Holiday Snaps

(All the writing in this set was inspired by dreams. For more info
read 'An Explanation - 25 Dreams'.)

The sun hurls its heat down through the non-roof of this greenhouse and
bakes the earth so that cracks have appeared like fault lines. I walk
through the dust with my camera and look at the plant life that has
swelled here to many times the size of the plants back home.

Most arresting are the Venus fly traps, their heads perched atop stems
as tall and thick as sunflower stems, mini-trees. The heads themselves
are the size of watermelons and the teeth of the jaws overlap like
crocodiles', a hideous grin on each eyeless face. Inside, I can hear
the tapping of flies trapped in the fleshy oven of their mouths. Around
them, flies are buzzing as if to get in, not realising the peril they
have narrowly escaped.

Some mouths still stand open showing the glaring red of their interior,
each one attended by two or three dozen zigzagging dots, their playing
not yet enough to tempt the jaws to clamp down around them. A further
ten or twenty flies lie dead or dying in the scarlet goo of the open
traps.

Behind me, a set of jaws opens with a hiss like escaping steam; inside
the maw is empty, gleaming, painfully red.

The heads of the plants bob gently.

If the plants have grown to these proportions, I wonder, then what of
the wildlife that may have crept into this hot corner behind the house,
and as if in answer to my question I see a pair of hot, black eyes
blinking at me from beneath the shadow of fauna.

It is a lizard. Huge, the length of my forearm, not including its tail
that lies like a snake, powerful and thick where it starts and tapering
out to a liquorice-like whip.

I see more of them now, jumping from plant to plant.

The heads bow, and rise.

I take pictures.

As we leave, I look through the lack of a ceiling up at the steadily
darkening sky. The sun is setting, an amber orb looking back at the
Earth. In front of that fire, more flies dance, silhouetted.

Because of the deepening colour of the sky, I can only see the flies
when they are in front of the sun and it creates the illusion that the
flies are trapped inside it, the way they were caught inside the Venus
fly traps.

I want to take a picture of this enigma and so I call to my friends to
wait. They do and I raise my camera. In order to get a decent picture I
have to jump so that the lens clears the wall of the house behind which
the sun is rapidly setting, falling.

I take the picture, not at all certain that it will come out and this
doubt is like fuel to the many smouldering doubts that have been
eclipsed by the wonders I have been seeing.

It is a shame, I think, that all this is only caught on a disposable
camera, without a flash; and then I realise that this plastic camera
does not wind automatically. I have not wound the film on once, despite
the many pictures I have taken.

Quickly, I wind the film and take a picture of the flaming sun, almost
completely set and barely visible at the top of the wall. Despairing, I
retrace my steps into the depth of the greenhouse, winding on the film
as I go. I take hurried pictures of the bulbous fly traps, like a
forensics photographer; I snap shots, without finesse, as though simply
cataloguing items for a potential insurance claim.

The sun has almost completed its arc. The best pictures are still
there, in the dark.

I snap a lizard.

It probably won't come out.

Dejected, I go outside with my friends and meet the night. Although it
is dark, it is warm and on the cooling breeze there is the scent of
plants and flowers reinforcing the fact that we are far from
home.

As we cross the courtyard, there is a jeep waiting for us, and inside
it, Alfonso, with a large white hat and khaki shirt, open to let in the
breeze. Beside him is his friend and tenant, Mark, who is a
student.

We pile in and it is in this moment that I decide I need to go to the
toilet.

They wait for me in the car while I go back up the steps, through the
huge front door, into the house. I expect to see a butler, it is that
kind of door, but no-one greets me.

Apparently, the toilet is easy to find, just follow my common sense.
There are six doors leading off in different directions. I stand in the
red-carpeted hallway, deciding. The wide strip of carpet is like a
catwalk and it ends opposite me at another door just like this one. I
know that is the last place the toilet is, but it is intriguing
nevertheless, because the carpet leads only in that direction - to walk
towards any other door would mean you had to walk on bare floorboards,
and I get the impression that I am not alone in the house.

