Declan Taylor, thirty-nine years old and in no way reconciled to being forty, stepped off the oxygen-deprived charter flight into a riot of glare. White-painted concrete reflected the Greek sun into his eyes like an interrogator’s lamp. His wife, Jenny, hauling her day-bag behind him, had already snapped her sunglasses into place with immaculate ease. As they decended the steps, Declan felt for his own in his bag and came up short. Both they and, as the sun scalded his scalp, his over-priced Italian sunhat, had not made it this far.
Declan was a man with one last chance. His unfinished novel dangled over him, the joy long drained from it. The advance, which his agent had so carefully negotiated, and which had seemed an inordinate amount of money even to his capricious appetites, had taken him seven months to steadily fritter away. He could buy neither peace nor inspiration. Instead of his plan, a carefully plotted character study spanning three generations, he found himself capable only of turning out post-modernist ramblings disguised as short stories about an author with writer’s block. ‘Nothing’, he had written recently, ‘is as uninspiring as a blank white screen.’ He renamed the computer term BSOD as ‘blank screen of death and clung to the maxim ‘write what you know’ like a drowning man clings to a raft. His character-study was slumping, the plot weakening and his resolve following. He had tried drink, a dabbling of drugs, visiting seedy East London strip-dives, even Psychodynamic group counselling in an effort to unlock the remaining two hundred pages, but it had remained steadily under wraps, occasionally deigning to despatch a few pages of mind-numbing clichés to his consciousness almost as a piss-take. So with the last few hundred quid in the bank he’d booked an month in an apartment in the Greek island of Skiathos. His wife would accompany him for the first week. In the dying days of September, to nothing but the sound of his wife turning pages and fat old men parading the beach, he was hoping he might finally hear the call.
They sat at a taverna on the beach, Sky Sports in the background, Greek beers on the table. He looked out over the bay. In the water tourists bathed, heads poking from the flat sea, like moles in a garden lawn. Jenny was pacing through a Jackie Collins she’d picked up at the bar. In front of him was a more modern version, some chick-lit – he preferred to call it shit-lit – which she had brought him as a joke.
‘Have a read of this’, she’d said, not entirely in jest, ‘it might help you relax.’
He read fifty pages of large text. The plot involved a youngish journalist, ‘a luxury correspondent’, who somehow got involved with an appallingly rich playboy only to discover – this bit he gleaned from the blurb on the back – that money couldn’t buy you everything. He read on until he had enough to go on – a big enough mouthful to chew up and spit out.
‘Look at this’, he exclaimed, ‘she meets this man and – in one line – there it is, in one line, she says ‘the chemistry between us was immediate and electric’. One line! You’d have thought in romantic fiction they might have put a bit more into the first meeting. One line!’ His wife nodded, as she chewed on a piece of bread then swiftly got her head back into her book.
Declan continued to masterfully dissect the novel. but soon ground to a halt. In fact, he realised with a sinking heart, for all its shoddy characterisation and worthless plotting, it was hideously readable, in a way which he knew that his work was, almost deliberately, not so.
‘What would it take to write something like this,’ he wondered aloud. ‘A passing knowledge of the most chi-chi brands of perfume, perhaps, a couple of visits to the most expensive Riveria hotels and maybe a complete joy and happiness in selling your soul for seven ninety-nine a pop.’
They’d been at the airport bookshop, Jenny haring around trying to buy a few more books to get her through the week while the tannoy announced their flight’s last boarding call. It was there, looking at the table at the front of the shop, laden with books with identikit covers, and remembering the two films he’d ground his teeth through in the last week, he was once again struck with a now familiar sense of misgiving – was nothing good anymore, he pondered, had everything worthwhile already been done?
At night they lay on their separate beds, too exhausted to push them together. Declan pulled his bed sheet up around his chin. Jenny lit a Citronella candle and left it in the corner by the ajar door. He wasn’t much bothered by mosquitos anyway. Let them bite, if they must.
So he thought. Throughout the night the searing squeal of the mosquitos’ wings had his teeth on edge. By three in the morning, he was wide awake, listening as an apparent army took turns to divebomb his head. One after the other after the other they swung down through the air. He repelled them as they came, since they all came towards his head and gave themselves away with their awful, piercing shriek. But when he felt the itch of bites on his hands and also at his ankles, where the sheet had ridden up, he turned the light on.
