Greetings From the Vodka Sea

They’d heard rumours of marauders sweeping down from the hills to rob tourists and worse, but the sun, the salt air and the stillness of the Vodka Sea immediately put their minds at ease. The hotel, the Crown, was even better than the brochure promised, with the recent addition of two huge kidney-shaped pools linked by a swim-up bar nestled in the plaster grotto. The bar was called the Queen of Hearts, and the heart motif was echoed in everything from the heart-shaped stools rising out of the warm salty pool water and the heart-shaped water-proof doilies (what was the point of those?) down to the cupid cherry skewers and the complimentary heart-shaped chocolate mints, wrapped in red or silver foil, that accompanied the bill. The romance of the place was breathtaking, and the two of them, Dr. and Mrs. Hammond, let themselves be drawn into it. On the first night the normally shy and reticent Monica unselfconsciously gratified her new husband manually in the shadowed hot tub (oddly spleen-shaped) that bordered the grotto, even though they ran the risk of being caught (slight, given the lateness of the hour and Bruce’s unmoving, impeccable silence that gave nothing away) or at least discreetly witnessed from a distance. In fact, the thought that they might be being watched (discreetly, that is, from a distance) heightened the experience for both of them. They relaxed and snuggled in the aftermath of Monica’s handiwork and tried not to think of the bubbling unhygienic residue of the hundreds or thousands of similarly indiscreet couples who’d honeymooned before them. As they watched the stars vying for attention in the incalculable distance, they could hear the Vodka Sea caressing the shore. It was, they would agree later, the happiest moment in their lives.

That first morning they walked to the sea. It wasn’t far, just past the mango grove (Bruce was quite certain that mangos were not native to this part of the world) at the far end of the grounds beyond the pools and tennis courts. One could cut through the grove (although they had been warned to watch for a small green snake, a kind of viper that could deliver a nasty and mildly toxic bite), or one could take the asphalt laneway that wound along the outside of the grove. That first morning they took the laneway; however, as time and their sense of London slipped past, they favoured the shortcut more and more.

The beach itself was splendid. Perfect round beads of pinkish-white sand, the colour of Monica’s skin, tickled and massaged their bare feet. No sharp stones or rubbish or aluminum flip tops or bits of broken glass, so unlike Bristol’s shaggy shores or those impossibly filthy beaches on the continent. Just warm, gentle beads. Monica said she’d love to lie in those beads fully naked, allowing the sand to surround her and warm her every cranny. Bruce squeezed her shoulder, and she understood that he would take her right then and there on the warm soft sand, if it weren’t for that couple with two small children, on holiday from America, enjoying their morning coffee. Monica walked to the shore and put her pink toe in the water. It was colder that she imagined, not that it was cold, in fact it was probably just a few degrees below body temperature, it’s just that she’d imagined it would be warmer. She breathed deeply. The smell of salty air (with a slight tinge, a wisp, of vodka) filled her lungs and invigorated her.

“Do you think it’s safe to swim?”

Bruce was way ahead of her.

“Bathing is permitted and encouraged,” he read from the full-colour brochure. “The salt density is five times greater than that of the Atlantic Ocean. No one has ever drowned in the Vodka Sea.”

Monica nudged out another couple of inches.

“I wonder, are there fish in it, then?”

Bruce plunged into the brochure. “I’d suspect not. The alcohol combined with the salinity — well, bugger me. The Vodka Sea supports several unique species of aquatic plants and a high concentration of free-floating crustaceans, close relatives of the brine shrimp. These are the single food source of the Bolen’s dwarf whale. No bigger than a carp, this Lilliputian leviathan is the largest inhabitant of the Vodka Sea.”

There was a picture of the whale in the bottom left corner of the brochure, a cartoonish drawing of a miniature blue whale breaching, curls of water rolling from its blowhole. At the top of the spout tumbled smiling shrimp sporting top hats. Bruce scanned the horizon.

“What are you looking for, love?”

“Whales, Peachtree,” he said.

She hugged herself, almost blushing. “Miniature whales! Isn’t this absolutely the most romantic place on earth?” She turned back and smiled at Bruce and he reciprocated. And at that very moment a tiny whale surfaced not ten feet from them and fired a handful of mist into the air before surrendering to the sea again.

. . .

McGuffan told them all about the Vodka Sea over dinner that night.

“The whole thing sits on a kind of peat bog,” McGuffan explained. “Layer upon layer of castings and roots that have decayed and built up since time began.”

Monica and Bruce carefully forked their pâté and sweet-breads — they hadn’t the courage to try the whale brochettes — and hung on McGuffan’s every word.

“At one point, it all lay underground in a subterranean cavern, isn’t that what the tour guide said, Alice?” Mrs. McGuffan, who was midway through a long sip of claret, snuffed her agreement. “The whole thing acted like a natural still — the minerals in the rocks, the vegetative bog, the salt water, all compressed and contained for millennia — until one day the earth above collapsed, and the Vodka Sea was left exposed to the world. It’s a geological wonder but not as uncommon as one might think, what with the Argentine Gin Flats and what-not.” It was McGuffan’s turn to test the claret. A rather portly Aussie who’d made his fortune in industrial plastics and, more recently, lost half his nose to skin cancer, McGuffan and his wife had been coming to the Vodka Sea for a decade.

“The first time we came it was a collection of rustic cabins, and that’s being generous,” Alice was saying as the waiter served their entrées.

“The room had snakes and these giant blue spiders. Remember those, love?”

McGuffan nodded. “You don’t see the spiders anymore. I wonder what happened to them.”

