A Stone's Throw

by Fiona Shaw

  Will put the beer deep in a rock pool at one end of the beach. The bottles slid down the rock and sank amongst the gentle anemones. The bucket of mackerel he dug deep into the sand, covering their broken heads with an oilskin against quizzing flies, securing this with four large stones. He looked back across the beach. Benjamin stood on the groundsheet, undressing. He had spread the square of old green tarpaulin high up near the cliff and away from the water, behind the tide line, where the shingle was dry. His swimming trunks and book lay before him like sacred objects. His trousers already removed, he had his fingers round the elastic of his underpants. Will gave a low wolf whistle and Benjamin started like someone caught in some act, his hands flying to his crotch. Then he laughed, catching sight of Will in the shade, and tossed his head and pulled off his underpants in a single flourish.

  The sun was high and warm, the sky clear blue. The boys laid their trousers, soaked with spray from the sailing, out to dry, then gathered driftwood. It was caught, as Will had said it would be, between the rocks that jutted down towards the water at the far end of the beach, together with all the flotsam that the sea so loves: brittle seaweed, dead birds, crab shells, cuttlefish bones, a broken buoy. Will clambered up the first reaches of the cliff and tugged out handfuls of dry grass for tinder. Then they piled the wood in the middle of the beach, tucking the grass beneath to keep it secure. Their arms and chests were scratched with their efforts; like initiation marks, Will thought, in a sacred place.

  ‘Nothing more to do now,’ he said, and somehow the saying of that made both boys abashed and they stood uncertain, looking at the water.

  ‘Hey, look!’ Will said, and he pointed to the middle distance.

  Benjamin stared. ‘Can’t see …’ he began, and Will threw himself and tackled Benjamin down, arms around his legs, and they rolled and struggled, pushing for purchase against the sand’s shift, digging in with toes and elbows. Although Will was the slighter of the two, he had the first advantage and straddling his friend, he pinned Benjamin’s arms and gripped his hips with his thighs, like a cowboy with a bucking steed.

  ‘Solid enough, am I?’ he said, wild-eyed with effort, laughing, and that set Benjamin off so he couldn’t speak and tears of laughter ran down to his ears.

  ‘Your mother didn’t know you played rugby,’ he said at last. ‘She did look surprised.’

  ‘You were sailing damn close to the wind,’ Will said.

  ‘But she thinks I’m a lovely boy,’ Benjamin said.

  ‘And so you are. Lovely and covered with sand.’ Will let go of Benjamin’s arms. ‘But too gritty for any rugby playing just now.’

  The sea was cold and they swam vigorously, their breath coming in short punches till their bodies grew used to it. Will lay back and floated, feeling the warmth above and the cold below, his body in two halves. He shut his eyes and listened to the hiss and chunter of the sea, the soft, grainy turn and turn about of the waves’ break, and when he opened them, the world had gone to white and yellow till he gathered in his sight again. Benjamin was out already, sitting high up on the beach on the groundsheet, a towel around his waist, nose in his book.

  ‘Hey,’ Will called, but Benjamin didn’t hear.

  Will swam back to the shore with long, easy strokes, feeling the gentle pull of the tide against him, and stood in the shallows, looking out. He could see the shadow of the hidden rocks, the sea puckering now above them. Any minute and they would break the surface. Will raised his arm high as if a victory had been won. They were marooned, till the water rose again.

  When he turned back to the beach, Benjamin was standing up and facing him. He wasn’t reading any more. Will’s breath quickened. With only the cap on his curly hair, Benjamin stood naked, arms by his sides, his prick high and full. He made no move, no gesture, he just stood.

  Will wanted to run at him and seize him, take him in, possess him. But instead he met him in kind and walked slowly back up the beach, still wet from the sea, his skin still cold. Ten yards off he stopped and carefully he pulled off his own trunks, easing them down till they dropped to the sand. Then he turned, naked before the cliffs and rocks, before the beach and the sea and the endless tide. He felt the wind brush his cock, and at last, unable to hold himself back any longer, he went to his lover.

