No Sharks in the Med and Other Stories (32 page)

My jaw fell open. Why was she talking to me like this? She knew I liked—more than liked—the real Moira. She
was
the real Moira! It was a tiff, brought on by excitement, fear, frustration; we’d never before had to deal with anything like this, and we didn’t know how. My emotions were heightened by hers, and now my pride took over. I thrust my jaw out, turned on my heel, and strode rapidly away from her.

“If that’s what you think of me,” I called back, “—if that’s as
much
as you think of me—then maybe this is for the best…”

“Josh?” I heard her small voice behind me. But I didn’t answer, didn’t look back.

Furious, I hurried, almost trotted back the way we’d come: along the cliff path, scrambling steeply down through the grass-rimmed, crumbling sand pits to the dene. But at the bottom I deliberately turned left and headed for the beach. Dirty? Oh the beach would be dirty—sufficiently dirty so that she surely wouldn’t follow me. I didn’t want her to. I wanted nothing of her.
Oh, I did, I did!
—but I wouldn’t admit it, not even to myself, not then. But if she did try to follow me, it would mean…it would mean…

Moira, Moira! Did I love her? Possibly, but I couldn’t handle the emotion. So many emotions; and inside I was still on fire from what had nearly been, still aching from the retention of fluids my young body had so desired to be rid of. Raymond? Raymond Maddison? By
God
, but I’d bloody
him
! I’d let some of
his
damned fluids out!

“Josh!” I seemed to hear Moira’s voice from a long way back, but I could have been mistaken. In any case it didn’t slow me down. Time and space flashed by in a blur; I was down onto the beach; I walked south under the cliffs on sand that was still sand, however blackened; I trekked grimy sand dunes up and down, kicking at withered tufts of crabgrass that reminded me of the grey and yellow hairs sprouting from the blemishes of old men. Until finally I had burned something of the anger and frustration out of myself.

Then I turned toward the sea, cut a path between the sickly dunes down to the no-man’s-land of black slag and stinking slurry, and found a place to sit on a rock etched by chemical reaction into an anomalous hump. It was one of a line of rocks I remembered from my childhood, reaching out half a mile to the sea, from which the men had crabbed and cast their lines. But none of that now. Beyond where I sat, only the tips of the lifeless, once limpet- and mussel-festooned rocks stuck up above the slurry; a leaning, blackened signpost warned:

DANGER! QUICKSAND!

DO NOT PROCEED

BEYOND THIS POINT.

Quicksand? Quag, certainly, but not sand…

I don’t know how long I sat there. The sea was advancing and grey gulls wheeled on high, crying on a rising breeze that blew their plaintive voices inland. Scummy waves broke in feathers of grey froth less than one hundred yards down the beach. Down what had been a beach before the invasion of the pit-yakkers. It was summer but down here there were no seasons. Steam curled up from the slag and misted a pitted, alien landscape.

I became lulled by the sound of the birds, the hissing throb of foamy waters, and, strangely, from some little distance away, the periodic clatter of an aerial dumper tilting its buckets and hurling more mineral debris down from on high, creating a mound that the advancing ocean would spread out in a new layer to coat and further contaminate the beach.

I sat there glumly, with my chin like lead in my hands and all of these sounds dull on the periphery of my consciousness, and thought nothing in particular and certainly nothing of any importance. From time to time a gull’s cry would sound like Moira’s voice, but too shrill, high, frightened, or desperate. She wasn’t coming, wouldn’t come, and I had lost her. We had lost each other.

I became aware of time trickling by, but again I state: I don’t know how long I sat there. An hour? Maybe.

Then something broke through to me. Something other than the voices of the gulls, the waves, the near-distant rain of stony rubble. A new sound? A presence? I looked up, turned my head to scan north along the dead and rotting beach. And I saw him—though as yet he had not seen me.

