No Sharks in the Med and Other Stories (31 page)

Her figure was fully formed and she looked wonderful in a bathing costume, and her legs were long and tapering. Also, I had a thing about teeth, and Moira’s were perfect and very, very white. Since meeting her the first time I’d scrubbed the inside of my mouth and my gums raw trying to match the whiteness of her teeth.

Since meeting her…

That had been, oh, maybe three months ago. I mean, I’d always known her, or known of her. You can’t live all your life in a small colliery village and not know everyone, at least by sight. But when she’d left school and got her first job at a salon in Hartlepool, and we’d started catching the same bus in the morning, that had opened it up for us.

After that there’d been a lot of talk, then the cinema, eventually the beach at Seaton that the debris from the pits hadn’t ruined yet, and now we were “going together”. It hadn’t meant much to me before, that phrase, “going together”, but now I understood it. We went places together, and we went well together. I thought so, anyway.

The garden allotments started properly at the end of the colliery wall and sprawled over many acres along the coast road on the northern extreme of the village. The access paths that divided them were dusty, mazy, meandering. But behind the fences people were at work, and they came to and fro along the paths, so that it wasn’t really private there. I had returned Moira’s kiss, and in several quieter places had tried to draw her closer once or twice.

Invariably she held me at arm’s length, saying: “Not here!” And her nervousness made me nervous, too, so that I’d look here and there all about, to make sure we were unobserved. And it was at such a time, glancing back the way we’d come, that I thought I saw a face hastily snatched back around the corner of a fence. The thought didn’t occur to me that it might be Raymond. By now I’d quite forgotten about him.

Where the allotments ended the open fields began, gradually declining to a dene and a stream that ran down to the sea. A second cigarette had been smoked down to its tip and discarded by the time we crossed the fields along a hedgerow, and we’d fallen silent where we strolled through the long summer grass. But I was aware of my arm, linked with hers, hugged close against her right breast. And that was a thought that made me dizzy, for through a heady half hour I had actually held that breast in my hand, had known how warm it was, with its hard little tip that felt rough against the parent softness.

Oh, the back row love seats in the local cinema were worthy of an award; whoever designed them deserves an accolade from all the world’s lovers. Two people on a single, softly upholstered seat, thigh to thigh and hip to hip, with no ghastly armrest divider, no obstruction to the slow, breathless, tender, and timid first invasion.

In the dark with only the cinema’s wall behind us, and the smoky beam from the projector turning all else to pitch, I was
sure
she wasn’t aware of my progress with the top button of her blouse, and I considered myself incredibly fortunate to be able to disguise my fumblings with the second of those small obstacles. But after a while, when for all my efforts it appeared I’d get no farther and my frustration was mounting as the tingling seconds ticked by, then she’d gently taken my hand away and effortlessly completed the job for me. She
had
known—which, while it took something of the edge off my triumph, nevertheless increased the frisson to new and previously unexplored heights.

Was I innocent? I don’t know. Others, younger by a year, had said they knew everything there was to know. Everything! There was a thought.

But in opening that button and making way for my hand, Moira had invited me in, as it were; cuddled up together there in the back row, my hand had moulded itself to the shape of her breast and learned every contour better than any actor ever memorized his lines. Even now, a week later, I could form my hand into a cup and feel her flesh filling it again. And
desired
to feel her filling it again.

Where the hedgerow met a fence at right angles, we crossed a stile; I was across first and helped Moira down. While I held one hand to steady her, she hitched her short skirt a little to step down from the stile’s high platform. It was funny, but I found Moira’s legs more fascinating in that skirt than in her bathing costume. And I’d started to notice the heat of my ears—that they were quite hot apart from the heat of the sun, with a sort of internal burning—as we more nearly approached our destination. My destination, anyway, where if her feelings matched mine she’d succumb a little more to my seductions.

As we left the stile to take the path down into the dene and toward the sea cliffs, I glanced back the way we’d come. I don’t know why. It was just that I had a feeling. And back there, across the fields, but hurrying, I thought…a figure. Raymond? If it was, and if he were to bother us today of all days…I promised myself he’d pay for it with a bloody nose. But on the other hand it could be anybody. Saying nothing of it to Moira, I hurried her through the dene. Cool under the trees, where the sunlight dappled the rough cobbled path, she said:

“What on earth’s the hurry, Josh? Are you
that
eager?”

