Degrees of Intimacy Ch. 04

Ibiza

Paul's forehead juddered against the thick glass of the window as the bus sped over the uneven sunbaked tarmac, forcing him to jerk his head back. He studied the trees and villas the bus passed on this longer dash between stops, all brightly illuminated by the late morning Mediterranean sun. He rubbed his forehead uneasily and let it slump again onto the glass.

At least he wasn't feeling like shit this morning, like he did most mornings on his three week stay in Ibiza. He had done well to go easy the night before, his body and head complaining after the punishment he and his friends had inflicted on themselves in the pursuit of pleasure. His mates were still back in the room they shared in thepensione just outside the town. He could imagine Baz still in bed with Tina and Dave with Sue, the girls they had got off with last night. Paul had been less lucky. The girl he'd focused on had collapsed in a pool of vomit and had to be helped back to her hotel by her friends, while he tailed behind Baz and Dave and their fresh conquests. Their score rate was always more impressive when they held back on the booze, though the general haze of Ecstasy and blow took away most of their inhibitions with women.

Paul had consumed enough booze and blow to help him fall asleep in his lonely bed where he could hear Baz and Dave making love with Tina and Sue. Fortunately, they weren't nearly as noisy as on that other night when Paul had also scored, but it was Baz that time who had to doze off alone.

Their Ibiza holiday was going well. After only one week, their relative score rates, which they often liked to compare, was nothing to be ashamed of. Eight nights so far, and each of them had scored with at least five lasses apiece. It mightn't be that romantic having to fuck in the same room as your mates, but they had to be careful with cash. Thepensione they found not long after arriving on the island was dead cheap. This meant they had plenty left to spend on nightclubs, drugs and booze.

Paul, no more than his mates, didn't want to go too wild. The money they'd saved in their year off working in offices and factories before going to university, he to Manchester and Baz and Dave to Leeds and Sussex respectively, would be needed to supplement their student loans. That was one millstone Paul didn't relish carrying about with him while studying Engineering and Physics. But Ibiza was generally real cheap, except for the nightclubs of course. They'd done the main clubs. Pacha. Manumission. Café Del Mar. Most evenings, they went to rather cheaper clubs where the DJs might be less famous but the music was just as banging. Or seemed to be when you were tanked up and E'd out.

Paul glanced over at the middle-aged Spanish woman he'd haltingly asked to alert him to the stop his Spanish was far too rudimentary to pronounce especially well. Most of the time, you didn't need to speak a word of Spanish, which was just as well, really. Languages had never been his strong point. He hoped though she didn't guess why he wanted to get off at this stop. In fact, he hoped he could avoid telling Baz and Dave just where he was going. He hoped they might think he'd lucked out again as he did in Tangiers with that Danish lass. Baz never stopped telling him he was a realspawny get, which tickled him. It was usually Dave who pulled the birds the most successfully.

He wished he'd kept in touch with Marla. They'd swapped e-mail addresses, but Paul sensed that any mail he sent her wouldn't be answered with quite the alacrity he always showed when something new appeared in his inbox that wasn't spam. She was a bonny lass. Not as much so as Trish, but bonny nonetheless.

The woman smiled at him from across the bus and gestured to him.

"Is this the stop?" Paul asked as the bus slowed down.

"Si!"

Paul staggered out of the bus. "Cheers mate!" he said to the bus driver, who made no comment. He wondered if it was just because Spanish drivers didn't acknowledge you like they did back in Newcastle or if he guessed why Paul should choose such an out-of-the-way place to disembark.

As the bus drove off, a cloud of dust blowing in its wake, Paul fumbled in his rucksack for the Lonely Planet guide he'd brought with him. If this was the bus stop, then he still had quite a walk to get where he wanted to go.

It had always been a secret ambition of his, one he'd never confessed to anyone except Trish, let alone Baz and Dave, to go to a nudist beach. He knew there were a few on Ibiza and now just seemed the right time to see what one was like. He wondered if that meant he was some kind of perv. Maybe it wasn't a pervy thing to go round starkers, but a lot of nudists were supposed to be real cranky. And Paul wasn't sure he wanted to go because he wanted to enjoy the open airau naturel or because he just wanted to gawp at naked women, but he was committed now. He couldn't very well go back without doing what he'd come to do. Even though he'd later have to invent some excuse that he'd been wandering round the markets to justify his absence to Baz and Dave. If they told his other mates back home, well, he'd be laughed out of the Stag and Hounds. And maybe the New Inn and all.

