Freefall 2009, day 5

A story I seem to be circling around, that peeked out on day 3 and continued on day 4.

The day didn’t start good. The matress was sodden when I woke. My own sweatstink rising up like steam. Another nightmare. Her again. Why can’t she just leave me alone? She always clawed at me, those ridiculous painted nails of hers. Always blood red, her toes too. I could feel them in my mouth, her laugh turning to sighs. I stared out the window straight into the blinding blue Mediterannean. I forced myself not to blink, not to think, not until my cock wilted. Sliding dream images tugged at me, slipping away like eels. Her nails talons, her mouth an eagle’s beak, pecking out my heart. I threw the sheets off. Didn’t they know about threadcount? Scratchy as all hell. I’d get out of here, I told myself, hike to the Agia Triada. Fifteen K the book said, easy. A pure architectural marvel the book said. Built out of pink coral. She’d have liked to see that. The look on her face as we stood together, hand in hand, in front of the Taj Mahal. I stared at the wall behind the bed, imagined punching my fist into it. A good way to hurt, I’d done it before. I didn’t because Jesus was staring me down with those bleeding eyes of his. Man they are weirdly religious here. Maybe I should punch out Jesus instead. Leave it alone Lewis, just fucking leave it alone, I told myself. You can’t bring her back.

I picked up the guidebook, flipped to Akrotiri. The monastery of Gouverneto was only a few K further. Our Lady of the Angels, they called it. I needed an angel, another angel, not her, she was no angel, I thought she was, oh God she took your breath away she did, those legs that went on forever. Jesus fucking wept, stop it, I told myself, punching the side of my head harder than I expected. It hurt but I felt better. I rolled off the bed and splashed my face with water in the shoebox they call a bathroom, ensuite no less. I aimed my piss into the hole in the floor, the sound was a kind of relief, listening to something that wasn’t my fucked up head. Listening to something pure, something real. Something you could count on, your piss every morning. It never failed you, maybe when I get old and it dribbles but even then, it’s still you, some part of you that isn’t a road accident waiting to happen. I should have seen the signs. I knew about rebound, been there done that but this one was the other way around. I thought she held onto me so tight because she loved me, not because she was trying to forget him. I swear she wanted to eat my flesh, grind my bones into powder just to make me hurt more than she was hurting.

I remembered to step back for the flush, it flows over the whole floor, all two square feet of it, washing your piss over your feet if you are not careful. At least the place was relatively clean, not like India. God, India. That was bad. I mean really bad. The worst was the ‘rest stop’ at some arsehole town on the way to Jaipur. I needed to take a shit.  I’d gotten past the holes in the ground and the rusty buckets filled with water to wash yourself with, even used the right hand, I mean the left of course. It was like being in Paris, not exactly a bidet arrangement, but at least you felt sorta clean afterwards. Anyway, we’d been on the bus for three hours, in 40 degree heat and the aircon just whirred hot air and I had the runs. Not a good situation. When we finally stopped I hobbled out of the bus, buttocks clenching for all hell. I indicated to busdriver what I needed, bit of discrete miming you know, I guess not that discrete because I heard Cheryl giggling behind me. Pees or Sheet? the busdriver asks, so loud the whole of fucking India could hear. I indicate the latter while Cheryl is just about killing herself laughing and the driver points to a wall a hundred feet away from the so-called restaurant, more like a tent patched together with garbage bags. I waddle myself over to the wall, clutching a wad of toilet paper Cheryl’s kindly stuffed into my hand. Place smells bad but then it all smells bad in India, insence and excrement and curry and those deep fried pastries that taste like the bottom of a woman’s purse and sweat and elephant dung and every other kind of aroma imaginable to mankind and the air so thick you could take a nap standing up and not fall over. I think nothing of the smell until I get to the end of the wall, turn around the side, expecting to find at least some kind of room or hut or something but there’s no room, there’s a ten foot high pile of human shit staring me in the face. A man is squatting beside it, his dhoti thing scrunched up around his waist. Before I can look away he says cheerily, What country? just as a long tubular bowel movement drops from his backside. Yeah, really. Compared to India, Greece is the kingdom of clean.

