The Lost Sailors by Jean-Claude Izzo, Howard Curtis

with Adelaide behind it. Port Adelaide consisted of a temple, a church, three bars, a hotel, a brothel, the town hall, a post office, and about a hundred houses. A sailors’ town. Further still was Taperoo Beach, where, according to Radar, their Swedish radio operator, “young girls from good families lived as recluses, and you could fuck them for free, if you knew how to go about it.”
    Abdul had laughed as he quoted these words.
    â€œGirls from good families. All sailors dream about that. Everyone has a story about a girl from a good family somewhere in the world.”
    â€œUh-huh . . .” Cephea had said.
    He had sensed a weariness in that “Uh-huh.”
    â€œAre you all right?”
    â€œI’m tired.”
    And she had gone off to bed without finishing her beer, leaving him alone with his margarita and his travel stories. He took a swig of the beer, but didn’t enjoy it. Cephea’s absence hurt him. Whenever he came home, he liked to feel that she was close to him. She and the children. To convince himself that he was a man like any other, a father like any other. That he had a family, and this family represented his only roots in this world.
    The journey this time, for the Hamburg-Süd line, had been a particularly long one. La Spezia, Fos-sur-Mer, Barcelona, Piraeus, the Suez Canal, Djeddah, Port Elizabeth, Sydney. He had written to Cephea every day. All through their married life, they had written to each other daily when he was at sea. It was his way of keeping her in his heart. Mostly, he would write to her about his love, his desires. His fantasies, too. Freely, without holding anything back. He never talked about his life at sea, the ports they put in at. He kept that for when he came home. For those evenings on the terrace drinking margaritas.
    He joined her in bed a little while later. The silence of the terrace, the view over the city, even the alcohol hadn’t calmed him down. He needed to have her next to him. To feel her body. Her body put his mind at rest. Every time, her beauty brought him back to the land of the living.
    He undressed quickly in the darkness, and slipped into the bed beside her. From the way she was breathing, he knew she wasn’t asleep. She had her back to him, and was pretending to sleep. That wasn’t like her. Slowly, he stroked her buttocks, then slid his hand between her thighs.
    â€œI’m tired,” she said again, pressing her legs together to stop his hand from moving.
    â€œCephea,” he murmured, taking his hand away.
    His erect cock pressed eagerly against her buttocks, looking for a way in. She had always said she liked it when he was impatient to fuck her. It wasn’t the same as those afternoon naps they took, when Cephea’s mother was looking after the children, and they made love, careful not to make the bed creak—or the table, the times when she lay down on it and opened her thighs. They would bite each other’s shoulder or neck to stop their cries echoing through the house.
    He was breathing heavily. His hand continued on its way along Cephea’s thigh, paused at her stomach, then moved higher. He grasped her right breast and started caressing it, teasing the nipple. He knew Cephea liked that.
    In his hand, her breast grew hard. She yielded, and he was relieved. He held her tighter. With his knee, he parted her legs slightly. She had stopped resisting. He let go of her breast and let his hand move down to her cunt. His fingers slipped into the moist cleft. Cephea sighed and arched slightly. The happy moment came when her round, firm buttocks rose toward him. He entered her forcefully.
    Their fused bodies became one long undulating movement, slow at first, then faster and faster. With both hands, he grabbed Cephea’s buttocks and parted them, the better to penetrate her. Each time he went deeper. When she started to convulse, his thrusts became faster. He was still kneading her buttocks. He