Isolation stories: (7) Aphrodite

This is another of my personal favourites and comes from my most recent collection, Spring Tide. Since the two characters only meet very briefly in the middle of the story I think it qualifies as an isolation story. Being alone isn’t always bad.

Like ‘The Kite’ (story 4), it contains no science fictional elements whatever, except perhaps that in both cases I try to come at familiar places on Earth as if they were on an alien planet.

My beautiful granddaughter is called Aphrodite, as it happens, but she is only one, and this was written two or three years before she was born.

Aphrodite

There
was a sea running east to west between two big brown bodies of land.  In the eastern part of the sea there were
many islands, and among them one island in particular that was long and thin in
shape.   At one end of this island a
holiday resort had grown up, with bright lights, discos, rows of restaurants
and music thumping till dawn, at the other there was a village falling into
decline at the foot of an extinct volcano.

 Thomas, who was going through a somewhat difficult
time, had gone to the resort at first but was now in the village, eating a
salad of tomatoes and goat cheese by himself, outside the small café where he’d
rented a room, a place that also doubled as a general store.  As Thomas munched his salad, the big plane tree
in the middle of the square was throwing long and somehow dreary shadows towards
him over the cracked and oil-stained tarmac to remind him that the day was
ending and the streets of this very quiet village would soon be empty and dark.  A stooped old woman in black turned to stare
at him as she hobbled past.  He smiled
and raised his hand in greeting, but her cold appraisal didn’t so much as flicker.  This was not a welcoming place.  Apart from one other, smaller café, there was
nowhere else in it that he could go, and many of the houses were empty and
boarded up.  As the café proprietor replaced
the empty bread basket with a full one on the chequered plastic tablecloth in
front of him, a worm of doubt stirred in Thomas’ mind.  Had it been a bad decision, coming here?  Wasn’t he going to have a very dull and very
lonely week?

“There was an Irish woman here
earlier, a young woman about your age,” his host said.  “Very pretty.   She had arranged to meet some friends here
for camping, but they missed their flight. 
It will be a couple of days before they join her, apparently.  I offered her a room, but…” he paused to give
a comically bewildered shrug, “but she said she was going to sleep outside.”

 His name was Spiro and his rugged face kept reminding
Thomas of a gone-to-seed version of Zorba the Greek,as played by Anthony Quinn. 
Thomas suspected that Spiro was well aware of the Anglo-Saxon stereotype
of the earthy, sensual Mediterranean man, and consciously played the part: a
Greek playing a Mexican actor playing a Greek.  But then again Thomas knew that, when the worm
stirred inside him, it always made him ungenerous and a little paranoid. 

“There’s a temple here, isn’t there?  A ruined temple?   I thought I’d go and look at it before the
light goes.”

“The temple of Aphrodite,” Spiro winked broadly, “the goddess of love.  It’s about two kilometres away, along that track just there.”

*   *   *

The
track led through a dry, open forest of pine trees and wiry scrub, the warm air
heavy with resin and pulsating with the constant shrill scraping of millions of
cicadas.  After an outcrop of bare grey
rock the track dipped down, and a side path branched off from it along a small wooded
valley towards the sea.   There was a clifftop
down there, he knew, and below it a beach, which you could also access directly
via a path from the village.  But for now
Thomas stayed on the main track as it climbed up again, past a metal shrine that
smelled of honey, and began to skirt round the broad shoulder of that extinct
volcano.

The temple stood on a kind of terrace
on the right-hand side of the track, with the wooded slope beyond it leading down
to cliffs above the sea.   There wasn’t
much left of the building itself, just a stone floor, the bases of the columns
round the edge, and on the near side, a couple of broken columns that still
rose about a metre from the ground.   In
front of it was a rusty sign with an empty beer bottle at its foot.  The sun was almost at the horizon, and a
pathway of yellow light stretched across the sea towards the island.  All around, in every direction, the cicadas kept
beating out their unrelenting rhythm, like a million children shaking dried peas
in yoghurt pots.

