The Pirate

The captain smiled. His first smile. It lasted but an instant. ‘Then I should bid good day to you, Doctor. I have work to do.’

From Glasgow to the south of France, summer of 1985. My first summer after starting university, four of us – myself, Paul, Ian and Maurice, all Strathclyde first years – living in two tents at a campsite a mile or so inland from St Raphaël, the heart of the Côte d’Azur. The excursion and its location was my idea, as was the stop-off en route in Paris to visit the grave of Jim Morrison. Not that we thought the stiff Lizard King would appreciate our visit, it just seemed appropriate to pay tribute to someone whom we, laughably, thought to be a kindred spirit. Jim Morrison had lived and died the full rock-and-roll trip, for him there was nothing that was forbidden, nothing that he denied himself. He had tested the parameters of the possible to glorious destruction. We four gathered around his tomb in silent salute and then made our way to the train that would take us south, our group preferring not to hitch its way there because it was deemed too risky by our parents. Welcome to the home of the existentialist French, where you live for the moment, once you’ve checked out it’s OK with mum and dad. Yes, things would have to change, for me at least; soon it would be time to cut loose.

France was liberating though, almost immediately. After a little more than a week’s stretching on the sun-baked sands I changed colour and became a different person. The heat also killed any appetite I might have had, it would have been from that time on that I took on the thin shape I have now, losing any normal appetite at least. And the rest of the boys? Well, I had taken them there, not that I had set myself up as expedition leader or chief fucking scoutmaster, but as the only one with any idea and any kind of will to see it through I became the travel coordinator, navigator and complaints department rolled into one. That would also soon change – I hadn’t sought this sudden elevation and I wasn’t cut out to be a consensus leader. Camping wasn’t really my bag either, truth be told, it was the lack of money and alternative options that had forced us under canvas. The site itself – Les Acacias – had been recommended by two Australian girls I’d befriended at Gare du Nord. They described it as the hang-out and rendezvous for the Riviera’s dispossessed, by which I took them to mean poor, but which just about described everyone when compared to the Cartier-garbed hommes and femmes hanging out in the yachts and restaurants of St Raph and the glitzy brand-new marina at Port-Fréjus. Millionaires, all of them, so it seemed. I’d never seen wealth like that before, the jewellery, sunglasses, white linen suits and limousines. Wealth worn and flaunted, to my open-mouthed wonder, though studiously ignored by the rest of the have-nots for whom the word ‘insouciant’ could have been especially devised. No, it was far, far away from the drab and rain-soaked quays at Greenock and Port Glasgow. It was hard to believe that the water that lapped these harbours of my youth was part of the same worldwide ocean. There was something that drew me to the sea in these places, even though I always felt as if on the outside of the people and activity that gathered around them; at home it had been almost by choice, here I wanted in, I wanted to belong to the crowd who had it all.

The Aussie girls had told me of the enlightened policy regarding campsite rents at Les Acacias, in that very few people actually paid them. You were meant to of course, the total due was added to on a daily basis, but most of the patrons tended to prefer a midnight exit through a hole in the hedge when their time was up. Strictly speaking then, it was those particular customers who were the enlightened ones, and with budgets being tight I intended to join them. Knowing this in advance, I had Paul give his passport number when we checked in. I wonder if he has ever had any comeback from our eventual abrupt departure? Perhaps, maybe many years later, he was arrested on arrival at EuroDisney with wife, in-laws and screaming kids because of this shameless plant. I hope he can forgive me for setting him up. The shit he found himself in.

Anyway, at the height of the season there would be over a hundred tents rigged up on the hissing summer lawns, one giant lattice weave of wires and ropes, zips and poles, all intolerable sweat-holes under the morning and afternoon sun, damp with cold condensation at night. I remember queuing for the toilet every morning behind some farting Belgian, and the smell of gas and cooking bacon bringing out a curious sensation of nausea and hunger at the same time. Everyone would congregate at the wash-houses to shower and shave, then you would wait in line for fresh rolls and croissant at the site shop, the same place you would buy your cheap white wine at the end of the day. All of this was achieved with a degree of harmony the United Nations would have been proud of; there was a huge cast of nationalities managing to get by, despite their different languages, colour of skin, and reasons for being there. I remember it as almost like being in a Benetton ad. After a day or so of witnessing the clear-out that would occur after breakfast, when an assortment of beat-up cars, creaking trucks and rusty buses would arrive to pick up the same people we had been behind in one queue or another, I realized that whilst there were some holidaymakers on site, they were in the minority, everyone else was working.

