A Stone's Throw (16 page)

‘Telltales?’

‘The bits of fabric tied on to the mast. When we’re going bang on, when it’s singing, they’ll all be streaming out behind us – aft that is.’

‘And when we get to the beach, then do you stop being so serious?’

Will grinned.

‘You just wait,’ he said. ‘Ready?’

The wind was gusty and unreliable at first and Will had to work the boat hard, beating a slow course upwind towards the mouth of the estuary. There were few other boats moving at this early hour. A bass boat piled high with crab pots chugged its way towards the sea and a boy put a dinghy through its paces, tacking tight, to and fro, between the moored yachts. In another hour the yacht club holiday schedule would be underway and the estuary would be tight with little boats, but for now the two boys had it nearly to themselves.

‘You’re doing fine,’ Will called to Benjamin. ‘Watch the boom when we go round. Don’t know what the wind will do then.’

But when they came round the point, and out into the open water, the wind steadied into that best of all sailor’s winds in those parts, a benign south-westerly, and setting the sails to a broad reach, Will gave himself up to it. He loved this. He loved the speed across the water, driving the tears from his eyes and he loved the fine-tune reading of wind and waves, always trying for the perfect reach. He knew this boat like the
back of his hand and his body was sure and strong now, bracing and balancing, finding the equlibirium, the perfect balance. He could sail like this all day and be happy.

‘Lean back a bit further,’ he called down to Benjamin. ‘Trust yourself,’ and Benjamin, pulling the sailing cap firmly down on his head, holding fast to the jib sheet line, and with his feet securely hooked, leaned his body back and out over the rushing water.

‘If my mother could see me …’ Benjamin yelled and they laughed, the two boys, with the sheer pleasure of it.

Will had planned to drop the mackerel lines when they were close enough to Brigstone Rock to see the hermit’s hut. He’d always done well for mackerel there and Benjamin would like the story of the hermit. He’d let the sails go and they would row for a stretch and see what they could pull in. They were half way there when Benjamin’s shout changed the plan.

‘Look! Look at the birds!’

Will turned. A crowd of seabirds rushed the churning water, dropping and diving any which way, the seagulls an ungainly mass of wing and beak, the terns impeccable, and a patch of the sea gone to a darker, fretty blue.

‘Mackerel!’ Will shouted back. ‘I’m stopping here.’

Heading the boat into the wind, he let out the sails and they luffed, as ragged and ungainly as the dropping gulls.

‘You row and I’ll set the lines,’ he said.

But there was barely any need to row because the shoal came to them and within minutes, as fast as they could pull in
the lines and unhook them the bottom of the boat was covered with bucking, shivering mackerel, eyes wide, mouths hollering silently. The boys fought off the gulls with oars, protecting their haul, greedy with excess. Then the shoal moved on, and the birds with it, and the boys sat still amid the dying fish.

‘How long before they die?’ Benjamin said.

‘If you leave them, can be a half hour, longer sometimes.’

‘They drown more slowly than us, then. What about hitting them on the head with something?’

‘Hard to kill like that,’ Will said. He picked one up. ‘A good size. Close on a pound’s weight, I’d say. Mother will be pleased. She loves mackerel.’

Slipping a finger into the fish’s mouth, and with his thumb behind its head, he pulled the head back towards the body.

‘Breaks their neck,’ he said. ‘Very quick. Best way to do it.’

So Will killed the fish and Benjamin counted them into a bucket and they stowed the oars, set the sails once again and sailed on.

As they drew closer to Shining Sands, Will’s pulse quickened. You couldn’t see the beach from the sea and every time he sailed there, it felt like an act of faith. Each time he left the beach he would pick out landmarks and try to stow them away in his mind for the next time: a particular bowed hawthorn on the cliff; the fall of the rocks to the water. Perhaps it was because he sailed out to the Sands too rarely, or perhaps it was some more mysterious refusal in the landscape itself, something self-protective to keep people out, but every time
he returned, he felt as if he were sailing blind, no landmarks, no sign of where the Sands could be, till finally, like an ancient Greek adventurer, he must take his best guess, and turn his boat and head towards the solid rock.

‘We’ll row from here,’ he said, letting the sails flap. ‘It’s always hard to find.’

‘There’s no beach,’ Benjamin said.

‘You can’t see it because there’s a shoal of rocks out from the shore. They look like they’re part of the cliffs till you get close. A kind of optical illusion.’

