What The Rich Men Did

They knew what they were doing, didn’t they?

Down where the acrid salt of the sea stings your calves and the yellow sand burns your back, where the greasy cerulean skies slur into the yachts on the horizon, where the droughting olive trees crowd the cliffs and the round-eyed village girls watch on, there is Mondello. Long abandoned by Vulcan and his hoard of slumbering deities, this is now a sanctuary to capitalist sin, rich with the fruit of the new generation, cloying in the mouths of the corpulent noveau riche. The gods, perhaps, slumber too deeply now to protect that which ripens on their shores.

Afford me a little floridity in my tone, comrade. How best to describe the bloated rot of a thousand bankers and dealers and their shrivelling wives as they lick their gold teeth and sink their gums into the necks of taut tanned teenagers, too easily impressed with traveller’s cheques and gin-heavy negronis. How best to write of their rippling weight on your stomach and the heave of their empty lungs and hollow hearts that feel nothing, love nothing, devour everything. How best to describe that hard pupiled gluttony for the youth of your limbs, the pain in your cries and the softness of your thighs. That bestial sweating, sodden sin wiped hurriedly away with hotel towels and napkins, that gaze avoided on the elevators taking you back down, down, down to…