The Love Beach (25 page)

'Abe will be yards ahead,' said Conway confidently. 'If I have to swim, I have to swim.'

Davies said: 'Secondly, since I've turned from a butter and fats salesman to a wholesale kidnapper and southseas adventurer. perhaps we could come to some agreement about what I'm going to be paid.'

'Why not?' said Conway. 'Two hundred Aussie dollars, flat rate, is that all right?' He
held
his hand up to Davies. 'I'll give you a note of agreement, don't worry, just in case I don't get back. After all, mate, why should you lose?'

'Why should 1?' agreed Davies.

Thirteen

Newport was so far away as the planets that night, Dayies thought. Newport with its wet evenings and the lamps like water lilies on the pavements. The car sizzling through the rain, and the bikes going by making whispered hissings like snakes. The neon over the Odeon, the river mud under the bridge, the copper dome of the tech gone mouldy green, the old town hall crowded by buildings all sides so that its clock tower peered helplessly out like a pinioned man. The bandstand in Belle Vue Park, the buses on the Cardiff Road, and those big ships riding in the meadows in the south, just as little Mag and David had seen them on that day.

Abe was already aboard the boat, working in an efficient manner, coiling a rope, banging his foot in a testing manner on a board, giving the engine a little oil from a can like a nurse giving a child night‑time medicine. Conway stood on the jetty, looking very big in the dark, feet astride, staring over the tired sea to where he knew the hump of St Paul's squatted. There was no moon that night and there were never any lights showing from the island at that distance.

It felt very unreal to Davies; unreal and yet somehow natural enough that all this should be happening in these hot places. It was
he
who was the unreality. He, Issy Davies, South Wales factory‑hand, turned immigrant, turned butter and fats salesman, turned sailor, explorer, adventurer, and God knows what else before the morning came. But the setting was right. The dark sea heavy and warm, the stirrings of the Pacific dark; the close sky. He had just left Bird lying diagonally across her bed, beautiful, resting, her sweat cooling. How did all these things come to take place. As Conway had said, they could only happen here. In Newport they would never believe you.

He put his fingers up and felt his face. The night perspration was lying across it like drizzle. His chin felt hard. Pollet had cut his hair for him. The Belgian cut the hair of the natives in the villages, kept the bits, and used them in the manufacture of Melanesian dolls which he carved from wood. He had chopped and changed and chopped again until Davies's hair was hanging around his head like tails.

Bird had loved him profusely that evening, lying on that ridiculously erotic bed with him above her, held in her soft arms. As they lay and moved together, they no longer needed to converse in their sex, big moths and other airborne insects flew in frenzy about the globe of the lamp by the bed, sending whirring shadows over the skins of the lovers. When Davies loved her, when his body was beside her and within her, he could find no room for any other thought or emotion. Only the great swollen sickness that she drew from him with her love, the feeling of it swelling up, gathering inside him, and then flooding away, leaving him clean and relieved. Then he could look from the window out to the assembled night and its staring stars, and send his thoughts away through the sky and back to distant places again. Then he wondered about the components of him that were stretching over so many thousand miles. How could a man be in two such separate places at once? She, with true woman's insight, never asked him where his thoughts were. She lay and felt him, all over his body, touching each part, examining him almost, his face, his hair, his ears, front and back, his chest, his stomach, his backside, his legs, and his loving parts.

Once, as he stared from the bed to the world she asked: 'Looking for the boat?'

'The boat? 'he asked stupidly.

'The Baffin Bay?'

'No,' he said, looking around to her and seeing the pain in her face. 'No. Never thought of it. It'll come some day, I suppose.'

'No supposing is necessary,' she said firmly. 'It will be

here soon. It is on the ocean now. I hope it meets a hurri‑cane or a typhoon, Davies.'

He had laughed quietly and took her choice breasts in his hands and kissed them. 'Poor Captain MacAmdrews, and Greta and old Curry and Rice,' he laughed. 'What about them in your hurricane?'

She had smiled ruefully. 'Well I hope they are saved by a passing boat,' she conceded.

'In a hurricane?'

'Yes, it will be a miracle rescue. The whole world will discuss it. But I hope
The Baffin Bay
never gets here.'

'It will,' he had said surely. 'By Tuesday.'

