Slapton Sands (11 page)

Will Hay was an old music-hall comedian who had starred in ten successful feature films between 1934 and 1941, each with the same two character actors in principal
supporting roles. Hay apparently always played the pompous bungler. Graham Moffatt played the fat, pompous bungler. And Moore Marriott played the bungling, pompous codger. Alice recognized all three. They were not so much stereotypes as faithfully exaggerated portraits taken from English life.

Had Devon been like Will Hay's England? If it had, it must have seemed arcane and basic to its invading army of young Americans with their dollars and lust, their Jeeps and motorcycles, Hershey bars and bubble gum. The principal difference between then and now, she thought, having spent an hour and a half looking at the film, was that this was an England that had liked itself. It was its own idle, self-serving, pompously incompetent universe. It had charm, innocence and unsullied optimism. It filled you with nostalgia for something you had never experienced. Will Hay's England had been comfortable with what it was and therefore inured to any urgency to change. Walking into the vaulting sunshine of the afternoon, momentarily blinded by it, she did not think that was anything like so true of the England to which she had come. She left the projection room very much looking forward to her first George Formby film.

She wanted to see David Lucas. She wanted to see the chief suspect in the crime that the Canterbury detective was sure had been committed only inside her own troubled head. She didn't believe she had done it herself, the grief-stricken somnambulist tapping out upper-case instructions to herself in the dark. Nor did she think David Lucas had
anything to do with what she had awoken to find. She just wanted to see him. She didn't even want to tell him about waking to the piece of paper gummed to her wall. She wanted company, that was all. And the company she most wanted, was his.

David wasn't in the gym, but Clifford Lee was there, hammering a malevolent tattoo in the heat on the heavy bag, his head rested on the cylinder of plumped leather as he shaped into a series of punishing hooks. Alice stood on the gantry above and watched him work. His punches spread staccato echoes around the gym. He worked with evident grace and a brutal economy with the delivery of his shots. But the grace was incidental. Anyone watching was watching violence, or at least a demonstration of violent capability. Eventually he stopped and raised his head. Sweat left an intimate smear on the bag where his brow had rested for the body work. He opened his mouth, gulping air, and looked up, grinning through his gumshield. Christ, she thought, he even does his bagwork wearing his gumshield, in this heat. Clifford Lee spat the guard on to the parquet floor and smiled at her.

‘Is he any good? Is he as good as you?'

‘Nah. He's shit.' Deadpan.

‘Really?' She felt crestfallen, childish for feeling so.

She had fetched tea for them from a vending machine in the entrance area of the gym. Clifford Lee was wrapped now in a tracksuit and towels. He was making weight, he'd
told her. He blew on his tea as if to cool the brew. But he didn't drink it. He just smelled it in gulps, gathered in the aroma under his nose.

‘Boxing's more or less been outlawed now at the universities,' he said. ‘There's us. There's Bath. There's Oxbridge and there's the army boys at Sandhurst. There's Edinburgh in Scotland, Trinity over the water. That's it.'

‘I don't see your point.'

‘To get any competition, we have to go local. We have to go to the clubs in Dover and Folkestone and the like.'

‘And?'

‘And they take liberties with the college boys. Or they try to. Now, you take a liberty with Davey, and you pay.'

Alice took this in. ‘So he is good?'

Clifford Lee smelled his tea again. ‘Good isn't quite the word I'd use. Bad is more accurate.'

She nodded, not saying anything.

‘Here's the deal,' Clifford Lee said. He inhaled steam off his tea. ‘Where will Ollie Deane be in five, ten years?'

‘I have no idea,' Alice said. She didn't.

Clifford smiled down at his feet, and his skin tightened over the bones in his face in a vision of premature age. ‘He'll be an estate agent. Somewhere like Putney, Hampstead. He'll sell posh properties in that public school drawl. He'll have an occasionally unfaithful wife, attend London—Irish home games and buy his two-point-four kids a pedigree puppy.'

‘Breed?'

‘How the fuck would I know?' He shrugged. ‘Jack Russell. Irish Wolfhound.'

‘Kids' names?'

He looked at her.

‘Come on, Clifford. You started this.'

‘Ben. Josh. Rory.'

