malia, greece

The journey there was the first time I’d been on a plane. I ordered a mojito and noodles and felt like I was living a life of luxury.

It was dusk when we landed and the streets looked red. The coach ride took half an hour to reach the Malia strip. Outside of the strip the whole country looked like a wasteland. There were occasional villas, surrounded by desert land and winding roads. At eighteen I couldn’t image living in a place like this. It was my first time venturing further from the UK than France and the world still seemed small. I saw the population of Malia, all the villas and houses we saw on our way, only as backdrops for people like me to enjoy a holiday. The idea that these places were homes to people as much as my home was a home to me never crossed my mind.

The coach driver was in a rush and chucked our cases onto the road. We started to drag our luggage halfway across the strip to our hotel: The Vagelis. We were given a chance to drop our stuff off in the rooms then went to meet the holiday reps downstairs. They were both attractive blonde women in their twenties with thick Northern accents. They had a pre-prepared speech where they explained the rules of the hotel, the events of the week and that we’d have to pay for any damages. One line that sticks in my memory: “So if you bring a fat girl back and fuck her on one of the beds and the bed collapses, it’s you who’s paying for it. So go back to her place”. After that we all went to get changed. I was sharing a room with Jonny and Josh. The hotel was nothing special, not too bad either, but it was made special in that it was the place where we were having our first “lad’s holiday”. We all changed clothes then hit the strip.

Most of my nights there blur together but I can remember a lot of that first night. We found a bar that served “Headfuckers” – I have no idea what combo of alcohol was in these but they were served in watermelons and tasted great – and where the reps sold laughing gas. One side of the bar was made of swings hanging from the ceiling. I was one of the last of the group to stumble back to the hotel that night. I was only in bed 2 minutes when I started throwing up. Jonny began to throw towels in front of me and I covered them in brown and red bile. And then collapsed on the bed. The next morning we checked the sheet of paper on our door and saw it was a 20 Euro fine for the towels; to fix this we chucked them out the window.  

Most of my best friends from high school were there: Jack, James, Josh, Jordan, George, Sam and Ross. There was people I had middling feelings about: Dan, Jonny L and Adam. Then there was people I hardly knew or spoke to: Chris, Jennings and Kieran, who everyone called Shorty. And finally there was people I didn’t like at all: Jonny P and Luke. There was 16 of us; as George said pre-holiday: “it’s gonna be 16 egos clashing for a week”. Remembering my time in Malia involves remembering the people I was with as much as the things I was doing, the people I surrounded myself with during this point in time.

The idea of having a lad’s holiday had always loomed over me. My dad had been on a number of holidays like this and seemed to expect that everyone did the same. Everyone I knew in the higher years celebrated leaving education with a holiday like this too. When it came time to start organising a holiday for our group of friends it was only a small group of people doing the organising. People were invited but I wasn’t. I wasn’t the only one: Ross hadn’t been invited either and some others had said they didn’t want to go. When I found out I felt like my body was trying to implode. I remember lying in bed that night hardly able to move. I felt crushed. After a few days Ross and me were invited. It felt like a bittersweet invitation but it was an invitation nonetheless.

On the first night a few of the boys made it their mission to have James lose his virginity by the end of the night. James had been the first of us to grow a beard, by now large and well-trimmed, and despite the pale look of his parents his skin was golden brown. He got more female attention than any of us but he still hadn’t lost his virginity. George reckoned it was because he was shy. James got drunk very quickly once we reached the strip but it wasn’t hard to get him a girl. Ross went up to a girl and asked if she’d sleep with him and she went straight to walking James back to the hotel. The next day he told it as a horror story. The girl had forced his head down between her legs – he’d described it as “bity” down there, and then, when it came time to have sex, he couldn’t get it up. So he faked sex for a ridiculously long time, then faked a loud and painful sounding orgasm, then pulled the condom off and chucked it to the other side of the room. The girl cleaned her teeth then left immediately.

