by Patrick Gale
“Farmer’s not coming back after all,” John told her as they drove on. “Harriet rang to tell me. Court found in his favor and said it would be an infringement of his civil liberties because in Brazil a crime no longer holds so many years after the event.”
“Oh darling,” she said, eyes wet again. “Do you really mean that? Clean slates all round? Oh I’m so glad!” and she shyly stroked his forearm as he changed gear, a gesture that took him back to 1968 and another crime entirely.
BEACHCOMBER
It was a Saturday so the beach was crowded with people who were not on holiday but happened to live nearby. The tide was extraordinarily low, which made matters worse. Skip, like Julian, had come to think of the small cove before the bungalow as their beach and joined him in despising the invasion. As the tide receded past the last rocky defense against the hordes of Polcamel and the first few people waded round in their flip-flops, the two of them talked in scornful voices and stared as witheringly as they could but no one seemed bothered. Before long the precious private sand was a maze of striped wind-shelters, folding chairs and lunch boxes. There were numerous dogs bounding around lifting their legs and worse on sandcastles and one family who knew no better had actually produced a portable gas burner and was boiling a kettle.
Ma did not seem to mind the crowds for once. Normally she would flatly refuse to step on to a beach she deemed too crowded. Now she was enjoying a prolonged surfing lesson from Bill, reckless, heedless of more sensitive souls in her care. Julian returned from Beachcomber with a plate of peanut butter and banana sandwiches, made the way Skip had taught him. He stood for a moment, scanning the surf for his mother then found her far out behind the main crowd of splashers and jumpers. She and Bill were floating, hunched over their boards like a couple of waterlogged shipwreck survivors as they waited for a wave worth their effort. It seemed they had been out there for hours and he felt a babyish impulse to go after Ma and impose his will. But she had been acting strangely all day. She was doing everything too much, talking, laughing, listening even, with the kind of embarrassing intensity he had learned to associate with the wet afternoons when she had been practicing the piano for hours and was left like a moody stranger in his mother’s body.
He straightened his towel, being meticulous about not flicking sand, then sat crosslegged at one end of it with the sandwich plate before him like an offering. Skip was pretending to be a grown-up. She lay flat on her back, her face a mask behind sunglasses, her arms and legs glistening with tanning oil. But she spoiled the effect by wearing a baggy tee shirt over her swimming costume in an effort, he supposed, to look like a boy. She was growing breasts, though. He had seen.
“Mmm,” he said, chewing a sandwich and she sat up and took one too.
“Not bad,” she said, tasting it. “You’re learning.” He had learned already, it was ridiculously easy, but it was too hot to argue so he simply offered her a second one. “I guess you think this buys you another surfing lesson,” she said, eating.
“No. It’s all right,” he said and added as casually as he could, “Bill said he’d take me out later.”
“You really like my dad, don’t you?” she asked.
“Of course,” he said. “He’s fun.”
She gave him one of her assessing stares. He could tell, even though she had sunglasses on, by the way her mouth pinched together like a cat’s bum-hole. “You know, he thinks you’re girly too. Why else do you think he calls you Julie?”
“I don’t care,” he said, stung.
She took the last sandwich. “Anyway, I don’t want to go out there now. Not with all those awful people.”
He smiled and she smiled back. She had imitated his way of speaking nastily at first. Now she did it as a sort of game. She was quite good at it, although she would never pass for English. She unwrapped a piece of gum and began to chew, the way she always did, when she had barely swallowed the last mouthful of any meal. He knew his mother hated this but he held the information back from Skip because it was more useful that way. When you were younger and more girly, he was coming to realize, you needed more ammunition.
“Truth or dare?” she asked suddenly.
“What?”
“It’s a game, stupid. For when you’re bored. Truth or dare?” He must have looked blank. “If you say truth you have to give the true answer to whatever I ask and if you say dare you have to do whatever dare I set you.”
