The Love Beach (11 page)

'Just snaps,' he said. 'Pictures from home. Takes you back a bit.' He had to pick and choose the words with care, making him realize that he was drunk.

She sat down, moving the guitar over, putting her young head between her hands and looking down at the pictures. It was almost as though she were in a booth, her hands shielding her face both sides, her full hair thrown back, only the gentle tip of her nose visible to Davies sitting at her side.

'What are their names?' she said.

'Mag is the little girl,' he said. 'Margaret really, but she's always been called Mag. She's six. Last month. And the boy is David and he's a couple of years older.'

She pointed: 'I like this one on the see‑saw. The sun is nice. I thought you never got sun in England.'

He laughed sadly: 'Oh, we do sometimes. Anyway, this is in Wales.'

'Same thing,' she said. 'Your wife looks pretty. This is nice where she is laughing.'

'Kate,' he said. 'Her name's Kate. She's twenty‑seven. I haven't seen them for more than a year. It chokes me a bit sometimes.' Bird moved her left hand to the photographs and half looked at him. 'It's a long time, a year,' she said. 'Who is this man?'

Davies thrust his hand out towards the end picture and his fingers touched its edge, but he stopped there, recovered himself, and said: 'My brother. Dilwyn, that's his name Dilwyn. He's about twenty‑five.'

She looked at him curiously and he withdrew his hand from the edge of the photograph. 'He looks a bit older than that,' she said. 'He's proud of his car, though, isn't he? Look how he's standing alongside it. And how it shines. You can even see that in the pictures. Even in this small light.'

Davies stared at the photograph. 'Oh yes,' he mumbled. 'He's very pleased with that motor. Very pleased. Nice little runner it is too.'

With deliberately separate movements he picked up each of the photographs and thrust them with overdone firmness into his wallet. He felt sick with drink now, dreary and tired with it too. 'Would you like to dance with me?' he asked vaguely.

'They don't play any more,' she said. 'Everyone is going now.'

'Are you going too?'

'I can't stay here,' she smiled. 'I came up by taxi.' Pollet was walking unsteadily from the bar with Olsen. 'Monsieur Pollet,' Bird said, 'have you some room for two more into 'Gesima?'

Dahlia looked from around Conway's head. 'It's all right, Bird,' she said. 'I've asked. We've got a lift.'

They were the last there. They went out into the night, which was easier now, settled and much cooler with some queenly stars sitting above. The three men were very drunk. Pollet almost fell into the mud and had to be brought to his feet by Conway and Dahlia hanging on to his armpits laughing and staggering.

Pollet, hoisting his stomach, rolled behind the wheel and jerked the engine. Davies, heavy and sick, sat with him in the front, and the happy Conway was between the two girls in the back seat. Pollet revved the engine violently, sending birds screaming through the darkness of the jungle trees. He let go an elongated laugh and jolted the car forward.

'Lights!' shouted the three in the back seat at once. 'Lights!''Ah, pardon,' smiled Pollet. The car was already careering along the skinny road, with the jungle on either side. He turned the light switch as they went, opening up the colours of the mud road ahead of them and the bright curling green at each edge.

Conway began to sing hideously, a howling pseudo‑song of the Australian outback which he had never seen and did not want to see. He thrust each hand, like the blade of a fat knife, between the upper legs of each of the girls flanking him. Bird spitefully pinched the skin on the back of his hand and he removed it. Dahlia let the other hand remain, enjoying its human feel and its animal movement provoked by the jumping of the car. There were some big holes in the rough road and Conway tried to judge the moment when the front wheels began dipping into each one causing his thumb to jump at the same time and collide with the mossy collection within the nylon at the girl's isthmus. It suddenly, and curiously, reminded him of touching the bags of lavender that his mother used to buy in the street when he was a boy. Dahlia stared straight ahead. Conway stopped his song and looked at her and in the uncertain light imagined she was smiling. He smiled too.

Davies hung, miserably drunk, in the front seat beside the bouncing Pollet. The crowding green of the jungle, caught in the lights of the pitching car, whirled before his dazed eyes like weedy water in a restless pool. He could hear movements from the seat behind him and wondered what Bird was doing. He reached into his inner pocket to take the pack of pictures from there, intending to sling them from the window. But he could not get his fingers about them and, his resolution dying, he let his hand drop hopelessly. He heard Conway's short laugh and Dahlia saying something softly. The car bumped on. Over the trees now, like a mirrored forest fire, the red reflection of the bakery sign touched the night. Then the brilliant blue and the glaring white.

'Home sweet home,' said Dahlia.

'Were is home?' asked Conway wriggling his hand like

a barracuda.

'There,' she nodded towards the sign. 'The bakery.'

'What! In the bakery?'

'Well, one floor up. Didn't you notice how shagged I look? It's nothing nice caused that, mister, it's those bastard lights.'

Conway hooted like an astonished owl. Dahlia said: 'Go on, have a scream. It's not as though the fool switches them off at a decent hour. He hasn't got over the novelty yet so they flash like that all night.'

Bird said: 'But he reduced your rent. He was kind.'

Dahlia sniffed. 'Kind! He only did it after I threatened to sue him ‑ in Sydney. That worried him. He wasn't sure whether I could do it or not. So he knocked the rent down.'

'That's something, 'said Conway.

'It's nothing,' the girl argued. 'Not when you're kept awake all night with red, white, and blue flashing across the room. Red, white, blue. Red, white, blue. If it went out of sequence,
white,
red,
blue,
just
once,
I'd run out hollering into the bloody street.'

'Curtains,' suggested Conway. 'Good thick curtains.'

'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.'