Leftoverlifetokill5

    Back to the bloody island, and the back-breaking of it. That I had not yet had a bath, in over a week, and must have been stinking to high heaven; plus the end of the month embarrassments, which make a point, especially abroad, of catching me unprepared, and consequently saddling me with the most medeival contraptions, had not helped to lift my morale. And though these may seem small things to the uninitiated, the initiated will fully sympathize.
     The only advantage to be gleaned from this state of siege was that it kept the Church at a cool distance, though as I indicated, he was a shade too ready to be cooled off. I wanted to make a friendly gesture towards hime, that would not be interpreted as an invitation, but without appropriate words, and the patting motion only pleasing to a dog: it was very difficult. So I contented myself with squeezing him from the back of his motor bike, where I felt strategically placed. He had a son about to be married, soft, smiling, with already thinning hair, who bore out my contention of the fathers being so much more attractive than their sons. Beside his father the son was non-existent; and gradually I was beginning to grasp, over the seven year boulder of contradictory experience, the built-up, from one root dug in its native soil, cored power of the man.
     And my body, which at home I treated with some respect, pummelling and pounding, and chivvying it into shape and tingling awareness of itself; shifting the sluggish blood; had never lain so long inactive: a stunted drugged tape worm, without the gumption to uncoil itself. And as my mental armoury - a couple of worn-out pea-shooters - responded in exact ratio to my physical condition, try to visualize the atrophied knots clogging my poor wilting senses.
     But I must try to enumerate the drops of healing ointment in this ocean of complaint: the search for a place to sit down, unobserved, rewarded. After assiduous dodging of the all-seeing eyes, I discovered, up some viney hen-pecked terraces behind the town, a single leafy, concealing tree, which, when I looked up, I saw to be covered with my favourite, packed with fertility, figs. Although the ground was dry and stoney and tufted with course grass, I could crouch underneath blessedly almost invisible. Two: going to fetch Colm from school, and hearing, from right downthe street, Colm roaring with laughter; when I asked him casually what it was about, he said that Sister had been telling them stories about putting rats and spiders down people's clothes. I know he has a great power of invention, like somebody else, but even so. I crossed myself and left it at that. It was disconcerting the amount of friends he had, not among children of his own age, but with the best looking lads of the town. They would spend hours fooling around with him, and trundling him up and down on bicycles; so that he was naturally crazy about them, and discipline was a dead loss. He would say grandly: 'My friends are waiting.' And they genuinely were, as keen as he was.
     And the third miracle: that I had actually touched water at last; the real, clean, buoyant Mediterranean. Disregarding temporarily the perpetual red dust bath that pervaded and coloured everything: Colm was plastered from head to foot by the end of the day, the sea was stained burnt sienna for yards out, and the beaches, which were nearly all rocks, were black with starry sediment. I still find it hard to credit that we hardly noticed it before, and would exclaim with surprise, 'How lucky that this place is not popular.' It would be very odd if it were, when out of all the romantic towns, and snow-white beaches, with sand like large granulated sugar, this is the only mining shanty town on the island, which has the one grace of saving it from the shanty appurtenances of a resort. And the sun is out in October; a sun that it is possible to lie in comfortably without scorching; though, even so, a bit too much for Colm with the long mine-laboured trek; and the full summer would definately have killed him; so I thought, with my first satisfaction, perhaps my timing was not so bad after all.
     And I had determined, if I could, by a carefully devised method, and strict monastic routine, somehow endure the coming months, I would stay on over Christmas, and the next three sure killer ones, till April - when Wales begins to stir again. Otherwise all this effort and pain of initiation would be wasted, and no benefit derived for either of us. And I did want us at least to master the colloquialisms of the language, and to feel a part of, and not a visitor to, the country. As it was, I was the only person without a function, with no set work to do: just the English widow on holiday, to recover from her sorrow; no more ignominious role; there must be something more for me to do.
     Not a note of music, not a line of reading matter; no distraction of any kind, apart from weather, and food, which had developed into a nun's orgy; and animated actors on a garish, but scantily convincing cardboard stage. And most of all I missed the music, the push away, put into perspective, this harsh, jarring, too representative reality. One engulfing pull, breast-filling draught, from that bespectacled midget Casals, on his great, planet-encompassing 'cello, and this little township would fade into its proper place in the background of respectful attention. Or a spine-curdling aria from Gigli, to make them sit up and forget the price of fish, if only for the inspired length of that voice: where are the procreators of all these famous tenors we hear so much about?
     And so to the rats: with my unerring flair I had lured, not with my co-operation, the biggest rat in the business to my defenceless side. There is one in every town, and this one put me in mind of a similar one, who used to scratch and scrape, and sniff and twitch his ugly whiskers at us, in the Chelsea gutter days. They always look like hamming stage villians with moustaches - was there ever a clean-shaved ratman? - pulled-down slouch hats, and slinky, shiny clothes, especially the shoes, with points. And they have a glib, soft-soap line of patter. And the local one was no exception: and he rode on a Vespa, which also was in keeping. Finally, after evading his pressing invitations for as long as was decently polite, and being warned by The Church to have nothing to do with him, I succumbed, and handed him the body and soul of Colm and me, to drive to rat damnation. And what a skinny twisted back he had, after the comforting bulk of The Church; I was beset with fears and doubts: that to punish me, Colm would be hurled down a precipice: and that, I decided, would fix me: the knife would go in, up to the hilt, this time, no messing. But, as is often disappointingly the case, there was a sucking babe inside this vermin skin of wickedness.
     However, his first concern was to find out, by not very subtle means, in fact by asking point blank, what was my age, and how much money I had got. But I can act dumb too, on occasion, and the lack of language could here be used to my advantage. Then that most putting off of all tricks, the producing of written credentials: a sure sign of a suspicious louse of the lowest order. A little later, as we walked in the desolate pinewoods, on the bleak white sands, he made a few dutiful unimpassioned passes at me; but his performance was not brilliant and hardly capable of deceiving a maiden aunt. So, damped in his heavy going ardours, he did a neat lightning switch over to more mundane immediacies, and, rather late in the day, suggested a drink, which did us both a lot more good.
     (We had suffered before from this unwelcoming Italian habit. When they got you, never again after the first couple of times, into their houses: cool, shaded, bare but for a few flimsy pieces of polished wood, skidding on stone floors; and bereft of the merest rug of human contamination: they sat you down, with much ceremony, and you politely waited, with an occasional glance at the array of bottles of different wines on the sideboard; but no offers were forthcoming; and the conversation would steadily become more stilted. With Dylan it would have been different: he would have had the uppishest dowager duchess herself relating her sex life with gusto; and have insisted on constant supplies of beer for himself, regardless of anybody else, including me.)
     So we set out and he went on and on, a long, long way: I thought he would never stop, and we would never see the, now metropolitan, lights of Rio again. We landed on Campo, which had everything that Rio had not, including sun-glassed, time-tabled, bronzed, exuding, even in their exclusive briefs, their superior status, Americans; French; Germans; and a singular soullessness. So my immediate wish was 'home', as fast as possible. Is it true I am calling Rio home? So without too much persuasion of the now slightly flagging rat, we remounted the jolting Vespa, and started the cold and windy return journey. We wedged Colm between us for warmth, and the wretched rat was pushed precariously on to the handle bars; I felt sure the judgment was upon us now, with Colm dropping off to sleep, his survival depending solely on the strength of my arm. But with a couple of stops for marsala and cognac, and tea for Colm, which put a dream hazy complexion on the tawdry