Simply Heaven (3 page)

He reappears. ‘Uh-huh?’

‘Look, I’m sorry to give you the third degree, but who’s this “we”?’

He looks blank. ‘Huh?’

Well, either he’s a good actor, or he’s lacking a few sandwiches in the old picnic department. Or he’s going ‘huh?’ because I’ve caught him out and he’s stalling for time.

‘You know. You’ve done it about ten times. Said ‘we’ instead of ‘I’.’

‘Well, I …’ He frowns.

Oh God. He’s thinking up a story.

‘Well, I did say it was a
family
house.’

‘Oh God.’ I sit down, heavily, in a wooden chair at the kitchen table. ‘Oh, God. How stupid am I?’

Rufus is frowning some more. Puts the tomatoes and the olives on the table and sits down facing me. ‘What’s up, captain? You’ve lost me.’

‘Well, shit, I might as well have known, but … Jeez. You could have told me. I mean, you can’t be
that
desperate …’

He shakes his head. That’s right, you low-down ratfink. Shake away. That’s a lot less than I’m doing.

‘So,’ I ask, ‘have you got kids as well?’

‘Have I got …? What are you …? Oh God! Melody, no! You’ve so got the wrong end of the stick. You think I’m married, don’t you?’

I look up. To my shame, I can feel that my nose has already started to puff up and go pink. ‘Well, aren’t you?’

He starts to laugh, which doesn’t please me. Reaches over and bashes me on the shoulder, which, given the fact that I’m making it so clear that I don’t like what he’s got me into, seems a bit inappropriate.

‘You think I’m some kind of moustache-twirling lothario preying on innocent sunbathers while the Ball and Chain slaves away at home? Is that what you think?’

‘Well, that’s about the size of it, isn’t it?’

He wipes his eyes. Collapses into another gust of giggles. ‘And I threw myself into the sea as part of my cunning plan to get your pants off? Gawd, blimey, darling. There’s a couple of hundred chicks who’ll probably put out for a couple of glasses of Lachryma Vitis staying in Marsalforn alone. I really didn’t need to … Bit of a high-risk strategy, isn’t it? What if you couldn’t swim?’

‘I’m Australian, aren’t I?’ I snap. ‘Of course I can swim.’

‘Didn’t check your accent. Sorry. Have an olive.’

He unties a plastic bag full of purple kalamata olives, pushes it across the table towards me. Starts to laugh again.

‘OK, OK,’ I say, embarrassed now, ‘that’s enough.’

‘I can’t wait to tell the wife about this,’ he says, then, catching my expression, points and cackles. ‘I’ll tell you what,’ he says, ‘even if I was married, I don’t think I’d
dare
try something like that on with you. Seriously, Melody, you look like you could come over Sicilian at the drop of a hat. You’d probably leave a horse’s head in my bed or something.’

‘Cypriot, actually,’ I say. I’ve inherited my father’s hair and skintone, but, fortunately, not my yaya’s capacity to grow a beard. ‘And it would be a goat, if I could get my hands on one.’

‘I’m not married,’ he says. ‘Melody, I’m not married. I’ve been waiting for you to come along, honestly.’

‘Don’t overdo it, mate.’

Rufus stretches over and tucks my hair behind one ear. ‘Will you have an olive, now?’

Sulkily, I pop a couple of kalamata in my mouth. Yum. Fat as a goose.

‘I mean it, though,’ says Rufus, and he hasn’t taken his hand away. Caresses my ear and my jawline, and I can feel another shiver coming on. ‘I know Englishmen aren’t meant to be romantic, but I swear I’ve been waiting for you. You’re different. You’re different from the kind of girls I know at home, but you’re just – different too. Melody?’

‘What?’

And a bit later, he says: ‘You feel it too, don’t you?’

And I say, ‘I don’t know. There’s something. You’re …’

And later still I say: ‘Yeah, OK. This is totally …’

And at five thirty or so, dawn beginning to make itself known in a serious way through the French windows, I say: ‘Rufus?’

‘Melody,’ he says.

‘Did you really say that that ham was made by someone called Twanny Mifsud?’

‘I was head boy of my school,’ he says. ‘Well, they didn’t call it that, but …’

Well, I can’t do that. I wasn’t a delinquent or anything, but most of my year twelve ambition was geared more towards popularity with first Liam Costello and then Troy Carver than it was to popularity with the faculty. Our piles of stones seem to be evening out again. Five minutes ago, I had only one stone left, was
that
close to whupping his backside, but I’m already back up to six. I’m going to have to put some effort in.

