The Love Beach (19 page)

'Lishen,' said Conway, waggling his finger at her. 'Aussic ain't any secondhand shop. Unnerstand.'

Mrs Flagg hooted. 'Hooo! Hooooo!' she bellowed. 'I thought that would get in! You're all so very, very, very touchy about it. Poor old Aussie, and poor old Aussies! Who will buy? Come on, buy a lump of our sunshine! Heee! Heec! Come and buy ‑ it's remnant week!'

Conway bravely assayed a leap to his feet at the affront, but his knees went and he fell forward heavily across Mrs

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Flagg's upland chest. It was good there, he thought., like falling into a warm snowdrift. He moved his face a few degrees. He thought he felt her stiffen in her stomach and she had stopped laughing or saying anything. Eventually, carefully measuring his words so that they came out in the intended order, Conway said: 'I'd like to know how they get those banana things on.'

She said in a low tone: 'The baloots?'

'You guessed.'

'It's not really too difficult when you know,' she said persuasively. 'There's a proper way, of course, and once they're on it's very, very difficult to get them off.. There's a proper way of doing that too.'

'Show me, Mrs Flagg,' he asked softly, his head still on her bosom.

She stroked his fair hair. 'You'd really like it?' she asked. 'You wouldn't be shy or embarrassed.'

'Oh no,' said Conway, turning his face to hers and pushing the fat of her breast over with his chin. He felt her react. 'We could treat it as purely educational. That's what we'll do.'

'Good idea,' she agreed. 'Keep it very educational. even medical‑clinical ‑ if you like.'

'I like,' he said. 'There's nothing like education, Mrs Flagg.'

'Nothing indeed,' nodded Mrs Flagg. Her round face was redder and warmer now, with the cognac and the proximity of Conway. Her hands were heavy and damp like cloths around his neck. Crickets were rattling in the garden and a sigh of night wind blew warmly into the room exciting the curtains and moving the hanging lamps.

'I'll need to go into the garden, dear man,' whispered Mrs Flagg. She began to wriggle away from him on the couch. 'There are some banana fronds hanging on the line. They have to be dried out you know and one of the little chaps was going to change his tomorrow ... He won't miss them.' She stood unsurely and wandered somewhat aimlessly, one foot all but treading on the other, across the carpeted room, until, with a sudden resolution, she turned towards the latticed door, opened it with a bang, and staggered out into the garden.

Conway enjoyed the engulfing sensation of well‑being that always filled him immediately before and after a sure conquest. The cognac helped and he poured two more generous glasses, sampled his, poured some of Mrs Flagg's into his own glass to make the levels right again, and wallowed back into the cushions. He watched the door through relaxed, splintered, eyes. A gentle laugh stuck somewhere down in his chest. He felt tempted to let it loose, but refrained. He felt happy.

Mrs Flagg came back, entering with a sort of pantomime villain's arched step, at a crouch, carrying in one hand the banana leaves. She smiled wickedly, turned, and exaggerated her backward look from the door, spying out to make sure no one was coming. t

Without a word, hardly a sound except for the bellows movement of her agricultural breasts, a look of honest eagerness on her face, Mrs Flagg advanced on Conway. He cowered back in pretend fear. Continuing her comedy villain's step she closed with him and began to take off his trousers. Conway felt a quick onslaught of boyish panic such as he could never remember. There was suddenly something frightening about being in the clutches of this big, healthy woman. He struggled symbolically like a virgin, his throat full of grit and his eyes wide.

'Come on now, Conway,' said Mrs Flagg sternly. 'No resistance now. No going back, eh?' She swooped with her big soft, rural hand transformed to a buzzard's claw, and thrust his brandy at him. He drank nervously. She began undoing his trousers.

In later years, in his most dismal and drunken dreams, Conway would see Mrs Flagg, blown to the dimensions of an ogre hanging over him with an awful determined smile on her face, like a demented hospital matron. He half lay across the couch like some accident victim, his eyes swelling, his smile iron‑set, a deathly shivering setting into his fibres and cells where the warmth had been. He was afraid of Mrs Flagg.

She pulled his trousers away from his waist, his buttocks. and his legs with a terrible efficiency keeping her face fixed on his all through the three distinct movements. 'Up!' she ordered when she had to pull them from under his behind, and Conway arched himself obediently up on the palms of his hands while she swooped the garment away from him. She drew away his shoes and socks with the same powerful pull.

