35053668-Empire-of-the-Soul-Paul-William-Roberts

‘A FLAME OF FAITH’
I asked someone who resembled the man in The Blue Lagoon if he
knew where Ray and Debbie lived.
‘Yeah,’ he replied, the accent perhaps Swedish.
I waited about a minute for him to elaborate on this.
‘That’s American Ray, right? Wiz the beard and the chick wiz big
knockers?’
‘Right,’ David cut in. ‘That’s them. Where do they live?’
‘I saw ’er dancing at zis party the other night, man,’ the guy
continued. ‘Wow!’ He became lost in his own thoughts, and we had
to lure him back to the present.
After fifteen minutes – it was like handling a three-year-old – we
managed to gather that Ray and Debbie lived ‘on the beach, zat
way.’
Off the little main road were various dirt tracks weaving through
palm groves, past houses both grand and humble. A hundred yards
off, behind a line of steep coconut trees and thick bushes, lay the
beach and the crashing breakers of the Arabian Sea. Goan children,
wide-eyed, laughing, screaming ‘Hal-lo, hal-lo, hal-lo,’ ran
alongside the car. Pausing at a fork, we asked a woman in a ragged
cotton smock if she knew a Ray and Debbie. She was so beautiful,
with huge almond eyes and perfect bone structure, that she could
have been the toast of Paris couture catwalks. Shooing the horde of
children away, she pointed to a large walled enclosure with a massive
red-tiled villa and many flowering trees inside it.
‘Mister Ray nice man,’ she said, her smile implying something
more. ‘Tell mister Ray you meet Isabella, yes?’
The wall had huge wrought-iron gates, which were locked. A
sort of mission bell hung to one side, and when rung was answered
immediately by two of the largest, fiercest, most unpleasant dogs
I’ve ever seen in my life. Frothing with fury, they snapped their
bared fangs through the bars at us, even their barking suggesting all
the tearing and chewing they’d like to do with our flesh.
‘They were Gestapo officers in their last lives,’ said Esther,
removing herself to a safe distance.
David rang the bell again, narrowly avoiding a set of jaws
embedding itself in his thigh. The ringing, gnashing, and barking
went on for what seemed ten minutes. I suggested that Ray and
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