“Yes.”

“They were attractive in their way. A most wonderful blue hue, right, love?”

“Yes. Deadly.”

“Deadly’s overstating it, love. Paralyzing. Coma-inducing. But you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who’d actually died . . .” McGuffan’s voice faded into another glass of claret. He smacked his lips and dove into his whale fillet. Monica and Bruce looked meekly at their mutton and new potatoes in a light grape-shrimp coulis.

“Fancy a bite?” McGuffan offered a forkful of whale to Bruce. “It tastes just like chicken, only saltier, with a hint of — what’s that flavour, love?”

“Vodka, dear. I believe it has a hint of vodka.”

. . .

The Vodka Sea hadn’t been their first choice. Spain. Spain is what Monica’s parents decided, and her sister and Anthony, Bruce’s best man, concurred. But Spain seemed so . . . Spanish, so done before. And besides, the spicy food didn’t sit at all well with either of them. France, of course, and Italy were options, but didn’t everybody who didn’t go to Spain go to France or Italy? Mrs. Perkins, across the hall, had been to Berlin on her honeymoon, but that was eons ago and her husband was, after all, a survivor of Dresden. Who goes to Germany for their honeymoon? You might as well go to Iceland. They asked Barbara to find them something different, something completely off the map. It would be their only holiday for quite some time; they wanted to make it memorable. Barbara looked at them for a whole minute before speaking. She was a handsome woman, middle-aged, in a crisp grey dress boldly bordered by a pearl choker. She looked more like a head-mistress than a travel agent. “I’ve got something perfect, I think.”

Bruce and Monica had to lean forward to hear her. Barbara got up and closed her office door, then chose the yellow key from a small coffee cup, souvenir of Barbados, at the side of her desk. She unlocked the bottom drawer and pulled out a single file folder. She removed a brochure and held it out for Bruce and Monica, without actually letting go.

“Have a look at this,” she near-whispered. “But I must ask you to keep it to yourselves.” Bruce and Monica looked at each other, and on her signal, he took the brochure. “The Vodka Sea isn’t for everyone, and we want to keep it that way.”

Louise was not impressed. Monica told her about the Vodka Sea (she hadn’t meant to, it just sort of slipped out, it’s hard to keep secrets from your sister) and showed her the brochure. But Louise could not understand. “Why go someplace no one’s ever heard of? Why take the chance?” Then her eyes narrowed. “Is this one of his money things?” It was a common theme in her family, Bruce’s thriftiness. “It must be the Scot in him,” her father would say, glad, for once, to see another familial male taking the heat.

“This isn’t about money, Wheeze. It’s the perfect place for us. It’s so unknown.”

“Everything’s unknown until you get to know it.” She wore an earnest smile with her blue and green pantsuit. She looked more like a travel agent than a sister.

“That’s deep. Have you been listening to Tracy Chapman, then?”

Louise rolled her eyes and laughed. “Am I being a bitch?”

“You most certainly are, sister. I mean, it’s our honeymoon . . .”

And that’s when the waterworks started. The whole pressure of the wedding hit Monica like a monsoon, and large pituitary-gland-shaped tears tumbled down her cheeks. Louise reached out and hugged her and rocked her back and forth and understood completely, like no man, no husband, ever could, the emotional maelstrom swirling inside her little sister’s heart. “There, there, Monkey. It’ll be all right. Everything will be fine. He’s a fine man. A fine, good man.”

Things were no easier on Bruce. Dr. Welsh, head of OBGYN, offered his villa (in Spain, no less) free of charge and rather angrily rebuked his young protégé for turning it down.

“You shan’t want to go portside in Chocko with no bullets in your backpack,” he said, or words to that effect; in moments of high emotion, Dr. Welsh often reverted to an incomprehensible public school patois. Bruce calmly held his ground (the cool head went a long way toward explaining his meteoric rise through the hospital hierarchy: thirty-two and already Senior Fellow) and said both Monica and he were quite comfortable with their choice of venue. Dr. Welsh, who was one for the parry but not the thrust, spent the week lunching on his own and didn’t entirely return to form until after Bruce had made him a present of Wagner’s complete Ring cycle on CD.

It was only through such machinations and breakdowns that Bruce and Monica were able to go to the Vodka Sea with more or less everyone’s approval (his mother was a problem, but that went without saying). Dr. Welsh even called up and made sure there were roses and champagne waiting in the room for them when they arrived.

. . .

McGuffan had cautioned against drinking the water. Not that there was anything wrong with it, per se. It was just the thirst it caused. The salt, he supposed, combined with the vodka. You could drink and drink and drink, he said, and never be quite satisfied. But Monica wanted to taste it just the same. Their second day on the beach, and already they were feeling more daring. They’d woken up at sunrise with the vipers and birds and invisible blue spiders and made love on the bed (and loveseat and floor) without bothering to shut the blinds. It was early, she said, setting her tongue on the skyline of his belly. No one was up to see, and damn them if they did. She took him in her mouth (which silenced the last of Bruce’s half-hearted concerns) and led him from bed to loveseat to floor to the kitchenette (Bruce resisted the passing urge to put the clean cutlery away in the drawer) and back to bed again before bringing him to what just might have been the loudest single orgasm in English history. He looked at her afterwards rather sheepishly, which is when Monica suggested they go down to the sea, in part so he could escape his ear-shattering embarrassment but mostly because she wanted to.