This did not sound like a very happy game. “Can’t we just play make-believe,” he asked. “You can be an evil queen if you like and I’ll be your slave.”
“I’ll go first,” she said, ignoring this. “To show you.” He was beginning to suspect she had no imagination. “Go on. Say it.”
“What?”
“Truth or dare.”
“Truth or dare?”
“Dare. Now you dare me.”
“Oh.” He looked around them. “I dare you to kick that boy’s sand-castle over.” He indicated the fat six-year-old attached to the family with the kettle. It was an instant castle, made with one of those buckets with built-in crenellations, so had taken no time to build. It didn’t have a garden. Not even any shells to decorate it.
“Consider it done.” With extraordinary sureness, Skip walked up to, over and past the sandcastle, crushing it underfoot as casually as if she had not seen it lay in her way to somewhere more important. The family was too preoccupied with tea to notice. Only the fat boy saw and he stared after her, plainly uncertain whether to complain or merely cry. Skip returned to her towel by a circular route and flopped back down.
“He’ll tell,” Julian warned her.
“So? I’ve been here for hours, asleep. Haven’t I? Truth or dare?”
Julian pondered. He sensed the dangers in this game now. “Truth,” he said.
Skip lowered her sunglasses to examine his face as she asked him. “OK. One of your parents has to die. It can be quick and painless but they gotta die. Which’ll it be?”
“Pa,” he answered without even having to think about it. He had never thought about it before but now that he did there was no question. His father would have to die. He gasped at the ease with which he knew this.
“So you love your mother more?”
“No. I … Well, Pa isn’t around so much so I’m not sure I … Oh I don’t know. I don’t like this. It’s silly.”
“No it isn’t. Your turn.”
“When is it over?” But she wasn’t answering. “Truth or dare,” he sighed.
“Dare.”
“Don’t you ever choose truth?” he asked.
“Dare, I said.”
He had to punish her. “All right,” he said. “Show me your thingy.”
“What?”
“You know. Down there.”
She stared at him, unable to believe he would be so impudent.
“Right here,” he added.
“I can’t,” she stammered.
“Does that mean I’ve won?”
“No!” She was furious. “I’ll show you at the house. Come on.”
She marched into Beachcomber and as he tailed after her, he wondered how she had turned triumph into punishment. Skip stamped into the bathroom and shut the door.
“Wait,” she said firmly. He waited outside. He heard her pull her T-shirt over her head and heard something slap on the floor. “OK.” Her voice sounded muffled. “Ten seconds. That’s all.”
“I really don’t have to—” he began.
“Get on with it or they’ll come back and catch you.”
So he opened the door. Her swimming costume lay flopped around her ankles and she had thrown a bath towel over her head and shoulders so that all he could see were her legs and the portion in question. The towel trembled slightly as he approached.
“Look,” she commanded. “You’re not looking.”
How could she tell? He looked. Very quickly, but he looked. He saw how different she was. How she had begun to grow hair though not as much as his m
other yet. It looked small and secret, like a cross between an anemone and a sort of mouse.
“Thank you,” he said politely and left the room.
She was dressed in seconds and seemed charged with a kind of hot fury when she re-emerged so that he knew what she had shown him in the bathroom could never be discussed. “Truth or dare?” she asked, inexorable.
“Dare,” he said, feeling he must offer some sort of atonement and his humiliation would serve as well as any.
She thought a moment. “Steal one of my dad’s cigarettes and smoke it.”
“I can’t.”
“So I’ve won.”
“No! You keep a lookout in case they come.”
“No way. If I did it wouldn’t be a dare.”
He went into their bedroom, looked around him and found a cigarette packet. But it was empty. So he felt in the pockets of Bill’s heavy leather jacket. In one there was just his wallet, made of even older leather, and a handful of coins. In the other, though, he found a foil packet, just like Henry’s Golden Virginia only without the label, and inside some tobacco and a packet of papers. This was easy. Skip expected him to fumble and be childish but here was a dare in which he could astonish and trounce her, better than sticking his finger in a sea anemone. He would show her. He would prove he was not a girl.
