The Love Beach (22 page)

Abruptly Mr English called a halt. The entire barge was sitting, like a tame hen on the rollers, and the rollers were firm on the steel mesh laid above the sand. They had done it.

The hundred and fifty men, young and ageing, native and European, fell, flopped, or sat with some dignity on the sand to rest. Four long lines, like boat‑race crews defeated at the finish. The night had taken its possession of the sky,

the sea, and The Love Beach. As they rested on the sand, most of them sitting now, arms back against the beach, the hooty Scots voice came from the conquered barge, from the thickening part of the sky. 'That's grand. lads. Tha's fine! Now we'll leave her here until daylight and then we'll pull her into the place where we want her. It's been a gran' effort.'

The men applauded from the seats on the sand, then gathered themselves up and began to walk back to the beach track. Something decided Davies to walk back along the sand to look at the invasion craft, riding high on its rollers and then to look into the old cavity where the barge had lain for so long. He was alone, for the others were moving in the opposite direction. In the pit, lying arms pathetically outstretched, was a pattern of bones that had once been a man.

Davies looked closer and put his hand to his neck. 'Hey, Mr English!' he called along the beach. 'Mr English, come here. Come and see this!'

Rob Roy English came at a jog across the sand with Mr Kendrick and Pollet. They stood looking down at the skeleton, dimly white, slightly phosphorescent it seemed in the greying light. Mr Kendrick, the cycle‑shop man, produced a bicycle lamp and shone it on the bones tracing one along and then another like a man following a street map. They were just bones, with a crushed and rusted steel helmet near them. Mr Kendrick moved the torch carefully. Other things, bits of metal, the hard remains of an automatic rifle.

'Looks like we've found our Unknown Soldier,' muttered Mr English quietly.

Davies stepped down into the pit and bent like a doctor examining a patient. 'No. you haven't,' he said. 'See this ‑his identification tags. This here. Have a look.' He handed up the metal discs. 'Hard luck,' he said.

Anger stiffened the fingers of Mr English. He picked up the metal identity tags, held them in his right palm, and then turned and ran a bent and bandy course to the sea. They
saw his outline vaguely jerk, like a fisherman casting a net as he reached the short surf. They knew he had thrown the discs into the waves. He came back at an amble, glared at Davies, and then looked down reverently at the skeleton.

'Our Unknown Soldier,' he breathed. 'Puir devil, I wonder who he was?'

Eleven

By the end of the second evening the chapel was made. The barges had been dragged, rolled, and rollered, manoeuvred into position so that they formed three sides of a square. Some of the members of the council suggested giving them a couple of coats of paint, but Mr English, with proper feeling, said that they were to remain as they were, with the rust and the wounds showing, like the Unknown Soldier who was to be reburied in their enclosing arms. A concrete cell was made for the tomb, a little box like a manhole to a sewer, Davies thought, and a cross incorporating remnants of the soldier's gun and his sadly inadequate helmet was made by the blacksmith at the native village and welded on to the middle barge. The skeleton was to be brought from the mission church and buried in the new grave on the Sunday before the arrival of the Queen. There was to be no eternal flame because, as Mr English so practically pointed out, the hard winds and the swooping rains in season would soon douse it and he, for one, wasn't going to keep going down to the beach to rekindle it.

Having made and set the sanctuary, the islanders abandoned it temporarily and went about their normal lives and with their preparations for the royal visit. But Davies went to the beach quite often, haunted by the moving colours and the strangeness of the scene that sunset when they shifted the first of the barges. He could feel it within himself, the tones and the little men against the tones. It ached to be remembered and caught for ever. He would have been a fine artist had he been able to paint.

He took his easel and his oils, still trapped in the old rugby sock, to the beach at evening and tried to get the sky right and the proportion of the humans tugging the barge. Disdainfully it eluded him. He returned to the Hilton with the same hopeless daubs, set them up in his room and looked at them, wondering what magic he was missing.

