by Lex Lander
The mainsail was only loosely stowed, and raising it was a simple matter of winching up the halyard and rigging the boom vang. The spread of canvas began to belly long before it was fully extended, stiffening into the shallow curve that makes for optimum performance.
‘Hold her on that course!’ I shouted to Lizzy as I started back to the cockpit, keeping to windward of the mainsail. Even in relatively mild conditions a sudden change in direction can whip the boom across and any object in its path will most likely be swept over the side.
I relieved Lizzy at the wheel and set about changing tacks, to bring us back on course. South-west, then west-south-west was our heading, running before the wind, the mainsail sheeted right out. Restful, carefree; sailing at its least demanding. I stood at the wheel, relishing the sting of sea spray on my bare chest and the music of the hull’s surge through the water.
Lizzy, hugging her knees in the corner of the cockpit, said, ‘Alan, we never talk about sex.’
No secrets. Remember?
‘Should we?’
‘Are you embarrassed to talk to me about it?’
‘Should I be?’
She rolled over and balled up the towel she had been lying on. I easily avoided it.
‘I hate you!’ she yelled.
‘Sure you do.’ I grinned at her, and after a brief glare she responded in kind. ‘Is there something in particular you want to know?’
‘Sort of,’ she said, her brow wrinkling. ‘Not the technical stuff, fucking and all that, I had that all sussed years ago. No, I just wondered if, you know, you’ve got a regular girl friend.’
‘Only a casual one,’ I said, and made a small correction to our compass bearing. A patch of swell lifted us, and water broke over the bows, flinging spray back as far as the cockpit. Then, suddenly, it was calm again. A passing reminder that the sea is never at rest, never completely trustworthy.
‘Do you … you know, fuck with her?’
No double entendres for Lizzy. I couldn’t help grinning.
‘You’re so subtle.’
‘All right then, Mr Prissy, do you make love with her?’
‘How does mind your own damn business sound? Do I ask about your sex life?’
She contorted her features into an exaggerated moue.
‘What fucking sex life? Since we left Oz I’ve been living like a nun. Hadn’t you noticed?’
I just nodded warily, wondering where this catechism was taking us.
‘Alan …’ Now she was hesitant, almost diffident. I braced myself mentally for some highly intimate probing. ‘What would you say if I was to go …’ She was up on her feet. A wriggle of arms, a flexing of shoulders, and a scrap of black and white flew across the cockpit, ‘topless!’
And topless she was. Creamy breasts with jutting nipples, in flagrant and exciting contrast to the rest of her bronzed body. Nor was she bashful. She pirouetted for me, a slender, shapely Venus, and lit a fuse of passion inside me.
The uneven pounding of my heart throbbed inside my head. My throat contracted. I couldn’t speak.
She interpreted my loss of voice as disapproval.
‘Cat got your bloody tongue?’ she said crossly, hands on hips, and her pout, like the rest of her, was in the young Bardot class.
‘Lizzy …’
She adopted a suggestive stance, cocking a hip at me, the pout metamorphosing into parted lips and a teasing tongue. She was into all the tricks.
I cleared my throat and with it my vocal chords.
‘Cover yourself up,’ I said thickly.
She went very still, hand still on thrusting hip. ‘What did you say?’
‘I said cover yourself up!’ Even as I spoke I was conscious of over-reaction. ‘And don’t ever do that again.’
She slowly unfroze from her come-hither pose.
‘You can go and fuck yourself, you fucking faggot!’ she seethed, and turned and stomped off towards the companionway, collecting the discarded bikini top en route. That was the last I saw of her until we docked in Sitges harbour.
Twenty-Three
More disconcerted than ever by Lizzy’s undermining of my defences, I set out to prove to myself that I wasn’t really besotted by a schoolgirl. In the week following our return home I all but abandoned her for an extravaganza of debauchery in the arms of complaisant, undemanding, always-available Simone, who wasn’t much older than a schoolgirl herself. Seven nights in a row I descended upon my accommodating Grenobloise. Daytimes too, when she was free. She accepted this new “up” in our up and down affair readily enough, though she wasn’t entirely lacking in curiosity.
