The Bodysurfers Read online

  I am still furious that one of the Sunday rags suggested that the school’s financial affairs were reportedly kept ‘in a casual manner’. I had to rein in a peculiar impulse to harangue the editor there and then. The papers referred to the unsuccessful search by the police and the Bourneville Volunteer Bushfire Brigade and the dragging of the Candlestick River. A month or so later a small item noted that the Board of Governors was advertising for a new headmaster.

  Recording this tonight makes my heart race and a throbbing, claustrophobic feeling almost overcomes me. It has nothing to do with today’s emotional and physical strains — I’m at loggerheads with myself. I have shrugged off my old life and its pressures, but too much of the provincial headmaster still clings to me. I am stupidly jealous of my replacement. I don’t feel as I had expected, not as ‘Joseph Forster’ should feel. Perhaps the name was too romantic a choice for me. I am too conservative and this is not a romantic place. But it was the only name that occurred to me, considering the role of Conrad and Forster in my life over the years. After twenty years teaching Conrad it’s ironic that I should be the one influenced by him. It’s not likely that too many of my graziers’ and country bank managers’ stolid sons have followed the example of the Giant in Exile.

  I still think New Zealand would suit me better. I understand it’s about ten years behind the times. I’m not mocking myself — I feel somehow out of my era on the coast. I expected sun and serenity here. The grubby amorality, the lack of manners, saddens me. If I crystallised my impressions I would say that all the Englishness has gone. New Zealand is still very English, more so than England from what you hear these days. I suppose it is silly, but in my idealised daydreams New Zealanders all wear natural fibres, speak without stridor, play manly sports, entertain in their homes, eat roast lamb and mint sauce, go to bed early and read English literature.

  Sometimes I find discarded hypodermic needles in the sand, some of them bloody, on Sunday mornings.

  I was thinking about New Zealand when I left the shop this afternoon and set off for my usual walk along the beach. There was still a sting in the sun and the sand was hot when I removed my shoes. Smells from the seafront fried food shops hung in the air. The beach had an abused appearance: the sand was everywhere scuffed from the day’s holiday crowds and littered with their refuse. The dying pines and the weather-beaten stucco-cement apartment blocks facing the ocean were starting to throw shadows across the beach. On the shore the afternoon tide was turning, levelling the children’s deserted sand castles into muddy corrugations. Sodden bits of plastic, ice-cream wrappers and drink cans bobbed in the shallows. In front of me two fishermen were worming. One dragged a lump of decayed meat on a string back and forth over the wet sand and, every so often when a worm’s head popped up, his companion bent quickly down, grabbed it with a hook affair, pulled the worm out and dropped it into a tin. The worms here are huge — twelve, eighteen inches long. As a fisherman myself I suppose I should have been in accord with this bait gathering, but today it revolted me.

  The ocean, flat and soupy, felt tepid around my ankles. This is the time of day, the season, the temperature, I thought, peering out to sea, when most shark attacks occur — just before dusk when the fish schools come inshore to feed. Heedlessly, clumps of wilted-looking people were still arriving at the beach and throwing themselves into the water. I stood watching the sea, imagining the shark out there alerted by the splashing and the greasy slick of hundreds of bodies. I foresaw the subsequent panic with great clarity: the immense jolt and subsequent tearing and wrenching of flesh. Though no more than three or four inches deep in the sea, I stepped out onto dry sand.

  As I walked further north away from the official bathing area the beach became less crowded, the swimmers spaced wider apart. A party of five or six foreigners was boisterously kicking a soccer ball about, making loud cries and generally showing off. Their podgy women sat on a blanket in their tight swimsuits giggling and regarding them admiringly. One man began walking on his hands and the women clapped and whistled. The other men, amiably jealous, pelted him with sand and the soccer ball until he fell over, thrashing wildly. Their rowdiness and flying sand annoyed me. Running skittishly from the others, his hair full of sand, one of them tumbled into me, thudding heavily into my side.

  ‘Do you mind?’ I said.

