Two in the Bush

I know it’s only a few kilometres from home, but there is this little spot where, if I’m coming home from Rhodes Town (for example) I can pull over, sprint up a few metres of dirt track and take a pee where no one can see me. I don’t use it that often, but it has come in handy on a few occasions when I’ve just been so desperate that I haven’t felt that I could quite make it all the way home.

Why did I have to do this on that particular day? Things may have turned out a lot different if I’d just kept driving the last ten minutes to home. The trouble is, none of us can foresee what’s around the next bend, can we? And I was pretty desperate.

I live on the island of Rhodes. My home is toward the south of the island, at least an hour from Rhodes Town by car. During the summer season you can add fifteen minutes to that owing to the sheer numbers of little white hire cars which clog up the roads. Actually, no, an even bigger problem with getting around during the holiday season is those pesky quad bikes. The Greeks call them ′gourou’na’, which I think translates as ‘hogs’. They aren’t designed for road use and go so slowly that they drive the coach drivers, not to mention the rest of us, crazy with frustration, they’re often so difficult to get past on the two-lane roads.

Anyway, I digress. How did I come to be living here? Well, after a messy separation and then divorce, I decided almost five years ago that I needed a sea change in my life. I was only forty-five, still pretty fit and well enough off financially. I’d been to Greece so many times that I decided I’d give it a try living out here. I had no stomach for much at all back in the UK. I still loved, still love my ex, but she decided that she’d had enough of me and took off with an estate agent. To say that I was devastated would be the understatement of the century. We’d made a pile doing up houses for a living. We’d buy a run-down property, spend a couple of years renovating it, then sell it and do the same again. It worked out well for us. Married when I was twenty-four and she was twenty-one, we were together for nineteen years and went through a lot of house-moves, all the while accumulating a nice pot of liquid assets. You don’t know at the time how unsettling it is being constantly on the move. You end up feeling that you don’t really belong anywhere. The only plus point from that for me was that deciding to move out here was a virtual no-brainer. New start, new friends, new climate and enough in the bank to mean I don’t have to worry too much, even after she took off with half of it.

I was lucky, I had a couple of friends who’d moved out here to Rhodes a few years before I did and they put me in touch with Spiro, my landlord. He’s a decent enough sort and the apartment I rent is spick and span, no wires hanging out of the wall, decent kitchen units, that kind of thing. Gennadi is a nice out-of-the-way village with a decent stretch of beach and enough bars and restaurants to keep one occupied. I don’t bother much with the ex-pat community as whole. Everyone’s carrying too much baggage, it seems to me. Mike and Cherry are my only close friends among the ex-pat Brits. Not that the ex-pat community down here is all that large anyway. Go a few kilometres up the coast to Lardos though, it’s like little Britain there.

I know, I know, I’m digressing again. Cutting to the quick, I’m only sitting in this police cell in Rhodes Town today because I stopped for a pee in my usual spot on Friday, June 30th, 2017. It was one month short of my fifth anniversary of living out here.

I pulled over, leapt from the car and ran up the track to get behind the bushes. Usually as I stand there experiencing that ecstatic feeling of pure relief you only get when your bladder’s been so full you’ve broken into a sweat, I end up studying the area around my feet. There are the usual plastic bottles, wrappers, beer cans, that kind of stuff. Occasionally larger pieces of paper, or pages from magazines, are tangled in the bushes in front of me. The terrain here’s not very conducive to lying on the ground, but I do also sometimes see spent contraceptives. What’s wrong with such people that they feel the need to litter the countryside like this? I can get quite worked up about it. I am a keen environmentalist if I’m going to come clean, which is why I’m recounting all of this really.

And that’s not really meant to be funny, either.

Now and again the clearing behind me as I expel the liquid is crammed with bee hives, and their drone quite induces a calm in me, almost like a sedative. I love bees, they do such a wonderful job, don’t they? Once or twice, too, I’ve even been able to salvage a log or two in that clearing for the wood-burner I have in the apartment for the chilly winter nights.

On this day though, like I said, Friday, June 30th, at approximately 4.00pm, while I was on my way back from town, apart from all the human jetsam and general detritus around me, I spotted a human hand, a woman’s hand. It was easy to tell that it was a female. There was no way, though, that I was going to barge under that bush and see what else there was to see. I’m pretty squeamish to be honest. I didn’t want to see any more. I’d leave the rest to the police.

Oops.