Journey to the Sea Page 12

  In the evening I tried without success to call up New Zealand and Chilean radio stations; then I listened in to some American commercial stations that were coming through rather well. There must have been unusual radio conditions as I was able to pick up local stations from Illinois, Texas and California, and it was on the last that I heard a recording from the 1968 manned American moon shot. I had not heard before of Apollo 8 and her crew, the first men actually to go round the moon, and it gave me food for thought. There they were, three men risking their lives to advance our knowledge, to expand the frontiers that have so far held us to this planet. The contrast between their magnificent effort and my own trip was appalling. I was doing absolutely nothing to advance scientific knowledge; I would not know how to. Nothing could be learned of human endurance from my experiences that could not be learned more quickly and accurately from tests under controlled conditions. True, once Chichester and Rose had shown that this trip was possible, I could not accept that anyone but a Briton should be the first to do it, and I wanted to be that Briton. But nevertheless to my mind there was an element of selfishness in it. My mother, when asked for her opinion of the voyage before I sailed, had replied that she considered it ‘totally irresponsible’, and on Christmas Day I began to think she was right. I was sailing round the world simply because I bloody well wanted to – and, I realised, I was thoroughly enjoying myself.

  A WORLD IN PIECES

  JULIE MYERSON

  SO WE’RE ON the road, a long time ago, in this long shiny car of his with the roof down and it’s the thickest, hottest part of the afternoon – everyone else is sleeping in the shuttered cool right now – but not us, we’re driving in this hard, mad way through the baking dust and I can’t help noticing that he’s taking the corners viciously, like he wants to hurt someone or something.

  Two strangers, look at us. Neither of us really wants to be here. I know I don’t. I don’t think he does.

  He bites his lip, leans into the curve. Andrea Benodotti. Tanned forearms. Navy Lacoste polo shirt, crocodile watch-strap. He’s at least twenty-five – who knows, maybe more? Italian men age slyly – and I’m nineteen, a pale English girl just biting her lip. His hair is dark, oiled, kinked like wool. He smells of the stuff you put in wardrobes to keep moths away. Cedar or something. Or no, maybe it’s not that, maybe he just smells of money. Everything he owns is new and expensive. He said so.

  ‘You like it?’ he asked me a moment ago.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Do I like what?’ I said.

  ‘This!’ He gestured as if it was obvious. ‘My car.’

  I shrugged. What could I say? A car was a car. He didn’t look at me so he didn’t see it, the shrug. That’s when he lifted his hips up to pull a cigarette out of his pocket, held it in his mouth, pushed in the lighter. After that we didn’t speak again.

  He doesn’t turn to me, his passenger, not once.

  Andrea. Sounds like a girl’s name, doesn’t it? – in England it would be – but no, there’s no way this guy is a girl. Girls don’t drive with one hand on the wheel while puffing on a cigarette with the other, not on roads like these they don’t anyway.

  If I glance to my left, then I can see the muscles bunch and slide under the dark skin of his right arm every time he turns the wheel. And this road is swervy and steep, so steep. His jaw is set. Smoke spills through his nose. My stomach counts each separate twist, each violent turn. He knows it. The faster he drives, the more I try not to hold on, not to reach for the dashboard. I don’t know where we’re going. He hasn’t said; I haven’t asked. I’m certainly not going to give in and ask.

  I try to yawn but realise I’m far too tense. I shut my eyes, desperate for the afternoon to be over. I have to be back by five. But it’s only two now. Maybe I should have agreed to see him in the evening, but I have to babysit La Simonetta tonight. These few hours after lunch, siesta time, that’s my only time off, my only time for dates. Though I’m not on this one by choice. It’s a blind date – an enforced blind date, very blind indeed.

  When my employers realised I was dating a waiter from the Golfo Pizza, they put their foot down.

  ‘There are plenty of nice young men on the island,’ Silvana announced, half shocked, half amused. ‘La Donatella Benodotti’s son for one. He’s starting med school in the autumn. He plays bridge and golf. He has an Alfa Romeo. We’ll introduce you.’