  Gently, Benjamin lay him down and with a towel he rubbed Will’s body dry. Only Will’s cock he did not touch, though it rose so hard to meet him. Then he knelt, his own erection captured between his thighs, and kissed him. Softly he kissed at first, his mouth on Will’s, licking the brine from his lip, then more fiercely, his tongue insistent, his teeth catching at him, wanting, hungry. He kissed Will’s neck and shoulders, his ears; he kissed his small, hard nipples and bit at his hips, his thighs, and the wind blew his hair against Will’s cock and Will groaned with desire.

  ‘Fuck me,’ Benjamin said, and he took Will’s hands and pulled him up so that they knelt on the groundsheet, facing. Bending forward, Benjamin kissed Will on his cock’s tight tip.

  ‘Fuck me,’ he said again and he smiled a knowing smile and reached over for a rucksack and pulled a jar of Vaseline from a side pocket.

  ‘You’re a thoughtful bugger,’ Will said, grinning.

  ‘Now fuck me like a dog,’ Benjamin said, and Will turned him round and pushed him down. He slicked him with Vaseline, pressing, prying, so that he made his lover groan. Kneeling behind, he entered him, slowly, slowly, each thrust a little deeper, till he was in right to the hilt, possessing him.

  ‘Feel me now,’ he said, and Benjamin put his hand back to feel them joined.

  Then he took hold of Benjamin’s hips, pulling him close, holding him there till he came; and he yelled out, as if with one fuck there on that beach, he could make up for all the silence. And Benjamin cried out too, and they lay close for a time before making love again.

  They had known of one another for four years, ever since their first arrival at the school. But for the first three and a half, placed in different forms, dormitories, sets, their paths had rarely crossed, and each was little more than a surname to the other. Will knew Benjamin as a Jew and a Londoner, attributes that could lend both suspicion and fascination to a boy in that school. Circumcisions were two a penny (there had been a vogue for them when Will was born, though Meg had resisted) but Benjamin’s yarmulke – he still wore it when he first arrived – was the first Will had ever seen. As for London, Will had never visited, only listened with reluctant awe when other boys spoke of the Tube and the West End and Soho.

  Still, in the last year he had become less impressed by such things than before on account of discovering the wonders of sex. Not the dark dormitory fumblings of his first years there, disavowed in the chilly light of the boarding school day, but something altogether more fun. Cross-country running; excursions into the woods to gather insects for Mr Blackman, the biology master; the long, independent study hours awarded to the senior boys; even cricket, once: all seemed organised to provide Will and his friends with time and space in which to discover the pleasures and excitements that their bodies afforded. But busy as he was with others, until that one November night, Will’s glance had never stopped on Benjamin.

  As for Benjamin, equally he had never given a second thought to Will; nor had he ever fumbled through his adolescence, except with himself, pinning up pictures of Audrey Hepburn and Doris Day in his mind, though it was true that they tended to meld into figures altogether more androgynous as he rose to the sticking point. But he never gave this too much thought afterwards.

  All this changed for both, the evening last November that they were left behind. It was a tradition with the upper years to visit the theatre before Christmas, a two-hour journey each way by motorbus. Ice creams were bought in the interval, and on the way home fish and chips, by prior agreement with the chippie who had his heaps of battered fish and newspaper ready. Unfortunately, or so it seemed at first to them, both Benjamin and Will were ill that day with the fever that had swept through the schoo
l; and though each, separately, protested his fitness to go, each was over-ruled, and so lay that afternoon next to one another in neatly-turned sanatorium beds.

  The sickness was a pleasant one, as sicknesses go, and the school nurse had seen enough of it in the last month to be familiar with its course. So she left the two boys to their own devices in the evening and went to visit her daughter in the village for an hour or two.

  The boys fell to talking – the fever made it hard to read and there was little else to do – and soon found much more than a slight pleasure in each other’s company. Far from finding their differences as obstacles to friendship, as they might have even a year earlier, they found them exhilarating. And although they knew how it had happened, they wondered that they had attended the same school these four years without finding one another out.