For breakfast I drank a coffee at the taverna across the street. As per usual I asked for it ‘sketo’, not because I like it that way but because enjoyed the look on the waiter’s face. They all drink it sweet as syrup, probably the only way to make the stuff drinkable. Tastes like burnt toast boiled in last years bitter coffee. I’d first ordered it sketo because I don’t normally take sugar, not since Cheryl went on her health kick, no carbs, no sugar, no nothing that you actually enjoyed eating.  I noticed the waiter staring at me when I took a sip. I almost spat it right out there and then but I forced myself to down the lot, grains and all. Fuck it was awful, but the look of awe in his eyes was worth it. From then on he gave me a little nod whenever he saw me, and almost a bow when he served me my morning coffee. Always made me feel like I cold start the day like a real man, ready for anything.

Didn’t work that day, not in the end. Or maybe it did, I don’t know. I don’t really know what happened. I can only say what I saw, and it wasn’t much. Don’t know why I’m telling you the whole godamn thing, as if you’d be interested in my coffee drinking rituals and how to take a shit in India.

I don’t really want to get to Gouverneto. I’ll skip the part about me nearly passing out from dehydration, saved by a withered goatherd who looked more goat than man, shoving his waterbottle at me, screaming greek like I was his disobedient grandson. I said efaristo so many times I think he felt bad because he gave me a hunk of cheese wrapped in vine leaves. It seemed like a gift from the Gods, so creamy and white and I hadn’t eaten breakfast and I’d walked 16 K without a hat because it blew off into the ocean while I was lacing up my boots by the port. I’d have dived in after it if it weren’t for the fishermen watching me, their eyes like stones waiting to be thrown. It was really pretty, that part of the village, the curve of the port, the old houses, stacked together all higgledypiggledy, pastel coloured paint fading and peeling, windows covered with wooden shutters like eyelashes. Reminded me of Venice. I wondered why I didn’t just hang out watching the fishermen darning their nets. You’d think it a woman’s job, but the only women I saw were hags scurrying about in black, cackling like witches to each other. No wonder I was having nightmares. One of the women had thin sliver scars on her face – three lines on each cheek. She looked like she must have been clawed by some animal, a bird, an eagle maybe, - there were quite a few around here. But eagles don’t do that, and on both sides? Straight as a dye? I don’t think so. Then I thought it was a kind of beauty mark like those Africans, but when she saw me looking she covered her face with her black shawl and clutched at something around her neck, one of those evil eye things they have around here. Maybe I should get one, maybe it would ward off women with talons who tore your heart into bits and then scratched around in the rubble trying to find pieces to fit into their own as if trying to make a heart out of jigsaw pieces.

OK so I knew about the war, the ‘Luftlandeschlacht um Kreta’. It was why I was there. War was my speciality, you could say. Right off the bat I knew what had happened to the woman with the scars. Not the details. But I got the jist. Doesn’t take a genius to figure out you are stepping into Nazi shit. It was like following the trail of a cougar as it dragged its prey behind, half mauled, still bleeding, bits of flesh lying about. The Luftwaffers were the worst. Put a flying man on the ground and he goes crazy. It had been over twenty years since it all happened of course, but who can recover from such thing? Problem was I was more concerned about my own recovery. I hoped it wouldn’t take twenty years. I didn’t even try to take notes for the book. The papers were still in my case, untouched. I’d long decided they’d remain that way. I could flog myself for it later when I got back home. Sometimes a horror is better dealt with afar. Someone said that, not me. They never explained how get away when you are in the middle of the horror.

I had seen the children’s mother around the village of course. Who couldn’t? She drew you in like a magnet only I wasn’t poled right, not then. I was still full of Cheryl, still had her teeth in me, and if I forgot I just remembered the day she told me how good the fucker was in bed. That was enough to make me look away from the woman. She had legs just like Cheryl’s, longer even, or maybe her skirts were just shorter. The fishermen pretended not to stare but you could feel their eyes aimed at her like shotguns. The hags too, sliding fisheyes at each other, muttering under their breath. Not all of them. The one with the scars hovered close, sometimes touched her hair. I once saw her wrap the woman with her black shawl, like a crow tucking a baby bird under its wing. It was a weird situation, let me tell you. The woman was always hidden behind movie-star sunglasses. I knew the colour of them because of her children. Eyes you could drown in if you weren’t careful, I was sure of that. Her hair was a multicolour of blond and red and gold and silver. Fancy bobbed cut. A woman who needed keeping. I wondered who kept her but I never saw a man with her, just the boy. I heard what happened, of course, but that was much later. It all made sense then, her eyes hidden behind those glasses even when the sun was down.

