'And suffocate,' she added. 'That's it. You either cut out the air or you get red, white, and blue waving over you all night. I have nightmares where I'm being flogged with a Tricolour.'
They had run into Sexagesima now. Empty, the streets stretching out like skeleton bones, a curious night‑time brownness over everything. The neon sign flashed defiantly at a thin grey cat sitting in the road staring at it, mesmerized. The cat did not see the car until it was three feet away. It did an agile back‑leap, and sat down again. The bonnet of the car, which had now stopped, blocked the full view of. the sign for the cat. It moved a couple of yards farther up the road, sat down, and continued staring from there.
The four passengers left the car and Pollet waved to them as he prodded it forward through the hollow street. They stood on the pavement. Bird was standing next to Davies. Conway had pins and needles in the hand which had been trapped between Dahlia's legs. He rubbed it solicitously.
'I'll make some coffee,' said Dahlia, but without much enthusiasm. Bird said politely: 'No. We'll go on.'
Davies blinked. 'Yes,' he agreed. 'We'd better. See you again. Tomorrow.'
He and Bird walked down the street, untouching, a channel between them. They didn't talk.
Conway put his thick arms about Dahlia's easy waist. They watched the other two going.
Dahlia said: 'Your friend is slow.'
Conway shrugged: 'Married,' he said. Then: 'And very
slow.'
They walked along the main street. It was like walking in a huge cave undiscovered for centuries. Everything was still and crouched in the oppressive night. The dainty stars had gone now, smothered by the rolling of another great bank of Pacific rain clouds. There were no lights in the street but they could somehow sense the flashing of the neon sign now far behind them down the town.
Davies sounded a dry laugh. He was still drunk but he felt steadier now he was out of the car. 'Years since I've walked a girl home,' he said.
Bird nodded. They still strolled a distance apart, shyly, very conscious of it. Bird said in her curious way: 'I do not suppose you have if you became married. It's one of the things you have to surrender.'
'Oh yes,' he said. 'I realized that.'
'Haven't you taken any woman out since you left?' she asked. 'Not in Australia?'
'We went to a couple of dances,' he answered. 'But just to dance, you know. I didn't do much of that either. Then I met a prostitute once...' He was astonished to hear himself say it. He had never told anyone. Bird didn't turn her head to him suddenly, but just kept walking in the same way. He knew because he turned his eyes to watch her.
'I didn't know she was, mind,' he said. 'I'm a bit stupid like that.'
'You are,'agreed Bird.
'Well, she was sitting in this pub in Sydney and I went in for a quiet pint after work. She had a round, homely sort of face too, and when she started talking to me I thought she was just being sociable. We had a couple of beers and then she gets this list out of her handbag, all printed beautifully and everything it was, like a price list. All the things you could do to her were printed out, and alongside were the prices for each thing. She frightened me out of my skin.'
Bird exploded with astonished laughing, looking at his innocent expression in the dimness, bending forward and holding her bands over her mouth. 'Oh, Davies,' she gurgled. 'To you of all people. Whatever happened?'
He stared at her for a moment, then began laughing himself. They laughed and danced a little dance of laughter in the street. They stopped. 'God help us!' he said. 'Now you come to think of it, it must have been funny!'
'Funny!' she said. 'You didn't think before...' He could see her eyes were wet. He still could hardly believe they were pantomiming like this in the street. He giggled again. 'No! No! It never dawned on me before...'
She stopped and held out her hand to stop him. It touched his hand and he felt it tender as a child's. 'Wait now,' she said. 'Wait a minute. Tell me, what did the list say? What sort of things? ...'
'I couldn't!' he exclaimed seriously. 'I couldn't tell it to you.' But he knew he could tell her. A sudden bravado was filling him. He thought it was the beer being stirred up by all this laughing and prancing about. But then he looked at her, a young girl, standing grinning at him and he knew from where the release had come.
'Go on,' she encouraged him. 'I must know.'
'Well,' he grinned. 'There's some very rotten words in it...'
'I've heard all the rotten ones,' she laughed. 'I say them too. Go on. Davies.'
