Irene could not move any part of her body except her legs. Ineffectively she tapped her feet against his back. He seemed to like that too. He was literally, grinding her into the carpet. She could feel her back beginning to give with the strain when finally, with one last triumphant push, he reached orgasm. For her it was near agony. For him it was ecstasy. He took his tongue out of her throat and shouted out to her what he was doing to her and what was happening to him. As he lifted himself off her and fell back, she hauled herself onto the bed alongside him and clung to him tightly the way she always did. She got very little from him sexually and even less emotionally, and she always followed their brutal apology for love-making with the same embarrassing plea.
‘You do love me, Mark, don’t you?’
‘Yeah, yeah.’
It was barely a minute since he had thrust himself into that knee-trembling gut-weakening climax, but Mark was young and strong, bursting with unspent energy, eager to get on with his life. He swung his long legs over the bed, ran his fingers through his curly fair hair and, turning slightly, looked down at the girl who would let him take any pleasure he asked for. He knew he should feel something more than he did for her. He actually wanted to feel more. But the harsh truth was that once she had satisfied his intense sexual appetites he didn’t feel anything. Nothing at all.
‘Gotta go,’ he said.
‘But I thought you weren’t going.’
‘Oh come on Irene. Get real. This is work.’
She pulled the sheets and blankets around her neck and watched him dress. His towering height and the spread of his shoulders seemed to fill the room. Sometimes it was as if that baby face and its halo of curls must really belong to somebody else. Sheer power surged from every inch of Mark. His limbs were thick and big-boned, but his body was lean and sinewy and totally masculine. It was covered by a film of fine down, soft and shiny. A faint, almost transparent fuzz coated his legs, belly, chest and arms. There was even some of this fuzz on his shoulders and back. Around his penis the hair was longer and silkier but still curiously soft.
He coaxed his genitals into a pair of stretch underpants and pulled on his faded blue jeans. He fastened his flies carefully and adjusted his balls as he did so. The mirror reflected a satisfying bulge and he knew that Irene was watching him as she always did. Amazingly he felt a slight stirring again. He ignored it but he was tinglingly aware that the bulge had grown larger. He put on a checked Levi shirt, leaving several buttons undone to show his suntanned chest. Strange that a man so fair did not burn in the sun. But Mark tanned easily. His skin was a gleaming pale gold. He shoved a notebook into a rear pocket of his jeans and a handful of loose change from the dressing table into one of the side pockets.
For the last time he approached the bed. He slipped his right hand under the bedclothes, widened Irene’s legs, quickly felt the wet stickiness there, squeezed his fingers together, and with his usual roughness, plunged them into her.
Abruptly he left her. As he strode through the living room he glanced casually over his shoulder and called out ‘Bye.’
Irene was swiftly out of bed. She had wrapped Mark’s towelling dressing gown around her and stood peering nervously around the bedroom door.
‘Will you be late?’ she called.
The answer came through the already closed front door. ‘Dunno.’
Mark bounced down the stairs, wondering about the lineage possibilities from the nationals, and whether, if he put his mind to it, he could find something that would last the week for the splash — front page lead — in the Durraton Gazette, and give him a bit of an edge on the big boys. He unbuttoned the breast pocket of his shirt where he always kept his car keys, and gave the balding tyres of his ancient battered Mini Cooper a vaguely anxious glance as he unlocked the door and slipped into the driver’s seat.
‘Crazy,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Only a bloody reporter would be expected to go and ferret out cops when he can’t even afford to keep his car legal.’
He knew he could still live at home with his parents and save himself a fortune, he had done so for his first year or so on the paper after university, but there was no way he could conduct the kind of sex life he wanted and needed from Durraton Vicarage. The back seat of the mini did not lend itself to the games he liked to play.
He firmly dismissed all further thoughts of sex. The prospect of getting to grips with a major story had already wiped out any initial feelings of irritation at being disturbed. The girl he had left in his bed was now a million miles from his mind. She no longer mattered — anyway she would still be there for him when he returned, whenever that was. The violent private joy which had so recently engulfed his whole being had happened to another man. Now Mark was on the real job.
Mark lived at the top of Pelham Bay — on the edge of the woodland leading down to the cliffs and less than a mile from the beach. Born, bred, and schooled locally, he had many friends and contacts in the area. He knew his way around, and as he wound along the coast road had already decided which of his contacts he would visit first. Bill Turpin. Who else?
Four
Down by the beach it had been business as usual. Just up from the slipway, Bill Turpin’s lads — bare-chested and belligerently beautiful — were handing out the deckchairs.
In Pelham Bay things had been the same for as long as anyone could remember. Bill Turpin, getting older, but still raking in the holidaymakers’ cash just like shovelling sand off the beach. And a succession of young bloods, meaningless St Christophers nestling among newly sprouting body hair, showing off their bronzed torsos to the straw-hat brigade.
On this hot August Sunday, the deckchair boys leaned luxuriously sullen against the sea wall. Theirs was the summer job for the budding Romeos of Pelham Bay, and has always remained so. Some things never change. An ideally idle way for students and professional loafers to make some beer money and eye up the imported talent. A job calling for little or no mental effort.
Old Bill Turpin habitually wore baggy grey flannels and grubby gym shoes without laces, so he shuffled when he walked. He was shirtless and weathered ebony by years of sun, salt, and wind — mostly salt and wind as he lived in Pelham Bay. Against his dark, gnarled body, even the deckchair lads seemed pale, plump and baby-like.
Bill had been born sixty-six years earlier in a fisherman’s cottage just back from the harbour in the fishing village of Brinton, set on the river estuary just a few miles up the coast from Pelham Bay. He was a man fashioned by the cruelty of the times in which he had grown to manhood and then to middle age, his life blighted forever by forces and quarrels of which he had little knowledge and over which he had no control.
He came from a long line of fishermen. Men who knew from some deep instinct inside them where the fish would be that night. In season they caught salmon in the River Brin, stretching their nets across the river to trap the shoals of big rich fish swimming upstream to spawn. More often they sailed out to sea at night to catch herring and mackerel and whiting, and came back the next day or sometimes several days later with holds full of fish that they sold at the quayside.