Jenny barely stirred as the white walls dazzled him. Even from his bed, and with his dubious eyesight, he could see several of the attackers resting on the textured white wall. They were each alone and they seemed to just sit, waiting on the wall, waiting for him. He got up and closed the door. Then he decided on a campaign of destruction.
It began easily enough. The mosquito is not equipped, unlike the fly, with super-sensitive slow-motion visual acuity. It is relatively easy to creep up on them and slam them into the wall with either a hand or whatever came to hand. Even in flight they gratifyingly bumble around enough to make clapping them between your palms feasible. Some were slicker than others and evaded his attentions for a while. They might only move a little way over or fly into the room, but their tiny bodies would vanish into the background. So he’d have to start looking again, but the brilliant white walls must have been designed to show up mosquitos, and they soon enough fell to his hunting prowess. Those yet to bite left black smudges on the walls; those which had fed popped like little raspberries.
He’d killed over twenty by the time he could find no more. He slumped back onto his bed and rubbed his bites.
Skiathos annoyed him intensely. He’d known it would and he’d chosen it partly for that reason, but when he surveyed the beach front on the next morning, cluttered with sun loungers, umbrellas and fat, roasted English Buffalos, it seemed to cut him in places he didn’t realise he still had.
Jenny, having jettisoned the Jackie Collins, was now making headway into the latest Zadie Smith. This was almost primed to disenchant Declan; over ten years younger than him and collecting accolades like he collected unpaid bills. His awareness of his bitterness, while meritous, did not do much to negate it.
Across the sand a fat man was energetically rearranging the beach furniture, to his chums’ amusement. His fat buttocks momentarily firmed under his swimming costume.
How could anyone question the naturalness of that, Declan wondered. It looks so correct. He began to imagine himself as David Attenborough.
And here we see a prime example of the species known as Hommus Affluentis – He is here in his natural habitat, by the water’s edge, seeing out his remaining days in restful activity. Notice here the gold chain which adorns his throat and also the baseball cap, with which he uses to convince females of his continuing virility. His huge belly is a testament to his years of good living, combined with the absolute minimum of exertion.
Jenny was chuckling. ‘Oh she’s awful,’ she said.
‘Who is?’ he asked, hoping against hope he might be about to hear a welcome denuciation of Smith.
‘Oh the girl in this, she’s so false, its like she can’t say what she means, she keeps hiding behind this false image of herself...’
Declan turned away. He was more or less resigned for Smith to be successful but he would find it extremely hard to deal with her being good.
Jenny put the book down. “Did you manage any writing?” she asked.
Declan had spent the morning at his laptop while his wife had trotted off to the beach but after half-an-hour he’d found himself reading the packet of cereal and trying to translate Greek letters.
“Not really,” he told her. “I’m a bit tired anyway from last night, what with those mosquitos keeping me up.”
Jenny, who’d always found herself untroubled by mosquitos even in Africa where they seemed to suck her friend dry, nodded noncommittedly. “We’ll buy one of those plug things tonight then,” she said already lifting the paperback back into its reading position.
“Do they really work?” asked Declan.
“I think so,” she replied, but he could see the clouds of Zadie Smith fogging her mind.
Mosquito plugs do not work, he decided, as the evening’s dive bombing got underway. It probably hadn’t helped that the instructions were entirely in Greek, a language which, despite his morning’s efforts, was as unfathomable as Arabic, or Chinese. Nor had attempting to follow the pictures effected much success, especially after he had snapped what looked like a reasonably pivotal piece of the whole mechanism. He stuffed it back in, and pretended it hadn’t happened. The plug was warm to the touch and there was a slight sniff of something like napalm very close by but. to take empirical results, there was no effect on the mosquito population. So it was back to the walls.
This time Jenny woke up, as he put all the lights on. and she watched him with some slight pleasure, thinking that at least he had found an activity to take his mind of things. She had her sleeping mask anyway, though that had no impact on the sounds of walls being slapped, hands clapped and Declan’s various outbursts, along the lines of ‘bastard’, ‘stay still, you little fucker’ and ‘gotcha!’. The walls were beginning to look dirty, pock-marked with miniature corpses.