  My pizza waiter had a dusty blue Vespa. He kicked it into life and I held on to his sweaty T-shirt. Halfway down the road it conked out and he had to kick it again, several times, before it restarted. He laughed. The day was hot and bright but the back of his neck smelled of school soap and dark October afternoons.

  Andrea and I were introduced at the golf dub bar. He shook my hand and his eyes took me in. I had on an old cheesecloth sundress, a bit tatty at the edges. I bit my thumb, annoyed with myself for being there. He asked me if I liked dancing.

  I hesitated. I suddenly couldn’t remember what I liked.

  ‘Go out on a drive with him at least,’ Silvana said when I asked her if I was free that afternoon. ‘Then if you get on okay, well maybe he’ll take you to the discoteca next time.’ Discoteca. She spoke the word with a flicker of barely concealed distaste, as if everyone knew this was all we English ragazze wanted – coloured lights and loud music and getting off with boys.

  In fact, I hadn’t been near a discoteca with my pizza waiter. Instead he’d taken me home to meet his family – la Mamma and three food-smudged baby sisters all smiling up at me in a cramped and steamed-up kitchen. Gloria, Maria and the little one, la Rafaella, who wore a bib with unicorns on it. We ate spaghetti with tomato sauce, Parmigiano grated over it. Rafaella threw her bowl on the floor and my pizza waiter bent and cleared it up.

  I dried the dishes for his mamma while he emptied the bin. She told me I was a lovely girl, a ‘bellissima ragazza!’. Afterwards we had a little coffee, which she made on the stove, and then we watched some sport on TV.

  Andrea offered me an olive on a stick. I took it. ‘Okay,’ he said in good and careful English, ‘tomorrow. I pick you up here. I take you for nice long drive.’

  Down there on the edges of this island, at the warm sandy roots of this place, at sea level, the air’s thick enough to brush against your face. You take a small careful breath and straight away it’s all over you – lips, tongue, cheeks. It’s hot by seven in the morning here, sun pushing and shoving to get through the green slats of the shutters.

  But not up here. Up here, it all changes. The trees get closer together, the sea further away and a cool hush falls. On the sharp crook where the road bends, we pass a sudden shepherd with his flock of two or three skinny sheep. He raises a forlorn hand, turns his head to watch us pass. So do the sheep. I smile, too late. Andrea ignores him, drives on. A chill descends and there’s a sharp herby smell – of rosemary and thyme, gorse perhaps, then pine. The tall blue-darkness of pine.

  I wonder where we’re going. I don’t think there can possibly be anything up here – not bars, nor discotecas, certainly. A moment ago we passed a small house, set into the hillside among the gorse – la macchia – but there’s nothing else ahead, just scrub and pine and a road that curves steeply up, on and on and on.

  ‘You like Johnny ‘allyday?’ Andrea asks me suddenly.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Johnny ‘allyday? English pop guy? You know?’

  I shake my head and try to smile. ‘I don’t know. Don’t know him, no.’

  He takes a last drag of his cigarette and chucks the stub out of the car. He flicks a look at me and grimaces.

  ‘This is very bad, to do this. Start fire in the – on the – hill.’ He throws his head back and laughs for a moment. ‘Danger? You know? People in prison for this.’ He laughs again, more to himself this time.

  The car keeps on going up and up. The air gets colder, darker, and I shiver. The trees pulse past us, fragments of light and dark. It feels like a world in piec
es.

  Andrea stops the car high up in the centre of the island, in a clearing just off the side of the road. It’s even darker and quieter in here. Bracken and pine needles underfoot. So many branches overhead – a roof of darkness – that our voices sound strange, as if we’re indoors.

  Andrea opens the car door and gets out. Reaches for something in the back of the car.

  ‘Where are we?’ My voice sounds small, tired. ‘What are we doing here?’

  He smiles. He has a blanket, woven brown and pink, a little worn out, in his hands.

  ‘Very beautiful here, yes? Fresh – in this place?’ He takes a deep breath, demonstrating.

  I blink. Look around me. I can hear stillness, silence. No sound of anything. No bleat of sheep or goat. Not even a breath of wind in the pines.