One of the pick-ups was a yellow Volkswagen dormobile, showing up every day, audible before it was visible, its bleating, rasping engine shivering and shuddering as it coughed its phlegm of exhaust into the fresh morning air. The driver was a stringy guy in a vest, cut-off jeans and sandals. Usually the same vest, cut-off jeans and sandals, but that’s the French way I suppose. He had dark eyes and heavy eyebrows, again the French way, like Charles Aznavour. I guessed he might have been in his late thirties, although he seemed cool about this, in fact, cool about everything. It came to pass that one fateful day he caught me looking at him; I would have been getting up to meet the guys for breakfast some way into our second week. When he saw me he motioned for me to hop in and join his crew in whatever it was they were leaving to do. A simple gesture was all he needed to convey what he needed to convey; a shrug and a dropping of the chin, cheeks puckered, a stabbing sweep of his arm towards the back of the van. Blink and you would have missed it, blink and the door to a new way of life remains shut. I didn’t miss it, nor what was meant by it, and in an instant we understood each other in a way that would have been impossible to communicate by him in his fractured English or me in the ‘plume de ma tante’ French that had recently been drilled into me at school but had proved – surprisingly – to be less than fucking useless when tried out on natives who didn’t behave in the beret-and-onions way the textbooks would have had us expect.

So what did the rapid fire mime mean? Well, firstly that there was some kind of scam going on, one that I was invited to join, probably at a low or lightweight level, and that this venture wasn’t likely to be one currently under investigation by Interpol – I wouldn’t be joining in an armed robbery or sophisticated international fraud. In fact, it would be simple enough to pick it up as I went along, as indeed the others who were packing into his Tardis-like vehicle had done before. Most importantly though, the gesture indicated he was reaching out to me, trusting me to come and try, and not to squeal or rip him off if I didn’t like it; I’m cool with you, the motion said, can you be cool with me? I took a look at the state of those clambering in – there didn’t seem to be much room left amongst the German chicks in bikinis, Parisian hipsters with their stubble and crew-cut hair, half-caste reggae-boys in Bermuda shorts. I turned to seek out Ian and Maurice who had been behind me at the check-out in the camp shop; they were outside juggling rolls, fruit and wallets as they counted out their change. I knew where I belonged and where I wanted to be. The rattling door was closing over as the rusty machine revved up. I smiled through the window and they held it long enough for me to squeeze in. The tin rocket took off. I was a passenger looking out on its convulsive spurt of fumes, wondering where it would take me.

It was dark when the Anne finally cast off, Captain Henry quarrelling with the customs men to the last over a set of barrels which he insisted were to be loaded empty. The tariff-keepers seemed dubious and threatened to stay and observe the procedure until it was completed. Martin would hear later that the captain had told them this would happen at daybreak and had thus persuaded them to depart from the scene. Sure enough, no sooner had they done so than another set of traders appeared, men who made quick work of filling the casks with French brandy. The anchor was raised the very moment they were done and the booty on board. Below deck in his quarters Martin listened to the grumblings over the captain’s apparent greed and his willingness to employ such deceit and subterfuge simply to avoid the ten per cent duty which should rightfully have been due on the outgoing goods. There were other complaints too; that the late loading had left the stacked cargo now out of balance, heaviest highest in the hold and not properly bound in the evening darkness below deck. What might this do to affect the ship’s stability in the open sea? These arguments would be aired over and over as the voyage progressed, and initially Martin would remain indifferent to them. In fact, he was almost reassured. Captain Henry had proved that he was an experienced mariner; his actions, although dishonest, were hardly those of a novice.

They did mean however that by the time the vessel began to move it was loaded to the full, every possible inch carrying provisions of one type or another. Martin found no space where the captain had directed him to lodge his books and duly stacked the volumes in the cabin, disobeying the earlier instruction. Here they would be safe from the water that would wash through the decks when the waves were high, here they would be close to hand if needed. Martin was not dissatisfied with this outcome, his only concern being whether the colleagues who would share this space would be offended by his presumption. In time he would learn that they, like himself, had their attentions focused on other matters.

Forty-four hands in total, that was the roll call when the Anne made off for the Guinea coast. Martin was surprised at the number, having witnessed earlier in his youth the ships leaving Greenock with a fraction of such a crew. He surmised that this quantity of men was indeed required and would have been taken only if strictly necessary, given the efforts of Captain Henry to cut the costs of the voyage on every other front. In the full light of day it was the state of the sails which had shocked the most; a patchwork of discarded rags, hastily sewed seams struggling to cope with the scarcely bracing winds of the Channel. Still, the almost admirable philosophy of the trip seemed to be to mend and make anew in these early, gentle days, rather than have the ship tied at anchor whilst the same work was carried out in presumably more expensive surroundings. Consequently Martin was to spend his initial weeks observing the industry of the crew on the decks as the carpenters, coopers and even blacksmiths went about their business. Sailing men on sailors’ wages, earning less than their fellow craftsmen back on land – this had to be another ruse of the parsimonious captain. All the while Martin would try to ignore the creaking sound of the hull under strain as the Anne sat deep in the water and the sight of a hundred rusty nails growing ever more prominent by the day, like green shoots appearing through the earth in spring. Perhaps it is as well that there are so many of us, he thought, there is ample enough work to do.