Paul followed the signs to 'La Playa' which he guessed meant 'beach', but you wouldn't have guessed that as the trail led him through thick brush and over rocks. Finally, perhaps a mile or so later, he was at last at what was a beach. But was it a nudist one?

Paul nervously walked along, glancing at bathers dressed in normal swimsuits. Just past an official looking sign he could see bodies in the distance which, squint as he could, displayed no evidence of bathing costumes. Paul waited until he'd passed a few naked bodies, mostly couples, some with children and some rather old, before he decided that, yes, this was definitely a nudist beach.

He felt slightly excited as he took off his shorts and tee-shirt, the new one he'd bought at Manumission, and stuffed them into his rucksack, wearing now only his designer sunglasses and the espadrilles he'd bought for next to nothing at the market. He hoped his excitement wasn't express by the penis that swung between his legs, one he had no need to be ashamed of, but was so easily aroused. And there was a lot to arouse it.

Somehow, even ordinary women looked so much better in the nude. And yes, not only were they topless, which was no big deal, but he could see the hairy patches of pubic hair magnified in his mind out of all proportion to the bodies that sported them. Even the plump girls didn't look bad. He was slightly disturbed by his feelings when he saw two naked girls, probably not even twelve years old. He wasn't some kind of paedophile, was he? That wasn't right. He averted his gaze to distract his mind from inappropriate thoughts, wondering now whether what was most pervy wasn't so much going about starkers, which he was sure was no big deal (though it seemed so not so long ago), but that he couldn't take his eyes off the women.

In actual fact, there were more naked men than women, but when you'd seen one limp cock in a bush of hair you'd seen them all. He just wished that some of the women weren't accompanied by either men or children. There was no chance for him to get to know them, And that, as Paul got steadily bored with walking along the coarse sand, the sea crashing on the shore and hidden from any roads or houses by thickets of palm trees and rocks, was surely the point of this exercise. Much as he liked beaches, he'd had more than a week of them now and this beach was nothing special, beyond being a bit secluded. He'd spent many hours dozing with Baz and Dave on much nicer beaches than this, only with a towel and a Science Fiction novel to keep him company.

Paul wasn't sure what he expected to gain from talking to a naked woman on the beach, any more than he was sure why he was there in the first place, but it seemed the natural thing to do. And there at last, almost totally obscured by the huge boulders around her, Paul saw an unaccompanied woman. As he approached her, he was sure she was a bonny lass. She certainly wasn't fat, although certainly not thin, and she had a very impressive pair of breasts. Paul didn't think of himself as a tit-man, although when he and his mates discussed what it was that they liked most about women, he'd never quite decided if he might not be. He didn't have Dave's attraction for arses or Baz's for thighs, and he was self-aware enough to know that a pretty face, however bonny, wasn't enough without a good accompanying package.

Experience had told him that whenever an opportunity was presented, the right thing to do was to dive in. When he was younger and his mates started seeing girls, he had been so painfully nervous he never got anywhere. Then his mate, Dave, gave him good advice as to what to do. It doesn't matter what you say, he told him, just say something. And don't worry about how crap it sounds. A lass isn't really listening to the words anyway.

"It's a good thing you've got a shade up in this sun, like!" said Paul, pointing at the sunshade that sheltered most of the woman's body.

Until then, Paul had really only seen her back and the pendulous bosom as her body twisted round to rest her buttocks on a huge beach towel. He'd noticed that her dyed-blonde hair was short, not severely so, but off the ears. Her skin was a medium golden brown rather than the deeper, almost chocolate brown, of those people who made a religion out of sunbathing. The eyes behind her small steel-framed sunglasses peered into a slim novel by someone called Jeanette Winterton, whom he'd never heard of before. But when she turned her head around to look at him as he stood a yard or so away from her, he now noticed that she wasn't a young lass at all.

She wasn't old exactly. Well, younger than his Mam which was Paul's benchmark of middle-age, but not that many years younger. Maturity had made her breasts pendulous, her arms thicker than the stick-thinness of a younger woman's arm, and her stomach less flat. In fact, she might even have had lines on her face, but Paul couldn't be sure in the shadow of the sunshade.