The way I took her up in my arms and kissed her till I reeled must have answered her question for me; but there were voices here and there along the path, and the place echoed like a tunnel. No, I knew where I wanted to take her.

Toward the bottom of the dene, where it narrowed to a bottleneck of woods and water scooped through the beach banks and funneled toward the sea, we turned north across an old wooden bridge over the scummy stream and began climbing toward the cliff paths, open fields, and sand holes that lay between us and Easington Colliery. Up there, in the long grasses of those summer fields, we could be quite alone and Moira would let me make love to her, I hoped. She’d hinted as much, anyway, the last time I walked her home.

Toiling steeply up an earth track, where white sand spilled down from sand holes up ahead, we looked down on the beach—or what had been a beach before the pit-yakkers came—and remembered a time when it was almost completely white from the banks and cliffs to the sea. On a palmy summer day like this the sea should be blue, but it was grey. Its waves broke in a grey froth of scum on a black shore that looked ravaged by cancer—the cancer of the pits.

The landscape down there could be that of an alien planet: the black beach scarred by streamlets of dully glinting slurry gurgling seaward; concentric tidemarks of congealed froth, with the sick, wallowing sea seeming eager to escape from its own vomit; a dozen sea-coal lorries scattered here and there like ticks on a carcass, their crews shoveling pebble-sized nuggets of the wet, filthy black gold in through open tailgates, while other vehicles trundled like lice over the rotting black corpse of a moonscape. Sucked up by the sun, grey mists wreathed the whole scene.

“It’s worse than I remembered it,” I said. “And you were right: we couldn’t have walked down there, not even along the foot of the banks. It’s just too filthy! And to think: all of that was pure white sand just, oh—”

“Ten years ago?” she said. “Well, maybe not
pure
white, but it was still a nice beach then, anyway. Yes, I remember. I’ve seen that beach full of people, the sea bobbing with their heads. My father used to swim there, with me on his chest! I can remember things from all the way back to when I was a baby. It’s a shame they’ve done this to it.”

“It’s actually unsafe,” I told her. “There are places they’ve flagged, where they’ve put up warning notices. Quicksands of slag and slop and slurry—gritty black sludge from the pits. And just look at that skyline!”

South lay the colliery at Harden, the perimeter of its works coming close to the banks where they rolled down to the sea, with half a dozen of its black spider legs straddling out farther yet. These were the aerial trip dumpers: conveyor belts or ski lifts of slag, endlessly swaying to the rim and tripped there, to tip the refuse of the coke ovens down onto the smoking wasteland of foreshore; and these were, directly, the culprits of all this desolation. Twenty-four hours a day for fifty years they’d crawled on their high cables, between their spindly towers, great buckets of muck depositing the pus of the earth to corrode a coast. And behind this lower intestine of the works lay the greater pulsating mass of the spider itself: the pit, with its wheel towers and soaring black chimneys, its mastaba cooling towers and mausoleum coke ovens. Yellow smoke, grey and black smoke, belching continuously into the blue sky—or into a sky that looked blue but was in fact polluted, as any rainy day would testify, when white washing on garden lines would turn a streaky grey with the first patter of raindrops.

On the southern horizon, Blackhill was a spiky smudge under a grey haze; north, but closer, Easington was the same. Viewed from this same position at night, the glow of the coke ovens, the flare-up and gouting orange steam when white hot coke was hosed down, would turn the entire region into a scene straight from hell! Satanic mills? They have nothing on a nest of well-established coal mines by the sea…

We reached the top of the banks and passed warning notices telling how from here on they rolled down to sheer cliffs. When I’d been a child, miners used to clamber down the banks to the cliff edge, hammer stakes into the earth and lower themselves on ropes with baskets to collect gull eggs. Inland, however, the land was flat, where deep grass pasture roved wild all the way from here to the coast road. There were a few farms, but that was all.

