The Love Beach

by Leslie Thomas

  'G‑God, don't say that, said Mr Hassey. 'Even in joking.'

  Mr Livesley said: 'I think it's an H‑bomb test. Right here. They'll blow everything to dust, or mud. And I've just got my sign up.'

  Inside the salon Bird rubbed at Mrs Flagg's scalp. 'What could it be?' she said.

  'Perhaps,' said Mrs Flagg with a sincere gurgle, 'they've heard about our natives coming over.'

  Three

  There were three violent, ten‑minute rain storms during the afternoon, and a session of thunder and vivid lightning during which the roof of a hill house was struck while a committee were discussing the next display of the Sexagesima Scottish Folk Dance Society. The committee, mostly ladies, were considerably shaken by the explosion and the sinister smell of smoke that followed it. Some thought it might be something to do with the imminent announcement the Governor was due to make, a premature attack perhaps in a war they had as yet heard nothing about. There was always that risk when you were tucked away in a fold of a large ocean. But when the smoke had cleared and the houseboys had inspected the minor damage it was generally realized that it was, after all, just another wet season thunderstorm, and the meeting proceeded.

  When the third storm had rolled out over the sea, Davies took his hired bicycle from the porch outside the South Pacific Hilton Hotel and rode along the chocolate road to the sea. The Hilton was the only hotel on the island. It had been established in 1933 by Cornelius Hilton, an escaped Irishman, and had been operated by his son Seamus ever since it was recovered from the military after the war.

  Seamus, a fine fungusy young man who spent his time inventing new drinks and playing his own fruit machine, had written a bold letter to the other Hilton Hotel Group protesting that his family had been in the business for more than forty years and did not intend to be usurped for any late starter.

  The hotel had begun life as a pleasantly white building, topped with wood and local concrete which meant that by the end of the first rainy season of its existence it was letting in water at every pore. It had mothered many miscellaneous extensions over the years, a little here and a

  little there, but the prevailing damp spread throughout these additions also and sometimes one would fall down. The rubble was simply left untouched ‑ unless, of course, human beings were trapped under it ‑ and the little dead structures leaned and piled against the main building. This itself had sighed and settled, drooped and discoloured, over time, and the day that Davies arrived the hotel resembled a pale grey stodge like a bread poultice.

  Davies rode his bicycle uncertainly along the gummy road, noting as he went the shops he intended to visit on the following day. They were set up on a wooden side‑walk clear of the road, like the buildings in a Western film. There were some European‑owned but most were run by Chinese or Vietnamese who had wandered the Pacific looking for somewhere not overpopulated with other Chinese and Vietnamese shopkeepers. The windows of their establishments were small and crammed like dustbins. Gross flies sat on the inside of the panes and blinked at the hard sun that had followed the rain. Dogs and children squatted in new warm puddles in the road. High above the children, bending and moving rhythmically like manipulations of marionettes, were the tall Pacific palms, and beyond them the recently reformed sky, smiling and innocent.

  The shops and the town ended with the road. It then became a sauntering path through congregating trees, past giant bushes thick with rainwater and sweet orange flowers. Steam was moving about the roots and the lower trunks of the palms as Davies pedalled; snaking out across the path, moving everywhere, occupying the limbs of the forest. His white shirt and his cream tennis shorts, which he had bought in Dock Street, Newport, clung to him as though needing his protection in this foreign, heated place.

  He went through a placid village after a mile. Its palm-knitted houses were pushed halfway into the trees, just their noses sticking out, reminding him, in a sudden, nostalgic burst of the way people in South Wales used to leave the noses of their cars poking out of their garages, just to show off.

  There seemed to be nobody about. Some bright washing was fidgeting on a rope line outside one house and there were several slim legs of smoke moving up from behind some of the dead brown roofs. The houses had little patches of vegetables set around them like skirts, hens and chicks investigated squares of sunlight, and masses of wild flowers, pushing into the clearing from the trees, were trimmed and gathered so that each dwelling place had its own brilliant cushions of colour. At the centre of the settlement there was a wide track, much broader than the one which had brought Davies there. It cut the place in half and was eaten up by the trees beyond the most extreme of the houses. A carved wooden figure, a tribal god about the size and attitude of a small jockey, stood by the track, and a few paces away a bus stop, properly painted and with a waste‑paper basket around its middle as though to keep its modesty. The sign said: 'Sexagesima Transport. City Centre Service. Queue other side.'

