Becoming Strangers (16 page)

'It can only be an improvement,' George said in a stage whisper to the others as they followed their host down on to the beach.

'Perhaps we ought to ask him to drink nine,' said Jan and was surprised when the others laughed loudly. He adjusted his earnest expression.

When they had made a mess of the several drumsticks of chicken, forked through the white wet salads, used each other's napkins and plastic beer mugs indiscriminately, they lay on blankets and towels underneath a tree and started to talk about paradise.

'It's England for me; in the summer you can't beat it. Fresh and lovely,' George said.

'I like to have a breeze,' said Laurie, 'that is paradise for me. It's something we have to make for ourselves in Hong Kong, it's one of the reasons I like to travel.'

'Now, myself, it's good company that makes a paradise. Good chat,' said Bill.

'Didn't Sartre describe that as hell?' said Jan, and blushed as soon as he'd said it.

'Cynical bugger,' said George, shifting one leg with a moan.

'Your man didn't drink enough,' said Bill, 'for sure. I say that with conviction, given that I know absolutely nothing about the poor fellow.'

'Paradise for me is being with family,' said Dorothy, 'nothing's quite right without them.' She was happy fleetingly, as she sat up and looked across the Atlantic Ocean, but her smile went as she said, 'It wouldn't matter where I was or what I had, if I couldn't see them. I think this holiday is very nice, I can see why people take to them, and we've met such lovely people,' she paused, blowing out, her face red from the heat, 'lovely, but I miss my family, and we've been blessed that they seem to feel the same way about us, haven't we, George?'

He nodded and turned his mug upside down. 'Dry,' he said, 'dry.'

Bill leapt to his task and took the top off a fresh bottle. He held out a beer to Jan, and said, with his head moving from side to side, 'Paradise. What is paradise? Somewhere to make us feel good or to make us better people?'

There was an uncomfortable silence and Bill nudged his arm with the beer, saying, 'Here you go, man, while you're thinking it through.'

With three bottles of wine upended and a stack of empty beer bottles, the group lay back and George was nearly asleep when Bill stood up unevenly, shaking sand
about him, and rubbing his hands together proclaimed his intention to try the waters. Walking down to the seashore, he removed an article of clothing every few paces until all four of the others sat upright, one after the other,

'He's not...'

'He is...'

He wriggled out of his Y-fronts and tossed them high in the air behind him before taking to the water with a fine belly flop.

When he came up for air, further out, they applauded him. He raised his hands to acknowledge them and shouted like a boy, 'Whooh-hooh! Bloody fantastic!'

With a grin splitting his face, George stood up and unbuttoned his shirt.

'Not in front of us,' said Dorothy, 'do it like he did, down by the water. Spare us the details.'

George hopped off, grimacing at the heat of the sand on his bare feet, moving like a man half his age until with painful side-to-side movements he managed to get both his shorts and his underpants down to his ankles. His white arse with its red cleft was like the St George cross waving at them and they fell about laughing, hands over their mouths, hands over their eyes, and Bill all the while protesting.

'Not you, mate, the ladies!' And then, 'If you lot think the view back there is bad...'

George looked backwards to shout out, 'Bombs away!' and careened into the water, his great legs making much of the waves, kicking up the white of it,
crashing through the waves, breaking the barriers between him and Bill. Soon the two of them were bobbing in the water, like brothers, ear-to-ear grins, attempting to salute each other with their toes.

'How is it that the sea can do this to grown men?' said Laurie.

She saw that Dorothy was wiping her face with a napkin.

'Bloody fool of a man,' she was saying, her mouth trembling.

'Shall we join them?' said Laurie. 'I've never skinny-dipped.'

'No?' said Jan, struggling to remember an occasion on which he had.

'I'm not much of a swimmer.'

'Well, I can't swim and I'm a terrible sight,' said Dorothy, 'but if everyone will look the other way while I get in, I'll bloody well do it.'

So Jan went down to the shoreline and organized the men to look away, George protesting he had rights, and they all looked out to sea or up to the road, counting up to twenty, loudly, giving Dorothy time to take to the sea.

'All done!' she said, breathlessly, her head and shoulders wobbling above the water as she tried to steady herself on the shingle.