'Good, very good,' she said, looking down at him as though examining the progress of a wound. He looked down at himself and was astonished to see that he had a primary erection thrusting up inside his underpants making them like a small alp. For once his manliness frightened him. Mrs Flagg was terrorizing him and he still had an erection! Could he, after all, be a latent masochist?

Mrs Flagg peeled off his pants, crimson in the face now with determination and crude pleasure. It occurred to the petrified Conway that he had never before been undressed first. He had never been in a defenceless state when the woman was all covered. She seemed now quite oblivious of him, uncaring about his feelings, or his participation in the event. Then, all at once and with a terrible realization it came to him that he was not important, that this was no sex for two. She leaned over him and caressed him, making still more hospital noises, soothing but remote, looking closely at his lower half, examining him.

'I've changed my mind,' said Conway shivering.

'I haven't,' said Mrs Flagg evenly. She put a glowing hand on his stomach and held him flat. He did not attempt to push or struggle. He had the trembling feeling that even if he did so it would be useless. She would overpower him to do terrible things to him. He remained leaning back, her hands working over him.

'I'll try to enjoy it,' he promised himself as an easy way out. But he was still with apprehension. There was a mad look on her face as she bent and went on working away. He could see the sweat streaming like rain from her red face. Her fair Saxon hair was in wet tails and trails across her forehead. She was moulding away at him like a potter at a wheel. The alcohol, that coward, had run away from his brain and his body. He was helplessly sober.

She stopped and straightened up, puffed with her handiwork. She looked from his lower half to his face. 'I've no experience with white men. This is the first occasion,' she mentioned.

'Well, perhaps another time,' suggested Conway. He began to push himself up, but she fixed him with her powerful, hot look again, her cheerfully bowed lips making blowing movements at him as though to puff him back. Her hands pinned his stomach again. Somehow he could not fight, there was no move of which he seemed capable.

Mrs Flagg shook her blonde head like a Wagner heroine. 'No other time like the present,' she intoned. 'Remain still, Conway. I'll get the ointment.'

Conway almost screamed. 'Ointment!' She thrust her face down at him. 'The ointment,' she repeated threateningly. 'It is essential.'

'The ointment,' he croaked pitifully. 'Yes, of course. You must get the ointment.' He had a plan to leap up and run through the door into the garden as soon as she had stepped away. But she did not go far enough. She merely backed to a small cabinet across the carpet, her eyes never going from his face, pinning him back like a stake, and from the cabinet took a paint tin, pint‑sized emulsion, with the end of a brush projecting from its open top.

'What colour?' he asked tragically.

'The ointment is colourless,' she assured him, advancing again. 'On St Mark's it is obtained from the sap of the poisoning yalla tree. It sets hard on application.' Conway closed his eyes. He felt her painting him with the cheap hairy brush, and a sort of paralysis setting in in his groin regions.

She moved away from him again and then he felt her massive return. Her hands again and then the round bandages of the banana leaves. He moaned sullenly, keeping his eyes tight. Mrs Flagg went about her task with dedication and distinction, wrapping and binding, puffing with intense gratification as she did so. Eventually he knew she had finished. He had the sensation of having a large stone rest‑ing on his stomach. Fearfully he opened his eyes and saw it, as he had feared, lying there like a prehistoric caterpillar, eyeing him with a single hole at the point of its head. That was one question answered, anyway.

He looked up at Mrs Flagg and he was shocked to see her staggering away from him like a crewless ship before a current. She half turned and stared at him as though she were a murderer and he the victim. Her large breasts were rolling like waves and her face sweat‑soaked. She moved with her hands in an ineffectual sort of way and mumbled, shaking her head. It was as though she had been brought from a trance into the horror of reality. She wiped at her face and her tongue came out and licked around her sagging mouth.

'Mr Conway,' she began, the syllables coming out wet and thick. 'I hardly know what to say...'

The liquid silence that filled the room was solidified by the slamming of a car door. 'Oh my heavens!' exclaimed the woman. 'Mr Flagg!'