Thomas sat on a piece of fallen
column that lay a few yards on from the temple itself.   The light faded much more quickly here than
it would have done back at home, and in a short time, a warm, scented darkness had
closed round him.  But more light was on
its way.  The sea along the horizon was already
silvery with moonlight and soon the moon had risen high enough above the
mountain behind him to illuminate the temple’s broken columns, cast faint
shadows over its pale floor, and transform the forest around it into a kind of stage
set: empty still, but full of dimly lit places where characters would meet, and
shadows where they would hide.  Thomas noticed
that he no longer felt that worm of doubt inside him.  This was the world and he was in it.  And that, for the moment, was enough.

Then he noticed he wasn’t
alone.  Someone else had stepped out onto
the stage, coming from the direction of the village.  To begin with the stranger was merely a
pattern in the patchwork of shadow and dim light, distinguishable from the rest
only because it moved.  He couldn’t see a
face, or make out the colour of the clothes, but quite soon he could tell
somehow that this was a woman, and he sat and watched as she took form, knowing
that he himself would be invisible as long as he stayed where he was.  In fact she still hadn’t spotted him even when
she stepped onto the floor of the temple, but he could see that she was about
his own age, slender, athletic, and wearing the clothes of a tourist like himself,
and he assumed she was the Irishwoman that Spiro had told him about.  Perhaps the old Greek had pointed her this
way.

“Hi there,” he called out, standing
up.  He’d been reluctant to separate
himself from the shadows, but to hide any longer would just be creepy. 

“Oh hi.  Jesus, you made me jump!  I thought I was on my own.”

Yes, she was certainly Irish.  

“Sorry, I should have spoken
sooner.”   He walked towards her,
stepping up onto the floor of the temple, worn shiny by two and a half
millennia of feet.

They were standing beside one of
the broken columns now: man and woman, dimly lit in shades of grey.  There was no black or white.  Everything was provisional, everything on the
point of dissolution.

“I’m Siobhan.  You’re must be the Englishman the café guy mentioned.” 

She reached out her hand.   Their palms and fingers touched, suddenly
firm and solid, and she looked up into his face with friendly but appraising
eyes.  He wondered if she was as aware as
he was of the obvious narrative which the universe, perhaps with Spiro’s
assistance, had set up for them.

So
where did you two first meet?

Would
you believe it, we met by moonlight in the Temple of the Goddess of Love.

“Hi, I’m Thomas.  I gather your friends have been held up?”

“Yes, a couple of days.”

“And you’re sleeping out in the
open?”

“I am.  The others have got the tent.”

“Are you short of money until your
friends come?  If so I could easily—”

“I’m fine.  It’s no hardship sleeping out when the nights
are as warm as this.”

“I guess not.  I just wondered whether there was a problem
because your—”

“There’s no problem at all.  And I’m looking forward to a couple of days by
myself if I’m honest.  I like being on my
own.”

Thomas nodded.

“Me too.”

He did like it, actually, if he was
in the right frame of mind, but that was something he’d only recently learned
about himself, as he grew older and became very gradually better at separating out
the question “what do I want?” from “what, right at this moment, would be the
easiest thing to do?”  He’d lately discovered,
for instance, that he didn’t really enjoy staying up drinking until four in the
morning, or hanging out in places where you couldn’t talk but only bellow like
a beast.  This had been the cause of an ugly
row with the friends who’d come with him to the resort at the far end of the
island, and was the reason he was now here. 
It had all been rather unpleasant and, in retrospect, he could see he’d
handled the whole thing very badly.

“There isn’t much to do at this end
of the island, is the only problem,” he said.  
“The only things open in the village are Spiro’s café, and one other
café that looks like it’s very much for locals only.”

“Yes, I know.  I’ve kind of resigned myself to a very early
bedtime.   I’m hoping the journey will
have worn me out enough to get me off to sleep.”

