Filthy Men and Skinny Bitches
By Brianna Walsh
Listen to Brianna reading this story:
Greece is full of filthy men. I generally try not to generalise, but it’s true.
Not just the Greeks themselves, brown, paper-bag skin stinking of smoke and sweat and wet dogs, barking at our summer sandals, snarling and snapping at Niamh and her arm tucked in mine, both of us screeching our way down white cobblestones. No, not just them filthy creatures. There were more Irish Over Seas, and the British, Aussies and Yanks, rich German boys who didn’t want to tell us what their parents did for a living, because then we’d know for sure that Daddy bought their watches, and the snus we rolled around our gums, and the rest of their boarding school summer holidays. Holidays they’d reminisce about without realising how they got there, drank so much, had all those sunset swims and sexual encounters. We didn’t have sex with them. We just made fun of their collared shirts, tasted their tobacco and left.
The days were lived in memory of the nights before. Crochet bags slung over shoulders just after noon, cream still wet on our backs and long nauseous walks to the nearest beach. On this final island, we couldn’t afford to take the bus. We swung from each other and giggled, the five of us, on our way out of the Airbnb, past our host’s little shrine to Jesus. She ran the place with her mother and daughter, three generations of their fathers’ name on the door. The door stood just below their pledge to God (the Father), a crucifix stuck like a thumb in the air. Occasionally, granddaughters. Little dark-haired girls playing with cats, doomed and scared of our short dresses. When Mary arrived home at 8am that morning, having not returned since we teetered out twelve hours before, they all sat at reception and glared at her, make-up mussed, heels in her hand.
She threw her body into the sea first and I envied her. I longed for that sore feeling, that startle, salt against skin, the heat of a wave. The remnants of a man’s touch lasted hours. I heaped sand into my palm and let it fall through my fingers, form a mound on my stomach, seep like time inside my navel. My other hand held a book to block the sun but the words sunk into the page and I dozed, head achy. My leg twitched every so often and the shape of young women rose and fell around me and occasionally, there was the soft crunch of a plum between Cáit’s teeth.
This most recent time, he lingered on me for days. His dull tongue hung in my mouth every time I licked my lips or had something nice to eat. I could still feel the rough scrape of bark grazing the backs of my calves and with it, the incapacity to feel anything but his hand cradling my cheek, his shattered breath on my neck, the mass of him pressed against me and the tree.
We’d met just a few days before I left for Greece. St. Anne’s Park, his side of the city, a foreign, family life I skirted around; make a good impression, don’t mention the word girlfriend. We hadn’t spoken for a while and I’d stocked up his voice notes, like promises. If I didn’t, he wouldn’t make any. He told me he’d a book for me that I’d like. Naturally, after months apart, this was the most romantic thing I’d ever heard, intensified by the plasticky heat of the book itself and the fact that he’d bought me my own copy. Even if the book was called “Take Charge of Your Career and Find a Job You Really Love”. Even if it did require my answer to interrogating questions I wished he would just ask. It wasn’t on loan.
I launched myself into the ocean then, let her envelop me like he had. The sea was nicer though, fresher, left my lips tasting all salty and new. She embraced me like a lover would from a lost other-world. Spending time abroad made me think like this, waves and wandering paths opening up a depth that everyone suppressed at home. It was hard to ignore here, while she crashed into me and cobbled cathedrals and the haggard edges of islands. Years upon years, layers of stone and stories pressed within them, people swimming and swilling and speaking to each other. A startingly intimate existence. I felt as though I could hang there for hours, under the water. Suspended in the clutch of something bigger, without having to apologise for that. She would just hold me, as I am and if I wanted, for as long as I asked her to.