Declan, for his own part, was beginning to tire. There were a couple of mozzies that he wasn’t sure if he’d caught or not, a couple that might have been wounded, or stunned. But he could feel his enthusiasm for scouring the walls and ceilings waning as his bed sat yards away.
One or two left, he thought to himself. What can they do?
But after an undefined amount of time spent back under the sheets, subjected to a chorus of that awful, high-pitched squeal as each insect swooped in to feed, he realised that there would be no rest for the wicked and he was going to have to finish the job. He picked up his flip-flop, the latest and most effective choice of weapon, and climbed back on the chair to scrutinise the ceiling.
The next morning Jenny was still reading Zadie Smith and he sat, hopeless, in the chair opposite. She was looking resplendent in beachwear and sunglasses, he bedraggled, unshaven and in a crumpled shirt. His eyes were slightly darker than usual.
She’d taken one look at him this morning and swiftly told him that he needed to relax. Perhaps a walk in the pine forests. He responded merely by looking tired, which was enough of an excuse for them to go down to the beach. There he could indulge his favourite activity, being rude about the other tourists.
Look at that guy’s belly, he thought to himself, wary partly of disturbing Jenny but more of being overheard. Look at it, its like an implant. Perhaps they do those nowadays, for people who haven’t time to eat themselves fat. The belly stood alone from the rest of the man’s body, and looked to him like the back of someone’s head.
He yawned again. Three coffees had made little impact on his tiredness. Jenny’s suggestion that he try and sleep now, at the same time as the mosquitos, had been ignored. He thought he could sleep on the sunlounger, but as he closed his eyes, he knew he’d be getting no sleep at all.
In the evening Jenny perused the local shop and returned brimming with anti-mosquito goods. Repellent, candles, another plug and she set to work fixing them all up. Then they left to go to dinner at a taverna, closing all the doors and windows.
When they returned, from dinner at an unfortunate choice – his – in a restaurant filled with English tourists and with the inevitable, subsequent drop of standards in the kitchen, he opened the door, flicked on the light and announced gladly ‘ah, mozzie hunt!’ Jenny gave him an indulgent smile.
“There are less,” he announced, “but there’s still a few.” He began reaching up to the ceiling to swat the first few.
This was true. The plug hadn’t succeeded in doing much except spreading a noxious odour around which quickly made them both feel queasy. They detached it from the socket and left it by the door. The room was so stuffy that she had no choice but to open the balcony doors, while he patrolled the room slapping an unfortunate number of insects.
“You know, I dont think its done anything,” he told her as she lay under her sheets.
“Try the repellent,” she told him, “and try and get some sleep, Dec, please.”
He did as he was told, doused himself in spray and got under the sheets.
In the middle of the night, he suddenly announced “They’re biting through the sheets!”
After a few nights of this the walls were looking splattered. Declan was finding that a lot of his time was spent seeing mosquitos that turned out to be already dead. No matter how many times he saw a dead one, he carried on returning to it, flip-flop in hand. He was getting incredibly sensitive to the sound of their flight, so he knew, even without seeing any alive, that there were some in the room. Jenny slept on unbitten. His bites were multiplying and getting sorer as he scratched them. His eyes were darkening, almost to the same shade as the walls.
Jenny, who only had a couple of nights left, was briefly concerned when she woke at three-thirty to see Declan washing down the walls with a slightly manic air, but she was used to this sort of thing in her artist writer. At least, she thought, he might be getting some material.
He went with her to the airport. The bags under his eyes were like reflections of her luggage. His head was reddening steadily. The unfinished opus was unyielding. She, unused to ever really worrying herself about him, looked at him carefully as they went to say goodbye. Something was definitely not right, she felt.
“Take care, Dec,” she managed, “try to get some sleep.”
He nodded in a fatherly kind of way and gave her a reassuring hug. “Oh, don’t worry about me,” he said confidently, though slightly flat. She decided to think the best.