He folded a paper as Henry had taught him, filled it with a generous pinch of the tobacco—which was different from Henry’s, stringier and less smelly—licked the paper’s edge and rolled it into a neat tube.
She seemed duly impressed when he emerged with the finished article. “Where’d you learn to do that?”
“Prison,” he said, enjoying the way this sounded, and holding it in a corner of his mouth the way he had seen Henry do it, he lit it with a kitchen match.
“You can’t smoke that!” she hissed as the smoke reached her. “It’s wacky baccy!”
“So? It’s still a cigarette.” Praying he wouldn’t be sick or cough, he breathed in a generous lungful and nearly did both.
“Stop breathing,” she said. “Hold it in, then you won’t cough. For Chrissakes!” She was right. But the moment he made as if to breathe, he started to cough again and he couldn’t hold his breath indefinitely. “Give me some,” she said and snatched it from his lips. While he felt free to splutter, she took a deep drag and, he was pleased to see, had to stifle a coughing fit too. “One more each,” she said, “then we have to hide the evidence.”
She held the cigarette out while he took another hesitant puff on it. Then she dragged on it again herself before wetting it thoroughly in the kitchen sink and throwing it hard through the open window. While she waved the veranda door speedily open and shut in an effort to disperse the smoke and the strange, nutty smell, Julian felt a sudden need to sit down. He climbed to the back of one of the armchairs and felt he would never walk again.
“I feel strange,” he told her and his voice didn’t work properly.
“Of course you do, Girlface,” she laughed. “You’re stoned.”
“Oh.”
“You’re meant to enjoy it.” She too flopped in a chair now and swung sandy legs up on its arms. “Now. My turn.”
“What?”
“Truth or dare. My turn.”
“Do we have to? Can’t you just win?”
“No. My turn.”
“Truth or dare?” he asked.
“Truth,” she said. “So? Ask me something.”
Julian thought but his head seemed to be like a deep, dark pond where his thoughts twitched away from his grasp like crested newts. Then he found a question dangling in the waters like a dead thing. “If you could go back in time and make Bill fall out of the window instead of your mother, would you do it?”
“What kind of a question is that?”
“Truth,” he said and giggled and could not stop. She looked at him giggling and started too. It was all the funnier because Ma might come in at any moment and smell the wacky baccy and find them with squidgy legs that had stopped working.
Suddenly Skip stopped laughing and said, “They’re having an affair.”
“What?” He did not understand.
“They’re in love. They’re having an affair. My dad and your mum.”
He tried to giggle again but it wouldn’t work so he shut up and waited.
“You must have noticed,” she insisted.
“Don’t be silly,” he said. “She can’t be in love with him. She’s married.”
“Listen, Julie,” she said. “I’ve been watching. You’re only a kid so you don’t know what to look for but I’m sharing a room with him and I can tell you he doesn’t come to bed until early in the morning.”
“He goes for walks. They both do. I’ve heard them come in.”
“Duh. Yes? And? They go for walks like they go for swims. To get away from us and spare our feelings. Then he gives it to her and she’s loving every minute of it.”
“Gives what to her?”
“Sex. She lies down or back or whatever and he puts his thing in her. You know. You must have seen dogs do it.”
Julian had indeed seen dogs do it, in a car park on the way to school. His mother had tried to distract him but he saw and she knew he saw and it was disgusting. And that was what she was doing and that was why she had been all strange and talking in high voices and laughing too much.
“Actually,” Skip went on, “I think it would be really neat.”
Julian just stared so she carried on.
“I mean, your dad’s really great too but she’s obviously way too young for him, anyone can see that, and she and Dad, my dad, are so good together. It’d be fun. Maybe we could all just live together? Your dad too. Some people do that, you know. My dad knows some people who do that stuff.”
