I Was Waiting For You (12 page)

“What?”

“What have you got?” the taller Arab asked.

“I don't know,” Giulia answered. “I don't want that much grass. Just a little.”

“Just a little?”

“Yes.”

“What will you do?” one of them asked.

A veil of weariness fell over Giulia. One part of her knew all too well what the men had in mind while the other half of her brain struggled to accept the fact she had reached such a low of emptiness that the prospect of agreeing to their demands could be dismissed as just another necessary chore.

They were observing her. She lowered her eyes. In lassitude or in shame.

Haroun and Jamel took this as a sign of acceptance.

“You come inside, to the back,” one of them said, pulling up the improvised hinged wooden counter top that normally separated sellers and buyers.

In a daze, Giulia walked into the shack and was guided to the back where their sparse merchandise was stored.

“You French or Algerian?” Jamel asked, his hand rudely grabbing one her buttocks, feeling for firmness,

“No. Italian.”

“Ah, I know you are from south. Dark hair and eyes.”

Haroun's breath smelled of pungent spices as he breathed down her neck and weighed her breasts in the cup of his hands.

“Is small, but nice.”

“Thank you,” Giulia couldn't help herself responding, as if the past year of wandering and bad mistakes could not totally erase the politeness bred by her upbringing.

“You do everything?”

“Yes,” she whispered, guiding her mind away from her body, attempting to detach herself from the situation.

“Show us your body,” Haroun ordered.

Giulia straightened her back and pushed her chest forward.

“No. Completely naked,” he pointed at her off-grey bikini bottom.

She obeyed. After all, everyone in the colony past and present had witnessed her nude, and so had the two Arab merchants, albeit from a distance inside their shack with an open view across the beach.

She stood there, exposed.

“You not like lots of other European girls. You not shave there?”

He was referring to her unkempt bush, the pubic hair she had never enjoyed trimming, let alone thinning or carving into all sorts of shapes on the borderlines of smoothness.

“No,” she replied. There was no point explaining why to them.

“You dirty girl?”

She wanted to protest, but quickly realised he was not referring to personal hygiene.

“I think you be very dirty girl with us, if you want good
herbe
. You work hard to earn it, Italian girl, no?”

Giulia kept her silence. Her breath shortened. Images of sea pirates, violators, torturers, despoilers racing through her imagination.

“Open legs and bend,” Haroun said, moving behind her while Jamel placed himself in front of Giulia and began loosening his belt.

A stray finger rudely forced its way past her sphincter, followed by a gob of spit pearling down her rump to lubricate her dry opening. Jamel's cock stood to attention in front of her eyes, uncut, a long thin envelope of brown, protective skin dangling past his hidden glans.

Giulia closed her eyes.

In darkness there is no sin, just shadows.

The finger in her rear was joined by another as the Arab man stretched her in readiness for his assault.

“Giulia! Giulia! Where are you? Are you inside?”

It was Stieg, loudly calling out for her.

The finger roughly withdrew from her anus, a long nail scratching her deep as it did so.

“Hell! What's happening here?”

The dreadlocked Swedish backpacker had suddenly rushed into the shack's storage room and surprised them.

Jamel, almost out of shyness, quickly pulled his trousers up to his waist and tucked his semi-hard cock inside. Haroun drew back behind Giulia, and turned to the unbelieving Stieg.

“Is OK,” he protested. “The girl she come here happily. We agree. Is deal. We give her
herbe
, she offer herself to us. Is not wrong.”

“The fuck it's wrong,” Stieg exclaimed in anger. “Giulia, you cannot do this. It's so wrong. You should have talked to Marta or me. You mustn't do this.”

Giulia was still bent over in the degrading position she had been assigned when he had rushed in. Stieg placed his hand on her shoulders. “Come with me. Now.”

Giulia rose to her feet and followed him out the souvenir and provisions shack. She realised she had left her bikini bottom on the ground. He took hold of her hand and pulled her away from the area of the huts.

