Simply Heaven (2 page)

‘Come home with me,’ he said, ‘please. You must come.’

I followed him in a dream. Left everything on the beach, damnit – clothes, paints, sketchbook, hat, sarong, towel, everything. I barely remembered to snatch up my purse before I trailed in his wake, one hand still clasped loosely in another, up rough steps hacked into great sandstone breakers carved by the sea, across the wind-bleached tarmac to his 4WD, parked immediately in front of my own battered little hire car.

We didn’t talk much. I think we were both still in shock. And speechless at the discovery that such urgent change can come upon you out of a blue summer day. I was thinking: either this is the craziest thing that’s ever happened to me, or the most romantic, or maybe both – and despite the heat pumping off the darkening landscape, I shivered and wrapped my arms around myself.

He drove quickly and surely, brown arms and strong hands caressing the steering wheel, eyes fixed on the road. There was a sort of shyness between us – not embarrassment, not awkwardness – an unwillingness to look at each other. I put my heels up on the seat, stared at mellow stone walls, at stone-carved, shuttered balconies, at red plaster onion domes and grand carved doorways, at caper bushes and great trees of prickly pear. I must remember this, I thought, for ever: this is the night I found love. Love, or an unmarked grave. Only time will tell.

‘Where are you staying?’ he asked.

‘Xlendi,’ I replied. ‘You?’

‘Xewkija,’ he said. And took his hand off the gear stick and put it on my leg. Stroked the sensitive skin at the top of my thigh with his thumb and set off another paroxysm of shivering. He smiled, said: ‘There’s a jacket on the back seat.’

I found it, pulled it on. Dirty cream linen with a gold silk lining and that peculiar smell that Englishmen’s jackets have: sort of sheep and rain and Granddad’s pipe tobacco. The lining felt good against my naked back. I hugged it round myself as we passed through Victoria, wound up through newly active evening streets. Hole-in-the-wall shops spilled tiny figures, dwarfed by the meat-fed tourists around them.

Xewkija was quiet and cool, front doors thrown open to the evening air. He pulled in, creaked on the handbrake and turned to me. And the electricity jumped the gap between us.

‘You can turn back now,’ he said. ‘It’s OK. I’ll take you back …’

I shook my head, no, ran a thumb down his cheek. He closed his eyes for a moment, butted against my hand.

‘Oh Jesus,’ he said, ‘if I don’t … I’ll …’

I was out of the car like a scalded cat, leaning against the bonnet, jutting my hips, with my hands in the jacket pockets. And he was after me like a fox. Grabbed me round the waist and pulled me up an alleyway: blank sandstone walls and weeds growing bravely up from dusty cart-ruts. And he got me up against a wall, grinding into me, both of us all hands and mouths and fast, hot breaths, and I had my leg wrapped round his backside and he had a grip on my buttocks like a sheep-shearer on a ram. And I was going, ‘No, look, we can’t do it here, someone might …’ and thinking: ‘oh, God, this is … will you just FUCK ME NOW, YOU BASTARD? Can’t you see I’m DYING here?’

And eventually, in a voice that was choked and hoarse, he said, come on, come on, and hauled me to a rough, studded wooden door in the wall. And he’s fumbling with keys and fumbling with me all at once, and I’m tearing at the tie on his shorts with my fingernails, and then the door suddenly falls open and we burst through it and I briefly catch sight of a courtyard and a couple of glass doors and some pots of bougainvillaea and geraniums, and a stone staircase leading up to the purple sky, and a huge stone table surrounded by large teak chairs, and then to be honest, I don’t see anything much but stars for a while.

I come to in the small hours because someone somewhere has let off a firework. Which is fairly much par for the course. Making things explode is the Maltese national pastime. Peer in through a few garage doors here of a summer evening, and you’ll find at least one set of men huddled over a tub of gunpowder, cigs dangling from lower lips, scratching hairy backs in off-white vests as they plan some
festa
mayhem.

I find myself curled up under a sheet in a huge room with a barrel-vaulted stone ceiling and a dozen niches, some the size of cupboards, some the size of shoeboxes, in the walls, the only bits of the room that have been plastered. And there’s this stranger, Rufus – I know that much – sleeping beside me, back pressed against my side and feet entangled with my own, breathing softly against his pillow.