On our way home, our hair drip-dried and we stopped for Lays and large bottles of vodka. The tarmacadam was beginning to melt, rivers of ink inching into drains, steam rising. The sun, still high, held its breath for later. Foreign supermarkets were exciting and we photographed colourful rows of fruit, the post-it note price tags that valued each. I laughed at the thought of doing this in Aldi and said so to Niamh, whose Instagram feed was curated to perfection. Her last post contained over-ripe strawberries, a blue, white and pink side street and a blurred set of half-full wine glasses. She snorted before posting a filtered basket of courgettes to her story. We then began to discuss taking pictures of things like Dublin bus, or Stephen’s Green shopping centre and laughed the whole way back. “But everything is so pretty here!”
She was right. Even where balconies crumbled, or steps led to nowhere, it only added to the town’s charm. Though we didn’t capture the long, blazing walk back to the apartment, motorway roaring in our ears and desolate nothing for miles, except an odd church or service station. Our budget didn’t stretch to ‘rustic’, ‘cultural’ and ‘centre’.
Before we turned down the final dusty trek, a lurcher appeared on the corner, chained to his owner’s fold-up chair. The chair was folded out and in it sat the parent of the mutt. He leered at us over rounded belly and when the dog began to bark, shouted angrily in Greek. We sprinted, flip flops slapping, and eventually reached the sanctum we now called home, bent over from stitches. I can’t breathe, we wept, I forget how to breathe. I let the thick folds of my stomach swallow my hands whole and smiled.
His sister had an eating disorder. Or issues with that kind of thing… like, when we were kids. I told him I couldn’t remember the last time I’d woken up without hating my body. We were naked and I watched his eyes widen. His sister’s childhood secret was another reason why he couldn’t commit to me. Another reason why his life now, as a result of his life then, was just a little too fucked up to fuck up having a girlfriend too. Another reason we discussed delicately, in bed, for hours. Scared to hurt each other.
Reasons why men don’t commit are the same reasons they buy books about “following your dreams”. Some things are so big, so consequential, time seems better spent reading about decisions, rather than making them. Or sleeping with decisions, in our case. That’s all we were really, a decision waiting to be made. That all made sense. I understood these things, how things are forever liable to falling apart. I made great efforts to understand, to empathise, to be there. We were twenty-five, after all. Nothing felt fully right. It’s just that being wrong was starting to bother me less and less. What did bother me was his insistence to buy me books anyway, kiss me against trees when he knew deep down that he shouldn’t, couldn’t. Not really.
I’d accepted the book though, and the text, and the kiss. I thumbed through the pages and longed for his lips before we got ready to go out again. Checked my phone for his name. Scrolled through his Instagram profile. One of the girls thumped down on the bed beside me and fed me a Salt and Vinegar crisp. We chased with shots of spirit, tasted like nail varnish remover. Chased that with San Pellegrino and sucked the juices out of limes. Skinny bitches, that’s what we called these concoctions. “I dare you to order a skinny bitch at the bar tonight!”
Dinner was sourced in a quaint eatery next to the water. Hollow and cosy all at once. Cave walls and little paintings speckled by the sea. I slurped spaghetti, suckled prawns. Shared smiles of watermelon slices, fresh tomatoes and feta. We spoke of what we would do with our lives in a way that felt possible. This was a rare sense of mine, and I savoured it like the shrimp, stretching the muscles of my cheeks. Expansive. I squeezed my dreams between my teeth, rolled them over my tongue and fed them to my friends.
Chocolate fondant for dessert, rich and blameless. However many drinks in, we’d moved on in conversation. “And he hasn’t texted you since? He buys you a book and hasn’t got in touch?”
“Yeah, but I did tell him I was going away.”
“Still…”
“Does anyone else think we’re reading into the book too much?”
Everyone directed death stares towards Mary. “Sorry, no, of course not. He bought you a book.”
“He bought her a book, Mary! I can’t even get a text back.”
“Well, neither can she.”
“What did you say again?”
“Just that I had a good time and could we do it again when I get back. Could we at least figure it out?”
“And he’s seen it?”
“Yeah, he saw it forty-five minutes later or so.”
“And how long has it been?”