My eyes narrowed and I felt my brows come together in a frown. Raymond Maddison. The pit-yakker himself. And this was probably as good a place as any, maybe better than most, to teach him a well-deserved lesson. I stood up, and keeping as low a profile as possible made my way round the back of the tarry dunes to where he was standing. In less than two minutes I was there, behind him, creeping up on him where he stood windblown and almost forlorn seeming, staring out to sea. And there I paused.

It seemed his large, rounded shoulders were heaving. Was he crying? Catching his breath? Gulping at the warm, reeking air? Had he been running? Searching for me? Following me as earlier he’d followed us? My feelings hardened against him. It was because he wasn’t entirely all there that people tolerated him. But I more than suspected he
was
all there. Not really a dummy, more a scummy.

And I had him trapped. In front of him the rocks receding into pits of black filth, where a second warning notice leaned like a scarecrow on a battlefield, and behind him…only myself behind him. Me and my tightly clenched fists.

Then, as I watched, he took something out of his pocket. His new knife, as I saw now. He stared down at it for a moment, then drew back his arm as if to hurl it away from him, out into the black wilderness of quag. But he froze like that, with the knife still in his hand, and I saw that his shoulders had stopped shuddering. He became alert; I guessed that he’d sensed I was there, watching him.

He turned his head and saw me, and his eyes opened wide in a pale, slack face. I’d never seen him so pale. Then he fell to one knee, dipped his knife into the slurry at his feet, commenced wiping at it with a rag of a handkerchief. Caught unawares he was childlike, tending to do meaningless things.

“Raymond,” I said, my voice grimmer than I’d intended. “Raymond, I want a word with you!” And he looked for somewhere to run as I advanced on him. But there was nowhere.

“I didn’t—” he suddenly blurted. “I didn’t—”

“But you did!” I was only a few paces away.

“I…I…”

“You followed us, peeped on us, messed it all up.”

And again he seemed to freeze, while his brain turned over what I’d said to him. Lines creased his brow, vanishing as quickly as they’d come. “What?”

“
What?!
” I shouted, stepping closer still. “You bloody well
know
what! No Moira and me, we’re finished. And it’s your fault.”

He backed off into the black mire, which at once covered his boots and the cuffs of his too-short trousers. And there he stood, lifting and lowering his feet, which went
glop, glop
with each up-and-down movement. He reminded me of nothing so much as a fly caught on the sticky paper they used at that time. And his mouth kept opening and closing, stupidly, because he had nothing to say and nowhere to run, and he knew I was angry.

Finally he said: “I didn’t mean to…follow you. But I—” And he reached into a pocket and brought out a packet of cigarettes. “Your cigarettes.”

I had known that would be his excuse. “Throw them to me, Ray,” I said. For I wasn’t about to go stepping in there after him. He tossed me the packet but stayed right where he was. “You may as well come on out,” I told him, lighting up, “for you know I’m going to settle with you.”

“Josh,” he said, still mouthing like a fish. “Josh…”

“Yes, Josh, Josh,” I told him, nodding. “But you’ve really done it this time, and we have to have it out.”

He still had his knife. He showed it to me, opened the main blade. He took a pace forward out of the slurry and I took a pace back. There was a sick grin on his face. Except…he wasn’t threatening me. “For you,” he said, snapping the blade shut. “I don’t…I don’t want it no more.” He stepped from the quag onto a flat rock and stood there facing me, not quite within arm’s reach. He tossed the knife and I automatically caught it. It weighed heavy in my hand where I clenched my knuckles round it.

“A bribe?” I said. “So that I won’t tell what you did? How many friends do you have, Ray? And how many left if I tell what a dirty, sneaky, spying—”

But he was still grinning his sick, nervous grin. “You won’t tell.” He shook his head. “Not what I seen.”

I made a lunging grab for him and the grin slipped from his face. He hopped to a second rock farther out in the liquid slag, teetered there for a moment before finding his balance. And he looked anxiously all about for more stepping-stones, in case I should follow. There were two or three more rocks, all of them deeper into the coal-dust quicksand, but beyond them only a bubbly, oozy black surface streaked with oil and yellow mineral swirls.

