Being a Description of Those I Encountered during my Sojourn on the Island of Lightning

1. A Catalogue of Ships

Increasingly I seek out Omar because he knows things. In fact Omar seems to understand most that happens on the island.

Because the city is an island. I’ve proved that to myself in my increasingly ambitious expeditions. But Omar also understands what has already happened, and I’m sure that’s the key. That’s the secret to this place. And that’s the secret that interests me. Because the past will explain the gods. The gods of this island.

One day I join the party of Germans Omar is leading around the ramparts. With two blonde fraus in leather and mimosa I have my photograph taken beside a cannon. The barrel points out to sea, the cannon balls are piled in a pyramid at our feet. Black seed, I think. The iron hearts of the papaya fruit.

There’s a cat, one of the island’s orange cats, curled on the cannon balls. All the cats here, so my scouting tells me, belong to one clan; the skinny, manky, orange clan. And how they love the sun. Even this scabby tom is sleek in its beam.

After thanking their guide, the party drifts away. I join Omar at a table in Café Leone and we talk about the weather. How unseasonably warm it is. I want to ask Omar about the gods, but he seems determined that I should learn about the island’s ships and the captains of those ships.

Yes, says Omar. Our fortune is built on such men. So God help us. First there’s Oscar, who lives in a hovel on Mediterranean Street. Oscar’s family have been sailors since the beginning. But Oscar likes the marsovin too much. He owns a paint-bleached barkazza and a broken gondola, and he sails out of an evening, looking for octopus.

Then there’s Georgiou of St. Ursula Street, who steals lobsters from the pots under the western ramparts. That used to be a capital offence, I’ve seen men keelhauled for such. But of course, a sailor is a man and a man must live. So don’t mind Georgiou. His barque is worse than his bight.

Have you met Manoel from Eagle Street? Ah, Manoel, he braves seas so rough in that old ketch of his, you think he’s never coming back. Force nine is a child’s breath to Manoel. But as I say, fishermen must live and Manoel casts nets for bristling and white pilchard.

And you must have seen the African from the warren in the walls? He’s made a boat from the planks of other boats, bits of driftwood and floats. He sets off in that raft with his five-tanged fork searching for angel shark. Maybe he was a great captain in his own country, which is Sierra Leone, a kingdom of cruelties where most of the murderers are children. Or so I’m told. And yes, there are scars on his back, healed violet. And burns on his wrists and ankles. But sometimes I look at him and see a stateliness in his eye.

Then there’s Hilario of South Street who puts to sea in a gharbiel, the water coming through the joints, a real sieve, hardly a bucket, more like a nightsoil barrel, yes a pisspot with a crack in it, that’s Hilario’s galleon, mad old Hilario who couldn’t catch himself but one morning came back with a mermaid, and friend I tell you, Hilario married this mermaid and she lived with him on South Street. Well, that’s the story. Dispute it with Hilario when he’s sober. He comes out with us sometimes when we go after flapperskate. Bloody old Hilario, he’s fathomless to me, bobbing out there like a cork, an old man astride his mustardiera, the wind taking the sail of his trousers. Old Hilario, blown along by his farts.

Of course you can’t forget Marcello, coming across the harbour in his scutch. That’s Marcello of St. Elmo Street where there are more boats than headlice and the nets hang like spiderwebs.

Now Michelangelo, he lives on Old Theatre Street and works on the dredger, ‘Sapphire’ in the grand harbour. He borrows his brother’s gondola and rows to the islet where the softbodied crabs live in the rock pools. Sometimes he brings us a coffeesack full, the whole bag wriggling and the crabs wheezing like tiny bellows. That’s a peculiar music to hear at dawn.

Don’t forget McCale, the nostromomu. He doesn’t usually come on our voyages. But he offers us stories. Once, marooned on the Black Isle, he milked a cowfish. That’s how he survived. The milk, he said, tasted as diamonds might taste, though salty as caviar. Yes, yes, McCale we say, go back to your cactus juice and Neptune save the ships you steer towards port. Why not sleep it all off in St. Pawlu Street with your fat wife?

Then there’s Aurelio, a good boy from the poorest barrakka on the western side, who will dive from the side of any boat and bring back cowries. Once he came up with an oyster filled with a rainwater-coloured pearlseed that somehow Hilario swallowed when he was sniffing it. May it grow to choke that imbecile. Or maybe I think, maybe Hilario is not as stupid as he pretends. That gumboil of his…

Of course, there’s the Macedonian too. He cannot swim nor sail and once went round all night under the moon. We found him the next morning in the same place and that Macedonian moonstruck, babbling away in his abominable Greek. We gave him espressos in the QE2 bar, and the next day he brought us aubergines from his garden, and sweet peppers he had grown in a window box. Stay home we told him, and water your seeds, or we will be lighting a candle in a red glass for you down at the shipwreck church. The fool had seen meteors all night and had thought them portents of his own death. Ah, we laughed there in the tavern, you must be a great man for heaven to fill with fire for you. Look, we’ll take you to the fishmonger in the suq so you can learn why we sail out. Why we do what we do. But no more ragtime with ragworm for you.

Maybe you’ve seen Azzopardi, who weights his line with a sparkplug and casts for flounder from the stern of the pilot boat when there’s no traffic in the bay. You never know what’s there in all that oil and plastic, he says, in all the shit from the Russian billionaire’s yacht and all the cruise liners with the captains in gold braid and the retired bank managers in their white tuxedos looking down at the greasy dock. I spit on them. Hey Azzo, we say, watch they don’t spit on you. You’ll never see it coming. But who knows what lives in the port. A child brought a sea horse once, nodding in a pickled onion jar. And once there was a harbour dolphin laughing as if it had heard the greatest joke in the world. Old Azzo lives in the apartments on Saint Guseppi Street, but his salmon is John West and then only on Friday. Hey presto, Azzo we shout, are you coming? And he comes.

Sometimes we have Ahmed too, from East Street, who will light a candle at Our Lady of Damascus before every voyage, because, my friend, even our pleasant excursions are voyages. For those in peril on the sea? Please don’t smile. We are seafarers too.

But Ahmed we say, you have no place in a good Catholic church. Go and bow your head and wiggle your arse under your broken moon. And Ahmed calls us ignorant fools for not knowing our history, and I agree with that. And he helps with the ketch and off they go, looking for lampuka, though I remember he and Oscar coming home once with an old grandfather octopus. The beast had a beak like an eagle, that old green grandad from the wrecks, grumbling and waving its arms, and we said no, take the monster back. It lay there and looked at us with disdain. A grumpy old patriarch with the sea hissing in his flesh. It will be tough as a tyre, we said, your axe couldn’t cut it. And anyway, it’s bad luck. This one’s old enough to have met the Emperor Napoleon himself. And it has survived those Sicilian pirates in their speedboats. Think of the life it has led. When that beast dies maybe the last memory of Lord Nelson will be lost to the world. And Ahmed looked at us then with octopus eyes.

But Masso? He lives with his mother behind Our Lady of the Victories. It’s a cellar like some whisky-dive but it’s their home when he’s not taking passengers around French Creek in his watertaxi. Masso brings that djhasja across the bay sometimes, and sometimes I go with him, or Oscar, or the African, even the moonmad Macedonian, if he promises to sit tight, and we have a good time with our rods in the summer evenings, the ocean flat and the air still warm, and flocks of songbirds crossing the bay, blackcaps and those little warblers no bigger than olive leaves, always heading away, away from us and the snarers’ nets.

And maybe we play a flawt or guitar but nothing to scare the fish. It’s bream we go for, slippery bream for our baskets and sometimes we’re lucky, but then Masso gets worried about his mother.

What if she’s fallen over? How will a bream help that? he asks.

She’ll only fall over if she has another suck of that duty-free she keeps under the floorboards, Oscar will say, but all too soon it’s ended and our taximan is taking the boat backwards, edging towards the walls and soon we’re under the ramparts’ shadow where the air is cool and purple.

