by Timothy Lea
Around me my fellow passengers are beginning to lie back in their seats and nod off and the atmosphere is beginning to match the drowsy drone of the plane’s engines. I approach the toilet and glancing around observe that Angela is engaged in a room of similar dimensions across the aisle. Through the half-open door I can see that she is adjusting her bra. This kind of unexpected glimpse always turns me on far more than a three-hour German sex instruction film; a good-looking bird flashing thigh as she got out of a car being one of my greatest treats of the fondly remembered pre-tight era.
I suck in a few quick eye-fulls of Ange repairing the ravages of flight 1147 and lurch into the toilet. This looks as if a drunken Irishman has tried to wash a sheep dog in it and I don’t particularly fancy doing anything more than washing my hands. Unfortunately, even this task is not as easy as it looks, because the tap is no sooner depressed than it jams. I could live with this but the plug hole appears to be blocked with sheep dog hairs and as I watch helplessly, water begins to flow over the floor. Immediately I begin to panic. The mess doesn’t bother me but I have an unreasonable fear that the plane might fill with water and we all be drowned. Drowned at thirty thousand feet! What a way to go. I can see the pilot holding his breath as he dives for the nearest landing strip. Too late! The plane explodes as a sudden shower over East Tooting. Don’t write and tell me that planes are not plumbed into the mains, I know that now. Then, I was rushing across the aisle and tugging Ange by the skirt. “The tap has jammed,” I gulp, “in the toilet.”
She looks at me with an expression of contemptuous disappointment like I am some kind of nasty insect, and she has left her D.D.T. spray at home.
“The tee-ap hes jemmed?”
“In the toilet.”
She winces when I say the word and adjusting her stupid hat sweeps across the passage-way. The tap has stopped of its own accord and the basin is now nearly empty. I push in after her and depress the tap.
“It was jammed,” I say. “Look.”
I take my hand away and the tap stops. I can see that Ange is about to say something very unkind when suddenly the plane drops two thousand feet. Maybe I exaggerate but it felt like that at the time. I grab Ange and she can see from the look in my eyes that this is not a clumsy pass.
“Turbulence,” she says like somebody has just burped. “Absolutely knee-uthing to worry about.”
It is very cramped in that toilet but I have a feeling that if I open the door I will step straight into space.
“You’re not free-heightened, are you?”
“Terrified.”
“See-it down. I’ll be be-ack in a me-oment.”
The plane gives another lurch and she has to prise my fingers off her one by one before I will let go. I sit down on the lav and look for the safety belt. There is no safety belt. What a diabolical way to go, I think to myself: bouncing round the inside of the kasi. You don’t meet a nice class of person that way.
“He-ear you are, drink this.” Ange pops round the door and hands me a glass of water with something fizzing in it.
“What is it?”
“It should he-elp to key-arm you dee-own a bit.”
“Great. Ta.”
The stuff slides down like Enos fruit salts and I slip on my grateful smile No. 143B.
“Captea-urn Barclay will tea-ache us up above the we-eather, I expect,” she murmurs and her voice is almost soothing. “Everybody has their see-it belt on knee-ow so you me-ite as we-ell stay he-ear. Knee-owe-body will key-um bar-gin in.”
“Seat belts!?” My hand sneaks out again, just in case she should be about to leave me.
“I repee-it knee-uthing to we-ury abee-out. You we-ont feel a thing in a mee-oment.”
That is what is worrying me.
“I’m terrified,” I mutter.
“Stand e-up.”
I do as I am told and she picks up a bottle of Eau-de-cologne and starts dabbing my forehead with it – I mean with what is inside the bottle.
“Be-etter?”
I nod slowly and find my arms slipping round her waist. Honestly they might belong to somebody else sometimes, the way they go on. I rest my head against her shoulder and let my hooter soak up her upper class pong. There is always something a bit sharp and bracing about the stuff birds like her wear – a whiff of the Young Conservative Pony Club outing to “Salad Days”.
Luckily the plane wobbles about a bit more and I can snuggle closer.
“You are free-heightened, aren’t you?”
“Not when you’re here.”
I hold her so tight that I expect to see her makeup cracking and she gives a little gasp like one of those squeeze-me dolls.
“Relax.”
To my amazement her hand drops to the front of my trousers and she starts to ruffle the hair at the back of my neck.
“De-ont be disturbed.”
A pretty stupid thing to say in the circumstances, but I am not complaining. With a practised ease that surprises me she flips open my fly and feels inside like she is taking her pet bunny out of its hutch.
“There, the-at’s be-etter, isn’t it?”
She is dead right it is. I don’t know whether they teach them that at air hostess school or whether it is just a personal service but what she is doing sure takes your mind off the horrors of flying.
“Dee-ont kiss me,” she says. “I can’t afford to get my me-ache-up smudged. Key-an you reach one of those peeaper tiles?”
