Sulphur wafted up from the bubbling Santorini island caldera as crowds of young people holding their noses, lined the white cliffs from Oia to the harbour. The nylon sea nets to keep out the rubbish had dissolved, allowing plastic bottles, dirty nappies and garbage bags covered in yellow foam, to beat on the base of the cliffs.

While the government warned tourists to stay away, thousands of holiday makers continued to flock to the over-priced accommodation, which promised romantic sunset views. The rats, long time natives and scourge of hotel managers, made their way to the ferries and were beaten and broomed in to the water. The seismographic station near the winery on the hill recorded small tremors but as the Greek tourist commission said, there was nothing worry about, and that was good enough for the honeymooners and backpackers, who drank more and danced harder into the night, because if a volcanic eruption was on the cards, they wanted to go out with a bang, preferably during sex.

As the weeks passed, the caldera stopped bubbling and the sulphur smell faded. The wine bar and night club owners regretted the passing of imminent death, because the tourists no longer drank three times their body weight in alcohol. A preternatural calm returned to the thousands of houses and apartments perched precariously high on the white chalk cliffs but below, the rats still fought to get on the ferries until they were poisoned and their bodies burnt in pyres inland, far from the tourists and their wallets.

On the island of Patmos, 240 kilometres north east of Santorini, sitting on an rusted life-saving tower, below a tattered blue and white beach umbrella, Craig McDonald looks down on the supine and glistening bodies. He’s Milo to the locals. He speaks the lingo.

The sun refracts off the turquoise water and the sapphire rays smack his 65-year old weathered face. He followed the Santorini story but the media had returned to reporting pregnant reality TV stars, woke outrages and senile American presidents. He puts his cheap sunglasses on and imagines the Greek fleet sailing past Ios, Paros, Naxos and Amorgos, to get Helen back from Troy.

There’s Helen’s on the back of the boat with Paris and the black sails are on a reach. Her husband Menelaus and the Greek armada are in hot pursuit. She’s wearing a light while cotton dress which falls just above the knee with a string of black pearls falling between two pert breasts. Her sandal thongs are wrapped tight around her calves. Her skin is the product of endless milk baths and she has never worked a day in her life. Helen’s the type of woman who says loud enough for the crew to hear, ‘don’t worry darling, every man has performance issues.’ Next stop, Troy.

Excuse me. There’s a Russian man over there who only paid the ‘some plastic’ fee and he has sat next to me.

The splitting image of the 1970s singer, Nico with a nose-job, looks up at him and points to the expensive section of the beach. The beach is divided into ‘some plastic’ and ‘no plastic’, dissected by a small concrete wall, which is easy to scale. The people in the ‘no plastic’ section pay more and have a better class of li-lo. Every morning, Milo rakes the beach of Coke and detergent bottles, empty cans and plastic bags and deposits the junk on a large plastic dune two metres high, which runs the entire length of the beach. It’s a Sisyphean task because the tide drops more rubbish every day. In the last month, pumice has washed in with the dead fish.

The Russian interloper looks like an anaemic Trotsky. He’s sorry like a rat says sorry and pays more to stay in the ‘no plastic’ section. Milo brings him a white plastic li-lo and a cushion and adjusts the umbrella. Nico wants him moved further away because he’s ogling her in her string bikini, which rides up her arse. Apart from neutering Trotsky, there’s nothing he can do. He picks up a plastic rake and clears the cigarette butts and lolly wrappers.

Milo’s house is high on the side of a hill with a spectacular view of Arkoi and Leipsoi, two islands off the coast of Turkey. He bought it for a song off a German family when he arrived from Paris. His bedroom is an eyrie overlooking the water. From his balcony, the islands look like the sunburned brown hills of coastal southern California. In winter, lonely writers live cheaply in houses which have seen better days to write novels which will never be read.

During the summer months, he works as a lifeguard and tour guide at the Cave of St John. The cave is on a mountain facing the sea. It’s the size of a backpackers hovel lit with votive candles, a window which lets the morning sun in, bum-worn wooden benches and old pictures of Jesus hang on the black basalt walls. John wrote the Book of Revelation in the cave 70 years after the death of Christ.

