Fortnight of Fear (18 page)

These days, Bryan's motto was: don't give the bastards even the
chance
to laugh at you.

Bryan was a print rep. He had sold color printing for Johnson & Foreman for nearly nine years, driving hundreds of thousands of miles. Rain, shine, seasides, provincial cities, isolated factories. Walls, hotel kettles, florid wallpaper, sausages for breakfast. He had eaten in more hotel restaurants than he could remember, and he had learned his social graces the hard way.

His mother and father had eaten their Friday supper straight out of the
Daily Mirror
, walking along the street. His cheeks still burned when he thought about it. But he himself had learned to be self-contained, and self-disciplined, and tight. He had also learned that it's a serious mistake to pretend to be more sophisticated than you really are; because wherever you go there will always be someone more sophisticated than you, and with one small word they can make you publicly bleed. Not only can, but will. So – although Bryan himself was self-made, he had learned to despise the self-made. (How many Benidorm-bronzed print-buyers' wives, in overtight gilt evening-dresses, hysterical with a whole afternoon's gin, had massaged his thigh under how many dinner-tables?) From Newcastle to Plymouth, O Lord; from Bradford to Bishop's Stortford. Desperate for what? Not sex. They were usually too squiffy for sex. Reality, maybe.

But this evening was different. This evening Bryan was celebrating one of the most profitable print contracts he had ever negotiated; alone; on the cocktail terrace of L'Horizon Hotel, overlooking the smooth brassy sands of St Brelade's Bay, on Jersey; and this evening he could risk showing off, just a little. Shortly before lunch, after only two and a half hours, he had signed contracts for £2.3 million worth of color brochure printing; two and a half
hours in a bland featureless office in St Helier, all dusty yuccas and chipboard partitions and travel posters; and that was it. The deal closed, the contracts initialled, everybody happy. Mr Shah had shaken his hand. He had shaken Mr Aziz's hand. Very good, excellent, nice to do business with you. Budduh-budduh-budda, mate, and chicken biryani to you too.

From the terrace of L'Horizon it was only fifteen stone steps to the sand. In the distance, where the sea glittered, they were dragging in the last of the pedaloes, complicated silhouettes of skinny girls and skeletal machines. There was a faint smell of fish-and-chips on the wind, from one of the beach cafes; and the last children on the beach sounded as sad as distant seagulls.

Earlier in the day, when the sun was high, Bryan had seen topless girls sunbathing underneath the promenade, breasts like caramel creams. All the girls were gone now; but Bryan had asked for two champagne glasses because a thirtyish woman with a handsome face and highlighted blonde hair was sitting two tables away, wearing a pink halter-top that emphasized her heavy bosom, and bright Bermuda shorts. She was concentrating on solving the
Daily Telegraph
crossword, and Bryan found that attractive. Intellectual, but apparently alone.

He stood up, scraping his chair. He stood over her. She bit the end of her ballpen with lipstick-tinged teeth.

He was about to open his mouth and ask her if she wanted to share his celebration, when she said, “‘Join to make a saving,' four letters.”

“Pardon?” he replied.

She looked up. He could see himself reflected in her sunglasses. A thin, shortish man with deep-set, almost Russian-looking eyes and his black hair well cut, but somehow too thin and too shortish to be quite convincing enough. His trousers too shapeless to be provocative but too tight to be fashionable.

“‘Bond,'” she said, and wrote it into her crossword. “Thank you.”

He tried to laugh. “I'm not sure that I helped very much.”

She paused for a moment, then took off her sunglasses. “Yes, you did. Just by being there. It always helps if I can ask somebody out loud.”

“Oh. Good. Well, so long as I was useful.”

Another pause, and he didn't go away. At last she looked up again. “Did you want something?”

“Yes,” he said. Then, “Yes,” and nodded. “I did a bloody good business deal today; and made myself a bloody good commission; and I've just ordered a bottle of Perrier Jouët rose, and I can't drink it all on my own. So I was wondering if you'd like to join me.”

She stared at him without blinking. Eyes flecked; very little compassion. “I don't think so,” she said.

“I don't want to drink it all on my own.”

Still she didn't blink. “I'm sorry, I really don't care.
Don't
drink it on your own. But you're not going to drink it with me.”

