In Too Deep (14 page)

Once he stopped fighting the notion of boredom, Doug realised that it was in fact quite pleasant to be lying on this beach. The sand warmed him even through the tartan blanket he had spread, and when he closed his eyes against the glare of the afternoon the gush of the surf really was soothing to his mind. He lay there and felt the sun rash the bare flesh of his face, shins and forearms, and counted the minutes that it took for his body to relax from their usual tensions. An hour later he was startled awake by the scattershot of shrieks and wild giggling.

The sun had slipped behind a flash of mud-coloured cloud in a way that somehow bleached the sky. With effort, he propped himself up on his elbows, and glanced around. Christ, the sand looked soft, but wasn't. The muscles of his back cried out with every small movement. Twenty-three years old and here he was, knotted up like an old man.

Fifty feet away, a group of girls were trying to play volleyball without a net. There were other people around too, families and loners spread-eagled on the sand or wading waist-deep in the water, but none were as compelling to the eye as those girls. Six of them, all in their late teens or early twenties, tossing a mid-sized ball back and forth amongst themselves. Their noise continued, as determined as the rush of the waves, a nearly constant warble of laughter punctuated by loud, high-pitched whoops whenever one of their number went full stretch to make or miss a point.

Feeling new to the day, he lay there, propped up on his elbows, and enjoyed their movement and their partial nakedness, but in much the same way that he might have enjoyed studying a particular flower, or a painting in an art gallery. Their bikinis were old fashioned two-piece types that nicely showed off their shapes but which were not so brief as to be in any way really improper, and their incessant noise seemed to enhance their innocence. If they were on a cusp then they had yet to risk crossing over, and, for that reason, it felt okay to watch.

A breeze was blowing, slight but rather sweet. Earlier in the week it had been too hot to sit on the beach. He'd spent the first two days here trying to get drunk, but no matter how many cold beers he put away he couldn't seem to break through that final barrier. And his mother didn't approve of anything stronger. She didn't much approve of beer either, but he could see that she was making a special effort to keep quiet. Since he'd been discharged from the hospital she'd been smiling up a storm, to the point where the strain was beginning to take its toll. The beach had been her idea, hoping that it would do them both some good just to get away, to recharge the batteries and maybe come to terms with things. When he told her that his batteries were dead, not just worn down, she had cried, the very worst sort of tears, sad and silent. He'd watched, not saying a word, but when he felt the first stirring of pleasure in his chest he held up his hand and surrendered, pretending that he was sorry and that it was a good idea, really it was. He felt like a bastard for thinking some of the things that he'd been thinking; none of what had happened was her fault.

When the sun burned through the cloud the girls threw down their ball and went splashing out into the sea. They moved in a pack, all fresh limbs and brilliant smiles. They screamed at the chill of the water, took turns in plunging under and leaping on one another. Doug watched them and thought about a prostitute he had spent pocket-money on in Saigon. She'd been nothing at all like these girls, and he'd have bet his legs that she had never in her life been able to laugh with as much freedom and lack of inhibition. After twenty minutes or so they waded back out of the tide, exhausted by their fun and games, and staggered arm in arm up the beach almost directly in front of him. He watched them openly, studying in the same detached way as before how their skin glistened in the sunshine. One of them noticed him watching and waved, a brazen gesture that made the others bleat fresh new gales of laughter again, but he nodded his head and tried to smile.

‘Enjoying the weather?' the brazen one asked, as the pack skirted to within a few feet of where he lay.

He cleared his throat. ‘A bit hot for me, but at least I'm enjoying the view.' Even a year before, he'd have been too shy even to look, but war had changed a lot of things.

‘You a soldier?' one of the others asked. She was probably the pick of this bunch, with a slim face, polished tan and jet black shoulder-length hair that had been washed straight by the sea. She was feeding on the courage of her friend, but her large dark eyes gave away a delicious anxiety.