The sea, smoother than a freshly shaved patient, beckoned to Monica. They’d already been through the question of the tides. Monica believed that the sea had its moods, its highs and lows, its empathy with the moon. Bruce did not. He wasn’t forceful or even particularly rude, just dismissive in that matter-of-fact way he had. No. The Vodka Sea was not tidal. Entirely landlocked, no bigger than a dozen of your smaller football stadiums, Stamford Bridge, say, or Upton, pushed together — it didn’t seem practical that the moon would have a discernable effect. They’d asked around, but no one had a definitive answer. McGuffan wasn’t sure, and Ricki, the treacly hotel manager, had never been asked before. Even the brochure was silent on the matter, which rendered it, to Bruce’s mind, a non-issue. But before entering the morning sea, Monica mentioned the idea of tides again, perhaps because she believed in them, or perhaps, and she was surprised to find herself even thinking this, because she wanted to get a rise out of her newly minted spouse. He could be so flat, so constant, so damned reassuring (and again, she only became aware of these feelings at that moment, as she stepped into the Vodka Sea, the taste of him still in her mouth, the unwashed morning smell of him on her hands and face).

“It’s definitely tidal. You can see the line where it came up to.”

Bruce looked. In truth, there was nothing there.

“It is rather unlikely, Peachtree. But maybe you’re right.”

Monica took another step. The water did not cover her ankle.

“I wonder how deep it gets.”

Bruce shrugged. “The manager said it doesn’t go much deeper than ten feet.”

“That was McGuffan.”

“I think it was the manager, dear.”

“I’m sure it was McGuffan. He said so only last night.”

“Perhaps it was both, then. It’s hardly worth arguing over.”

“I’m not arguing.”

Bruce thought to say something, then shut his mouth, which annoyed Monica more than just about anything he could have said. She wanted to be mad, but those eyes, those eyes of his, caught her and lifted her up. It was the eyes, the eyes that had first attracted her. Bruce was really not her type. Far too angular, too milky, too British. Monica liked men with a dash of pigment in their skin, a hint of something other than public schools and holiday motor trips south and skin that burnt and peeled at the mere memory of sun. When he’d first asked her out (she was Anthony’s sister’s boyfriend’s neighbour; it was a much-brokered deal) her inclination was to say no, doctor, as she told her sister, or not. But then she caught a flash of those eyes. Very dark, a black, black chestnut, almost evil, somehow rather American. She liked that. She liked those eyes. And when he fixed them on her with a sexual confidence that surprised her, she said yes. Their first date was antiseptic: luncheon (that’s the word he used) in the hospital cafeteria (an emergency compromise), Bruce on his cell the entire time, shards of perfunctory conversation. She’d figured that was that. But at the end he apologized and asked for a chance to make things right. Part of her wanted to take a pass — she was definitely the kind of girl who could turn a man down — but those eyes, those eyes engulfed her, and she granted him his second chance. Was he conscious of the power of those eyes? Did he (an only child, whose mother was, in the most charitable term, difficult) understand English women so completely, understand their need to find a sliver of darkness beneath the facade? Or was he simply a sexual savant, a self-absorbed, hypercritical, handsome head in a jar? He’d shown his passion: on their second date, an Irish concert and then the pub, he’d kissed her at just the right moment in just the right way with just the right amount of force and just the right amount of discretion. It was not the chaste kiss of a woman’s romance (she was far from virginal, after all, but not too far), and she and he allowed their hips to slide together, and he pushed with little force on the small of her back, drawing her in even closer, and she allowed herself to press into him and felt how big he’d already become and looked again into his dark, dark eyes, into nothing but more darkness. And that’s how love was born.

Monica waded out several feet, until the water snuggled her hips. She wanted to wash her face, get the smell of him off her; she wanted to take a drink, get the taste of him out of her mouth. She bent down and cupped her hand, but as she raised the water to her face, a dwarf whale surfaced and spouted inches from her head. Monica jumped back, bringing her hand across her chest. And then she laughed. She threw her head back and brayed in delight.

“It startled me!” she cried, when she’d caught her breath. “Aren’t they just the cutest . . .” And she dove in head first, quickly bobbing to the surface and rolling to her back. “It’s like flying! You float, you float without the slightest effort.”

“It’s the salinity,” Bruce said, but what he meant to say was that Monica had never looked more beautiful to him than she did at that moment; he had never been more in love. That’s when she did it. She turned her head and drew a mouthful of water, then put her head back and spouted a mist of vodka water into the air.

“Thar she blows!” he called, as playfully as possible, resisting the urge to caution her against drinking the water. Monica turned her head again and took another draw, not as long as the first. She seemed to be swallowing this one, closing her eyes as she did. She scrunched her face.

“Yuck. That’s awful.”

“Remember McGuffan’s caution, love.”

“It tastes like . . .”

She turned her head and took another drink. “Cor. That certainly doesn’t hit the spot.”

Bruce was watching his floating bride and inching out himself when Ricki, the manager, appeared, holding two yellow towels.

“It’s a beautiful morning for a swim, sir. Of course, sir, it always is.” Ricki smiled and handed the towels to Bruce. They were still warm from the laundry.

“The water, is it safe to drink?” Bruce asked.

Ricki looked almost insulted. He stumped his pinkie finger into his hairy ear and corked it around, evidently composing himself. He had a large oblong head, like those mystery men of Easter Island, and rounded, bulky arms and legs, simian. Rumour was that Ricki had fought on both sides of the civil war that had ravaged the countryside in the decades before. (Alice said she’d heard the International Tribunal at The Hague had a standing warrant for his arrest, although McGuffan, in the most comical manner imaginable, pooh-poohed her. They really were quite a couple.)

