I am wide awake, my heart pounding like footsteps in a hollow corridor, ears cocked listening as his hushed breath grows louder again, catches and resounds in a sigh of contentment. He burrows into the sand. I kiss his arm. He doesn’t feel it. He is lost in his dreams as I roll from his side and remain motionless against the edge of the dune staring up at the sky. I close my eyes and count to one hundred. I wait. I listen for his breath and hear that same long rumble of satisfaction.
Men are exhausted after fucking. Girls are rejuvenated. They want to go out and dance, drink, laugh, kiss, kick off their shoes. My body was filled with carbohydrates and male sperm, an energy drink that warmed my blood as I climbed out of the dune and raced across the sand towards the path that led up to the old lighthouse. I moved like a city fox, my feet barely touching the ground. The cactuses were deformed ogres with spines shining like blades in the moonlight. One of those monsters took a nip at my arm. I spat on my fingers, rubbed at the wound and kept going.
The air swirling around the tower tasted of old dust and long memories. I crossed the peak and, as I began to descend towards the far shore, the stars seemed to fade and the night grew darker. I remembered the razor shells and fossilised starfish that littered the beach and picked my way as carefully as I could over the dunes to the sea.
I paused on the shore, catching my breath, the tide lapping at my feet. I glanced back across the hillside. There was no movement. The sheikh was sleeping still. The tall palms along the beach could have been a corps de ballet, black swans with arms moving imperceptibly. Ahead, the waves spread as far as I could see, vanishing invisibly into the sky.
You can do it. You can do it.
It had probably taken me about forty minutes to swim to the island. At the half way point going back, I expected to see the lights on La Gomera. When I saw the lights, I would be home and dry.
You can do it.
I strode into the surf, plunged in and the sea chilled the nervous sweat coating my damp on my body. I emerged for breath and warmed myself striking out in a fast crawl before switching to the less demanding breast stroke, conserving energy. This isn’t a race, I kept telling myself. Don’t panic, keep your eye on the same spot on the horizon and keep going, one breath, one stroke, another few yards between the island and safety.
Having swum across the strait during the day, I knew I had the strength to make it back. But at night with nothing before me except the long march of the waves, I began to fear that I might get lost. I knew in the desert when people thought they were going in a straight line they eventually walked in a circle. Was it the same at sea? I didn’t know. All I could do was rise over each swell of the ocean and press on into the next. The wind whipped the surface of the water and stung like razors that seemed to be striking my face with the indifference of the beachcomber striking my backside and the man in black beating me with a broken cane, fucking me until I screamed for more. I didn’t know that girl parading naked with a remarkable lack of self-consciousness, a disdainful bravado, the touch of vanity concealed behind every club door that opened to let her in. Was it really me? Was that the girl I wanted to be and the girl swimming through the waves was the shell of who I had once been, that composite of other people’s designs and dreams and ideas?
I was thrilled to be swimming back to La Gomera, but it struck me that in spite of everything that had transpired that day on the hot sands, I felt no shame, no conscience or self-doubt. We all cast ourselves in different roles, re-write the past. We all find the perfect thing to say after the moment to say it has past. We all have a fantasy life and the island was a fantasy. The fear we have of opening the box concealing our secret self is the fear of what we might find, the fear of what others might say or think, the fear of what we might think of ourselves.
As I pushed through the waves, I thought about the sheikh, how he was nervous of that first kiss, how there was a look of wonder in his moonlit eyes as his cock vanished into my mouth. I had been beaten against my will and I had seduced the sheikh to engineer my escape. I had done nothing to be ashamed of.
It was getting colder. I knew that the temperature of the sea changes very little at night, but the air cools and on the current were icy hands that crept over my body like a foreboding and made me shiver.