  By now my mood was very low. I would have given up the walk and returned to my flat, but I knew how hot and stuffy it would be. And the idea of the emptiness and loneliness there today weighed on me. The image of myself at the window peering down on the vulgarities of the street was grotesque. I put some distance between the foreigners and myself, sat on a clean patch of sand and tried to think optimistically of my revised plans. My usual vision of New Zealand, of tweedy, peaceful people, beautiful scenery and grazing sheep, seemed an absurdity, like something from a 1950s travelogue.

  No sooner had I sat down than two teenage couples sauntered up and flopped down nearby. Though no older than fourteen or fifteen they instantly embraced with great ardour and were soon writhing in the sand, each couple’s loins locked together. I looked away, tense and embarrassed. Out to sea, just inside the line of breakers, a man was waving cheerily. Bobbing in the broken water, he was waving in my direction and calling out, ‘Hoy, hoy.’

  I glanced at the petting teenagers. ‘Is that man calling you?’ They looked up briefly, muttered something and fell back on each other. Squinting back over his shoulder, one boy said, ‘He’s waving to you.’ He cackled coarsely. They all giggled. One of the girls said, ‘Cop his funny cap.’ The man did wave at me again. ‘Hoy, hoy,’ he cried softly. Dark hair hung in his eyes. Only his head and one waving arm were visible.

  ‘He’s in trouble,’ I said. The boys and girls looked up again, but stayed petulantly in each other’s arms. The man in the sea was waving less vigorously. ‘Hoy,’ he said once more as he began to sink.

  I took off my shirt, cap and sunglasses and ran into the ocean in my trousers. The water was surprisingly cold. Small floating shreds of plastic and paper touched my arms and sides. I was conscious of these sensations, of my pants flapping uncomfortably, of my spine turning cold with fear, as I swam to the man, grabbed him around the chin and slowly side-stroked back to shore. Middle-aged and stocky, he was a sagging load and by the time I could stand I was panting with exhaustion.

  ‘OK?’ I asked, steadying him as we walked through the shallows. He brushed the hair from his eyes and burst into tears. I supported him until we stepped from the water. He patted my arm in thanks and, shaking his head, stumbled up the beach towards the group with the soccer ball. As I gathered my belongings and left the beach the teenagers clapped ironically.

  When I got back to the flat I changed my clothes, went to the pub and drank several double scotches. By closing time I had come to the decision to ring home. At home it would be only eight o’clock. I willed John, the birthday boy, to answer the phone, but I told myself I was prepared for whatever happened. I don’t know quite what I planned — just to listen and send loving thoughts back along the wire. Perhaps more. Marion would be washing the dishes no more than six or eight feet from the telephone. I was deathly exhausted with it all. I wanted to give up, to speak, to return.

  I walked urgently to the public phonebox, past Sealand, on the beach front. The aquarium was dark and silent. The night surf boomed as usual, furtive shadows flitted on the beach. I heard the panting of running figures, grunts, cackling laughter. The phone rang for ten or fifteen seconds before it was answered. My heart beat so heavily I could hardly breathe.

  ‘Yes?’ a voice said, abruptly and assertively. ‘Hullo! The Cameron residence! Hullo!’ Peter’s adolescent breaking voice had a crass defiant edge to it, an independence I didn’t recognise. As he thumped down the telephone receiver I could sense the exasperated obscenity on his lips.

  Baby Oil

  Anthea had been living with Brian in Paddington for almost three years when she began an affair with Max in June.
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  Anthea and Max met on a fashion shoot in Noumea. He was not the usual photographer her magazine used for fashion assignments, but Gunter was in Mauritius for Vogue and Max stood in. By the time they boarded their U.T.A. jet for Sydney a week later they were talking, rather surprisedly for such people as they recognised themselves, of being in love.

  This affair was different from the other encounters Anthea had experienced while living with Brian. One afternoon at lunch soon after their return from New Caledonia, tanned and dreamy and still out of tune with the weather, she invited Max home, into her and Brian’s house and, by extension, into her, their, bed.