Ciao, Masso, we say, and he putters and phutters back round to his mum, the lady of the victories all right, her shrine where his balls should be, the bottom of his boat full of torn up tickets.

Then there is David who lives on the ramparts above the yacht club in a room that once was a gun emplacement. Snug and dark. That’s the best that can be said for it. At night he will look out at the stations of the stars all the way to Tunis. David spends his money at the tattooist in Strait Street, that little entry between the Smiling Prince tavern and the Consulate of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. A story is unfolding upon his back and shoulders and it concerns his greatest dream. To catch a devil fish. David has heard many stories about them, but none of us, apart from our kingly African, will ever accompany him. Why? Because he sails out for days in an old motor-boat with an oildrum of drinking water and hardly a tarpaulin to hide from the sun. David, bless him, has read the great books and his hero is Odysseus.

David, I say, beware the tales. The poets are never to be trusted. They are an eelish tribe. But that young man has decided he has a quest. We need such things, he says. A great work. A challenge and a life’s undertaking. And I nod and smile and say no more. Too soon David will sleep the iron sleep.

Ciangura? His home is an attic behind the Palazzo Carafa, opposite the Societa Dante Alighieri. You must have seen it? Near the amateur football HQ. Ciangura is determined to net cerna to sell to the restaurants. His cousin is a chef and looks out for our catch. Well this Ciangura, he lives with a dumb woman, her hair is greasy as sump oil. A skinny cat, not bad looking. Or so I’m told. And jumpy as a hare. That’s a poor corner now, though much of the district has become offices for notaries and advocates. You know the type. Well, this woman plays the zither and that’s what you’ll hear if you ever climb to Ciangura’s apartment, someone’s transistor in the middle flat, then this slithery zithery thing at the very top, zinging and zanging, not an atrocious sound. Not an insult to the ear, I have to say. And the sky blue in the roof.

Scibberas’s idea is always to go for ceppulazza, which doesn’t excite many of the others, though they sometimes agree. We always think he has an interesting life because next to him on Saint Christopher Street is a Moroccan trading company that claims to import furniture and musical instruments. But the door is covered in dust and there’s few have seen it open.

Hey Skibbo, we say. What goes on?

Then he will shrug and say ‘search me’ and pull his boat down the steps on a set of pramwheels. But we are suspicious of that smile. It is a dolphin’s smile. Because when the dolphin smiles it is thinking about something else. Well, we’ve heard that Scibberas and Aurelio and Ciangura sometimes help the Moroccans, lugging rugs out of vans. A bit of muscle. And as payment they are each given a pinch of hashchich.

Skibbo, we say, any fool can smell that sweet smoke. The air about you is like a dolceria. And your eyelids, Skibbo, are heavy as a goshawk’s, and a dreamy look upon your face and no edge to you man, these days. No zip in your zobb.

But Skibbo will pull the boat along on its wheels and laugh and stumble and tell us of his dreams and his girl friend’s dreams because they dream the same dream. And we always groan at that and shake our heads. We are experienced men. You must understand that. Men of the world. That kind of talk is bread dipped in tea. The same dream? Sop we call it here. Bloody sop.

2. The Bells

When I awake the Carmelites are chanting. Perhaps it is they who have broken my sleep. But that sound? I say to myself. That sound? I am born in bells. Their cast iron is this apartment’s walls. Green, I say. A green iron sound from which there is no mercy, no mercy from these bells that roar like bulls, green bulls that roam this city at dawn and dusk and every sanctified hour between, and my bed hard as a shelf, this bed drenched in dreams and the light upon me a crust of pearls.

Yes, I say. Praise the bells. They have freed me from the madnesses of sleep. So perhaps I should walk out now and join the devout and the poor and pray for my own soul. I should stand where the bells bellow, stand in the nave of the thunderstorm and let the priests prosecute this intruder. But I tell you straight. I will never confess. Never. I’ve done what I’ve done and I’ll pay what I have to pay but I will not do God’s dirty work.

3. Paradiso

I have seen her sometimes on the stair or at the Stage Door and we have exchanged greetings. Today in Leone’s, there she is, a cup before her like a white bell. Her treat to herself, she says. Coffee with cardamom.

As we have the theatre in common it is easy to talk. It seems she has been a cleaner there for thirty years, starting at fifteen, like her mother before her, her mother with whom she lives in an alley under the eastern bastion.

Not much money, she smiles. But a steady job.

What’s been your favourite concert? I ask.

But Manuela has never attended a concert in the theatre. Nor a play, nor any paying performance. Rehearsals? Now that’s a different matter.

By the evening, I’m tired out, she says. So much dust. So many people and so much dust. There’s dust in the costumes and a dune of dust in the orchestra pit. It comes from the fresco.

The painting in the cupola?

The fresco. In the paradiso, she says.

I have heard about the painting, I say.

Yes. High up amongst the blue and gold. Three hundred years old. Caravaggio, they say.

Surely not?

El Greco, then.

Never.

Oh maybe, she says. Maybe. He is looking at it now.

Who?

The Superintendent. But he’s been called away.

Show me, I say.

Now?

Yes.

The theatre is always being restored. Its limestone flakes away in a tawny scurf. Its lead leaks, its boards rot. Out in the street, Manuela takes an iron key from her bag and opens the artists’ entrance. We step in darkness down a corridor and up a flight of steps. Suddenly, we are on stage.

Was there a concert last night? I ask.

Nothing.

Are you sure? I thought I heard voices. And singing.

No, nothing.

And strange music.

Manuela laughs. Manuela in her pinafore, Manuela in her slippers because her bunions hurt today. All her life Manuela’s feet have suffered the island’s broken steps.

The light is rosy here. The boxes above stage and along the walls are quilted in a red plush. And there is gilt everywhere, a circuitry of gold luxuriant as honeysuckle. A ladder stands in the auditorium and reaches a hundred feet into the paradiso, and yes, I am climbing, climbing a sketchy ladder towards God, out of the darkness and into the gilded light that filters in through windows like arrow slits, climbing further and Manuela laughing, Manuela whom I thought would protest, but who is laughing at me as if I was performing here for her, Manuela who has never seen a pantomime nor an oratorio, but who watches me now, Manuela who is already so far below in the black ranks of seats and I peer into the Superintendent of Singing’s box and then into the Presidente’s balcony and the light falls over me, a light that might devour me and no there’s no going back even as I feel the ladder shudder and bend, the ladder that is really three, four, five ladders held together in aluminium brackets, a ladder that bows like bamboo, some rungs wooden and some wire and once a rung missing but I am beyond that chasm now and the dust is falling, yes, the paradiso dust that has settled upon me every time I have entered here, the dust I noted in Manuela’s hair as she raised the coffee to her lips, I am ordained in that dust, as were the sopranos and the comedians, the cellists with their knees flung wide as if to receive the dust, that dust is falling past me into the abyss, and here are the nets that catch the goldleaf as it drifts out of heaven, nets of a fine silk stocking mesh with the gilt dull within that weave, dark fishscales of gold that must be counted and catalogued and replaced and the nets billow round me like webs but I shoulder through and there is paint in my mouth that tastes of lead soldiers from a lifetime ago and the ladder bends and my knees ache though all I am thinking of is the coffee in Leone’s, the coffee with cardamom that Manuela urged me to try; I’m surprised you didn’t know already, she had said, surprised you didn’t, the cardamom and the lead soldiers within my mouth, and a knifeblade somehow upon my tongue, which might be fear, an iron tine that presses harder between my teeth even though those teeth are clenched and when I raise my eyes at last here is the ceiling and the fresco foaming so close I might touch it if I chose.

And I choose. Finger by finger I unwrap my right hand from the ladder, the ladder that is tied to two iron brackets in the ceiling and I reach up towards a hand that extends towards me, a saint’s hand or even God’s or maybe the skinny finger of a demon because perhaps the fresco is a depiction of hell, but angel or devil I am glad to touch this figure in the paradiso, his face an empty dial, the colour gone entirely so that only his hand remains here one hundred feet above the auditorium, and beyond that hand yet unreachable are the stars, all dark lanterns now, those stars once silver which today are mere outlines of stars. Yes, a constellation of dead stars and black planets above the gods themselves.