Yet he knew that the fact that there were over forty hands manning a three-hundred-ton vessel owed more to the demands of the cargo that they planned to load off the African shore than it did to prudent maintenance. High numbers of men would be required to guard and subdue the holds filled with savages once they were on board, and perhaps to ensure that there were enough of them left once the malarial and yellow fevers had taken their toll on the outgoing crew. Back on shore the bars and taverns of the coastal towns were rife with tales of trading ships arriving back carrying nothing but ghosts once the illnesses that lurked in the jungle had taken their grip. Some said it was the lands themselves that were cursed, damning any civilized man foolish enough to visit. Others blamed the savages and their magic, and their attempts to poison the soul of the white man. Whilst Martin found no reference to either theory in his medical volumes he knew that it stood to reason that at least a quarter of the men he watched would die of such affliction. Yet they, like he himself, had boarded regardless. Indeed, to his knowledge, there was never a shortage of those willing to enlist and bed down in the vermin-ridden corners of the merchant fleet. This curiosity, he thought, watching the toils of the crew against the shifting backdrop of the restless sea, had to be worthy of debate and investigation, and he made a note to question the captain on his views later in the voyage, once he was sure he had gained his confidence.

But such a day seemed far off as the Anne followed her early course towards Cape Verde, blown by the favourable wind. Captain Henry kept himself remote, locked in his cabin with his papers, issuing instructions through his bosun and mates. It was only the purser he had time for, and the two would be in conference from dawn to daybreak poring over the balance sheet, if quarterdeck gossip was to be believed. And so it was that Martin found himself becoming fascinated with his more accessible new shipmates: some old like the master craftsmen on board, riggers and carpenters bearing the scars of a lifetime spent at sea, all bent bones and rotten teeth, with sallow skins that were testimony to endless scurvy-plagued voyages; others younger, boys hardly in their teens but already marked by the poverty and brutality of their childhoods ashore. Martin would watch them and wonder if their adoption of the sailor’s life was a noble defiance of the hand that fate had dealt them or a surrender to the inevitable. Were they like him, chancing a final throw of the dice in the hope of a different kind of life on the seas or merely succumbing to a different kind of servitude from the one they could expect on land? Irrational though he knew it was, he felt more of an affinity with the men climbing the masts and rigging than he did with his cabin-mates on the quarterdeck. That he who was educated, like them, and born into the relative middle-class privilege of officer life should somehow feel removed from them and more at one with the common crew was a cause of an unsettling disquiet. Was this not the trip that was going to cure him of such conceits, were these maritime endeavours not the ones that would so occupy his thoughts as to leave no room for such subversive and ungodly meanderings in his mind?

That was the problem at this stage of the journey, the paucity of stimuli to exercise his faculties. For all that he chose to observe the men of the ship at work and amuse himself with the formulation of theses as to each one’s past and future prospects, he knew that these were not his charges and represented neither reason nor purpose to his presence on the Anne. No, he would have to wait for his work to begin, once they were moored off the African shore. Then the trading would start and his scant medical knowledge would be put to the test. Which of the negroes on offer would make the best slaves, which would be most likely to survive the trip to the Americas, which hid the fever they were already surrendering to? Ship’s Surgeon. A gloriously impotent title, he reflected bitterly. Who amongst the crew would seek his advice for their ailments? None. They would be better served following their own instincts, given the inadequacy of his expertise. Somehow the tawdry nature of his qualifications seemed ever more transparent now his maiden voyage was underway. Conversations with his fellow officers had been strangled, stunted affairs as he struggled to conceal what he felt were ruinous shortcomings. Ship’s Surgeon. By what right did he answer to this preposterous title? By virtue of the handful of lectures he had attended, by virtue of the boxful of dusty volumes he had brought aboard to saddle the Anne with even more dead weight? Yes, these, and a curiosity which did not always serve him well when dealing with figures of authority, and the ten guineas which had secured him his practitioner’s certificate. No, the privilege he had been born with had brought him to the title, his space in the quarterdeck cabin and his exemption from onerous duties on deck. Was this the reason for the vague sense of guilt which ate at him with a growing relentlessness, the same sense of guilt which he had taken to the sea to escape? Perhaps, he thought without pleasure or emotion, perhaps. For this identification was worthy of no respite, it was a diagnosis without cure. All he could do was wait for Africa, wait to busy himself amongst the savages; at least they were unlikely to be inquisitive about his past.

The stringy guy in the vest and cut-off jeans turned out to be called Henri. Once you were up close to Henri you could appreciate why he didn’t tend to talk much. Not that I hadn’t seen worse teeth, just that they usually belonged to horses or ancient shrunken heads. Once you were up close you could study his skin colour and still be none the wiser as to whether this was a tan or ingrained dirt. For all this, my first impressions of the man were accurate, he was cool about most things; cool with you if you were cool with him. I’m about to describe how I, on the face of it, ripped him off after he’d trusted me enough to give me my start in the apple donut trade, although I can’t say I meant to rip him off from the start, it was just the way things worked out. Anyway, in advance of going through how this came to be, let me also point out that for every franc, centime and pastry that I took from him I would estimate that I repaid him twice or threefold in increased revenue from my efforts and those of the recruits that I brought to him. I’m sure he knew this and would be cool if I were to see him right now. And how I would like to see him now, a friendly face; could he take me back to those times?