  In the past she had joined her lovers — a very catholic assortment with a rapid turnover — on afternoons at the Hilton or, on the rare occasion when one was single, at his place. In the spirit of frankness which marked the beginning of their affair she had told Max all this. The squalor of the bachelor flat had even added a frisson then, Max guessed, but only before the act — and there would never have been a return visit.

  Anthea admitted to Max that her willingness to make love to him in her own bed was an indication of her strength of feeling for him, their spiritual and physical closeness. Their star signs were also terrifically compatible.

  ‘We’re kindred souls,’ she said, kneading his buttocks in the lift going down from the New Hellas after lunch. She had also mentioned (rather defensively, he thought), ‘I believe my body is mine to do with as I like.’ Brian, a daily political cartoonist whom Max had never met, worked long hours on several publishing projects, and she travelled constantly, so the opportunities to uphold her belief were numerous.

  Max could understand why someone wanted their lovers away from the domestic hearth. But having decided to break her usual rule she showed amazing sang froid, he thought, in drawing him urgently by the hand into the bedroom and onto the bed beneath a framed skiing holiday photograph of her with Brian, both beaming in red sweaters, cosy and radiant in the snow.

  She was even more ardent than in Noumea. Her practice showed, her lean, whippy skills by no means subdued by the presence of Brian’s accoutrements around them: pens, opened mail, coins and keys on the bedside table, Brian’s New Statesmans, Guardian Weeklys and New York Review of Books stacked beside it, even a pair of Brian’s red underpants hanging on his wardrobe doorknob. If she suffered any pangs of conscience at these souvenirs, at the juxtaposition of Brian’s happy picture and Max’s naked body, it didn’t show.

  It occurred to Max that as Anthea had obviously planned for them to return here after lunch this particular afternoon, but had not removed the more intimate traces of Brian’s occupation, even the rather blatant note of the discarded underpants, that maybe she got a kick out of it. Or perhaps she was just a sloppy housekeeper. Anyway, the combination of this selective insensitivity and her carnality held enough intrigue for him. And Brian’s bits and pieces didn’t unduly concern him; perhaps, if he were honest, they even added a spark.

  He was right, there was a perceptible change in her love-making now; not in her techniques exactly, but she was slightly less romantically swept away, even more lustful than under the Pacific palms. The face was not expressive with tropical wonder. She had changed up a gear. Her in-bed personality now was one of impassive sexual hunger. She burbled sweet obscenities, her body was warm and responsive, but there was something almost neutral in the eyes.

  ‘Just wonderful, my darling,’ she said afterward, fetching them tumblers of Chablis. Max sipped, and flipped through a New Statesman. Very dull lay-out, no photographs to speak of, a couple of anti-Thatcher cartoons. Brian was presently in Alice Springs or somewhere doing a book of drawings of Aborigines. Presumably she washed the sheets before his return. Maybe while she was at it she could throw in the bloody underpants.

  A little later, for the encore, she reached up to the bedstead for a bottle of baby oil. Slowly anointing them, she whistled softly at his pleasure. She had obviously made a speciality of this. Under a film of oil her tan glistened. On her brown breasts the nipples were big silver coins, then their slippery cones darted everywhere — even the backs of his knees, the soles of his feet didn’t escape their touch — until he couldn’t differentiate between tongue and nipple. Anthea glided knowingly over him, they slid together, undulating like an ocean swell, rolling and curving towards shore. Owing to the wild buffeting of the bed Brian’s coins and keys rattled and danced.

  As their affair intensified over the next weeks Max spent a lot of time in Anthea’s bedroom. Emboldened by the intensity and intimacy of lunch they would kiss on restaurant stairs, hail taxis with incautious exuberance, and she would draw him home to Paddington. He succumbed gladly to the force. What could match the thrill of the cab ride along Oxford Street, thighs pressed conspiratorially together; the anticipation as she fished in her handbag for the key? Max’s senses sang, his hormones fizzed. The teasing abandonment of the kiss inside the door! Her fellatio attacks on him in the hallway! (The sensual relaxation of her lower lip almost floored him.) His heightened perception amazed him. Her textures, smell and taste were uniformly exquisite.