And my first thought is: strewth, Melody, girl, what have you got yourself into this time? He could have been an axe murderer for all you knew. And my next thought is: is this for
real?
Because, obviously, the backpacking experience has to involve some level of promiscuity if you like your naughties and have set out without a playmate, but this was way beyond naughties. This was, like, supersex. I feel stretched and pummelled and blissfully, dreamily washed over with satisfaction like someone’s come along and given me a lovely big shot of morphine.

So my next thought is: I wonder how long it’s polite to leave him to sleep before I wake him up and see if he’s up for a spot more universe-expansion? But he looks so happy snuffling away there, and I suddenly feel shy. I mean. It makes you think, when you’ve spent half an hour with your ankles wrapped around someone’s neck before you’ve even learned their name.

So then I realise that the inside of my mouth is as dry as a bone. Because, though we took time out for a ‘swim’ in the emerald-painted pool in the walled garden at the back of the house, and swallowed a fair amount of water in the process, neither of us has actually thought to rehydrate in any serious way since we got back. And in 40 degrees of heat, at that.

My stranger-lover shifts slightly in his sleep, presses his face closer into the pillow and unwinds his leg from mine where the contact is making the both of us sweat like brumbies. I decide to take advantage of the opportunity, and very slowly, very quietly, lift my side of the sheet off my body and swing my feet to the floor.

Barefoot and naked, I search for something to cover up with. The linen jacket lies, as far as I can remember, just inside the alley door, and my bikini is most probably hanging in separate parts from the frames of a couple of the living-room pictures. Whatever, I don’t fancy wandering about this unfamiliar house without a stitch. I sidestep a big heap of clothes on the floor and head for the armchair that stands in the shadows in the corner of the room, root around among the could-go-another-wear pile tangled up on the seat. From the feel of it, the chair is made of leather. Nice. Eventually, my hand lights on the reassurance of brushed cotton, and I extract a long-sleeved shirt and pull it on. Tiptoe back to the open door and out on to the stone staircase.

There’s a church looming over me, lit by one of those flash Arab moons, as I emerge from the bedroom, the roof soaring above the slabby little houses like a rising sun, clad in a thousand hundred-watt lightbulbs. The Maltese islands would be a good few degrees cooler if they’d only leave the lights off. And I have one of those God-is-everywhere moments. Swiftly followed by one of those yeah-and-he’s-watching-you-right-now-you-scrubber moments. So I pull my purloined shirt over my breasts and shoot down the stairs in a vain attempt to get out of sight of the Almighty.

In the kitchen, one of those huge old 1950s fridges that looks like a spaceship grumbles by the French windows leading to the pool. Smooth stone tiles, cool under my feet. I throw the light switch, flip on the fan standing in the corner and hunt through the wall cupboards for a glass.

The interior of the cupboards is pretty impressive, in a mad sort of way. I know he said it was a family house, but it looks like this is one of those families that buys a house so they’ve got storage for all the junk they’re too mean to throw out. There must be six dozen glasses in here, none, as far as I can see, matching. The same with crockery. Soup plates the size of cattle troughs and teacups the size of sherry glasses, piles and piles of dinner plates and side plates, dessert bowls and sauce boats, each with a different pattern, each one bearing a chip, or a crack, or a glaze that has run to a million crazy-paving crackles. On the top of the cupboards, lined up like urns in a crematorium, half a dozen lidless soup tureens. My yaya had one of those, which she bought in an insolvency sale. She used it to grow hyacinths in. She had a chamber pot she used for the same thing.

I help myself to a large cut-glass tumbler and fill it with fridge-water. Help myself to a couple of fat purple figs from the blue glass bowl in the middle of the long, scuffed pine kitchen table and go through to the lounge to eat them.

More of the same in here. The maroon leather Chesterfield settee must have been gorgeous, ooh, say a hundred years ago. It’s certainly well made, but you’re not talking cutting-edge design here. The leather has been polished black in places by years of contact with the human body, and has worn through in others to the point where the rough hessian backing shows through. The two armchairs are in roughly similar states. Apart from that, the room contains two wine tables (chipped), a standard lamp whose shade has been eaten away by time and moths until it is little more than lace, and a couple of truly baleful old folk in 1930s gear glooming from heavy gold frames on the bare stone walls. A low bookshelf runs the length of one side of the room, crammed two layers deep with paperbacks that have obviously been building up for decades. Dozens of original Penguins in the stripy covers; a complete collection, as far as I can see, of Dashiel Hammett, the usual copies of
Valley of the Dolls, Riders
and
Jaws
, scotched and battered copies of Hardy, Eliot, Woolf, Dickens, King, du Maurier, Richardson, Rendell, Shelley (M., not P.B.), Crichton, Franklin M., Maupin, Manby: all hotched and potched together as they’ve been read and discarded.