A few minutes later I am making my way back down the aisle towards Ted feeling a pleasant glow fanning out through my thighs. Most of the passengers are asleep but the bloke who was sitting between Nan and Nat is hanging on to the seat in front with both hands and biting his tongue. There is a wild staring look in his eyes. I can’t see Nat or Nan, although there are a pair of female legs sticking out into the aisle. I sit down next to Ted who smiles at me a trifle contemptuously.
“You came over a little queer, did you?” he says.
“No,” I say. “Over a paper towel, actually.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Isla de Amor sounds romantic, doesn’t it? Like a beautiful woman’s name. Can you imagine the deep blue ocean softly stroking the sinuous sandy shores? The warm Mediterranean sun embracing you in its lover’s caress? The tasty tipple in a small discreet taverna before an evening of self-revealing sensual exploration? Chances are that, if you can, you have read the Funfrall Continental Brochure. That is where it says all that stuff. In reality, Love Island is a little different.
You approach it from the airport in one of Funfrall Continental’s fleet of luxury coaches (i.e. two, one of which is always out of service). “Luxury” is pitching it a bit high, too, though I suppose they offer marginally more room for stowing thirty people’s baggage than the Wells Fargo jobs. Through the fly-splattered windows you can see dust, small children making very common market-type gestures, Coca Cola signs and the kind of crumbling villages that Clint Eastwood would be ashamed to book for a lynching. The sun is there alright, and the roof of the coach feels like the lid of a pressure cooker. In fact, there is almost too much sun. It glares out of the sky as if determined to reduce you to a blob of fat before you can get your swimming costume on.
There are mountains in the background but the coach takes you away from them, through land which is pretty flat – or, more exactly, flat and not very pretty. The scenery may be drab, but at least this prepares you for your first glimpse of “the pleasure dome of liberated sensuality” – no prizes for guessing where that came from.
At the fag end of a small fishing village, on a driftwood strewn beach, stands a ramshackle wooden jetty pointing like an accusing finger at a low-lying island separated from the grateful shore by about five hundred yards of water. It is difficult to get an exact idea of its size because it appears to run away at right angles to the beach but it is certainly not going to give Australia an inferiority complex.
“Is that it?” I say the first time I see it, hoping that someone is going t
o disagree with me.
“That’s what the sign says.”
“How do we get there?”
“You take a running jump from the end of the pier. What do you think they built it for?”
It is true that there appears to be no boat to speed us to to our new home and this is causing Manuel, who met us at the airport, and who we have discovered to be unofficial leader of the Spanish anti-deoderant movement, great anxiety.
“Fission, fission!” he keeps muttering angrily.
“He means it’s the world’s first nuclear slag heap.”
“No he doesn’t. He means that the ferry boat has gone fishing.”
An hour later we find the latter explanation to be correct and cross to the island with fourteen sardines and a small octopus. All the way, Manuel shakes his head and shrugs apologetically whilst occasionally excusing himself to tear a strip off the boat’s skipper who ignores him and continues to gaze resignedly into space. In the next few weeks we meet a great many Manuels, all of them bearing a responsibility that ends just short of the job you want doing. In fact, we come to say that when a job is done “manuelly” it means it is not done at all.
Another expression we adapt is “traditionally Spanish”. This is much used in the Funfrall brochure and can be employed to describe everything from plumbing – taps that spring from the plaster when touched and wave in front of you like angry snakes – to the electrical fittings which don’t.
At close range, Isla de Amor looks like the abandoned set of a low-budget Spanish western. This is not totally surprising because in fact it is the abandoned set of a large number of low-budget Spanish westerns. Unfortunately they were also low-profit which accounts for Sir Giles having been able to snap up the whole place for the price of a couple of tons of Entero Viaform.
Sir Giles, who would be able to pluck swallows out of the air if they had five pound notes strapped to their backs, was not slow to realise that the “Last Chance Saloon” could be converted into the “Candlelight Casino” and that the “Wagonwheel Hotel” and stables would make an ace dining hall if you bothered to put a wall on the back of them. This, that matchless servant of the British shareholder has done, and as I sit in the Passion Fooderama and nosh my Paella and chips – “Fish, food of love since times immoral” it says on the menu, though I reckon there must be a misprint – I am thinking what a clever old basket Sir Giles is. A couple of ancient aircraft hangers at Melody Bay and this load of traditional Spanish set-building, and he must be making millions. I can’t see any difference between the food either, apart from what is written on the menu. I mean, paella does not have batter round it, does it? “Every attempt is made to combine exotic local foods with the good wholesome English fare that Funfrall’s holiday guests come back for year after year” it says, “you won’t find greasy, garlic-ridden, spicey, indigestible local oddities at Funfralls Continental”. True, and if you do you can always beat them to death with one of the three hundred tomato ketchup bottles handy. “Many of our chefs have been trained in England so they know the high standard we expect”, the menu goes on to say. Looking at the hands of the bloke picking his nose behind the counter, I reckon his training must have been as a mechanic.