4. Television

Yes, I say to myself. Or rather, no. But what’s certain is that it’s not taken long to lose my mind. Is that something to be proud of? Perhaps I should treasure the fact.

I turn on the television. Channel One is the Government Channel. Channel Two the same. These are live broadcasts of the government’s pronouncements. Channel Three is a repeat of what the government announced yesterday. Channel Four is what the government said two days ago. I zap and zap.

Then, at last. Channel Forty Two is the forecast. Here it comes.

Sea? Confused

Wind? Bourgeois.

Sun? Indiscriminate.

Air? Vanishing.

Fire? Numb.

Earth? Mythic.

Snow? Bisexual.

Visibility? Salacious.

Pressure? Yellow.

Tomorrow? Xenophobic.

Long term? Vodka martini, no ice.

Yes, I say to myself. Yes, yes, yes. Then, no no no no no. Then I say, or. Or or. That’s it, I say. Or.

5. The Pealing

I make an appointment with the Superintendent of Bells. Because I have questions.

Why do the Carmelite church bells and the bells of the shipwreck church and the cathedral bells and St Pawlu bells and St Christopher’s bells and the Lady of Damascus bells and the Victories bells not strike on the hour or the half or the quarter? And if they do strike on the hour, why do they strike the wrong hour?

The Superintendent comes to my apartment to listen. He sits there on my sofa with a saucer upon his knees. We wait. When the bells start to ring, he consults his watch. After one hour, his tea not touched, the Superintendent of Bells says he will inform the pealers’ sergeant-at-arms and that officer will act. Or not, as the case might be.

There is a backlog of enquiries, he says, that must be dealt with first. Some complaints, of course. But also praise for the bells and the bellringers. Some people want more peals.

Did I know that?

There are one hundred and forty seven saints’ days, he says. And that doesn’t include Sundays. Also, there are victory celebrations. There are so many wars. It is lucky for you we do not celebrate the defeats. And of course the bells must be tested. Every so often bells must be brought to the boil. Bells must be allowed their bellowing, as I have heard it put. Bells must bawl. Bells are bowls. We must fill them to the brim. That is why they are bells. If bells don’t ring it is surely a crime and an insult to the bellmakers’ union, the bellbrokers society and campanologists everywhere. At one time, sir, we will all be summoned by bells.

You betcha, I say.

And as far as I am concerned, he says, these bells are not loud. I have visited homes where the grandparents’ dentures have rattled, where the window glass has shivered, where an ikon of Our Lady was disturbed from the wall.

What about the fresco? I ask. In the theatre?

What do you mean?

It’s flaking away. It’s unique and priceless and it’s flaking away. I blame the bells.

Surely not, says the Superintendent. Though now you mention it, the Carmelite bells are particularly…

Unbearable?

Particularly…

Deafening?

No, particularly fine bells.

Particularly loud bells, I say. With monstrous clappers. When they ring, as you’ve heard, it’s like a hundred blacksmiths hammering horseshoes.

Hmm, he says again. The fresco.

I look at the dandruff on his shoulders. The dust.

Perhaps, he says, regarding the fresco, perhaps the Department of Tintinnabulation should be informed.

6. The Soldier’s Tale

There was a man I sometimes saw at Leone’s on the island of lightning. We would talk, and one day he told me his story.

Yes, I escaped, he said. Came here in the bottom of a fishing boat. The crew threw me out on the north side of the island, not a crust in my pocket, not a word of the island’s language in my head.

For months, maybe years I had stood in the black land. There were the stars, as thick as leopard fur. And below the stars was our platoon. You could predict each one of us: clown, psycho, clerk, coward. Which was I? Apart from such conscripts there was only one real soldier. The sergeant.

We knew that out there in the desert was the madman’s army. We could see their campfires and sometimes the plastic wrappers from their rations blew into our camp. Some of our boys would lick the sugar off the cellophane. But we all understood that their army was as poor as our army, as afraid as our army, as badly-equipped as we were, our guns without bullets, our boots without laces. And we knew they were as stupid as we knew we were stupid. And like our army we knew the other army would be full of beggars and boys and pederasts.

It seemed that I was always on guard. But there was nothing to guard. We were guarding the border but the border was a straight line. On one side, a grain of sand. On the other side, another grain. I used to look at the ground where the border was written and try to understand.

Surely it should be a special place, a border? Maybe it should be a holy place. So why such straight lines? Were the emperors so bored they required their draftsmen to draw the border through mountains and mosques and grazing land, separating the kid from the goat?

No, they weren’t so careless. There was oil in the north. There was oil in the south. But in the middle there was nothing. So the people from the middle stole the oil.

I patrolled the wire. Right, left, up, down. Up and down I looked at Rigel. Rigel was the left foot of the conqueror and that was a cold light. Right, left I gazed at Betelgeuse. That star was the right shoulder of the conqueror, and I found no comfort in its urn of ash.

Out in the dark there was sometimes laughter, sometimes screaming. Just like our camp. And some nights the sergeant would appear. It had to be in darkness and he came silent as a sniper, creeping along the wire towards me.

Look, sarge, I would say. I’m on your side.

Though he did not reply his mouth would make a bubble. And then he would laugh, a dark man the sergeant, from some southern tribe, black hair on his belly and his billyclub with a bloody ferrule.

Washed was he? Where was the water to wash in the Badiet esh Sham? There was no pool there, no tarn and no tarp to trap the dew. Even in that dry air he smelt like a mule.

Whose side? he would whisper.

And I would look at the whipcord in his cock and see that the border ran even there.

Whose side? he would hiss.

Your side, sarge, I would answer, the wind blowing, the sugar papers trapped on the wire, Orion and the madman’s stars almost overhead.

7. Swiftsure

There is a man lives in Eagle Street who deserted from the Royal Navy many years ago. I sometimes see him in an upstairs window where he will sit in the mornings, a thin man with a sallow face, a birdcage that holds a linnet beside him.

Manuela tells me stories about this Mr Swiftsure, as we sit over our coffee and cardamom during her breaks. Last night in my room, sleep had been particularly heavy. I had awoken with difficulty, a cabaret of weeping in my head. Yesterday there had been children’s voices in the theatre. A school party I supposed, although I knew the place was closed. And whispering too. A campaign of whispering, transparent voices floating to earth like cranefly wings.

Swiftsure has worked in the victualling yard and made himself useful during the sieges, even after losing a foot to a musketball. Once he ferried laudanum and lemon juice to the lazzaretto so people are inclined to turn a blind eye, even with a bounty on the old smuggler’s head.

Not me, whispers Manuela. I hate old Swiftsure.

Why?

He has hides all over the island. And a little popgun. Swiftsure shoots birds. He will sit in his hide all day for the chance of a potshot. Eagles, pigeons, the tiny birds that pass in spring, he shoots them all.

She leans closer.

He’s a snarer too. A poacher. Like the rest of them he uses snares to catch birds alive. But I think of him in his hides. Oh, so beautifully camouflaged. You’ll pass a yard away and not notice there is green canvas in the branches and a little man sitting in the scorpion grass with his gun cocked. You know…

What?

He could be with us in this room. And you’d not notice him. Of all the snarers, Swiftsure’s the craftiest. He can be invisible.

Now coincidentally, but the island of lightning is full of coincidences, I encounter Swiftsure this afternoon. He is in the street, whimpering after the linnet that has fallen from its cage. I find the bird in a drain and capture it, wings bedraggled, its eye a raspberry seed.

Ta boss, says Swiftsure. Ta very much. The old King o’ Naples wouldn’t last long with these cats. You must come up, boss. Come up for a drink.

Swiftsure pours cactus juice from a stone jug with a mitred lip.

To his lordship.

Pardon?

