I broke into a grin despite myself. My legs were one of the only parts of my body I didn’t feel insecure about, and I was glad he’d noticed them.
He nodded behind me and said, ‘Have you seen all the ponces here?’
‘I’m sorry?’ I said.
‘Ponces. Poofs. Homos,’ Conor said, too loudly for comfort. ‘Whatever you care to call them. Look around.’
I now glanced around the restaurant and took in that at least half of the tables were indeed occupied by same-sex couples, and at least two of these were now glaring at us.
‘Right,’ I said. ‘I think Mykonos is sort of their special place. It’s known for being gay-friendly and all that. But that’s OK, isn’t it?’
Conor shrugged. ‘I suppose,’ he said. ‘If you like that sort of thing.’ He clicked his fingers surprisingly loudly, and shouted, ‘Garçon! Can we get some service over here? Garçon!’
‘I think that’s French,’ I said, blushing.
‘Whatever,’ Conor said. ‘As long as it works, which it does . . .’
I watched as the small, nervous-looking waiter sped towards us, and I cringed.
‘I’ll have a beer,’ Conor told him. ‘A pint. And whatever my beautiful girlfriend here fancies for herself.’
Girlfriend, I thought, already forgiving him for being so brash. He called me his girlfriend!
Amongst the ups and downs that characterised spending time with Conor, the rest of dinner continued on an upswing. The service was perfect – fast, efficient, friendly – and the food, succulent calamari for me and a Greek version of fish and chips for Conor, was delicious. With some food inside him, Conor quietened down considerably and even asked me a little about myself, my mother, and my job.
The bill came to some crazy number of drachma – I think it was fifteen or twenty thousand – but Conor insisted this was just fine and with a flick of the wrist added it to the hotel tab. For all his other faults – and they were many – no one could ever have accused Conor of being tight.
We stepped outside and, along with tens of other couples, both gay and straight, we wandered along the beachfront. Conor took my hand and I started to feel really romantic again. It was about eleven at night by this time, but still incredibly warm, and I decided I would have been better in my denim skirt. Pleasing Conor on that front wasn’t going to prove to be too much of a drag after all.
To our left were neon-lit bars alternating with more traditional-looking tavernas, and they all seemed to have their own sound systems fighting it out. To the right, the waves lapped against the thin strip of sandy beach. It was beautiful, but loud.
‘Santorini will be a bit quieter, hopefully,’ I said as we reached the intersection of two of the noisiest bars. From where we were standing, the music from their loudspeakers merged, producing an unrecognisable dirge and a level of decibels that was almost impossible to suffer without wincing.
‘Well, I hope it’s not too bleedin’ quiet,’ Conor said. ‘This is good craic. Here, let’s grab a bevvy and see what’s happening.’ He took my hand and tugged me towards the door of a bar called Babylon.
Inside, rhythmic electronic music was playing and on the small dance floor some twenty people were grooving, mostly individually.
Conor pushed through to the bar and ordered, without consultation, one of those massive German one-litre glasses of beer for himself and another glass of white wine for me. It was too loud to talk, so we stood at the edge of the dance floor and watched. The majority of the dancers, I now saw, looked as if they might be gay. They were too trendily dressed and danced a little too unreservedly to be straight, I thought.
I glanced at Conor to see if he’d noticed and saw that he was transfixed by a couple of rather beautiful women kissing in the corner. They were olive-skinned, dark-haired beauties, almost certainly Greek.
‘Perhaps we should go somewhere else,’ I shouted in Conor’s ear. ‘I think this is a gay place.’
Conor shrugged and grinned at me so I decided he wasn’t homophobic after all. Perhaps it had just been his brash sense of humour that had given me that impression.
‘Look at those two over there,’ he said, nodding towards the two women. ‘D’you think they’d let me watch?’
I exhaled deeply and raised my left hand to pinch the bridge of my nose. The pendulum had swung back the other way and yet again I was doubting if this could work out.
Conor put his arm around my waist and pulled me in tightly. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘I’m only ragging you. Don’t take everything so seriously, girl. You know there’s only one woman here I’ve got my eye on, and she’s the prettiest woman in the room.’
I felt both flattered and unnerved, so I gulped at my wine and forced myself to sway a little with the music, and after a few minutes decided that whatever happened I was going to be with Conor for the duration of the holiday, so I might as well make the most of it.
‘Are ya dancin’?’ Conor asked me, once he’d downed his drink.
‘Are you asking?’ I replied.
‘I’m asking,’ he said, plucking my empty glass from my fingers and putting it on a table beside us.
As he pulled me to the centre of the dance floor, we stumbled on the slightly raised edge – we were both a little the worse for wear by this point. And, for fifteen minutes or so, we danced.
As I’ve said before, electronic music has never really been my thing, but as I’d met Conor at a rave party it seemed churlish to explain that right then, so I did my best to copy Conor’s moves and when these became too outlandish, as they quickly did, I did my best to emulate a woman beside me who had a great little shimmy thing going on. I was quickly saved when a six-foot drag queen with glitter eyeliner and a Barry Humphries dress inserted herself between Conor and me.
Ever unpredictable, Conor played along, grooving with her expertly, even eliciting a few whoops from admirers when he performed his trademark spin. Then suddenly it was all over and Conor was barging his way to the door. Assuming he was feeling ill – I had no idea what else could have happened – I ran after him.
When I caught up with him on the promenade he said, almost shouted, ‘Fucking freak!’
‘Are you OK?’ I asked. ‘What happened?’
‘He tried to grab me bollocks is what happened,’ Conor replied. ‘Put his dirty mitts on my packet, so he did. Thank Christ we’re leaving tomorrow. It’s fecking Sodom and Gomorrah round here.’ It was a horrible thing to say, but sadly nothing my mother wouldn’t have agreed with, so I was saddened rather than shocked.
We walked along the seafront in silence for a moment until we came to a bar playing REM’s ‘Losing My Religion’. It had been a hit a few years before, and I loved it.
‘I love this song,’ I told Conor. ‘Can we go in and dance to this?’
‘Nah,’ Conor said. ‘That’s shite, so it is.’
We continued to walk in silence until we found ourselves back at the hotel. The decision to retire had seemingly been taken without a word being said. I was feeling exhausted and fairly squiffy, so decided the idea suited me fine as long as it was sleep that was on the menu. Another drink in the REM bar mightn’t have been such a good idea, after all.
On arriving in the room, I took another shower. I was feeling sweaty and uncomfortable from the heat and the dancing, and I decided that if something were to happen at least not being sweaty was one less thing to worry about.
But by the time I came out of the shower, and I really wasn’t in there long, Conor was fast asleep, snoring, sprawled across the middle of the bed, still fully clothed.
Not daring to wake him (let sleeping dogs lie and all that), I pulled on a T-shirt and slipped between the sheets in the thin strip of space that remained. I’d never slept with anyone who snored before, and I learned that night just how annoying it could be.
I slept badly until about three in the morning, when Conor finally rolled onto his side and fell silent, whereupon I slipped into the deepest of deep sleeps.
> In the morning, I was dragged screaming and kicking from a beautiful dream in which I had been lying on a beach with the sea lapping between my legs. It had felt heavenly.
It was really hard to wake up – I honestly was a thousand leagues below – but I really had to, I had to make myself surface, because here in the real world, something wasn’t right.
For a few seconds, maybe considerably longer, I couldn’t distinguish dream from reality. But when I finally did grasp the fact that the beach was the dream and Conor’s head between my legs the reality, and that the lapping sensation was not caused by waves, I gasped and sat up. ‘Agh!’ I cried out.
‘That’s my girl,’ Conor said, briefly pausing to look up at me.
‘Stop!’ I gasped, my still-present sleepiness muting my attempt at expressing outrage.
‘Aye, you’re not with the poofs now!’ Conor said. ‘And don’t tell me that it doesn’t feel good. You were laughing in your sleep!’
He rose up on his arms and slid forward, pushing me back down so he was effectively performing a press-up over me.
