The Pleasure Seekers (7 page)

Manoussos used the key and the gate swung back. He led Bridget by the hand from the courtyard to his front door, swung that open and her into his arms, carrying her into his house. She was out of her blouse and had wriggled out of her mini skirt, had lorn the strings of her bikini underpants and was sliding the triangle of white silk from between her legs while still in his arms and before they had even reached the bedroom.

Big-breasted to the extreme with an incredibly tiny waist and voluptuous bottom, and sending out an aura of sexuality, hunger for sex and a man, she was a delight. She had the face of an angel with blonde hair. She had an openness of heart and brimmed with sensuality. She was a lover of the erotic, had a passion for sex and men – it was coming off her like an exquisite and rare perfume. Junoesque and lascivious, she was quite crazy with desire for sex with Manoussos. She draped one of her long legs over his shoulder and leaned forward to unzip his fly. Bridget held his throbbing penis in her hand, closed her eyes and sighed. How great it was for Manoussos to have a woman who revelled in sex as much as he did.

He walked her straight through his bedroom and down
the hall to a large bathroom where he placed her on her feet and shed his clothes. They wanted to say things to each other, it was there in their eyes, but passion, urgency and lust struck them dumb. What need of words anyway? It was all being said with their bodies. He took her by the hand and they stepped into the shower, a large space of tiled walls and floor with a marble bench in one corner. He raised her up and she wrapped her legs round his waist as soon as he had impaled her on himself. The scream that escaped her lips was not of pain but of the pure pleasure of being penetrated by a man. He turned on the shower and the cold water hit them in a powerful spray, pouring over them. Bridget threw back her head and let the water run over her face and hair. Manoussos stepped closer into the spray of water and their bodies were transformed: made to shine like flesh-coloured satin.

Manoussos felt as if he was taking possession of a goddess. She had beauty, extraordinary strength, and was supple, raunchy but graceful; cock mad but with love and passion, sheer adoration for penis. In the land of the erotic, she was a queen, mistress of her own desires, her very soul. And she was so free, so uncomplicated and full of adventure in her lust. For a second D’Arcy came to mind and then vanished.

She was like a magnificent succulent dish to be savoured – Manoussos wanted to eat her alive. He started with her mouth and deep, lusty kisses while his hands caressed her heavy and luscious breasts. He played with them and the cascades of water flowing over them, buried his face between them while his penis throbbed inside her. He was a man lost in her lust, not his own. She
somehow understood that, placed her hands firmly on his waist and, still leaning back and away from him so that he might continue his kissing and caressing, her legs still wrapped around him, she used her grip on it as leverage and proceeded to ease herself on and off his phallus. She had what Max called an educated vagina and used it with imagination, had a knowledge of how to please with every grip, every release; using her pelvis, she created a rhythm with her thrustings, had control of their exquisite lustiness and drove him into a sexual frenzy.

They came. And again, this time on the floor of the shower, lying in a shallow pool of water with the shower still running over them. He took her again and again in every way he had ever taken a woman. They had sex on the marble bench, her on her knees and he behind her, and it was then that they both realised they were making love in their lust. The realisation was sweet and made their hearts beat a little faster. It stirred their emotions and they were grateful for this one night of sex that would never happen again. They were human and loving creatures enough, that to experience a taste of the dark and delirious side of sexual depravity would not affect who and what they really were.

The sun was well up in the sky when Bridget made scrambled eggs and bacon for Manoussos, and he explained that Max would have to come and get her. Not because he was ashamed to walk her home to Max’s house where she was staying but because his neighbours, the old crones, would be out on their doorsteps or peering through the windows, and though they all knew he was a womaniser, he did not like flaunting it in their faces. He
was the keeper of the peace, he had a position to maintain, and that had to rate above all the other things he might or might not be. Bridget understood that. He made the call to Max’s house.

A platoon of shiny red ants was on a quick march around the rim of the worn white marble sink. Arnold closed his eyes in the hope that they would go away and it was not true that they were back again. He opened his eyes. It was true.