‘Girls?'

‘God help them,' Clifford said. ‘Celia. Sophie. Alice.'

She laughed. ‘And David?'

‘Five years from now? I don't know. A mercenary. A priest.'

They were silent for a while. Alice wondered where Clifford Lee would find himself in five years from now. She supposed pretty much wherever he wanted.

‘He says your speciality is the American occupation of Britain during the Second World War.'

‘Occupation?'

‘Invasion, my grandfather called it. That's what it seemed like in the South-West of England, he said. He was a merchant seaman on the convoys. He said there were a lot of Yanks in Bristol.'

‘Are you interested in the war?'

‘Not particularly. You know how it is. When people get older, they like to reminisce. Very fit, the Yanks, he told me. Well fed, they were. Strong. He was invited to spar with their boxers sometimes. Fought the odd exhibition bout.'

‘I wasn't aware inter-racial boxing was allowed.'

‘I don't know that it was,' Clifford Lee said. ‘My grandfather is white.'

Universities were funny places, Alice thought. On the way to the gym she'd walked past the campus bookshop, where they did a brisk trade selling Arthur Rackham fairy posters to young adults toiling for competitive grades in pure sciences. From where she sat she could hear the faint chanting of the anti-apartheid protestors outside the campus branch of Barclays Bank. There were always at least three or four students picketing the bank, and since she'd been here she'd never seen a black face among them. When Clifford Lee shifted where he sat, muscles like lazy grapefruit ripened on his upper arms.

‘Aren't you going to drink that tea?'

‘I'll gain less weight just enjoying the aroma. Aren't you going to ask me where he is?'

She was about to knock on the door when she thought she heard her name spoken from within. Her hand hesitated. The voice had belonged to Oliver. It was Oliver's posh, corrupted drawl.

‘And those men's jeans they all wear that make their arses look like crisp bags. And Earth shoes. Make their feet look like they've been put on back to front, Earth shoes do.'

There was a silence. No one from within the room filled it. Then Oliver spoke again.

‘Charlie Brown. Eval fucking Kneival. And all that metal
they wear on their teeth. “If You Leave Me Now”. Fucking … Neil Diamond.'

‘Neil Diamond doesn't sing “If You Leave Me Now”.' David's voice.

‘You know what I mean.'

‘You know what he means.' A third voice, one she didn't recognize.

‘And she doesn't wear braces on her teeth.'

‘Those self-supporting socks that Jimmy Connors prances about in. Naugahyde furniture. Wonderwoman.'

‘You can't knock Wonderwoman.' David's voice again.

‘You can't. No one would want to argue the point about Jimmy Connors and his unnatural socks,' the stranger said. ‘But you can't knock Wonderwoman.'

‘Those electric shaver adverts with that cretin with the silver hair.'

‘Remington,' the stranger said.

‘No,' Oliver said. ‘I'm pretty sure he's not called Remington.'

‘Victor Kiam,' David said.

‘Him,' Oliver said. ‘Fucking Victor Kiam.'

She could smell the thick fug of a joint drifting under the door. Hall and Oates were playing on a record player she could picture without having to see. They were playing
Abandoned Luncheonette.
There would be Wharfdale speakers on the tabletop opposite the narrow bed, to either side of a Garrard turntable. Albums in a flat stack on one of the speakers. An album on Oliver's lap, littered with Rizla
papers and tobacco fragments and burned-down matches.

‘He's a bastard, that Victor Kiam.'

It was tedious and disappointing. She was disappointed with herself for being there. If she possessed more of a gift for friendship, she wouldn't be in this situation. Maybe it was more a question of effort than talent. She didn't put the work into developing friendships. Perhaps she deserved her isolation. But believing that didn't make the isolation any easier to tolerate at times like this. Her hand was still raised to rap her knuckles on the door. She let it drop to her side instead and turned to go. Oh well. In the library and the projection room at least, the day had been a sort of a success. Hall and Oates were singing, ‘She's Gone'. They were almost right. She was certainly going. David's voice stopped her.

‘You know, smoking that stuff isn't really giving what passes for your minds a fighting chance, boys. Don't get me wrong. Paranoia and prejudice can work as the basis for a belief system. But you still need a mechanism for some independent thought processes.'