“You come back anytime, Signorina. We always have
herbe
. Is the strongest and the best,” Haroun shouted out behind her. “I know you come back,” he sneered.

* * *

Both Stieg and Marta were unmercifully angry at her. How could she do what she had done? Or been prepared to do, as Giulia feebly pointed out. Nothing had yet happened.

“I don't know. I was in a daze,” she tried to explain to them.

“You must never do it again,” Marta pointed out. “Go to the Arab men. They will give you disease.”

“You smoke too much, Giulia. You must stop, cut down. It's just not good for you so much,” Stieg added.

Giulia nodded in agreement.

“I will. I promise.”

Like adrenaline in steep overdrive, the realisation of what she had just done overwhelmed Giulia. It was madness, there was no other way to describe it. Her shoulders slumped. They were inside the tent where Giulia sat cross-legged on top of her crumpled sleeping bag. She had slipped on a T-shirt and panties.

“The others have set up a big new campfire down the beach,” Marta said. “It seems it's Halloween. I'd lost all track of time being down here. The German girls have brought their guitars. Come with us. We'll sing, drink a little, dance, relax. It will do you good, Giulia,” she suggested. “Take your mind off things.”

“No,” Giulia said. “I feel tired now. I'll sleep instead.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” she crawled into the sleeping bag. Marta tucked her in with care.

But sleep wouldn't come. The earlier scene she had been involved in flashing like a movie behind her eyes. In slow motion. Speeded up. Every word said, every single gesture captured in the amber of memory. Giulia couldn't help herself crying. What had become of her? How could she have stooped so low?

Distant sounds of laughter reached her from the campfire down the beach where the winter stragglers of the colony were enjoying themselves but it felt like a world away.

One hour or so later, or maybe it had been longer, Stieg unhooked the tent's flap and looked in.

“You're crying?” he queried.

“Hmmm …” Giulia sniffed.

“I thought I'd just come and check how you were. Not feeling better, are you?”

“No.”

“What is it?” Stieg asked.

“I feel abandoned, lonely.”

“There's no need. We love you, you know, all of us. You're our little girl lost …”

Giulia tried to regain her composure. She wiped her tears away with the back of her hand, raised herself halfway out of the sleeping bag and sat up. The night was cold and she felt a chill fly across the thin material of her T-shirt.

“I didn't say thank you, Stieg. You arrived just in time.”

“I'd seen you wander away towards the huts, and you were such a long time returning, I sort of wondered what was you were up to,” Stieg explained.

“You saved me,” Giulia said.

“You're our friend. I would have felt rather guilty had I not.” He lowered himself to his knees and leaned over to take Giulia into his arms and held her tight.

Giulia drew a deep breath and held in his fraternal embrace quietly wallowed in his warmth. He smelled of the sea. It had been such a long time since a man had held her like this, in invisible chains of tenderness. He loosened his grasp on her. A voice at the back of her throat was screaming silently that she wanted to stay like this for ever. She moved her chin from his shoulder where she had buried herself during their clinch, moved her lips towards his and kissed him, her tongue desperately darting past the wall of his teeth and connecting with his wetness.

Stieg initially displayed some hesitation but soon surrendered himself to the moment. He firmly strengthened his hold on her, squashing Giulia's thin frame against his hard chest. His outstretched hands circled her back.

Giulia lowered her right hand from his shoulder and felt for his penis through the torn jeans he was wearing.

“I want you inside me now,” she begged.

“This is wrong,” he whispered.

“Who cares?” she said.

Marta returned to the tent a short while later to find Stieg and Giulia fucking on the ground between the two sleeping bags, sand flying wildly across their bodies as they convulsed. They were grunting like animals in heat. It was desperation, not lovemaking.

Stieg did not see her enter, too busy ploughing the young Italian woman who lay on her back opening herself wide to him.

Across his heaving shoulders Giulia caught a sight of Marta and the look of first surprise and then sheer disgust spreading across her features.

Giulia silently hoped Marta would recognise the note of regret in her eyes, explaining in the language of emotions that it wasn't Stieg really, it could have been anyone, any man right now. That it wasn't personal.