  But the vital change between them occurred not in all this talk, but in the heat of fever, and it was Benjamin, all unknowing, or so he claimed later, who was responsible for it.

  ‘There seemed nothing more natural,’ he said laughing. ‘I was burning up and you were shivering. It made sense to me to share the fever.’

  Will was already laughing.

  ‘It made sense to you because you were feverish,’ he said. ‘Delirious.’

  ‘But it did. If you were too cold, and I was too hot, then you would cool me, and I would warm you through.’

  ‘That’s another fine mess, Stanley,’ Will said, laughing so hard, he was crying. ‘Best bit of sense you ever made.’

  So at Benjamin’s fevered bidding, Will climbed in to his bed and what began as an imagined exchange of humours – the hot for the cold – quickly became a very different kind of encounter.

  Till now Will had given no thought to whom he might love. Other boys bragged of their success with girls – how far they had gone with them, mostly. Though sometimes when they talked about the future – careers and universities – they would add into the mix the kind of girl they wanted for a wife, even sometimes a particular girl. And Will would listen and agree, assuming that he must want this too. But now he had met Benjamin, he knew what he wanted, though he never dared name it, even to himself, and girls played no part in it.

  ‘We’re like Crusoe on his lonely beach,’ Benjamin said. He lay back, shielding his eyes from the sun, his body soft, curved now. ‘If only he and Friday … Would’ve been perfect then.’

  ‘Or Achilles and the boy he loved,’ Will said. ‘What was his name? I’m famished.’ He hunted in the rucksack, and then let out a whoop.

  ‘She’s put in the just-in-case food.’

  ‘Who’s Justin Case?’

  ‘Look, Ben. Buttered bread, and more apples, and chocolate. There’ll be cake somewhere. There’s always cake.’

  ‘Your mother loves you differently from Henry and Emma,’ Benjamin said, running his finger softly down Will’s spine. ‘Not more; I don’t mean that. But differently.’

  ‘I’m older,’ Will said. ‘Do you want something?’

  Benjamin shook his head. Will folded some bread into a sandwich and ate.

  ‘Henry’s only eleven,’ he said. ‘He hasn’t even gone away to school yet.’

  ‘Tell me the story you asked your mother to,’ Benjamin said.

  ‘What do you mean, she loves me differently?’

  ‘I don’t mean anything,’ Benjamin said.

  ‘But she’s going to tell it tonight.’

  ‘Tell me anyway. I want to hear you. I won’t let on to her. I promise.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Please?’

  ‘I’ll tell you if …’

  ‘What?’

  Will laughed. ‘I don’t know what. I’ve got it all, right here and now. The whole damn lot.’

  The sun was high and hot, and the boys moved the groundsheet into the shade. Benjamin fetched two bottles of beer from the rock pool and Will lay back.

  ‘I don’t remember when she first told me,’ he said. ‘But in the war she was on a ship sailing to marry my father in Africa and it got torpedoed. She saw lots of people die, lots of her friends, and some of them because they hadn’t got their life jackets on. That’s why she got so exercised about the life jackets this morning.’

  ‘But she likes telling the story?’

  ‘Actually not that part of it. The story she’ll tell tonight will be about how she put my father’s photo in one pocket and her mother’s in the other when she knew the ship would sink, and that’s all she arrived in Africa with; and how my father was told she was dead but wouldn’t believe it and kept going back to the harbour; and how he didn’t recognise her when she did arrive finally because she was so sunburnt and unwashed. They married the day after and I was born nine months after that. That’s the story she’ll tell tonight.’

  Will stopped and thought. When he spoke again, it was haltingly. There was something he wanted to understand, but it was slippery, elusive.

  ‘You know in the dormitory how boys would say things when the lights were out that they would never have said in the day? My mother drove me to school for my first term, and during the drive she talked, but she couldn’t look at me because she was driving. So it was as if she spoke with the lights out. That’s how I’ve always thought of it.’

  ‘What did she tell you?’