“I can assure you, sir, no one has every come to harm . . .”

“McGuffan said . . .”

“I understand, sir. Mr. McGuffan has shared his concerns with me. But they’re folk tales, really, to amuse the peasants and their children.” Ricki’s voice faded, politely. His gaze fell on Monica, who was standing again. The sea had pasted her t-shirt to her bra, and in the cool sunlight, Bruce could track the gravy-coloured outline of her aureoles and the harsh stubs of her nipples (hard, Bruce assumed, hoped, from the cool morning breeze). He glanced at Ricki, and had he been a jealous man he might have thought that the manager was giving his bride the once-over. It’s funny. Bruce had never thought of Monica as particularly beautiful. Not plain, no. Louise was plain, in that flat-chested, horsy-faced, hospital-cornered British-matron way. Monica had a certain virginal sexiness, an attractive middle-aged nunnishness (Sister Grace, for example, Nursing Head of the chemo ward, who turned a resident’s head or two). But this morning, in the cool sun, with stubbing tits all glisty wet, her fleshy cheeks peeking out from her bikini bottom, that orgasmic smile, that don’t-give-a-damn glaze to her eyes — this morning she was a bit of something. Ricki held up his arms.

“Towel, ma’am?”

Monica took a towel and rubbed her hair, messing it up in such a way that she only looked sexier. Ricki extended his hand and helped her out of the water.

“I’ll think you’ll enjoy the breakfast today, Miss. Strawberries, fresh from the fields, and local blood oranges — better than the Italian. And Monsieur Langour was up very early preparing his apple-almond croissants. I’d suggest you try them with yellow pepper marmalade: spicy, sweet, a house specialty.”

“That sounds wonderful,” she said, as Bruce drew the other towel around her shoulders (trying discreetly to cover her visible nipples) and led her by the arm toward the mango grove.

“He’s an interesting man,” Monica said.

“Yes. Hairy, too.”

“Yes, indeed. Hairy.”

. . .

That afternoon they took the boat tour across the Vodka Sea. McGuffan and Alice joined them, although they’d taken the tour a dozen times before. McGuffan was the sort who’d interrupt the tour guide to offer his own by now much-practiced insights; the Australian was quickly losing his lustre. Likewise Alice’s calculated hee-hawing and endless slogging had worn thin. (Bruce had quickly come to hate the sight of her lips as they snarled over yet another bottled vodka spritzer.) They were like two tireless party guests who refuse to leave even as you stand there, hats and coats in hand, yawning and blearily eyeing your bedroom door.

“Is it true that, at its deepest point, the Vodka Sea is barely ten feet deep?”

(Objection, your honour! Counsel is leading the tour guide.)

“Yes, sir. Even at its deepest point, the Vodka Sea rarely exceeds ten feet.” The tour guide, they called him John, for convenience, smiled at McGuffan, calculating, Bruce supposed, his tip.

“Remarkable,” McGuffan declared, although there was nothing remarkable about it. He turned to Monica, beaming, and raised his eyebrows like an excited ten-year-old auditor who’d just found a KitKat amongst the debits and credits. Monica smiled back and tilted her head in a motherly fashion, then she shifted in her seat slightly, adjusting her dress. She wanted to give Bruce, sitting directly across from her, a better view. She wanted him to see that, under the crepe sundress, white, translucent, she wasn’t wearing any panties. She’d done that for him, she supposed; she’d thought about it for a long time as she readied herself after lunch. She stood in front of the mirror with panties on and panties off and panties on and panties off just to get the hang of it. She felt so free without out them, but did she dare? It’s not the kind of thing a nice woman, a decent woman such as herself, did, walk around in a crepe sundress (it hardly hid anything, and in any case, concealed only as a roundabout way of revealing) with no panties and no bra (her nipples were clearly visible, if she looked hard enough) in broad daylight. But every time she made up her mind to go with them, she slipped them off again, the soft fabric brushing her soft skin, bikini-waxed at Mercury Spa not four days before, just to see if she could dare go without them. It wasn’t a matter of comfort, because she felt more comfortable with her panties on. It just seemed different, like something she would never do and may never do again.

“And the tides? Our friend here,” McGuffan nodded toward Bruce, “was wondering about the tides. What about the tides?”

John shrugged. “The tides are still a matter of some debate.” The tour guide had a vaguely Oxfordian accent. Perhaps he’d studied there. Perhaps he was the son of a local potentate and had been afforded the advantage of a British education.

Monica continued twisting one ankle and raised her knee and looked expectantly at Bruce. She could feel the fabric of her crepe dress drop below her (just as she knew it would, as if the fabric was now part of her), although the top of it still lay respectably on her knee. She felt the breeze move up her skirt and across her trimmed pubis, and with one more minor adjustment — there! — she awaited Bruce’s reaction.

He caught her gaze and was smiling back at her now. She rather dramatically ran the back of her hand across her brow, then slowly lowered it to rest on her knee. She drew her sun-dress up another inch and watched her husband’s eyes widen. He seemed at first to panic, to signal her with urgent nods that something was amiss. But she only drew her hem up, discreetly, another notch, and slowly let her hand fall onto the pocket of fabric that tented her crotch. A finger lazy brushed the skin along the inner thigh, and Bruce’s signals became more frantic. The other passengers were engrossed in the tour and paid no attention as she casually let her hand drop to her thigh, and slipped two fingers along her smoothed skin until they lightly brushed the ruffled, raised flesh. Bruce crossed his legs and tried to look away. Was he angry? She couldn’t tell.