Bird came to the beach one evening, early while there was still gold on the sea and the sky had not begun to digest the daylight with its vivid juices. She wore a native parau, brilliant orange with the traditional curves and commas of white worked into the pattern. Davies was sitting against one of the barges, his easel set up trying to pursue and capture the place, the situation, and the mood. She came smiling across the sand to him.

'If you are never a Gauguin it will not be because you did not give sufficient time to it,' she said. 'You are always here.'

Davies grimaced at the streaks like wounds on his canvas. 'I don't want to be a Gauguin,' he grumbled. 'I want to be a Davies.' He thought about it. 'Mind,' he admitted, 'it doesn't sound half so special, does it? Gauguin ‑ Davies. It could be that you've got to have a certain sound of name to be a great painter. I was thinking of changing the paints when I get back to Sydney, perhaps I'll change my name instead.'

She stood and considered what he had worked. From his crouch he looked up at her. The parau was brought about her under her arms in the traditional native way with the end tucked between her breasts, so that her shoulders were exposed. It looked very natural on her, he thought, and she wore it unselfconsciously as a Pacific island woman would have done. Her shoulders were brown and gently shaped. She looked at him and smiled again. 'Still trying to catch again the vision?' she said. 'The only way, Davies, is to get all the men back here and ask them to pull another barge for you. And you must get Mr Rob Roy English to stand on the barge like a slave driver.' She laughed gaily at the thought. 'Then you will get the painting you so desire.'

Davies rolled his shoulders. She crouched down beside him, squatting. looking at his poor work on the easel, frowning, pulling back her nose, shaping her eyes. Then she looked over the top of the canvas and stood again. A group of native girls. from the beach village, were capering in the water, making the shallows splash like feathers around their ankles. Their cries and their faultless laughter came across in the somnolent evening.

'Davies,' said Bird slowly. 'You said once you would like to paint the dancers on The Love Beach. Remember the ones we laughed about, the maidens that shocked poor Captain Cook?'

'Keeping time to a nicety,' recalled Davies.

'Why don't you paint them now? There is some light left, is there not? I will get these young girls to dance. You will paint.'

Davies was slow. 'They'll dance?' he said.

Bird nodded. 'Yes, they would like it. They are happy dancing.'

'Yes,' said Davies, still slowly. 'Ask them, will you, Bird? I would like to have a try.'

She walked away from his place, her feet making dents in the beach. She went towards the distant young girls, unhurriedly, her body moving with the liquid sway of a Melanesian islander. Davies let his eyes go with her, watching her sandalled feet making tracks and the hem of the orange garment that was low about her legs. Hurriedly he took the used canvas from the stubby easel and replaced it with another. He was getting short of canvases, he thought. Never mind, he would be going soon. He would not be here. Back to Australia. Then perhaps back to Newport.

Bird neared the native girls. They stopped jumping in the shallows when they saw her coming to them. They stood quietly in the little surf and watched her walk. Davies, at the other extreme, saw her approach them and bend to talk with them. Then he saw them leap like fish in the sea as they heard what she had to say.

They followed her from the wet sand, up the climbing beach, skirting the still straddling landing craft, and went to an open part a hundred yards from where Davies crouched behind his canvas. Bird called something to the Melanesian girls, but the words were carried away over the attentive trees by the breeze coming in across the lagoon. Davies saw the girls obey her, saw them form a pattern on the beach.

And then they began to dance. They danced the special dance, the dance of The Love Beach. They required no music, just the rhythmic clapping, the bare touching of their own hands to keep time. Bird was at the front, dancing too, with a movement just as native as theirs, a melodic swinging grace that seemed to go with the breeze. They danced a story that was concerned with the going down of the tropic sun, that in its very mystery foresaw the coming of the night. Davies watched them and, mesmerized, began to paint them, the clumsy, bad, strokes going across his canvas, attempting to fill it as the evening was filled ‑ with the sky and the sea, the island, and the brown dancing girls.