A silence followed this remark.

‘At least we're not punch-drunk,' Oliver said.

‘I'm talking about basic stuff. You know. Perambulation. Respiratory function. Toilet training.'

‘Do you find you've started having trouble remembering telephone numbers?' This from the stranger.

There was another silence.

‘When you leave home,' Oliver said, ‘do you have to have your address with you, written down?'

Alice knocked on the door.

The one she hadn't met was an Eng. Lit. student called Larry. He was on a continuous assessment course, and he'd received his latest assessment that afternoon, sweating the verdict before a three-man panel while she had chuckled over Will Hay's grainy comic antics. It was his room. He considered he'd done well. The dope was partly reward, mostly their prelude to a long evening of boozy, narcotic celebration. They were undergraduates. The sun was shining. They were celebrating the last, shiftless days of their final term before the long vacation. Clifford Lee had given her the college name and room number, but not the name of its occupant.

‘Great believer in fate, Clifford,' Larry said, patting a spot on the bed where he sat next to Oliver. Larry looked like he dressed out of one of Canterbury's charity shops. His teeth signalled years of neglect. His watch showed base metal through chipped chrome plating on the case and was fastened to his wrist by a nylon strap striped like a scrap of seaside deck chair. He was probably the heir to an estate somewhere, she thought. But his invitation was an uninviting one. To Alice, the bed looked already over-crowded. The beckoning to sit was best ignored. ‘A Thomas Hardy man, our Clifford,' Larry said. ‘Believes it will all end in tears.'

‘It usually does. For his opponents,' Oliver said.

It was funny how they stuck for the duration with the friends they made in their freshers' weeks. At home, the
like-minded were funnelled through societies and sororities and frat houses into homogeneous groups. Seamlessly compatible cliques dominated student life. Here, they stuck stubbornly to the haphazard and unlikely friends they made in ther first chaotic weeks at college, usually while half-drunk. Compatibility had nothing to do with it. It was endearing in a way. It was fiercely loyal. But it was mad.

She sipped some of the Nescafé David had made her. Larry had the Christ image of Che Guevara Blu-Tacked to his wall. It shared .space with a poster for a production of
Waiting for Godot
staged at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. There was a picture of Samuel Beckett, stony-eyed as a bird, in some austere Paris café with rain-daubed glass. Trinity College had been one of the many that had offered her a postgraduate place. She wondered if Ireland laboured under the same relentless summer heat as England did this June. She wondered if the Irish were as irritating and incomprehensible as the English seemed to be.

‘He must like you,' Oliver said to her. ‘Clifford, I mean. He isn't usually so forthcoming with information.'

‘Maybe I'm likeable.'

‘No,' Oliver said. ‘You're not. You're extremely easy on the eye. But you aren't likeable.'

Nobody in the room contradicted him.

‘Sorry,' Oliver said.

Alice turned to David. ‘Why is Clifford sweating off weight?'

‘He can't get into his jeans,' Oliver said.

‘He needs to scale a hundred and seventy-five pounds,' David said. ‘He's on the scales tomorrow morning for a match made at that weight.'

Larry said: ‘What's that in kilos?'

‘I haven't got a clue,' David said.

‘Kilos are the future,' Larry said. ‘Kilos, litres, kilometres. I reckon he weighs about eighty kilos. Alice?'

‘Search me,' Alice said. ‘I'm an American.'

‘Get away,' Oliver said.

‘American,' Larry said. ‘So you'd be far more familiar, of course, with the imperial scale of measurement.'

Larry and Oliver were doing that dope thing of not daring to look at one another.

‘Where'd you get your clothes, Larry?' she said. ‘A landfill site?'

She wanted to get out of the room. She wanted David to come with her. He wasn't indulging in the smoking ritual, but he seemed very settled, very comfortable there. She couldn't really drag him away from his friends without appearing to do exactly that. But she'd had enough of Hall and Oates and the skanky smell and claustrophobia of a dormitory space on a stifling day. She'd had enough already of Apache Oliver and Metric Larry. She wanted to sit under the shade of a tree on the slope behind the college down to the city and tell David about the note on her wall and the Canterbury detective.