“The Bolen’s whale, then, is it related to the humpback?”

“Exactly right, sir. This whale is a close relative of the humpback. Scientists believe that the Vodka Sea was once part of a vast oceanic corridor that stretched from pole to pole. Way back, as the oceans receded, a pod of humpbacks may have become landlocked. They practiced the elementary rule of evolution: adapt or die.”

“What about the marauders?” It was Bruce’s turn to ask the question. John hesitated. This was not the kind of question he normally faced. Bruce watched the guide scan his memory bank for a moment. John had one of those ageless foreign faces; he could have been anywhere from fourteen to forty. (Bruce thought of a story Anthony had told him about how his sister-in-law, ex-sister-in-law now, had once befriended an orphan during some South American getaway and decided to take him home and adopt him. They’d done all the paper-work, at least they thought they’d done the paperwork, but as they were entering the airport the chief of police stopped them. Turned out their orphan was a twenty-six-year-old midget with a wife and children of his own. The kicker to the story, as Anthony told it, was when his now-ex-sister-in-law lamented, “What’s the world coming to, when you can’t even trust a midget?”)

John cleared his throat, suitably recovered.

“Everyone has heard such stories,” he said, beading in on Bruce. “But it’s important to remember that our government has never supported the — what’s the word — notion? Yes, notion of a resort on the Vodka Sea. First of all, they mistrust foreigners in general, even Australians,” John turned to the McGuffans and smiled; Alice hee-hawed appreciatively, “and wish to do anything to avoid encouraging them to come here. And second, the government is given to a certain,” he paused again, grasping for the right word, “fundamentalism. The notion of a sea of alcohol, well, they don’t quite know what to make of that. First they tried to ban it, but as you can imagine, it’s hard to ban a sea.”

The small crowd tittered.

“Then they tried to regulate it: no swimming on Sundays or after eight o’clock, that sort of thing. Now, they simply tax us to death. There’s a twenty-six per cent room tax, a fourteen per cent food service tax . . .” He waved to indicate that he could go on forever. “It’s the perfect antidote for a pious, avaricious, ambivalent government. Condemn with one hand, profit with the other.”

“But the marauders? What of them?”

“The marauders?” John grunted. “That’s just an old wives’ tale, sir. Spread by the government to scare off tourists. The old women believe it, and the children. But I can assure you, you’re perfectly safe on the Vodka Sea.”

On cue, a whale punched the surface and rolled its back through the air, and then another and another until the sea around the cruise boat boiled with these bobbing self-contained fists. John pulled a bucket from under his seat and spilled its shrimpy brine into the water; in their rush to get at the food, the little whales smashed into one another quite comically.

“Look, the whales have come to say hello.” John uncovered another bucket, and with a professional conjurer’s flourish, poured it over the side. “A most intelligent animal indeed, ladies and gentlemen. Stories are told of I don’t know how many drunken fishermen, who, after falling overboard in a stupor, have been safely buffeted to shore by the vigilant whale.”

Bruce looked into the water. The sun was already beginning to set, and the broken water sparkled sharply in the whales’ small wakes. Two or three of the creatures begun ramming the side of the tour boat, hungry for more, It was all quite comical, like a small child play-fighting a giant dog. Ping. Ping. Their little heads echoed off the aluminum hull. Bruce looked in the water and watched the curious whales, immersed in his own tiny sea as surely as Monica (leg slightly raised, fingers discreetly but vigorously working) was immersed in hers.

. . .

There were ups and downs. At times they seemed to be moving in different directions. If Monica wanted to go to the bazaar, Bruce wanted to go to the ruins; if Bruce fancied the ancient burial grounds, Monica insisted on the sixteenth century frescos. She called her mother.

“It’s a give and take, sweetheart. Your father and I never really agree on anything. That’s why we have two tellies.”

“Three tellies, Mum.”

“What’s that?”

“Three tellies. You and Dad have three tellies.”

“Yes, three tellies. One for the children, of course.” Monica envied the way her mother could reduce any problem to fit into her dollhouse world of social teas, the ladies’ squash ladder and Third World charity boards.

“It’s just that I sometimes wonder if — not that I think I’ve made a mistake, mind you, but — I wonder if maybe we didn’t rush into this a little too fast.”

“Surely you’re not having second thoughts? The man’s a doctor.”

“That’s not what I’m saying, Mummy. I just don’t know him. I should have eased into him a little more, I think.”

“Monkey, sweetie, you’re on holiday. You’re a thousand miles away from nowhere. You shouldn’t have a care in the world. I know what it’s like. I get to Provence or Gibraltar, I’m weeks before I can settle in. It takes time to shake the city out of your head, to let yourself go and just relax. Go have a nice mineral mud bath — have you tried the mineral mud bath? Treat yourself to something nice and stop worrying so much. You’re just like your father.”

And Monica took her mother’s advice. She treated herself to a mineral mud bath (it was as good as she’d heard; she emerged, hours later, thoroughly rested, her skin tingling), then wandered down to the sea. She took a sip of the salty water, and then another and another. She spent the rest of the afternoon on the shore, drinking from the Vodka Sea and watching the tiny waves rise and fall.

The week was almost over, and they’d planned a coach trip to the coast. At the last minute Bruce got an urgent call. They needed his advice on a complicated case (Bruce had pioneered the use of non-invasive procedures, almost single-handedly pulling London out of the Dark Ages of reproductive surgery); they wouldn’t have called but it was, quite literally, a matter of life or death. Bruce kissed Monica’s forehead.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to get used to it, Peachtree. A doctor’s life is never his own.” He urged her to take the motor trip without him. The McGuffans would be there, and that new couple from Bingly (married, it turned out, the same day as Bruce and Monica), and besides, he would likely be in and out of consultation all afternoon. She reluctantly agreed.