‘Is it true you have a girl living with you?’ she asked, after an energetic session that left me feeling all of those forty years.
‘Yes. But not the way you mean it.’
Her chuckle was sardonic. She stubbed out her after-sex Gauloise, and discharged a twin plume of smoke at me through her nostrils.
‘My dearest André,’ she murmured, ‘it is exactly the way I mean it.’
Trust a French girl to put a sexual slant on any relationship, whether or not it existed.
Unsurprisingly, Lizzy, who had been slow to recover her natural bounce after her humiliation on Seaspray, did not take kindly to my frequent and sometimes lengthy absences. I managed to avoid any dissension though, until the Monday of what was supposed to be her last full week in Andorra before the start of the new school term.
I had spent the afternoon and evening with Simone, demonstrating to both of us how I could get by without Lizzy. After our second stint she began to menstruate and immediately, as was the norm with her, went right off sex. Consequently I had returned home early in the evening, slightly the worse for fornication and much the worse for drink.
Señora Sist was still there, working overtime. She made no bones about her disapproval.
‘It is not right that you are away so much,’ she remonstrated. ‘And everybody knows you are seeing that girl.’
Thanks to me, Simone had gained a certain notoriety of late.
‘What girl?’ I said dully, my intake of vodka insulating me against all censure.
She went off home in a huff.
I fixed another hefty slug of my favourite painkiller, selected a Brahms album on the iPod, and stretched out on the couch. Under the combined influence of music and dissolution I drifted away to a dark and peaceful place.
When I awakened all was quiet. No lilting Brahms, just wind, butting at the corner of the house. The carriage clock told me it was eleven thirty-five. I felt shagged-out. Decrepit.
I became conscious of the smell of perfume. Prodigious though the effort required, I flopped my legs off the edge of the couch and rearranged the other parts of me into a semblance of sitting upright. My left arm felt dead. I massaged it, and looked straight into the troubled eyes of Lizzy. My focus was blurred: her features didn’t look right.
‘How long have you been here?’ I slurred, backhanding a thread of drool from my chin.
‘I want to ask you something.’
My vision was steadily clearing. She was kneeling at my feet and had on the garish blue and red night shirt.
‘Yeah … yeah, whatever.’
‘Have you been out screwing again?’
My brain was too woozy to concoct a story.
‘What if I have?’
If I had learned anything at all about Lizzy in the two months or so I had known her, it was that she could not be fobbed off with equivocation. A direct question deserved a direct answer and no messing about. That was her ethos and it was not for compromising.
‘I reckon I could fuck better.’
I blinked and my vision unglazed a little. That was when I realised what looked wrong about her: she was wearing make-up. Not just the usual touch here and there but great dollops of it – eyes in black pools, mouth red as fresh-spilled blood, cheeks plastered with foundation, over-emphasizing the bone structure to create an almost skull-like effect. It was a whore’s mask.
While I
was taking this in, a slow process, given my condition, she got up quickly. In a single flowing movement, practiced as any nightclub stripper, she pulled the nightdress over her head and cast it aside. It was a re-enactment of her performance on the boat. Underneath she had on matching cotton briefs and that was all. Her eyes on my face, she dug her thumbs in the waistband and down went the briefs over her thighs, over her knees, to her ankles, forcing her to crouch awkwardly. Then she straightened and stepped out of them, proud in her nakedness.
‘What are you doing?’ I said, my voice seeming to come from the bottom of a deep shaft.
‘Don’t you like my body?’
It was a delightful body. The golden brown of her skin was made glossy by the artificial lighting, and her legs were long and smooth and svelte. I ached to reach for her and accept what she was offering. After all, I was human, I was male. Only the foreknowledge of the shame that would come after, as surely as winter follows summer, prevented me. I reminded myself, as I had done so often these past weeks, that she was sixteen years old, and only just that. A child, albeit with very much a woman’s body. Not only that, she was in my care. In my safe-keeping.
‘Don’t you like my body?’ she repeated, resentful now. ‘Isn’t it up to the standard of your precious … Simone?’ She spat the name as if it were a fly that had got in her mouth.
