Simply Heaven Read online

  Barefoot and naked, I search for something to cover up with. The linen jacket lies, as far as I can remember, just inside the alley door, and my bikini is most probably hanging in separate parts from the frames of a couple of the living-room pictures. Whatever, I don’t fancy wandering about this unfamiliar house without a stitch. I sidestep a big heap of clothes on the floor and head for the armchair that stands in the shadows in the corner of the room, root around among the could-go-another-wear pile tangled up on the seat. From the feel of it, the chair is made of leather. Nice. Eventually, my hand lights on the reassurance of brushed cotton, and I extract a long-sleeved shirt and pull it on. Tiptoe back to the open door and out on to the stone staircase.

  There’s a church looming over me, lit by one of those flash Arab moons, as I emerge from the bedroom, the roof soaring above the slabby little houses like a rising sun, clad in a thousand hundred-watt lightbulbs. The Maltese islands would be a good few degrees cooler if they’d only leave the lights off. And I have one of those God-is-everywhere moments. Swiftly followed by one of those yeah-and-he’s-watching-you-right-now-you-scrubber moments. So I pull my purloined shirt over my breasts and shoot down the stairs in a vain attempt to get out of sight of the Almighty.

  In the kitchen, one of those huge old 1950s fridges that looks like a spaceship grumbles by the French windows leading to the pool. Smooth stone tiles, cool under my feet. I throw the light switch, flip on the fan standing in the corner and hunt through the wall cupboards for a glass.

  The interior of the cupboards is pretty impressive, in a mad sort of way. I know he said it was a family house, but it looks like this is one of those families that buys a house so they’ve got storage for all the junk they’re too mean to throw out. There must be six dozen glasses in here, none, as far as I can see, matching. The same with crockery. Soup plates the size of cattle troughs and teacups the size of sherry glasses, piles and piles of dinner plates and side plates, dessert bowls and sauce boats, each with a different pattern, each one bearing a chip, or a crack, or a glaze that has run to a million crazy-paving crackles. On the top of the cupboards, lined up like urns in a crematorium, half a dozen lidless soup tureens. My yaya had one of those, which she bought in an insolvency sale. She used it to grow hyacinths in. She had a chamber pot she used for the same thing.

  I help myself to a large cut-glass tumbler and fill it with fridge-water. Help myself to a couple of fat purple figs from the blue glass bowl in the middle of the long, scuffed pine kitchen table and go through to the lounge to eat them.

  More of the same in here. The maroon leather Chesterfield settee must have been gorgeous, ooh, say a hundred years ago. It’s certainly well made, but you’re not talking cutting-edge design here. The leather has been polished black in places by years of contact with the human body, and has worn through in others to the point where the rough hessian backing shows through. The two armchairs are in roughly similar states. Apart from that, the room contains two wine tables (chipped), a standard lamp whose shade has been eaten away by time and moths until it is little more than lace, and a couple of truly baleful old folk in 1930s gear glooming from heavy gold frames on the bare stone walls. A low bookshelf runs the length of one side of the room, crammed two layers deep with paperbacks that have obviously been building up for decades. Dozens of original Penguins in the stripy covers; a complete collection, as far as I can see, of Dashiel Hammett, the usual copies of Valley of the Dolls, Riders and Jaws, scotched and battered copies of Hardy, Eliot, Woolf, Dickens, King, du Maurier, Richardson, Rendell, Shelley (M., not P.B.), Crichton, Franklin M., Maupin, Manby: all hotched and potched together as they’ve been read and discarded.

  The top surface of the bookcase is covered in dozens and dozens of household goddesses: rough miniature terracotta reproductions of the crazy Neolithic statuary from the great temples scattered across the islands. Fat ladies, long since decapitated, stand and recline by the score, flesh dripping downward like moulded lard, on chipped white gloss paint, watched over by a mater dolorosa printed on to knobbly cardboard and fadged into a brass frame so lightly plated with silver that a couple of rubs of a duster has taken the surface away.

  ‘Mad, aren’t they?’ Rufus has come into the room without my noticing.

  I pick up a goddess – a she-walrus who lies on her side on a primitive ottoman in a knee-length A-line skirt, like she’s just got in from a twelve-hour shift mopping the floors at a discount supermarket – turn her over in my hands.

  ‘Yes. Are you sure you’ve got enough there? Couldn’t you cram a few more in if you put your mind to it?’

  ‘People keep giving them to us,’ says Rufus. I’m not sure if I like this ‘us’ business, but I let it ride. ‘It’s some sort of running joke. Would you like one? A souvenir of Gozo? Although, of course, she comes from Tarxien, which is over on Malta, but …’

  He approaches, closes my hand over the statuette and squeezes. And smiles into my eyes. Which somehow manages to make both my heart leap and my nether regions contract, all in one go.

  I wriggle out of his grasp. ‘Nao-ouh!’ I reply. ‘I couldn’t take something as obviously unique as that. It must be worth a mint!’

  He’s wearing boxers and a white T-shirt that’s obviously come off the pile on the floor. He smells – well, manly. His beard’s grown in and his hair stands up in tufts on the side of his head where he’s been sleeping. He looks good enough to …

  ‘Melody,’ he says, and, spoken with those long English vowels that come from the back of the throat, my name sounds classy, romantic, sexy, even. I’ve spent most of my life being called ‘Millerdee’, and all it takes is one Englishman to turn me into a princess. I smile back at him because it’s fairly obvious that he’s not actually after an answer.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he says. ‘I’m appalled I didn’t at least give you some water. Would you like something to eat?’

  ‘What time is it?’

  He glances at his watch. ‘Half four.’

  More than fourteen hours since I last ate, and that was just a couple of pea pastizzi and a glug of water.

  ‘What’ve you got in the house?’

  We go over to the fridge and I replenish my water as he delves about inside.

  ‘Eggs,’ he says. ‘Tomatoes, olives. And some of that disgusting cheese. And some – yes. I thought so. There’s still some ham left.’

  ‘Aah Jeez,’ I say. ‘The ham here’s terrible. Reminds me of rinsing at the dentist.’

  ‘Ah, no,’ says Rufus, ‘we get ours from Twanny Mifsud. He cures it himself. Well, I say cures. He covers it in salt and leaves it out in the sun, as far as I can work out.’

  There he goes again with the ‘we’. I don’t like this ‘we’ stuff. It’s the sort of word that’s calculated to make you feel unsure of yourself.

  I know. It’s a bit late to be asking questions now.

  He emerges from the fridge with a waxed paper bag in his hand, grins with pleasure. ‘See? A totally different animal.’

  Unwrapping the bag, he brings out a lump of maroon meat, an inch of white fat around the edge, marbled and stippled and perfect. ‘It’s almost like biltong,’ he tells me. ‘Totally illegal, of course. Well, it soon will be now they’re in the EC, anyway. Have a taste.’

  I peel off a flake, pop on to my tongue. It’s like chewing pig-flavoured car tyre. Beautiful.

  ‘Beautiful,’ I say.

  Rufus throws it on to the table, goes back into the fridge. ‘I told you so. We’ve been getting it from him for ever. Well, his dad—’

  I’ve got to know. It’s not just the disappointment factor, though I know already that I’m riding for a severe disappointment, because this man is something different from anything I’ve encountered before. I don’t do that sort of thing: just chuck myself into the love-thang without a single doubt. I’ve never done before and I’m not going to start now. So I say: ‘Rufus, hold on a minute.’

  He reappears. ‘Uh-huh?’

  ‘Lo
ok, 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?’

  Chapter Three

  Truth Game

  ‘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.