No Sharks in the Med and Other Stories

  Geoff saw them coming in the boat and stopped gouging at the rock. His fingernails were cracked and starting to bleed, but the job was as complete as he could wish. He ducked back out of sight, hugged the sentinel rock and thought only of Gwen. He had one chance and mustn’t miss it.

  He glanced back, over his shoulder. Gwen had heard the boat’s engine. She stood half-way between the sea and the waterfall with its foul pool. Her spear was grasped tightly in her hands. Like a young Amazon, Geoff thought. But then he heard the boat’s motor cut back and concentrated on what he was doing.

  The put-put-put of the boat’s exhaust came closer. Geoff took a chance, glanced round the rim of the rock. Here they came, gentling into the channel between the rock and the cliffs. Spiros’s brother wore slacks; both men were naked from the waist up; Spiros had the tiller. And his brother had a shotgun!

  One chance. Only one chance.

  The boat’s nose came inching forward, began to pass directly below. Geoff gave a mad yell, heaved at the loose wedge of rock. For a moment he thought it would stick and put all his weight into it. But then it shifted, toppled.

  Below, the two Greeks had looked up, eyes huge in tanned, startled faces. The one with the shotgun was on his feet. He saw the falling rock in the instant before it smashed down on him and drove him through the bottom of the boat. His gun went off, both barrels, and the shimmering air near Geoff’s head buzzed like a nest of wasps. Then, while all below was still in a turmoil, he aimed himself at Spiros and jumped.

  Thrown about in the stern of his sinking boat, Spiros was making ready to dive overboard when Geoff’s feet hit him. He was hurled into the water, Geoff narrowly missing the swamped boat as he, too, crashed down into the sea. And then a mad flurry of water as they both struck out for the shore.

  Spiros was there first. Crying out, wild, outraged, frightened, he dragged himself from the sea. He looked round and saw Geoff coming through the water—saw his boat disappear with only ripples to mark its passing, and no sign of his brother—and started at a lop-sided run up the beach. Towards Gwen. Geoff swam for all he was worth, flew from the sea up onto the land.

  Gwen was running, heading for the V in the cliff under the waterfall. Spiros was right behind her, arms reaching. Geoff came last, the air rasping in his lungs, Hell’s fires blazing in his heart. He’d drawn blood and found it to his liking. But he stumbled, fell, and when he was up again he saw Spiros closing on his quarry. Gwen was backed up against the cliff, her feet in the water at the shallow end of the vile pool. The Greek made a low, apish lunge at her and she struck at him with her spear.

  She gashed his face even as he grabbed her. His hand caught in the loose material of Geoff’s shirt, tearing it from her so that her breasts lolled free. Then she stabbed at him again, slicing him across the neck. His hands flew to his face and neck; he staggered back from her, tripped, and sat down in chest-deep water; Geoff arrived panting at the pool and Gwen flew into his arms. He took the spear from her, turned it towards Spiros.

  But the Greek was finished. He shrieked and splashed in the pool like the madman he was, seemed incapable of getting to his feet. His wounds weren’t bad, but the blood was everywhere. That wasn’t the worst of it: the thing he’d tripped on had floated to the surface. It was beginning to rot, but it was—or had been—a young man. Rubbery arms and legs tangled with Spiros’s limbs; a ghastly, gaping face tossed with his frantic threshing; a great black hole showed where the bloated corpse had taken a shotgun blast to the chest, the shot that had killed him.

  For a little while longer Spiros fought to be rid of the thing—screamed aloud as its gaping, accusing mouth screamed horribly, silently at him—then gave up and flopped back half-in, half-out of the water. One of the corpse’s arms was draped across his heaving, shuddering chest. He lay there with his hands over his face and cried, and the flies came swarming like a black, hostile cloud from the cave to settle on him.

  Geoff held Gwen close, guided her away from the horror down the beach to a sea which was a deeper blue now. “It’s OK,” he kept saying, as much for himself as for her. “It’s OK. They’ll come looking for us, sooner or later.”