‘Was,' he said, looking straight at her. ‘Not any more.'

‘Were you in the war?' Now another of the girls wanted in, but he kept his eyes fixed on the dark-haired beauty. She shifted under his gaze and, clearly uncomfortable, tried to slip back into the safety of her crowd.

‘Yeah. I was up to my neck in it,' he said, hoping that they'd take that as a joke. They tried, but their laughter was limited to a few charitably nervous hiccups. They had come within a few feet now and could easily have passed on their way, maybe diffused the situation with another little wave or something, an easygoing so long, but one of them lingered, raising her left foot to brush sand from her toes, and perhaps it was the mention of the war that had awakened some sense of obligation. Or maybe they were merely curious.

He continued to study them openly; they had neat bodies, trim and shapely, but not movie star bodies or anything, nothing that would get them on TV. They were girls, seventeen or eighteen and predictably pretty because of that, pleasing to the eye. Sometimes, reality really did leave a lot to the imagination. They stood a couple of paces away, and he could see a slew of questions in their eyes, questions they were clearly afraid to ask. He considered them one by one, so slowly that it began to seem wrong somehow, before deciding that he'd been correct in his first choice all along, that the dark-haired girl really was the pick of the bunch.

‘Well,' he said, when a cold smile began to crimp one corner of his mouth. ‘So long, ladies. Don't let me keep you from your game.
'
Then he lay back on the blanket and closed his eyes. It was a moment before the sun fell across him once again, and another longer moment before he heard them a distance of forty or fifty feet off to his left, gathering up the ball and tossing it about once more. He waited for the sound of their laughter to settle into the afternoon, that tinny, clashing racket that would help to lighten the humid air, but their few efforts at mirth fell flat around him, like out-of-tune music. Not long after that, he was asleep once more.

He saw the dark-haired girl again at dinner. She was dressed in a pale blue cotton dress that did far more for her shape than the bikini had, and she wore her hair pulled back into a casual ponytail that really enhanced her face. A breeze from the nearby veranda caused the table's candle-
light to flicker, and that soft, dancing glow seemed to outline and emphasise the precision of her bone structure. When she saw him watching her she looked away quickly and began to fondle the lobe of one ear, but when she risked a second look, a minute or so later, he was still watching, and she offered a small, embarrassed smile before looking away again.

She was sitting with her family, her parents and a pinch-faced young boy of about ten or twelve who had to be her brother. The man to her left was bald and quite a distance overweight, and the woman across the table was small and dowdy-looking. They could have been a party of random strangers for all the likeness that they shared, but Doug understood that time was skilled in pulling at and reshaping surfaces.

The food was good, though a little too precise for his tastes. Poached flounder, asparagus, potato au gratin, some sort of rich white wine sauce. Perched at the bar with a hotdog and a cold beer would have done him just fine, but his mother had been at him since they'd arrived for an opportunity to dress up and today he was just too sick and tired of everything to bother even trying to put together another excuse. This was her vacation too, after all.

‘Mabel said that just as soon as things pick up for Denny he'll get you sorted with some work,' she was saying now. The silver cutlery was tarnished from wear, but she held them in such an exact way that they might have been surgical equipment, scalpels and suture clamps, knife in her right hand, fork in her left, as if she were English or something. She'd painted her nails too, probably had used the chore to pass away the entire afternoon. The shade didn't suit her bony hands at all, the red so deep in this poor light that it might have been the maroon shade of freshly spilled blood.

‘Should be set by the end of August. Mid-September at the latest, she said.'

If she noticed how his stare had locked itself away from her then she made nothing of it. He knew that she was afraid of some of the things in his mind.

Across the room, his dark-haired girl was fumbling at her ear again. A tiny pearl hung like a fast-thawing snowdrop from the underside of her lobe and glinted in the candlelight. Her profile might have been carved out of stone.

‘What sort of work?'

His voice was vague, empty.
The words filled gaps, nothing more.