The coach was cramped and hot (air conditioning was yet to be discovered by the locals, it seemed). Monica had a seat mostly to herself, although John sat with her whenever he was taking a break from his guide duties. They drove due west, past the government checkpoint a few kilometres from the resort compound, up into the rolling hills (several rows of barbed wire separated the road from the untended orange groves), and through the gentle grasslands. They drove right past the Hanging Gardens, heralded in several languages as the Tenth Wonder of the World. It looked broken down and unattended, and judging by John’s smirk, it must of been something of a local embarrassment. The coast was . . . well, a coast: rocky shoreline and sandy beaches, although the water looked cold and muddy and violent; it had nothing of the Vodka Sea’s soothing charm. And so they trudged through the half dozen grim tourist shops, each selling the same cheap t-shirts and shell animals, and the dirty bistro (where a mercifully Spartan lunch of fish soup and herbed bread was provided) and out along the same breakwater where pirates and crusaders, centuries before, had stopped to ask directions. Their last stop was an icebox-sized bar, named simply 1234. A glass of local wine was included with the tour (somewhere between a Merlot and a Cabernet, with a peaty, almost mouldy, aftertaste). Monica had one drink, and then John, who’d latched onto her, the Single Englishwoman, bought her another and another.

“It’s a long ride back.” He smiled. He skin smelled of coconut and motor oil.

And a long ride back it was. Dusk had come, and the coach fairly crawled along the unlit gravel highway. John gave up his patter ten minutes into the trip, and settled into the spot beside Monica.

“It seems so curious to me,” she said, after enduring a few moments of silence.

“What’s that, miss?”

“You seem to be somewhat above this.” The wine had made her unusually brave. “I mean, you’re obviously educated. A man of some character and breeding. Surely you aspire to being more than a tour guide.”

John shrugged.

“We do what we can, miss. And when we can’t do what we can, we do what we must.”

“Come now, John, there’s no need to play the inscrutable foreigner on me. You and I both know that you are cut out for bigger things than pampering fat Americans and buying squeaky English women drinks. I could see you doing quite well back in London.”

John smiled. “Two things, miss. First, never look at a postcard and think you’re getting all the picture. And second, this isn’t London.”

A few minutes later, he seemed to drift off to sleep, his head tilting onto her shoulder. It was not uncomfortable, it just wasn’t comfortable. Some minutes later, John let his hand slip casually against Monica’s knee. Slowly, glacially, it marked its way up until it rested on her thigh. A slight grunt as the pretending-to-sleep tour guide pretended to turn in a dreamy fit, and the hand was on her lap. He pressed lightly, his hand vibrating and jumping as the coach slithered along the ancient road. She let it stay there, pretending now to be asleep too. Casually, she let her legs unfold a few inches, so that the tour guide’s hand pressed firmly against her. And there it stayed for the duration of the trip.

. . .

At supper that night, Monica ordered the whale, grilled on an open flame and served with a peppercorn-garlic mash. There were potatoes too, the brownish red kind, apparently a staple around these parts, roasted with a variety of sweet local squash. Bruce watched his wife as she ate. He expected her to approach the whale with caution; she attacked.

“Mmmm.” Her eyes were shut, the sound stretched into a barely muffled moan. Bruce felt embarrassed. Surely nothing could taste that good.

“You must try the whale, Bruce. It’s . . .”

“I’d rather not, thank you.”

“But it’s . . .”

“No thank you, Monica.” Bruce pulled on the wing of his game hen, which tasted rather more game than hen, and looked around the dining room. McGuffan was there, chawing on his whale steak and kidney pie as his wife neatly filleted her whole poached whale in a vodka Béarnaise (spécial du jour in the Imperial Room). The Americans were there too, he sucking the marrow out of a whale’s spine, she helping the young children slice their battered whale and chips into manageable pieces. There were others, couples mostly (new couples, honeymooners, seemed to arrive every day) who collectively, and silently save for the gnawing and sucking and appreciative smacks, were devouring an entire generation of Bolen’s dwarf whale. Monica took another slug of her Blue Whale (fresh-drawn vodka, blue curaçao and grenadine), downed the last drop, and signed to Ricki, pulling double duty behind the bar, for yet another glass.

“Haven’t you had enough to drink, Peachtree?”

“We’re on bloody holiday.”

“But angel, that’s six . . .”

“Give it a rest, granny.” She offered Bruce one more bite, just, she didn’t doubt it now, to rub it in. His priggishness was suited to back home; the hospital and great city demanded no less, but that was a thousand miles away. The more kempt and parcelled he became, the more Monica unstitched herself. It was stupid, really; Monica knew it. She’d set Bruce up as some sort of authority figure (not unlike, as distressing as this was to admit, her father), and now she tilted and tumbled at him like a temperamental teenager. He’d challenged her when she headed off to supper in shorts and her bikini top (although that’s how the other women were dressed, for godsake, what with the nights so stifling and the atmosphere of the restaurant so informal), and sternly swatted her hidden hand away during appetizers as she quietly tried to breech the fortress of his trousers. The reactions were expected. Anticipated.