Nelson of course. What other lord is there in these parts?

I look around. There are stuffed birds everywhere. A bee eater sits inside the door, a plover in black and gold stencilling hovers from a wire overhead. On the table, otherwise covered with papers, wineglasses and an evil-looking nimcha, stands a brass astrolabe. Swiftsure follows my gaze.

Arab work, he says. Very useful if you want to say a few Hail Marys toward Mecca.

Do you use it?

Oh yes. It’s a stardome too. I go out mostly at night. Get away from the lights see. Just bob about out there and look at the globe then study the stars themselves. Sometimes I can even tell where I am. Watch this.

Swiftsure closes the curtain and strikes a light, applying it to the well of oil within the globe. In the gloom it starts to glow and the star holes cut in the copper make a smoky constellation. From its cage on the balcony the linnet starts to sing.

You’re honoured, Swiftsure says. Old King o’ Naples doesn’t do much of that these days. He’s a good old bird.

We stand together in the dusk listening to its song. Then he touches the globe.

See this star. Its name is Antares. The pride of Scorpio. And if you look at it as I do, through a spyglass, it’s exactly the same colour as this. A ruby in the night. That’s Antares. With a sapphire close beside it too, because Antares has a pale companion. You’ll have to come out one night and see for yourself

I’d like that.

Learn to set the equipment, laughs Swiftsure. You know, his lordship used to look for Antares most nights when in these waters. Can’t see it a lot of the time in England.

The poacher pours another round.

Good health, I propose.

Well, maybe. I always say this stuff’s the only thing that keeps me going.

The linnet like a clockwork bird, has stopped its song. Swiftsure and I stand together in the dark, the furnace of stars between us.

You know, he says, after Trafalgar they sent his lordship home stood up in a barrel of grog. Pickled the poor sod, they did. Buried the bugger in brandy. And no kidding, sometimes I know just how old Horatio must have felt. Cheers, boss.

8. The First Couple

One day Omar and I are leaving the Piccadilly when a man hails us from a balcony. We climb his stairs and part a bead curtain.

Salutations, says Omar. How the devil are you? Now, may I perform the introductions?

There are two men before us in the tiny room. Behind them the balcony is set with two plastic chairs and a table.

This is Mercurius, says Omar. A man extends his hand, a greyhaired man with a stubbly beard, the apron over his jeans covered in paint. His clothes too are discoloured, also the fingers I take.

The room is full of canvases, always, it seems, of the sea, the sea at dawn with the mist upon it, the midnight sea where the island’s lights are reprinted in yellow, a sea teeming with whales and dolphins and creatures that can never have existed. And ships too, the ships that have visited the island since men ventured into the deeps.

And this is Gloriana.

Pleasured to you, says the second man, hair in toffee paper twists, his kimono pumiced with cigarette burns.

We share their supper of bread and blood oranges, Gloriana tipping fino into himself, the rest of us coffee.

You knows what Omar calls us? he cackles. Dido and Anaeas. How grand he makes us sound. And how old.

Surely Gloriana is grand enough, I say.

He shrugs and blows smoke. Ah yes, darlings. The virgin queen. She has been a role model once but I seem to have departed from the script.

We had an unfortunate incident, says Mercurius.

Unfortunate? shrieks his partner. These sailor boys come up the stairs as good sailor boys does, but I knows they is trouble in storage.

Inebriated, says Mercurius.

Steaming, darlings. Pisticated. Anyways, to cuts the short stories shorter, they kicks the place to kingdom come.

Paintings over, easel broken, the lot, said Mercurius.

Pushes Dido here over too. Fat lots of good Dido heres is. Not Caravaggio, are you, darling? Where’s Caravaggio when I need him? Not seen at his lodgings a long times now.

Yes, they roughed Old Glory up something chronic, said Mercurius. Dangled the little darling over the balcony. Didn’t they, you silly ox?

That’s how I gets the shiner, says Gloriana. Losing thirty-five cents, too. Hanging there, I sees the wolves in the street, their greedy eyes below me in the dark.

Problem is, says Mercurius looking at me, our street used to be well known.

Notorious, smiles Omar.

But times, they changes, says Gloriana. Supplies, demands.

Unfair competition, says Mercuius.

So our friends here are the last, says Omar to me. Of the line. To perform, shall we say, a public duty.

Too true, says Gloriana, looking round. We soothes. We consoles. We gets the steam out of the radiator and boys I tells you that steam has got to gets out of it somehow. But blimeys yes, as you well knows, there’s no problems with sailors. Sailors with problems, yes honey. But not the other ways about. I counts ships sometimes under my sleep. The Simon, the Santa Theresa…

The Matrona…

The Punta la Gaviota

Good ship the Punta, says Mercuius.

The Viver Atun Uno…

The Baltic Breaker.

Oo yes, says Gloriana. All those happy Finlandings. I had one in here, you knows, and he wouldn’t stop crying. Hanini, I says. Here’s grapes. Here’s pommies. But you knows what he wants? He wants cold. He wants dark. He wants to sleep it all days and gets up it all nights. He wants it all backs to fronts. Look, I says, here’s a pin for the pommie. Stick it theres. And theres. But it’s no uses, so he goes back early. Or late. I don’t even cares no more.

Anyway, says Mercuius. We have news. Which is the reason for bringing you up. Look.

And both he and Gloriana show off the rings they have bought one another, wiggling their fingers with the two gold bands.

The Bishop of the Blue Lagoon came last week, he continues. But an official visit, you understand.

Ceremony very good, sighs Gloriana. I cries right through it. And, you knows? We are the firsts, I think. We are the firsts to be ever on the islands and so will be even since.

9. Tiny Gods

It’s a small island and I have become used to meeting the same people and exchanging greetings. But there is one man whom I see taking coffee on the ramparts and surveying the ocean who is differently familiar. One morning I decide to act. I take my cup to the next table on the bastion and look out. The Lambusa of Limasol is entering harbour and an old ketch is leaving on an expedition for trigger fish.

Bonju, I say. A wonderful morning.

The man turns to me.

How are you these days? he smiles.

I look closely at him then.

The last time we saw each other, he says, I believe I was crying. You might think that a difficult thing to admit. But it no longer matters.

We’re alive, Mohammed.

He lifts his cup in a brief toast.

Remember that hotel room in the madman’s capital? I ask.

Yes, he replies. You and your companion laid out the money on the bed. Black dinars I wouldn’t wipe my arse with. Royal Jordanian pounds that were more like it. But no dollars, my friend. Not a George Washington to be seen. And I needed dollars. All that work I had done. All the special services.

But the government paid you, I say.

Pistachio shells. But to repeat, it doesn’t matter now.

How did you get away?

From the insanity? Surprisingly easily.

We order more coffee. The ketch has disappeared, the Cypriot cargo boat is tying up below us at two of the castiron capstans askew on the quay.

Do you know? says Mohammed. I was in a restaurant in Amman when that fool, the Information Minister, came on television and said there were no Americans. And no American tanks.

What’s that then? the journalists asked. There was a Challenger coming down El Rashid Street behind this oaf. A Challenger tank with a barrel long as a palm tree.

Oh, pardon me, gentlemen, says the Minister, I have an urgent appointment. And he disappears.

How we all laughed in that café. Or maybe I was still crying, but the coffee was very strong. Yes, that café was an excellent place. There were CIA there, braying and bragging, but I wasn’t afraid. Small fry, you see, I was never more than that. My picture wasn’t on their screens. Not one of the playing cards, not even close. A different game entirely.

How did you get here?

Mohammed smiles again and points into the dock. There are people disembarking from the Lambusa, filthy sailors, an old man, a woman with a suitcase.

Well, maybe Amman was a little fraught. So I hired a pickup and took my bags to Beirut where I have a friend. Then, when the money started to come in, I decided to travel. See the world. I have a pleasant apartment here, you will have to come over.

So money’s no problem? It used to be.

Mohammed looks hard at me. He is a man of about sixty in a linen suit, a shirt with a frayed collar.