Earlier in the day, when I had stood with the beachcomber at the foot of the tower and looked back the way I had come, the clouds on then horizon warned me that a storm was coming. That storm finally arrived, announcing itself with a stripe of lightning and a roll of thunder that drove a line of stamping sea horses pounding into my face. The stars above like light bulbs in a string of seaside illuminations went out one after the other. The world turned monochrome, my white arms clawing at the grey waves below a sky now black as pitch. The pale silver path lit by the moon disappeared and spots of rain the size of coins struck the water like drumming fingers. I closed my eyes and swam without looking and didn’t know if the briny tang in my mouth belonged to the sea or my tears.
When I opened my eyes, everything was black except distant spots in the dome of the sky that turned blue as lightning crackled in long zigzags like a pattern on a piece of cloth. The crash of thunder hit the sea in sonic booms that plunged me below the surface and, like a dolphin, after each dive I leapt higher to take another breath.
There was a cramp in my leg and I rolled on to my back and kept going, kicking with one leg, panting, filling my lungs. I was 22 and in six months I would be 23. I didn’t want to grow old, it seemed pointless growing old, but I thought in the next ten years, by the time I was 33, I could do a lot of things, achieve something, be something, do something other people don’t do. Until now I had done nothing. I had gone to university and idled my way through long months of long nights drinking, flirting, sleeping with different boys, sleeping through morning lectures, cramming for exams.
When I got my modest degree I felt like a complete fraud stepping up on the stage in Durham Cathedral and staring out with my embossed scroll at the graduates lined up in black gowns like beetles, all identical, all carried to uni on the same mediocre mother ship. Even my job at the publishing house was acquired through family friends. I was a shoe-in. Eye candy for the office, nicely spoken, nicely shaped, a blonde with full pink lips, a short skirt, a slice of cleavage on show for the authors, those middle-aged men pretending to be young, those middle-aged lesbians writing to succeed in what they saw as a man’s world. Nothing I had read in the last year was original and nothing I had written for jacket notes and PR handouts was original. I was going to drown there that night in the sea and the only original thing I had ever done was fuck three Arabs in one day.
I wasn’t swimming any more. I was surviving. I was being tossed about in ten foot waves. I could have been moving with the tide back to the island or out into the open sea where oil tankers and cruise ships plied the sea lanes between Europe and America. A vicious burst of lightning ripped the sky in two, the light was brilliant, a ghostly blue, and the thunder that followed was like a barrage of guns, boom, boom, boom, the shock waves lifting me up in the air and throwing me deeper into the sea.
Down I went, spinning under water, down and down, eyes open, mouth open. I’m never coming up again. I’m never going to get back to La Gomera. In two weeks my mum and dad would be wondering what had happened to me. They will set out for the Canary Islands. They will talk to the police and no one will have a clue where to look for me and no one will understand a word they are saying. I didn’t want that to happen. It would ruin their lives.
I kicked down and shot up through the murky water and breathed again. I had almost drowned. I had almost died. That’s not going to happen, I told myself. I didn’t panic. I took deep breaths. The storm, as if we were subtly linked, was moving away. The rain stopped as quickly as it started. I could just make out a line of red fairy lights. I rubbed my eyes. Was I seeing things? No. They were there. A few more lights were dimly flickering on the horizon and I realised I had reached the half way mark.
It was La Gomera that I could see and I set off again in a steady crawl.
In a few minutes, I switched to breast stroke. The lights were stronger now. They outlined the building that carried the Spanish flag, the landmark guiding me home. The lights gave form to the hill, the village where I had found a room in a fonda. I smiled. I would have to stride back through the streets wearing nothing but the St Christopher, the patron saint of travel, the necklace a reminder that what had happened that day wasn’t a fantasy. I had swum off into the sea dreaming of adventure and the adventure was over. Perhaps I’ll phone Bobby, tomorrow, give him another chance.
The moon was back in the sky, lighting the beach, the sand at night grey like pewter. The stars burst into life. The wind died. The only sound I could hear was my arms and legs cutting through the water.