'Good job, duck,' said George, making his way over to her.

With the majority regarding them from the sea, Jan and Laurie looked at each other.

'I don't think we have a choice,' said Laurie.

'No.' Jan stood up and walked, fully clothed, to the seashore. To the slow hand-clapping of the others he removed his clothes and laid them neatly on the beach until he was wearing merely a pair of boxer shorts. He started to walk into the water. The others began to protest, so he returned and quickly took the shorts off, holding them in front of his genitals until he was submerged, then jettisoning them. Watching his Ralph Lauren polka-dot undershorts travel through the sky and land raggle-taggle on some driftwood, he felt a rush of joy.

'Fuck! This is good,' he said, feeling the water around his penis, and between his cheeks. Tickled, he laughed out loud.

Then Laurie came down the beach with her dress in front of her, her glasses still high on her head, her hair back and her expression stealthy. She dropped the dress and crouched down to take to the water modestly, splashing herself as she went as if to accustom herself to it.

'I've never done this before,' she said as soon as she was in. She bounced up and down on her feet, her hair jumping behind her, her hands dipping in and out of the water sprinkling it like fairy dust at her sides, her mouth open all the while.

Jan stood still, looking at the four of them, to take a photograph of what he saw with his eyes. Strangers, more or less.

'This is crazy,' said Laurie, splashing him suddenly, 'crazy. I feel so lucky! Don't you feel lucky?'

T
HERE WAS NO REASON
why she should not have a new life, why she should not have all the things she could appreciate. There were wealthy men who had ugly wives. An American man would suit her. It would be a fresh start.

She sat at the side of the yacht; chin out to the horizon, feeling the tensile strength in her collarbones and her nipples hard against the flimsy dress. She could reinvent herself. Her boys would fit into the scheme, whatever it was.

The owner of the yacht, Jason's friend, was a hardened man, firmly into his middle age, firm with his opinions. He insisted on this, insisted on that, and as he was the host, the others garrulously concurred with whatever he expressed.

The captain took them out to a place to fish and the men gathered around the toys at the rear at the boat, each pressing the other to take part, keen to see fun happen. She was not used to being relegated to a women's section and was angry that parts of this day were for men only. She was not offered beer after beer as the men were but allowed to help herself from the crate of cold sodas.

The women bored her, discussing some of the more shocking crimes of the times. At lunch they ate the fish the men had caught and the women praised the men.
Missy proclaimed Jason's the biggest and they all fell about, taking it in turns to ensure the innuendo had not gone unremarked. Annemieke felt excluded. She sat silent until the owner himself, between mouthfuls, asked her about herself. She intended to set out towards the terrain of her impending widowhood but she prevaricated, with sophisticate modesty, describing herself as nothing more than a bourgeois, but was shanghaied by Missy.

'Not at all! Annemieke is married to a hero. Her husband went out for an entire night to find an old lady, who went missing from the resort.'

With polite interest, secondary to his rapport with luncheon, the owner raised his bushy eyebrows to look in turn at Missy and Annemieke, sucking his fingertips.

'Of course, it turns out the lady has Alzheimer's/ said Jason with head-shaking disbelief. 'Her husband ought to have thought things through before they came away.'

'Can you imagine,' said Missy, her right hand raised, 'the old woman walking, all alone, in the heat, a stranger, going nowhere.

'It's sad,' she said, looking at her husband with sudden intensity, 'isn't it?'

He squinted at her but apparently saw nothing in it, for he looked distant and shook his head lightly.

'We saw an old man walking along just off the freeway outside of Charlotte once,' Beverly began, 'with a suitcase. We slowed down, Joe and I; I mean nobody walks on the freeway, do they? It was so weird. And with a suitcase. When we asked him what he was doing—'

Her husband cut in, 'He said, "Going home" so we asked him where it was and he wouldn't say a thing, just kept walking.'

'Well,' Beverley went on, opening her mouth and letting it sag, 'we just couldn't drive off, I said to Joe, what if he's just got out of a prison. If we'd seen something on TV or in the papers, afterwards, and seen his face we'd never have forgiven ourselves. You think of JonBenet Ramsay, that sort of thing, child abuse, pornography, the Internet...'

