The Quay

Zeus awoke at some point in the early hours. It was still dark, or rather the night sky was as dark as it gets facing North in Protaras in August. On top of that the lights of the hotel complex were still full on. It was after the hotel bars had closed though for the wretched thump of music was missing. He was at first a little confused because Hera was sleeping beside him. That was not usual these days although it had to be admitted that they were on holiday and the bed was very big.


As he opened his eyes, he could feel the leviathan in his dreams slipping away. Not going. Not gone. Just slipping away for a while, ready to return when the opportunity showed itself. He wondered for a moment what role his brother played in all this. Whether in some way he was responsible for this great heaviness of being. It was, he had to admit, an unworthy thought. Indeed, it was a pitiful idea especially for the All Father. It was a good job that some thoughts remained secret even amongst the gods.


His mouth had been open for his tongue was dry and he was lying on his back. That most likely meant that he had been snoring although he guessed that Hera was fast asleep and so hadn’t heard him. He rolled onto his side, away from her, a small pain shooting up his leg for reasons better know to the mysteries of biology than to mortal or immortal alike. He noticed that he had left his laptop on and that there was some inert screen of another island paradise facing out towards them from the table. He should have got himself up to turn it off but he couldn’t be bothered.


Although he hadn’t been drinking, he felt that kind of fuzziness that was so common to him these days: that uncomfortable sense of anxiety that meant that he wouldn’t be going to sleep again right now. Carefully, so as not to wake his wife, he got up and went first to the toilet and then, sliding the doors carefully open, out onto the balcony. Here, he could hear a cricket chortling away somewhere nearby with all the enthusiasm that crickets had. He couldn’t see the creature although, as he paced up and down, it seemed to be loudest near the outside light (which he had left off).


He sat down on one of the lightweight metallic chairs and placed his arm on the table. That was when he realised that he had forgotten to bring his glass of water out with him.


“Sod it,” he muttered under his breath.


His mouth and his tongue in particular felt like sandpaper but he didn’t want to wake Hera and so he just sat there looking out over the complex. Below the water in the pool was bubbling and dark blue. Signs indicating that the pool was closed and that no swimming was allowed were spread around the perimeter. A strong chlorine stench coming off from the water made it quite clear that the pool was having its nightly disinfection – enough bleach to deter anyone who fancied night-time skinny dipping, he thought. It was another unworthy thought he knew but then he was Zeus after all and as far as he was concerned the normal rules didn’t necessarily apply.


The distractions however weren’t working. He began to feel the dampness of the beach towel that Hera had placed on his chair earlier that evening as the water started to leach into his underwear. At the same time the leviathan returned to his mind, bringing with it a darkness that seemed to swallow up the pinpricks of light from the gardens below.


“Why now?” he hissed.


Usually, he could point to something that might have triggered his dark thoughts but now he was uncertain. There was the omnipresent absence of sex these days and with the wrong wind and the right level of irritation that could be relied upon to start the ball rolling. He knew it was not that, even though the gods knew that it should be. Nor was it the spectre of autism and all that this offered him with wave after wave of persistent focus that threatened to overwhelm him. Nor was it the shortage of money for that was one of those truths that he held, in this life at least, to be self-evident.


He stood up carefully once more and went back into the hotel room, stopping briefly at his bedside to pick up the glass of water before heading past the bathroom towards the door. Here he stopped and placed his head gently against the woo. It had been cooled by the air conditioning and so that it felt good to his heated brow. He knew that he couldn’t go out, even though a part of him wanted to, even though a part of him was at that moment walking the long corridor to the vestibule where the lifts waited patiently for the hotel guests later that morning. It was a routine, the long slow walk and the clatter of sandals and flip-flops.


“Kalimera!”


“Kalimera!”


Day in, day out. A part of him stepped into the lift and pressed the button for the Ground Floor. The door closed and then a moment later reopened and a young woman stepped in. She was lightly dressed as though for the beach with bikini and a sarong and she looked briefly at him through dark brown eyes from beneath a wave of dark brown hair. She didn’t speak. He knew that she was not one of the living. She touched the button marked B1 and then leaned back against the cool metallic side of the lift.


At the ground floor, Zeus decided to remain in the lift and go with the woman to B1. Here, they both stepped out, she first although it was unclear whether she had noticed the ostentatious wave of his hand or had simply stepped out at the allocated time. He followed her, noting that the sensors did not click on the lights until he had stepped into their view. This child was definitely not one of the living.


He followed her, more out of a sense of curiosity than anything else as she headed out in the general direction of the pool, turning first left and then right to navigate the disability ramp. Once she was outside, she headed straight to the poolside where she stopped. Here she untied the sarong from her waist, dropped her bikini bottom with a delicate bob of her knees and then unclasped the top before diving naked into the toxic cocktail of cleaning fluids in the water before her.


“Hm,” said the god as he watched the roiling and empty surface of the water below him.