  As it happened, it was sooner…

  THE PIT-YAKKER

  When I was sixteen, my father used to say to me: “Watch what you’re doing with the girls; you’re an idiot to smoke, for it’s expensive and unhealthy; stay away from Raymond Maddison!” My mother had died two years earlier, so he’d taken over her share of the nagging, too.

  The girls? Watch what I was doing? At sixteen, I barely knew what I was doing! I knew what I wanted to do, but the how of it was a different matter entirely. Cigarettes? I enjoyed them; at the five-a-day stage, they still gave me that occasionally sweet taste and made my head spin. Raymond Maddison? I had gone to school with him, and because he lived so close to us we’d used to walk home together. But his mother was a little weak-minded, his older brother had been put away for molesting or something, and Raymond himself was thick as two short planks, hulking and unlovely, and a very shadowy character in general. Or at least he gave that impression.

  Girls didn’t like him: he smelled of bread and dripping and didn’t clean his teeth too well, and for two years now he’d been wearing the same jacket and trousers, which had grown pretty tight on him. His short hair and little piggy eyes made him look bristly, and there was that looseness about his lips that you find in certain idiots. If you were told that ladies’ underwear was disappearing from washing lines, you’d perhaps think of Raymond. If someone was jumping out on small girls at dusk and shouting boo!, he was the one who’d spring to mind. If the little-boy-up-the-road’s kitten got strangled…

  Not that that sort of thing happened a lot in Harden, for it didn’t. Up there on the northeast coast in those days, the Bobbies on the beat were still Bobbies, unhampered by modern “ethics” and other humane restrictions. Catch a kid drawing red, hairy, diamond-shaped designs on the school wall, and wallop!, he’d get a clout round the ear hole, dragged off home to his parents, and doubtless another wallop. Also, in the schools, the cane was still in force. Young people were still being “brought up”, were made or at least encouraged to grow up straight and strong, and not allowed to bolt and run wild. Most of them, anyway. But it wasn’t easy, not in that environment.

  Harden lay well outside the fringes of “Geordie-land”—Newcastle and environs—but real outsiders termed us all Geordies anyway. It was the way we spoke; our near-Geordie accents leapt between soft and harsh as readily as the Welsh tongue soars up and down the scales; a dialect that at once identified us as “pit-yakkers,” grimy-black shambling colliers, coal miners. The fact that my father was a Harden greengrocer made no difference: I came from the colliery and so was a pit-yakker. I was an apprentice wood-cutting machinist in Hartlepool?—so what? My collar was grimy, wasn’t it? With coal dust? And no matter how much I tried to disguise it, I had that accent, didn’t I? Pit-yakker!

  But at sixteen I was escaping from the image. One must, or sex remain forever a mystery. The girls—the better girls, anyway—in the big towns, even in Harden, Easington, Blackhill and the other colliery villages, weren’t much impressed by or interested in pit-yakkers. Which must have left Raymond Maddison in an entirely hopeless position. Everything about him literally shrieked of his origin, made worse by the fact that his father, a miner, was already grooming Raymond for the mine, too. You think I have a down on them, the colliers? No, for they were the salt of the earth. They still are. I merely give you the background.

  As for my own opinion of Raymond: I thought I knew him and didn’t for a moment consider him a bad sort. He loved John Wayne like I did, and liked to think of himself as a tough egg, as I did. But nature and the world in general hadn’t been so kind to him, and being a bit of a dunce didn’t help much either. He was like a big scruffy dog who sits at the corner of the street grinning at everyone going by and wagging his tail, whom nobody ever pats for fear of fleas or mange or whatever, and who y
ou’re sure pees on the front wheel of your car everytime you park it there. He probably doesn’t, but somebody has to take the blame. That was how I saw Raymond.

  So I was sixteen and some months, and Raymond Maddison about the same, and it was a Saturday in July. Normally when we met we’d pass the time of day. Just a few words: what was on at the cinema (in Harden there were two of them, the Ritz and the Empress—for this was before Bingo closed most of them down), when was the next dance at the Old Victoria Hall, how many pints we’d downed last Friday at the British Legion. Dancing, drinking, smoking, girls: it was a time of experimentation. Life had so many flavors other than those that wafted out from the pit and the coke ovens. On this Saturday, however, he was the last person I wanted to see, and the very last I wanted to be seen with.