'No,' said Joe, 'we had to do something. So we called the police and we just kind of trailed him in the Jeep for a ways, until they showed. He kicked up a bit of a fuss, the old-timer, tried to fight them off.'

'You should have seen him, he was all rough shaven and his clothes were awful. Poor man, I mean he was probably just really old. Don't I always say, shoot me if I get like that...'

And I always say, I'm not going to jail for you, darling,' he put his hand on hers.

The other laughed, circulating the coleslaw and potatoes that the Captain had prepared.

'The mentally ill are a real danger...' started the owner. 'To themselves as much as anyone. I'm on the board, don't ask me how, of this institution in Maine, and you wouldn't believe what the folks there have to put up with. The truth is there just aren't enough places to lock these people up. The prisons take some, but the prisons are fit to bursting with drug users. How do we find enough places to stow all the people we cannot
include in our society? This is the conundrum. Our European friends haven't solved it, so it's down to us. It's a big question and something that costs us a great deal of money.' He swung his head from side to side, a dead weight.

That old fellow, going nowhere, I can't get it out of my head,' said Missy. 'Looking for his home ... it's symbolic,' she said, struggling now. Jason beckoned to the Captain and he refilled all of their glasses, starting with Missy's since Jason indicated he should.

'Maybe he wanted to die there,' said Beverly.

'Maybe,' said Annemieke, taking her chance to speak, 'an animal instinct. Some run away from it, of course. Like Jan.' She looked away, out to sea. There was a small silence.

'Annemieke's husband is, very, very ill,' said Missy.

'I'm sorry,' said the owner, grasping a piece of French bread and tearing it between his teeth. Annemieke looked at him. His skin was tanned, his hair short and well managed, his frame, naked from the waist up, was like a handsome property, but his eyes were dull.

She got up to tidy the plates away and was held away by the Captain, who came leaping up from the rear of the boat.

'My job,' he said and so she sat back down, alone with her thoughts; as the others drifted away to their various discussions, Annemieke drifted to memories of her boys as children.

She could recall reading stories to them, a boy either side, soft nubuck-like skin on hers, their lips against her
cheek, either side, as she read, the mother's voice ripening in her chest. She thought how every year brought three or four favourite stories that she would be required to read constantly, she could remember them in succession: the Gingerbread Man, the Frog Prince, Rumpelstiltskin. She recalled the Kings final demand, 'You spin this straw into gold by the morning and tomorrow you shall be my bride.' 'He was a greedy man,' Marcus would say each time and she would nod. She had joined them there in those certainties, then.

'Would you like to go for a swim?' said the Captain, putting his head up from below, standing on the stairs. 'We're going to be in a good clear place for swimming, just off a bay. In five minutes.' It was about three in the afternoon.

'When will we get back?'

About five.'

Going on to the roof of the yacht, she saw the Americans stretched out, sunbathing. The owner was sitting next to Missy rubbing oil on to her back.

W
HENEVER
J
AN THOUGHT OF THE
C
ARIBBEAN
, he thought of the rich and sticky aquamarine of sea and sky. In Belize he'd lain watching formations of clouds that seemed impossible, maps of countries, giant marlin fish suspended, rapiers on their snouts, clues and signs amidst the ruffles of God's bed skirt. He did not seek
answers in the Belgian sky which was a mute grey from day to day. But in the Caribbean where the sea and sky divide the world between them, the land is just a gesture on the part of the sea. The lesson for the day is written up above, for you to follow.

Jan lay on the sand, still naked, with his shorts draped over his privates, one eye open squinting at the sky.

When he sat up he saw Laurie emerge from the water, a steady-footed, dripping diva, making straight for him. His stomach turned with apprehension. She sat down beside him, squeezing the water from her hair behind her head, and he saw out of the corner of his eyes her breasts, soft and damp. He was afraid for himself and he cleared his throat several times.

'This is paradise! Here and now!' shouted Bill from the water, leaping like Neptune.

'He is very true,' said Laurie, and Jan frowned momentarily at the peculiarity of her Hong Kong English expression. 'I think there is no heaven, I think it is our job to make one on earth, while we are alive.'