On the jetty he stood just behind Conway. Conway, who, he knew, would leave Dahlia very easily and she would leave him the same way. They were travelling lovers, they would never forget, but they would never particularly remember either. That was a good thing to be, a travelling lover.

Davies was wearing some sailcloth jeans and a blue shirt with one button the middle of an original family of five. He still retained his tennis shoes, although they had aged and his big toe was thrusting through the right one. He felt that his body was brown and tough. Strangely he felt as though he had grown. That night he felt he could have undertaken a fight with Conway.

Conway said: 'Ready, then?'

Davies said: 'Ready. Why is Abe so keen? Have you paid him?'

'Half,' said Conway looking at Davies sideways. 'The other half later.'

'What about me?' said Davies. 'Don't I get anything?'

'Christ,' muttered Conway. 'Show a man danger and he starts counting the pennies.'

'Dollars,' corrected Davies. 'Aussie dollars. Let's be businesslike.'

'All right,' agreed Conway. 'I said I'd give you a payment note, is that good enough? It's a hell of a fine time to discuss your terms, sport.'

'It's the best,' said Davies. 'A payment note will do if you haven't got the change on you.'

Conway grimaced. 'The day of the gifted amateur is over, eh? Well, as it happens I've got your note all ready here and signed. You would have got it. Do you want me to stamp your health card?'

'I'll just take the note,' said Davies. He took it. Two hundred Australian dollars. A hundred pounds. That would get him some of the way home, anyway. He folded it carefully and slotted it into the back of his trousers. 'Right, I'm ready,' he said, clambering down into the boat. 'Best of luck, Messiah.'

Abe watched them studiously, especially Davies. He felt surprised at Davies. He had always thought he was a bit soft. Playing that harmonium, that morning on the beach at St Paul's, he had really thought he was a bit soft. This place changed people.

They left the harbour quietly, the vessel snuffling along the sea like a smelling puppy. Davies had not been among the islands at night, except for his arrival in
The Baffin Bay.
St Peter's slunk off astern, black except for the stark fluttering of the 'Bread' sign over Livesley's shop. It reminded Davies strangely of a can‑can dancer lifting a many-coloured skirt. He watched it and hummed out the time and tune of
Orpheus in the Underworld.

'Cheerful,' commented Conway. He handed Davies an Australian army water bottle.

Davies looked at him and then the bottle. 'No thanks,' he said.

'Scotch.'

'Sorry.' He took the bottle and had a drink, feeling the fiery glow coming through the hard, rimmed neck. He felt it farming out quickly inside him. 'Aussie army issue?' he asked.

'For special combat assignments,' said Conway. 'This thing here is a gun. A pistol. Aussie army issue again. It's for you.'

Davies made a face at the weapon. 'I told you, didn't 1? Any trouble and I'm running not fighting.'

Conway said: 'Listen, son, all sorts of things could happen. If you get two hundred of those fanatical buggers

around you waving clubs and spears it's no use playing the bleeding harmonium.'

'A gun won't be much better if there are two hundred,' said Davies, nevertheless taking it. 'How does it work?'

'You've been a soldier?' asked Conway. 'Don't you know?'

'Officers had little guns,' said Davies. 'Other ranks, that was me, had the long guns. I've never used a little one.'

Conway ill‑humouredly showed him the working of the pistol, flicking it open and closed, throwing the magazine, closing it, handing it back. 'You point it this way,' he said sarcastically. 'With the little hole directed outwards.'

'Glad you told me,' said Davies. 'Can you now tell me exactly what is going to happen when we get there?'

Conway said: 'I wish I knew. Too right I do.' He clamped his top teeth over his lower lip. 'What I hope will happen is that we'll close in to the little pebble bay just around the headland from the lagoon. There's a wide opening in the reef there, but hardly anything of a beach. Enough for us though. I'll go ashore and all you have to do is to wait for me to come back. Abe knows the drill already because I've been through it with him. Right, Abe?'

Abe nodded in the dark. 'I know it all,' he said. 'Just as long as nothing goes wrong, I know it all.'

Conway continued to Davies. 'We've made a wooden ramp ‑ it's there, see? ‑ to run on to the boat from the beach. It's pretty elevated just there and the levels shouldn't be any worry. All you have to do is to be waiting with that ramp in place for me to get back on their sacred motor bike.'

'You'll run the bike aboard,' said Davies. 'And we get out as quick as we can?'

