The Pirate

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.