Henri’s van took us to the beach where we would meet with the car of Henri’s pal. Henri’s pal’s name is not relevant, he was just the supplies man, he had made the journey to the bakery whilst Henri had been gathering his itinerant workers from the campsite and a host of other equally prestigious Riviera addresses. We, the contents of the van, were then introduced to the contents of the car, the donuts. Our mission was then explained to us in tones of exhortation. That mission was simple and straightforward: sell the bastards, lots of them. At least, that was how it was explained to me on that very first day, in a mixture of Henri’s, and giggling German chicks’, pidgin English. They knew I would have a hard time that day, they must have been pissing themselves at the look of bewilderment on my face as I was kitted out like a cinema ice-cream girl – minus torch – with my tray of donuts, bag of change and patch of land to patrol. I was shown the rendezvous point where the van would come to collect me and my leftovers at the end of the day’s toil. The money I would be paid was dependent on my own success in selling; this was made very clear, together with the final, crucial, part of the briefing.

I never figured out whether this was Henri’s own personal scam or whether he was part of a higher chain. Quite who had decided that what the droves of horizontal French crammed up beside each other under an eighty-degree-plus heat like a giant herd of poisoned wildebeest at the side of the waterhole really wanted, and wanted with a perverse craving that defied all logic, was apple donuts ripened under the sun by being walked up and down the beach all day was never made clear. The chances are that if I’d have met that person on that first day, the encounter would have resulted in extreme violence. I trudged my way through the few narrow corridors of sand left uncovered and unclaimed by beachtowels for over three hours without selling a single crumb. Occasionally I would pass a fellow hawker from the morning crew and would be dismayed to see their inventory now significantly depleted. Mine seemed to be breeding in the tray – I’d started with around thirty and must have had over forty by lunchtime. It did strike me of course, that I was at a disadvantage in not being able to shout my pitch in French. Somehow I’d forgotten to ask how this might be done, maybe I’d just assumed that English was the recognized tongue of seaside cake selling. Around midday I sat down, defeated, ready to rest my burning feet. Suddenly, an ambush. A pack of predatory old crones waddling along the beach perimeter by the road fell victim to a strange hunger. Seven donuts later, they left. I had my first sale.

To understand the point of it all is to understand that I had let them come to me. Unwittingly, sure, but I had toiled and toiled and not sold a single thing until I had stopped and stayed still and thought of something else. It seemed obvious later that nobody was ever going to buy from a stressed-out malcontent with a bead of sweat dropping from his nose. No, they were only going to be tempted by someone at ease with himself, someone confident in the power of his goods to attract purchasers by their own merits. Forgive me for lingering on the details and understand that there were lessons I learned on that beach, that summer, with that tray of donuts – universal lessons that formed the foundation of everything I became. At the end of the season my friends made their way back to Scotland, back to university and the coming term. I didn’t need to, I had received my education.

The main lesson? That there are signals we give off, signals that tell the world how we would like to be accepted. That how we are accepted is in our control. That sometimes when we are freed from the expectations of others who know us from our past we can surprise ourselves with the energy and eagerness with which we reinvent ourselves, how we reinvent how we would like to be received. And some of the signals are easy to change – the way we dress, or wear our hair, the language we speak – all external signs, all easy. The ways we think and confront the world, these all come from inside, these are harder. The way you gesture for someone to get into the back of your van. An example? I’m trying to sell fucking donuts. I want to be approachable, warm, uncomplicated, purposeful; someone with integrity handling quality goods. What I don’t want to be is withdrawn, burdened, arrogant; someone with whom the transaction, however brief, is going to be unpleasant. I need to be a success, not a victim of the tray hooked on to my shoulders. The signals I give will dictate whether the market sees me as one or the other.

I sold another three items on that first day, and ate two myself in lieu of lunch. My total day’s commission was fourteen francs, just over a pound in real money. It was still more than Henri had expected, being used as he was to the negligible impact of new starts. They all had to go through this learning curve before they decided to give up or get very good. I wasn’t going to give up, although the hardest part of the day was trying to persuade the lads back at the campsite that my efforts had been worth such a derisory wage. How they laughed. Within the week though, things were different, I was carting round my own ice-box and selling my own range of drinks bought from the supermarket and suitably marked up to reward my investment, as well as my original tray of sugared delicacies. I could clear a hundred and fifty francs, more than ten times what I had made at the very start. Hard work, sure – not so much I let it look that way; the signals I gave were the opposite. So much so that my initially dubious companions soon joined me in the endeavour. And when they did we sold to a plan, my plan.