“Shut up,” he told her. “Shut up shut up shut up!”
“OK. Jeez. I thought you knew. I’m going back to the beach. Look, it’s no big deal, Julie. Maybe I’m wrong. Don’t say anything. Oh Jeez.”
She was like someone who had dropped everything in her bag and did not know what to pick up first. She only went as far as the veranda then she flopped in a lounger and shut her eyes.
“Skip?” he called out. “Skip?” But she seemed to be asleep.
He sat on, staring through the open door to the beach. He wanted to cry but he could not force the tears out. It all made sense but he did not want it to. He had been gathering the signs but ignoring their meaning but now that she had spoken the truth aloud it would not go away. It was like when one walked in dog shit. It never smelled that bad until someone pointed it out—There, on your shoe, oh God no, don’t walk anywhere, just take your shoe off, no, don’t put it down, sit down and take your shoe off, carefully— and then the whole room stank and you wondered why you never noticed it earlier.
He wanted his father not to have left. He wanted Bill and Skip not to have come. He wanted so many impossible things. If Henry had not escaped none of this would have happened, and perhaps if he had not told Henry about … But there was another level of wishes, darker wishes, on the level of his unspeakable early-morning thoughts, that was glad Bill had come but furious with his mother. It made him want to fill her bed with sand or her shoes with seaweed. He wanted to tear her dresses and stick her hairbrush somewhere dirty like behind the stove or down the lavatory.
Bill was coming up the beach. On his own. Julian just stared for a minute. It was like early-morning thoughts. He could stare as much as he liked from in here and not be seen. Stare at Bill’s hairy chest. At his legs. At everything. He held his hand before his face and slowly brought his finger and thumb together until they framed Bill like the viewfinder on Ma’s camera and seemed to be holding him like a toy soldier. Then Bill waved, so he must have seen and thought Julian was waving and suddenly Julian thought of the wacky baccy. He ran into Bill and Skip’s room and stuffed the tobacco and papers back into the jacket pocket and hung the jacket back on the chair, just the way he had found it. Then he felt a litt
le strange so he sat on the end of the bed. Then it seemed nicer to lie down, so he did. And he could tell from the ashtray which side of the bed was Bill’s and he rolled on to it and smelled the sheets because it was so good.
“Hi there,” Bill said as he came in. “What have you been up to? Junior’s dead to the world too.”
“Nothing,” Julian said. “Playing.”
“Oh. That,” Bill said. He was toweling himself, though he did not really need to because the sun had dried his skin off on his way up the beach. “It’s so crowded out there. Your mum walked into Polcamel to get some food. I said I’d get lunch together. Want some lunch?”
Julian did not know where the courage came from. Maybe the cigarette supplied it. Maybe it came from his being so cross with his mother. But he sprang just as Bill sat on the edge of the bed to pull down his trunks. He pretended to pretend to be a tiger so Bill would think it a game. He made a growling noise like a tiger. But actually it was like the unspeakable thoughts. He held Bill tightly from behind, as he had on the motorbike, then when Bill laughed and stood up as if to give him a piggyback, he slid down and held him tight around the legs, his hands holding so hard on his thigh it must have hurt.
“Hey!” Bill said. “Hey!”
And Julian thought that, since he had got this far and would probably be punished anyway, he might as well go further so, not sure exactly why, he reached up and tried to pull Bill’s trunks down. But he had barely got his hand on the waistband than Bill slapped a hand across his and said, “Hey!” more firmly. “Stop that. What are you doing?”
“Pulling down your trunks,” Julian said quite truthfully. He was still trying to pretend it was a game but it didn’t really work anymore and he felt he had to put on a babyish voice, which he knew even as he did it made things worse.
Bill hauled him off, still grasping his hand. He was so strong he lifted Julian right off his leg and off the floor like a little monkey and dumped him on the bed. Julian giggled and made a monkey noise because perhaps they could make it a game after all but Bill was terrifying.