‘Dov! DOV!’
O, FFS – any moment now, she was going to say –
‘LOOK AT ME!’
On the lounger next to him Josh snickered. The kid was fully dressed in the blazing Eilat sun, his rancid hood pulled up over his stinking dreads
‘DOV!’ Jackie did what she obviously hoped was an ‘erotic’ move beneath one of the spitting stone cats which lined the length of the swimming pool at Herods Palace Hotel. It might have worked if she’d been ten years younger and five stone lighter, but as it was it was pretty depressing. He sighed and shook his head; sadly, she was so short-sighted she couldn’t see, and merely continued with her embarrassing antics.
Having a fat wife was a tricky one. On the plus side, it was pleasant in bed (no one in Biology class had ever seen their first human skeleton and immediately thought ‘O, one day I really want to sleep with that!’) and outside of bed it put her in a vulnerable position as he was now more attractive than she was. On the other hand, it was embarrassing to be seen with her in public. And because he continued to respond to her sexually at a size 20 as he had when she was a size 12, the fool seemed to believe that he loved her for ‘herself’ or something equally vile.
He didn’t think he had ever loved Jackie for herself; for her sexual depravity, yes, which would probably wane with age, and her foolishness, which she might one day conceivably shed via a sudden lightning rod of wisdom. If either of these happened, he was off, and she could cuddle up to her precious self till the end of her days - which weren’t going to be a long wait, judging by the size of her gut. How could a woman have had so many abortions and yet look so pregnant?
Sinisterly, as if reading his nasty thoughts once more, Josh scowled and addressed him; ‘Why are we staying in this place anyway? It sucks. There’s a bird on the balcony up in the room. And a lizard in the bathroom.’
‘Don’t you care for having your own little petting zoo?’
‘The lizard looked poison. And the bird was dead!’
‘Don’t talk so loud – everybody will want one. So isn’t that so much better – you’re a Goth, aren’t you? Don’t you people like dead things? Isn’t that why you’re wearing one on your head?’
‘Very funny. Goth! Shows how much you know about stuff…’ Josh scowled so hard Dov wondered how he didn’t sprain something. ‘O my days. Look at her!’
Jackie had tired of her aqua-erotics, or maybe just run out of puff, and was now holding a woman of about eighty under the stomach and encouraging her to kick her legs. Dov couldn’t hear what she was saying but it was obviously some sickeningly predictable chorus of encouragement and life-affirmation to a sad sack of skin and bones who would have been better off attempting to eat herself to death at the buffet rather than force her poor old carcass through pointless exercise.
Still, it made a good photo - the redhead with the splendid tits falling out of her Norma Kamali swimsuit and the fragile old dear with the tichel tied tight. He grabbed his camera and snapped. You had to give it to Jackie - her enthusiasm and lack of embarrassment in any given situation made her a valuable prompt for narrative - SISTERS IN ARMS, he’d call this one.
Josh watched his mother and her new old friend disgustedly for a moment. ‘I know why we’re staying here…’ he finally pronounced.
‘Go on. I’m sure this is going to be excellent!’
‘Because it’s called Herod's. And she hates children. Dad told me. That’s why she had all those abortions. Herod killed children - just like she did.’
‘No,’ Dov said patiently. ‘We’re here because – like with the other Eilat hotels we’re going to be gracing with our presence this week – by using your mother’s contacts as a travel writer and my contacts as a photographer we figured we could get a free room and a big breakfast for one night and one morning before we moved on to the next freeload station. And here the swimming pool is one of the best, despite the puking felines lined up along the side. Three down, four to go. Then we go and stay in my uncle’s flat in Tel Aviv. Keep up, kid.’ He lit a cigarette; the pool was officially a no-smoking area, but everybody was doing it - they were Israelis! Dov liked a fag at the best of times, but there was something about being with the Solomons kid that made him want to die young, and lung cancer seemed as good a way as any. Besides which, Josh seemed to suck all the oxygen out of the atmosphere anyway, so what difference could a few more carcinogens make? ‘Your mother has terminated a few pregnancies, yes. But she has never killed a child, to my knowledge. However, had she known what you would turn out like, I’m sure the law would have shown mercy. And we’d certainly be having a far better time now.’
The kid gaped at him in amazement, and Dov saw his big upper lip tremble like a child’s before he jumped up, getting a leg of his oversize jeans caught in a hinge of his lounger and falling to the ground before jumping up, cursing and running away, his stepfather’s laughter mocking him as he ran from the pool area towards the beach.
Serve him right, Dov thought, grinding out the cigarette. He wondered if there was time before he came back to get Jackie up to the room for a quick one. They were having barely any sex – twice a day, if he was lucky. He felt himself scowl like the winner of a Come-As-Josh-Solomons-competition as he considered the Eilat trip so far.
