Touch (18 page)

Afterwards we lie in the sun watching a family of jackdaws squabble on the cliff. There's sand stuck to Yusef's face, tiny glittering particles of quartz. His eyelashes tremble, long and thick. A tanker labours across the horizon, fuming into shades of blue and green. To the south, the leakage of iron oxide stains the sea dark red.

* * *

The next day, Marie and I drive into St Just for provisions, wandering past the little art galleries and bric-a-brac shops, drinking morning coffee with the newspapers in a café run by a couple of middle-aged hippies. Middle aged like us. Old ladies with tattooed arms pass us in the street. They must have been beatniks once. Dreamers, freedom seekers. But whatever you try to get away from follows you. And maybe that's us: invading the peninsula with thousands of others every summer; then leaving them to the winter.

Everyone's friendly and welcoming. Maybe that's just good for business. We buy bread at the bakers and two colossal Cornish pasties, then drive back to the cottage and sit with the ordnance survey map. Marie has her heart set on the coastal path that runs the length of the peninsula and we set off after lunch with a shoulder bag, camera and binoculars, driving to Pendeen, then finding a track that takes us down towards a small bay. We park at a farm, drop a pound coin into the honesty box, then follow a track that winds through gorse thickets and hedgerows tangled with blackberries and rosehips.

The bushes are full of songbirds and the weather is bright with a steady breeze from the sea. Hot gorse releases the scent of coconut as we pass. The old mine workings appear on the cliff top to our left, then the blue curve of the bay begins. The path crosses over a small stream. I ford it, yards ahead of Marie, and find a notice warning that the beach is full of old metal from shipwrecks and mining. I remember a trickle of blood running from Yusef's heel.
It's nothing man, I didn't
even feel it
. His blood seemed unbelievably bright, deeper and redder than any blood I'd seen. Now Marie's calling from behind. I turn to watch her stumbling over the stream I've just climbed out of.

‘…a what?'

‘Well you might bloody wait…'

She's caught the sun already. Her skin is lightly tanned, gleaming where her hair is pulled back. She catches up, panting slightly, cargo pants tight around her hips. The backs of her hands are freckled.

‘A meadow pipit, I think, could've been a skylark.'

I don't answer her, but take her arm and walk a few yards before having to let go because the path is too narrow. Then the beach is there and the Atlantic: green, blue and turquoise, sending cream-topped breakers to drag at the shore. The sun is high, the air astringent. A family with five kids are making a moated sandcastle where the stream fans over the beach. There are a few walkers on the sand, tiny in the distance. A fat guy tackles the waves on a surfboard, cheered on by his wife and daughters. His shaved head gleams like bronze.

Marie wants to paddle. She always does. Her chest is glazed with sweat, her nipples tight against her tee shirt. The light catches her eyes. Hazel-green.

‘What's that?'

She's pointing above the cliff where a dark shape is hovering. At first it looks like a kestrel, but when I lift the binoculars it has that unmistakeable moustache.

‘It's a peregrine!'

Marie's never seen one before. I hand her the binoculars and she fiddles with the focusing wheel.

‘Here, like this.'

‘Shit! You have them. I can see better without…'

I take them back and re-focus. The bird has swooped lower, away from the sun. It's flying into the wind, plumage flustering, tail fanned, wing tips flickering, its breast striated, its body rocking on the air. Its head is fiercely alert, gimbaling from side to side. It slackens and sinks lower, trembling in the streaming air. It folds its wings and dives, stooping into bracken. Marie is touching my arm.

‘It's got something!'

‘Yeah, a meadow pipit, probably.'

She slaps my elbow and the bird rises again, steering away down coast.

 
We walk barefoot at the edge of the sea, letting the waves wet our trouser hems. Afterwards we pull on our walking shoes and follow the coastal path up through the cliff, a circular route that winds to the Levant mine through heather and granite, then back to the village.

By six o'clock we're outside the Radgel rubbing sun cream into our arms and drinking bitter shandies. Then a tedious last mile to the car, our feet aching against hot tarmac. Before we leave, Marie pulls a plastic bag out of the boot and we pick blackberries, feeling for the fruit amongst the briars and nettles that have grown into the hawthorn hedge, pricking our fingers and staining them with juice. When we leave we have a pound of fruit and a good few stings. I remember my mother telling me how she'd picked rosehips in the war to make jelly for the soldiers in the hospital where she was a nurse. I'd taken her blackberries and stewed apples a few days before she died, spooning them into her mouth. But she was too weak to care by then.