 “Well why not have a drink with me back at the
village before you settle down?” would have been the obvious thing for Thomas
to say at this point.  It would have been
a natural thing to do, in no way difficult or awkward, and certainly not pushy
or overfamiliar.  Arguably it would actually
be rather unfriendly not to make the
offer, given that it was very early in the evening to lie down to sleep, and
Siobhan couldn’t retreat to a room as he could, or read a book by electric
light.  And what was more, Thomas liked
Siobhan immediately.  Not only was she
very pretty –Spiro was quite right about that– but she projected a kind of lively
curiosity that he found instantly appealing. 
He liked the fact that she was Irish too, and different in that small
way from himself.

But he didn’t suggest a drink all
the same.

“Well, nice to meet you, Siobhan.  I’ve actually been here a while and I was
just thinking of heading back.”

He was surprised at himself.  He could already see, without even the benefit of hindsight, that this was going to be one of those moments he would replay in his mind.  I should never have walked away from that Irish girl, he knew he’d tell himself at lonely moments, perhaps even years from now. Stupid, of course, but it would happen.  And never mind the distant future.  What about this very evening, what about the prospect ahead of him, trying to fill the time by himself  in that sad little village?   He did like being on his own, it was quite true, but there were places where that worked, and places where it didn’t.  A depressed and slowly dying village wasn’t a good setting for solitude.

But still he walked away.  The argument with his friends had shaken him
quite badly.  He’d been shocked by his
own sudden eruption of rage.  It had made
him think about his dealings with other people in general, and the way he swung
so suddenly from one feeling to another, from friendliness to contempt, from
love to indifference.  And he was tired
of blowing about in the wind, and doing whatever seemed easiest at the time.  He knew he’d hurt people that way, especially
women, and he’d had enough of the mess and shame when the wind suddenly
changed.

*   *   *

As
Siobhan watched him dissolve into the forest, she wondered why he’d been in
such a hurry to get away.  He’d seemed very
reserved, even by English standards, but she’d quite liked the look of him, and
had assumed he’d like the look of her too –well, why wouldn’t he?– enough in
any case for an evening together to seem like a pleasant prospect.  Perhaps he was just shy, she thought.  Maybe she should have suggested it herself?  But something had stopped her.  Siobhan wasn’t prone to shyness, so it wasn’t
that. No, it was almost as if he’d seen her thought and metaphorically held up a
warning hand.  Which was kind of odd.

But anyway, never mind.  By the time she’d unwrapped the cheese and
tomato sandwich that had travelled with her all the way from Dublin airport, she
was enjoying the ruin in the moonlight and the chorus of cicadas, and thinking about
other things.  After about fifteen
minutes, she headed back herself along the track.  

When she reached the side path towards
the sea, she paused. She could go straight on to the village now and, as likely
as not, she’d meet Thomas again outside the café, for where else was there for
him to go?  She could stop for a word
and, if he seemed more amenable this time, a companion for the evening would perhaps
be an option once more.  Or she could turn
left now down the path towards her little camp on top of the cliff.  Spending the night there had been quite
appealing in prospect, even in the absence of the camping equipment that her
friends were bringing, but it seemed rather less so now.  Meeting Thomas, and then watching him go, had
made her more aware of the fact that she was on her own, and she felt unnerved
by the moonlit forest and its shadowy and ambiguous forms.  But recognising this fact made up her mind
for her.  She didn’t like to give way to unfounded
fears.  She preferred to push on through them.

She’d just turned down the little
valley when she saw a man ahead of her, standing just a few yards back from the
path, completely motionless, and watching her with an odd, sardonic, sideways
gaze.  This was genuinely frightening and
she was on the point of turning back and heading for the village after all when
she realised this wasn’t a human being at all, but only the broken trunk of tree.  Amused by her own irrational fear, she walked
over to the tree to give it a little kick, and had just returned to the path
when suddenly a real man appeared on the path ahead with a gun in his hand,
striding determinedly towards her.  Her
heart began to race again but he walked straight past, heading towards the
village without saying a word, and Siobhan was on her own again.

