New and Collected Stories (45 page)

Nothing.

‘Shall we make a tunnel, Dad?'

‘All right, then, but it'll crumble.'

The thin white ray was coming towards them, feather-tips lifting from it, a few hundred yards away and suddenly no longer straight, pushed forward a little in the centre, scarred by the out-jutting pier. It broke on the sand and went right back.

‘She'll be in in a bit, don't worry. We're in the front line, so we'll have to move,' the old man said. ‘Half an hour at the most. You can't stop it, and that's a fact. Comes in shoulder-high, faster than a racehorse sometimes, and then you've got to watch out, even from this distance, my guy you have. Might look a fair way and flat one minute, then it's marching in quick like the Guards. Saw a man dragged in once, big six-footer he was. His wife and kids just watched. Found 'im in the Wash a week later. Pulls you underfoot. Even I can find my legs and run at times like that, whether I'm eighty or not.'

If it weren't for the trace of white he'd hardly have known where sky ended and sand began, for the wetness of it under the line was light purple, a mellower shade of the midday lower horizon. The mark of white surf stopped them blending, a firm and quite definite dividing of earth and water and air.

‘Come here every year, then?' Stanley asked.

‘Most days,' the man said. ‘Used to be a lifeboatman. I live here.' His hand ran around the inside of a straw basket like a weasel and pulled out a bottle of beer. He untwisted the tight cork, up-ended it, and swigged it into his bony throat. ‘You from Notts, I suppose?'

Stanley nodded. ‘I'm a waiter. Wangled some time off for a change. It don't make so much difference at a big hotel. There used to be a shortage, but we've got some of them Spanish chaps now.' His jacket and tie lay on the sand, one sleeve hidden by a fallen rampart of Ivan's intricate castle.

Looking up he saw Amy making her way between patchwork blankets of people, a tall and robust figure wearing a flowered dress. A tied ribbon set hair spreading towards her shoulders. She never tried to look fabricated and smart, even on her job as a cashier at the local dance hall. He was almost annoyed at being so happy to see her, yet finally gave in to his pleasure and watched her getting closer, while hoping she had now recovered from her fits of the morning. Perhaps the job she had was too much for her, but she liked to work, because it gave a feeling of independence, helped to keep that vitality and anger that held Stanley so firmly to her. It was no easy life, and because of the money she earned little time could be given to Ivan, though such continual work kept the family more stable than if as a triangle the three of them were too much with each other – which they wanted to be against their own and everyone's good.

She had sandwiches, fried fish, cakes, dandelion-and-burdock, beer. ‘This is what we need to stop us feeling so rattled.'

He wondered why she had to say the wrong thing so soon after coming back. ‘Who's rattled?'

‘You were. I was as well, if you like. Let's eat this though. I'm starving.'

She opened the packets, and kept them in equal radius around her, passing food to them both. ‘I didn't know how hungry I was,' Stanley said.

‘If anything's wrong,' she said, ‘it's usually that – or something else.' She reached out, and they pressed each other's hand.

‘You look lovely today,' he said.

‘I'm glad we came.'

‘So am I. Maybe I'll get a job here.'

‘It'd be seasonal,' she said. ‘Wouldn't do for us.'

‘That's true.'

While Ivan had his mouth full of food, some in his hand, and a reserve waiting in his lap, she asked if he wanted any more. Even at home, when only halfway through a plate, the same thing happened, and Stanley wondered whether she wanted to stuff, choke or stifle him – or just kill his appetite. He'd told her about it, but it made no difference.

After the meal Ivan took his bread and banana and played at the water's edge, where spume spread like silver shekels in the sun and ran around his plimsolls, then fell back or faded into the sand. He stood up, and when it tried to catch him he ran, laughing so loudly that his face turned as red as the salmon paste spread on the open rolls that his mother and father were still eating. The sea missed him by inches. The castle-tumulus of sand was mined and sapped by salt water until its crude formations became lopsided, a boat rotted by time and neglect. A sudden upsurge melted it like wax, and on the follow-up there was no trace. He watched it, wondering why it gave in so totally to such gentle pressure.

They had to move, and Amy picked up their belongings, unable to stop water running over the sleeve of Stanley's jacket. ‘You see,' she chided, ‘if you hadn't insisted on coming all this way down we wouldn't have needed to shift so early.'