‘I . . . I was asleep!’ I said. ‘And you . . .’
‘I know!’ Conor laughed, lowering himself slowly so that his solid little body pressed against mine, then reaching below to position himself before, in a single, painful movement, he was inside me.
‘Fuck!’ I gasped, unable to believe what was happening. ‘Conor!’
‘That is the general idea,’ Conor said, still amused despite my obvious outrage and discomfort.
‘Stop!’ I said again. Then, ‘God! Your breath!’
I turned my face to the side to escape the foul stench of beer and morning breath coming from Conor’s grinning mouth.
‘Ah, shut the feck up will you, woman?’ Conor said, still sounding as if this was all funny, as he started to move gently above me.
Though my mind was still utterly outraged, some other biological part of me began to respond to the sensation of his body upon me, to his chest hair rubbing against my breasts (he’d pushed my T-shirt up at some point) and to the undeniably agreeable sensations his back-and-forth movements were producing.
Gradually, my groans shifted from soft gasps of outrage to gasps of exertion, and finally to what were undeniably sighs of pleasure.
I explain all of this because consent, of course, is a huge and complex issue. And sex without consent is rape. But did Conor rape me that first time? I still struggle to decide.
Younger women than myself with more clearly defined boundaries tell me it’s perfectly simple these days. If you say ‘no’ – in fact, if you haven’t clearly said ‘yes’ – then it’s rape. And I’m genuinely glad for them that things have moved on, that there’s debate on these issues – that there’s a concerted effort to define, clearly, for everyone concerned, exactly what consent means.
But for me, in my twenties, it all seemed far more complex. Sex had never been discussed in any way at home and the thorny issue of consent certainly hadn’t been addressed. And yes, I’d gone away with Conor fully intending to sleep with him. And yes, I’d enjoyed being called his girlfriend, and had got into bed with him thinking it was going to happen at some point. And yes, my body had responded to his touch with pleasure, enough pleasure to momentarily override my outrage, so that by the end I can’t deny that I was no longer saying ‘no’ but instead, saying, ‘Yes, yes, yes!’ I wonder what a judge would make of it all?
It was only once it was over, once I had seen Conor withdraw without a condom, that I thought of birth control.
He cuddled me for a while and his momentary gentleness allowed me to convince myself that everything was fine. I would never have had the nerve to make a move on him anyway, I told myself, as he kissed my forehead and vanished into the en-suite.
At least the deed was done and my status as girlfriend was confirmed, I thought. I would just have to find a chemist in Greece. I would have to source either a morning-after pill while on holiday, or, potentially, an abortion pill once home. I was pretty sure Abby had told me there was a pill you could use for weeks after the act. It all left me feeling suddenly terribly grown-up, which reveals more than anything how immature I still was.
We had breakfast in the hotel – they had laid on a luxurious buffet with everything from croissants to bacon and eggs to papaya . . . I was still watching Conor nervously from the corner of my eye, trying to make up my mind about him, but in our post-coital hunger we stuffed ourselves silly. Afterwards, we returned to the room to put on our swimmers and headed for the beach.
The water was crystal-clear and amazingly warm, and Conor was playful and funny, duck-diving (again) between my legs and play-wrestling me in the shallows. It was good, honest fun. As we were lying on our towels on the crowded beach, my head on Conor’s chest gently rising and falling, he said quite casually, out of the blue, ‘I was surprised you’re not a virgin, though.’
‘I’m sorry?’ I said, sitting bolt upright.
‘I was surprised you’re not a virgin,’ Conor said again, with the same mellow intonation, as if this was a perfectly normal thing to say. ‘A supposedly good Catholic girl like yourself,’ he added.
‘Agh!’ I spluttered, my anger rising. ‘If I had been a virgin, Conor, I wouldn’t be now. You bloody shagged me in my sleep, for Christ’s sake!’
At this, Conor merely laughed. He stood, clipped my ear playfully and said, ‘Last one in’s a ninny,’ and ran back into the sea.