He and Jackie had planned to spend the first week of their trip, escape or migration - Dov thought it symptomatic of the general disarray of his married life that neither he nor his wife had any idea which one it was, and furthermore hadn’t seen fit to enquire of each other - chilling out, hanging out and most of all putting out. The three hour gap between hotels would have been ideal for lunching at a beach bar and checking out the talent – then on to the next five star sleep-factory and a quick fuck in the room to mark their territory before tarting themselves up and heading out into the sultry North Beach night, partners in crime and perversity.
The presence of an un-screwable, un-doable third wheel – and such a creaky, troublesome one, at that, so bent on letting down the tyres on his mum’s fun – had totally kiboshed their plan. They certainly couldn’t afford a separate room for the kid, so he slept on the couch and if they wanted sex, they had to give him money to go out – sometimes he showed reluctance, at which point Dov would start stripping off, which always seemed to work. If he was asleep, they had to go and do it on the beach themselves like furtive kids, and when they stumbled drunkenly back in, he’d turn on the light and give them a what-time-do-you-call-this look.
‘Kid, you need to get laid,’ Dov had told him on the second night. ‘And if you can’t get laid in Eilat, you might as well just cut it off and be done with it.’
‘I hate it here,’ whined Josh. ‘All these Jews, showing off! Like they own the place!’
‘Which they do,’ Dov reminded him ‘though I appreciate that this may interfere quite seriously with your view of your poor self as the eternal victim. Look, I’m not saying Israelis are perfect - why do you think I came to London? But these people have had some bad stuff happen to them and rather than lying around whining and licking their wounds, they get back up and grab life by the balls. You should try it sometime.’
Josh smirked. ‘It’s funny how much you mention cocks and balls. I told Dad. He said you probably had unresolved gay issues.’
‘Really? Well, I’d rather mention cocks and balls a lot than talk them constantly. Go and tell your Dad that.’
He thought about this now as he saw Josh stumble away. He was glad they had rocked up at Herods Palace yesterday. He couldn’t think of anywhere in Eilat which was more calculated to taunt, torment and generally stress out the painfully introverted Solomons kid; if Liberace and Cecil B DeMille had built a love-nest together, it would have looked a lot like Herods. In the short time they’d been here he’d already seen Josh caught unawares by a capering life-size jester statue, royally pissed off by a prancing bronze ibex and practically going head to head with a horned ram hewn from metal, all of which he’d got good photos of. STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND, he’d call this series.
Jackie was wading, or rather waddling, out of the pool now, and he felt a twitch in his groin. Marriage truly was all about precious shared memories, and even now she was well on the way to resembling Jabba The Hutt’s kid sister he still sometimes recalled the lovely girl she had been when he first met her. And even better, he recalled all the lovely girls they had seduced together and that made him feel a warm rush of genuine affection for her. He could never have got so many girls without the lure of Jackie’s exotic accent and splendid rack. Truly, marriage was a wonderful thing.
She came towards him, mincing in what she obviously hoped was a sexy fashion; it might have been, if her weight had been divided among three separate versions of herself. She threw herself down on the lounger; it groaned resignedly. She tossed her wet hair and smiled at him, in a way she probably thought of as ‘kittenish.’ It was weird about some women – Jackie was far from being the only one – that they wouldn’t at the age of twenty dream of behaving the way they had at ten, but they saw no paradox in continuing to behave at forty the way they had at twenty.
‘D’you remember when we stayed here at the Meridien that time?’ Jackie was in reminiscent mood. Good luck with that! Her mental recall was the same as her muscle memory – totally shot. She was always mixing up memories of threesomes with orgies, and the locations of past public stranger-anal with past public marital hand-jobs. It was incredible that a grown woman with such a track record of promiscuity could know so little about her own sexual history, especially considering that she had been a journalist for so long – whither the ‘Who/what/when/where/why?’ tools of her trade? It had to be battle fatigue, like a top sniper losing count of how many men he’d killed.
He frowned, scrolling down the sperm-smeared screen of his memory. ‘What, the bukaki party?’
‘No!’ She rolled her eyes in wifely indulgence and shoved him playfully. ‘That adorable old lady who sat by the pool umbrella at the far end every day, all by herself, reading a novel. And at exactly the same time every morning – 11 o’clock – that young waitress would bring her that one glass of brandy. I thought that was just so classy. I’d love to be like that, one day…’
‘You? Not drink till 11?’ He snorted. ‘That’ll be the day!’
She looked sad and he felt fond of her; the clown really was completely free of any iota of self-knowledge. It was very endearing – why, you could pull any stroke on such a semi-evolved soul! He smiled and stroked her hair. ‘Come on, you old lush, let’s get you a drink.’