Still, one does not want to be too critical, does one? I think, as I sit there on that first night. It is early days yet and we have all had a long, tiring journey. Even Nan, I find as I look underneath the table on my left, is having a struggle to pull down Ted’s fly. Try and look on the bright side, I tell myself. Fortunately, this task is made easier for me by the presence of a dark sad-eyed girl with big tits who is mopping down one of the tables nearby. She is obviously Spanish which I find exciting, and looks tired and bored like me. I smile at her. She immediately puts down her cloth and approaches me with a ketchup bottle in her hand.
“Tomato?” she says helpfully.
“No. No thanks.”
“Brown sauce? Mustard? Thees one?” she holds up the Worcester Sauce bottle which I suppose must cause some pronunciation problems to the average Spaniard. Her desire to help is touching and it occurs to me that she has probably served the needs of the British holidaymaker before.
“You speak very good English,” I murmur, working on the basis that birds anywhere lap up flattery.
“Thank you,” says the girl. “So do you.”
Isn’t she nice? Nobody has ever told me that before.
“What is your name?”
“Carmen.”
I should have guessed, shouldn’t I?
“My name is Timmy.”
“Timmee.”
“That’s right. What time do you finish working in here? I was wondering whether you might show me round the island. Perhaps I could buy you a drink?”
“I think that is possible. They are not very expenseeve.”
“No, I didn’t mean that. I meant—oh well, it doesn’t matter. Do you live on the island?”
Half an hour later I have discovered that, like most of the local staff, she lives on the mainland and is ferried backwards and forwards every morning and evening – “except when I help with big entertainment” she says rolling her eyes at me. She has also worked on one of the American air bases nearby and this raises her availability rating a few notches, especially in connection with the previous remark. I mean we all know what those yanks are like once they get a couple of pounds of T-bone steak and a gallon of ice-cream inside them, don’t we?
Acting on this information I try to touch her up beneath the hacienda but she wriggles away and waggles her finger at me enticingly.
“No, no. You say you want to see Isla de Moscas – I mean Isla de Amor. I am going to reveal it to you.”
“What does Isla de Moscas mean?”
“Nothing, nothing,” she says quickly. “It is an old name for the island. I do not know what it means. Come.”
And before I can ask any more questions, she is moving off towards the higher ground behind the Ghost Town, as Ted calls it.
There we find a shallow, sloping depression in which are situated scores of straw huts looking like stooks of corn in a field. Amongst them is the occasional thatched drinking trough and under the trees are two rows of pig sties – no, wait a minute; they must be traditional Spanish toilets.
“Happy Campers,” exclaims Carmen, rolling her eyes skywards. Happy indeed. I am glad I am tucked away in a little bungalow behind the Candlelight Casino. This place looks like a deserted Red Indian camp, only without the amenities. You don’t have to be promiscuous to sleep in a different bed every night, you just have to be bad at telling the difference between identical straw huts.
We follow a sign which points to “Lover’s Beach” and I discover that this must refer to those who love climbing up and down three hundred steps. That number of feet below us is a strip of sand the size of a cricket square surrounded by towering rocks which must shut out most of the sunshine.
“Where are the other beaches?” I ask.
She points towards the mainland shore.
“Below the sewer works.”
I nod understandingly. “This is the best beach.”
“This is the best beach.”
I throw a stone into the sea, because I never go near the sea without throwing a stone at it, and square my enormous shoulders.
“Time for that drink I promised you,” I say taking her arm firmly but gently. “I know” I try and make it sound as if the idea has just occurred to me “I have a bottle of whisky in my room. Why don’t we have a drop of that?”
“Bourbon,” she says.
“Just like bourbon,” I say, grateful to our American cousins for having corrupted her.
“Let’s go.”
“O.K. buddy,” she says.
Back in my room half a million assorted insects are circling the light bulb which must work on a wattage low enough to ripen green tomatoes. I pour us a couple of shots of whisky and advance towards the tap. This, when turned, yields half a tumbler full of liquid rust and then dries
up. Carmen shakes her head.
“Water no good,” she says and grasping her throat with both hands, sticks out her tongue and shows me the whites of her eyes. This is a gesture I have no difficulty in interpreting and I hand her the glass of neat whisky.
“Better,” she says.
“Better,” I echo.
“Skin off your arse.”
“Skin off your arse.”
Really, those Americans! She knocks back the Scotch like it is wrapped round an aspirin and extends her glass for another shot. I give her one and she marches into the bathroom jerking her arm at me to follow. To amuse myself, I try the bath tap which gurgles reproachfully.
“Bath?” I say.
“Tomorrow, maybe,” she says. “Maybe the day after. Water bad.”
I nod and she opens the bathroom cabinet – or rather she removes the door of the bathroom cabinet which comes away with the knob. Inside are five bottles which she holds up proudly. They all seem to be for stomach disorders.
“Good?” she says, asking for praise.
“Very good,” I say. “I use mucho, I think.”
“You bet your sweet life.”
“You, beautiful girl,” I say, feeling that it is time to dispense with the medicine chest and get a lot closer to the one that is heaving temptingly before me. “You have beautiful body.”
“Built like concrete shit-house,” she says proudly, “everybody say so.”
“I wouldn’t dream of arguing with them. And beautiful hair.”