Then, quite suddenly, from the distance, like a murmur, came the steady drum of a motor beating like a train getting closer and louder. I turned on to my back and could just make out a white shape moving towards me. The beach was a hundred yards away. I could do that in five minutes. I turned back on my front and set off again in a fast crawl, the fatigue sliding from my limbs, my breath steady, three strokes and breathe, three strokes and breathe.
The dinghy overtook me in a swirling circle, round and round, trapping me in a wall of foam. The craft moved faster and faster. The engine howled like a wounded beast. Then the motor died, the roar ended and the night grew still. The dinghy slowed, bobbing on the tide, the wake pushing us together and I took a grip on the rope looped along the side. It had been a long swim, a long day. I was tired.
The sheikh’s features were sharp in the moon’s glow. He wasn’t smiling. He wasn’t angry. He seemed ponderous as he glanced towards La Gomera. I did the same. He was looking towards the bar with dim yellow lights at one end of the beach. Shadows. Tourists. People like me. With the motor silent now, I could hear the beat of music, the tune familiar. As I looked back at the sheikh, he stretched out his hand and, for the first time since I left my towel on the sand and dived into the sea, I had control over my own destiny.
Four
Arabian Nights
THE DINGHY BOUNCED OVER the waves, gaining speed as we rounded the coast and entered the bay. The sheikh raised the propeller at the last moment and I was thrown forward as the inflatable ploughed into the sand. He had stared at the sea ahead from the moment I hauled myself on board and, when he cut the engine, the sudden calm was like the stillness before the storm.
‘Are you OK?’ I said stupidly. He didn’t acknowledge that I’d spoken.
The Arabs were sitting in a line outside the fishing shed in the glow of an oil lamp. They were waiting without talking, the blaze from their cigarettes like fireflies briefly lighting their faces before thrusting them back into darkness. The sky was clear. It was as if time was standing still, that my following the sheikh into the dunes had never happened, that kiss, the long swim, the blue bursts of summer lightning, the glimpse of life on La Gomera like something seen in a dream. Only the moon turning yellow and lowering in the sky marked the course of the night.
I adjusted the sarong the sheikh had brought for me and stepped out of the dinghy as he made his way in restless strides up the beach. He stopped, turning to crook his finger, motioning me to follow. As I did so, he bent and grabbed a strip of cane from the same abandoned lobster trap from which the man in black had armed himself to beat me. A tingle ran across my bottom. The pain had gone but my memory was still smarting.
The men shuffled to their feet, their shadows elongated by the diffused light of the lamp. The sheikh tapped the sand with the tip of the cane as he spoke, his voice soft and melodious as if he were reciting poetry. When he gestured towards the boat, the three sailors he had arrived with grabbed the sacks lying on the sand, made their way down the beach and waded through the tide.
The sheikh glanced at the beachcomber and spat out a single word that sent the man scurrying off back into the shed. He returned with an enamel cup filled with water. The sheikh was about to quench his thirst but stopped himself as the cup was about to touch his lips. He placed the cup in the bowl of my hands and, as our eyes met, the crescents of light mirrored in his gaze were like flames heating the night air. My pulse raced. My underarms were damp. I had that feeling you have in a school play just before you go out on stage. I looked down at the cup and found the moon floating on the surface of the water. I drained every last drop and the beachcomber refilled it again for the sheikh.
No more words were said. The beach was an amphitheatre. I was a part of the drama, but unsure of my role, my character, the arc of my journey. I looked out to sea. The sailors had balanced the sacks on their heads and were about to board the boat. I glanced back at the man in black. He had remained silent, shoulders hunched, hands loose at his sides. The sheikh dropped the cup when he had finished drinking, the water that remained draining into the sand.
He then turned to the man in black, eyes blazing, teeth clenched. I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck as the sheikh raised the cane above his head and brought it down across the other man’s arm. The man flinched, his mouth fell open and he gasped for air. He didn’t cry out, he didn’t move, he didn’t defend himself. That man had whacked me five times, five fork-tongued lashes that branded my bare flesh. He had slapped my breasts and bent me over the rubber side of the Zodiac to take me like a wild beast in rut.
Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me.
I felt ashamed and I felt confused. That man had inflicted pain on me, but still it was horrifying to watch as the sheikh beat him again and again, slashing at his arms and legs, one side then the other, one stroke after the other, the bamboo singing as it sliced through the air, the two figures in the moonlight silhouettes in a lantern theatre, one in black, one in white, their movements oddly mechanical, the cane climbing into the air, the man in black shrinking away as the two figures fused together just as the bomber pilot and the bomb he drops from 50,000 feet connects him to the people in the villages and schools and hospitals on the ground below.
The man turned, his black turban slowly unwound, falling like a dead cat to the sand, and the cane came down in a series of vicious swipes against his back.
One, two, three, four, five times …
He fell to his knees.
…six, seven, eight …
‘No. No. No more,’ I cried.
The night stood still.
The sheikh turned and stared at me. He looked angry, puzzled, uncertain. I had disturbed the ritual. He turned away and struck the man in black again, three more times, three hard concentrated blows before he tossed the cane back on the sand.
He marched down the beach and I followed as a wife would follow her man from the pub after a brawl. He dragged the inflatable off the hard sand, fired the motor and lowered the propeller. He stared into my eyes, his face taut with tension. Once more he was giving me a choice and, just as I had chosen not to swim on to La Gomera, again it was with my own free will that I stepped into the dinghy. The sheikh pushed the craft from shore and slipped across the rubber hull, accelerating without a word towards the boat.
I glanced back, just as I had glanced back from the tower earlier that day, and watched the past recede.
How did I feel at that moment? I felt bewildered, impulsive, terrified and I felt reborn. I felt like the newly hatched butterfly seeing the world for the first time. My shoulders were bent from being imprisoned inside the cocoon and, as I stretched, I was aware of my wings growing, forming, sprouting feathers. They were fragile, of many colours, slowly unfurling, and I didn’t know if my wings were going to take me high into the sky or whether I was destined to plunge disastrously back down to earth. The baby bird doesn’t know how to fly when it leaves the nest, it flies on instinct. I had been given the chance to go back, not once but twice, and felt certain, even now, that had I slipped over the side of the white dinghy the sheikh wouldn’t have stopped me swimming away.
He turned off the engine, rais
ed the propeller and we bounced against the hull of the boat. My fingers went unconsciously for the St Christopher at my throat, a gesture that belonged to my mother, and I thought of her wearing gardening gloves, trimming the roses, looking up from under the brim of her straw hat, the sun behind her, her wide face with my own green eyes full of mystery and secrets. I didn’t know my mother. I didn’t know myself.
The sheikh threw a line up to one of his men and reached for the rope ladder. There are few moments in life when we are faced with great decisions. When I reached the halfway point on my swim to the island from La Gomera may have been one of those times. This was another. I knew I would regret it if I didn’t leave with the sheikh and, at the same time, I knew I was taking an unimaginable risk, that far greater regrets might be waiting in my future.
I stood. When I took his arm to balance myself, he flinched as if my fingers burned and it occurred to me at that moment that he too might be taking a risk, that this young man who appeared to wield such power might be subject to some greater authority, that taking white girls south to nowhere may not be the most sensible thing to do.
Why did he want me? I didn’t know and it is the unknown that drove me on. Our eyes met for a second and he looked away as I shuffled the sarong up my thighs. I climbed the ladder and stepped on deck, disturbing the pair of seagulls on the rail at the stern. The air filled with the beat of their wings and I watched them sweep over the sea, cackling noisily until they vanished from view. The anchor chain groaned as it ground its way around the pulley. The diesel engines thumped, the moon was at eye level off the starboard side as we moved into the night.
The boat was a patchwork of ancient timbers held together with sheets of steel. We travelled at a leisurely pace, the sound of the engines muted below sea level, no louder than the beat of my heart. The breeze combed the knots from my hair as I watched the island disappear, consumed by the black swell of the sea.
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