Nearby, invisible but horribly present, the leviathan stirred once more. It had been a good diversion but it wasn’t good enough. He tapped his head lightly against the bedroom door a couple of times and then stepped back, walking as quietly as possible back onto the balcony. Once more, he stopped to look over the parapet at the empty pool below.


Of course, they fought. They bickered a lot like most couples who have been together through an intensity of passion and through financial stress and all the angst of bring up children in any age and the menopause, female or the male version for that matter ( if there is one – and it sure felt like it). They were rowing now over something small and insignificant but there was an edge to it for Zeus. It might have been the same for Hera for all he knew but despite all attempts he remained blissfully unaware for the most part of what his wife thought at any given time.


Right now the matter in hand was over a son and his own particular brand of autism. A simple fact of biology that had managed to turn upside down all those learnings and home wisdoms acquired from his parents. Whilst Kronos might not have been a reasonable role model for most, he had nonetheless provided a frame of reference for Zeus’s own rebellion. Indeed, there was a fair amount of the Titan’s own psyche swilling around in the All Father’s head. A small matter that his sister wife was never slow to bring to his irate attention.


“But I am not him,” he would rage as he waved arms about and stormed around the kitchen.

“And I am not your mother, so don’t treat me like her,” yelled Hera back at him with that anger that she was renowned for in the tales.


It was true, of course, Zeus would have to admit in his more sober moments. His relationship with his mother had been an ambivalent one. It wasn’t necessarily a matter of love although undoubtedly when his mother had saved him from his father’s wrath, she had undoubtedly acted out of love. And, in his moments of clarity he knew that Hera was no doubt far cleverer than his mother had ever been and yet he could see, because he was a god, that she was also blessed or cursed with the same simple fragility. Still, he admitted once again to himself, that it was undoubtedly true that she wasn’t his mother, even if she treated him occasionally more like a reprobate son than her lover.


Just as he was Kronos and yet not Kronos. He felt once more the leviathan stir in the deeps.


But that row was then, whenever it was and it had ended, just like so many others, with a stalemate and dark looks and the slamming of doors. All the while in their rooms small children, had they been awake, would have covered their heads in fear. At least that is the tale that the sirens of the Local Authority would have us believe. And in the darkest corners even darker shapes of collective memory would wait and watch impassively taking notes: passing judgements.


This was the moment when the night opened to him to reveal its own particular secrets and ox-eyed Hera came to him from deep within his mind. She came straight from her bath where she had cleaned away the aches and pains of their busy days and had washed and plaited her hair so that it hung down as far as he might desire it to. Then also she had anointed herself with Chanel, what else would she do, goddess that she was? And she had pulled on a pair of dark hold-up stockings and wrapped a lightweight cloth about her that was coloured like saffron. At the last she had fixed to her throat a fine gold chain and re-pierced her ear to accept the single pearl earrings.

Thus undressed, Hera went downstairs to the kitchen where the back door was open, and stepped silently out into the darkness of the garden. He would have to search for her and if he sought, then he would find her and she would give him what he desired. She gave no thought to the neighbours any more than she might have considered the trees or the sky or the stars. This was primal night and biology was demanding and she was at once complicit and her duplicity was without question.

He had found her after a while, following the scent of perfume and of something else as he stepped into the garden, discarding his clothes as he went.

"Therewith the son of Kronos clasped his wife in his arms, and beneath them the divine earth made fresh-sprung grass to grow, and dewy lotus, and crocus, and hyacinth, thick and soft, that upbore them from the ground. Therein lay the twain, and were clothed about with a cloud, fair and golden, wherefrom fell drops of glistening dew. " - Homer.

And afterwards, Zeus slept whilst images of white limbs engulfed him and ensnared him, wrapping themselves around him in turmoil and with racing hearts and sweat that streamed from their bodies as though in their heat they were dissolving.


And Hera slipped away.


He was angry at that memory. He should not have been for it was a thing of simple beauty (and purest lust, he had to admit) and he had no business in getting bumpy about it. It was an image that belonged to a simpler time, when they were younger in the world, when each day ended with night and came anew the following dawn. Unlike now, he considered, when each sleepless night merged into each following grim and bitter dawn.


He found that he was sitting now on the metallic chair once more, although he did not recall stepping back from the balcony’s edge. He could also see the beginnings of purple light appearing at the edges of the sea to one side of the hotel, just out of sight in the east. Then a bird.


He sipped his water, warm and tepid from the residual heat, yet it felt good and it brought him back in touch with his world, the world of this old man sitting on a wet towel on a metallic chair on a balcony in a hotel on a small island in one corner of an inland sea. On the bed, he heard his wife stir and roll onto her back, a gentle puff of air escaping from her partially open mouth.


Below him he heard a squeal and a splash as a young woman dived into the living surface of the pool, her costume and a sarong littering the poolside where she had been standing. He knew that the diversion had been a good one, but he also knew that it hadn’t worked at all. The leviathan had slipped now invisibly into the murky and bleachy deeps in the pool below, out of sight or sense for now but not gone. No, not gone at all.