The cave tour is popular with middle-aged American women who harbour apocalyptic fantasies about the end of the world. Some wear Jim Morrison t-shirts. The cojoining of the insane visions of a mad Jew and a mad UCLA film school graduate. Milo herds them from the buses and makes them wait until the older Greek women leave. They tarry and press notes into Father Dimitri Rocobino’s weathered hand, little prayers they want him to say for their dead husbands, dead parents and dead grandparents. Father Rocobino smiles, does a little bow and tucks the notes into the folds of his black gown, which covers a sizable girth.

The American women can’t believe this is the cave where John wrote about the lamb and the seven seals and Christ returning to sort matters out. One woman from Oregon asked Milo how they got the seals into the cave. The women spend a long time in the gift shop and buy crucifixes, postcards and pashmina shawls.

“Yassou, Father Dimitri”

“Ah, Milo, another day another dollar, eh? Come here, I want to show you something”

The women will be another 20 minutes in the gift shop. They’re bargaining the attendant down on crucifixes. Father Rocobino opens a door at the back of the cave and they walk down a pitch dark passage way to a small room lit by an old kerosine lantern. Bottles of water, cans of tuna and tinned artichokes line the walls. Left over stock from a failed business venture. He points to the ceiling.

“See that crack? It runs right across the roof”

In the shadow play of the lantern, there’s a large fissure three centimetres wide.

“Jesus! Are you going to tell anyone? Looks nasty”

“Are you out of your mind? This gig earns me 300 euro a week in tips. If it gets worse, can you help me patch it up?”

“No problem big man”

xxxxxxxx

The Meltemi winds blow from the north, gusting up to 70 kilometres per hour. Milo’s beach is packed as it faces south and is protected by hills and the two metre high plastic rubbish groyne. The August sun takes the temperature to 35C by mid-morning.

He breaks up a fight between a young French couple and a Scottish woman in the ‘no plastic’ zone. When Milo confronts froggy, he holds his arms out in innocence as a red Katie Spade purse falls past his testicles and on to the sand. Milo leads him and his howling girlfriend to the ‘less plastic’ section.

Two American women in their mid 20s, bask in front of the life guard tower. They’re attractive in the way 20 years of high quality medical care and diet provides. They’d spent 1000s of hours sculpting their bodies in gyms.

“I went to this nightclub last night – the Resurrection – or something like that and ordered a Flamin’ Groovy, which is Vodka, strontium 90, Frangelico and icecream. In Boston, they put a cherry on top but the greaseball making it didn’t put a cherry on top, so I said, finish it off with a cherry and he says, that will be five euros more”

“That’s outrageous, Harlow. These fucking wogs are con artists. Five bloody euros!”

“I know. I know. That’s what I said and he says the cherries are imported and cost more. I says this cocktail calls for – no demands – a cherry and I’ll not be paying one more euro than the standard price – 20 euros”

“The absolute cheek. As it is, we paid for a non-plastic beach and there are bottle tops and straws from here to arsehole”

Milo’s humming a mixed bag of songs from his teenage years: Jenny said when she was just five years old, you know there’s nothin’ happenin’ at all; you’re dirty sweet and you’re my girl, bang a gong, get it on, oh yeeeaahhh.

The Meltemi wind blew itself out over the next three days as the oxy acetylene sun torches the sand. Milo finishes his raking and climbs up on the tower for the morning shift as the bathers slather themselves in coconut oil. A young Russian woman stands in the water in a high-cut red bikini with the inside of her arms turned towards the sun. Milo pictures her dressed in dental floss in a chrome Moscow disco at 2.00am, looking aboriginal, jiving her head off to the doof, doof, doof, surrounded by pasty women green with envy.

A sulphur-yellow cloud creeps over the water from the south west and within 30 minutes, it’s cats paws cover the beach. The pungent smell of gun powder and burning electrical cord sends fits of coughing and jesus fucking christs as people cover their noses with sandy towels.

“For god’s sake Jennifer” a nasal male Yorkshire accent hawks, “we should have gone to Corfu like I said”

“It’s not my fault. You’re the one who said Patmos was spiritual like Iona but without the fucking Scots.”

“Hey you, life guard!” Jennifer screams like a white cockatoo, “What the hell’s going on?”

Through the haze, Milo sees a well-fed middle aged woman from some English shit hole, kneeling on the sand looking up at him. When tourists complained he’d usually mutter ‘fuck you cunt’ in Greek and ignore them.

“I’m only a lifeguard but to me, it looks volcanic. A deep sea fissure or something like that”

“A fissure? What’s a fissure?”