There they were in columns of twos and threes, marching one behind the other, making an assault on the draining board, then splitting their column around the edge of a turned over white coffee mug. They marched on towards the bread box.

Arnold leaned across the sink to look through the window but was immediately distracted by the sight of its white plaster ledge. There the main body of the army was milling about, waiting for a signal to form ranks and take over his kitchen. Would he never be rid of them? How many times had he committed mass murder on those red ants? He thought he was done with them, had won, that his last raid had wiped them out. That had been the day before yesterday.

With a trembling hand he opened the cupboard and reached for his latest final solution. An old-fashioned remedy: a bottle of citronella. He had given up on the latest weapons, they were useless. This was more like guerrilla warfare so he had resorted to age old methods. He grabbed a wad of commercial cotton, the kind that is more grey than white and still has the seeds in it, and
tore off a piece. He uncorked the bottle. One whiff was enough to turn his stomach and make him miserable.

As the brown liquid spread over the cotton, he realised he simply could not do it, chase after the ants yet again as they scattered, mopping up the hundreds of dead little beasts with their bug eyes and twitching legs. What for? Only to have them come back again in their endless march to drive him mad . . .

He washed his hands and as he placed the bar of yellow Fortnum’s soap down in its dish noticed several of the enemy had been trapped in it. He felt terribly depressed. He stared at the soap for some time before he dried his hands, having first shaken out the towel, then reached into his hip pocket from where he pulled out a red cotton handkerchief and mopped his brow and neck. He was wet with perspiration. Nine-thirty in the morning and it was 92 degrees.

Arnold picked a clean glass off the draining board and examined it for the enemy. No ants. From the fridge he removed a bottle and poured out a half glass of ice cold Smirnoff vodka, topped it up with tomato juice, cracked a raw egg into the glass, and not even bothering to stir it, sat down at the kitchen table and wearily drank his breakfast.

On the table was his old battered shopping basket, in it a
Time
magazine, the
International Herald Tribune
(five days old), a battered copy of
Finnegan’s Wake
and his beach towel. He looked around the neat, clean kitchen. Soon Kiria Marika, his cleaning woman, would arrive. She would deal with the tiny red devils. By the time he returned to the house at five that evening they would be
gone, and even though he knew they would be back and on the march by morning, he felt momentarily relieved. How could this endless infestation have happened to him? Late at night, alone in the house, there were times he thought they had infiltrated his mind.

Arnold was obsessed with his army of tiny red ants. On occasion, when he was walking from his house to the port, as he was about to do now, he imagined he smelled of insect repellent. Other times his mind wandered away from insects only to be pulled back again because he imagined they were nibbling at his brain.

Normally docile and easy-going, he could live with them without being obsessive about them, as he had for years: part of life in a hot climate. But things were getting to Arnold of late. He was fed up with tolerating what he did not like about his life.

He sighed, thinking how foolishly he was behaving, and while lifting his glass and draining it to the very bottom, looked over the rim and was horrified to see the red devils, six abreast in some places, marching in a long column from under the back door across the floor towards the sink. He slammed the glass down on the table. It smashed. He grabbed his basket and fled from the house.

Arnold was on time, he was always on time. He never ceased to amaze people with his recuperative powers; how he could, no matter the hour or the condition he was in, rise, seemingly none the worse for wear, and carry on with one of his many schedules for living. Everyone knew that Arnold’s schedules gave him a purpose in life, a reason to complete each day.

D’Arcy was early. She was halfway up the street and waving at him. He cheered up immediately. Arnold enormously enjoyed these morning swims with D’Arcy when he would wash the ants from his brain. They happened often, but D’Arcy and he usually met in the port at her favourite coffee shop. Arnold like most everyone else was just a little bit in love with D’Arcy, thinking her one of the loveliest creatures on earth.