By the time I got to Gouverneto I was too tired to go inside and sightsee. I just slumped against a wall, trying to get my breath back. To fuck with checking out the Renaissance Venetian influence of the monastery’s facade, what I needed was a long cold beer. I found a pool of shade under a cypress tree, pulled my boots off and fantasised that that the monks were Trappists and I could order a Bockbier. Or two. Or three. No such luck of course and I’d arrived at closing time, siesta time and the Monastery was closed to visitors. Too bad. I could have pretended to be doing research. Not that there was much left to find out, the Germans had destroyed their archives, along with most of the monks.

It was about then I saw them. Maybe later, I can’t be specific. Sometime between two pm and three. I remember hearing the tinkle of bells, thinking it was coming from the monastery, a call for matins but it was too late for that and then I was staring into the beady eye of a black goat, horns as big as a bison’s aimed straight at me. I scrambled up, scaring the both of us, the goat going ‘bleat’ and scampering off, and me just about tearing the skin from my back against the bark of the tree. Yeah, that’s when I saw them. They were following the path that lead down towards the gorge. I’d forgotten about that paragraph in the guidebook. The gorge, the Neolithic cult cave of Artemis. I’d only planned to get as far as the monastery. But watching those soft footed, sliverheaded children heading into the olive grove, the lanky Greek kid behind, I couldn’t stop myself from wanting to follow. They seemed like the cool drink I’d been wanting. Something I was desperate for, something to wash the insides of me and make me clean again. Oh boy I could drink them up, their pale skin, their sea-coloured, sea-changing eyes. Well. Fuck. Anyway, right about then a cave sounded very good, place to hide from the beating sun. I could almost smell that damp from where I stood, needles sticking into my ankles, a softmildew smell mingling like honey with the pinesap smell of the cypress towering over me.

I knew who the children were, I’d seen their shine all over the village. They darted about like fireflies, even in the hot sun they seemed to glow. They were always together, sometimes hand in hand. The boy about eleven, twelve maybe. The girl I couldn’t really tell, I’m not good with girls. At first I thought she was really young, four or five years old, but up close, the way she looked at you, that wasn’t a five year old look, I was sure of that. She stared right through you as if trying to find out what you were really made of. X-ray eyes. I shuddered to think what she’d look like as a woman, scare the shit of me kind of woman, the one you’d want to curl up inside and weep all the tears you ever had, all the ones you pretended you never had. The kind of woman you could tell anything to, the kind of woman you could confess your sins to  and you knew she’d love you even more for the telling. Crazy thinking, I know. Who knows how’s she’s going to grow up. After what happened. After what I think happened. I already told you I don’t know for sure. Villagers tight as a fist around here. I suppose they know, I suppose they punished the boy, hid him away somewhere in the hills behind the village. I say boy but he was a man. You’re a man at eighteen, right? You are responsible for your actions at eighteen, right? I was eighteen when I married Cheryl. I take responsibility for that. She was twenty-two. I figured she’d be able to teach me a thing or two. I guess she did.

They didn’t hear me follow. I went barefoot, strung my boots over my shoulder. I knew how to make silent footsteps in a forest. My brother Bob and I were always playing Cowboys and Indians and I was always the Indian. We got so good at it we once scared the living daylights out of each other, hiding behind the same tree, on either side, each of us circling quietly, our arm about the tree, pulling us around, until our fingers touched. It was like that Halloween game where they blindfold you and stick your finger in a bowl of bread dough, telling you  you’re sticking your finger into a monster’s eye. I think Bob pissed himself with fright and neither of us had mastered the art of the silent scream. I learned that one later, pulling my body as far away from Cheryl’s as I could, half falling off the bed, lying there stiffer than the dead, listening to her soft breathing, each breath a kind of betrayal.