  It went even further than Anthea. Max’s general attention to detail was never more acute than in the opening minutes of their afternoons together. Even as he entered the bedroom and began undressing every corner of the room instantly registered on him. He noted the current disarray of male and female clothing or any minor adjustments to the furnishings since his last visit — the addition of a TV set in front of the bed, for example — which hinted at domestic conviviality. Conviviality was the alleged keynote of the Anthea-Brian relationship. Implied was plain old friendship rather than romantic sexuality. That was all right; Max could live with conviviality.

  ‘He makes me laugh,’ she’d volunteered to Max. ‘That’s all.’ He knew better than to pursue the matter. He was never quite sure what women meant when they said that. It sounded platonic but he suspected it covered the whole range to one hundred per cent sexual. Women were so wonderfully dishonest and dismissive when it suited them. In the face of this treachery Max quite often felt more in league with the husband or boyfriend he was cuckolding than with the woman in question — equally, eternally ignorant of the extent of female fraudulence.

  Objects still registered on his consciousness as he climbed into bed — even the bed coverings themselves — and created their own spun-off meanderings. The erotic suggestion he’d got one afternoon from black satin sheets, for instance, was partly allayed by the realisation that they were their satin sheets and that at one time at least they had thought black satin sheets would be a sexy thing to experience.

  ‘Kinky,’ he joked, the day of the sheets.

  ‘A bit of a cliché, aren’t they?’ said squirming, sliding Anthea, slippery enough as she was.

  The oil plus the sheets made purchase difficult. The sheets did not return.

  ‘I love you,’ she told Max often, whenever he looked serious.

  ‘I love you,’ he repeated.

  The State Department gave Brian a trip to the United States for being a pace-setter in his branch of the media — and to keep him on-side. Max rejoiced. His afternoons with Anthea quickly formed a pattern. They managed to meet about three days a week throughout August. They would rush to bed and make love. Then Anthea, pulling on one of Brian’s T-shirts, would totter downstairs and bring them up glasses of wine. Once, returning to bed, she stretched to remove the shirt and Max saw for an instant the light catch the shine of his moisture on the inside of her thigh. The image of this peaceful interval remained fixed photographically in Max’s mind when they were apart: their quiet bodies settled obliquely across the bed as they murmured and sipped wine and laughed softly. He ran a finger along her vulnerable hip. A cool breeze played with the net curtains. The cat rearranged itself in the laundry basket.

  Before long she would take his glass from him, reach for the baby oil and slyly, languorously, begin Stage Two.

  Cool rain. Drops as distinct as purity f
ell on his thirsty skin. Sighing, Max reclined as she dripped oil on his penis, spread oil on her nipples with a studious familiarity and then caressed herself with him. Her New Caledonian tan had faded; she was the shade of peaches. The silken delicacy of her touch approached no touch at all. Though her lubricity made it redundant, Anthea passed him the oil to caress her thighs. He dropped some oil into his hand — one droplet — and his heart jumped. The bottle was empty. Two days before it had been a quarter full. Squeezing hard, Max forced out the last drop of oil. He let it fall in her navel.

  Perceptibly, even against Max’s inclination, Brian’s possessions and knick-knacks began to get on his nerves. It became an effort to use the bathroom, to shower after their love-making, with Brian’s New Yorkers stacked by the lavatory, his Eau Sauvage on the shelf, the ubiquitous red underpants hooked over the doorknob. In bed he would look up from her face or breasts or thighs into the tanned faces of the amiable skiing duo. Her hair was longer then, darker, her face rounder. He hated the Anthea in the photograph. He made love with great passion and they both cried out with equal vehemence. Afterward she gave him a quizzical look but said only, ‘I love you.’

  One late August afternoon when Anthea left the bed for the bathroom, Max, compelled, took Brian’s pen from the bedside table and marked the oil level in the current bottle. Its label said: