The Pirate. Christopher Wallace
it was only in the way she kept stopping me and then grabbing my scalp to pull my face right up to hers – not to kiss, but so that our eyes were an inch apart. This was the signal she wanted to give to me; that this was intense, special, a one-off connection of soul-mates on an astral plane rather than a holiday screw with a horny bar-owner. Pulling me away from kissing her nipples so that she could head-butt me again with her passion and our special togetherness in that moment. So it’s this staring, staring, staring. What the fuck was she looking for, what did she want to tell herself she’d found?
I came the once and then we shared a couple of lines that she’d brought along – good stuff, actually – so that I was ready for round two which lasted longer, almost too long, so that by the end I was squeezing and pulling and pumping everything so I could just shoot and get back to cleaning up the bar. We finished when I finished, right that very second. I knew it was selfish but I was looking to lock up and get out of the bar sharp. This must have upset her; I think she was hoping for us to go off somewhere together at that point, perhaps to watch the fucking sun rise, and for her to ask more of her questions – when did you know that we had … you know … clicked, when did you first notice me; Martin, how did you know we’d be lovers? My English, she says pleadingly, my English not good enough to tell you how I feel. Thank fuck for that, I don’t want to hear it. I put a finger to her lips again; silence please, we had our moment, don’t spoil it now.
So by then time was running out for me to make it home, as in ‘home’ home, and I knew I was heading for another couple of hours in the flat I’d been loaned round at the side of the complex by one of Herman’s colleagues. I’d taken the key never intending to use the place but by now had spent most of the week there with one thing and another. When I let myself in and looked at the bed lying unmade from the night before I felt a wave come over me, maybe a feeling of regret that here I was again, or a sense of resignation or whatever. A completely bare flat with nothing in it but that bed; yes, something stirred when I saw that. Home, I told myself, make it there tomorrow, slip off for a few hours in the afternoon, it’s overdue. And then I sat down to think about this some more. I woke up three hours later, mouth dry and every other inch of me sticky and clammy. Cocaine always gives me night-sweats and I’d fallen asleep with my clothes on.
Time to get moving again, it must be around seven. Time to pull myself together for another day only I’m staggering from room to room in exhaustion, a ghost let loose in the blinding daylight. I peel off my clothes as I wander towards the shower. And when I make it into the cubicle and slouch against the tiles and watch the water that has flowed from my head to toes disappear down the drain I start to dream, the same dream that haunts me in moments like these when the day ahead is still to happen, the dream about water.
There are six of us in a boat far out in the ocean, floating in a calm in the middle of an endless expanse. Five of them surround me, sitting silently, waiting for me to make a move: for whilst I am the one in control of the situation, it is me they all want dead. I know this with a heavy certainty that could drown me even before I hit the waves lapping the sides around us. The sound of the water becomes a call, an invitation to step over the side out into the deep, to walk the plank into the only means of escape. The water will one day take me, always waiting to take me down.
And this is the thought always haunts me in my waking moments, when I’m moving too slow to distract myself with the shit that makes up my life. It casts its grip on me, almost impossible to shake off, even without the drug-induced paranoia that I’m trying to rinse out of my head after the night before. Today, there is help from outside; a blast from a car horn and a squealing of tyres on the bone-dry coastal highway outside is enough to snap me out of the morbid premonition and return me to the present. The noises serve as an abrupt reminder that out there Mallorca is waking, outside the traffic is already building and jousting in the macho Spanish way. Outside, the island is kicking and screaming its way into the day, tetchy and irritable, like a newborn baby left hungry and hot under the stifling heat. I turn the shower to cold and raise my face to take the shock.
Once I dry off I face my next immediate problem, clothes, or lack of clean clothes. I’ll go without underwear until I make it home and I’m lucky to find a black T-shirt that I had left behind at the flat a couple of days before. Doesn’t smell that great, but better than the one I slept in. The trousers are a matter of real concern though. My fawn linen pair look creased and lined enough to pass for a pair of pyjama bottoms, which in a way they were, and that’s nowhere near the worst of it. Somehow, although I don’t quite remember the particular detail, I must have started with the girl last night when I still had them on. She herself, lousy bitch, presumably in the heat of the moment, or in the middle of squeezing my hand and locking on her full eye-contact number, had forgotten to warn me that she was having her period, or having it all over my fucking trousers. The shit I find myself in, desperately scrubbing the crotch of my priceless designer gear with shampoo so that a blatant red stain can become a fairly obvious maroon one. No wonder she was so fucking horny, she’d found a man who cared enough to want to connect despite all that. Or one who failed to notice. Until now. How am I going to pass this off and serve breakfasts without looking a complete dick?
This, truth be told, is the final spur to me going home that morning, going home to throw on an unsoiled pair of jeans and consign the present pair to history. That is what made me do it, to walk over to the bar with my hands covering my stained soggy crotch, open it up, wait for the cleaner, give her a note to give to Sarah telling her to do everything the best she can until lunchtime when I was planning to be back, and to ignore Herman’s note that had been waiting for me in the door like a fucking German’s beachtowel claiming the space and to just head for the jeep and then head off, away from the marina and inland, up the side of the mountain towards the villa at Paguera.
An enjoyable drive, almost an hour I recall, enjoyable up to a point, that point being when I arrived. I had never made the trip at this hour; the road was curiously quiet and slow, it was the hordes of cyclists who were responsible for the latter, middle-aged Swiss pumping their way up the incline in their Lycra shorts and gaudy jerseys. A surreal vision, bankers and credit managers acting out their fantasies of being tour professionals. I smiled for them and turned the car’s music system off. The windows were down and the air blowing in seemed to be making a better job of clearing my head than the cold water had earlier. I tried to take in the colours and impressions of the island as the bikers would have been seeing them if they had not been so intent on exhausting themselves; the sweeping verdant hills and narrow valleys filled with wild olive, pine and dwarf palms; up in the higher, drier stretches the scatterings of carob trees standing defiantly and incongruously green under the Balearic sun’s strongest rays, a hazel carpet of carob pods covering everything at ground level, insulating the earth from the heat. I passed auburn-coloured hamlets and cottages in amongst the growth as the winding route led on to Camp de Mar and Andraitx. If I stare and stare I am reminded of why it was I came to live on this island, or rather why it was I came to stay.
I turned off and headed sharp left, a new road taking the jeep uphill towards another plateau and another scattering, this time of villas, built within the last five years, built for privacy, to accommodate new wealth. The last of the three, with its iron gates and driveway pointing to the heavy wooden porch doors is the one I draw up outside. There is no other car here, I can change clothes in privacy. Then I notice the gates are unlocked and I’m annoyed, they shouldn’t have been left like this; if the house alarm has not been set I’ll be seriously pissed off. On the doorstep itself I’m relieved to see that it has; I punch in the code, find and use the key and I’m inside, walking into the cool air and on to the tiles of the open-plan hallway and lounge. Right away, I notice that something is missing, not in the sense of stolen missing that would reduce me to a panic, but missing as in not there, the things that would give this home its normal atmosphere. Yes, it’s the atmosphere that’s not here – the mess of child’s toys on the floor, the pictures above the fireplace, gone. Into the kitchen and there is no food, no fruit in the bowl or bread lying out on the carving board. Walking slower now, into the bedroom, I open the wardrobe, no clothes hanging, other than mine. I sit down on the bed and contemplate the weight of the evidence, it’s back to the dream about water and the heavy certainty of knowing events are closing in, the heaviness that could drown me then and there in this room on a mountainside. My wife has left