The night before, at about 2 am, I’d sent him a text demanding a reply. The room was sticky and Cáit’s arm had slumped itself across my stomach in the bed we shared of its own unconscious accord. At 2:07, I sent another apologising. He hadn’t responded to either. I shoved the prickly shame down,
down,
down,
and said, “Well, we’re here, what, ten days? Eleven days?”
“Bastard!”
“No, it’s probably me. He doesn’t owe me anything, we’re not together. We were never together. And he has a lot going on, you know.”
“It’s NOT you!” On this, they were unanimous.
After the tree in St. Anne’s Park, there was inevitable, hasty sex, back on my side of the city. He’d left then, eyes fixed to the floor. Book on my bedside locker. Suddenly aware of what we’d done again and the weight of it. He’d stuttered, “We should talk when you’re back.”
“Yeah, sounds good.” I’d felt light. Like my body had lifted from the bed and only my soul remained, sinking into the covers, naked and bound to something big. Stopped, for a while, thinking about all the things wrong with me. Wrong with us. How, when there had been this, could there be anything wrong with us?
The clubs in Greece weren’t clubs. They were tiny bars wedged into the same walls as the restaurants, like pop-up shops for alcoholics. Inside resided more seedy animals, encouraged by a self-confidence that only came from the inhibition of being somewhere new and temporary. Tight white jeans, coifs gelled into hard little hills, shirts lacking one too many buttons. They were greedy, starving, entitled, and we were fresh summer meat. Cáit inched herself away from one, step by tiny step, eventually grabbing my hand and spinning us away. “Bitch” followed us, just under breath, barely a second after.
We didn’t care. This was it. This had been it for a lot longer than this, than us. There was something nice about surrendering to it, about surrendering to Greece and the simplicity of it all. Boys who barked and churches for houses and girl-prey in summer pubs. The music reverberated our bones and we threw them around, danced on table-stages. They watched and we let them. We enjoyed it, them watching us. I know we did. I know because Niamh kept fixing her top and Mary flipped her hair and looked over her shoulder every few seconds, towards a tall man in the corner whose hands were big and skin was sallow. Cáit adjusted her skirt and I watched us like the men did, before checking myself in the mirror on the opposite wall.
Time passed like this, quicker than we could keep up with, the night slipping from under us until we found ourselves pulled into a tangle of German girls. It occurred to me that before this moment, I hadn’t noticed the presence of any females in the place. Not even to compare an outfit to my own, the golden spray of another’s tan, the sway of hips and sound of anklets decorating delicate feet, placed there to make me feel fat.
One by one, they dragged us in, and then others. Two Spanish, a few Australians and one from Costa Rica. Every girl that passed was swept up until the bar was left with only men at its counter. More men stood along the walls and sat at tables. At their centre, this circle of dancing women.
It didn’t take long for them to approach, as though we emanated some kind of wanting. Needing. Dependence. Reliance. Assurance. Affirmation.
No. We didn’t let any of them in.
Each and every one was pushed away, the German ringleader spreading her arms and forcing us to find each other in the dark, find hands we’d never held and shoulders we’d never cried on. At first it seemed accidental, like there wasn’t enough room. We filled what wasn’t a dance floor, but the only space between door and drink. The more who tried, the more active she became in her agitation. Gimme, gimme, a man after midnight.
We wouldn’t let any of them in.
“I feel kind of bad”, Mary whispered in my ear, but she was caught now too, wrapped up in us, the length of our hair and our limbs, generations long.
“I feel free!”
We were skinny bitches. Thin, beautiful victims. Allowed to be wronged. Allowed to be angry. I let myself dance, in a circle of strangers, waxed armpits and plucked brows and the perfume of sun cream sweat. And I let men be filthy creatures.
Brianna Walsh is a writer living in Dublin. Originally from Kilkenny, she works in rights education and youth engagement. She's interested in people, how we behave and relate, and how we're impacted by contemporary culture. She writes fiction and personal essays and is a member of a writer's group, whose feedback, support and example are sources of motivation and inspiration.