My plan involved the occasional lifting of the daily wage to even higher levels. This involved exploiting the weak point in Henri’s operation, and I’d known what that was from the very first briefing he’d ever given me, in fact I’d known it from the moment he’d gestured for me to climb into his wagon. Henri’s operation was illegal. You weren’t allowed to sell anything on the beach without the appropriate licence, let alone organize whole squads of hawkers to cover every grain of sand. The CRS – the municipal guard – were out there on the same ground determined to maintain public order. Henri had mentioned them in what he probably thought was a casual way right at the start. If you see them, he’d said, drop the tray and keep your money, run like fuck. According to him they would detain us if we were caught but he’d already given the game away. The CRS were never likely to imprison us, not for more than a couple of hours anyway. What they were likely to do was to confiscate our goods and sales proceeds, that’s what scared Henri. Hold on to the money he’d said, hold on to it so you can give it to me. Sensible advice? Perhaps not. Perhaps, occasionally, you just can’t run fast enough and they take all your merchandise and your revenue and your change. Perhaps no one else sees this and Henri just has to take your word for it. Perhaps it happens to everyone once in a while, perhaps it’s inevitable that way. In my plan, such an occurrence would take place to each one of us every three weeks. We just happened to have repeated bad luck that way. Henri cursed it as much as we did, muttering in his curious way as he drew his breath in, so that the words all came out as one, almost backwards in the anguished tongue of the possessed; mer-mer-merde!

We would look the other way whilst he came to terms with his grief. There never were any arrests, the CRS and gendarmerie didn’t seem that interested in us. Just as well – I was soon carrying goods which were more dangerous than apple donuts.

Great moments in my life. Sometime last year, sometime in the morning. Sometime when what I had to do was clear enough. I’ve closed the bar maybe ten minutes ago, at which point I felt as if I would fall asleep in mid-conversation with the two remaining customers who were busy telling me what a great place I had, what a great guy I was and how they envied me my lifestyle here on the island – the sunshine, the spot here at the marina, the holiday atmosphere. So sincere, so drunk, so very keen that I understood exactly what a great guy I was. Were they Danish, or Dutch? Doesn’t fucking matter, they all speak in the same, confident English with American a’s and r’s. MTV has a lot to answer for. They tap their feet to the latest bland anthem going out to Europe on all the screens like mine, talking to me as they groove along. My bar is a happening place thanks to the satellite pap my guests steal their accents from. ‘Martin … up … Marrt-in, could you turn the volume up?’ And so I do, and then shout above it to ask the usual stuff, had you heard of Puerto Puals, of the Arena Bar, will you be back?

These are not the questions at the front of my mind though, those are to do with the money. Do you know how much you have spent here, how much you owe me, how much I have taken in total tonight? No, neither do I but I’m dying for you to go so that I can see, so that I can clean this place up and get it ready for tomorrow morning when we open for breakfast and start this whole thing up again like we do all summer. Go on, fuck off. I pour a couple of whisky shots. The third glass, my glass, already has its liquor in it, flat ginger beer, not that these two will notice. An old trick, if you want someone to leave, ply them with cheap whisky. If they drink it as fast as they should, once they have seen me down mine in my impressive manly gulps, the dizziness and nausea will carry them out the door before I can shout time. Yes, goodnight, thank you gentlemen, that last one was on the house.

When they leave I count the takings. A so-so night, every table outside taken in one way or another. Some Germans who laughed loudly and bought a lot of beer. Some middle-aged British who sat quietly, probably intimidated by the whole ambience of the bar and the glam parade it’s part of, here by mistake at the club of the beautiful people. They drank even more beer and the best part of three bottles of Irish Cream, we nearly ran out of ice trying to stop the stuff from curdling in the heat. And some girls, Scandinavian girls. Young, early twenties, four of them, all blonde, all Identikit minis, cream lace crop-tops, blue eyes and brown limbs. I gave one of them the treatment for a while, I thought she was going for it but then they were gone, all off to a club to dance under the ultra-violet so that their white bits can at last sparkle. A realization from my early years in Spain: girls like this don’t sunbathe to get brown, they do it so that everything can be bright against them – their flashing eyes, their perfect teeth, the whiteness of their underwear, your dick.

I take twenty thousand pesetas for my immediate needs and put the rest of the cash inside the safe-bag for banking tomorrow. The chairs outside are already chained with the parasols tied down and locked, these being the last instructions given to my crack new staff before I sent them home. The glasses can be done in the morning, I just stack them by the dishwasher. My mind is slowing right down as tiredness takes over once more. How many hours’ sleep will I get before I’m back in here – three, four?

Not really sleep at all, more a fucking cigarette break; I try not to think about it. What time does the cleaner come, is she coming at all, do I have to do the fucking toilets? The last is not really a question, I know I do. The shit in my toilets, I mean, you would be amazed and appalled by the shit in my toilets, stuff you can never imagine. The men’s and the women’s. Both as bad. Shit on the floor, on the walls, everywhere but the lavatory pan. Dregs of cheap cocaine on the cistern, on the washbasin, on top of the paper dispenser, everywhere but up the nose of whoever was snorting the shit. Sometimes there might be syringes in the waste baskets, spent and used, like the tampons in beside them, and the condoms chucked in the corner of the floor. The shit in my toilets, God knows what will be in there tonight, but experience has taught me that whatever there is it is better faced now than in the morning when I come back. Seeing it now, it will irritate me, something else to be sorted before I can hit my bed; tomorrow, in the cold light of day, it would break my heart. All this energy, investment, hope, to be landlord to a cast of animals, is that what it was all about? No, I’ll deal with it now, my cleaner can do the easy stuff if and when she shows – the tables outside, the windows, the walkway. Easy yet still part of the show, the never-ending show I find myself starring in.