‘No! It’s only 10. Well, maybe a Bloody Mary. As we’ll be checking out at noon.’
He clicked his fingers, and in return the young pool boy who also fetched drinks – in theory, at least - gave him the finger back, his digit belying the HERE TO HELP message writ large on his T-shirt. Dov laughed, and captured the image in an instant with the camera he wore constantly around his neck as more relaxed, deluded men wore medallions. The Israeli lack of interest in serving, especially by those employed in ‘hospitality’ – or the Hebrew Hostility Industry, as he liked to call it - was a ceaseless source of pleasure to him, and now it would be a source of profit too. YOU’RE WELCOME he’d call this one.
He surveyed Jackie’s big, tanned body stretched out in the sun. Was it too early to try and find a cosy toilet at one of the North Beach beach bars, and therein have his wicked way with his wife? She sat up, and the apparent six-month foetus she was packing put paid to his uxorious urges. But give it a few shots come sundown, and it would soon return, Dov reflected, as he sipped his Kinley soda.
As if reading his mind (he wouldn’t be encouraging that, he decided) Jackie stretched luxuriously and murmured ‘O, I’m SO glad we didn’t have kids together!’
‘I too am pleased that we have no immature goats in our charge,’ Dov answered primly. He hated the word ‘kids’ – start accepting it as a slang word for children from your wife, as far as he was concerned, and you were on a slippery slope to ‘willy’, probably via ‘tummy’ and ‘boobs’. And then you probably started calling each other ‘Mummy’ and ‘Daddy’ never had good sex again. ‘It’s been proven that while marriage makes people happier, offspring do not,’ Dov observed. ‘And this must surely be principally due to the disastrous effect their emergence has on the sexual aspect of their parents marriage.’ He pointed rudely as a young man, pushing a tot in a stroller and laden with bags, followed in the wake of a woman and two small children. ‘Look at that. The triumphant triumvirate of children are essentially the tiny jailers of that man. And that women has acted as judge and jury, pronouncing sentence on the poor sap.’
‘Ooo, I love it when you talk like a book!’ Jackie purred. Already she was fawning on him in her early stages of drunkenness, which fed his desire; he had to be sure to get in there before she was on the BOMB IRAN NOW level of intoxication, in which state she was in no mood for sex with anyone but members of Mossad. He pressed his advantage home, in hope of pressing something more concrete home in a while: ‘It’s true. There was also a survey in which women were asked to list the previous day’s activities and note how they felt during them. Looking after children did badly even against stuff like commuting! Of course they tried to explain it away by blaming it on people having cell-phones and e-mail and being ‘distracted’ – as if that was a bad thing. But of course it’s just the fact that if you educate women to a certain level, they aren’t going to be happy repeating inanities all day long. We don’t expect educated women to find happiness looking after senile people or mentally backward people, but we expect them to be happy catering to an infant’s inanities. Whereas a smart society would enquire of girls at puberty if they intended to breed, and then give them the option of substituting their academic studies for practical courses on mopping up mess, shovelling baby-shit and associated topics. As it is, even moderately educated women are frequently so traumatised by the reality of child-rearing. So much so that they take their fury out on the father of the child by emasculating him. Or as we know it in polite society, ‘co-parenting.’’ Dov nodded at the sorrowful caravan of familial constraint passing by.
’I remember reading someone saying somewhere,’ Jackie mused with typical total recall, nibbling her celery stick as if it was circumcised, ‘that if a Martian came down from space and saw a dog-owner following their pet with a plastic bag, picking up their doings, they’d be convinced that humans were the slaves of hounds.’
‘They’d think the same about fathers and their families too. Look at that!’
The woman had yelled ‘FOOYAH!’ loudly as one of the walking children picked up a dubious-looking balloon which may or may not have seen action in the sex wars. But she was looking – glaring, rather – at the husband, who looked instantly guilty.
‘Fooyah means dirty,’ Dov explained. ‘Look at the guy’s face. Busted! I bet he downloads barnyard porn every night the minute the brats are in bed. While telling the wife that he’s researching Montessori schools or some such bull-crap.’
‘Fooyah…’ Jackie wriggled. ‘What an INTERESTING word…’
‘Apparently there’s a picture of you in the dictionary of slang beside it,’ Dov whispered in her ear, pinching her left nipple hard. He was ready to do her right here, the fat fool.