Genius. I pick up a stone, put it on the heap between us. ‘All my education was free on the state.’

Rufus waggles a finger at me. ‘That’s cheating. Prior knowledge.’

‘Take it like a man.’

‘OK.’ Rufus picks up a stone of his own. ‘Well, if you want to play it that way. I’ve
never
been the recipient of state education.’

‘Now, that really
is
cheating.’

He shrugs. ‘Your petard, my darling. Take the hoisting …’

An impasse. That’s the trouble with the truth game. If you start playing tactically, it gets boring. I mean, obviously you don’t want to be the idiot drunk who misreads the point and starts sharing intimate detail they’re going to remember with sick horror in the morning, but you’ve got to keep it moving to keep it interesting. Especially if, like Rufus and I have been doing for the past five days, you’re using it to share information without looking like you’re getting heavy. I look away over the sea to give myself time to think of something. And for the gazillionth time, I’m hit by the blinding beauty of this place.

Ask me about Gozo, and I’ll tell you: it’s blue. Gold and blue. Huge azure skies, sea that dapples its way from whitest turquoise to near-black royal, stones soft and crumbly like Cheddar cheese, houses casually fronted with decorative sculpture of wedding-cake complexity. It’s blue and gold, with the scarlet of
festa
banners hung across streets, pink-marbled plywood plinths that raise plaster saints above the heads of Christians. It’s the place I found my love.

And I’m giddy with love. I never thought I’d feel like this again, after Andrew did his disappearing act. I’d thought this was it: me, alone, own two feet, travelling the world and looking after myself, and here I am now, rushing like a hippie. I feel like I’ve got vertigo. I feel like I’m standing on the highest cliff-top, all the splendour of creation spread out below me, and I feel exuberance and terror rolled into one lurching wave of elation. It is delirium, this love. It consumes my waking thoughts and seeps, mellifluous, into my dreams, so that, each time I surface, it is with a new shock of
my God, but you’re real
. I didn’t know. I didn’t know.

He is – Oh Lord, I don’t believe in all that love-at-first-sight, consuming passion, not being able to be happy when you’re away from someone thing. I thought that the
Our Song, We Just Couldn’t Help Ourselves, Our Place, I Just Knew, Do You Remember The Moment When
… stuff was the province of people who didn’t have enough in their lives, who needed to add drama to their histories, and I’ve had enough drama already to last me a lifetime. I’d thought the love-at-first-sight thing was a justification for losing your self-control, an excuse for all those greedy little acts of adultery that shatter other people’s hearts.

But Rufus. To me, he’s all of humanity, and a creature set apart. This familiar stranger, this ordinary man: he’s a hero in my eyes. I want to fight his enemies, embrace his friends, leaf through his baby photos, wash his back when he’s tired.

And yet I know nothing about him. Not really. I feel I know everything, and yet I know nothing. And he knows nothing about me. Beyond the basics: his father and mother (‘married longer than most of the county and very full of it’) and heavily pregnant older sister, my Cypriot dad and beach-blonde mum, my gravelly yaya, and Costa, my big brother, the Kebab King. That he went to an English public school (didn’t they all?) and on to Oxford, and I, largely educated on the state, got out at eighteen and didn’t get back in till I was twenty-three. His job in the family business (‘I suppose you’d call it property management, really’) and the reflexology practice I had in Brisbane. He knows a bit about my fucked-up, fractured engagement, and I know scant details of the half-dozen averagely fucked-up relationships that make up his past. We’ve agreed our political agendas (left-central, appalled at the way psychopathic corporations are taking over the world), our attitude to animals (love the ones we live with, eat the ones we don’t, nothing personal), favourite song (‘Rock’n’roll Suicide’, David Bowie, him, ‘Natural Woman’, Aretha Franklin, me), worst food (tripe); favourite place (right here, right now). But we are as innocent as Pledgers. We know nothing of night fears, of insecurity, of hatreds and jealousies and failures, of cowardice and ignorance and limitations, of childhood illness and family timebombs. What do we want to know about that for?