  ‘It’s lovely,’ I agree. ‘You do know, don’t you, that I have to be back by five?’

  ‘Eh?’

  I point to my watch. ‘Cinque? I must be back.’

  Andrea makes a slightly impatient face, clicks his tongue against his teeth.

  ‘We have two hour, yes?’

  ‘Okay. Are we going for a walk or what?’

  I’m still sitting in the car, in the passenger side. Andrea comes over and opens my door.

  ‘Come.’ His voice is brusque now. ‘We sit.’

  I get out. He spreads the blanket on the ground. I sit down on it and he sits down too. I pick up a pine cone, press its rough, round shape between my fingers. He reaches out and touches my arm.

  I only spoke to my pizza waiter in Italian. He had no English, nothing – well, nothing beyond ‘hello’ and ‘how are you?’

  He told me I had the most beautiful eyes he had ever seen, sea eyes, occhi della mare – he told me he’d seen them change colour at least three times in the half-hour we’d been sitting in the bar.

  I laughed. What could I say to that?

  He was working so we couldn’t talk much, but every time I came to the bar – to get a drink for la Simonetta mostly – he’d make a reason to come over. Was the water okay? Did la piccola want some ice? A straw? Some juice – pera or pesca perhaps?

  That’s how we got talking about his little sisters – three of them at home. He said they all preferred juice to water. That it drove their mamma pazza that they would not drink the plain water from the tap.

  I kept my eye on la Simonetta, whose tastes were not of my making. Actually she was an easy child, she liked almost everything. Now she had a bright-coloured windmill, red and yellow and silver, and she was waving it around. A white cat had come to play with her. It lay on its back on the warm Golfo paving stones and tried to bat the windmill with its paws. Simonetta stamped her small sandalled foot and laughed loudly.

  My pizza waiter was very quiet, watching her, watching me.

  Then he asked if I’d like to go out for an ice cream some time. A gelato. ‘I could pick you up,’ he said, staring at the counter, ‘when you get some time off from your work.’

  I smiled. I knew it had taken courage for him to ask. I knew he liked me because he wouldn’t look at me, not properly, not in the eyes, not once. He always kept his eyes on the floor when we talked.

  ‘Yes please,’ I said. ‘I’d like that. That would be really nice.’

  We made an arrangement to meet up at three.

  Beyond him a sweating man in an apron lifted pizzas in and out of the wood oven on a big wooden paddle. In and out, all afternoon. Some of the people on the beach had a very late lunch.

  Andrea lights another cigarette, lies back on the rug with his arm behind his head. There’s a small sweat patch on the aertex of his polo shirt, under his arm.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘What’s what?’

  ‘What is the matter with you?’ he asks me loudly, waving the cigarette in the air.

  ‘What do you mean, what’s the matter?’ My voice comes out crisper than usual. I hear myself through his ears and think how English I sound, how very foreign and startled.

  ‘You want to – do nothing?’

  ‘No,’ I say, ‘I don’t want to do nothing.’

  He gives me another of his impatient looks, then rolls towards me and puts his big brown hand on my breast. I stiffen. His nails are short and clean. I have on a white T-shirt and a long red cotton skirt, and leather sandals bought in the weekly market in Procchio.

  Gently, he squeezes my breast.

  ‘No! What are you doing? Please stop it,’ I say, sitting up and pulling away again.

  ‘We make love,’ says Andrea as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, and he pushes my red skirt up my legs, my thighs. ‘We make love now.’

  ‘No.’

  I push his great weight off me and kneel up on the rug, pull all my clothes back down and hug my knees. I’m trembling a little.

  ‘You don’t like me?’ Andrea spreads his hands in disbelief.

  I take a big breath.

  ‘Look, Andrea,’ I begin.

  My pizza waiter and I walked on the beach in the moonlight. The sand was mottled with shadow. The moon turned the sea navy blue. You could hear the wind in the pines. It was all so perfect that I wondered why I felt disappointed.