How different it seemed on the
cliff now, in the dark.  She searched for
some time for her sleeping bag which she’d left in a small hollow under some rocks,
cursing herself for not marking the spot more clearly, and worrying that
perhaps it had been stolen.  Eventually
she found it, though, and this was immensely comforting, a moment in fact of
really intense happiness   Even returning
to a patch of earth on a cliff top, it seemed, could feel, in the right
circumstances, like coming home.  She
knew she wouldn’t sleep for some time, but she rolled out her sleeping bag and lay
down quite contentedly on the outside of it. 
The stars were very bright, and the entire span of the Milky Way was
stretched out above her across the sky.  She
wished she could name the constellations, but the only one she could remember
was Orion, shining up there above the mountain.  

Never mind.  The stars didn’t know their names.

Still awake an hour later, she stood up and stretched herself and, as she did so, she looked down over the side of her rocky hollow at the small beach beneath, its narrow strip of sand dimly visible in the moonlight, and little waves glowing softly as they broke over it.   Some way out to sea, the lamps of several fishing boats were moving slowly across the water, the crouched fishermen inside them half in light and half in darkness.  

She was watching their slow
progress when she became aware of movement below her.  There was a direct path to the beach from the
village and a man was coming along it.  She
could see it was Thomas.  Shadowy and
indistinct as he was in the moonlight, there was something slightly dogged
about his walk that she immediately recognised. 
It was as if he was battling against something, she thought, forcing
himself forward into the world against some sort of resistance.  She saw him pull off his T-shirt and shorts and
wade out naked into the sea.   The water
glittered around him as he dived in, and it seemed a long time before he
emerged again to swim thirty or forty strokes further out in a strong,
confident crawl, before stopping and treading water so he could turn and look
back at the shore.  Not wanting him to
see her watching him, Siobhan squatted down again behind her rocks. 

Soon afterwards, she decided to get
inside her sleeping bag, for the air was beginning to cool. As she lay there,
she imagined herself in Thomas’ place: the moonlight under the sea, the play of
grey shadows on the blurry stones on the bottom, the coolness of the water against
her skin.   If they’d spent the evening
together, she thought, the two of them might well have both have had a swim.  By then he’d no longer be the shadowy being
she’d met at the temple in the moonlight. 
They would have talked for a while, seen each other’s faces properly in
electric light, knocked back a few glasses of beer or wine or ouzo or something,
and learned a few anchoring facts about one another, like where each of them came
from, what they did for a living, and who was in their families.  There would have been just the two of them together
in a little pool of electric light.  It
would have felt intimate and conspiratorial, and, based on past experience and
her knowledge of herself, Siobhan thought it quite likely that, after their
swim, or even instead of it, they would have had sex.  People differ a great deal in this respect,
but Siobhan’s attitude was very straightforward.  Pleasure was a good thing if it didn’t hurt
anyone, and she was quite open to brief encounters in situations like this where
there was little risk of difficult emotional entanglements.   

It could have been rather nice
actually, she thought a little wistfully, but then she smiled.  Sex was such a funny thing when you examined
it.  She’d always thought that.  Such a big deal was made of it.  So many contradictory prohibitions and
expectations were placed upon it.  It was
the focal point of so much huffing and blowing and agonising and general
nonsense: sonnets, songs, sermons, Viagra, lipstick, rom-coms, operas, jokes, public
stonings, pop songs, vows of celibacy, Romeo and Juliet, Ten Top Tips to Wow
Your Man in Bed, the pill, the confessional, tears. . .  On and on. 
So much drama and worry and guilt and longing.  And all of it, whether disapproving or
celebratory, was centred on sex as a wild and subversive force.  Yet what was it in the end?  What was that feeling?  When you really came down to it, wasn’t it
just scratching a rather fancy kind of itch? 
An itch, what’s more, that only existed because it ensured that living creatures
didn’t stint in the business of making more creatures.  What was wild about that?   What
was subversive about a force that pulled all the time, like a kind of biological
gravity, in the direction of parenthood and domesticity? 

