Dov rolled over and saw a fine figure of a Jew looking down at Jackie - who had given up on her labour of love and was once more sprawled on her back, snorting softly, like a piglet washed up on an alien shore - as a whole with pretend concern, but at her tits with genuine interest. He had the ripped abs, dirty blond hair, snub nose, and pale, insolent eyes that always made Dov feel both proud that the Israelis had effortlessly bred a golden race of sporty stoners and annoyed that he wasn’t one of them. How easy their lives seemed - unlike his, yoked to a sexual hamster-wheel with his loose canon of a wife, all those photographs out there just waiting to be taken, taunting him, then going home with some other freak with a Leica because he had been too busy getting his end away. This joker probably faced no greater decision each day than whether to wear the turtle- or the pineapple-printed Vilebrequins.
‘Ah…she’s had a bit too much to drink.’
‘You want me to call Sourasky?’
‘No, man, it’s cool.’ Why did he inevitably start talking like some daddy-o from a hipster time machine whenever he addressed young Israelis? ‘It’s not the first time - she’s English.’
The young man grinned, shrugged and settled on the sand beside them, taking a somewhat dog-eared joint from his pocket. He sparked it up and handed it to Dov, who took it not from any desire to get wasted - Jackie was currently working overtime for both of them on that front - but because the glimmerings of a plan were slowly growing in his mind. It wasn’t a pleasant plan, and he wasn’t proud of it, but desperate times called for desperate measures. And he was desperate for a bit of freaky fun.
‘English girls, huh?’ Blondie smirked knowingly. ‘They really go!’
‘They really do,’ Dov agreed.
As if on cue Jackie sat up, her breasts spilling out of her swimsuit, took in Dov’s new friend and smiled brightly ‘Sha-LOM!’
This was going to be even easier than he’d thought. And obviously completely lacking now in what some uptight souls might have judged to be the exploitative angle of his infant plan - the fact that Jackie would have been semi-conscious at best, and probably legally incapable of giving consent. But look at her now - positively running over with slutty bonhomie, like some human Horn of Cornucopia.
Blondie smiled back and produced a fun-sized bottle of arak from his back pocket, a regular mobile candy-store. He grabbed the joint back from Dov and presented both to Jackie with a flourish. ‘For you!’
‘Ooo, TODA RABA!’ She sucked on it greedily, and didn’t she know it, her eyes moving slinkily from Dov to Blondie as her cheeks hollowed around the woozy treat. Blondie watched her for a moment then retrieved the joint, inhaled, put his mouth to Jackie’s and exhaled into it.
O, that old move, Dov thought. What is he, still in college? What sort of sad clown finds a mouthful of filthy smoke an aphrodisiac? His wife, apparently, who was now closing her eyes and putting her arms around the kid’s neck. He surveyed them, in two minds about the unfolding scenario - cynical from the neck up but rather interested from the waist down.
The kid was pushing her back down into the sand now, getting on top of her and grinding away like a good ‘un. ‘Hold this,’ he said to Dov, handing him the sad remains of the soggy joint. Dov didn’t take kindly to being used as an ambulatory ashtray by someone who was in the opening stages of having sex with his wife, so he pushed it into the sand and pushed Blondie off of Jackie, in as non-possessive a way as he could manage.
The kid looked confused. ‘I thought…’
‘You thought right, chavar,’ Dov encouraged him. ‘How you want to do this? Get fucked or get sucked?’
‘By you? No man, I don’t…’
‘Not by me, man! We go all at once.’
‘Oh. Oh, yeah.’ The kid literally scratched his head at the quandary; Dov was pretty sure that they wouldn’t be encouraging him to stick around for a post-coital exchange on the role of post-modernism in the future of Middle Eastern conflict solution. ‘I’m good with being sucked, man.’