the tent door peering in. I didn’t like it, and I tried to stop Joris, but he shrugged, put his finger to his lips and carried on pounding away. Sigurd came right into the tent and zipped the door behind him.’
I stop.
‘Go on, then what happened?’ Debs asks.
Suddenly the memories sicken me. I want to put them back in a box and throw away the key. My headache clings on like a bad dream. ‘I don’t want to talk about it any more,’ I say. ‘I feel lousy.’
‘It was just getting good,’ says Debs.
‘I was in hell,’ I say. ‘I’m in hell now. Why do I want to rake over the past? I only just managed to climb out of the abyss that time.’