“Oh,” he said. He tried to smile. Nobody had put him down quite as directly before. “Well, then … looks as if I'll have to find somebody else.”

She didn't even answer. It was so obvious on this nearly-deserted terrace that there
was
nobody else – not unless he wanted to celebrate with a fat French woman in a catastrophic blue dress who was sitting with her legs set staunchly apart; or a malarial-looking couple who must have been over ninety, and were probably clinging to each other to stop themselves from trembling so much.

“All right, then,” he said; to the terrace in general. “Sod it.”

He lifted the flower-decorated champagne bottle out of its cooler, picked up his glass, and stepped down from the terrace. Then he crossed to the steps that led down to
the beach. Glass in one hand, bottle in the other, with sand in his white Alan McAfee loafers, he plodded to the waterline, and stood with his face to the south, to the sea, to the sun, to France, and toasted himself.

“Well-done-Bryan-you-are-a-fucking-genius, amen.”

He looked back at the promenade; back at the hotel terrace; just in time to see the blonde thirtyish woman in the pink top being collected by a gray-haired man in enormous shorts and heavy-rimmed glasses.

“Sod it,” he said. The gray-haired man in enormous shorts and heavy-rimmed glasses was probably the same age as him, 37; or maybe younger. He deserved a woman who couldn't solve the
Daily Telegraph
crossword without talking to perfect strangers. She probably kept on doing the crossword when he was fucking her. “‘Large guns required when leaving town, nine letters'?”

Night began to flood slowly across the sky like washable ink. The sea continued to shush and fuss; but there was very little wind; and between the rocks that bordered St Brelade's Bay, Bryan felt that he could have been back in his childhood, in the seaside land of Rupert Bear or Tiger Tim, where there were always crabs and starfish and sandcastles with flags that flew. He walked along the very edge of the sea, allowing it to foam occasionally into his sneakers, £210 a pair, but who cared, this was a night for celebration.

It was almost dark when he reached the rocks on the eastern side of the bay. A faint mauvish afterlight still outlined the hills and the neighboring rooftops, but here on the beach it was chilly and damp and very black. He swigged Perrier Jouët from the neck of the bottle. It frothed violently in his mouth, and he almost choked.

He was about to turn back to L'Horizon when he saw a quick light darting across the sand, beside the rocks. Dim, diagonal, very quick, then extinguished. He peered into the darkness, wishing he weren't so drunk.
He heard scuffling noises; chipping noises; then he saw the light again.

He approached the rocks. The light was shone directly into his face.

He waited, and when nothing happened, and nobody said anything, he raised the Perrier Jouët bottle. “How about a drink?” he suggested.

A sniff. Then a man's voice, with a burry Jersey accent, “Orright then, don't care if I do.”

He passed the bottle into the darkness. Swigging, sloshing noises. Then the bottle returned. “Wass that, cider?”

“Champagne, the best. I'm celebrating.”

“Oh yuss?”

“I sold two-point-three million pounds' worth of print today.”

“Oh yuss? That good, then?”

Bryan laughed. His laugh sounded flat against the rocks. “Good? It's not much short of a miracle!”

“Oh,” said the man's voice. “You've come to the right place, then.”

Bryan drank more champagne; hesitated; then passed over the bottle. “What do you mean by that?”

“Well… just here, after dark, in St Brelade's Bay … this is the place for miracles.”

“I suppose it is.”

Abruptly, the man shone the torch into his own face, from underneath, so that it took on all the ghastliness of a primitive mask carved out of a coconut. A thin-faced man, cavernously thin, with a prickly stubbled chin and blood-streaked eyes.

“Aint no suppose at all. You ever seen the like of this?”

He clenched the torch between the knees of a well-soiled pair of brown corduroy trousers; and directed it toward the sand. Then, deftly, he molded the sand into the
shape of a smallish crab, outlining its claws with his fingernails and its shell with the ball of his thumb.

He had hardly finished sculpting it when it seemed to shift. Bryan watched in complete horror and astonishment as it suddenly released itself from the beach out of which it had been fashioned, and scuttled quickly toward the sea.