Dessert was served, mango ice in hollowed coconut shells (definitely imported, he was certain of this) as Bruce diligently avoided eye contact with McGuffan. It had become ritual for the Australians to come to their table for coffee and dessert, and Bruce couldn’t bear the thought of entertaining them again. He strategically selected a minuscule table at the far end of the dining room, beyond the pampas divider and prostate-shaped dance floor. They ate their ice in a pleasant silence. The sound of a folk guitar washed over from the Queen of Hearts (and here and there, an odd cracking sound from across the water, fireworks, no doubt, for some local saint’s eve), riding the rhythms of the distant waves. The fingers of their free hands interlocked, and they looked deep into each other’s eyes the way lovers should.

He was talking to his wife about London, about how the city had changed.

“I don’t see the difference,” she was saying. “It’s the same old city it’s always been, only there’s more of it, I suppose.”

“Nonsense!” Bruce was surprised how aggressive his tone had become. Already a Senior Fellow and department head, he’d learned not to have a lot of patience. “I mean, it’s not really English any more, is it? You won’t find any real English people in London. You’ve got to go far out of the city to find real English people.”

“We’re real English people, aren’t we?”

“You’re twisting my meaning . . .”

“And my family. And your friends. Even your mother — Christ, her father was assistant to the Home Secretary.”

“Let’s leave Mother out of this.”

“Her uncle was a Churchill by marriage. How could anyone possibly be more English than your mother?”

“I mean the city as a whole. It’s become . . . cosmopolitan.” Bruce emphasized each syllable, as if each one represented a particular shade of decadence. “Just try getting a decent meal. It’s all McDonald’s and halal meats. Just try getting some decent fish and chips . . .”

“You hate fish and chips.”

“Or a decent glass of beer. You know what the pub across from the hospital sells? Molson’s Canadian. And Coors Lite. Coors Lite? What the hell is that?”

“I hardly think fried potatoes and beer are reasonable grounds for dismissing an entire city.”

“That’s not the point.” Bruce was shouting at Monica now. “It’s the people. The people have changed. When I was a boy, the people were still English. Now, everyone in London is an immigrant or a tourist or a businessman. Christ, even the prostitutes are Russian. And when I go to work, I need an interpreter — and that’s just for my staff. In the wards, it’s like a UN refugee camp, its all coloureds and Asians and Indians . . .”

Bruce’s voice trailed off. Monica sat in silence. This was a side of her husband she had never seen or even suspected. Underneath the starched shirt and school tie was a starched shirt and school tie, an Englishman dying to get out. Bruce tried to smile.

“I’m only saying the truth. You know it as well as I.” He reached for her hand, but she pulled it away. She was thinking of the years ahead, the chubby, pasty children, the women’s club, a mistress perhaps, a lover for her, a friend of his no doubt, a protégé.

“Honey, please don’t be that way.” He reached for her hands again. She let him hold them but turned her head toward the sea.

“Fancy a bit of company?” McGuffan had rooted them out.

“Actually, we’re just going to our room.” Bruce pushed his chair back.

“Splendid! But we’ve only just ordered fancy coffees. Imperial Room specialty. You must try one.”

“Caffeine doesn’t agree with me.”

“Caffeine doesn’t agree with you. Did you hear, that Alice? We’ll make it decaf, then. You really must try this drink. It has — what’s the stuff, Alice?”

“Anisette, dear.”

“Anisette, yes . . .”

“And a splash . . .”

“. . . of vodka?”

“That’s right, love. Vodka.”

Bruce looked at Monica pleadingly. She tilted her head and ran her bare foot up his leg.

Bruce collapsed just a little. “One drink, then. Only one.”

“Splendid.” McGuffan rubbed his hands together, excited at the opportunity to play the congenial host. “Ricki! Café spécial, for four.”

“Make mine a —”

“And make one a decaf, for the good doctor here.”

“One drink, and that’s it.”

But one drink became two, and two become four, following the physics of alcohol consumption, and soon even Bruce had become dizzy. He remembered singing with Alice (in French? Something from Cats?) and parading, almost obscenely close, to Ricki and one of the serving boys in some strange folk dance involving tea towels, bare chests and a kind of frog-hopping two-step.

And at some point the whole crew, the McGuffans and Monica and Ricki and a regiment of servers, made their way to the hot pool, as Bruce took a walk to the beach to clear his swimming head. It was a strategic move; as soon as he hit the sand, Bruce shoved two fingers down his throat and forced himself to vomit. Once. Twice. Three times. He gasped for several moments, his knuckles and knees planted in the still-warm sand. He pushed off his shoes. That was better. His stomach was not so sour, his head clearer. He pulled his shirt off (vomit had drooled across the pocket) and rinsed it in the water. Then he dipped onto his haunches and, sitting like a dog, looked out to sea. There was something out there. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust, but there — there it was. Not twenty feet from shore, a small whale, poking its head into the air, watching. And there, nearby, another whale, and another and — there were almost too many for a drunk to count. They simply bobbed and stared at Bruce impassively (of course, as Bruce quickly realized, they were whales; they could only be impassive). It was the noise. Yes, that was it. The retching song — that had confused them, attracted them. Bruce reached for a stone. He felt a wide flat one. Perfect. He pushed himself to his feet and flung the stone onto the water. It skipped half a dozen times, jewelling the water with moonlight each time it scratched the surface, stopping finally in the space between two buoyed whales. From across the sea, firecrackers clacked again. Quietly, together, the whales withdrew.

