ocean view

I finish the book, and close its scrappy cover. I look around. On the beach spread out, ahead: couples collide in the water with self-conscious glee, slippery bodies rubbing together, salty kisses, sub-surface slap and tickle. Their intense desire to just up and lie there on the lapping shoreline and make love, slowly but loudly, is obvious to everyone who bother to watch them from their own cabins and hammocks, which dot around the bay. Eventually they give up, and retreat to their own thatched cubby, drying each other on the verandah then closing the door and window. Switching on the fan, they bite their lips and try to make as little noise as possible.

Under the palms are the blue smocked massage ladies, eating noodles straight off the little stove. In the sand, the supine, brown and celulite-pocked body of a German woman, her ass tucked in leopard skin, and her exposed breasts dwelling butterball and bronze on her aging frame. The sea is flat and blue-green like cats eyes. The sky, woolpacked with cumulo nimbus, curves around the coastline and disappears behind the vast thicket of green jungle which looms above the huts. A transparent gecko, a dragon-fly, a crab in its nugget-like shell. The wind picks up and drops. A smile from the hammock-seller, her legs taking wide strides through the soft sand. A coconut falls. If time is moving at all it is moving very slowly. Black heads bob together a way out to sea. Laughter from the massage ladies. With movie-star images in mind, the German woman has moved to the waters edge, the waves ebbing against her as she lies, back arched, legs flicked-up, boobs puffy and nipples like inverted chestnuts. Her husband, frail and bird-like, in tight racing-bathers, joins her, and together they lie, beached and prostrate, looking dead, almost, in the island sun.

From the hut I retrieve the next book on my shelf and begin, again, to read.