'I want to be there and I want to see it – you standing tall, Malachy.'
Chapter Eighteen
The tide had turned to reveal the wide depth of the beach, and the gulls wheeled while searching for washed-up crabs and shells.
And they ate.
From the rucksack she had taken a tin of chicken in white sauce, another of rice, and one of peach slices in syrup. They passed the tins between them and scooped with their fingers at the meat, the rice and the peaches, licked the sauce and syrup off themselves.
Malachy felt the sand grains clog in his throat as he swallowed, and once she coughed hard and spat to clear her mouth. At the bottom of the bag, there was a small, collapsed burner and tablets in a sachet for lighting under it, and a rack the size of a palm for fastening over it, but the wind was too great and the rain too hard for them to try to heat the chicken or the rice – and the smell would have carried on the wind, with smoke that was a signature.
He made a rhythm for himself. With the binoculars he watched the skyline, where the white caps met the cloud, tracked the lenses over the dunes to the west and to the east, followed the flight of the ducks when they dived to feed, then back to the horizon, the roll of the waves and the clouds' chase. Each time he saw her, lingered on her, he thought she took longer to lick her fingers and nails, then her palm. Her face was pale and her lips; sand crusted her cheeks and settled on her glasses. All of her animation was in her tongue, working meat scraps, fruit, rice, sauce and syrup from her hand, licking and sucking. She sat with her shoulder pressed against his. When he lifted the binoculars, his elbow lurched against her arm. When he dropped them on their neck strap and reached to scoop from the tins, his elbow pressed against her chest and softness beneath the weatherproof coat, but he kept to the rhythm he had constructed and watched the sea, the beach and the dunes.
The tins were emptied.
She had her boots and the over-trousers inside the zipped-down sleeping-bag and he felt, through his elbow, the shiver of her body.
Through the lenses he saw the break of the waves far out and the spray leaping above the surf, but no darker shadow of a boat coming towards land. The gulls, in soft focus, were distorted, closer to him.
She shook in little convulsions. Malachy had reason to be there, huddled in soft sand and with bent grass stems around him, all that survived in the dunes. He had a purpose and she did not – should not have been there. Hunger took him back to the tin that had contained meat and sauce. For the last traces of it, his elbow against her chest, he pressed his forefinger, grimy and coated with sand, down into the tin and scraped its sides, his nail against the bottom. The skin caught the top edge, serrated with tiny teeth from the ripping out of the lid. Blood ran. No pain, but blood from a small wound spilled on to the can's base. She took his hand in hers, lifted it.
She gazed at him. Tiredness swelled the rims of her eyes at the limits of the frames of her spectacles, and hair, damp, limp, fell over them, but the eyes had brightness and light. Blood came from his cut and smeared her hand. Not looking away from him, not breaking her gaze, she slipped his finger between her lips and closed round it.
He felt her suck, swallow, and her tongue moved on the wound.
There was, at first, sweetness, gentleness – then the tongue brushed his finger with more force and the lips held it tighter.
She said, muffled, because her mouth held his finger and her tongue took the blood from it and closed the wound, 'I can't think of anything to talk about.'
The warmth from his finger ran in his hand.
'We could, if you wanted to, talk about the weather,' she said. 'Is it going to rain much longer? I think it's getting brighter in the west, don't you? The wind's not dropping, is it? Do you want to talk about the weather?'
Her tongue licked his finger and she swallowed his blood.
'If you won't talk about the weather, you could talk about damn hypothermia – or you could do something about it.'
With her free hand she pulled down a little more of the bag's zipper, but she held his finger in her mouth, and she wriggled to the side. He slipped into the bag, pushed into it the old brogue shoes and felt them run against her legs, then against the bag's bottom stitching and heaved his weight against her.
She grimaced. 'I've never done it like this before – get sand in me and I'll kill you.'
She reached behind him and dragged up as much of the zip as she could, and they were pressed together.
He felt the hardness of the pistol barrel gouge at his skin and the angles of the binoculars; he took his finger from her mouth and kissed her. He held her head, and her eyes did not close – as if the moment were too vital to go unseen – and his lips found hers and he tasted her breath and his own blood. He remembered what she had said to him, on a bench in a park of spring flowers: Do it like you mean it… Don't get any bloody ideas. He had done as he was told. It had not entered his mind that she had kissed him, under the blossom and watched by the search party, from affection. She squirmed in the bag.
'God, aren't you going to help? Do I have to do it all?'
There were zips and eyelets, buttons, belts and hooks, and they writhed together to free themselves.
He did not think it was love… but need.
'I don't have one, don't suppose you do – not to worry, not that time of the month. I can feel that bloody sand.'
The need was bred on emptiness, Malachy recognized it. The void of his life and a corresponding chasm in hers. Each of them with an unspoken loneliness burdening them. He felt her skin, its coldness, had his hands under her waterproof coat, her sweater and blouse, and his fingers moved with wonderment, as if privilege was given him, and she caught the hand where the wound had been and forced it lower. Their loneliness made it desperate. He heard the zipper of the bag torn open as he came across her. They clung to each other, and she stroked him and he buried himself in her, and then the motion calmed. She moaned. She bucked under him. It was as he had never known it before. She cried out, piercing, as the gulls did over them and he felt the ecstasy of it… It was for need, hers and his, and they fell apart. She had said: Do it like you mean it. He had, and he cradled her head. He thought it took them nowhere.
He crawled out of the bag. She swivelled on to her side and her back was to him. He did up the zips and buttons, reefed in his belt. He did not know of any future, only that emptiness must be filled. He lifted the binoculars, scanned and tracked.
'What can you see?'
He said, 'Only the waves and the clouds and the birds – but they'll come, I know i t… Thank you.'
'Crazy, isn't it? You being my friend, me not being your enemy. Mad, isn't it? If you saw me where you come from, whatever place it is, I'd be your enemy – and if you'd just pitched up in Bevin Close I wouldn't be your friend. But we're here.'
The voice dripped in his ear.
'Your thing is killing people… What's mine? I'm not bloody proud -1 do heroin from Afghanistan, and cocaine from Venezuela… Dean, have you been in Afghanistan? Sorry, sorry, not for me to ask. Forget that. We're friends and we don't ask, don't need to know. I often wonder what Afghanistan's like. It comes on the TV but that shows you nothing, just ruins and old tanks and kids without shoes and women who cover themselves. I tell you, straight up, I've made big money out of Afghanistan, five times the money I make out of Venezuela. I'm not hating you because you kill people, and you're not judging me for what I do.'
The voice rambled, incoherent. He let him talk. He understood most of what Ricky Capel said, and he tolerated it. He took help where he could find it, and when the usefulness of the help was finished he discarded it. He had put the fool's socks against the skin of his crotch and let them dry out against his body warmth, and then he had peeled them on to the feet he had massaged, then put the shoes back on the idiot's feet, pulled the laces tight and knotted them for him. It was critical to him to have the imbecile's help.