Bruce took the main path back to the hotel. He expected, hoped, to find Monica there waiting for him, perhaps a little worried (where had he been?). But the room was still dark, the bed empty. Bruce went to the window. He looked down into the courtyard. There, near the shadows of the grotto, in the hot tub, Monica, Ricki and John, close but not too close. Alice and McGuffan sat at the other end. She may or may not have been singing. In any case, he was nuzzling (or at least, from Bruce’s vantage point, appeared to be nuzzling) her throat. Monica was leaning forward, relaxed (almost overly so); Ricki and John sat motionless, their faces blank, revealing nothing. Ricki tilted his head back and seemed (from where Bruce stood, it was hard to tell) to close his eyes. Aimlessly, Monica turned her gaze toward the window. Bruce stepped back, half hiding behind the curtain. Nevertheless, she seemed to find his eyes. She seemed (though the distance and darkness could have been playing tricks) to be staring right into his eyes. Her arms moved vigorously now under the bubbled surface — Monica made no attempt to conceal what she was doing. The realization that her husband must have been watching (discreetly, that is, from a distance) heightened her excitement. Ricki arched forward as John thrashed in the water (Bruce found himself growing excited despite himself, knowing she must have been watching him watching her), and the tour guide moaned so loudly that Bruce could clearly hear him, three floors up and through the glass. A moment later, the hotel employees had sunk back into their spots, but Monica still looked up to him and, in fact, had never averted her gaze. These eyes, his eyes, she was trying to reach inside them, to dive inside them, find herself in his eyes, look through his eyes and see herself as he saw her. Bruce drew the blind. He went to the kitchenette and opened the drawer beneath the microwave. There were several knives in the drawer, and he selected the long one with the serrated edge. He shut the drawer, then slipped into bed to wait for his wife.

. . .

Monica stood up. She didn’t need to towel, the night air was that warm. The breeze, hot as it was, cooled her wet skin. There was that sound again. The firecrackers. McGuffan stopped himself mid-nuzzle to listen.

“Marauders, eh, Ricki?”

The manager grunted and shrugged.

“Marauders?” Monica looked toward the sea.

McGuffan nodded. He’d been through it a couple of times, he said. “Hadn’t wanted to mention anything earlier, what with the honeymoon and all.”

“What do we do?” Monica strained to still her voice.

McGuffan ran a hand through his thinning hair. “Remain calm, that’s always best. And wait. The government usually reestablishes a safe corridor within twenty-four hours. Isn’t that right, Ricki?”

“A day, maybe two. There’s an election coming up, so who knows?”

John broke in. “They’re like the tide. They ebb, they flow.”

“Who? Who is like the tide, John? The government?”

“The government . . . the marauders . . .” His voice drifted off lazily; they were one and the same for him.

Monica looked to the hills across the water. Several fires were spreading at an alarming rate (almost comical, from this distance). A wave of panic washed through her. She must find Bruce. Where could he be? He’d gone to the beach hours ago. And a different kind of panic overtook her. Perhaps he’d seen? Perhaps he’d been coming up through the path and caught sight of her — the lot of them — in the Jacuzzi. Of course, the idea had struck her before, and, in fact, at the time, it was this idea that appealed to her most. It wasn’t so much the foreign men, naked, leading her on (Alice bleating, “Go for it, love, you’re on bloody holiday,” but the thought that Bruce might see, would see, and approach in anger (slightly aroused but angry, righteous without being self-righteous) and grab her roughly (but not ungallantly) and, with a few threatening, understated words to the foreigners, whisk her off to the room — this is what excited her. She’d been stupid. A stupid girl. She couldn’t blame the men. They were attractive and aroused (not a big deal, really, for her, but it did tip the scales slightly) and so adolescent in the obviousness of their intentions, their earnest, almost pathetic actions (they must have thought English girls were such sluts), tugging her hands towards them (not forcefully, but with such vague and, again, pathetic deference it was almost sad; she pitied them, as people tend to pity foreigners). No. She’d never been so stupid. Not even in school. She was a married woman now, for godsake; and even if she weren’t —

Monica hurried off toward the beach to find John, all the way reproaching herself. But you can say only so much, and by the time she reached the sand (there were his shoes, and there, his shirt) she was already repeating herself. It was agreed: she’d been stupid. But now they’d have to live with it and move on. The waves washed almost to her feet. It was the sea, she thought. The damned sea. They’d put it in everything: the sauces, the cocktails, the dessert, the aperitifs. The sea was everywhere. The waves licked her toes. Monica squatted. She dipped her hand into the sea and, almost without thinking, took a sip. It was awful stuff, horrible. How could anyone . . .

She took another drink. From across the water, she heard the shouts of men, some angry, some, it seemed, frightened. Women too were screaming, and children, she thought she could make out the sound of children crying for their mothers. It didn’t matter that she couldn’t speak the language; the sound of children crying for their mothers was something you just instinctively understood. Now she sat and wondered, where was Bruce? Perhaps he’d gone for swim. Or a long walk along the beach? He liked to do that when he’d had a bit to drink.

There was another crack. The gunshots were getting closer. The marauders were sweeping down from the hills, and where was John? She wanted him there with her. She wanted to hold him. She wanted him to be angry at her, to reproach her. She wanted to be hated and forgiven. She rolled onto her hands and knees and reached into the water for another drink, then she bent forward and began to lap the water like a dog. Nearby, a stone’s throw, really, a whale surfaced. It was close enough for Monica to look into its eyes, to read the blankness, and she realized for the very first time that these friendly whales weren’t friendly at all.

“I know your game,” she said, then lapped another mouthful of water. She felt around for a rock and found one almost the size of her fist. She pulled it towards her, nestled it in her lap, held it tighter. Bruce would come for her soon, she was sure of that. She wanted to be ready.