  He left the village at an ungainly circus pedal watched by the six wide Melanesian women who came, sedate as wooden ships, to the centre of the road as he turned away. They watched him, discussed him, and then turned and voyaged back to the places from which they had emerged.

  Walled jungle closed about Davies, pressing the wet heat close to him. He was wearing his British woollen socks with ugly open‑thonged sandals and it seemed to him that the sweat was dropping from the points of his toes as he worked his legs.

  .Then, with theatrical suddenness, the trees and under. growth fell away, he rode on to soft white sand, gently bumpy, looked up and stopped amazed. The beach was bowed over by courteous palms and spiky pineapple trees. The ocean, churned by the storm, tripped over the outlying coral reef and ran quiet and shame‑faced on to the beach. And lying, lined, alone and littered along the beach were the dead rusted bodies of great steel invasion barges. The bevelled snout of one reared above his head as soon as he emerged from the forest to the beach, petrified in its death attitude, jammed into the island in the place where it had come ashore twenty‑three years before. Its brothers lay straddled the whole length of the beach, most of them the same shape and size, but some smaller and three or four gigantically bigger.

  Davies felt as though he walked among monsters. He placed the cycle against the first barge, touching its flanks, feeling the surface rust powder away in his fingers. Then he went slowly along the battlefield. He felt choked, strangely frightened, to see them left and lying like this. Their square shadows were thrown forward by the late sun, some reared up, their prows high, others nuzzled the ground in the manner of a dying bull at the fight. The landing flaps of some were down, others had never dropped. Here and there, painted numbering and lettering, the square cornered 'us', had survived to show who had joined the battle that mattered nothing now.

  He walked the length of the line of metal ghosts. Halfway along the head and shoulders of a small pointed‑bowed vessel sat sunk in the sea like an old man taking a decorous bathe. Beyond it the white tape of the surf falling over the coral and the ocean journeying out to the horizon. The retreating storm was still on the far edge of the world, black below and topped with pink, yellow, and purple clouds, fluffed and fancy like a celestial ice cream.

  There was a short metal ladder, thinned with corrosion, fixed to the side of one of the big barges. Davies tested it, felt it flake in his fingers, but found it held and carefully climbed it until he reached the level of the deck. He did not know what he expected to see, decomposing tanks or even strange crouched men, but all there was for his gaze was the great hold of the creature carpeted luxuriously with fine sand, inhabited by crabs and other lodgers from the sea. Nothing else. only a close silence, with the enginesound of the reef far away and subdued, broken by the small thud of his own sandalled footsteps on the corrupted deck.

  He was glad to get down to the beach level again. But he continued to walk, like a lone visitor to a museum. He half expected to hear hollow echoes. He remembered, quite oddly and for the firs
t time in years, the massive whale which had once been exhibited in the fairground at Barry Island.

  His father had always grumbled at paying to see the whale which he alleged was a clever imitation made of wood. It certainly seemed like that to the touch, like dry hard wood, but the fairground man had denied any fraud and claimed it was an extraordinary feat of preserving mammal flesh. They also had a foetus whale, about two feet long and looking very pale and unborn, which was supposed to have been found inside the big whale when they cut it open. Davies had always felt very sorry for this little innocent whale and, until he was eight years old and had adjusted himself to things, he had great difficulty in stopping the tears on each occasion he viewed it.

  Walking under the barges on the beach was like standing under the open‑mouthed surprised expression of that exhibit whale of long ago. He almost felt its shadow on him, and knew once again the firm feel of his father's hand around his.