Simone was one secret I hadn’t planned to let her in on.
‘Lizzy … honey, this isn’t right. You know it, we both know it. Your mother … She and I …’
‘Who’s to know except you and me?’ The tone was shrill, unnatural, like the fire that blazed in her eyes.
‘That’s just it. I’ll know! And it’s me who’ll have to live with my conscience, not you.’
I was trying. As God – if he exists – was my witness, I was trying. Then Lizzy, done with talking, took the initiative. She seised my hand and clamped it to her breast, to that soft, tender badge of her womanhood. Her nipple was hard as a pebble against my palm. Her breath was a blowtorch on my face, her open mouth on mine, smothering my protests.
‘Love me,’ she moaned, between clumsy, intense kisses. ‘Love me, fuck me!’
‘No, bugger it!’ I thrust her away, more roughly than I intended. She rolled off my knees and hit the floor on her back with a crash and a squeal.
While she was sorting herself out I staggered away from the couch and made for the nearest door. Through the kitchen I lurched, out into the warm night, heading noplace, anyplace, just away from her and the road to moral doom that she stood for.
Another storm broke that night. A crashing finale to the five month drought. Winds lashed, rain descended in a solid mass, thunder and lightning provided the usual special effects. Wilder, more turbulent than the storm that raged inside me. Incomparably less devastating.
It drove me back inside in the small hours, to warily re-enter the living room. My trepidation proved groundless. Lizzy still occupied the couch, was still naked, only now she was aslumber, her painted mouth slightly open, adding to her air of vulnerability. Scribbles of mascara ran from her lower eyelids over her cheeks.
Sick at heart, I scooped her up into my arms. She was no lightweight. The curtain of her hair swung loose, tinted golden by the yellow lighting, its form as ever-changing as waves in a stormy sea. She spoke my name sleepily and snuggled up to me, almost purring. My fingertips beneath her armpit sank into the edge of her breast; her flesh was cool. The wanting returned, stirring within me like a restless embryo. I stifled it, teeth clenched, eyes fixed straight ahead. She was a child, only a child.
I mounted the stairs, carried her into her room, detouring around strewn garments. When I laid her gently on the bed, she half awoke.
‘Alan,’ she murmured, eyes still closed, clutching at my arm. ‘Don’t leave me.’
I drew the duvet over her. I kissed her forehead, bringing a ghost of a smile to her painted lips.
And walked out.
Next morning the rain was pelting down as solidly as ever. Lizzy was booked for a French lesson in La Massana and would normally have cycled there. Since her sighting of de Bruin I was unhappy for her to travel anyplace unescorted. The rain was a convenient excuse for me to take her in the car without appearing over-protective.
In La Massana the deluge had turned roads into rivers, fortunately still fordable. Having dropped Lizzy a hop and a skip from the door of her tutor’s apartment house, I sat out my vigil in the bar of the Gran Hotel Font opposite, wiping the condensation from the window every once in a while. Neither de Bruin nor any of his known henchmen passed by. Nor the Gravedigger couple. If it hadn’t been for Giorgy advising me to let de Bruin alone, half-confirming that Lizzy was his target, I would have been inclined to write off her encounter with the Dutchman as a case of mistaken identity.
My doubts I kept to myself as I drove Lizzy back up the hill. In fact I didn’t have much to say at all that morning and neither did she. We were both uncomfortable over the events of last night. So much so that, after a wolfed lunch, I escaped to Lucien’s in search of less emotive company.
Madeleine was out and Lucien was glad of an opportunity to discourse on his favourite subject – politics. We talked about climate change, the current state of the world’s economy, ISIS and other Muslim issues, and the rest. Once again I went home with a gutful of alcohol, and spent the evening slumped in front of the box. On my own.
About once a month I would go bargain-hunting in Andorra-la-Vella, to prowl the back street bazaars and rummage through bric-à-brac, hoping to come across some dusty objet d’art. My success rate was dismal, but it was an amusing pastime, not to mention a form of education.