I apologise, he says. For crying, that is. How unedifying it must have seemed.

Those were strange times.

No, my friend. Those were good times. Well, better times, despite the embargo. These are the strange times. The dangerous times. He whose name we could never speak, he whose photograph was in every room, he was maybe not so mad after all.

You miss those times?

The certainties? Yes. Being able to sit in a restaurant or walk down the street without some imbecile blowing his useless carcass up beside you? Yes I miss those times.

How do you live?

He looks at me tolerantly.

Remember the museum? I had it opened especially for you and your friend.

It was unbelievable, I say.

Before I left I paid it a visit. And then another visit.

It was marvellous, I say.

Mohammed produces his wallet and from it a plastic wrapper three inches square. From this he takes a piece of bubblewrap. Within it might be a dark coin.

It’s a stamp, he says. Or a seal. A stamp, a seal.

I look at the broken disc which he doesn’t let me touch. There are designs of antelopes upon it and men who might be hunters.

Pretty isn’t it, he smiles. And, guess what?

What?

It is six thousand years old.

He sits back, the bubblewrap on the table between us, the disc catching the sun. It waits like a tip for the waiter.

Such a pretty thing. And there is so much more, so much you wouldn’t believe it. You see, we Mesopotamians are a civilised people. Six thousand years ago we had artists and craftsmen and kings who craved such fine art. When your people were rubbing sticks together.

You looted the museum?

Of course not. I went with a friend who knows Nineveh, who understands how Babylon and Ur were built. Who knew what wouldn’t be missed and what the country could afford to lose. Oh, we were careful in that. We were scrupulous.

We both look out. A dredger called the Sapphire is coming in with its gravel and mud.

See, says Mohammed, we walked down the aisles of the museum and we were the only people there. Just like when you paid your visit. No wardens. No guardians, no professors muttering or students sketching. And no glass on the floor as there soon would be.

We came to a hall. In a cabinet was a copper mask, a bearded king’s head, and the king’s beard was cut in curls and ringlets in the copper, and the king’s eyes were hollow and there was a copper crown upon his head. But his lips were a woman’s lips, red and royal and alive. I looked at that king in the twilight and thought, yes, I could love that man. For that man is an imperial leader, maybe a cruel man, maybe a murderer of his people, a sacrificer of children, a lunatic, a psychopath. But here he is, here is the king. After five thousand years, here is the king.

And my hands were on that cabinet and I said we must take this, we must. And you know what my friend did? He touched me on the shoulder. Such a beautiful touch. It explained everything. And the passion passed. And we walked on through the museum and we left Nebuchadnezzar’s dragons and the Assyrian magicians with their square whiskers and we took what would not be missed. Tiny gods. It was only the tiny gods we took. The smallest gods who never really mattered. Not gold but alabaster gods. As tiny as chessmen, those gods. My gods now. And seals like this. Some tiles from Babylon. And a red cheetah that fits my hand.

Because I am silent, Mohammed thinks I am critical.

I saved them, he says. I saved them for the world. Where is the great king now? Where are the lions of Uruk or the golden bulls? Where are the chariots? Where are the tablets with the world’s first writing? Gone my friend, gone with the smugglers who lacked my scruples. Gone with the idiots who exchanged eternity for cigarettes. I sell what I took to dealers who make one hundred times, one thousand times the money I could ever do. But my tiny gods will be safe in Damascus or Los Angeles when the rest of it is dust in the street.

Yes, I say. I agree with you. And I wish I had done the same.

Another time, he says.

You mean for coffee?

No, says Mohammed. It was all another time.

10. The Prophet’s Garden

Quickly I’ve learned that this island is a bad place to fall asleep. Because it is difficult to wake. Sometimes I will sit up in bed at noon or later, bewildered by the dreams that began on the first night and still continue. But often the dreams are forgotten immediately, becoming I suppose a kind of dark dream humus in which other dreams will flourish.

One afternoon I wake still delirious. The music is playing again. It was part of my slumber but I can still hear it, the silverish music made by wires and gourds, hear it even after I rub my eyes, take a glass of sweet tea.

And the dream is clear. I am in a garden surrounded by minarets. Beyond us lies a rocky region where the wind pilfers the grass. A clockwork bird is singing, a muezzin playing prayers at a mixing desk. I see a man who bears milk to a minaret, a man carrying two pails of milk climbing the ziggurat steps. It is dusk and I am on my hands and knees searching for coriander. As it is too dark to see the herb’s constellations, those tiny flowers on their long stems, I have to rub the leaves of all the plants that grow there.

I know that if I touch its leaves the coriander’s perfume will eke into the night. In the dream the mosque’s shadow lies over the plot like a fortress fallen on this pauper’s ground. It seems the land has been given to the poor that they might grow food and not starve. So maybe that is why I feel safe there. Because I am not threatened in the dream. Confused, yes, but not terrified.

Because there I am, smelling the dew, a dew-drinking animal with my face in the grass, a dog, a dungbeetle, safe in the prophet’s garden, sunflower seeds stuck to my soles.

11.The Storm

At last, after an hour’s search, I find where the rain is entering. But the ceiling of my room is high and it’s impossible to mend the hole. So the rain will enter where it will and fill the saucepans I have placed on the floor, fill the jars, the plastic bucket. And such rain. Explosive drops that detonate on the lofts that surround my apartment, that echo on the theatre’s dome, that run along the walls.

For a few moments I brave one of the theatre’s flat roofs, climbing out naked through a trap door into the night. Lightning on the sea is salt on a fire. It turns green and burns blue.

Yet most of the lightning is silver as magnesium ribbon. It passes in a river over the sky forming deltas on the horizon towards Tripoli, exploding in snowstorms, dying, coming back. And such thunder. The thunder is greater than the bells. But the bells too are ringing, the Carmelite bells only yards away across the street. I can see them in the lightning, honouring some approximation of the hour and its quarters.

But when the thunder claps the bells are beaten. And now the storm is overhead so that thunder and lightning arrive together and the rain falls straight as piano wire, finding nailcracks and unleaded joints between the rafters to pour into my apartment, falling on my bed and my papers and my glossy poster for Cosi fan Tutte, soaking my bread and watering my wine.

But there’s something else. A different sound. Even here on the roof with the aerials and washing lines, I can hear music. When I woke I was sure it was the thunder that had disturbed me. Or the bells.

Yet perhaps it was this strange and windswept music that comes to me now, a human voice praying, pleading, some unnameable instrument that has captured the sound of rain falling into rain.

Downstairs, I consult the theatre programme. Just as I thought. Nothing scheduled last night or this morning. No concert or rehearsal in these small hours. The theatre should be dark as my room. But the music, like the rain, enters where it will, praying, pleading, a storm of sorts, a fever maybe, a silveriness alive inside my head.

12. The Thrush

Here’s a spell I’ve learned. Mix sour wine and stale bread. Then feel the world warm. But I don’t cut the bread. I tear it. The flesh comes away in my hand like grass with its roots and crumbs of earth. Or limestone dust from the walls of this theatre where I live, my room high on its north side, and my life more theatrical by the minute. But with Samuel Beckett doing the writing.

Now what’s that? Somebody knocking.

How dishevelled I look, I think as I open up. Unshaven, uncombed, bare chested too because the day is humid and the fans make little difference. There might be bread in my teeth. I must look like a dog disturbed at a stolen meal.

A man stands in the doorway. I know what he is going to say.

My costume? he demands. For Cosi?

Cosi fan Tutte costumes on the next floor down, I reply. Come with me.

And I take him along the corridor and put on the light because even in daylight this is a dingy place. Doing this is easier than explaining where the costumier’s is, and I lead him down to the door marked Stage Door, and I rap for him and he thanks me and I return.

What a world awaits that chorister: collections of Ruritanian extravagance, rags of old pantomimes, armour, haloes, Saturn and its rings on invisible wire, a lifesize black and white cow, a breed never seen on this island.