“Bitch,” Marta mumbled and turned back and ran down the sand away from the tent.

Stieg came loudly. Giulia was unable to reach orgasm despite the savage intensity of the fuck. They separated in darkness, neither willing to speak. Both slipped into their respective sleeping bags, as if nothing had happened.

When morning came, Marta had not returned to the tent.

M
ARTA HAD CAREFULLY FOLDED
her clothes, taken off her bracelets, ankle chains and watch and removed her wallet, placed them all in a neat pile and, without a word to anyone, walked out as the sun rose and plunged into the still cold waves, as fearless of the elements as she had been all her life.

Marta never came back. Her body was not recovered, and Giulia's whole world fell to pieces.

The sea near the improvised colony had always been treacherous but there was no one around to look after matters or raise a red flag warning that it was sometimes unsafe to swim. No one knew if she had done this deliberately or if had been an accident. Both Stieg and Giulia kept their own council, and mourned her silently, while all the others who had not known Marta as well as they had ambled silently up and down the beach for the next couple of days, watching the horizon in the vain hope of her surfacing again, or at any rate her inert body floating on the waters.

She kept on sharing the tent with Stieg, but an abyss of silence and blame quickly grew between them. Giulia wanted to feel guilty, but could not summon the right emotion. She wondered whether she had lost the capacity to feel for others, as if the cold heart Jack had once accused her of harbouring had now become a fact of life. She'd never wanted it to be that way. She'd dreamed of love, meeting the right one, having children. Where had this terrible dissatisfaction with normal life begun, she wondered?

Soon, the colony was almost deserted as others left, one at a time or in small groups, to migrate back to the world they had left behind. Winter was approaching. Barely a dozen tents survived, scattered across the immensity of the beach. Haroun and Jamel had boarded up their shack and disappeared one night.

“What do you plan to do?” Giulia had asked Stieg.

“I think I'll stay,” he said. “Maybe she will come back.”

He kept on refusing to believe that Marta had drowned. Insisted she had just gone travelling and would return when her anger had faded.

“I'll keep you company,” Giulia said.

He greeted the news with indifference.

Today, she would smoke that final joint, one she had found in Marta's corner of the shared tent, half-buried in the sand beneath a pile of months-old women's magazines she had picked up on her travels. Some sick form of inheritance, she realised. There was no more grass to be had, by any means. She convinced herself she could survive without it. Reality wasn't that bad, was it?

Jack sat on the hotel room balcony facing the marina, counting the pregnant women walking by outside. Eleonora had gone into town to look at the shop windows, now that the siesta hour was over. He'd done that useless pilgrimage too often by now, and was long tired of the sight of leather belts at premium prices, cut-price swimming costumes and colourful and flimsy summer dresses and pharmacies advertising herbal Viagra substitutes between the handful of tapas bars.

The score was pregnant women: seven vs. prams: five. All in the space of one hour.

A small boat came swanning in and slowly inserted itself into its assigned gap and moored.

The smell of grilled fish wafted up from the parade of restaurants below that stretched all the way to the harbour's gates.

For the first time in weeks, he had booted up his laptop and gone online earlier. Several Google Alerts for Giulia. Though not one of them actually concerned her, the search engines extracting her first name and her family name from separate locations on the web. An avalanche of e-mails, two thirds of them spam or newsletters he no longer took any interest in. Few people appeared worried by his disappearance from London. Only a few pointed comments from his literary agent. He had churned out three of his monthly book comment columns while still in Paris and the next deadline was still a few weeks away. He could always improvise another here without the need to refer to any of the actual books he was writing about. His online bank statement was still in the black. An editor in San Francisco was inviting him to contribute a new short story to an anthology on the theme of decadence. Twenty-four people wanted to become his friends on Facebook, none of whom he'd even met. He deleted messages wholesale.

The blank screen on his computer just glared at him.

He had once told Giulia, when they were still together, that he would never make her a character in one his stories or books. But he now realised he was now about to break that promise.