He smirked. He felt like a boy who had suddenly discovered the way to ride a bike, or to kick a ball, or play something on the piano after millions of years practice. He said: 'Well, she handed me this list. All lovely and printed...' She burst into merriment again. 'Shut up,' he said. 'Or I'll never tell you. And on the top it said in big letters FIONA'S PRICES ...'
'Fiona!' exclaimed Bird. 'Yes...'
'Then, underneath it was all set out like a menu. French and all. The first thing said "Fuck Ordinaire . . .....
Bird collapsed on the pavement and sat holding her face in her hands. 'Oh, Davies,' she laughed. 'Exquisite. Fuck Ordinaire! Oh, my God. Sit down, Davies, please sit down.'
He squatted down opposite her on the stones. Her laughter was still making him laugh. 'Then there was "Fuck. Three different positions".' Bird didn't look at him. She kept her head down. 'Then?' she asked. 'What then?'
'Some others. I can't remember them all ... Oh yes. My God, Bird, there was another one which said "Uprightt Fuck", and it had little elaborate brackets after it and the words "Against Interior Wall" in them.'
He tried to remember. 'She had all sorts of positions printed down and all this French, and you can imagine me looking at them. At the list I mean, not the positions themselves.'
'I believe that,' said Bird. 'She might as well have shown it to the Archbishop of Canterbury.'
'Oh, I'm not that bad,' he protested. He stopped and suddenly realized what he had said.
'You mean, you're not that good,' she said quietly, looking intently down the vacant street as though she saw someone coming.
He felt all the laughter drain from him. 'You don't know, Bird,' he said, 'how I have felt. I sometimes think I'm the only bugger in the world who feels like this. Everybody else seems to be like old Conway. Like it says in the thing ‑keeping time to a nicety ‑ remember?' She nodded and smiled. He said: 'I wish to God I was.' There was some damp dust on the pavement where they sat. Davies drew a little meaningless map in it with his finger.
'I love Kate, you see,' he said. 'And those kids ... well, they brought a sort of freshness to me. I never wanted anything outside that.'
She drew a second anonymous island in the dust and joined it to his with a causeway made by a single stroke of her finger. 'Who was the man with the car, Davies?' she asked. 'Not your brother.'
He looked at her. Her young bright face was composed, perfect; interested and concerned. 'It showed, didn't it?' he said.
'Very much,' she nodded.
'No, it's not my brother. I haven't got one for a start, and my mother wouldn't have called him Dilwyn, anyway. That's my old man's name and she couldn"t stand the sight of him. No ... I've never met him.'
He took the pictures from his pocket with difficulty still because he wasn't doing anything right, and set them out on the ground, like playing cards once again. The photograph of the young man with the shiny car was laid out last.
'That's the joker,' said Davies. He looked at the photographs again. 'See, the day I left home to go to Australia, I found this film in one of Kate's shoes. I thought it had just got there by accident. But I knew which film it was, because we didn't take many. A couple of rolls a year. We never had a lot of money to chuck about. Anyway, I remembered taking these snaps of Kate and the kids in the park, on the swings and all that, and I thought, "Ah, I'll take these to Australia with me". I was going to get them developed and then send them home as a nice surprise, see.'
Bird nodded. The cat which had been watching the bakery sign had torn itself away and came sauntering up the street towards them. It rubbed itself for comfort along the channel of Bird's back and she softly caught its thin tail and let it run through her hand.
'Well,' said Davies. 'It was me who got the surprise. One of the chaps at work does photography as a hobby and he said he would do the developing job for me. When he came back with the prints, I was all keen and eager as you could imagine.' He laughed without humour. 'I was in such a bloody rush I dropped the things all over the floor at work, behind my desk, fortunately, because the boss came in and started telling somebody off about something; so I couldn't
pick them up from the floor for a minute. They were down there, scattered about, and the picture of the chap with the car was on top. I sort of stared at it, trying to make out what it was, because I was still standing up, you see. I could see this snap quite clearly, but the others were either hidden underneath it or had fallen face down on the floor. Naturally I thought "Old Harry's given me the wrong photographs". I thought he'd got them mixed up with somebody else's.