"I'm sorry?" she asked in a voice that had lost every hint of girlishness.

"The sunshade, like. It's a good thing you've got one in this bright sun and all."

"You're a Geordie, aren't you?" she asked with an amused smile, turning her body round to face him. She looked him up and down dispassionately.

"Aye," said Paul weakly, suddenly feeling very naked, his penis now such a prominent thing between his legs but one he knew it was far too late to try and hide behind his hands. And now he could see her in all her nudity, he felt a sudden frisson as he regarded her crotch. She hadn't even a little patch of pubic hair there. Not even the little stripe adorned by porn stars and strippers, like the ones at Manumission. And, unlike those children, equally bald in that region, whose crotches had disturbed him so much and made him evade his eyes partly from respect and partly from fear of his own desires, this was not the tidy smooth vulva of a London statue. The lips of the vagina spilled out and were clearly visible, as golden tanned as her breasts and the rest of her body. No white patches, unlike the rather obvious one he exposed between his waist and lower thighs.

"And you're alone, are you?" she asked. "You're not with some friends hiding behind a rock laughing at you while you chat up a strange English woman on the beach?"

Paul blushed. Was he making a fool of himself? "Naw! There's nobody. There's now't but me, like. I just saw you sitting there, all alone, like..."

"And you thought you'd chat with me, is that it?"

"Aye. I'm sorry if I've pissed you off, like," he said crestfallen and blushing in that way he still couldn't control. Just as he had with that Danish lass in Morocco. "I'll just leave you, like. I shouldn't have disturbed you."

"Don't be silly!" the woman laughed with some kind of Southern accent. Not a London accent, perhaps, though Paul was no expert in these matters. Maybe Home Counties. "I don't mind. As long as you don't think I'm a likelycatch, if you know what I mean."

"Acatch?" Paul wondered.

"Well, whatever you youngsters call it these days," she said. "Look! Sit down. I don't mind. I'm by myself. My ... er ... friend, she's sleeping off a hard night at the moment, so I thought I'd wander over to the nudist beach. Catch up on a bit of reading. Improve my tan. As long as you don't get any silly ideas, I really have no quarrel."

Paul sat down nervously beside her. Perhaps this wasn't such a good idea. He looked around the beach, where the next nearest company was quite a way off. "Naw! I wasn't going to ... you know ... I'm not really that kind of guy. Not really." Although, when he was with Baz and Dave, and the girls were so obviously up for it, there was no doubt in his mind that he could be and, in fact, almost certainly was that kind of guy. But here, alone, with a woman more than fifteen years older than him, he was definitely not lying.

"I see," said the woman, placing her paperback face down on the towel. Paul noticed for the first time that the illustration on the cover was of a quite sexy young woman. "My name's Jayne, by the way."

"Paul."

"Paul the Geordie," Jayne laughed. "Almost every region of Britain is represented here in Ibiza. Why's that?"

"It's the clubs, like," Paul said. "That's why me and me mates are here."

"You like dancing, do you?"

"Oh aye! Going to nightclubs and dancing. That's the biz."

"And what music do you listen to? Is it this house music that they play?"

"Well, some house. Mostly hard house. But I like trance, me. But I'm not too fussy. I'll dance to anything if it's got a good beat. You know, garage, progressive, drum & bass, even R&B."

"Really?" Jayne asked, leaning over with a smile, that shaven crotch less than two feet away from Paul's limp penis.

Paul breathed in deeply. This reminded him of the unexpected consequences of his encounter with Marla. What the fuck had he let himself in for?

"Are you a nudist, like?" he asked.

She nodded. "Areyou, Paul? Surely you must be to come to a beach like this."

"Not really," confessed Paul, trying hard to keep his eyes off Jayne's shaven crotch, but not sure where else to look. He could see his reflection in Jayne's sunglasses as surely as she could see her own in his. "I thought I'd just see what it's like."

"I'm not a card-carrying nudist. I don't belong to any naturist organisations. But I like to be naked. And do you have a girlfriend?"

"What here? On the beach?"

"Well, anywhere?"

"Not really. Though I did a few months back. Do you have a boyfriend?" He asked this to deflect the conversation away from the subject of his single status.

"No. In fact, I've never really had a boyfriend."