  ‘First off she told me she ate most of her mother’s cake on the ship because she was hungry, and how sorry she was. I didn’t understand everything, but I didn’t want to ask in case she stopped talking. Turned on the lights. Anyway, it was the cake that got her started, and that was because of the one she’d baked me, the one in my school trunk. I’d asked her if it had cherries in it.’

  ‘Cherries?’

  ‘I love cherries, the sugary ones that go in cakes; so she said of course it did. And how my grandmother had put cherries in the cake she baked her for her wedding and she didn’t know how she’d got hold of them, because it was the war. Anyway, the end of the cake went down with the ship and that still made her feel very sad. So I asked her why.’

  ‘You asked her why!’ Benjamin swiped him. ‘You moron.’

  ‘I was only thirteen.’

  ‘Bet you understood soon enough, first term away at school.’

  Will nodded.

  ‘So what else did your mother tell you?’

  ‘That the ship was full of soldiers. “Not much older than you are now,” she said, and it made something go through me, don’t know what it was. She’d watched the soldiers parading once; told it like it was an adventure, that she’d had to escape to do it. Climb ladders, duck under ropes. The soldiers reminded her of boys she’d known; she said one of them especially reminded her of someone.’

  ‘Sounds like a boyfriend,’ Benjamin said cautiously, ‘but perhaps not your father.’

  Will shrugged.

  ‘Maybe. I don’t understand why she married my father. I don’t know why anybody would. But the thing was, so many of those soldiers died when the ship went down. She said one of them died leaning against her in the lifeboat. She thought he was only sleeping.

  ‘There was a moment when she stopped the car. She’d been talking, telling me all of this. But then she stopped the car and turned round and put her hand on the back of my neck. It was quite strange. She hadn’t done anything like that since I was about five. It tickled a bit. It felt as if she was trying to get hold of my hair, but I’d been to the barber’s the day before, so there was nothing there. Anyway, she turned and she said: “The people you love, they just slip away. There one minute, gone the next. I won’t let you do that, William.” She was so fierce. I remember those words exactly. But whenever I think about it, I don’t know who she was talking to, or what she was talking about.’

  Will fell silent, then stood up, dizzy with telling. Benjamin put on his trunks and piled the driftwood into a bonfire.

  ‘Didn’t feel safe, lighting a fire without them on,’ he said.

  Will laughed. He fetched four mackerel and put them on the griddle, nos
e to tail. He pushed the dry grass underneath Ben’s pile, making sure it had enough air and enough small driftwood to catch to. He wouldn’t have built the bonfire this way, but he was happy. From the rucksack he took out his cigarette lighter and a penknife. The penknife was looped onto a string and Will put it around his neck so that it hung on his chest like a medal.

  ‘Fine lighter,’ Benjamin said. ‘A lover’s gift?’

  He lit the fire and the driftwood, dry as bones, blazed at once. The flames were invisible in the sun, like ghosts in the air. But the heat they put up was ferocious, and the boys stepped back to watch.

  ‘Once it’s died back we can cook the fish,’ Will said.

  ‘Patroclus,’ Benjamin said. ‘He was the one Achilles loved.’

  Stropping the penknife blade on a stone, Will picked up the first fish and with a soft stroke, he slit it gills to tail. Then two cuts top and bottom, and he slipped his fingers into its belly, tugged out the innards and threw them on the fire. Swiftly he gutted the other three.

  Benjamin said: ‘What will happen? We haven’t got a battle to disguise things and anyway, England isn’t Greece. Your mother hopes you might meet a nice girl at the dance.’

  ‘My mother likes you, Ben.’

  ‘She wouldn’t like me so much if she’d seen us on this beach.’

  Will stood, cradling the fish in his hands.

  ‘Need the water,’ he said.

  The boys walked down to the falling sea. The sand was packed and dark underfoot. Will rinsed the fish, swirling them to and fro, and their bodies muddied the water for a moment.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Will said. ‘I don’t know what will happen.’

  The flames had died back now and Will made a level place for the griddle. Carefully he laid out the fish.

  ‘Why can’t we go on as we are?’ he said. ‘Go to university. Get jobs. You want to be a lawyer, follow your father. I don’t know what I’ll do. Something unlike mine.’