Raymond’s predicament was a bad one. Not because of me. I would only hit him. Once or twice, depending how long it took to bloody him. But this stuff would murder him. If he fell in. And the black slime was dripping from the bottoms of his trousers, making the surface of his rock slippery. Raymond’s balance wasn’t much, neither mentally nor physically. He began to slither this way and that, windmilled his arms in an effort to stay put.

“Ray!” I was alarmed. “Come out of there!”

He leapt, desperately, tried to find purchase on the next rock, slipped! His feet shot up in the air and he came down on his back in the quag. The stuff quivered like thick black porridge and put out slow-motion ripples. He flailed his arms, yelping like a dog, as the lower part of his body started to sink. His trousers ballooned with the air in them, but the stuff’s suck was strong. Raymond was going down.

Before I could even start to think straight he was in chest deep, the filth inching higher every second. But he’d stopped yelping and had started thinking. Thinking desperate thoughts. “Josh…Josh!” he gasped.

I stepped forward ankle deep, got up onto the first rock. I made to jump to the second rock but he stopped me. “No, Josh,” he whispered. “Or we’ll both go.”

“You’re sinking,” I said, for once as stupid as him.

“Listen,” he answered with a gasp. “Up between the dunes, some cable, half-buried. I saw it on my way down here. Tough, ’lectric wire, in the muck. You can pull me out with that.”

I remembered. I had seen it, too. Several lengths of discarded cable, buried in the scummy dunes. All my limbs were trembling as I got back to solid ground, setting out up the beach between the dunes. “Josh!” his voice reached out harshly after me. “
Hurry!
” And a moment later: “The first bit of wire you see, that’ll do it…”

I hurried, ran, raced. But my heart was pounding, the air rasping like sandpaper in my lungs. Fear. But…I couldn’t find the cable. Then—

There was a tall dune, a great heap of black-streaked, slag-crusted sand. A lookout place! I went up it, my feet breaking through the crust, letting rivulets of sand cascade, thrusting myself to the top. Now I could get directions, scan the area all about. Over there, between low humps of diseased sand, I could see what might be a cable: a thin, frozen black snake of the stuff.

But beyond the cable I could see something else: colors, anomalous, strewn in a clump of dead crabgrass.

I tumbled down the side of the great dune, ran for the cable, tore a length free of the sand and muck. I had maybe fifteen, twenty feet of the stuff. Coiling it, I looked back. Raymond was there in the quag, going down black and sticky. But in the other direction—just over there, no more than a dozen loping paces away, hidden in the crabgrass and low humps of sand—something blue and white and…and red.

Something about it made my skin prickle. Quickly, I went to see. And I saw…

After a while I heard Raymond’s voice over the crying of the gulls. “Josh!
Josh!
”

I walked back, the cable looped in my lifeless hands, made my way to where he hung crucified in the quag; his arms formed the cross, palms pressing down on the belching surface, his head thrown back and the slop ringing his throat. And I stood looking at him. He saw me, saw the cable in my limp hands, looked into my eyes. And he knew. He knew I wasn’t going to let him have the cable.

Instead I gave him back his terrible knife with all its terrible attachments—which he’d been waiting to use, and which I’d seen no use for—tossing it so that it landed in front of him and splashed a blob of slime into his right eye.

He pleaded with me for a little while then, but there was no excuse. I sat and smoked, without even remembering lighting my fresh cigarette, until he began to gurgle. The black filth flooded his mouth, nostrils, the circles of his eyes. He went down, his sputtering mouth forming a ring in the muck that slowly filled in when he was gone. Big shiny bubbles came bursting to the surface…

When my cigarette went out I began to cry, and crying staggered back up to the beach between the dunes. To Moira.

Moira. Something I’d had—almost—that he didn’t have. That he could never have, except like this. Jealousy, or just sheer evil? And was I any better than him, now? I didn’t know then, and I don’t know to this day. He was just a pit-yakker, born for the pit. Him and me both, I suppose, but I had been lucky enough to escape it.