With his wife out the way Declan could begin the battle at sundown, when they first appeared. He began obliterating swathes of them. After a while, he forgot about the plug and candles and repellent and decided to try and attract them, in order to bring them to a swift death. One night, two nights, three nights, he chased mosquitos across his celing, until, almost by a system of evolution, they congregated in the corners of the room, where the flip-flop was less effective. Still he cut down battalions, like some biblical army.
His ears were so sensitive now to their screaching tone that instead of just when they were near him, he could hear them outside in the night air. For their part, they seemed to know the battle was at hand and were sniffing him out in their droves. The back of his flip-flop was black with their bodies.
He found the mornings to be his favourite time. There was a peace to the Greek dawn in excess of any he’d felt before. The trails of mosquitos left from the night would be cleaned up and he could look forward to relaxing for a few hours. Meanwhile, for all its strain on his body, he could almost feel the book moving beneath his conscious. Somehow something was happening.
It was his eyes that first started to let him down. They’d flicker across the white walls, see the black marks of past victories and stick there, even though he knew what they were. They were rebelling against him, too tired to keep up their continuous hunt. Still he urged them on, to greater glories.
It was after a further week of this that one cool evening, as he sat, polished flip-flop in hand, waiting for the battle to commence, that none came. He opened up his doors and sat, skin exposed to the air, but still none were tempted. He wondered if the evening was too breezy, but the trees barely stirred. He began to think that maybe he had won.
More fool he. Every child knows that after you have completed one level there is a brief pause before you are let in to begin the next level. This was his pause. He lay down on the bed and for the first time on the whole holiday began to snore before the sun had even struck the hills.
He woke just before it had completely passed the horizon. He could hear the high-pitched buzz of the mozzies. This time, however, it was different. It was not the sound of a mosquito wheeling in near to his ear. It was quite evidently from outside. He went to the balcony. The sound didn’t even seem to be from close by the house. It was from somewhere near, but it also seemed to be from very far away. The hills shimmered with the sound. The leaves rattled in its sympathy. It was the same cutting, slicing sound of the mosquito, but it was more like God scraping a celestial fork across a plate. A huge shadow flittered across the far off trees.
He panicked. He tore off, towards the beach. They won’t follow me there, he thought. He pictured a huge flock of mosquitos, bunched together, hunting him down. He hared down the dusty track and scampered across the sand. There he looked round towards where the sound was still coming.
The sound had quietened for a moment. At the beach taverna he could see the Greek waiters dawdling about, while the customers chattered, all of them regardless of the plague of mosquitos surely to descend upon them, if they dared persue him down here. Then suddenly, the sound started again to get louder, increase in intensity. They had been to his room, the balcony doors left swinging open, and now they were on his scent. The waves gurgled as they caressed the beach contentedly. There was not enough wind to put them off, he realised. He’d have to make a run for it.
The waiters watched him jaunt towards to pine forest with a bemused air. The English did a lot of crazy things, they thought to themselves, but this one was special. They didn’t notice the shadow cast along the far edge of the beach.
Declan skulked amongst the pine trees. He had seen the swarm at the edge of the wood, but it had yet to find him. He imagined scouts sent off through the trees, ringing their clarion high-pitched bell to all directions. He saw one or two sniffing him out, perhaps swooping in for a cheeky taste of the prize, perhaps not, before shooting off back to the group, from where inescapable justice would be dispensed. He lay down close to the sand and pine needles.
Something flew around his ear. It wasn’t squealing but it shocked him out of his hideaway. They’re here, he thought. Although he was pretty much at the limits of freaking out, he managed to push the boundaries a little further. His heart was pumping blood around his body at full pelt. It was as though it was aware things were bad and was trying to use up all its allotted heart beats before the end came. Blood coursed through every vein and artery, his hair stood on end, his nerves twitched. There was silence. And then the deadly, terrible squeal began again to sound in the air, reverberating around the trees. Coiled like a spring, he leapt up and shot off through the forest. They were closing in on him.