I go into the cupboard to retrieve the heavy-duty gear, the scrubbing brush and disinfectant, the pine-scented detergent that burns off the surface stone from the ceramics and five layers of skin from my hands. There are some rubber gloves in there somewhere but I’m too tired to go hunting, I want this over and done with even if I go to sleep with my fingers stinking of this stuff enough to poison a room. At least it might scare off the mosquitoes. Tooled up, I enter the gents. It’s not so bad, I can do this on autopilot, bucket and mop to wash the piss from the floor, wipe for the basin and bottom of the walls, attack of the brush for the crap clinging to the rim of the bowl. For a fleeting second, I watch myself doing this in the mirror, I want to stop and banter with my reflection – you should see yourself pal, you look fucked. Darkness around my eyes, hair lank and greasy, skinny as shit, the friendly face of a psychotic is smiling grimly back at me, you looking for trouble? We both get the joke. Definitely the sexiest lavatory attendant in town tonight. So much for cool travails.

I stop. I thought I heard something. Could have been outside, could have been those two guys coming back after throwing up, maybe they saw the lights still on. Shit. I hear it again, it’s closer than that, it’s inside. This is worse, I can feel my heart begin to race to a faster beat, I’m suddenly wide awake, am I being robbed? I put down the brush and slowly lift the mop handle; if there’s someone there they are going to feel this, I work too fucking hard for anyone to come in and help themselves to what’s mine, I don’t care if it’s the biggest guy in the fucking world who’s about to beat me to a fucking pulp, I swear he’ll know about me and this wooden pole first. OK Martin, cool it, I tell myself, the adrenaline has got to be controlled, go deep inside, compose yourself and think, then you can take anyone. I hold still – the sound is coming from the women’s toilet, someone is in there. I wonder whether to kick down the door and surprise them. Maybe not, maybe it’s just a drunk who went in and fell asleep, it’s happened before.

‘Hola? Come out for Christ’s sake, everybody’s gone home.’ The shouting is loud, I’m sending a signal, I’m not scared you cunt, you’re not in control of this now. I try to turn the handle. It doesn’t shift, the lock is on.

‘Come on!’ I’m banging hard, maybe it’s a junkie, out of it and about to expire, how can I get in there without breaking my own door?

‘Martin?’

A voice, a female voice, small and fragile. I calm down.

‘Yeah?’

I hear the lock being turned. The door slowly opens.

‘Do you want to fuck me?’

It’s one of the Scandinavian quartet who were in earlier on. She’s standing stark naked in front of me looking kind of alarmed at the mop that’s pointed at her face. I hadn’t realized she’d sneaked back in, I hadn’t realized she was so keen or was even falling for the treatment. I take in the view. Five-foot-six, maybe seven, small by Swedish standards. Small-to-medium tits pointing east and west, tanned skin with tiny white hairs in a line from her navel to the chestnut pubes; wide hips, about ninety-seven per cent beautiful. She has a confidence that comes from being at one with her own sexuality, either that or she’s just wired on something, maybe just plain nuts. Anyway, it’s her that wants to cool the scene down, trying to fix me in the eye. Don’t be scared, Martin. I like that. I’m tired and I stink of bleach and I’m still annoyed that she scared me pulling this stunt but I know that I will fuck her, like I promised myself I would fuck someone for every shit night that I was stuck behind the bar, or for every hour spent talking to boring Danish sailors, or for cleaning the shitty toilets when I’m tired enough for a coma. Sure baby, I’ll fuck you, I have to, it’s my destiny. Sex is a talent. And I have it.

Another moment, the next one that comes in the sequence, or does it? In my mind it happened next but the truth will be that it was a few days later, for various reasons. The first was the sex; it was good, surprisingly good. The Swedish girl turned out to be German, I can’t remember her name, and it’s not really relevant. I remember her talking, until I placed a finger on her lips to show there was no need. I led her from the back through to the main bar area. She waited as I switched off the lights and lit the candles at the front tables. She was naked but comfortable with it, I liked that. I turned the CD player and amplifier back on, the disc I wanted – Roberta Flack, First Take – was already on, I had been playing this music more and more to wind me down last thing. Once it started to play I was ready to give my guest the attention she deserved, advancing on her to place a kiss on her silent mouth, gently forcing her backwards until she could retreat no further and her white cheeks touched the plaster walls. I tried to kiss with delicacy, no tongues, kissing only with lips, kissing lightly, briefly; kissing to set the pace, a tender pace, not rushed. I kissed her like this until the feeling was there that we were synchronized, that we were in tune, and then I began to explore the touch of her skin, a soft skin, perfumed with the moisturizer she must have used after her days in the sun. I felt her with the backs of my hands, brushing lightly down her sides, the tops of her arms, then massaging the tightness from her collarbone to shoulder. I turn my hands outside and then run them gently down again, this time the touch lingers and there is more contact, I let my wrists and forearms warm and rub against her, moving inwards towards her breasts, closing in to gently grip her nipples between fingers. My palms are still turned backwards so that when I slowly clench my fists they gently push each breast upwards, cupping them in reverse, softly squeezing each nipple. I kiss them with an open mouth, my tongue coating their tips and sides in saliva. The song on the music system has changed, Roberta is starting to sing ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’, my hands release their light grip on cue and I bring them up to run my fingers through her hair. And then they go down again, down to her hips then circling in with the lightest of touch from my fingertips across the tops of her thighs. She shifts her stance slightly, kissing me with more urgency, parting her legs so that I can touch the insides of her thighs but again I concentrate on the lightness of my fingers, brushing the skin almost teasingly, dabbing the lips of her vulva with restraint, and then breaking off from her kiss to place one of my own behind her ear as my fingers make their way towards her clitoris. Her arms are around my neck, hugging me close so that I can hear her quickening breaths. I can sense her whole body tensing as the circle my hand is drawing centres more and more on her velvet lips and the moistness around them. She pushes her legs further apart and tilts her hips towards me. She lets out a sigh and then begins to sink, sliding down against the wall, down to her knees.