It was a beautiful walk, tricky but beautiful. You had to watch your footing carefully, but that meant you saw the all the tiny plants and flowers growing by the side. The yellow heather was out, there was broom and sage and wild roses the colour of a south sea pearl, the colour of a woman’s labia. Miniscule blue flowers I don’t know the name of. A tuft of daisy’s growing between two rocks. I picked one, flung it away when I realised what I was going to do. I knew the answer already.

By the time I got to the ruined church guarding the mouth of the cave the kids were already inside. I stopped awhile, pulled my boots back on, laced them up. I wished there was a goatherd to give me water. I couldn’t believe I’d been so stupid not to bring any. There was usually water inside such caves. If not I could lick the walls, they were sure to be damp. I heard the boy laugh, the girl’s giggle. I went in.

The cool dark was a kind of benediction. Thank Christ, I said. This was where I was meant to be, inside somewhere safe and blueblack, inside where my mind seemed to still and go numb, my ears deafening as if the air pressure had shifted. It was so quiet. I didn’t even think about the children or the Greek boy. It was a big cave.

Once my eyes adjusted I walked deeper inside, deeper into the dark and the quiet and the coolness, it was like slipping into a waterhole, like slipping into a woman, just the right temperature, cooler than you were, the softness of her taking your breath away and that’s when I heard her gasp. A soft sweet noise, nothing desperate. My eyes were adjusting slowly and I headed further, towards the centre of the cave where the stalagmite was supposed to be. At first I thought I’d gone the wrong way, but then there it was right in front of me. It was incredible. Huge. It seemed to glow. At first I couldn’t see the bear shape, but after a while it was clear. The she-bear, protectress of women. Artemis herself even. That’s what the guidebook said, myth and mystery wasn’t really my thing. Real life was complicated enough without bringing strange rituals into it. To me the stalagmite looked more like a shrouded woman, a woman or a man or someone, some holy thing waiting, just for you. Actually it was a bit phallic if you really want to know. I probably gasped too. In fact I’m sure of it because something startled the boy, the young boy, not the Greek. He stepped out from behind the stalagmite, flashed a torchlight in my face, blinding me, and then he cried out and dropped it. It sounded like it broke. I heard the clunk and roll of something hard against rock, and then it stopped with a muffled thud. I heard the boy shuffling frantically, trying to put the torch back together again.

Hey, it’s OK, I’m not going to hurt you, I said. I could hear almost hear his heart beating, poor kid. I knelt down beside him, his hair for light. Here, let me, I said, and he handed me the torch. I don’t know why he trusted me. I wouldn’t have.

Where are you from, I asked, as I felt around the cave floor for batteries. I knew the family were English, but I wanted him to hear the sound of my voice. Cynthia used to say just hearing my voice made her feel all better. I don’t think she was lying, not then. The boy didn’t answer my question. He just said, can you fix it please, all polite, his consonants clipped and high pitched. It was a beautiful sound, made me think of my days in Oxford, the summer Cynthia joined me, the summer she dangled those long legs of hers into the Isis, me pretending I could punt when all I could do was stare at her ankles, the fineness of them, like cut glass.
The torch wasn’t broken. The batteries had just rolled out. One was caught in a divit near my foot, the other was nestled against the stalagmite. I put them back inside the body of the torch, screwed the back closed, flipped the switch on.

Two legs. little girl legs. Unmistakable. Long and straight, like her mother’s. Perfect little knees scuffed. Her dress rucked up around her waist. At first I thought she had the pattern of a starfish on the front of her white panties. The torchlight flickered, went off. In the dark a kind of rage ballooned inside me, opening out in my head like the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima.That was no starfish. That was a boy’s hand, a man’s hand. I say this now and I’d say I’m sure of it. But then all I knew was the rage and the sound of my voice yelling Get your fucking hands off her echoing in the cave, bouncing off the walls, holding silent a moment like a standing wave and then and crashing down upon me, upon all of us, scattering feet and stones and darkness then it all went silent again, just the plink plink of water dripping in the distance, the sound of emptiness, the sound of someone who’d fallen down a well, someone who had given up calling for help.

In that plink plink silence I lurched forward but the boy was quicker than me, he was already by her side, holding her as she slipped to the ground in his arms. The Greek was gone. Maybe he was never there. Maybe the shadows of the cave bear were playing tricks on me. Maybe Artemis had aimed her arrow and shot him in the heart. I hope so, I sure hope so.