I decide to make a move before I am discovered by that other presence,
be it benign or not. I go to the right. Through an arch. Down a
corridor. Turn left. Immediate right. Into another room like a hotel
kitchen, and the toilet is on the right. How I knew this, I don't know.
Common sense said that in a building like this, this is how you get to
the toilet.

I shut the door behind me and proceed to put almost all of my clothes
into the toilet bowl. I pull them out suddenly in horror, realising
what I have done. Fortunately, they are not too wet and in the heat
they will soon dry off.

I pee, almost as an afterthought, and make my way back to the front
door. Somehow, I find my way back, and I stand there, a couple of steps
from the door, knowing that my two friends, Alfonso and his student
tenant are waiting for me in the jeep, but I am fixed to the spot and
my eyes are fixed on the door opposite this exit, the intriguing door
where the red carpet ends and begins.

Putting my clothes into the toilet has delayed me, but ... I cannot
leave here without looking ... just to know ... what is behind that
door.

I walk quietly and quickly to the door, checking behind me to make sure
Alfonso has not come in to find me. He hasn't and there are no other
sounds.

There is a small label on the door, which I read. It says: DO NOT READ
THIS LABEL.

Okay, I think. I can pretend not to have read it. I was looking for the
toilet, and I got lost.

And so, slowly, carefully, I turn the handle, and push open the
door.

It creeps back, a couple of inches, a foot, enough for me to put my
head round. Inside is a porch, a tiny anteroom, and at the other end of
this cupboard-size space is another door, cobwebbed and the same size
as the door I have just opened. On the floor is something like a
welcome mat, but it is made of brown bristles and is covered in dust
and grey fur. The floor is similarly dusty. The only light comes from
behind me as I look at the second door.

To open one door is an error. I made a mistake, I was looking for the
toilet, I got lost ...

To open a second door, like this, is deliberate and a trespass. And to
be caught like this ... in here ...

The door is a temptation and as soon as you open it you are caught; I
know this. The consequences of opening a door like this would not be
worth the sight behind it, whatever it is.

Outside, the jeep has gone and instead there is a red, open-topped
Ferrari sitting in the drive.

I enter in the traditional fashion, hopping over the side and landing
on the backseat. I sit beside my two friends. Only the left side of my
T-shirt is wet and this side is towards the outside of the car where it
can be dried by the breeze.

Alfonso starts the engine and it growls, the car rolls forward and we
leave the courtyard behind.

Before we have travelled for a minute, however, Alfonso's tenant asks
to get out. He has changed his mind about joining us in tonight's
clubs. Alfonso stops and the student gets out without another murmur of
apology and walks back towards the house.

Alfonso sets the car rolling again. "We can still have fun, huh?"

Somehow, it doesn't seem as though it is going to be as good a
night.

The three of us sit in the back, no-one taking the young man's seat, so
that we look like tourists being chauffeured around by a local, which
is what we are. Alfonso is starting to look more and more like the man
from Del Mont?.

"I may be able to persuade him later," Alfonso says quietly, suggesting
that this happens quite often.

The question of how he is going to persuade the boy to join us when we
are miles away, in a club, late at night, flits through my mind, but I
let it go, because I just want to get through tonight; it is becoming
more and more like an ordeal. I concentrate on the moment. The hums and
growls of the engine. The scenery sliding by, the buildings a blur,
people even more so, their faces smeared in my short-term memory.

We slow down as we get to a playground. We drive through it at about
five miles an hour while the kids keep playing around us. They are
hitting a golf ball with a cricket bat. The golf ball bounces around
like a squash ball possessed by a fierce momentum. It narrowly avoids
our faces and the car. It bounces off the air, changing direction like
a flying saucer, until my friend catches it in his hand, a foot from
his nose.

I turn to a boy outside the car and say:

"Bon jour."

He looks at me with astonished eyes, his mouth agape. The words 'bon
jour' fall out of his mouth in reply. He is beautiful, in ragged
trousers, with bright, clever eyes and subtle traces of mischief in his
posture.

As the car rolls by he asks me where we are going, and though he spoke
to me in English, I struggle to reply in French, agonising over the
blank in my memory, and by the time I remember the verb 'aller'

we are gone.