This particular expedition, which took place on a Thursday morning, I was bent over a trestle table outside one of my regular haunts, extricating from the junk a pair of tongs that might have done duty in some Inquisition torture chamber, when a passing elbow jostled me.
‘Pardon.’ The accent was guttural, Nordic. I responded with an automatic ‘Je vous en prie,’ dismissing the incident. The next moment my hand was grasped and pumped, and I was facing the Dutchman who had dropped in at my house, unasked, with his wife. The Gravedigger couple.
‘Ah, it is you,’ he said, full of bonhomie. ‘So nice to see you again, er … Alan.’
‘You too … er …’
‘You have forgotten.’ A gush of forgiving laughter. ‘No matter. Pim Gravemaker.’
With the Dutchman was a short, scrawny man, pasty of complexion, wearing a T-shirt several sizes too large and a pair of patched, faded jeans. I had seen him hanging around the Bar Raco de Valls, gathering place of the town’s ne’er-do-wells.
Gravemaker introduced him. ‘This is Miguel. He works for the immobilier who has been helping us find a house.’
It would have been impolite to call him a liar, so I settled for unspoken incredulity. Even in easy-going Andorra, estate agents’ assistants don’t look and dress like hobos. Much of Miguel’s face was hidden behind octagonal sun-glasses. The mouth, however, split into a friendly enough grin.
Gravemaker made a show of peering around me. ‘And where is your young companion today?’
The answer ‘at home’ was stillborn on my tongue. Irrationally maybe, I still entertained suspicions about this man. The Dutch connection and all that. So instead, I said airily, ‘Oh, shopping someplace. And your wife?’
‘The same. Look … we are renting a house, not far from yours; why not visit us?’
‘Sure.’
‘Tomorrow? You will come tomorrow?’
I stalled. ‘Give me a call in a few days.’ Only when Lizzy was despatched to Paris would I feel safe to socialise again.
‘Give me your number. I will telephone you on Saturday.’
‘Messieurs.’ The store owner had come to hover in search of a sale. ‘Vous désirez quelque-chose?’
I was still in possession of the tongs. I unloaded them on him and said, ‘Not today, thanks,’ and left him grinning hopefully an
d ingratiatingly at Gravemaker.
Lucien, presumably with the purest of motives, had sent his nephew round to meet Lizzy. Jean-Phillipe was a dark good-looking youngster and cocky as a rooster. He had arrived the previous evening with his parents, Lucien’s sister and her husband.
Lizzy’s encounter with Jean-Phillipe was instructive. Hunting for a pair of swimming shorts in the dressing room, I overheard a snatch of conversation between them as they sunbathed by the pool. He was hitting on her and giving a decent account of himself. Most girls would have been impressed. Not Lizzy. Her brush-off was a tart ‘Come and see me when you’re grown up.’
This cameo brought home to me the reality of Lizzy’s extreme youth. With her looks, boys would line up for her favours. Jean-Phillipe was only blazing a trail that many more were destined to tread. All of them young, which was as it should be. What depressed me as I eavesdropped, was my shame in even mildly resenting the boy as a rival, as if Lizzy were my prospective lover. Part of me was increasingly out of control, running downhill, no steering, no brakes. And lying just ahead was a hairpin bend and a vertical plunge to certain oblivion.
Gravemaker didn’t ring on Saturday because I hadn’t provided him with a number. That was the good news. The bad news was that he and his wife called in person. When, around dusk, the beat-up green Seat bumbled into the driveway, trawling the perennial blue smoke, I was retreating indoors for the night. With the advent of September the evenings up here above the thousand meter line were beginning to chill. Upstairs, rock music was churning.
Yellow headlights swung across the terrace, and I hoisted a welcoming rictus and a nominal salutation. Be the Gravemakers friends or foes, harmless or malevolent, I wasn’t ready to antagonise them. Playing the innocent was a game at which I had more practice than most.
The Python was in its usual place in my bedroom. While the Gravemakers parked below the terrace I raced upstairs, startling Lizzy who was proceeding in the opposite direction, still wriggling into the top half of her track suit. Her hair was damp and she smelled of shampoo.