‘Oh, something in the shop, I expect. Does it matter?'

He watched his mother raise a sliver of asparagus and give it a second's consideration before eating.

‘August, you say?'

‘Well, August or September. Everyone's looking forward to having you home, you know, Doug.'

He nodded. The girl was trying to eat spaghetti. The breeze from the veranda must have stiffened with the fall of darkness, because now and again her hair fluttered, loose little strands of it corkscrewing up and outward before settling back down, less precisely, into place. But she hardly noticed, or maybe even enjoyed it.

‘Yeah,' he said, softly, around a mouthful of fish. ‘I'll bet they're counting the minutes.'

There was a moment then when he was certain that his mother was going to cry. She did that often, these days; the wrong word could send her down for an hour at a time. She never argued or screamed or shouted, or tried in any way to defend herself or to deflect the blows that the words delivered; she just bowed her head and gave way to silent, wretched sobs. He watched her face stiffen, thinking that she looked terribly old for forty-seven, as if her blanched flesh had set too tightly across her bones. She dressed these days in an eccentric, lost-generation style, and though she still dyed her hair, she never quite seemed to carry the effort all the way down to the roots. He watched her, waiting for the quiver of her mouth that would signal the breakaway of tears, but it was possible that she had already cried herself out for the day.

‘Mabel's your sister,' was all she said, her voice a dry wisp, not quite a cough, but nearly. ‘You know how much she loves you, Doug.'

He thought about asking just how much Denny loved him, Denny, his sister's husband, who flew a flag on his porch and boasted an Uncle Sam decal in the back windshield of his Camaro, but who escaped the draft by sticking a sharpened pencil an inch and a half into his left ear. Denny, a guy who had drunk away every weekend since he was probably sixteen years old and who liked to keep his wife in place with a twice-a-month shot to the kidneys, and maybe a kick or two if someone had made fun of him or dared to question one of his tall tales down at Kelsey's bar. But there was nothing to be gained with a question like that.

‘Yeah, well, I'm not so sure that shop work will suit me all that much,
'
he said, as much to himself as to his mother. ‘I've been thinking about taking a trip.'

‘You mean like a vacation?' His mother pushed her plate away, just a few inches, but the intention at abandonment was clear.

‘Like one,
'
he answered, letting his stare range out over the room again, out to where his dark-haired girl sat wrestling with her spaghetti. ‘But not one.'

‘I don't understand.'

He shrugged. ‘I don't much either, to tell you the truth, Ma. But I do know that I don't want to spend the rest of my days sitting in a shop while Denny spins his ropes of bullshit.'

There was more to be said, on both sides, but he couldn't find an order for the words just now and, clearly, neither could his mother. He watched the girl across the room and listened to the incessant pulling and unfurling of his mother's whispered breath beside him. When a waiter drifted within hailing distance he made a gesture and ordered Scotch on the rocks, twice. His mother set down her cutlery with more noise than they should have made, but she offered nothing in the way of objection.

They worked at the whiskey in long steady sips, and the only noise worth noting was the cracking of the ice cubes in the alcohol and an occasional clicking as they bounced against the walls of the glass. When he was most of the way through his drink, Doug raised a hand and signalled the waiter to bring them two more.

‘Do you know that girl?'

He turned, trying not to be abrupt, but the set of his face defied him and he didn't quite trust himself to speak. His mother met his eyes without flinching, only her slatted lips working with the taste of the Scotch.

‘You've been watching her all night.'

‘She was at the beach today. With her friends. We exchanged a few words, that's all.' He turned back to study her again. The family had finished with their main courses and were studying the dessert menu now. Apart from the girl, they looked like people who didn't spend a lot of time worrying about diet.

‘Don't do this to yourself, Doug.'

‘Do what?'

‘You know what.'

He smiled, a little twisting of the mouth that jarred the lips apart to reveal tightly clenched teeth. ‘I know,' he said, ‘but I want to hear you say it.'