Literary Indulgence

Chapter 6

Hunger woke me. When I opened my eyes, it took some time to adjust mentally to the unfamiliarity of the room before the events of the early morning fell into place.

Surviving the ferry had given Madeleine a renewed appreciation for living. Confidently, she had steered us past the touts and into the dark at the end of the dock; I’d been grateful for it – my own attempt at being intrepid was rapidly fading. But when the hotels she’d circled in the Lonely Planet guide greeted us with firmly secured doors, her confidence had waned.

In a final attempt at leadership, but too tired to speak, I indicated with my head towards a park bench on the foreshore, visible under a solitary streetlight. We removed our packs with a thud and sat down heavily.

Across the still water, the harbour lights of Bodrum glittered and, above it, in a sky the blue of a royal robe, a sickle moon and star shone in a stunning cliché. We sat in silence, absorbing the beauty of it.

There was a flurry of movement behind us – a car screeching into the curb, an elderly man and woman almost falling out of the front seats. She strode with surprising agility ahead of him and was turning pages in a catalogue before she had even reached us. Stultified from lack of sleep, I motioned to Madeleine to follow them.

The back of the old Renault was crammed with papers, small boxes and clothing that had been shoved aside to allow room for tourists’ backsides. Madeleine and I sat low to the ground while the couple in front seemed to be perched in the air. I have no memory of the husband’s face, just a sense of his anxiety under the command of his wife. The greying hair beneath his bald spot sat unevenly over his collar, made worse by the tilt of his hunched shoulders.

In the rear-view mirror, I glimpsed sad and apologetic-looking eyes. He ground through the gears and the car finally took off, though there was an odd feeling of wading through thick water. I relaxed back into the peeling leather of the seat. Exhaustion released me into their hands and a sense of recklessness.

Why stop now? I thought.

* * *

After only 10 minutes, we turned into the drive of a modern complex and drove past a swimming pool to the back of the building. The rest is a tired blur of choosing beds in a small but tidy unit, of dropping luggage and climbing, fully clothed, under the bed covers.

With my chin still tucked securely beneath the stiff sheet, I scanned the room. In the other bed, Madeleine’s back rose and fell in a calm sleep. To my left, large glass doors opened on to a small but functional balcony. Beyond the glass was a barren land, covered in stones and small, dense shrubs in a limited range of brown and olive green. Scattered here and there were new housing projects that were in various stages of completion, but nearly all were a white that screamed from the brown landscape surrounding it. I imagined that, from the air, these building might look like the droppings of a giant prehistoric bird. In its raw and uncontrived way, it was beautiful.

Smudges on the glass doors distracted my attention. When I focussed on them, their random placement seemed to order themselves into an opaque and transparent mosaic that drew forward the memory of another dream I’d had in the early morning.

Before Bonnie’s death I remember having only dreamless sleep. Since that day, I had come to feel that I was living part of my life caught somewhere between the vivid world of dreams and waking. In this recent one, I struggled to free myself from within a room with walls of the same mosaic pattern. Their texture though, was membranous, and they bent to the pressure of my hand. Afraid that I would suffocate, I picked and prised at one raised corner of the pattern and peeled away a diamond-shaped flap that I realised, with horror, was skin.

“Can you believe that sleep?” Madeleine’s voice broke my thoughts.

I rolled to face her, and we smiled with peaceful satisfaction.

“I’d like to go back into Kos Town and have a look at it in the clear light of day. What do you think?” I asked.

“Sounds good to me.” Madeleine stretched and leapt from the bed with a return of her typical energy. “What did that hoverfly of a woman say about the hot water?”

“Something about the switch in there.” I nodded towards the wardrobe facing us.

With 30 minutes and two cold showers behind us, we set off for Kos Town.

Outside our unit, we took in the exterior of the complex that had flashed by us in the dark. Like others, it was finished in a brilliant whitewash – hard on the eyes in those places where the midmorning sun reflected. Though we couldn’t see any other tenants, there were signs of their lives – colourful beach towels over balcony rails, shampoo bottles just visible through opaque bathroom windows. At the front, the large swimming pool would have looked inviting if it wasn’t for the tiny whitecaps that were forming in the strong breeze that was blowing up the hill toward us.

The main road was about 100 metres down the drive, and, on its other side, the sea was just visible through the roadside trees. It wasn’t the vivid blue I had expected but looked churned and dirty in the wind.

“Are they really gum trees?” I pointed ahead.

“Yes! But here?” Madeleine was disappointed.

* * *

When we reached the road, there was nothing that resembled a bus stop, but 200 metres to our left, in an open-air restaurant, a tall figure was moving between tables, setting up for lunchtime trade. As we approached, I leafed through my pocket dictionary, but before I could say a word the figure, a young man, called his hello.

We returned it.

“Hellooo Ossie!” he boomed again, “Gedayyy Maite!”

Bewildered, we introduced ourselves and he told us loudly, in fractured English, that his name was Alexander, that there was indeed a bus stop and that the bus was due any minute. We noted the menu for a later time, thanked him and headed back up the road.

“No whurrries, Ossie!” he called after us, “Come back for meal! Ask for Alexander… Alexander the Great.”

“No worries!” we called back, certain that we would eat there in the future.