After this I hoped my virginity would be lost as easily but this wasn’t the case. My clubbing persona was awkward, it involved forcing too much eye contact onto uninterested girls and devoting myself to dance moves that likely resembled a tree strangling itself. I wasn’t the only virgin in the group, there was a few of us actually, and I gave the outward appearance that being a virgin didn’t bother me, but inside I carried my virginity like a raincloud of shame constantly showering above my head. The Malia strip was a miniature world of sex, every way you looked you saw more women than pieces of clothing; I felt my virginity most painfully here.   

On the first night George had forgotten his room number and walked through the wrong door. He realised his mistake but needed a piss so bad he continued through the apartment to the toilet anyway. When he came out there was four Scottish lads, each only a year older than us, waiting outside the door and wondering who he was. These four guys – Will, Calum, Michael and Mark (who they called Barry because he looked like Barry from EastEnders) – spent the rest of the holiday as part of our group. During the day we’d sunbathe, play in the pool, play table tennis and have games of Cards Against Humanity with the Scottish lads.

As night time approached we’d start drinking on the balconies and landings of the hotel. George was always drunk by the time we were leaving. One night Jonny P and Shorty told him he should go back to the hotel, but the night had just begun, so to stop this happening George started running away down the strip. I watched his lanky figure disappear into the crowds of drunkards. Hours later I found him dancing on his own on a stripper podium in a club called Warehouse with UV sunglasses on and a whistle in his mouth.

Josh was easy to talk to and I spent a lot of the holiday with him. One of my mind’s returning image of the holiday is being sat on the benches on the pathway connecting The Vagelis pool to the strip, with Josh talking very fast about people back home and ranting about religion like he liked to do. On the second last night he got a henna tattoo of Jonny L’s full name, written twice in large writing. He told everyone but me it was a real tattoo. When I came back to the room that night he had a big smile on his face while he slept. But he cracked instantly when his mother text to ask if it was a real tattoo.

Ross and Dan provided the holiday with drama. Dan’s ex-girlfriend was, coincidentally, having her own holiday in the hotel next to ours, while his current girlfriend was on holiday with her friends in Ayia Napa. A few jabs were quietly thrown about this; when Jordan said something about it to Dan’s face it ended with both men being pulled away from each other and Dan punching a wall. Dan showed up in a sobered mood the next morning at the end of my bed talking to Josh and me about what had happened, a bandage wrapped around his hand. Ross’s drama was very different: he slept with a girl on the first night then found a different girl for night two. I can’t remember Night Two Girl’s name but she kept coming to the hotel every day to see Ross. He even took her on a date. By the end of the week she’d bought train tickets to come visit him from Wales. Near the holiday’s end we all decided to pull a prank on the both of them so Jack ran into Ross’s room while he was alone with the girl, Jack having his phone in his hand pretending to record whatever was going on. The girl took it very personally. She ran out of the hotel, shouting back insults at Jack and Ross. Ross was soon stood outside the hotel crying. By the time we were going home Ross told us all he’d “sorted things out” with the girl, but James had shown me texts the girl had sent to him, James, saying that he was the one she really wanted to be with.

One highlight was the boat party. There was an endlessly pourable alcohol machine, the only payment being the wait in line. I can still picture later into this day, the boat so far out to sea that no land was visible, lost in the blue, with Michael Jackson’s Man in the Mirror blasting out into the universe. The pain party was good too. Everyone left early apart from George and me who stayed until the end. I kept jumping into the back of girl’s photos whenever I saw cameras flashing because I was in such a good mood. I returned to the hotel room with a trail a paint still dripping off me.

My week in Malia was great, maybe the most fun I’d ever had at the time. Less than two months later I left for university and my relationship with all these people changed forever. Some remained in my life, others disappeared. But my relation to them all changed. The holiday doesn’t have to mean anything, but if my time in Malia does represent anything it represents the end of my years at school and living in my hometown – a week of booze and partying to end a time in my life that was severely lacking both. But it also represented the first taste of a freedom and escape that I was about to get a lot more of by moving away.

On the last night George, Sam and me found ourselves on the beach. Dawn was already peeking through the sky. The sea looked more mysterious than back home. The curves of the Earth looked more obvious in the distance. Sam walked into the ocean on his own while George and me sat on sunbeds talking. It was a gentle night. We then walked across the strip in the sobering morning light, the aftermath of the previous night still covering the streets.