They caught him at a clearing. In keeping with his general style, he gave up his escape by collapsing onto the ground, pretending that he’d tripped, rather than been out-run fair and square. He rolled over onto his back, hair shrivelling up and prepared to face a hungry retribution. Every inch of his skin twitched before the expected onslaught. But there was no death by a thousand nibbles, no great swarm of vampire insects. Instead before him, a foot off the ground, wings beating rapidly to produce the now terribly familiar high-pitched drone, he saw not many but just one, huge, glaring mosquito. Its spindly legs were tucked under a vast, translucent back-pack, unfilled, its blood bank, with roughly the capacity of a cement mixer. Between its angry looking eyes was extended a fearsome blade, the proboscis, which also doubled as a straw. The sword glinted in the evening light, the way that only the sharpest swords glint. The mosquito lifted its head, and he saw the serrated underside. For a long time the two of them looked at each other. Then the mosquito lowered its legs and dropped to the ground, the wings stopped beating and finally the awful, searing tone died down.
“What the fuck...” said Declan.
The mosquito looked at him with first one eye and then the other, coincidentally giving him a good, sideways look at the samurai sword extending from its face. “I might say the same thing,” it said. Declan thought he could detect a Spanish accent.
“I am told that there is a beast which is laying rack and ruin to hundreds of my children a night. I am told that this beast does not proceed by the usual manner, that is poisoning himself and his crops in an attempt to kill me and my children – how do you call it – cutting off your nose to spite your face” and here he swished his nose through the air to emphasise the point. “Nor have you been draining ponds or whatever other stupid and meaningless thing that occurs to you. No instead you have proceeded what I should call the old-fashioned way – you have bludgeoned to death one by one more mosquitos than were killed by Alexander the Great – and he truly was a warrior.”
“They were biting me,” offered Declan.
“Do you know how Alexander the Great died,” asked the great mosquito. “Of course the truth is most likely hidden from you by your tutors. Such a shoddy death, for such a heroic soldier. Well I’ll tell you. He was bitten to death by mosquitos. I personally took the first bite.”
Declan considered that there couldn’t have been much left for any other mosquitos, if that was true.
“I also was present at the ending of Genghis Khan’s reign of terror against my kind. We hunted him down and sucked his blood dry in the foothills of the Urals. The great barbarian ran screaming from my presence.”
It occured to Declan that he was either in very illustrious company or that this beast was prone to some wild imagination.
“And now you too shall join them. You can swap mosquito-killing tips in hell.”
Declan could not get up the energy to scream. The beast advanced on him, the proboscis rising up, in anticipation of its meal. The wings started to beat, like drummers at a sacrificial feast, and the terrible squeal began once again to echo amongst the pine trees. Declan’s only thought was that no scream of his, even if he could manage one, could possibly compete with that racket.
The proboscis started to nuzzle him around his neck, prodding him here, nudging him there, looking for the ideal spot to strike. It was so sharp that although at every point it cut him, he couldn’t feel the blade, even as he felt trickles of fresh blood run down from the slices it left. The beast paused.
“Perhaps,” it relayed, after a brief moment’s thought, “perhaps I shall spare you. I think I have a use for you after all. Alexander and Khan were, well, it would have been weak to have spared them but you, I think I can make use of your initiative.” With that the proboscis found its perfect spot on the jugular vein, and entered with no sound at all. Declan watched in fascination as blood, his blood, was sucked up the gleaming spike and began to swill around in the cavernous back-pack of the giant mosquito. Then he passed out.
He awoke to a slurping noise. The mosquito was finishing him off in the same manner that he would finish off Slush Puppies in the cinema and annoy his dad.
“Come,” it said and Declan unfolded his wings and, yes, he flew. Beneath his eyes he could see a gleaming long straw, not as sharp or shiny as his vanquisher’s, but adequate for the purpose. Behind him he carried an empty blood-sack and already he desired it to be filled. He had shrunk down to a more ordinary mosquito size. But he realised, with a relief, that he had lost none of his critical faculties in the transformation. That was the meaning of the change of heart. No longer would mosquitos be such easy prey for any dolt with a flip-flop and a few weeks to spare. He would teach them such concepts as stealth, speed and camoflague. With him as their guide, mosquitos could learn the cunning so often denied to the insect kingdom. Soon, the blood would be flowing and all mozzies could drink in its ever-lasting abundance.
But first, he thought to himself, I’m off to visit Zadie Smith.