All week I have followed the rehearsals. The great themes have swept up through this labyrinth and stopped and started again and been halted in a grinding of cello strings as the maestro sobs at the fools in the pit.

Was it ever different? I say to myself. Did Mozart tear his hair or did the music run seamlessly through him like candlelight on the Danube? And no, I will not come to the performance. All week I have heard the production taking shape, the chorus carrying into the small hours, the baton cracking like a pistol shot. Everything that happens in the theatre happens here.

So I get on with my dog’s breakfast. The bread and the wine. The loaf as sweet as a lemon leaf. But the wine? Sometimes I drink from the bottleneck. Or I pour the wine into a bowl and soak the bread if its crust is hard. Because I’ve found these loaves sometimes turned to rock, the rye especially a splinter of basalt. But the wine wins. It always will. Now the bread lies in its black petals. Dreamfood I call it. All that’s left of last week’s loaf.

The baker is a man-child who has lived in the bakery all his life. His mother is the crone at the hatch. When she offers my few cents change I always wave it away and she whistles in admiration, whistles like one of the thrushes that dive from the ramparts. And I smile at her but realise that sarcasm from the old is harder to swallow than ancient bread.

That’s why I prefer the wine shop in Zachary Street. I take a bottle there and the girl does not dip the jug as I thought she might but fills it with a ladle. The wine is cheap. At first I thought the price a mistake, but no, she assured me, no, put that coin away, and that one too. Look. I need only this one and this one. And okay, this one with the thrush upon it, our blue rock thrush, il merill, a bird seldom seen now because of the snarers’ nets.

And such wine it is. Black as the girl’s eyes watching me as I watch her dipping and pouring and dipping. Yes, the same darkness in the barrel as in her gaze. Because this wine is inscrutable even in candlelight, this wine my tarry physic, warm in the room as the girl’s hand might be. I touched it once. I touched her hand and she did not withdraw. But the jug was full and I was scrabbling for coins, for the coin with the thrush upon it. Yes, a rare bird now as everybody says.

13. Counting the Fireflies

If Omar is not telling tourists about the island’s past, standing on the steps of a palazzo or in a cobbled yard where blue bees crawl through hibiscus, I ask for an hour, or an afternoon, of his time. Often, he agrees, and I feel honoured.

Yet so far he has said nothing about the gods. Yes, he tells me of the baroque churches. Of the Renaissance art. But that’s not what interests me. I’m not that kind of scholar.

Today he takes me to a place I must have passed a score of times, yet never noticed. Under the western ramparts the walls are a maze of tunnels used by fishermen and lovers and the klandestini. Down a flight of steps we stop in shadow. There is a string of washing hung against an entrance, and above this door are two eyes painted blue and white, and the word Caccarun in flaking paint.

Omar leads the way, parts the shirts and vests on the line and beckons me inside. It is a small room, perhaps a kitchen. There are a table and two chairs and shelves of jars and bottles. The room is dark, so dark I cannot see that around the wall this space continues. Omar leads on. The room becomes a tunnel. Ahead a candle is burning. There are two diesel drums with a piece of driftwood between them. In the gloom, I think, someone might be sitting at this board.

Wine? asks Omar, and he himself lifts a bottle and two dusty glasses from a shelf.

Where are we? I ask.

Under the bastion, says my guide. It’s time you met the Phoenician. Hey Nannu, your health.

Omar is toasting the shadow in the corner. I look closer. There is a man there with hair the colour of a spiderweb. An empty glass waits before him. Omar offers to pour him wine, Omar already the host, Omar the leader. But the figure places a palm over his cup. This man is very frail. In the candlelight his skin is yellow.

No hurry at all, smiles Omar. Nannu has waited a long time. He will wait longer. But you, sir, you should learn more.

Of course, I say. I’m here to learn. But…

Then listen, says Omar. We’re in the warren here. These tunnels run a long way. Above us is a palace of many rooms and in its history it has been many things. Now, it’s a kind of hotel. Sixteen women live there, not as many as before. But if you would know the island, you must know them.

It’s less the present, I say. Than the past. The ancient days. And the…

But Omar holds up his hand.

First, the lovely Rusatia. Ask her, and she will dress as a priest for you. Or the Emperor himself. As a gladiator if such is your taste. No, she is never without callers.

Callidrome is a little older. She keeps a goat in her suite and feeds it radishes. It is tied to her bed with a toga chord and Callidrome rouges its white cheeks and puts lipstick on its nannygoat lips. Yes, Callidrome’s goat is a beautiful creature, its eyes like dates. Once she gave it cocaine and she swore it spoke monk’s Latin.

Fortunata is inseparable from her mother. They are, I suppose, a team. Once mummy put a love potion in the communion wine, then they waited in their room. The first to knock was the Bishop of the Blue Lagoon, and soon a school-teacher with his class dinner money. Yes, powerful medicine.

Now Fabia, she has style. She drinks ouzo from Milos and listens to Cole Porter songs. Ah, she whispers, I was his muse. In love with the night mysterious? Of course. He came here you know. To this island. Ah Mr Porter, sang Fabia. What shall I do? Night and day, you are the one. That’s Fabia’s best line, I think. Of course, it didn’t last. Poor Porter with his limp and his money? The hotel was no place for him and Fabia such a demanding child. But for a while they got along. They were artists, you see. He could no more stop writing his music than Fabia turn down one million Turkish lire for a tick of her eyebrow pencil. People like that can never switch off. Because you should never retire. Ask old Nannu here. Still keeping a bar. So Fabia stays working. What should she be doing? Watching the island’s TV? As she will say, I am a witness, as are all artists.

Nica is always in demand because she owns the strongest mosquito spray. Pif Pif, I think it is called. Yes, a powerful poison that gives those swampflies no chance. But as to losing blood, doesn’t little Nica have that all her own way? How sweet, Nica will say, after her pearly whites have done their job. Advocates taste of palm oil, she tells the other girls. And MPs of mothballs. Her favourites of course are the orchestra from the theatre. Apparently, violinists are salty as the Ligurian deeps. Oh, what blood, little Nica will say. I can taste the music in it.

Felicia drinks like no other. Her tipple is anis, which has deranged many a fine mind. Men often challenge her to a bulb of wine. Always Felicia wins. How? Because she doesn’t swallow. The wine simply disappears into her gullet, though sometimes of course, I can hear it sloshing about when I place my ear to her belly, a belly dark as a communion plate. Yes, little Felicia, outdrinking the lascars, the Ark Royal stokers tattooed like Scythians, the trireme oarsmen still in their chains. How often have I seen her hands in their pockets or lifting a greasy tarboosh while they slept it off? Often, brother. Oh yes.

Cressa and Drauca work together for safety’s sake. They come from Siricusa and know all the wiles of the dockside trash who want to try their luck. But one day, they were duped. Some old fool offered an IOU. He swore the next day, or the next, he’d have the brass. Together they tipped him upside down and found only grapeseeds in his suit. So they christened him with the chamber pot. No credit notes, no plastic, no Albanian squindarkas are their rules of business. Couldn’t he read?

Mula is from the island. Her father makes brandy from prickly pears, and delivers a cask of it to the hotel every month. So the girls look after Mula, who cannot read, but is kind and plump and sunburned. A friendly girl. And the brandy? Rotgut. But cut it with luminata and they can stay sober at least an hour.

Now Helpis’s specialty is hashchich. On her door and her website is the sign of the snake that swallows its own tail. Her shift is the blue of michaelmas daisies, and Helpsis is suitably melancholy.

As to Ianuaria, she speaks some dialect that no-one understands. Maybe she comes from Durrazo or Izmir, tough cities. Yes, the girls are a United Nations all by themselves. But those opaque vowels are no matter when she begins her love talk. Then she is the oriole the snarers crave. Yes, with her words, Ianuaria can make anyone disgorge their soul. Her tongue is a goldsmith’s anvil all right. Where did that woman learn to speak such a language? Such whispering behind her boudoir door.