"No?" wondered Paul, feeling quite sorry for the lass. She wasn't bad looking and she didn't seem especially shy. "Why's that, like?"

"I don't really want one. Men don't appeal to me very much."

"Oh!" said Paul, feeling even more sorry for her. This reminded him of what Trish told him the first time he persuaded her to go out with him. Perhaps Jayne was like that for the same reasons.

"That's what my girlfriend said at first," he told her.

"She did?" Jayne asked, with a genuine expression of interest. "But she changed her mind, did she?"

"It took a long time," Paul admitted. Somehow, it didn't feel so bad talking about such things with an older woman. "We'd been going out together nearly a year. She let me kiss her and touch her up and all, but whenever I suggested doing anything more she got all upset and sometimes angry."

"Was it because she preferred women?"

"Women?" wondered Paul, who'd never thought of that before. "Naw! She wasn't a lezzie... a lesbian. It was her Dad that made her like that."

"Her Dad?" asked Jayne, with a slight catch in her voice that suggested genuine concern.

"She didn't tell me about it for months. But she made hints I didn't really understand, like. In fact, we'd been going out for ages, and we sorta pretended we'd been, you know, doing it, so our mates wouldn't think we were queer or ow't, and then she told me all about her Dad. He'd left her Mam a couple of years before and she'd never really told me why. But it was because... it was all because of her..."

Paul paused as the memory of Trish's confession replayed itself in his mind. She cried so much while she told him. She was hardly able to complete a sentence before spluttering into tears.

"Was her father abusing her, Paul?" asked Jayne in a low sympathetic voice and placed a hand very lightly on his bare shoulder.

Paul squeezed his eyes. He was glad for the sunglasses now. Not only did they keep out the glare of the sun, their presence meant Jayne couldn't see the moisture in his eyes behind them. He really was soft as shite, even now. He still felt really angry on Trish's behalf. And yet Trish's father had never seemed a bad bloke, often going down the same pub as Paul's Dad and his pals.

He nodded his head. "Not once. Not even only a couple of times. But all the time! And getting Trish never to tell her Mam, like. Ever since she was real young."

"How young?"

"I dunno. It started when she were just a bairn. But he had real sex with her when she was not even yet eleven, like. And he kept doing it till Trish told the school councillor about it when she was fourteen."

"Why did she leave it so late?"

"I guess she didn't want to get her Dad locked up or summat. You know what it's like when you're young. Family first and all. But she was always moody at school. And got into trouble all the time. Getting into fights, bunking off school, not doing her homework and things. And when the councillor spoke to her, she sorta let it all spurt out, like. And that was why her Dad had to leave home."

"She'd never told her mother?"

"Her Dad told her not to. That it would upset her, like. And that she shouldn't upset her Mam."

"And what did you feel like when she told you?"

"I dunno. Real weird, I suppose. But it wasn't long after that, we sorta got it on together. But we only sorta did so for a few months. And then she decided not to see me any more, like."

Paul thought back to those two or three months when he and Trish were real lovers. It was strange. He wasn't a virgin before her, but she was his only proper regular girlfriend. And when, a few days after her confession, Trish said she'd decided they could have sex together, it was real weird doing it with her. But after the first few slightly embarrassing tries, their relationship became incredibly passionate. And it was obvious that Trish knew a great deal about sex.

Those first few times, she was really reserved. It was as if she thought sex was something you did with your eyes closed, on your back, sort of waiting for it to be all over. But then she somehow exploded into an ecstasy and passion that frightened Paul. It was a sudden release. And for the next couple of months, Paul and Trish had the best sex he could imagine anyone ever having. Every time they made love, he just wanted to stay inside her. She made every effort to keep him there, although because she insisted he use a condom, and she never took the pill or got a diaphragm, they got through quite a few packets every week.

And then, on the phone, not in person, she told him she'd decided they shouldn't see each other again.

And that was that.

No warning. No sign that anything was wrong the last time they'd made love, their bodies clinging together, sweat sticking to their conjoined skin. They had the same relaxed conversation afterwards, when they both joked together and caressed each other's still-burning flesh. And then, on the phone, a curt announcement that they were no longer a couple, a decision that didn't change at all despite all his pleading and subsequent phone calls. And no evidence that there was another boyfriend who'd superseded him in her affections.