  I was waiting for Moira, sitting on the recreation-ground wall where the stumps of the old iron railings showed through, which they’d taken away thirteen years earlier for the war effort and never replaced. I had been a baby then but it was one of the memories I had: of the men in the helmets with the glass faceplates cutting down all the iron things to melt for the war. It had left only the low wall, which was ideal to sit on. In the summer the flat-capped miners would sit there to watch the kids flying kites in the recreation ground or playing on the swings, or just to sit and talk. There was a group of old-timers there that Saturday, too, all looking out across the dark, fuming colliery toward the sea; so when I saw Raymond hunching my way with his hands in his pockets, I turned and looked in the same direction, hoping he wouldn’t notice me. But he already had.

  “Hi, Joshua!” he said in his mumbling fashion, touching my arm. I don’t know why I was christened “Joshua”: I wasn’t Jewish or a Catholic or anything. I do know why; my father told me his father had been called Joshua, so that was it. Usually they called me Josh, which I liked because it sounded like a wild-western name. I could imagine John Wayne being called Josh. But Raymond occasionally forgot and called me “Joshua.”

  “Hello, Raymond!” I said. I usually called him “Ray,” but if he noticed the difference he didn’t say anything.

  “Game of snooker?” It was an invitation.

  “No.” I shook my head. “I’m, er, waiting for someone.”

  “Who?”

  “Mind your own business.”

  “Girl?” he said. “Moira? Saw you with her at the Ritz. Back row.”

  “Look, Ray, I—”

  “It’s OK,” he said, sitting down beside me on the wall. “We’re jus’ talking. I can go any time.”

  I groaned inside. He was bound to follow us. He did stupid things like that. I decided to make the best of it, glanced at him. “So, what are you doing? Have you found a job yet?”

  He pulled a face. “Naw.”

  “Are you going to?”

  “Pit. Next spring. My dad says.”

  “Uh-huh.” I nodded. “Plenty of work there.” I looked along the wall past the groundkeeper’s house. That’s the way Moira would come.

  “Hey, look!” said Raymond. He took out a brand new Swiss Army penknife and handed it over for my inspection. As my eyes widened he beamed. “Beauty, eh?”

  And it was. “Where’d you get it?” I asked him, opening it up. It was fitted with every sort of blade and attachment you could imagine. Three or four years earlier I would have loved a knife like that. But right now I couldn’t see why I’d need it. OK for wood carving or the Boy Scouts, or even the Boys’ Brigade, but I’d left all that stuff behind. And anyway, the machines I was learning to use in my trade paled this thing to insignificance and made it look like a very primitive toy. Like a rasp beside a circular saw. I couldn’t see why Raymond would want it either.

  “Saved up for it,” he said. “See, a saw. Two saws! One for metal, one for wood. Knives—careful!—sharp. Gouge—”

  “That’s an auger,” I said, “not a gouge. But…this one’s a gouge, right enough. Look,” and I eased the tool from its housing to show him.

  “Corkscrew,” he went on. “Scissors, file, hook…”

  “Hook?”

  “For hooking things. Magnetic. You can pick up screws.”

  “It’s a good knife,” I told him, giving it back. “How do you use it?”

  “I haven’t,” he said, “—yet.”

  I was getting desperate. “Ray, do me a favor. Look, I have to stay here and wait for her. And I’m short of cigs.” I forked out a florin. “Bring me a packet, will you? Twenty? And I’ll give you a few.”

  He took the coin. “You’ll be here?”

  I nodded, lying without saying anything. I had an unopened packet of twenty in my pocket. He said no more but loped off across the road, disappearing into one of the back streets leading to Harden’s main road and shopping area. I let him get out of sight, then set off briskly past the groundkeeper’s house, heading north.

  Now, I know I’ve stated that in my opinion he was OK; but even so, still I knew he wasn’t to be trusted. He just might follow us, if he could—out of curiosity, perversity, don’t ask me. You just couldn’t be sure what he was thinking, that’s all. And I didn’t want him peeping on us.

