censored skiathos journal (part 5)

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10.10pm. Another Skiathos day almost done. Filled with all the prerequisite Skiathos eventualities.

Worked and read until two thirty. Then set off on what was supposed to be not too long a walk, to a beach on the pretty side of the island.

The walk was another epic. After having gone past a dead snake in the road, an enormous thing, which reeked of the concept ‘omen’, I turned West after about forty five minutes, thinking I was at least half way there. Nowhere near. The road was completely deserted – was passed by two cars and one moped in over an hour’s walking, not a sign of a walker (they’ve all gone home). It wound and twirled through the hills like a drum major’s stick. Not a stitch of shade to be had for most of the way there. There was one point when I could actually see the sea, and felt I might be no more than twenty minutes away, when the road backknifed on itself, and took me the best part of half an hour inland, after which I came to a point exactly the same distance from the sea as I had been before, just two hundred metres the other side of a ravine.

It was gruelling. I didn’t enjoy it. The walking catching up with me. I felt like I was in the Sertao, hot, red mud roads, scrub, no trees to speak of, just boiled valleys, full of snakes and prickles.

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I notice a few tanned spots on my forehead, like freckles, vestiges of pigment. (I have been sitting here working on Truck, and in front of the desk is a large mirror). I peer at these spots. I didn’t notice them before. I thought my forehead was by now a white slate. In which case – are these spots really vestiges? Or are they new? Because somehow you anticipate that one day, the body will retro-spect, rewind the process, and just as randomly as it appeared to disappear, the original pigment will seep back in, year by year, until one day, you’ll just have glymphs of white, and you’ll say – you see those? That’s the colour I used to be.

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