Faustilla? Dear Fausty’s tongue is pierced with a ball bearing. It serves as a clapper for the bells that God cannot ring. So who better to serenade the priest, who has brought wine with honey and whose birretta is crushed under his fat arse?

And I know Palindrome as well as any. She is white as gesso and looks like a ghost. In her cupboard once I found the following: a charioteer’s whip; sea holly; a barbed wire torque; a packet of angel dust; Vallium; blindfolds; scarabs; a map of the port of Alexandria; a stone jug of raki, pale green as I recall, and a letter from the Caliph. Oh yes, she is known in high places is our Palindrome.

Restituta wears a veil. A gorgeous hoodwinker she. Who do you favour, sir? she will ask her regulars. Am I your Dominican today? Or your grateful poor Clare? Such admirable humility. You see, Restituta has truly been a nun. But it was a roofless convent with cactus in the garden. The well had collapsed. She came here, to the island of lightning, from Kriti, where she had already learned much of her science.

And Felicia? A Nubian princess they say. Experiencing interesting times. She keeps a panther, and this beast has a shrivelled leg. As a deterrent to intruders it lives on the roof, shitting in an old roasting tin filled with torn up Gazzetta della Sport.

Yes, smiles Omar. They live above us. It’s one of my jobs to help them out with the money. And to learn their stories of course, because all the girls are great raconteurs. What can I do with these? Nica might ask. That Moroccan in the Hugo Boss suit paid in dirhams. So I take them, as I take the dinars and the kroons and the lecs and the forints and the tolars and the dollars Canadian and turn them into money the girls can understand. A lovely family, I hope you agree. My fireflies I call them. How they glow.

14. The Wedding Dress

Today I come to a district I have not visited before. The streets are narrow here, the balconies almost touching. And there’s no-one about, no-one in all this crowded city, nothing but the usual famished cats, and a linnet in a cage on a balcony, rouge-headed little harlot singing in the abandoned afternoon.

I stop on a flight of steps. The wall above is covered in bleached paintwork, devotional works that picture local saints, pale men and women exhausted by time or their passion, the blues and yellows almost drained from their robes. At a balcony above the saints hangs a bushel of dead grasses and the leaves of a salt tree that has dried to a negative of itself.

Above this balcony is strung a line of washing like a tattered gonfalon. I look at the garments pegged there, all the colour of the city’s stone, stonedust in the creases of the shirts and stonedust in the shift hems, stonedust in the folds of the jerseys and the jalibayahs, stonedust covering the veils.

I look more closely. A wedding dress is hanging there, a grey gown exploding like one of last summer’s cornsheaves, stonedust in its folds and flounces and its bodice embroidered with stony sequins. Behind these clothes the windows of the apartment are shut but something has been written on the glass.

I peer through the leprous underwear at the letters and spell them out and spell again, useless as they are to me as the linnet’s heartbroken song.

15. The King

I see the old man has wandered from his house again. Or from whatever hole in the ramparts he inhabits. In hospital pyjamas he stands on the cobbles, scratching his chest, his cock, that inflamed member red as a radish. Under his breath the old man murmurs a love song, a lullaby. Or is it some warning?

I step closer. Yes, he is muttering about dogs, how the brave and the beautiful will be eaten by dogs, unspeakable battlefield curs that lick heroes’ blood and gnaw the bellies and balls of dead warriors whose golden greaves have been stolen by the thieves and whores, thick as horseflies, that follow all armies, smelling death and the must of riven exchequers, the air heavy with such perfume.

There is badger-bristle on his cheeks, his chest collapsed and hairless. This man reminds me of someone I might see where I used to live. This other man would hurry through my town, his shirt unbuttoned and cap crooked, his eyes rolling, this other man racing every morning on an impossible errand, the news he brought too terrible to communicate.

But this man does not race. Here he stands, mumbling about dogs. Perhaps someone will come and take him away but maybe he has run out of someones, as must we all. Yes, here he stands with the sea before him and the Maria Dolores coming into harbour and the Anchor Bay and the Martzaiola departing our shore and the pigeons clinging to the fortress brick. For this is honey-coloured Troy. And here stands Priam, shaking his pizzle at the Greeks.

16. Sigmundo

There is a saint carved from the mast of a scuppered scutch. Peter in effigy is whiskered with grime, the gilt on him dusty as mothwings. But Peter is celebrated here.

There’s no plaque to give his proper name so I will call him Sigmundo. Yet who is or was Sigmundo? All I find, and all I see, are the skull and a casket of relics, bones above a tomb in the shipwreck church.

Ah, Sigmundo, I whisper. How goes it, brother?

Or, Good morning, Sigmundo. Do you hear the rain outside, a torrent down the steps of this city and bouncing off the lead on the cupolas above us? Please, tell me what you know, Sigmundo, and what you see with those hollow eyes, bony cupolas themselves those sockets.

But was it not the monks’ trick to roast a pig and gnaw the bones white and then proclaim them the holy scaffolding of a saint? Surely I’m not talking to a boar, Sigmundo? Or a red titted sow famished for her farrow?

Or maybe you are a rabbit, Sig? So many rabbits are served on this island, roasted, stewed a week in garlic and crusty wine. The peasant cuisine. But what peasant could wait a week. Please prove to me Sigmundo that you are not a bucket of bones and that I retain traces of sanity.

But, sir, I honour you. The Luftwaffe didn’t get you, nor the skull-embroidered legions. And you are so beautiful in this sacred twilight, a goblet dressed in madriperla. And, best of all, there’s no-one near the saint’s inglenook to hear me talking to a bone.

Well, such are my rituals in this city, where I live quietly and attend to my duties. A coffee at Leone’s and a word with Sigmundo in his crystal. And truly, yes, I would like to take him outside to the rampart to watch the sea breaking below. Because the light would have you gasping, Sig. Maybe I’d offer you Raybans.

Yes my friend, there in your aquarium, staring over the Libyan Sea that spits like an iron’s hotplate, tell me which way did the galleys come?

Ah yes, the same way the ferries do now. Because, as you know, this is where all trajectories meet. East and west merge upon our Phoenician rock, and a hollow rock it is, hollow with caves, and churches in caves and casbahs in caves and taverns in caverns and calabashes in caves and jewellers’ and haberdasheries and harlotries in caves. Yes an island of caves, Sigmundo. Maybe you hear the tide beneath our feet?

So let’s wait here a while and realise we have come to the centre of things. A rock on the horizon. That’s us, my friend. A limestone mote in Africa’s eye. But think of our forebears. Odysseus was here once, and Bloodaxe too, while Philip’s fleets brought figs and falcons. So gaze with me here, Sigmundo. And realise the world is looking at us.

17. Waiting for the Barbarians

A cup of the warm south, says my friend. But nicely chilled.

We take our seats and here she comes, a pale girl, a goose of a girl, a gorgeous gooney girl with a mouth like a goldfish, a tall and serious girl with slender neck and hair in a tortoise-shell clasp plaited down her back.

Now she ghosts towards us and now she ghosts away, this servant who will bring our glasses. My friend is astonished. The girl cannot speak the island’s language. Where can she have come from? She a servant, too. A minion.

It’s written right through her, he says. From one of the so called republics to the north. One of those insane ragbags of counties and impoverished commotes. That’s where she’s from.

Since the island entered the confederation such outlandish types are seen more frequently. But the bar owner is a cruel man. He shouts at the goosey girl. He makes her stand in a corner and clean the necks of the ketchup bottles. Maybe he will make her do other things.

Wild dogs in the squares. The Presidents all turnip farmers. Black magic in the back streets and the children not in school but the uranium mines. And the old men drinking eau-de-cologne and antifreeze. It’s true. They worship salamanders there. And now, here they come, here come the salamander-worshipping eau-de-cologne drinkers. And they’re unstoppable.

I look at the girl. She dribbles rice grains into salt cellars. At an empty table she reads the Borges olive oil bottle label and the Borges vinegar bottle label. And very slowly, as if she has recognised an old friend, she begins to smile.