Will dipped the oars: small strokes, easing closer.

‘Keep your eyes skinned,’ he said.

He rowed, hearing the slap of the waves beneath the boat and the high ‘pheew’ of a buzzard above the cliff. Then a triumphal cry.

‘I’ve spotted it. There’s a gap. Left a bit, Will, pull left.’

Gently Will rowed and the rocks opened to a channel not much wider than his oars’ width. The water turned aquamarine, with sand below, and sometimes rock, and as they drew closer to the shore, the wind dropped. He rowed the boat between rock and rock and they were in.

Will gave a last, full pull, shipped the oars and the boat drifted to the shore.

‘Damn, Will,’ Benjamin said in a low voice. ‘You didn’t tell me.’

Will grinned.

‘Good, eh,’ he said.

Sheer cliffs rose behind, their blue-grey slate streaked with
guano, and later Will would point out to Benjamin the nesting birds up there. Fine, silver shingle pitched steeply to the water, which was limpid and smooth as a lagoon. Leaping down into the shallows, Will pulled the boat up, her bow easing in with the softest sound.

‘Tide’s two hours past its highest now,’ he said. ‘We just made it in. We’ll be stranded in no time. There’s rocks below the water just where we came through, you’ll see them then. You can’t take a boat over them for long, but you get longer with a neap tide. That’s why today is the perfect day for it.’

He watched Benjamin jump onto the beach and sink his hands into the sand, then lift them and let it run through his fingers. He watched him stride in great long strides, sinking with each step below the ankle so that he seemed to make a strange, slow-motion kind of progress; he watched him stride, and turn, and let out a whoop, and then another, and saw the gulls rise, startled, from their cliff. They had the whole day ahead of them, a whole day to whoop and cry, to swim, or sleep, or dream.

Will put the beer deep in a rock pool at one end of the beach. The bottles slid down the rock and sank amongst the gentle anemones. The bucket of mackerel he dug deep into the sand, covering their broken heads with an oilskin against quizzing flies, securing this with four large stones. He looked back across the beach. Benjamin stood on the groundsheet, undressing. He had spread the square of old green tarpaulin high up near the cliff and away from the water, behind the tide line, where the shingle was dry. His swimming trunks and
book lay before him like sacred objects. His trousers already removed, he had his fingers round the elastic of his underpants. Will gave a low wolf whistle and Benjamin started like someone caught in some act, his hands flying to his crotch. Then he laughed, catching sight of Will in the shade, and tossed his head and pulled off his underpants in a single flourish.

The sun was high and warm, the sky clear blue. The boys laid their trousers, soaked with spray from the sailing, out to dry, then gathered driftwood. It was caught, as Will had said it would be, between the rocks that jutted down towards the water at the far end of the beach, together with all the flotsam that the sea so loves: brittle seaweed, dead birds, crab shells, cuttlefish bones, a broken buoy. Will clambered up the first reaches of the cliff and tugged out handfuls of dry grass for tinder. Then they piled the wood in the middle of the beach, tucking the grass beneath to keep it secure. Their arms and chests were scratched with their efforts; like initiation marks, Will thought, in a sacred place.

‘Nothing more to do now,’ he said, and somehow the saying of that made both boys abashed and they stood uncertain, looking at the water.

‘Hey, look!’ Will said, and he pointed to the middle distance.

Benjamin stared. ‘Can’t see …’ he began, and Will threw himself and tackled Benjamin down, arms around his legs, and they rolled and struggled, pushing for purchase against the sand’s shift, digging in with toes and elbows. Although Will was the slighter of the two, he had the first advantage and
straddling his friend, he pinned Benjamin’s arms and gripped his hips with his thighs, like a cowboy with a bucking steed.

‘Solid enough, am I?’ he said, wild-eyed with effort, laughing, and that set Benjamin off so he couldn’t speak and tears of laughter ran down to his ears.

‘Your mother didn’t know you played rugby,’ he said at last. ‘She did look surprised.’

‘You were sailing damn close to the wind,’ Will said.

‘But she thinks I’m a lovely boy,’ Benjamin said.

‘And so you are. Lovely and covered with sand.’ Will let go of Benjamin’s arms. ‘But too gritty for any rugby playing just now.’