  He held my hand – so lightly that at times I could hardly feel it. Every time I stole a glance at him I was reminded of how beautiful he was – white face, black hair, black eyes, cheekbones of a statue.

  But I knew something was wrong and eventually I worked out what it was. My pizza waiter was far too tentative. In England a man who looked like this would never in a million years be so shy.

  I began to wish he would kiss me. In the end we sat on a rock and I tilted my face up and did it to him, the kiss. He didn’t hesitate, but when he kissed me back his lips were strangely soft and unconvincing.

  ‘I’ve never had a girlfriend,’ he told me at last.

  I stared at him.

  ‘No one. I’ve never done anything with anyone. You are the first, my first love, la prima.’

  I shut my eyes and kissed him again. I wondered why he had to be so frank.

  When I’ve made it perfectly clear to Andrea that I am not going to have sex with him right here this afternoon in the pines on the rug, he gets up quickly, pushes me off it, rolls it in a heap and flings it in the back of his car. Alfa Romeo. The name glints at me, tells me what a let-down I am, what a tease.

  Andrea jerks his head to show I should get in.

  ‘Last night,’ says my pizza waiter when I see him on the beach in the morning, ‘I cried about you.’

  ‘Cried about me? But why?

  He stares hard at the sand. ‘I think I love you.’

  I try not to smile. ‘You don’t mean that,’ I tell him gently.

  ‘Oh but I think so. I do. It’s been here.’ He touches his heart and his eyes are dark, so dark. ‘It’s been waiting in me a long time.’

  I agree to see him after work that night but inside I’m not so sure. I’m going to have to break someone’s heart, I tell myself. There’s no way round it, that’s what will happen. It’s the very first time and I guess there’s got to be a first time. So that’s it. I’m going to have to know for the first time how it feels to have to do it and not care.

  On the way back down, driving back towards the sea, Andrea takes the corners as fast as anyone possibly could. Full throttle, like a madman, a man out of his head. My mum would have kittens if she could see. On one corner he hoots loudly and a goat scampers out of the way and down the slope. As we descend, the air grows warmer, thicker. I feel the familiar heat against my face, my chest, my arms.

  He doesn’t speak; neither do I. What is there, after all, to say? He sucks at the cigarette, then flings it out, so he can put both hands on the wheel, go even faster.

  I don’t tell him to slow down. I try not to breathe or think or care. I know what he’s doing. I know this is my punishment, that this is no more or less than I deserve. I know that this is the kind of thing that happens to girls who refuse one
man and break another’s heart.

  Already I can smell the sea.

  The road twists and the car feels as if it might turn over. I don’t really care if it does, but still it’s with some relief that I finally glimpse the water, a cool, hard slice of turquoise showing through the black branches.

  My red skirt is bunched around my knees. I smooth it down, glad of it, glad of everything.

  I’m nineteen. I don’t know how to behave but that will come soon enough. Meanwhile, the sea sparkles, waiting for me down there. I’ve never been in love. All that heartbreak is still out there, in the secret space of the future, waiting for me.

  Right now I’m indestructible, an English girl, high up in the centre of the world and on her way down. Coming down a little too fast, perhaps, but you know, I’ll be fine. I’m clean, I’m good. And you see, it all waits for me down there – sea, sand, broken hearts. A rinsed-out world. A world of love and hope and disappointments, yes. A world in pieces.

  DON REDONDO GOES SURFING WITH BOB DYLAN

  BY CARELESS CONSTIPEDA, AS TOLD TO DREW KAMPION

  IT WAS IN my eleventh year at Los Angeles Valley Junior College that one of the most bizarre encounters to date occurred in my long history of bizarre encounters with the Malibu beach bum, Don Redondo.

  As some may know, Mr Redondo has been one of the major resources for my ongoing study of the anthropology of the sub-society called surfers.

  Why I consider him such a resource is almost a mystery to me now; it seems he was helpful somewhere back there. What’s clearer is that I’ve become a resource to him; I’ve been taking groceries down to his ticky-tack beach bungalow for eight years now. How that started is a whole other story – best summarised, perhaps, by the phrase ‘psychophysical blackmail’.