Writing about her would keep her alive. In his mind at least. No doubt she would hate him for doing this, he knewshe would see this as a particularly perfidious form of betrayal, but then how much worse could things be? She probably hated him already. Years ago, he would have written pages and pages full of sound and fury in the hope one woman or another would return to him, understand the savage nakedness of his love, the purity of his affection. He was older than that now and no longer held such romantic notions. It would just be a story, not a bottle in the sea.

Maybe he could try and imagine, novelise what she had been up to since she had left him behind and taken her own road on a journey where he could not follow.

Yes,she would take a train to the south and there could be guns, drugs, bad men, all the normal clichés, maybe even pirates on the high seas. A life imagined. There are no new stories, Jack reflected, just the craft of knitting familiar elements together and coming up with a new angle and enough surprises to keep the reader intrigued. The minor art of fiction.

He opened a brand new folder.

He was thinking about his opening line when Eleonora arrived back, with a baguette and a bottle of mineral water under her arms. They already had Serrano ham in the room's fridge and had agreed to eat in tonight. She kissed him on the forehead.

“Any news?” she asked.

“No,” Jack replied. “Just doodling.”

“Doodling is what?” she looked at him and the empty laptop screen with round eyes.

“Just trying to write something.”

“I never see you write,” she said. “Is good if you start again.”

“Watching someone write is no spectacle, Eleonora. Most of the time, I just sit there, scratching my scalp or other parts, picking my nose, drinking Pepsi or coffee. There are better things to see, even on Spanish TV …”

Jack closed the folder and switched off his laptop.

The writing could wait.

Stieg opened his eyes, rubbed them, watched Giulia rise from the sleeping bag that had once belonged to Marta. Bent over to avoid brushing her unkempt head of black curls against the canvas of the tent's roof, she slipped her jeans on, a pair of old socks and her scuffed trainers. He stretched his limbs, his vision of her still blurred by sleep as she stood there, her now-tanned skin and pert breasts contrasting with the off-blue of her washed-out jeans as she delved into her backpack where she finally found a well-creased T-shirt and a woollen cardigan he had never seen her wear before. He noticed her dropping various small items into her pockets, her purse, some papers – was it her passport? – and watched her slip out of the tent in silence. Stieg remained silent throughout.

Giulia aimed straight for the dunes, retracing the path that had brought them here months before. The upwards journey through the sand was arduous; she had grown used to wading barefoot through the sand for so long now, and her trainers now felt awkward and didn't provide her with any grip. Half an hour later, she had reached the road which she remembered travelled north. The sun had barely risen. She sat down, took a sip of water from the plastic bottle and waited for some sign of traffic. By the time a van stopped for her, she had almost run out of water. The driver was an Arab with a lined face, his sun-ravaged skin drawn tight across his features. He was only driving to the nearest village, where he said she might find drivers journeying to Tangiers.

The next day, seven vehicles later, Giulia finally reached the city and caught a bus and then a ferry to Gibraltar where she rang her father back in Rome from a public telephone booth on reverse charges.

“I want to come home,” she told him. “I need your help.”

He asked her no questions, just listened to her explanations and what she needed now. First he would wire her some money at the General Post Office and would then arrange for a flight to be booked. There were no direct connections between Gibraltar and Rome, and she would have to catch a connection in Madridwhere she would have a six-hour wait. Giulia smiled: what were a few more hours in the general scheme of things?

“Please,” she asked him. “One thing … When I am home, I don't want you to ask any questions, OK?”

“You're my daughter,” he said. “The important thing is that you return to your family. I will ask no questions, that's a solemn promise.”

“Thank you.”

The cash would likely not reach her until the next day, she knew. She sought out the beach where she would sleep tonight. A final night on the sand would not do her any further harm, she reckoned.

Eleonora was reading on the hotel room's balcony, while Jack took a shower. Their conversation these past days had reached a total impasse, as if they no longer had anything to say to each other. Words no longer seemed necessary. They both cared immensely for the other, but there was a wall that now separated them. They slept in the same bed but no longer touched, almost like a couple who had been married or together for decades. It had only taken them three months to reach this awkward stage of comfortable companionship.