  Some of the barges on the farther reach of the strand had come ashore higher than the others. They had nudged into the sand only a few feet from the trees and with that insatiable curiosity of all tropical growth the plants had sent their tendrils to reconnoitre. These had insinuated themselves into, and wrapped themselves around, the dead hulk until they had, over the years, thickened into a cocoon of greenery and flowers, giving each little ship of war a decent burial.

  'Why leave you, then?' Davies asked aloud. 'Fancy not clearing away after them.' He felt as annoyed and hurt as if some old men had died in the park and nobody had bothered to do anything about them.

  He continued walking about the invasion barges and had turned the corner of the last one when he came upon Bird walking out of the sea. It was early‑closing day at the salon and she had gone to swim while the rain was away.

  She wore a black bikini and, as she came out of the quilted lagoon, her long hair was stuck to her neck and shoulders. She freed it with a careless feminine movement and then twisted it cruelly, like a wrestler twisting an opponent at his back, wringing the water from it and then shaking it out.

  The action made Davies feel strangely embarrassed as though he should not have witnessed it. Bird did not see him until she started up the beach. She stopped, then walked again.

  'Sorry,' said Davies, not knowing quite why he apologized. 'I was just looking at this little lot.'

  'You came in on The Baffin Bay,' she said.

  'Yes,' he agreed and then added, as though it were some kind of naval protocol, 'Captain McAndrews.'

  She smiled, strode up the clean sand a few yards to where her bicycle was parked against a tree, and took a towel from the handlebar basket. She rubbed herself down as though doing a dance. Arms, neck, legs, flat stomach. Davies stood uncomfortable again. He said: 'Well, I'll be going, then.'

  'Please,' she said. 'Please wait. I will be only a few moments.'

  'Oh yes, of course,' he said. 'I thought ... well, with you drying and that...'

  You've got a funny voice. Where is that from?'

  Wales,' he said. 'The one next to England. Not New South Wales.'

  'This is called The Love Beach,' she said. 'It's a shame isn't it.'

  'Why don't they do something about it? Get rid of all these?'

  She shrugged: 'Why don't they do something about anything? I don't know. They don't, that is all.'

  She folded the wet towel professionally and replaced it in the basket. She had brought out a native parau, vivid flame and white flowers on the linen, and this she wrapped gracefully about her, tucking the final end into the earlier fold of the material that covered her small breasts. He fetched his bicycle from the landing barge and they walked and wheeled towards the path through the trees.

  'How long have you been here then?' he asked.

  'All my life. I was born on St Luke's, one of the little islands.'

  'You have a funny voice too,' he said carefully.

  'I know. I went to the French Convent for years. When I was young I spoke French and Pidgin much better than English. My parents were Australian and on St Luke's we only had natives on the plantation, so I grew up speaking like the natives. My father is dead now and my mother has gone to Sydney. My name is Bird.'

  He laughed. 'Bird?' he said. 'Just like that.'

  'Like that,' she said seriously. 'They all call me Bird. I've got other names but nobody ever uses them. I have a hairdressing salon.'

  'I saw it,' said Davies triumphantly. 'Parisienne something, wasn't it? In the muddy street.'

  'Parisienne Hair Style and Beauty Salon,' she recited proudly. 'The only place it is possible to get a perm for three hundred miles.'

  'Business must be good, then.'

  She shrugged; 'I think it is,' she said. 'Why are you here?'

  'I sell ... well I'm trying to sell ... My name's Davies.'

  'What other names? Not just Davies.'

  'Well, mine are difficult too. Very Welsh mouthfuls. Isslwyn is one of them. People call you Issy then, and that sounds like a Jew doesn't it?'

  'You could be a Jew,' she said seriously. 'You are dark and you have quite a big nose.' They had reached the path through the close trees now and she mounted her cycle and went off first, swaying and winding with the muddy path.

  'You wouldn't mind being a Jew, would you?' she shouted over her shoulder. 'Would you?'

  'No,' he lied. 'No, I wouldn't mind at all.'

  She pedalled on. 'What do you sell?' she called. 'You did not finish.'

