"You must be Hera," Joseph remarked to Lucy with about as much feeling as if he were reading a map. And it was then that the dramatic discovery was made: he had these scars!
Lucy could scarcely contain herself. The most appealing of them was a neat drill-hole the size of a five-pence piece, like one of those bullet-hole stickers Pauly and Willy had on their Mini, only this one was on the left side of the stomach! You couldn't see it from a distance, yet when she touched it, it felt all smooth and hard.
"And you're Joseph," Lucy replied mistily, not knowing who Hera was.
Renewed applause drifted across the sand as Alastair held up his glass and shouted a toast: "Joseph! Mr. Joseph, sir! Power to your elbow! Sod your envious brothers!"
"Come and join us, Mr. Joseph!" Robert cried, to be followed by Charlie's furious order telling him to shut up.
But Joseph didn't join them. He raised his beaker and it seemed to Charlie's raging imagination that he raised it to herself particularly, but how could she have registered such a distinction at twenty yards, one man toasting a group? Then he returned to his reading. He didn't snub them; he didn't do anything plus or minus, as Lucy put it. He just rolled back onto his tummy and got on with his book, and goodness it really was a bullet-hole, the exit scar was on his back, big as a splat gun! As Lucy went on staring, she realised she was observing not just one wound but a range of them: his arms, scarred along the underparts of the elbow; the islands of hairless and unnatural skin over the backs of the biceps; the vertebrae scoured, she said--"like somebody had taken a red-hot piece of wire wool to him"--maybe somebody had keel-hauled him even? Lucy stayed with him for a bit, pretending to read his book over his shoulder while he turned the pages, but in reality wanting to stroke his spine because his spine, apart from being scarred, was hairy and recessed in a cleft of muscle, her favourite kind of spine. But she didn't, because, as she explained to Charlie later, having touched him once, she wasn't sure that he was touchable again. She wondered--said Lucy, with a rare spurt of modesty--whether she ought at least to knock first. It was a phrase that afterwards lodged in Charlie's mind. Lucy had thought of emptying his water-bottle and filling it with wine, but then he hadn't really drunk the wine anyway so maybe he liked water better? Eventually she set the jug back on her head and pirouetted languidly home to the family, where she made her breathless report before falling asleep on somebody's lap. Joseph was deemed cooler than ever.
The incident that brought the two of them into formal touch occurred next afternoon, and Alastair was the occasion of it. Long Al was leaving. His agent had sent a cable, which was a miracle in itself. Until then it had been generally assumed with some justice that his agent was unaware of this costly form of communication. It had come up to the farmhouse on a Lambretta at ten that morning; it had been brought down to the beach by Willy and Pauly, who had been having a late lie-in. It offered what it styled "possibility major film part," and this was a great thing within the family, because Alastair had one ambition only, which was to star in large, expensive films or, as they called it, crack a movie. "I'm too strong for them," he'd explain each time the industry rejected him. "You've got to cast up to me; that's the trouble and the swine know it." So when the cable came, they were all happy for Alastair, but secretly a great deal happier for themselves, because his violence had begun to sicken them. It sickened them for Charlie, who was becoming black and blue from his assaults, and it made them frightened for their own presence on the island. Charlie alone was upset at the prospect of his going, though her grief was directed principally at herself. For days, like them, she had wanted Alastair out of her life for ever. But now that her prayers were answered by the cable, she felt sick with guilt and fear at the sight of another of her lives ending.
The family led Long Al down to the Olympic Airways office in the town as soon as it opened after siesta, in order to get him safely on the next morning's flight to Athens. Charlie went too, but she was white and giddy and kept her arms folded tightly round her chest as if she were freezing.
"Bloody flight will be booked solid," she warned them. "We'll be stuck with the bastard for weeks."
But she was wrong. There was not only a seat available for Long Al, but a reserved seat in his full name, booked by telex from London three days ago and reconfirmed yesterday. This discovery took away their last remaining doubts. Long Al was headed for the Big Time. No such thing had happened to any of them, ever. Even the philanthropy of their sponsors paled beside it. An agent--Al's agent of all people, by common consensus the biggest slob in the entire cattle market--booking actual bloody air tickets for him by telex!
"I'll cut him on his commission, mind," Alastair told them over several ouzos while they waited for the bus back to the beach. "I'm not having any bloody parasite taking ten per cent of me for the rest of my life, I'll tell you that for free!"
A flaxen-haired hippy boy, a weirdo who sometimes tagged on to them, reminded him that all property was theft.
Utterly apart from Alastair, aching for him, Charlie scowled and drank nothing. "Al," she whispered once, and reached for his hand. But Long Al was no more gentle in success than he was in failure or love, and Charlie that morning had a split lip to prove it, which she kept wistfully exploring with her fingertips. On the beach, his monologue continued as relentless as the sun. He'd need to approve the director before he signed, he announced.
"No south-of-the-border English faggots for me, thank you, girl. And as for the script, I mean I'm not your type of docile ham actor who just sits on his rectum having lines thrown at him to mouth like a parrot. You know me, Charlie. And if they want to know me, the real me, they'd better get used to that idea right now, Charlie girl, because otherwise them and me, we're going to have a grade-one battle royal with no prisoners taken, oh but we are!"
At the taverna, to command their attention, Long Al took the head of the table, and that was the moment when they realised he had lost his passport and his wallet, and his Barclay-card, and his air ticket, and almost everything else that a good anarchist might reasonably regard as the disposable trash of the enslaved society.
The rest of the family missed the point to begin with, as the rest of the family very often did. They thought it was just another black argument brewing up between Alastair and Charlie. Alastair had grabbed her wrist and was forcing it against her shoulder and Charlie was grimacing while he muttered insults close into her face. She gave a smothered cry of pain and immediately afterwards, in the silence, they finally heard what he had been saying to her in one way or another for some time.