He heard her cellphone ring.

Jack was washing his hair when she came into the bathroom.

“Anything?” he said, brushing the water away from his eyes.

“Yes.”

He switched the water off and Eleonora handed him a towel. Her face was inscrutable.

“So?”

“It was Il Dottore …”

He stepped out of the bathtub, still dripping profusely onto the porcelain tiles. He held his breath as long as he possibly could. Please, not bad news. Please. Please.

“She's returned home.”

The weight on his shoulders and heart just swept away in an instant.

They looked at each other. Extraordinary relief. Pleasure. Questions galore.

“Good,” Jack said. His vocabulary had been drained and he could thing of nothing better to say.

“Yes,” Eleonora confirmed.

“So here comes an end to our lives as amateur detectives,” he joked.

She managed a crooked smile.

They walked back to the bedroom, where he slipped on some clothes. She closed the window to the balcony to keep out the cold.

“I'll be leaving tomorrow,” she said.

“I see.”

“It's better that way. I'm not sure if I want to see Giulia again, in Rome. But my life is there. I'll have to find a job, do something with my life. It's been good being with you, but we both knew it would come to an end. You understand?”

“I do.”

The quest for Giulia had finally brought them together. Its ending could only tear them apart. That was the way of things.

“I'll call reception to let them know we'll be leaving tomorrow then.”

“What will you do?” Eleonora asked.

Jack had a wry smile. “Go back to my wife, I reckon.” He had never mentioned her before. Yet another unseen presence in his affairs of the heart. “If she will have me back.”

Eleonora moved over to the kitchen area to boil some water for coffee.

Jack called out after her.

“Maybe the next time we meet, we can make things work out better,” he suggested. “All you have to do is call me, you know that. Anywhere in the world, I will take you. Just say where and when, OK?”

“Yes, I think we need time for reflection,” Eleonora pointed out. “If we meet again, it must be a new chapter. We start again. Just us. No more Giulia and Henry looking, how you say, over our shoulders?”

Eleonora would return to Rome and he to London. She spoke to Giulia once on the phone, neither of them willing to reveal much of what had happened in the intervening months since Giulia had left for her studies in Paris.

She would find a job in Naples as the official photographer for the local sports arena where a variety of rock and jazz concerts were held. It wasn't much but it was a living. Jack began writing stories again, in great part influenced by the past months. She had a brief affair with a drummer but she knew he would never be faithful to her. Six months later, in the throes of abominable loneliness she rang Jack. She knew he was not perfect and that they could not seriously envisage a future life together, but right there and then all Eleonora wanted was a bit of tenderness.

He sounded exactly the same. Both positive and melancholy.

“Another chance?” she asked him.

“Absolutely.”

“You won't believe it, but I have missed you.”

“Me too … Swear.”

“That's good,” she said. The sounds of Naples at night were crowding outside the window of her first floor apartment.

“Where?” Jack asked her.

They made the necessary arrangements.

Giulia's flight landed at Fiumicino. Her father was unable to pick her up as he was on hospital duty, but her mother and brother had come to greet her instead. Tommaso was driving her old banged-up car, which she had been given on her nineteenth birthday. She was surprised it hadn't yet fallen apart.

Both were careful not to ask her too many questions as they waited for her luggage to emerge along the conveyor belt.

They both remarked on how tanned she was and that she had lost weight.

The drive back into the city was loaded with long silences.

Rome seemed so quiet and provincial after all this time away. So dead. But she knew it was not the city that had changed in her absence. She was a different person now.

Giulia briefly remembered Ernesto. He was nice, but a bit boring. Years ago, during the course of her first year at University, together with two other friends they had organised a film club. He was the only boy she had brought home that her mother had approved of. Well-bred, polite, somewhat shy. But she knew he had a soft spot for her. Had been hurt and resentful when he had heard through common friends that she had become involved with a man twice her age. He'd begun to avoid her as a result. Maybe she would agree to see him again.