After breakfast, l set out to explore the beach at Saint-Tropez, the same beach we had seen every morning from the balcony of our seventh floor apartment, on the eastern side of the Chateau Messardiere. Jane and l had decided to come to Saint-Tropez on the recommendation of her family and friends, who in pursuit of their nudist lifestyle, had faithfully returned to the south of France for the last ten summers.
It had been a week of full blast, naked hedonism, as Jane and l busily explored every possible combination of word, gesture, body part and emotion, before finally deciding upon a sexual act involving both ourselves, and the hotel room. We had stripped off and run along its dank, narrow corridor laughing with girlish gaiety, eagerly marking its walls and furnishings, with our saliva, mucus, smegma and semen, a crazy semaphore from some deranged, sexually precocious interior designer, briefed with his instructions for decorating the boudoir of a gentle, caring, Fairy Queen.
It was late September and the honeymoon was nearly over.
Soon l would be returning to a life of meetings and symposia, endless presentations where l held court in a shaky kingdom of paper cuts and dust, ruled by sadistic, human resource managers, pushy careerists with bullshit PhDs from Indian Universities and sundry leaches on the capitalist structure, each one squarely under the thumb of our ageing, bleary eyed Director, who had once come across Jane fellating me in a deserted stairwell, staring at her like a pointer in rut, as Jane's mouth, lips and tongue, slowly drew the semen from my testicles.
"Anthony".
"Anthony".
"Remember to use your block out, and keep clear of any mermaids".
"Because they don't brush their teeth, and their bite is poisonous!"
"I'll be thinking of you, while your gone".
"I want you to hurry back to me, Anthony".
"I love you Anthony, l do!".
Jane was standing on the edge of the balcony, some twenty meters away, and had loosened her dressing gown, exposing her small, long nippled breasts. She looked down on me smiling, as if in some Byronic pose, and started to tug at them, in the hope of ejecting a few drops of fluid, presumably as a pacifier. Jane and l had often fantasised about children, spending endless hours copulating, in ever more desperate positions, all in the hope of allowing my half cocked loins, the closest possible access to her cervix, and my waste tissue, the shortest path, to the promised land of her uterus and Fallopian tubes.
But her monthly cycle flowed unceasingly, as my sperm were scattered more cruelly than the lost tribes of Israel.
Our world was what it was.
Endless holidays, terminal boredom.
Sanitised, machine sex.
Jane lifted her arms and started waving, as the hem of her dressing gown rose up above her waist, exposing her dark haired crotch, labia open and protruding. It was then that I suddenly realised that l didn't love Jane, or had ever loved her.
I thought of past infidelities, her hands stained with the blood of a thousand, one night f**ks, a million blow jobs given in the stairwell of every building, in every city, in every country on earth.
I wanted to expunge the memories of the past five years.
I wanted to be dressed in nothing but black.
I wanted to take my lungs out with an ice cream scoop.
I wanted to do a lot of things.
It was half a mile down the coast, that l first saw her.
Rusting flanks and a striped section of cannon breech, emerging from the sand, smooth grey angular planes, with their precise jut and rake expressed in small captured fragments of mid twentieth century air, somehow brought to the surface by the transits of time.
It was a German Tiger tank, lost or abandoned seventy years ago in the face of the Allied landings and now uncovered by some chance combination of tide and wind, with its twin exhausts rusted to the colour of fused oak; 88 mm gun speckled with magnetic mine paste, like some giant metallic penis, inclined towards Jane's natal cleft.
I wondered what the laws were surrounding officially, abandoned wrecks, and whether l would be able to repair and start the massive V-12 Maybach petrol engines. I made a mental note of what l needed to bring on my next visit, and then started to dig away, careful not to expose myself to the cold salt air, as the combination of scuffed sand and rusting metal, the juxtaposition of Jane's anus and vulva, and our newest obsession, seized my mind in a powerful, but ambiguous way.