'Then Mr Trellis went out and I dived down and picked up the bunch. They were mine, all right. All except that one. The others showed the kids on the swings and the seesaws, and there was just the one of that smug‑looking bastard in his new suit and his crappy car.'
Davies looked up dizzily. The heavy sky had gathered around them. 'Looks like a bit more rain,' he said. 'We'd better get on.' He took Bird's hand and helped her up. They walked apart, onwards down the dumb street, the cat following with puzzled walk. 'Even then I thought that Harry had mixed this one in by mistake. But he said it was on the roll, and he wouldn't be shifted from that. I didn't know the bloke in the picture, never saw him in my life. But you can see the number plate of the car, see, and one of the blokes at work had a diary with all the registration letter codes in it ‑ all the ones in Britain, that is. He's from London and he brought this over to Australia with him. Anyway, we checked, and those letters are a Newport registration. I sent off to the County people in Newport and they turned up the address of this bloke. He lives about half a mile away from us. Well, from Kate.'
Bird stopped walking. 'This is where I live.' she said. 'This is the shop and I live up there, over the top.' Davies stopped awkwardly on the pavement. 'There'll be another downpour soon,' he said turning his head up. 'Doesn't stop for long, does it?'
'Not at this season,' she said. 'Did you write and ask her about the man?'
He said softly: 'No. I didn't have the guts. I keep thinking that everything will be all right and she'll bring the kids 89
out to Australia. I've got just about enough for us to start again now.' He stopped there and they stood without speaking. Then: 'Goodnight, Davies,' said Bird.
'Goodnight,' he said absently. Then starting forward he continued with a rush of words: 'It's a funny thing, you know, but I should have realized there was something fishy the day I left home. It struck me at the time, but I didn't think any more about it. Or hardly. At Newport, you see, the railway bridge crosses the river almost alongside the old road bridge. There's only a couple of hundred yards between them. And that day when they all came to see me off, Kate and David and little Mag, I kissed them all at the train, got in, and it moved off pretty quickly from the station. They were all on the platform when it pulled away. Well, it was a false start. The train waited a bit, just stopped outside the station for a couple of minutes for the signal or something, and then went off across the river bridge. And I hung out of the window hoping that with any luck they might have walked as far as the bridge and would wave. Well, they were on the bridge right enough ‑ right at the far end ‑ waving to me. I was a bit shattered at the time. I thought "Well, how the bloody hell did they get that distance in a couple of minutes, out of the station, along the street and on to the other end of the bridge". It was like a conjuring trick. And, thinking back on it, there was a car standing not very far from them, which is unusual because they won't have parking on the bridge in Newport. That's how they got there. In his car.'
Bird said: 'He must have been waiting outside the station, then.'
'Yes. He didn't let the grass grow under his bleeding feet did he. Goodnight, Bird.'
'Goodnight,' she said again. She watched him walk down the sloping‑ street towards the hotel. As she did so heavy gobs of rain fell. Davies began to lope, at a jog, his shoulders hunched.
Seven
'I think I like you best in red,' said Conway. He hung back across Dahlia's bed, considering her, his shirt, his trousers, and his shoes off, two toes, blinking at the light, poking from a hole in his black sock. Dahlia was standing in the centre of her room, tall and naked, a bottle in her hand, caught delicately by the neck. She had been returning from her drinks cupboard when he stopped her with a policeman's upright hand. She had a very strong body, with big, steady breasts, and her hips, pelvis, navel, and crease forming a perfect heart. Each time the neon light changed outside it threw its garish reflection through the net curtains at the window and coloured her flesh. now red, now startling white, now blue.
Conway thought it was very erotic. Somehow it electrified her shape, the blue turning her icy, the white making her like an apparition, and the red making her flesh bum. The moon shadows under her breasts and in her other hillocks and pits were deep as wounds each time the light changed.
'It suits you, that red,' continued Conway casually. 'The blue is a bit cold and the white makes you look like you've got no clothes on.'