He was sleepy and good-natured, for the food hadn't yet started to eat his liver. ‘Everybody'll have to move. It goes right up to the road when it's full in.'

‘Not for another twenty minutes. Look how far down we are. Trust us to be in the front line. That's the way you like it, though. If only we could do something right for a change, have a peaceful excursion without much going wrong.'

He thought so, too, and tried to smile as he stood up to help.

‘If everything went perfectly right one day,' she said, ‘you'd still have to do something and deliberately muck it up, I know you would.'

As he said afterwards – or would have said if the same course hadn't by then been followed yet again – one thing led to another, and before I could help myself …

The fact was that the whole acreage of the remaining sand, peopled by much of Nottingham on its day's outing, was there for an audience, or would have been if any eyes had been trained on them, which they weren't particularly. But many of them couldn't help but be, after the first smack. In spite of the sea and the uprising wind, it could be heard, and the second was indeed listened for after her raging cry at the impact.

‘You tried me,' he said, hopelessly baffled and above all immediately sorry. ‘You try me all the time.' And the jerked-out words, and the overwhelming feeling of regret, made him hit her a third time, till he stood, arms hanging thinly at his side like the maimed branches of some blighted and thirsty tree that he wanted to disown but couldn't. They felt helpless, and too weak to be kept under sufficient control. He tried to get them safely into his pockets, but they wouldn't fit.

A red leaf-mark above her eye was slowly swelling. ‘Keep away,' she cried, lifting her heavy handbag but unable to crash it against him. She sobbed. It was the first time he had hit her in public, and the voices calling that he should have less on it, and others wondering what funny stuff she had been up to to deserve it, already sounded above the steady railing of the nerve-racking sea. An over-forward wave sent a line of spray that saturated one of her feet. She ignored it, and turned to look for Ivan among the speckled colours of the crowd. Pinks and greys, blues and whites shifted across her eyes and showed nothing.

She turned to him: ‘Where is he, then?'

He felt sullen and empty, as if he were the one who'd been hit. ‘I don't know. I thought he was over there.'

‘Where?'

‘Just there. He was digging.'

‘O my God, what if he's drowned?'

‘Don't be so bloody silly,' he said, his face white, and thinner than she'd ever seen it. Bucket and spade lay by the basket between them. They looked into the sea, and then towards land, unable to find him from their mutual loathing and distress. They were closer than anyone else to the sea, and the old lifeboatman had gone. Everyone had moved during their argument, and the water now boiled and threw itself so threateningly that they had to pick up everything and run.

‘What effect do you think all this arguing and fightin's going to have on him?' she demanded. He'd never thought about such outside problems, and considered she had only mentioned them now so as to get at him with the final weapon of mother-and-child, certainly not for Ivan's own and especial good. Yet he was not so sure. The horror of doubt came over him, opened raw wounds not only to himself but to the whole world for the first time as they walked towards the road and set out on a silent bitter search through the town.

For a long while Ivan sat on the steps of a church, the seventh step down from the doors, beating time with a broken stick as blocks of traffic sped by. He sang a song, dazed, enclosed, at peace. A seagull sat at his feet, and when he sneezed it flew away. He stayed at peace even after they found him, and went gladly on the train with them as if into the shambles. They seemed happily united in getting him back at last. The effort of the search had taken away all their guilt at having succumbed to such a pointless quarrel in front of him. He watched the fields, and heavy streams like long wavy mirrors that cows chewed at and clouds flowed over and ignored.

He sat on his father's knee, who held him as if he were a rather unusual but valuable tip a customer in the restaurant had left. Ivan felt nothing. The frozen soul, set in ancestry and childhood, fixed his eyes to look and see beyond them and the windows. The train wasn't moving after a while. He was sleeping a great distance away from it, detached, its jolting a permanent feature of life and the earth. He wanted to go on travelling forever, as if should he ever stop the sky would fall in. He dreamed that it had, and was about to black him out, so he woke up and clung to his father, asking when they would be back in Nottingham.

The Rope Trick

While making an efficient fire on which to roast sausages, on a rock bed built between carob and olive trees in Greece, one of the happy-go-lucky girls called June, who was nothing if not stoned and with it (and with me) said: ‘I can see you've done your time in Sherwood Forest.'