The dancers were engrossed, lost in their story, in its movements, its continuous grace and unheard music. Bird was with them in every motion and emotion. Davies watched and saw her take the tail of the parau from her breasts and lower it to her waist, so her breasts were exposed white and showing in the evening light. It was a natural movement, almost incidental. He buried his fists in his eyes because he wanted her too much for his own good. He looked again and all the young girls had brought their garments to their waists also. Their naked breasts and oiled shoulders moved to the simple music they made with their hands. The paraus hung about their hips and their legs, making a different separate movement. Davies worked his brush across the canvas, but there was nothing there. Nothing he could capture, to take away with him from this place. He only wanted to watch them, and to watch Bird. Dancing like that, gently churning the sand with her young feet, moving like a child at the belly and like a woman from the shoulders and the breasts. She was a distance away, but he could see how fine, how marvellous, she was. All the many times he had wanted to touch her, but was afraid, not of her, but of himself, and his children, little Mag and Dave. He had seen her every day, working, or walking with him, singing with her guitar, laughing, being simply Bird, and he had been unable to find the courage to reach out for her.

She did not look towards him through the entire dance. The poetic details were accomplished, each movement, each indecent movement as Captain Cook had primly

noted, worked out of the dancers and worked into the story pattern. They performed several dances, the first in rows remaining on a single spot, making a bowl of sand under their bare feet. Then they enacted a circular motif, moving sideways, and keeping once again the time with the clapping of their hands. Davies watched the dark bodies with their cocky.‑ little breasts, the slim necks, and the faces, expressionless, far away in the demands and dreams of the dance. And among them, her skin tan among all the brown, Bird kept the same rhythm and the same intricate time, her breasts as small but vivid white, her waist bending with an easy swing.

Then they began to sing. They sang as they danced a new dance, in pairs, imitating the naked kiss, the love‑stance, the growing of desire and ardour, girl to young girl. Bird danced with a tiny girl, about eleven years old, who matched every erotic movement with one of her own. 'In the practice of which they are brought up from earliest childhood,' Davies thought.

He had stopped trying to paint. The brush had dropped into the sand, the grains sticking to the yellow ochre he had been using. His canvas was just hapless streaks, his eyes full of the white girl among the native dancers. They were facing each other in pairs now, legs thrown apart, singing in a low vibrant key. One leg of each partner was thrust between the widened legs of the other and they worked their bodies upwards like snakes from the knees, through the thighs and the waists to the quivering breasts; the necks and chins and cheekbones set, the faces ecstatic and savage with the urgency of the dance. The girls worked their bodies close to each other, their voices flying over the beach, their hand‑clapping sharp in the evening silence. Davies felt his sweat running down his face and his chest, a choking lump bulged in his throat. A massive erection arrived like a stranger and grew beneath him as he squatted. He dropped his eyes to his forearm and tried to think that he had to get away from this place and back to Newport, Mon.

The song and the clapping were cut off in a second. He looked up and, ashamed, saw the dancers laughing, the laughter of innocence and childishness. They rolled in the sand like dark clowns and crowded about Bird, gabbling to her, and giggling. They raised their paraus from their waists, covering their bodies and each one tucking the bright hem of the garment into the glade of her breast. Bird patted their shoulders and their heads as though they were her children. They were laughing again then, the almost hysterical native laughter like screaming, and tumbling, jumping up, running and tumbling again, like prisoners suddenly released to a world of sand and sea. Bird began to walk back towards Davies, slowly, her head bowed like a novice, and the Melanesian girls ran in a flock to splash in the surf‑line of the lagoon.

Davies watched Bird come back to him across the dimming place. The great booming evening was past the climax of its display, the colours were running across the bottom of the sky, draining away, and the sea was growing dark and pensive. He watched her steadily as he crouched by the easel but she did not raise her head and she came towards him. The emotion he felt for her stuck up inside him, reaching from his groins to the curls of his stomach.

She stopped her walk a yard away from him and looked up with her composed face. She pushed her hair away, taking it to the back of her neck and leaving her hands there, her arms bent upwards like wings, her body stretched and slimmed by the movement. Davies remained squatting by the small easel.