“It’s like when you tear your arsehole, that’s a fissure”

“Oh Jesus, an Australian. When do you reckon it will blow over?”

“About 2.37pm”

“How do you know that?”

“I don’t”

They saw it before they heard it. A large mushroom cloud rose quickly far to the south west. It churned and vomited black cloud higher into the sky. The tourists put their hands to their brows in a sun salute like in the old films of atomic tests in Nevada. The black cloud kept pillowing skywards. Then a colossal boom roared over the island, breaking the kiosk’s windows.

Behind Milo’s chair, in the car park, 200 well-dressed women, most in their 50s and 60s, sat on cheap plastic chairs, listening to writers from England, America and Australia. They’d paid $1500 a head for the privilege. The Australian women wore green and yellow terry towelling hats.

The mobile phones went dead. Disembodied voices arose Babel-like from the beach, a cacophony of different accents, some rising in panic.

“There’s no reception. My friends and memory are gone”

“Someone will come soon.

“How soon is soon?”

Milo walked the shore as tiny pieces of pumice crunched under foot. It was high tide yet an empty bottle of laundry liquid followed by clumps of seaweed were moving quickly out to sea. The water’s pull knocked a child off its feet.

“Hey, what’s happening to the water?”

“Why is our holiday turning to shit?”

He rides his old motorbike home. From the patio the town and bays are covered in yellow fog. No Internet, radio or TV. A pack of dogs runs past his house, making for higher ground. He throws a pair of binoculars around his neck and rides to the Cave of St John as Father Rocobino stares out the window.

“Never seen anything like it,” Father Rocobino says. “The water is being sucked from the island as if someone had pulled a bath plug. Are people still down the beach?”

“They’re huddling together looking frightened”

“Shouldn’t you get down there and save lives?”

“Shouldn’t you?”

“No time. We’ll get a good view up here”

“Unless up here isn’t high enough”

A large Greek islands ferry from Syro turns around in the bay and makes for deep water at speed. It’s decks crammed with holiday makers. They look like ants, running from the bow to the stern.

“Here it comes,” Father Rocobino says, pointing to the horizon. “Must be 70 metres high”

Milo looks through the binoculars and sees a wall of water charging towards Patmos. A flock of birds has settled on the roof of the cave and sheep have taken refuge in the entrance. The women of the literary festival are performing a chaotic Morris dance, running into each other, turning in circles, then pointing at the sea.

The bow of the 80 metre ferry rises quickly at the foot of the tsunami and is flipped on its back and buried beneath millions of tons of fast moving water.

In the last minute of his life, it struck Milo both curious and profane that he would die outside the Cave of St John, whose writings were so dedicated to apocalypse, with a fat Greek Orthodox priest who dedicated much of his later life to small time scams and sleeping.

As the wave approached with roar befitting the end of his world, Milo wanted to think kindly of his mother, but could not; to flick over the book of his life and see the pretty pictures of far off places visited, the Himalayan mountains, the snow falling on the Forbidden City, dancing to The Smiths in The Tower Ballroom in Blackpool, the Dervishes in Istanbul, but it all fell from his mind, not through fear but through ennui.

He wanted to dwell on past lovers – those middle class PC valkyries – but they bored him with their hunt for culture and status, for alternative music and bookshops. He wanted to revel if only for a few seconds in the beauty of literature but that bored him most. All of those words hung page upon page and to what end? The reification of the human spirit?

The wave was laden with rubbish picked up from the sea floor: washing machines, cars, yachts, bloated farm animals, hurtling towards him and he closed his eyes as Father Ricobono took his hand and said “Dog forgive me” – he meant God – and the wave crashed 20 metres below the cliff and moving at incredible speed, hit the town and beach and carried up the valley for five kilometres before it stopped and started to fall back dragging houses, trees and people with it.

Amongst the rooves and uprooted trees were the green and yellow terry towelling hats of the literary festival women, moving at speed out to sea. Moving with a grace and poetic elegance their wearers could never muster. Moving with nature not against it.

The sheep at the caves entrance were surprised they had survived and wondered how the death of the shepherd would affect them. Amongst the bleating democracy of wool, they realised it would not affect them at all. There was plenty of grass on the top of the mountain.

Milo walked inside the cave and found Father Rocobono had snapped the ring pull from a can of tuna and was now cutting the top and screwdriver.

“Do you think we should pray for the dead, Father?”

“First things first, Milo. First things first.”