He’d clearly intended the slap to be nothing more than a joke provocation but my ear was really stinging. His off-hand comment about my virginity, or lack of, had stung, too. So I did not run after him. Instead, I rubbed my ear and glared at him and ignored his calls to join in. Eventually, with a laugh and a shrug, he turned and started to swim in an efficient, apparently effortless crawl, cutting a line across the bay.
Suddenly I’d changed my mind about him, so I returned to the hotel and packed my suitcase. I had a brief fantasy of vanishing before he got back from the beach. But where would I go? I had a return ticket in a week’s time, but from Santorini, not Mykonos. Perhaps if I got to Santorini I could, if things remained bad, change it and go home early. From Mykonos, it was almost certainly an impossibility.
I sat on the bed and stared at my suitcase and bit my fingernails, and I was still doing this when Conor returned, his beach bag over one shoulder and his towel around his neck.
‘I found a lovely little shell,’ he said, crouching before me and opening one hand to reveal a huge clamshell with a pearly pink and purple interior. ‘Here, it’s for you.’
‘I don’t want it,’ I told him glumly.
‘Look, I’m sorry,’ he said, as destabilising as ever. ‘I’m a bit of a prick sometimes. I know I am.’ His breath smelled of alcohol.
‘Have you been drinking again?’ I asked, starting belatedly to pick up on a theme here. ‘It’s only ten thirty.’
‘Just a pint,’ Conor said. ‘To get rid of the taste of the seawater. I swam through a bit of diesel from one of your motorboats out there and it tasted rank.’
He jiggled the shell in his hand again. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘I’ve said sorry. You can take it now without losing face.’
I looked into his eyes. There was something hypnotic about them. He was smiling gently.
‘Come on. You do still want to be my girlfriend, don’t you?’ he asked.
I shrugged and did my best not to cave in, but I could sense I was fighting a losing battle. There was always something irresistible about him when he turned the charm on.
‘Come on,’ Conor continued. ‘You’ll give yourself wrinkles if you carry on like that, and we can’t have that, can we?’ He reached out and stroked my cheek. ‘I’ve said I’m sorry,’ he said again. ‘What more do you want me to say?’
Unable to maintain my sour expression, I relented and took the shell from his hand, but not without telling him, ‘You are a prick. Sometimes, you really are.’
‘Now tell me something I do
n’t know,’ Conor replied.
‘It’s half past ten,’ I said. ‘And the taxi’s booked for eleven.’
‘I suppose I’d better get me arse into gear then,’ Conor said, straightening and heading for the bathroom.
The trip to Santorini was sublime. The ship, a largish ferry, took us to Paros and Naxos and Ios . . . weaving its way through a series of islands, stopping occasionally to pick up and drop off hordes of tourists dragging their wheeled suitcases behind them. Other islands we passed were so small they appeared to be completely wild.
The sun shone down and the sea breeze felt gentle and refreshing. The light was of a kind I had never seen before – sort of piercing, like a thousand halogen bulbs, it made everything seem brighter. The colours of people’s clothes seemed to shimmer and zing against the all-encompassing blueness of it all.
Conor and I stood at the rear of the boat grasping the railings, watching the trail of churning water, the seagulls following in our wake and the pretty islands as they slipped by.
At one point, Conor kissed my cheek and I turned to look at him and tried to reappraise him once again. The breeze was ruffling his white shirt and blowing my hair into my eyes, and despite everything that had happened, I felt brave like an adventurer, and happy like a lover, and when he winked at me, maybe even beautiful, which was something that hadn’t happened that often in my life.
From the port in Santorini we got a taxi to Oia where our hotel was located. Though there was a central hotel building with a bar and a restaurant, the rooms themselves were tiny, blindingly white, dome-topped houses, clinging to the hillside and linked by zigzagging steps in all directions.
While the porter opened our front door and showed Conor the bedroom and bathroom, I stood on the little terrace and stared. It was the most stunning view I had ever seen. In fact it’s still probably the most stunning view I have ever seen – a vast 180-degree vista of gently curving Santorini.
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