The sea was cold and they swam vigorously, their breath coming in short punches till their bodies grew used to it. Will lay back and floated, feeling the warmth above and the cold below, his body in two halves. He shut his eyes and listened to the hiss and chunter of the sea, the soft, grainy turn and turn about of the waves’ break, and when he opened them, the world had gone to white and yellow till he gathered in his sight again. Benjamin was out already, sitting high up on the beach on the groundsheet, a towel around his waist, nose in his book.

‘Hey,’ Will called, but Benjamin didn’t hear.

Will swam back to the shore with long, easy strokes, feeling the gentle pull of the tide against him, and stood in the shallows, looking out. He could see the shadow of the hidden rocks, the sea puckering now above them. Any minute and they would break the surface. Will raised his arm high as if a victory had
been won. They were marooned, till the water rose again.

When he turned back to the beach, Benjamin was standing up and facing him. He wasn’t reading any more. Will’s breath quickened. With only the cap on his curly hair, Benjamin stood naked, arms by his sides, his prick high and full. He made no move, no gesture, he just stood.

Will wanted to run at him and seize him, take him in, possess him. But instead he met him in kind and walked slowly back up the beach, still wet from the sea, his skin still cold. Ten yards off he stopped and carefully he pulled off his own trunks, easing them down till they dropped to the sand. Then he turned, naked before the cliffs and rocks, before the beach and the sea and the endless tide. He felt the wind brush his cock, and at last, unable to hold himself back any longer, he went to his lover.

Gently, Benjamin lay him down and with a towel he rubbed Will’s body dry. Only Will’s cock he did not touch, though it rose so hard to meet him. Then he knelt, his own erection captured between his thighs, and kissed him. Softly he kissed at first, his mouth on Will’s, licking the brine from his lip, then more fiercely, his tongue insistent, his teeth catching at him, wanting, hungry. He kissed Will’s neck and shoulders, his ears; he kissed his small, hard nipples and bit at his hips, his thighs, and the wind blew his hair against Will’s cock and Will groaned with desire.

‘Fuck me,’ Benjamin said, and he took Will’s hands and pulled him up so that they knelt on the groundsheet, facing. Bending forward, Benjamin kissed Will on his cock’s tight tip.

‘Fuck me,’ he said again and he smiled a knowing smile and reached over for a rucksack and pulled a jar of Vaseline from a side pocket.

‘You’re a thoughtful bugger,’ Will said, grinning.

‘Now fuck me like a dog,’ Benjamin said, and Will turned him round and pushed him down. He slicked him with Vaseline, pressing, prying, so that he made his lover groan. Kneeling behind, he entered him, slowly, slowly, each thrust a little deeper, till he was in right to the hilt, possessing him.

‘Feel me now,’ he said, and Benjamin put his hand back to feel them joined.

Then he took hold of Benjamin’s hips, pulling him close, holding him there till he came; and he yelled out, as if with one fuck there on that beach, he could make up for all the silence. And Benjamin cried out too, and they lay close for a time before making love again.

They had known of one another for four years, ever since their first arrival at the school. But for the first three and a half, placed in different forms, dormitories, sets, their paths had rarely crossed, and each was little more than a surname to the other. Will knew Benjamin as a Jew and a Londoner, attributes that could lend both suspicion and fascination to a boy in that school. Circumcisions were two a penny (there had been a vogue for them when Will was born, though Meg had resisted) but Benjamin’s yarmulke – he still wore it when he first arrived – was the first Will had ever seen. As for London, Will had never visited, only listened with reluctant awe when
other boys spoke of the Tube and the West End and Soho.

Still, in the last year he had become less impressed by such things than before on account of discovering the wonders of sex. Not the dark dormitory fumblings of his first years there, disavowed in the chilly light of the boarding school day, but something altogether more fun. Cross-country running; excursions into the woods to gather insects for Mr Blackman, the biology master; the long, independent study hours awarded to the senior boys; even cricket, once: all seemed organised to provide Will and his friends with time and space in which to discover the pleasures and excitements that their bodies afforded. But busy as he was with others, until that one November night, Will’s glance had never stopped on Benjamin.

As for Benjamin, equally he had never given a second thought to Will; nor had he ever fumbled through his adolescence, except with himself, pinning up pictures of Audrey Hepburn and Doris Day in his mind, though it was true that they tended to meld into figures altogether more androgynous as he rose to the sticking point. But he never gave this too much thought afterwards.