The top surface of the bookcase is covered in dozens and dozens of household goddesses: rough miniature terracotta reproductions of the crazy Neolithic statuary from the great temples scattered across the islands. Fat ladies, long since decapitated, stand and recline by the score, flesh dripping downward like moulded lard, on chipped white gloss paint, watched over by a
mater dolorosa
printed on to knobbly cardboard and fadged into a brass frame so lightly plated with silver that a couple of rubs of a duster has taken the surface away.

‘Mad, aren’t they?’ Rufus has come into the room without my noticing.

I pick up a goddess – a she-walrus who lies on her side on a primitive ottoman in a knee-length A-line skirt, like she’s just got in from a twelve-hour shift mopping the floors at a discount supermarket – turn her over in my hands.

‘Yes. Are you sure you’ve got enough there? Couldn’t you cram a few more in if you put your mind to it?’

‘People keep giving them to us,’ says Rufus. I’m not sure if I like this ‘us’ business, but I let it ride. ‘It’s some sort of running joke. Would you like one? A souvenir of Gozo? Although, of course, she comes from Tarxien, which is over on Malta, but …’

He approaches, closes my hand over the statuette and squeezes. And smiles into my eyes. Which somehow manages to make both my heart leap and my nether regions contract, all in one go.

I wriggle out of his grasp. ‘Nao-ouh!’ I reply. ‘I couldn’t take something as obviously unique as that. It must be worth a mint!’

He’s wearing boxers and a white T-shirt that’s obviously come off the pile on the floor. He smells – well,
manly
. His beard’s grown in and his hair stands up in tufts on the side of his head where he’s been sleeping. He looks good enough to …

‘Melody,’ he says, and, spoken with those long English vowels that come from the back of the throat, my name sounds classy, romantic, sexy, even. I’ve spent most of my life being called ‘Millerdee’, and all it takes is one Englishman to turn me into a princess. I smile back at him because it’s fairly obvious that he’s not actually after an answer.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he says. ‘I’m appalled I didn’t at least give you some water. Would you like something to eat?’

‘What time is it?’

He glances at his watch. ‘Half four.’

More than fourteen hours since I last ate, and that was just a couple of pea
pastizzi
and a glug of water.

‘What’ve you got in the house?’

We go over to the fridge and I replenish my water as he delves about inside.

‘Eggs,’ he says. ‘Tomatoes, olives. And some of that disgusting cheese. And some – yes. I thought so. There’s still some ham left.’

‘Aah Jeez,’ I say. ‘The ham here’s terrible. Reminds me of rinsing at the dentist.’

‘Ah, no,’ says Rufus, ‘we get ours from Twanny Mifsud. He cures it himself. Well, I say cures. He covers it in salt and leaves it out in the sun, as far as I can work out.’

There he goes again with the ‘we’. I don’t like this ‘we’ stuff. It’s the sort of word that’s calculated to make you feel unsure of yourself.

I know. It’s a bit late to be asking questions now.

He emerges from the fridge with a waxed paper bag in his hand, grins with pleasure. ‘See? A totally different animal.’

Unwrapping the bag, he brings out a lump of maroon meat, an inch of white fat around the edge, marbled and stippled and perfect. ‘It’s almost like biltong,’ he tells me. ‘Totally illegal, of course. Well, it soon will be now they’re in the EC, anyway. Have a taste.’

I peel off a flake, pop on to my tongue. It’s like chewing pig-flavoured car tyre. Beautiful.

‘Beautiful,’ I say.

Rufus throws it on to the table, goes back into the fridge. ‘I told you so. We’ve been getting it from him for ever. Well, his dad—’

I’ve got to know. It’s not just the disappointment factor, though I know already that I’m riding for a severe disappointment, because this man is something different from anything I’ve encountered before. I don’t do that sort of thing: just chuck myself into the love-thang without a single doubt. I’ve never done before and I’m not going to start now. So I say: ‘Rufus, hold on a minute.’