“You made a crab,” he said, his lungs rising in his ribcage. “How the hell did you do that? You made a crab and it was actually alive.”

The man laughed, as grating and roaring as a sink-disposal unit. Then he said, “It's the sand, ennit, this side of St Brelade's Bay. The story goes it's all the bones of shipwrecked sailors, ground up by the waves. Look how white it is, you could believe that, couldn't you? And look how red these rocks are! They say they're stained with blood. The stuff of life, this sand! The elements of life!”

Bryan swayed. He was feeling very drunk, and he wasn't quite sure if he were really here or not. “So what are you saying?” he asked the old man. “You're saying this part of the beach is
magic
? or what? I don't follow you!”

The man stood up. For some reason, Bryan could smell the drink on his breath, although he couldn't taste drink in his own mouth.

The man swayed close to him, and said, “Whatever you make out of this sand, Sonny Jim, it takes on a life of its own. Make it after dark, and it'll be yours till morning. Living, breathing, whatever you want. It's sailors' sand, that's why. Shipwrecked mariners' sand.”

Bryan stared at him for a very long time without saying anything. Then he said, “Do it again.”

“What?”

“Make another one. Go on.”

“I'll have another drink first.”

Bryan handed over the bottle and the man wiped the neck and swigged it. “Gah, bloody awful this stuff. All froth. Like drinking your own bathwater.”

“Make another crab,” Bryan insisted.

The man crouched down again. “What do you want, big un or little un?”

“Big un.”

“How big?”

“Really big. Big as you like.”

The man began to mold and pat the sand into a domed heap; and then to outline two monstrous claws. “Don't want to make it
too
big,” he remarked. “Don't want to make it so bloody big we have to make a run for it.” Then he laughed, and coughed, and spat into the darkness.

Bryan watched him closely as he finished the pie-crust crimping around the edge of the sand-crab's shell. It was almost a foot-and-a-half across, the biggest crab that he had ever seen, and by the erratic light of the torch it looked humped and sinister. But how could it live? It was only sand, after all, and it was so ridiculously huge that the man wouldn't be able to deceive him by substituting a real crab – which was what Bryan was beginning to suspect that he had done the first time. The crab had probably been buried in the sand all the time, and all it had needed was a quick brushing-away and a tap on the shell and off it had scuttled.

At last the man was finished. He stood up, and smacked the sand from his hands, and said, “There.”

“But it hasn't come to life.”

“Give it a chance. The bigger you make em, the slower.”

They stood beside the crab for almost ten minutes, sharing the bottle of Perrier Jouët's best bathwater. Eventually, Bryan said, “You're pulling my leg. That's not going to come alive.”

The man coughed. And, at that instant, the humped crab suddenly stirred, and swung its claw, and started to heave itself out of the surrounding sand. Bryan said,
“Shit!” and jumped back in alarm, colliding with the man, and dropping his champagne bottle.

Both of them took a few cautious paces back, well out of the crab's reach. It stayed where it was for a moment, its bead-black eyes revolving on their stalks.

“Do you think it's dangerous?” Bryan whispered.

The man shook his head. “Prolly not. It's trying to sniff for the sea, ennit?”

He was right. The crab was simply trying to fix its bearings. After a while, it began slowly to lurch toward the sound of the distant breakers. Bryan played the torch on it as it crossed the beach, and eventually disappeared into the darkness.

“Shit,” he said.

He looked around. The man was already making his way back around the rocks, toward the stone esplanade, where summer lights were strung all the way from one side of the bay to the other.

“Your torch!” called Bryan. Then started to hurry after him. But he paused when he reached the steps that led back up to the esplanade, and stared at the rocks, and the sands that the man had called sailors' sand, the elements of life.

He was thoughtful all the next day. He sat in L'Horizon's health club, eating a slow breakfast of croissants and marmalade and strong black coffee. The shouts of children echoed around the pool. Last night he had dreamed about crabs, hundreds of crabs, stirring in the darkness. Then he had dreamed about the woman doing the
Daily Telegraph
crossword. She had been naked, lying back on a sunbed, with a bare-shaved vulva, sticky and pink, out of which bees had been crawling, and wiping their wings, and then flying into the sunshine. She had looked up and smiled at him, and licked her lips.