Marie and I drive back to the cottage in sun-stunned silence, watching robins and wrens break from the hedgerows, then shadows stretching from the pithead wheel.

There's a bottle of Australian Chardonnay cooling in the fridge. We open it after taking showers in the cramped bathroom. When we make love I push my tongue against Marie's breasts, feeling them tighten, nuzzling her throat as I enter. She takes me with half-closed eyes, letting her fingernails graze my back. Afterwards we doze, then wake to the dark, to half-empty glasses beside the bed. A thrush is singing outside in short, cascading phrases. Marie stirs and kisses my chest. Her hot breath sighs across my skin but I can't tell whether that's longing or satisfaction.

* * *

On the last day we hitch to the Blue Anchor at Helstone to try the beer they brewed on the premises. A young clergyman picks us up in an ancient split-windscreen Morris Minor. I sit in the back as usual, whilst Yusef fields his questions. There's a Welsh Springer behind me, asleep on an old blanket.

‘So where are you lads from?'

I remember Yusef telling me he was born in Croydon and tense myself in the back seat.

‘We're at university in Nottingham.'

‘Oh yes. Studying…?'

‘Mining engineering.'

‘Mining? Oh yes….'

The young vicar looks surprised. I pipe up from the back before he says something stupid.

‘English.'

‘Ah, yes, English.'

He seems to approve. Yusef raises his eyebrows and sends out a dazzling grin. His eyes are deep blue in the light that's falling through the windscreen. The dog farts, filling the car with the stench of rotten meat. The clergyman chuckles and winds down a window.

‘Sorry gents. Don't mind Waffles. He's getting on a bit now, losing his manners…'

I see Yusef frown. He doesn't do dogs. He turns to me behind the clergyman's back, making his fingers into a gun and pointing them towards the Springer. We don't speak much after that until the vicar drops us off.

 
In the Blue Anchor we drink four pints of the dark bitter that's brewed on the premises and then reel out into the light. The sun is blinding. Yusef blinks theatrically.

‘Fuck, that was
schtrong
.'

‘Yeah. Good, though. Where now?'

Yusef has spotted a good hitching point on the way in, where there's a broad verge beside the road. We walk into open country and start to thumb. Progress is slow. We end up climbing over a gate to piss against the hedge. I start to feel slightly nauseous in the heat, the beer dragging at my belly. The sun's blistering my face and my nose is peeling. We don't reach Pendeen until gone six. When we get into the bar of the Radgel, Yusef's greeted noisily by some of his mining chums. We feel great. Triumphant. The night begins.

Hours later, and before I realise it, we've switched from beer to scrumpy. I remember Wally going into the back room, emerging with the dregs of the barrel. Two pints of scummy pink froth. The broken-toothed grin of Beaky saying something dirty in his clotted Cornish accent, so close I can smell his armpits. Yusef's chuckling. The room is dense with laughter and blue cigarette smoke. I want to heave, but hang on as everything dissolves. The room turning on its lost moments like a fairground ride. We're drinking sour candy floss. Then, mysteriously, we're out in the Atlantic rain, struggling with the zip of the tent. We stagger in the mud. Laughing, cursing. Nylon cracks in the wind. Then a voice mutters inside the tent. Which isn't ours.
Fuckfuckfuckit
. This one has a zip that runs round the edge. Ours has a centre zip. Clawing our way through rain, we find our tent behind. Then I'm throwing up into the rain, the lighthouse blinking, Yusef's hand on my neck.