We walked half a mile along the cliff path until the fields began to be fenced; where the first true field was split by a hedgerow inside the fence, there I paused and turned to Moira. We hadn’t seen anyone, hadn’t spoken for some time but I suppose her heart, like mine, had been speeding up a little. Not from our efforts, for walking here was easy.

“We can climb the fence, cut along the hedgerow,” I suggested, a little breathlessly.

“Why?” Her eyes were wide, naïve, and yet questioning.

I shrugged. “A…shortcut to the main road?” But I’d made it a question, and I knew I shouldn’t leave the initiative to her. Gathering my courage, I added: “Also, we’ll—”

“Find a bit of privacy?” Her face was flushed.

I climbed the rough three-bar fence; she followed my example and I helped her down, and knew she’d seen where I could hardly help looking. But she didn’t seem to mind. We stayed close to the hedgerow, which was punctuated every twenty-five paces or so with great oaks, and struck inland. It was only when we were away from the fence that I remembered, just before jumping down, that I’d paused a second to scan the land about—and how for a moment I thought I’d seen someone back along the path. Raymond, I wondered? But in any case, he should lose our trail now.

After some two hundred yards there was a lone elder tree growing in the field a little way apart from the hedge, its branches shading the lush grass underneath. I led Moira away from the hedge and into the shade of the elder, and she came unresisting. And there I spread my jacket for her to sit on, and for a minute or two we just sprawled. The grass hid us almost completely in our first private place. Seated, we could just see the topmost twigs of the hedgerow, and of course the bole and spreading canopy of the nearest oak.

Now, I don’t intend to go into details. Anyone who was ever young, alone with his girl, will know the details anyway. Let it suffice to say that there were things I wanted, some of which she was willing to give. And some she wasn’t. “No,” she said. And more positively: “
No!
” when I persisted. But she panted and moaned a little all the same, and her voice was almost desperate, suggesting: “But I can do it for you this way, if you like.” Ah, but her hands set me on fire! I burned for her, and she felt the strength of the flame rising in me. “Josh,
no
!” she said again. “What if…if…”

She looked away from me, froze for a moment—and her mouth fell open. She drew air hissingly and expelled it in a gasp. “
Josh!
” And without pause she was doing up buttons, scrambling to her feet, brushing away wisps of grass from her skirt and blouse.

“Eh?” I said, astonished. “What is it?”

“He saw us!” she gasped. “He saw you—me—like that!” Her voice shook with a mixture of outrage and fear.

“Who?” I said, mouth dry, looking this way and that and seeing no one. “Where?”

“By the oak tree,” she said. “Halfway up it. A face, peering out from behind. Someone was watching us.”

Someone? Only one someone it could possibly be! But be sure that when I was done with him he’d never peep on anyone again! Flushed and furious I sprinted through the grass for the oak tree. The hedge hid a rotting fence; I went over, through it, came to a panting halt in fragments of brown, broken timber. No sign of anyone. You could hide an army in that long grass. But the fence where it was nailed to the oak bore the scuff marks of booted feet, and the tree’s bark was freshly bruised some six feet up the bole.

“You…
dog
!” I growled to myself. “God, but I’ll
get
you, Raymond Maddison!”

“Josh!” I heard Moira on the other side of the hedge. “Josh, I’m so—ashamed!”

“What?” I called out. “Of what? He won’t dare say anything—whoever he is. There are laws against—”

But she was no longer there. Forcing myself through soft wooden jaws and freeing myself from the tangle of the hedge, I saw her hurrying back the way we’d come. “Moira!” I called, but she was already halfway to the three-bar fence. “Moira!” I called again, and then ran after her. By the time I reached the fence she’d climbed it and was starting back along the path.

I finally caught up with her, took her arm. “Moira, we can find some other place. I mean, just because—”

She shook me off, turned on me. “Is that all you want, Josh Peters?” Her face was angry now, eyes flashing. “Well if it is, there are plenty of other girls in Harden who’ll be more than happy to…to…”

“Moira, I—” I shook my head. It wasn’t like that. We were going together.

“I thought you liked
me
!” she snapped. “The real me!”