Chapter 4: 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 the pensione 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. The pensione 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 real spawny 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 air au 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 likely catch, if you know what I mean."

"A catch?" 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.