18. Klandestins

One day I arrange to meet Omar at Nannu’s place. When I arrive no-one but Nannu is present. I wait in a darkness lit by one red candle on the board. Outside, the light is shattering and the sea wild, a curdled milk. Inside, it is midnight.

As usual the Caccarun is silent and I pour my own drink. I wonder whether it is his laundry that hangs over the entrance. The Caccarun must have better things to think about than personal hygiene, and I too must look unkempt, a week’s bristles, and sour wine in my armpits, appropriate for the tavern of the two eyes. If I need a pexpex, there’s a slop pot. But no lavaman that I’ve seen. My research is not going well.

At last Omar arrives.

Has the catastropher been talking to you? he asks.

Nannu?

Wars and invasions, Nannu knows when. And why. Ask him, man. He’ll tell you when the rains are due. The new rains. He understands how hot it will become. Nannu has predicted how far the tide will creep up the ramparts. And yes, Nannu has even counted how many people are moving towards us, across the desert, over the waves. Towards us now, at this moment. He can see them all. Or rather…

Omar takes a shell from a shelf and gives it to the old man.

What do you hear, Nannu?

The old man remains silent.

Does he hear the sea? I ask.

I’ll tell you what Nannu hears, says Omar. Ships’ bells. So much louder than church bells. And so many more of them. Many men with many oars. That’s what Nannu hears in the shell. The sound of oars. The galleys coming this way, the galleons with bells in their rigging, the gondolas, the gharbiels, the lazzarettos, the cruise liners. And the king astride his driftwood shaking that five pointed fork.

But does he hear the gods? I whisper

Maybe Omar doesn’t hear.

Occasionally on my travels I pass a derelict barrakka on the west side. The blocks in the wall have shrunk and the building is unsafe. So there are plenty of places to stow away, to squat, to put a bedroll in the dust.

I suppose that’s where I see most of the illegals, in the holes in the walls, holes such as the fishermen use. The ramparts are a honeycomb, entrances and dead ends and who knows how deep a labyrinth it all is. And there they are, rats in the rock, or in and out like flying foxes, because I’ve seen the bats too in the dusk on their own journeys, sharing their chambers now with these unfortunates.

Many’s the time I’ve seen klandestins go in one hole and come out another. I’ve looked in too and seen dried palm leaves covering blankets, old clothes, yoghurt pots with rainwater, stale bread from the wheelies, bags of olives.

Because that’s what these people do. Pick up olives. They sit under the olive trees and fill a bag, green going black, medicinal-tasting olives, most of the crop already soft and trodden to oil under the benches.

Who’s going to buy? I always wonder. There are more olives than cockroaches on the island. More olives than children and there are children everywhere, hanging from tenement windows, bobbing still in the sea before me, the coal-coloured sea with clouds massing in the north. The coral is black now and the fishes invisible.

So slight in the sun are those slim fishes that silver the eye as light stuns time. Yes the fishes have vanished. But who will buy olives when they can pick the olives themselves? There are olives everywhere.

Yet that is what the klandestins do. They pick olives and look at olives as if they have never seen olives before. Maybe they haven’t. Perhaps olives are a strange fruit to these people.

Takes all sorts, I suppose. Perhaps they don’t know the olives need to be soaked in brine. Soaked for weeks and even then they’re not ready. They’ll have to learn the hard way.

Who are they, these visitors? I ask Omar. A troupe of outcasts from the desert?

Everyone comes to the island of lightning, he says. Eventually. The Greeks in their gold breeks, Palestinian farmers whose peach trees are full of cluster bombs. They all find themselves adrift, and the currents bring them here.

We go to the highest rampart and look out. The sky is dark and there are lanterns lit.

The rafts will come ashore in the night, says Omar. They don’t have long to wait. You can imagine the passengers. Pregnant women who had never seen the sea before their journey, teachers, students, the brave, the mad.

Think of them now out on the ocean, their skins indigo in this light. Behind one another one, and behind him yet more. What if a wave takes a child from the stern? Who would know? When the snake steals the chick does the mother remember? Swallowed whole, it was never there.

Why do the superintendents let them in? I ask.

The island’s grown old, he says. It’s full of old men. And women. Old men are like cicadas, telling all they know. Children are the same. We are talkers now, not doers. Not warriors. We’re cicadas on a tree. And ugly as cicadas. No-one listens so we sing louder. Who can tell when one of us falls because the racket is the same. And if we could learn from cicadas we would have already done so.

You wish to contact the ancients? You wish for the gods? Oh yes, I know what you wish. Those voices in our heads? Maybe those are the gods’ voices. Certainly they are the cicadas. Dream sounds. The dreams of old people with the sheets up to their chins and their teeth chattering. We should honour the cicadas.

But the gods, I say.

The gods? Yes, it is always the gods with you.

Then he smiles.

Here, says Omar. For you.

He gives me a poster, old paper, cracked and stained.

There are names on it, a concert advertised for the theatre. But there’s no time, no date. Abdallah Ali will play the santur; Sha’ubi Ibraham and Hassan Ali the djoze; Abdul Razzak Madjid the tabla; Kan’an Mohammed Saith and Dia Mahmoud Ahmed the deff. And the chanter, the poet? Yusuf Omar.

Yes, says Omar. This is your dream music. Listen again.

And Omar sings:

Oh these nights, these sleepless nights.

Who have I lost myself for?

A drunken man, a sober man, who have I lost myself for?

Take me to my home, take me to my home.

Who have I lost myself for

In these nights, these sleepless nights.

From the great tradition, he says. Or, one of the great traditions. In the dialect of my street, from a city far away. In fable, that is. But not so far across the black land.

19. The Venuses

I thought I was a scholar, I whisper to Omar. Until I met you. Sir, you understand everything on the island. Surely you can show me the gods. It’s the gods I came for. Not the sailors. Not the fireflies. My research grant is spent.

Omar smiles.

I was at the bakery this morning, he says. Down the passageway I stepped and along that chancery. I saw a man carrying the hot trays, his mother counting the cents out on the mensa, flour in her eyes and apron. And the loaf she handed me? As big as an oxcart wheel. That’s what I thought this morning. And I remembered wheels I once heard go rattling through the prickly pear. You will come with me.

And so the next evening I go to see the venuses. Omar directs me to the bus, but warns I will have to make my own way home.

It is the far side of the island. Wind blows, the stone dust flies. But the venuses are not hard to find. They sit together on a hillside looking east. The rain has worn their brows like temple steps. Loaflike they squat, and I think of Omar’s loaf, his great wheel. For the venuses are loaf upon loaf. Their bellies are bread and their faces swollen dough, globular in the dusk and gilded with the last sun upon them. Sowlike I suppose, these beady-eyed matriarchs, with clefts in their bellies and shadows conglomerating in those gourds. A race of lumpen stone the venuses, looking where they have always looked. Forever out to sea.

I sit down. I sit amongst the Aphrodites in their ancient easiness.

How venerable these venuses. Their breasts and buttocks so cool under my fingers, these women who wait for time to stop, heads crushed into their shoulders’ yoke, seven thousand years patient in this limestone sorority, their faces hidden, expressions concealed, knowing what they know and grown fat on the wind’s salt, resting here on their millstones.

In the dark the gods are carboys of greenish wine. I gaze with them out to sea. The moon is coming up but is no whiter than their shepherd-polished thighs. These are the gods. These are the goddesses. They have survived so long that their religion is dead.

And I think of the women I passed on the track out of town, grandmothers come from market with halma and grapes. The last bus late.

Yusuf Omar (1918-1987) “was the last great traditional singer of the school of ‘Iraqi maqams’.”

The poem quoted occurs in the Baghdad sialect of Arabic and is an ancient popular lyrc, used in the ‘Maqam Hsseini’, “one of the seven fundamental maqams”, and recorded for Ocora radio France, 1996, as ‘Les Maqam de Baghdad’.