Conway had faced emergencies before with the unexpected return of husbands, but never in a situation to equal this. He moved quickly, however, despite his horrid encumbrance. It swung outwards like the jib of a crane as he jumped from the couch. He swooped upon his trousers, his underpants, his shoes and socks, and limped from the door into the dark garden. As he went he heard Mr Flagg coming through the hall at the front of the house. Conway stood a few yards from the door among some trees and contrived to replace his trousers. The solid trunk he now carried made it impossible for him to zip them or secure them in any reasonable way. Only the legs fitted. He hobbled into them and pulled them around him. The banana monstrosity swelled up and over the top. Mr Flagg now entered the room. Conway heard him kiss his wife resoundingly. 'Earlier than I thought, dear,' he said. 'All over in an hour, sacrifice, ritual, everything. Positively fascinating. They really do get up to some quaint tricks, these tribesmen.'

Fortunately Sexagesima was full of its night desertion. Keeping to the more robust shadows, and hiding when he heard a noise, Conway made his way back to the Hilton Hotel. There was only a hundred feet of open street to risk, and he got across safely and swiftly running like a rugby three‑quarter clutching the ball to his stomach. He bolted through the downstairs hall which was empty and dimly lit at that hour. Like a warring animal he went up the stairs and charged into his room.

He leaned on the bed, panting, moaning with anger and embarrassment. It took him three hours twenty minutes to get the contraption off, soak‑ing it in a bucket of tepid water and using a scout knife.

The operation was so painful it brought shocked tears to his eyes. When he eventually got into his bed, sore and shivering, it was daylight. The Chinese shopkeeper across the road threw fifty firecrackers into the road at six o'clock that ‑norning to celebrate his birthday, but Conway did not care.

Ten

After two weeks of plodding search through the webbed jungle of St Peter's Island the men from Sexagesima had ,still not found an Unknown Soldier. The hours spent recutting tracks overrun by the avid growth of the rainy season, the uncomfortable casualties through falling into concealed pools and inky bogs, and all the million red insect bites suffered by the patrols were fruitless.

'Och,' grumbled Rob Roy English at the end of the day of searching. 'Ye'd think that aboot enough o' the brave lads were slaughtered here in 1944 to leave a few bones lyin' aboot.'

On several days Dayies went with the patrols, glad of the companionship, eccentric though it was, and with the intention at the start of merely filling time. There was little for him to do in Sexagesima during the hot days waiting for the return of
The Baffin Bay
and his return to Trellis and Jones of Circular Quay, Sydney.

Sometimes he painted, in the town, trying to draw from its deep light, the great crawling shadows early, and the slim shadows of noon, the ponderous movement of its day, the dry houses and the dry people and the sun always striking at it as though it were the only open target in the whole of the world. Early mornings were quiet and dustless., and the town seemed to go about its life with renewed hope, sight, and energy, like a man temporarily recovered from an illness. But noon would come with all its choking heat and the town would sweat and cough the dust from its gullet, and drink and sweat again, and finally surrender and hide in the darker places until the burning of the sun had receded again, leaving the settlement like a well‑browned pie hot from the oven.

So Davies went with the patrols to look for the Unknown Soldier. They would set out from the South Seas Hilton bar at eight, a dozen or more each time, parading in an array of guerrilla outfits, bush jackets, floppy
hats, cricket flannels, tough mountain boots, neckerchiefs for the sweat, sandwiches, boiled sweets to suck on the way, bottles of beer, field glasses, knives, machettes, and guns. They took the guns because, they said, there was always a chance of wild animals, and because the guns made them feel good. Each day they would troop from the hotel like some determined rescue party from a war a century ago. With Rob Roy English at the van, in tartan trews and a Highland Light Infantry bush jacket, they would trudge, as though already weary but brave, as if they were returning from a battle in fact, along the main street. They did not look at the people who peered from the houses and shops but marched solidly like desperate men who have fought to all but the last of their blood and are ready to fight again and die.

Davies, armed with a walking stick borrowed from Seamus, was always towards the rear of the heroic column. He noticed how all the men before him seemed to fall naturally into the part of soldiers, that trudge, that dry stare into the fatal distance. When Mr Hassey went with them he would break line sometimes to pat the heads of little children sitting on the pavements sag‑mouthed in wonder at the grim men', pat them as if to say 'We may die, but the world will be a better place for you, my dears'. A man who lived on the outskirts of the town and who had been in the New Zealand Navy during the war turned up for one patrol in his white tropical naval uniform with ammunition boots and several medals. Rob Roy sent him home because he said he was making a laughing stock of the whole venture.