Somehow there's a fight with clothes and sleeping bags. I'm sipping water from the plastic bottle, pissing in the rain, dragging off my wet tee shirt. Body heat. The sweet sharpness of sweat. Yusef's skin smooth under my own. He's laughing, his lips against my neck, his body arched above me. My hands feel his spine, his hips, the curve of his arse. I've still got my socks on and reach down to take them off, but Yusef gets there first, pulling them over my feet. The taste of salt. My face hot. Then sleep. Then waking in a tangle of clothes, rucksacks pushed against the side of the tent where they've let rain percolate. Yusef naked on his back, his pubic bush gleaming, his cock limp against his thigh. Faint snail trails have dried there on his skin. He smells of marzipan and bleach and beer all mixed together. I dress quickly, crouching, careful not to wake him. Though he might already be awake. I step outside onto wet grass into startling sunshine. The couple in the tent in front of us are just making breakfast. I smile sheepishly, but they're cool and smile back. It's the smell of bacon frying that brings Yusef to the door of the tent, growling with a hangover, tousled, flashing his best smile at the couple who make us both a cup of tea.

* * *

Every day we choose a different route to walk, sometimes taking lunch, sometimes stopping off at a pub. We see Cape Cornwall, Land's End, Sennen Bay, Porthcurno, Mousehole, Carn Goose Promontary and those tiny islands, The Brisons, where cormorants are crowded together to dry their wings against a glittering sea. We swim on the beach below the Minack Theatre and doze on a strip of white sand. In the evenings, I cook or we go to a restaurant. In the mornings we wake and I make tea in the little kitchen, enjoying the early morning scent of gas, the feeling of being alone before the day begins. After dinner, we watch the sun from the upstairs lounge, going down through torn cinema curtains to the sea where the tankers tack backwards and forwards. We stew the blackberries and keep them in the fridge, adding a dab of clotted cream. Their colour is deep, rich as blood in amber.  We read in the evening, then lie with clasped hands each night listening to last traffic on the road that runs past the house to Land's End before we sink into sleep.

One day we find Priest's Cove, making our way down past lobster pots and floats and beached fishing boats to the concrete jetty. The beach is formed from smooth boulders, mysterious as blank skulls. Three elderly ladies are getting into their swimming costumes. They flip-flop to the sea, splashing their shoulders, sculling towards sunset, their arms breaking its tilting mirrors. Walking home, we find the pink flowers of campion bobbing in the wind.

* * *

 
Things got awkward with Yusef. For two days he hardly spoke. When we headed north again he didn't carry his shoulders with the same swagger and left me to do the hitching. We came most of the way home in a furniture van. Driving through the night, side by side on the bench seat, our legs touching, a yellow cheese of moon looming over Somerset. When we got to Manchester the city was still asleep. We said goodbye in Piccadilly Square, under the statue of Queen Victoria. Yusef swung his arm and let his fist hit me lightly on the mouth. Not a real blow, but real enough.

‘See you Ginge.'

I was too stunned to speak, lips stinging from his fist. He turned away, hoisting his rucksack, his heels striking the paving stones. He looked over his shoulder and smiled and said again.

‘See you.'

But I didn't see him. We went our separate ways and I never saw him again. I heard that he'd gone to Manitoba to mine copper. But maybe that was just a rumour. When I got home and needed to wash my clothes, I found his pendant stuffed into the pocket of the spare jeans in my rucksack. I've still got it somewhere.

* * *

That's a lie. A lot of stuff is lies without meaning to be. Marie and I set off home on the Saturday, hoping to get a decent breakfast in Warminster. We end up in a greasy spoon with a bacon sandwich, drinking instant coffee. The best England can offer at 8 o'clock on a Saturday morning. We'd had a good week: walked miles of coastline, seen dozens of wild flowers and birds, felt the sea pulling at the land, slept in the peculiar darkness of the Cornish night and made love there. We'd got close again. So why did we drive most of the way back in silence? Once we found the road home, after Exeter, we hardly spoke. Something had thickened around us like a misgiving or mistrust. It was hard to say. It wasn't just sadness at our holiday coming to an end. It was something else beyond that. The stuff you grope to understand but words fall short of. Maybe it was the lives we could have led. I don't know.

When we finally get home and drag our bags from the car and up the garden path, the front door is jammed with the weight of stuff behind. Letters, bills: all that junk mail piled up on the mat. I get my arm inside and fling most of it down the hallway. The door opens, but before I can step inside, Marie touches me on the temple, brushing back the hair. She looks as if she's about to cry.

‘I love you, you know. Whatever you might think.'

I don't know what to say, squeezing into the house, Yusef's pendant pressing into my chest where it's buttoned into the pocket of my shirt. Why did she say that? It's as if she knows something about us that even I don't know.