It might start out in the moonlight
on a beach, Siobhan thought, but it ended up with stair gates, and car seats,
and grownups saying ‘weewee’ and ‘poo’. 

She had to admit, though, there her
thoughts at this point were somewhat coloured by the fact that her friend Anne,
back in Dublin, had had a baby a few months ago, and seemed to have lost
interest in all the things the two of them had shared.  In fact, if it wasn’t for that baby, Anne
would have been with her now.

And actually, Siobhan thought, in
all fairness, and setting jealousy aside, opening your legs and pushing out an
entirely new human being who no one had ever been seen before, well, that
wasn’t exactly tame.  The poo and the stairgates might be, but they
were just anodyne trimmings, as Valentine cards and silly pet names were anodyne
trimmings for sex.  The raw reality was
something else. 

In fact, when you came to think
about, wasn’t it life itself that was the really subversive thing?  Not just sex but motherhood too? All of life
was a rebellion really, a doomed, Lucifer-like rebellion against the peaceful
downward pull of entropy, the orderly clock-like unwinding of galaxies and
planets and stars.

This last bit, however, came to her more as images than as words, for as sleep took hold, her thoughts ceased to be made of language.  In fact they weren’t really images either.  They were something more abstract than that: forms, diagram-like chunks of meaning that were as much tactile as visual.  Some huge dark falling thing, creatures moving in a moonlit forest, water running down downhill in torrents and streams and dripping from sodden peat …

Dear God, she thought, coming awake
suddenly, Thomas hadn’t even been the first opportunity that day when it came
to sex!  When she’d asked Spiro about the
price of rooms he’d winked and said there was no charge for those who shared
his bed.  Christ, how sordid!   No way was she going to stay there after
that!  No way.  Of course the old goat
had spotted her distaste almost at once: “Forgive me my silly joke!”  But it didn’t fool her.  She’d already seen him watching her, eyes
slightly narrowed, like a shrewd old fisherman watching his line to see if the
bait would be taken.  He was about the
same age as her dad.

Still, she thought, it had probably
worked once, thirty years ago, when Spiro wasn’t so flabby and Greece had seemed
much more exotic to northern Europeans than it did now in these days when Bali or
Thailand were commonplace destinations.  The
pull of the other.  She remembered some
nature programme she’d seen.  Female
chimps sneaking away from their troop when the alpha male was sleeping in his
tree, risking attack by leopards to journey all by themselves by moonlight over
a mountain ridge and down into the next valley. 
They’d mate with males from another troop down there and then return
again over the rocks and through the leopard-ridden night.  Hedging their bets, the programme had
said.  New genes to mingle with their
own. 

A leopard in the moonlight.  Dear God, imagine that.  Those spots among all these speckled shades
of grey.  The creature would be right on
top of you before you’d seen it at all.

*  *  *

Several
hours later, she surfaced from sleep again and sat up to have a look around.

The moon had gone, and Orion was right down at the horizon.  This evidence that the planet had been quietly turning while she slept was for some reason immensely comforting, and she felt a surge of that same delicious happiness that had come to her when she found her sleeping bag. It reminded her of when she was a little girl, back in the days before her brothers were even born, wrapped in a warm blanket in the back of her parents’ car as they drove through the night to her Nan’s house in Galway.  Sometimes, after an aeon of silence, one of the grown-ups would say something in the front there, some murmured thought or observation, and she’d half-wake to see the street-lights of some little town flickering in the windows above her, or maybe the headlights of a passing truck, briefly illuminating the door handles and head-rests, the plastic lining of the car roof, the pocket in front of her, with her pad and crayons, on the back of her father’s seat.  And then quietness and darkness would return, and she’d slip back down into sleep.

Everything in her immediate surroundings was in almost complete darkness.  So was the sea below, except for the faint grey ghosts of waves breaking below her on the beach.  There were no fishing boats now, and Thomas had long since gone.  

Copyright 2018, Chris Beckett