They greeted each other with kisses, one on each cheek three times, the way Parisians kiss, and then she slipped her arm through his and they proceeded down his street. They stopped to have a word with two of his black-clad neighbours who were always cordial to Arnold and treated him with great respect. They liked him, liked the way he kept his house at the end of the cul-de-sac. It pleased them to have a stranger in their midst to cluck over, though they felt sorry for him because he was a foreigner in a foreign land. They talked to him endlessly about his lonely life, his need for a wife, and remained silent about his drunken walks home. They turned their backs to the occasional women he brought to his house. Mercifully they knew nothing about the rough Greek boys who sneaked in and out of the street in the dead of night, dragging, from some deserted place they had lured him to, an Arnold nearly catatonic with drink.

For years he had had enough control over his drunkenness never to allow the poor, illiterate boys from the mountain villages, to whom he was nothing but cordial in the daytime under the sun, into his house. His way had always been to have sex on the beach in the dark, hidden behind a rock, with the odd Greek boy or intellectually
aware foreign female in Livakia for a brief visit. It was all the same to Arnold, who always excused his sexual encounters to himself as having been the product of a mad drunken moment. The foreign colony and the Cretan residents of Livakia knew nothing about that side of his life; they believed that drink was his mistress, and gave him all the sex he ever wanted. If they had ever suspected differently, they put it firmly out of their minds.

Now someone new had come into his life; he knew it wasn’t love but a bizarre sexual attachment he was too weak to resist, a complex relationship he had been seduced into. Outwardly he had it firmly under control, but, like the tiny red ants, it was eating away at his emotions. Yet, in spite of that, he felt strong enough to deal with it, keep it under control. He believed he was master of the situation, that goodness, intelligence and kind gestures will always win out over the dark and cruel. It was the philosophy he believed in and lived by. The positive aspects of Arnold Topper that all who knew him loved him for.

There were few people on the beach and none of them from the crowd of the night before. D’Arcy held up her hand to shade her eyes as she looked out over the water. Arnold was doing knee bends. D’Arcy turned her attention to him. He looked happy. Mercifully after a certain amount of drink he never remembered anything, or so he claimed. She often wondered just how true that was. Clearly the humiliating incident between him and Mark had vanished from his mind, if indeed it had ever been there at all.

They spread their towels out on the sand. D’Arcy
removed the straw hat from her head and the full-length sarong from round her body. Arnold pulled off his tattered straw hat and shoved it in his basket, stripped down to his black silk knit bikini, removed his round horn-rimmed eye-glasses and carefully put them in the basket as well. They slipped their feet from their sandals. The burning hot sand made them hop from one foot to the other several times before they joined hands and ran to the water, waded in a short distance and dived into the sea.

The water was instantly refreshing. Nine times out of ten when they dived into the water together and finally surfaced Arnold would tell D’Arcy, as he did now, ‘I miss that wonderful shock and shiver one gets diving into the ice cold Atlantic at Truro on the Cape. Now
that
was something!’

D’Arcy laughed, and scooping up water with both her hands she splashed it at him. Then side by side they began their swim. They were both excellent swimmers and loved the sea, any sea, so long as it was relatively clean. They swam a good distance and then floated on their backs for some time, eyes closed under the grilling sun.

Suddenly Arnold was pulled under. The commotion shook D’Arcy from her reverie and she was immediately at his side. It was unnecessary. With arms flailing, he shook himself free. A head bobbed up from the depths. It was Melina. She made another attempt to grab Arnold. She was a silly young girl, frolicking in the water, no more than that. The three swam round and teased each other for several minutes before embarking on a race back to the beach.

Still some distance from the shore, Mark joined them.
There was a glint in his eyes, a knowing smirk on his lips. D’Arcy picked it up at once. Melina would never have thought to join them or attempt to pull Arnold under the water and snatch his bikini had it not been instigated by Mark. She never socialised with the foreigners; sat in on the fringes of their evenings in the port maybe, and that only if Mark was there, but never more than that. This was a bold act. Oh, yes, Mark had set the girl up to inflict a little humiliation on Arnold. Had he thought that if he had Arnold unnerved, Mark himself could win the race, beat them to the beach? Not this time, Mark Obermann, D’Arcy told herself, determined that either she or Arnold would leave Mark trailing in the water behind them. She reached down and found added strength, swimming harder and faster. Arnold, who was swimming next to her, must have picked up on her determination that one of them should win: he was going all out for the shore.