She said: 'I haven't got any on. Can I move now?'
'Oh yes,' he replied waving his hand. 'Carry on. Don't let me stop you pouring.'
She went towards the glasses on the bedside table. 'You're a born bastard,' she said without malice. 'Really, I've ordered some heavy curtains, you know. I've been hanging it out, not knowing whether I was going to stay here in the island another week or another year. But I need my sleep. So I've sent the measurements to Noumea and told them to make the curtains in velvet or something heavy. Nobody in this dopey island is capable of making them even if I could get thick material here, which I can't.'
'Stand there a minute,' said Conway abruptly, leaning towards her. She was quite near. She stood. She mimicked uncertainly: 'Stand here, stand there. You sound like Van Gogh or someone.'
He rolled over on his stomach, his white backside in view from beneath the end of his longish singlet. He rested his head and eyes on one arm and put the other out, seeking her. He got his fingers rolled in the thick hairs about her point and began to gather them together, pulling them gently down and arranging them into a sort of Frenchman's beard.
'Jesus,' she breathed. 'Now what are you doing?'
He began to tug at the beard firmly, but not hurting her, with a milking motion, his face still buried in the curve of his other arm. 'This,' he said, eventually answering her. 'It's called Fud Tugging.'
She began to bend forward tenderly. 'Excuse me,' she said. 'I can't take too much of this.'
'Take a bit more,' he suggested. 'It's very difficult to get the right rhythm and the correct control to the little perversion like this. Finesse, that's what's required. It's an art...'
She was looking at him with full eyes, half pulling away from him, half pushing herself towards him. Her hands moved eloquently, but she remained helpless. Conway still didn't look at her. 'I can't stand much more,' she repeated the warning, speaking very low.
'They should have this Fud Tugging in the Olympic Games,' he muttered. 'Better than hop‑skip‑and‑a‑jump. Better than the pole vault or any of those events. Just think of doing this on an international scale.'
'Con,' she began again. 'Stop...'
'I know who'd get the gold medal,' he said rolling over and displaying to her what the exercise had achieved for him. She looked down at him. 'Australia,' she whispered putting out her hands.
'Steady,' said Conway, stopping her. He lifted the front end of his long vest
and hung it over the top of his penis, like a shroud. 'Ladies and Gentlemen,' he intoned, 'we are here today to witness the unveiling of a statue of one of the most important members ‑ members, get that? ‑ of our community. He has stood erect among us for a long time...'
'Stop it,' said Dahlia seriously, not laughing.
He smiled officially at her. 'Lady Dahlia,' he announced, 'looking lovely as ever in alternating red, white, and blue will now perform the unveiling. Lady Dahlia!'
Conway applauded politely while Dahlia, the wild lights still flowing over her skin, stood and made a speech. She had found some control of herself now and she purposefully went on for some time until Conway looked up uncomfortably and whispered: 'Hurry up, then. There won't be anything to unveil in a minute.'
They made varied love after that, at intervals through the night, with the neon flashes bouncing upon them on her bed. Then the dawn peeled over the ocean, first, then the lagoon, and then the town, clear and yellowy after the rain, and the sign lost its power and went on blinking pathetically in the growing day.
They did not sleep much, but lay quiet mostly, talking sometimes, for they were both wanderers, both adventurers. They had loved in many places. Late in the night Conway said: 'Who would you say knows St Paul's the best? Is there anyone gets across there regularly?'
She was lying in the bend of his arm, her big breasts pressed into his flank, the rest of her half underneath him. 'When are you going?' she asked.
'Tomorrow,' he said. 'No, I mean it's today now. Today.'
'Abe Nissenbaum goes across pretty regularly. He does deals with the natives over there. He has a motor boat and he takes stuff across to sell to them. He does a great trade in religious things, prayer beads, and crosses and all that stuff.''He fixes the crucifixes eh?' said Conway.
'As a matter of fact he does.'
'With a name like Abe Nissenbaum?'
'The natives don't know the difference. He's very popular over there.'
The Love Beach Page 9