  It dawns on me now that in his “innocence” Raymond was anything but innocent. There are two sides to each of us, and in someone like him, a little lacking in basic understanding…well, who is to say that the dark side shouldn’t on occasion be just a shade darker? For illustration, there’d been that time when we were, oh, nine or ten years old? I had two white mice who lived in their box in the garden shed. They had their own swimming pool, too, made out of an old baking tray just two and a half inches deep. I’d trained them to swim to a floating tin lid for bits of bacon rind.

  One day, playing with Raymond and the mice in the garden, I’d been called indoors about something or other. I was only inside a moment or two, but when I came back out he’d gone. Looking over the garden wall and down the street, I’d seen him tip-toeing off into the distance! A great hulk like him, slinking off like a cartoon cat!

  Then I’d shrugged and returned to my game—and just in time. The tin-lid raft was upside down, with Peter and Pan trapped underneath, paddling for all they were worth to keep their snouts up in the air trapped under there with them. It was only a small thing, I suppose, but it had given me bad dreams for a long time. So…instead of the hard nut I considered myself, maybe I was just a big softy after all. In some things.

  But…did Raymond do it deliberately or was it an accident? And if the latter, then why was he slinking off like that? If he had tried to drown them, why? Jealousy? Something I had that he didn’t have? Or sheer, downright nastiness? When I’d later tackled him about it, he’d just said: “Eh? Eh?” and looked dumb. That’s the way it was with him. I could never figure out what went on in there.

  Moira lived down by the high colliery wall, beyond which stood vast cones of coal, piled there, waiting to fuel the coke ovens. And as a backdrop to these black foothills, the wheelhouse towers rising like sooty sentinels, coming into view as I hurried through the grimy sunlit streets; a colliery in the summer seems strangely opposed to itself. In one of the towers a massive spoked wheel was spinning even now, raising or lowering a cage in its claustrophobic shaft. Miners, some still in their “pit black”, even wearing their helmets and lamps, drew deep on cigarettes as they came away from the place. My father would have said: “As if their lungs aren’t suffering enough already!”

  I knew the exact route Moira would take from her gritty colliery-street house to the recreation ground, but at each junction in its turn I scanned the streets this way and that, making sure I didn’t miss her. By now Raymond would have bought the cigarettes and be on his way back to the wall.

  “Hello, Josh!” she said, breathlessly surprised—almost as if she hadn’t expected to see me today—appearing like a ray of extra bright sunlight from behind the freshly creosoted fencing of garden allotments. She stood back and looked me up and down. “So, you’re all impatient to see me, eh? Or…maybe I was la
te?” She looked at me anxiously.

  I had been hurrying and so was breathing heavily. I smiled, wiped my forehead, said: “It’s…just that there was someone I knew back there, at the recreation ground, and—”

  “You didn’t want to be seen with me?” She frowned. She was mocking me, but I didn’t know it.

  “No, not that,” I hurriedly denied it, “but—”

  And then she laughed and I knew she’d been teasing. “It’s all right, Josh,” she said. “I understand.” She linked my arm. “Where are we going?”

  “Walking,” I said, turning her into the maze of allotments, trying to control my breathing, my heartbeat.

  “I know that!” she said. “But where?”

  “Down to the beach, and up again in Blackhill?”

  “The beach is very dirty. Not very kind to good clothes.” She was wearing a short blue skirt, white blouse, a smart white jacket across her arm.

  “The beach banks, then,” I gulped. “And along the cliff paths to Easington.”

  “You only want to get me where it’s lonely,” she said, but with a smile. “All right, then.” And a moment later: “May I have a cigarette?”

  I brought out my fresh pack and started to open it, but looking nervously around she said: “Not just yet. When we’re farther into the allotments.” She was six months my junior and lived close by; if someone saw her smoking it was likely to be reported to her father. But a few minutes later we shared a cigarette and she kissed me, blowing smoke into my mouth. I wondered where she’d learned to do that. Also, it took me by surprise—the kiss, I mean. She was impulsive like that.