Pillaging takes it out of one, particularly with the onset of a Mediterranean summer. Troy was looking a little sad after we’d summarily executed the men, enslaved the women and boys, and tanked numerous kegs of Heineken while chanting Mycenaean sports club songs. Everyone was headed off home, dragging their haul of Anatolian carpets onto one of the thousand ships that sat parked on the beach. I was up for a holiday – just a chilled couple of weeks on an island with a favourable exchange rate and plentiful visiting tarts from the mainland – as were some mates I’d made during the siege. Why head straight back to Ithaca and get an earful from Penelope about dead sheep, rapey suitors, and the difficulties of single-handedly mothering a bored, masturbating teenager called Telemachus? I’d have the rest of my life to grow olives and father bastards with serving wenches.
So Lee, Brian, Steve-o, Winston, Kev and I piled into my vessel with 54 bottles of ouzo and an emergency stash of cheese-and-onion pasties. We set sail: on tour, once again. The nearest spot on the map was the Land of the Sirens, described by the guidebook as ‘a place where attractive women sit all day on sea-facing rocks and sing loudly at passing stag parties’. ‘I’m not sure I’d be into that,’ I said to the men. ‘Sounds a bit like Prague.’ So we passed it by – a string a concrete ‘villas’ gazed at us from the shoreline, with a few dejected-looking women visible on rocks (standard) – and began raiding the ouzo store.
Weeks passed in an aniseed fug. I vaguely recall an altercation with a giant one-eyed landlord, with ‘Polyphemus’ etched on his safety-pinned nametag, in a cellar bar in Zakynthos; also an incident involving Steve-o and a whirlpool in which we lost most of our cheese-and-onion pasties. Owing to the latter, and the hunger abetted by the recurrent ouzo- and spear-based masculinity contests – the last deterrent against raw buggery – we made a detour to the island of Ogygia, where Winston assured us was a well-stocked Greggs selling a variety of tax-exempt heated pastries.
Immediately upon quitting the stony beach we were set upon by a hen party of sunburned trollops from Sparta, swinging their handbags and baying for man-flesh. We unsheathed our (slightly rusted) spears and succeeded in impaling all but one of the harpies – who, in the melee, had grabbed hold of Kev and now stood, quivering, holding a Swiss Army knife to his neck. Her demands were simple. ‘I am Calypso,’ she spoke in a rich baritone. ‘Surrender me the small squinty one,’ she pointed at me, ‘and I shan’t kill this overweight, freckly bastard here. I like the small squinty ones.’
We reasoned among ourselves. ‘She’s probably just after a bit of sport, a night at most,’ Lee said to me. ‘Totes,’ said Brian. ‘And we need Kev. He knows people. He can get us into anywhere. Just lie back and think of Ithaca. You’ll be home in no time.’ I acquiesced: to take it for the team guarantees one a favourable afterlife resplendent with obliging nubiles and pitted olives. She turned to the others as she led me away to her cave: ‘Now fuck off and get on with your holiday, boys.’
I’m still stuck in Ogygia, a year on. Calypso has marriage plans. It’s not all bad: she goes like a train and always makes me a steak sandwich afterwards. That’s more than I can say for Penelope. But – I never thought I’d say this – I dearly miss exploiting peasants and throwing lambs off cliffs (a local variant of a Dionysian rite) on my home-island of Ithaca. And it pains me that I’m not there to belittle my son Telemachus’ hunting skills (‘that’s not how to spear a pig, you snivelling pansy’). I just want to go home.
Odysseus, the island of Ogygia, 1178 BC