Conway grinned. 'Simple for you, mate. Just nothing to it. I've got the hard part.'

'That's how it should be. How are you going to stop them rushing you when they see you on the motor bike? After all if they think you're the divine Dodson‑Smith they'll want to grab hold of you. When they find it's only you, not Santa, they'll have your balls off.'

'They won't see me that close,' said Conway. 'Not if I can help it. They'll all be down on the beach.'

'And how can you work that?'

'I have something figured out, don't worry. They won't catch more than a quick look at me when I ride down the road through the village and then down that bend above the beach. Then I'm heading like hell along the track for half a mile down on to the pebble beach, and we get the bike aboard this thing and we tail off as hard as we can go.'

'Still sounds as though you're out of your mind to me,' said Davies.

Conway looked quiet. 'It sounds a bit like that to me too, sport.' He sniffed around at the sky and the sea, a dark mixture all about them. 'Never mind,' he said. 'It's a nice night for it.'

He had gone ashore on the island, moving with expert quietness up the shingled stone of the beach, and sidling into the trees. Davies sat in the boat with Abe. It stirred a little beneath them. They were in a small tightly curved bay with the eavesdropping palms close over their heads. There was little difference between light and shadow. Davies could just see Abe's face.

'What about him then? 'he asked Abe.

'Lunatic,' sniffed Abe. 'Real lunatic. He'll be a great man.'

'If he lives.'

'Oh, he'll live okay. Great men always do. That's part of the secret of being great ‑ survival. If you don't live you don't make it to be great.'

Davies grunted uncertainly. 'What a thing to try, though. What a thing.'

'He'll be great,' confirmed Abe. 'Like Barber, and Wilkie Wilkins, and Sooney Petersen. Like all the world's great men.'

'W'ho the hell were they?' Davies glanced at him in the dark.

'You don't have to whisper,' said Abe. 'But you don't have to shout neither.'

'I wasn't whispering.'

'Shouting,' said Abe. 'That's what you was doing, shouting.'

Davies put his hand on the pistol lying on the cross seat before him. 'Do they have guards or anything at night?' he asked.

'Do they buggery,' laughed Abe. 'You don't get people anywhere so tired as this tribe. They all sleep like the rotting dead. Dodson‑Smith had better make a row or he won't stir 'em.'

They squatted silently, the boat musing to itself.

'Sooney and Wilkie Wilkins?' said Abe, shaking his head. 'Greats. World greats. See it depends on what your world is, sonny. Here the world is the farthest island you can see. Not much matters after that. Suva might as well be London, and Sydney, well, that's the stars, and London ‑ha! we've never heard about it. They
don't affect us, see? We hardly get to think about them. And if you come here, from the outside, you soon get like it too. Oh yes, you learn pretty quick that the whole world is just this little bit. It ends where the sky starts.'

Abe bent down towards the cabin opening. 'You want something to eat?' he said. 'I'm going to cook some tea and I've got some crab. Fresh from this morning. You want some?'

Davies agreed. Abe wriggled into the door of the cabin. 'Wilkie, now,' he said. 'Ha, you've got to be an islander to really get the feel of them. Wilkie used to run a flying boat, see, around the islands. He used to have a base at Honoraria up in the Solomons. That thing was so old there were no more spares left for it ‑ not anywhere in the world. Nowhere. Not a nut, a bolt to fit the thing. But he flew in every day, patching it up, putting bits into it that he made himself. Everybody flew with Wilkie, son. Island to island. Honoraria, down here, St Peter's to St Mark's to St Paul's to St Bamabas and the rest. All the tribesmen went with him. The St Mark's boys and this lot from St Paul's had a pitched fight one day in the flying boat, so Wilkie rolled it all of a sudden in the sky and tipped them all arse over earhole. What a man.'

'Dead?' suggested Davies. He took a sandwich from Abe and felt the dry salt taste of the crab.

'Oh sure, dead,' nodded Abe. 'But a great man. He kept tying that flying boat together, and then he was fiddling around for weeks trying to make a pipe or a valve or something that would fit it. He'd be stuck in Honoraria, which wasn't so bad because he had his woman there ‑ Filipino she was ‑ but sometimes he'd be down here trying to fix it, or on one of the outer islands. But it couldn't go on for ever. He'd patched and welded and put so many bits and oddments in that flying boat that it just had to fall apart some day.