She unzips me and draws my cock out, she strokes me and kisses its sides. Then her mouth is open and I’m in then out of it, in then out. This is not unpleasant, but it leaves me with nothing to do. I turn my head to one side and see our silhouettes reflected in the bar window. A man is having a blow job, he’s still fully clothed. I feel remote somehow, even though that man is me. I pull off my shirt, throw it across to a chair; my aim is good, a thought that seems to demand my concentration more than it should at this moment. I bend to put my hands under her arms to lift her up. She looks puzzled – did I not enjoy what she was doing, was there something wrong with it? I look at her; no, nothing wrong, just me going mad, my mind wandering off for some insane reason. Occupy me, please, involve me somehow.

With one hand I separate her legs and with the other I guide myself into her, pushing hard, full penetration in one thrust. After the tenderness, the rough selfishness, my preferred combination. Show them a tender side, and a tough side, it works every time. I’ve seen women leave a gentle man for a rough one, and vice-versa. The trick is to offer both, to explore both. I think of good sex, the best sex, and I always think of Jim Morrison singing with the Doors, how his voice could be soft and gentle, but what gave his performance its edge was the knowing that at any moment it would break into something more base and brutal and that he was almost struggling to keep that element within him under control. That’s what makes it compelling, particularly for women who have their own take on this, that it’s their destiny to accommodate both in a passionate man.

So.

That was why we were now doing it standing up, then doing it sitting down with her astride, doing it both of us on the bar I’d only recently wiped down. I liked to look at her against the marble, her delicate tanned skin against the stone; I put my weight on her, pinning her down by the shoulders, pushing and grinding so hard into her pelvis. A real work-out, and if there was a down-side to it at the time it was only in the way she kept stopping me and then grabbing my scalp to pull my face right up to hers – not to kiss, but so that our eyes were an inch apart. This was the signal she wanted to give to me; that this was intense, special, a one-off connection of soul-mates on an astral plane rather than a holiday screw with a horny bar-owner. Pulling me away from kissing her nipples so that she could head-butt me again with her passion and our special togetherness in that moment. So it’s this staring, staring, staring. What the fuck was she looking for, what did she want to tell herself she’d found?

I came the once and then we shared a couple of lines that she’d brought along – good stuff, actually – so that I was ready for round two which lasted longer, almost too long, so that by the end I was squeezing and pulling and pumping everything so I could just shoot and get back to cleaning up the bar. We finished when I finished, right that very second. I knew it was selfish but I was looking to lock up and get out of the bar sharp. This must have upset her; I think she was hoping for us to go off somewhere together at that point, perhaps to watch the fucking sun rise, and for her to ask more of her questions – when did you know that we had … you know … clicked, when did you first notice me; Martin, how did you know we’d be lovers? My English, she says pleadingly, my English not good enough to tell you how I feel. Thank fuck for that, I don’t want to hear it. I put a finger to her lips again; silence please, we had our moment, don’t spoil it now.

So by then time was running out for me to make it home, as in ‘home’ home, and I knew I was heading for another couple of hours in the flat I’d been loaned round at the side of the complex by one of Herman’s colleagues. I’d taken the key never intending to use the place but by now had spent most of the week there with one thing and another. When I let myself in and looked at the bed lying unmade from the night before I felt a wave come over me, maybe a feeling of regret that here I was again, or a sense of resignation or whatever. A completely bare flat with nothing in it but that bed; yes, something stirred when I saw that. Home, I told myself, make it there tomorrow, slip off for a few hours in the afternoon, it’s overdue. And then I sat down to think about this some more. I woke up three hours later, mouth dry and every other inch of me sticky and clammy. Cocaine always gives me night-sweats and I’d fallen asleep with my clothes on.

Time to get moving again, it must be around seven. Time to pull myself together for another day only I’m staggering from room to room in exhaustion, a ghost let loose in the blinding daylight. I peel off my clothes as I wander towards the shower. And when I make it into the cubicle and slouch against the tiles and watch the water that has flowed from my head to toes disappear down the drain I start to dream, the same dream that haunts me in moments like these when the day ahead is still to happen, the dream about water.