‘Listen,' I snapped, feeding brittle wood into the smoke. ‘There are two ways you can do time in Sherwood Forest. One is in the army, and the other's in the sanatorium. I did mine in the sanatorium, but as a stoker not an invalid, which was after I came out of prison and met the girl of my life – if I remember.'

They laughed. Yes, it was very funny. We were all recovering from a strong dose of the pot, and lay in deadbeat poses eating at bread, and sausages burnt in pine and juniper branches. A hot wind came from up the grey wall of mountain as if someone were wafting it down through the asphodel for our especial benefit. We got to talking about love, and to my surprise none of them thought much of it – though we all had our birds, the birds were there, and they didn't wear feathers, either. Neither did I believe in love – though I had an idea I was lying as usual.

‘The sooner you lose all trace of love, the better,' I said. ‘I can see that now, having never got her, yet realized that she was the love of my life and was bound to have some influence on it.'

June moved over to let me sit on the tree-trunk after such a selfless stint by the fire. ‘Love is the end,' said Michael, ‘the end; so go to greet love as a friend!'

‘And turn queer,' someone shouted, I forget who.

The blue sea puffed its spume tops along all the caves of the coast, fisherboats smacking down into it, and swooping along. ‘I can never turn anything,' I said. ‘But I'll try and tell you about her, if you'll pass me some more of that resinated fishwater that in these parts goes for wine.'

I didn't even know her name – no name, no photo and hardly a face, yet the memory bites at me so often that I think it must end up a good one. Either that, or it will rot my soul.

They looked at me, my travelling companions, friends of the fraternity that one bumped into on the Long Grand Tour. They listened as always, which was pleasant for me, because if you don't have anything to say how can anybody know you're alive? And if people aren't sure whether or not you're alive how can you be expected to know yourself?

I was lucky to have a few good pennies left in my pocket on that raw October morning, for it meant I still had one at least without a hole in it, which may have accounted for the fine and heady feeling as I walked down Mansfield Road. Stepping off the kerb I almost became good for nothing but a few black puddings as a petrol lorry flowed an inch from my foot, but even that shock didn't shake my tripes, and the flood-roar of swearing stopped in half a minute. Buns in a baker's window looked as if pelted with coal-specks and baked in canary-shit, so I thought I'd rather throw my remaining coppers on a cup of cold tea in a dirty cracked cup with lipstick round the edges, for the half-hour buckshee sitdown would be a break from the never-ending traipse over concrete and cobblestones looking for a job, a hard thing to find after a long stretch of the penthouse.

But at least I'd paid society for my crimes, which as you can imagine made me feel a lot better. You think it did? When you've stopped laughing, I'll go on. No matter how much quod you get you don't pay back anything. Some who thieve were born to make good, can't wait between snatching the loot and getting pulled in, but I'm not like that, didn't hand back a shilling of all I took in spite of my spell in the nick, for it was spent before they got me.

When the powdery rain eased off, a blade of sun leapt a row of pram and toy shops, as sharp and sudden as if God had whipped out a gold-plated flick-knife to prise open a door and break in. But the sun went back. He'd changed his mind because the shops weren't rich enough, being the sort that could go bankrupt any day. I pulled up my collar for the umpteenth time, the changeable weather lifting clouds high only to let them fall low again. If this sly and treacherous rain kept on peeing itself I'd sit in the library for a dose of reading, I said to myself.

Being still so close to clink I told the other half of me things it might have thought healthier to forget. I remembered a tall man inside, with black hair and a Roman conk whose brown eyes stared too much for his own good. Up to then I'd thought only blue eyes could stare so much, but his brown ones gazed as if a fire blazed between him and the world. Maybe he glimpsed something that could never be reached, even beyond the blue skies of outside. He was down for a seven-year stretch after manslaughtering a pal who'd knocked on with his wife, and he had a habit of pushing a scrap of paper into anyone's hand he passed close to. One day I happened to be going by on exercise and felt something pressed into my own. Despite the friendliness I wondered how much of a good thing it was, for if it had been a cigarette you had to be careful it wasn't a choir-boy getting round you, for it was a common move of theirs.