The Final Cut was written in 1994. All these years later the British are still arguing about Europe, the Cypriots have discovered a vast ocean of hydrocarbon wealth beneath the Mediterranean, and the Greeks and Turks are still arguing about the future of that sadly divided island. What I also hope the reader will find timeless is the enduring wickedness of FU.
Troödos Mountains, Cyprus – 1956
It was late on an afternoon in May, the sweetest of seasons in the Troödos, beyond the time when the mountains are muffled beneath a blanket of snow but before the days when they serve as an anvil for the Levantine sun. The spring air was filled with the heavy tang of resin and the sound of the breeze being shredded on the branches of great pines, like the noise of the sea being broken upon a pebbled shore. But this was many miles from the Mediterranean, almost as far as is possible to get from the sea on the small island of Cyprus.
These were good times, a season of abundance even in the mountains. For a few weeks in spring, the dust of crumbling rock chippings which passes for soil becomes a treasury of wild flowers – erupting bushes of purple-flowered sword lily, blood-dipped poppies, alyssum, the leaves and golden heads of which in ancient times were supposed to effect a cure for madness.
Yet nothing would cure the madness that was about to burst forth on the side of the mountain.
George, fifteen and almost three-quarters, prodded the donkey further up the mountain path, oblivious to the beauty. His mind had turned once again to breasts. It was a topic which seemed to demand most of his time nowadays, depriving him of sleep, causing him not to hear a word his mother said, making him blush whenever he looked at a woman, which he always did straight between her breasts. They had an energy source all their own which dragged his eyes towards them, like magnets, no matter how hard he tried to be polite. He never seemed to remember what their faces looked like, his eyes rarely strayed that far – he’d marry a toothless old hag one day. So long as she had breasts.
If he were to avoid insanity