  He was glad he had not made a joke about the Parisienne Hair Style and Beauty Salon, and its muddy street. 'I'm selling butter and fats,' he shouted.

  'What and fats?' she called back. They were getting close to the village now. He could see the houses slit and split by the thinning trees.

  'Butter, 'he shouted. 'Butter and fats. 'He wondered if she were laughing. She had moved forward over the handlebars, almost crouching, and he thought she might be. But then his machine stuttered over some stones and he thought she could have crouched because of them.

  'Business good?'

  'Not yet. I'm starting tomorrow. It poured down today. didn't it?'

  'It will tomorrow too. You must not wait for the rain to end.'

  They rode from the trees and into the village. A mass of natives on bicycles were advancing down the breadth of the thick road. A bus was at the stop and more natives were jumping, toppling, falling out like people abandoning a ship. Some wore shorts and shirts, some just shorts. Others were semi‑uniformed in khaki drill, and one or two wore suits and bore funny briefcases. Some boys were rowdy at a game of football beside the road and smoke was pushing up sinewy columns from the houses. Dogs yapped and children pounded their feet in the red mud.

  'Rush hour,' sighed Bird. She had stopped her bicycle at the verge of the road. Davies rode up beside her and straddled his machine. 'Every night,' the girl said. 'It gets like this. The roads are hopeless for the traffic.'

  'Looks like it's all one‑way. I never thought I'd see this here, mind,' said Davies. He had thought of Newport Bridge at five o'clock with the cars and the buses choking its throat and the muddy Usk gurgling below. The warehouses cowering and cold along the coal‑coloured banks and the castle stuck like an old tooth between the road and the railway.

  They started pedalling again, Bird going first. They rode close along one kerb, while the tide of bicycles went in the other direction. 'Surely they're not all from that village,' Davies said. 'There's hundreds.'

  'Oh no,' she said. 'There are four more villages on this side of the island. They all work in 'Gesima.'

  He had heard people all day naturally abbreviate the capital to 'Gesima. He supposed they could hardly call it anything else. To take the first two syllables would have been ridiculous. The girl had turned along a secondary track now. away from the road and curving like a bow along by the sea again. She was very slim on the old heavy bicycle. Her feet were still bare and the gobs of mud that jumped from beneath the tyres had reddened her feet and spotted the lean backs of
her legs.

  There was a yawn of wind across the lagoon, as though the weather was tired after a hard‑working day. It stirred the sheeted water, now an evening grey but rouged in rounded areas with the diffuse reflection of the ballooning copper clouds still piled and climbing on the perimeter of the sky. In the shallows, mooring poles and net fixings projected from the skin of water, and reeds paddled, some bending as though to examine their own feet in the mud. A pair of casual birds flapped low across the sheen, reflected and slightly distorted twenty feet below.

  A great evening clearness had come across the island. It was as though the focus had been adjusted. Davies could see squared houses and other buildings on the other arm of land, beyond the lagoon, individual tall trees, and almost against the distant sea‑line, the splendid shape of a motionless sailing ship. He could only tell it was a sailing ship and an old one too, by the shape of the hull, thick and bulky but tapering to an elegant bow. She had only one and a half standing masts, the smaller one behind like a thin boy following his thin father.

  'Bird,' he said, conscious of using the odd name for the first time, 'what is that? A schooner of some sort?' She stopped her bicycle on a lip of land overhanging a primitive jetty used by native fishermen. He stopped his machine, pulling it up awkwardly with his feet because the brakes were weak.

  'A hulk,' she said unromantically. 'They use it for storing the copra, you know the coconut oil, until the collection every six months. Years ago, before my parents came to the Apostles, three of them were towed up here for that use. It is good, I believe, to keep copra stored where it can do no damage if it catches fire.'

  'What happened to the others?'

  'They are still in the islands. Being used the same. One is at St Mark's and the other at St Paul's. The natives store their copra in them.'

  It was six now and some of the thickness had been pressed out of the day. A wandering wind strengthened from the sea and ushered away the depressed dampness. The two short people stood by the shore.