Ronnie was not the kind of guy to just pick up his girlfriend, cradle her in his not-very-manly-but-somewhat-hairy arms, pad through to the window of their shared holiday apartment, and drop her into the garden, pool-side, three stories below. But that is what he did.

Falling from the thick-eyed slumber of bedroom sleep thirty feet down into the rather more wracked oblivion of unconsciousness (without any idea of what went on in between), Sophie lay sprawled among the lotuses for many minutes while Ronnie stared down from above. He seemed to be in some kind of daze. He did, however, start to come to when he saw his Cypriot landlord, Nikolaus, an erstwhile unflappable man, looking up from the garden while bending his moustache over a wide-moving and oval mouth that yelled: ‘Hey! Hey! Mister, what you done!’

Gentle Ronnie slowly gathered his thoughts, shook his head like a pointer flapping its ears, saw what he had done, and hurtled down the stairway, his sandals clapping ‘No! No! No!’ on the cool stairs as he went. Taking the cue from his footwear, he took up the refrain as he hurtled through the bar – baffled British holiday-makers following his arrow-like progression like a Henman serve at Wimbledon – and plunged to a stop shouting ‘no, Sophie, no’ in best Hollywood style, cradling the beloved’s sleeping head on his knees. (‘Easy . . . easy’: you can almost hear the film director whispering to a tensed camera-man as he pans out from above.)

So an ambulance was called, Ronnie blanketed and bundled in the back, and Morag and Muriel, two Swansea sisters over for schnapps in early summer, ruffled their arms, patted their hair and turned back to the bar to wring the full story from under Nikolaus’ reticent moustache. Ronnie, meanwhile, spent the fourth night of his short-break holiday slumped in a plastic chair in the A&E waiting room of Ayia Napa hospital, while his loved one’s limb was plastered and re-packaged in a room next door. Collapsing over a table, he slept fitfully through the morning until a tired yet amused Cypriot lady in blue cleaned round his sticky elbows, whereupon he awoke and clunked a Kit-Kat out of the vendor.

‘Bloody hell’ he said, as he thought about his girlfriend, braced and trussed on pillows, and watched the first swimmers of the morning loping past the wide sliding doors of the hospital with a trail of toddlers and towels.

‘Bloody, fucking, hell.’

                                                *

The holiday hadn’t been Ronnie’s idea. The brain-child of a work-stressed, recruitment consultant Sophie, the ‘short break in the sun’ had caused more than a few ructions before getting off the British ground. Ronnie had booked the time off from his computer shop job, but continued to rage (mostly within himself, as he was wont to do) about what he really wanted to do with his precious spare time. Even after buying the tickets at last minute prices – loving the big whack in savings – and finally settling into a composed air of acceptance of his fate, he remained reluctant. (Of course, his manager’s little reminiscence about what could be seen in the Cypriot sea-water helped, as did the even littler voice at the back of Ronnie’s head that relished self-martyrdom, saying ‘I’m the one doing the sacrificing here’. This made him feel part of a grown-up relationship, putting him in mind of a popular Australian uncle of his that threw up houses for his wife at ten year intervals while throwing off comments like ‘yeah, we’ll put a balcony on the front there. Have a bit of a conflab about who wants what and do a bit of negotiating and compromising until the old girl gets what she wants, I s’pose.’)

The scale of his sacrifice, however, had been whittled down to nothing soon after he dumped his bags and burgeoning air of maturity at Sophie’s parents’ place the night before take-off. Here he felt shaky, little, and poor, again. Greeting the slightly spindly twenty-five year old with a hearty slap and a breezy look that said ‘so, you’re taking her for a dirty weekend now, are you?’, his potential father-in-law (and that notion alone was enough to frighten Ronnie into muteness) had laughed over his refusals of help with holiday supplies and whisked a delighted Sophie off to the shops for a spend-up on beach-bags and super-noodles that soared beyond the spending cap of Ronnie’s already sorely tested salary. Ronnie was left on the sofa, staring at soap operas with a barely interested young niece-to-(maybe)-be and a growing awareness of the sweat in his socks.

‘So, you at school, then’ he ventured, once.

‘ . . . . . yep.’

‘Do you like it?’ (Ronnie had a long way to go in the art of entertaining in-laws.)

‘ ‘S’allright’.

Five days later, as he crunched a half-moon in a styrofoam cup in Ayia Napa while watching Sophie slumber unconsciously on and on in her hospital bed, and feeling the little surges and flows of his love for her, Ronnie thought about the weight of his in-laws. Their smiles; the inevitable polite marginalising. They would arrive; he would go mute. Fetch tea, offer up a few suggestions and a few jokes - which, because they lacked confidence, would lack comedy - and would end up running endless errands out into the Ayia Napa streets for grapes and stamps.

‘O God,’ he said, biting into the cup.  

                                                *

Elbowing his way through his countrymen, Ronnie headed for one of the supermarkets that leapt out of every Ayia Napa streetcorner. The noise and flesh thrashed around him, pushed at the sides of the somnolence he still carried on his person from the ward where Sophie slept. For the third day running, he was headed for melon.

Suddenly he was confronted with a messy queue of tourists, made dopey by the sun, all spewing from an aged bus. The driver, an irate local, was yelling at the gathering.

‘Perlana, Paralimni!,’ he barked, ‘ Perlana, Paralimni!’

‘Yes, I know that,’ said a Birmingham mother, ‘but will you drop us at Tsokkos Gardens?’ Her voice carried the exasperation of a heated mother.

Ronnie stared at a ribbon of white that ran across her burned, red back. Blobsters, Sophie had called these sun-bathers, her easy satire delighting her boyfriend.

‘Perlana, Paralimni!’ shouted the driver. ‘50 cents! Perlana, Paralimni!’

Ronnie watched, entranced, and slowly became aware of his dullness. His head felt full; weighted and sloshing with water like a medicine ball. The liquid had been leaking in for some time now. He slowly rolled his bowling ball eyes and found an infant staring from behind another woman’s shoulder. ‘Ugh!’ He gave a slow start. Kids scared him (he always said). The girl stared, with a film of water over her eyes. A little crust of sleep had gathered in the corner of her right eye. She stared. Behind her a palm tree waved slowly. ‘Your dream home’, a white sign ribboned. Gareth Gates’ latest hit thumped by in a jeep.

‘Perlana, Paralimni!’ the driver yelled, and hissed the doors shut, gunning the bus up the hill. Ronnie shook his heavy head; the girl curled a sticky fist in her mother’s sun-split hair.

                                                     *

Ronnie sat and watched his girlfriend breathing. The sheets, white, marooned the pink blob of her hair. Watching her, one arm held up on a string and plastered, with his head feeling as if it were filling with snow, he closed his eyes and suddenly felt himself tumble within as his own image sloshed over and over. Eventually he wrenched his head back; snapped to a prospect; looked down on a boy from above.

He saw his slender wrists and knees running like rails toward the great green melon he cradled low on his lap. It looked as large as his thrumming head. He sat, silent, and weighed that watery sphere he held in the midst of his smallness. Reaching gently over the side of his girlfriend’s bed, he stretched his spare arms and rolled the melon into her sleeping lap.