I’m living in a fantasy world of figs and honey, vines and prickly pear, hot afternoons making love in the blast of the fan, early mornings diving for sea urchins with a knife and a mesh bag tied round my waist, snoozing in the shadow of a rock overhang, eating fried rabbit and olives, spaghetti vongole, driving up to Victoria for
pastizzi
hot from the oven at two in the morning, building chemical hangovers on local wine and swimming them off to the sound of church bells. But it’s not these things that make me love him. It’s that I’m certain that when we are together, we are invincible.

And I look up, sometimes, and catch him looking at me, and I can see the same thoughts reflected in his eyes. We’ve been together a week, and I’ve forgotten all about my onward plans. I collected my bags from the aparthotel in Xlendi as soon as we left the bed on the first morning, and lost myself in his arms – such an easy thing to do – and now I’m scared stupid because I know that this will have to end. There is life outside, and one day we’ll both have to go back to it, and the prospect fills me with dread.

And now we’re on the rocks at the top of Mgarr ix-Xini creek, lying side by side as salt dries into healthy skin, handing out a caress here, a kiss there, throwing each other quick glances of complicity and playing another round of the truth game.

What you do is this: you each have a bunch of stones. You take it in turns to say something about yourself that’s true. If it’s also true about the other person, they put one of their stones on your pile. The person who wins is the person who gets rid of all their stones first. As a drinking game, it can be pretty cruel, but sometimes, the way we play it, you’re just as happy to lose, as the forfeit always involves physical contact. And, baby, the physical contact.

I think some more. Then I ante up, say: ‘OK. I once manipulated the feet of a cast member of
Neighbours
.’

‘Got me there. Which one?’

‘A blonde one. You’re not going to tell me you’ve heard of her. She didn’t go on to have a blistering pop career. But she had toenails like pork scratchings and skin like Emmenthal.’

Rufus’s lower lip wiggles like a seismograph reading. ‘Just my type,’ he says. ‘A lot of the girls where I come from spend the entire winter in riding boots and never change their popsocks.’

‘That’s attractive.’

‘Well, you don’t want to be downwind of the hunt ball. It’s amazing they manage to catch any foxes at all, really.’

I’ve slowly started picking up that Rufus comes from a more elevated background than my own, that the accent is more than Hollywood English. It’s the small things: the references to horses, the occasional rueful mention of the fact that he wore a tailcoat to school.

‘So was that a truth, then?’

He shakes his head. ‘True, but not a truth. Let’s see …’ He takes his own turn at staring over the azure water.

‘OK,’ says Rufus. ‘If my grandfather was alive, he’d be over a hundred and forty years old.’

‘Bollocks.’

‘True. He had my father when he was seventy-three.’

I laugh. ‘No. But that would make him old enough to be my yaya’s grandfather. It’s too weird. And this was by his first wife, was it?’

Rufus, for some reason, tweaks my nose. ‘Cheeky. No, his first wife went down with the Titanic at the age of thirty-eight. He was twenty-five years older than her.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I say, not sure apropos what.

‘I don’t think the family were too upset. She was running off with some Canadian lard baron she’d met on Paddington station. Saved everyone the embarrassment of a divorce, and besides, I think they all probably felt it was a judgement from God. My family has always thought that God was on their side, one way or another.’

‘So who was your grandmother?’

‘The youngest daughter of one of his shooting buddies. She was well over forty years younger than him.’

‘God! Poor cow!’

He shakes his head. ‘I think it was probably a lucky escape. Youngest daughters were generally lined up to look after the old folk and then eke out their lives on tiny allowances from their brothers’ whims at the time, and at twenty-five she was already heading over the hill for a normal marriage in those days. As it was, she had fourteen years of pandering to Grandfather, and she’s had another sixty pottering about the place telling everyone what to do. Mummy’s been a daughter-in-law since practically the ark.’

‘Your grandmother’s still alive?’

‘She’ll be a hundred next year,’ he says proudly, ‘and still has most of her marbles.’

‘Impressive,’ I say. We live, after all, in a world that sees vacant longevity as evidence of a life well lived. ‘And you mean they’ve lived in the same house all that time?’

He gives me a funny look that I can’t quite interpret. ‘Urrr … yuh.’

‘Holy Ada. That must have been tough.’

‘Well, there’s a fair amount of room,’ he says, and, changing the subject: ‘Go on, then. What’s yours?’

‘Oh. Right. Um … OK. I once danced so energetically I dislocated my knee.’

He curls up into a ball and makes ai-ai-ai noises. ‘Jesus, Melody. Would you be accident prone, by any chance?’