There are six of us in a boat far out in the ocean, floating in a calm in the middle of an endless expanse. Five of them surround me, sitting silently, waiting for me to make a move: for whilst I am the one in control of the situation, it is me they all want dead. I know this with a heavy certainty that could drown me even before I hit the waves lapping the sides around us. The sound of the water becomes a call, an invitation to step over the side out into the deep, to walk the plank into the only means of escape. The water will one day take me, always waiting to take me down.

And this is the thought always haunts me in my waking moments, when I’m moving too slow to distract myself with the shit that makes up my life. It casts its grip on me, almost impossible to shake off, even without the drug-induced paranoia that I’m trying to rinse out of my head after the night before. Today, there is help from outside; a blast from a car horn and a squealing of tyres on the bone-dry coastal highway outside is enough to snap me out of the morbid premonition and return me to the present. The noises serve as an abrupt reminder that out there Mallorca is waking, outside the traffic is already building and jousting in the macho Spanish way. Outside, the island is kicking and screaming its way into the day, tetchy and irritable, like a newborn baby left hungry and hot under the stifling heat. I turn the shower to cold and raise my face to take the shock.

Once I dry off I face my next immediate problem, clothes, or lack of clean clothes. I’ll go without underwear until I make it home and I’m lucky to find a black T-shirt that I had left behind at the flat a couple of days before. Doesn’t smell that great, but better than the one I slept in. The trousers are a matter of real concern though. My fawn linen pair look creased and lined enough to pass for a pair of pyjama bottoms, which in a way they were, and that’s nowhere near the worst of it. Somehow, although I don’t quite remember the particular detail, I must have started with the girl last night when I still had them on. She herself, lousy bitch, presumably in the heat of the moment, or in the middle of squeezing my hand and locking on her full eye-contact number, had forgotten to warn me that she was having her period, or having it all over my fucking trousers. The shit I find myself in, desperately scrubbing the crotch of my priceless designer gear with shampoo so that a blatant red stain can become a fairly obvious maroon one. No wonder she was so fucking horny, she’d found a man who cared enough to want to connect despite all that. Or one who failed to notice. Until now. How am I going to pass this off and serve breakfasts without looking a complete dick?

This, truth be told, is the final spur to me going home that morning, going home to throw on an unsoiled pair of jeans and consign the present pair to history. That is what made me do it, to walk over to the bar with my hands covering my stained soggy crotch, open it up, wait for the cleaner, give her a note to give to Sarah telling her to do everything the best she can until lunchtime when I was planning to be back, and to ignore Herman’s note that had been waiting for me in the door like a fucking German’s beachtowel claiming the space and to just head for the jeep and then head off, away from the marina and inland, up the side of the mountain towards the villa at Paguera.

An enjoyable drive, almost an hour I recall, enjoyable up to a point, that point being when I arrived. I had never made the trip at this hour; the road was curiously quiet and slow, it was the hordes of cyclists who were responsible for the latter, middle-aged Swiss pumping their way up the incline in their Lycra shorts and gaudy jerseys. A surreal vision, bankers and credit managers acting out their fantasies of being tour professionals. I smiled for them and turned the car’s music system off. The windows were down and the air blowing in seemed to be making a better job of clearing my head than the cold water had earlier. I tried to take in the colours and impressions of the island as the bikers would have been seeing them if they had not been so intent on exhausting themselves; the sweeping verdant hills and narrow valleys filled with wild olive, pine and dwarf palms; up in the higher, drier stretches the scatterings of carob trees standing defiantly and incongruously green under the Balearic sun’s strongest rays, a hazel carpet of carob pods covering everything at ground level, insulating the earth from the heat. I passed auburn-coloured hamlets and cottages in amongst the growth as the winding route led on to Camp de Mar and Andraitx. If I stare and stare I am reminded of why it was I came to live on this island, or rather why it was I came to stay.

I turned off and headed sharp left, a new road taking the jeep uphill towards another plateau and another scattering, this time of villas, built within the last five years, built for privacy, to accommodate new wealth. The last of the three, with its iron gates and driveway pointing to the heavy wooden porch doors is the one I draw up outside. There is no other car here, I can change clothes in privacy. Then I notice the gates are unlocked and I’m annoyed, they shouldn’t have been left like this; if the house alarm has not been set I’ll be seriously pissed off. On the doorstep itself I’m relieved to see that it has; I punch in the code, find and use the key and I’m inside, walking into the cool air and on to the tiles of the open-plan hallway and lounge. Right away, I notice that something is missing, not in the sense of stolen missing that would reduce me to a panic, but missing as in not there, the things that would give this home its normal atmosphere. Yes, it’s the atmosphere that’s not here – the mess of child’s toys on the floor, the pictures above the fireplace, gone. Into the kitchen and there is no food, no fruit in the bowl or bread lying out on the carving board. Walking slower now, into the bedroom, I open the wardrobe, no clothes hanging, other than mine. I sit down on the bed and contemplate the weight of the evidence, it’s back to the dream about water and the heavy certainty of knowing events are closing in, the heaviness that could drown me then and there in this room on a mountainside. My wife has left me. My wife and child are gone.