‘I especially love it when you talk like a DIRTY book,’ she breathed, grabbing him and and getting to work. He closed his eyes – marriage wasn’t so bad, sometimes…
‘Sli-KA!’ came an indignant female voice. Dov and Jackie jumped apart, him staring angrily at the buzz-killing baby-machine whose family had done a lap of the huge pool and appeared now, against all odds and logic, to be bent on setting up camp nearby. Dov couldn’t believe their audacity - an almost empty pool area with maybe a hundred loungers, and they were rocking up to spoil his conjugal jollies. The joyless clowns appeared to be colonising the five nearest loungers as well as three separate parasols lest their little darlings precious skin be besmirched by the very rays of the sun that they had presumably come in search of.
The brood were no sooner settled than the wailing started. Kids were like dogs in more ways than making crap-collectors of their owners, Dov reflected – one started up with the noise, and it set the whole lot off.
‘Jack The Ripper,’ Jackie whispered.
Dov laughed. ‘Use it or lose it!’ Over the past few days in Eilat, they had amused themselves by drawing up what they called The Spawn Scream Table:
JACK THE RIPPER – stubbed toe
SCREAMIN’ JAY HAWKINS – thwarted use of inflatable pool toy
BOSTON STRANGLER – perceived favouring of sibling over self
HAEMORRHOIDAL STEVEDORE – unexpected introduction of sun-hat
THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING – denial of popsicle
USE IT OR LOSE IT – low level keeping-one’s-hand-in grizzle
‘Don’t ever let any hippie tell you that the barter system would be an improvement on the monetary one,’ Dov advised, eyeing the family with distaste. ‘The broads want babies, the men want sex, so they barter – that’s how the vast majority of marriages work. But inevitably, once the woman has what she wants, she welches on the deal. Over the years she cuts out the extras – slices off a little sucking here, trims off a little anal there – and before you know it the poor devil’s on basic rations and slaving round the clock to support a bunch of parasites he never really wanted in the first place. And women wonder why men are ‘scared to commit’! It’s not that they’re scared to commit, it’s that any man who walks into this trap when he could avoid it is committable. Talking of which – ‘
Josh was walking towards them, limping theatrically. ‘There’s sand ALL over that beach! Why can’t it be like Brighton? At least with pebbles you know what you’re getting…’ He stared at Jackie’s drink, halfway to her lips, half finished. ‘What’s that?’
‘Tomato juice,’ she gulped, finishing it up in one draught.
‘Don’t lie to me. It’s BOOZE!’
‘WAS booze,’ she gurgled. ‘With tomato juice, celery stick, CELERY SALT!’ She held up her bottle of Hawaiian Tropic. ‘And what have we here?’
‘Factor 5? Are you SUICIDAL as well as drunk?’ Josh sneered.
‘What a veritable smorgasbord of fruity treats!’ Jackie trilled, very merry now. ‘Mango, papaya, passion fruit, ‘ she read from the label, before hiccupping and applying the viscous oil to her long caramel legs. ‘Et voila! I’ve started my day the five portion way!’
‘She’s drunk at TEN O’CLOCK!’ Josh seethed accusingly at Dov.
‘Ten fifteen. What’s your problem? Couldn’t get laid again?’
‘Is sex all you think about?’ Josh accused, verging on the hysterical. That would be a no, then.
Dov noted with rising pleasure that the annoying family next door were rapidly packing up and moving on. So that was the point of families – to ward off other families. ‘Uh huh. And thinking about it’s all I’m doing with you doing your best impersonation of a raspberry 24/7.’
‘Gooseberry!’ Jackie chortled.
‘You’re disgusting, the PAIR of you – ‘
‘And you only just found that out? I would have thought your dear old dad would have told you what’s up in that department long ago. Isn’t that why he used to treat your mother the way he did, because she was disgusting? And dared to talk back to him when he came out with his fortune cookie philosophies of life? That man will have a bumper stick on his gravestone!’ As Dov’s voice grew louder, and the look on the kid’s face more embarrassed – HERE TO HELP and his slacker colleagues had gathered nearby to stare and snigger – he felt his own excitement grow, and the sex deprivation which he blamed Josh for (and by proxy Solomons Senior himself, who had landed them with the boy) found an outlet as he raved on.
A crowd was gathering now, as guests drifted to the pool from the breakfast buffet, and a few high-rollers from the attached Herods Vitalis Spa were even peering over the balcony that joined the two hotels. Everyone was looking – perfect! And, Dov relished, a good many of them were looking at his cock, which with all the excitement was full on and ready to rumble. Enough was enough; he grabbed Jackie by the wrist and with the last of his fervour pulled her up from the lounger and in the direction of the beach.
‘Where are you going?’ the kid had the nerve to wail.
‘To a public bomb shelter in which to screw your mother!’ Dov shouted back at him, and then repeated it in Hebrew for the wider audience of his tittering kin-folk. ‘And I may be some time. If I’m gone more than fifteen minutes, send a bisexual blonde to find us.
’
Very funny indeed!