All Of Monday’s Reasons – 9

9. At sea
Map

I woke up early enough to see the sun rise, stirred by the commotion of people getting ready to disembark for Corfu, which was about a half hour off. Adriana had bedded down extremely close to me, so much so that I nearly elbowed her in the jaw when I rolled over to reach into my rucksack.

I said good morning and goodbye to John and Susan, who got off together in Corfu. John didn’t wake Frank up, leaving him to go to the adjacent Greek mainland port of Igoumentisa, where he caught a ferry to the island while we sailed on.

The temperature had risen as we sailed further south. I spent the cooler hours of the morning talking to Adriana. I asked her a question I had meant to ask previous companions.

“Why do you travel alone?”

“My uncles and cousins and aunts and everybody were all saying to me: ‘Oh, don’t go alone, you are a woman.’”

She had a heavy Brazilian accent.

“Then I admire you, but you haven’t answered my question.”

“I like meeting people.”

“And sleeping with them?” I thought.

“It’s niiiice,” she said.

I bet it is, I thought again, but said, “It is nice.”

She listened to her walkman and I went and washed up while I read a bit about Greece in my outdated guidebook.

After five minutes, she slid over to my side of the bench, pulled out a cassette box, and said, “Do you know this?”

I looked at the cover. Phantom of the Opera by Andrew Lloyd Webber. Original London Cast. It was a sorry sight and my heart sank in the middle of the Ionian Sea.

“God yes, I know it well.”

“Oh, I love this music so much. It’s a love story, but it’s niiiiice.”

I nodded and managed a smile.

“Listen.” She produced a walkman from her rucksack and put some headphones on me. I braced myself.

It wasn’t Phantom.

“Lambada!” she shouted and pressed the play button. There followed some of the worst Brazilian music I have ever heard. It had synthesized drums, shallow keyboard substitutes for guitar and bass and percussion that sounded like someone throwing pots and pans down the stairs at random intervals.

The vocals contained obnoxiously happy declarations of “YEAH!” and “GIT DOWN!” in English, whereas the rest was sung in Portuguese. I say sung, but actually the vocal track was run through heavy reverb to mask the singer’s almost complete lack of tone. The backing vocalists simply repeated the singer, only they did so three octaves higher, in the same place at every chorus.

I’m no authority on South American music, but this sucked. Courtesy had driven me to start tapping my knee with the palm of my hand because she thought that by letting me listen to this crap, she was doing me a favour. She worked an earpiece free from the headphones and held it to her ear.

She stood up and, wearing only a bikini, started to dance in front where I was sitting. She had enormous breasts and I sat there mortified as the other people on deck watched her unfathomed endowments as she swayed.

“I want to dance,” she said in that loud, flat tone people have when they can’t hear their own voice. She held an imaginary partner for the lambada, closing one eye with the other fixed firmly on mine, which remained consciously unfixed on anything at all.

“I love it! It’s so niiiiice,” she said even louder, attracting even more attention to her and me and the breasts between us.

“No. No - please don’t,” I thought, “I can see what’s coming. Please, please don’t ask me to. Please for the love of fuck.”

“Let’s dance, come on!”

In a panic, I said something about being tired and travelling non stop from Barcelona and that using my rucksack as a pillow gave me a stiff neck and that because we were at sea, no matter where we danced, one of us would always have the sun in their eyes, because, see, there’s no shade on the top deck.

“Right,” I said, tearing off the earpiece out, “I hear there are showers on this boat.”

Breasts I like. An audience and dancing I do not. Just for the record.

I grabbed my towel and my overpriced shampoo and soap from sleazy Brindisi and headed for the showers, which were empty, thank you Robert.

The next few minutes were bliss. There was only a cold tap, so I braced myself and jumped under. I washed, rinsed, washed, and rinsed again. The feeling of getting clean days of severe griminess was almost spiritual. To empathise, you may wish to travel one thousand miles along the Mediterranean in July, sleeping in train compartments and on ship decks, wearing the same clothes for four days, sweating and getting drunk and stoned along the way, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

I had saved a clean change of clothes since France because I knew this day would come.

I returned to the deck to find Adriana trying to mend her headphones. We sat and enjoyed the cool breeze, but got sunburned because we didn’t realise how hot the sun was. My face went red so I put on my cap which felt like sandpaper on my forehead.

We were soon sailing through a typical Greek panorama, with Lefkada and Kefallonia jutting out from the placid sea as if defiant of the ship’s course, making the passage slower, but setting a mythical backdrop for her passengers as she ploughed silently through the still water.