She looks at me impatiently, water breaking at our feet, a rushing sound, a dragging back. This is the last thing she wants now. ‘And then?’
‘Then please make me believe it was only once, it was a mistake, it’s never going to happen again.’ I feel feeble asking this – I should be able to handle it – but I can’t. Can I trust her? Her eyes seem disappointed with me, glazed suddenly, distant. ‘Please!’
But before that there’s the bike ride, fast, cooling in the heat, the speed wrenching away thoughts before they can form, like being part of your own dream, watching yourself move but with no way of getting off or out.
Nick’s bike seems suddenly wider, heavier, taking the hills like a breeze, eating up gradients which have Dad’s Bentley wheezing. I’ve never done this: ride pillion on a motorbike through flashing hedgerows, dark and blurry, a wall of nothingness hurtling by on either side, like a mindblasting trip through a maze. The light beam ahead is a gunsight, a border patrol nightlight. We’re flying, feeling the bumps and falling into the curves, the machine noise and the speed drilling me hard, pumping my adrenalin. I’m in the helicopter napalming the geeks. There goes the village! There goes the whole of fucking Devon!
Then it’s different. We’re in the trees, spiraling down toward Sidmouth, dropping on to a shadowy blanket of lights that cuts off where the sea starts. This can’t be England. This can’t be my life. Why can’t it just go on like this, why does the speed have to stop?
Something alive darts across the road right in front of the bike and Nick almost jerks us off the road, but he steadies us, our necks craning back to see what it was. We continue our descent into town, the lights taking form, becoming houses and shops the way they do in music videos when a blur becomes a set. We’re moving through a network of one-way streets all leading to the sea, and it’s party night, a bunch of eighteen-year-olds are crisscrossing in and out of parked cars, gesturing back at us, moving hunkered down like insurgents, sliding past pub doorways in pursuit of some prey. We glide over the battlefield, glimpse a couple kissing or struggling by a bow-windowed shop, then Nick drives us straight at a curb, up on to the pavement, down a pedestrian alley and out onto the seafront where the others are waiting for us, John launching a beer bottle to smash in our path as we approach.
‘Don’t damage anything you can’t fix,’ Nick says quietly as we draw alongside them, his voice still carrying above the sound of his bike. He looks at Jessie, angled back behind John on John’s bike, and even in my ravaged state of mind I see that there’s something clear about Nick, something powerful in his intentions, which gives him the edge over John or anybody else. But I also get a flash that Jessie’s playing around, more than I thought. She’s teasing Nick, very quietly she’s flirting with John, and I’m not sure that I like that.
‘Where the fuck were you?’ Toe-rag quizzes Nick. He looks at me, the obvious cause of the hold-up. ‘You must have crawled here backwards.’
But Nick isn’t listening. There’s some unspoken communication going on between him and Jessica, whereby he seems quite deliberately to shut her out of his mind. Picking up on this, but at her own pace, with no evident submission, she gets off John’s bike, comes over and stands by me, looking as if she might have something to say but might just as easily walk away. I am expected to move, there’s no doubt about that, and for a moment I’m tempted not to, but there doesn’t seem much option so I slide off and stand faced with the prospect of a ride on John’s bike or no ride at all.
John is turning in tight circles in the middle of the road, waiting to go, waiting to move, frustrated by being here on the front and looking more out of place than usual with a backdrop of fake-elegant hotels, rats’ nests with Riviera pretensions, all palm fronds and colored lights, ready to be requisitioned by the government as proof that normal family holidays still take place. Couples walk along the sea front, robots, their kiddies in bed, their brains dead but perhaps troubled by basic motor responses to John’s manic circling, Toe-rag’s yodels and the general unease our little gathering seems to create.
I’m ready for John’s bike and whatever ugly surprises he wants to spring on me now. Jessie is draped around Nick and everyone seems ready to go, so I walk right in front of John and force him to stop, which he does, not interested in me any more, watching two panda-faced policemen staring at us from the safety of their car, as they wonder, ‘Shall we have a bit of fun with those boyos? Is it worth the hassle? Are they going to give us a real run for our money?’
I hop on behind John fast, hoping they haven’t had a chance to clock my young face, and as if by remote control the whole circus rolls out, Caz and Colin taking up the rear with what I presume to be the supplies of beer in an awkwardly clutched cardboard box.
Then it’s twice down the front just for good measure, cranking the noise level up, racing the bikes, thrilling the little teenyboppers waiting on the sea wall for their lives to change. John’s Suzuki feels different from Nick’s Norton, or maybe it’s John – unpredictable, a bit dangerous because he’s really quite stupid. The second time, he does a wheelie right across one of the mini roundabouts and nearly kills us as we scoot across the front of an oncoming car. We touch down without me falling off and I feel dizzy with fear or relief as he punches the throttle and takes off after Nick and Jessie up a hill, past a looming five-star Victorian hotel surrounded by a maximum-security wall, into darkness.
The water is cold, like it should be, and even though it freezes my balls off I don’t care because I’ve got a bottle of beer in my hand, the sight of Jessie’s and Caz’s and Caz’s friend’s tits ahead of me and anyway the night is muggy – warm and still – not like a night at all.
The bikes are parked at the edge of the beach, not one of the Wild Bunch being prepared to risk his tires on the rocks and pebbles, and we’ve all stripped down to our underpants, Caz’s friend making the biggest deal about getting into the water before she’d unhook her bra and then shrieking with the cold and chickening out until Toe-rag appeared suddenly behind her and offered a helping hand. Jessie, of course, leads the way, striking out into the water ahead of any of the boys, not even playful for a moment but throwing herself into it, cutting through the darkness with an urgency. As the beer hits my stomach I realize there’s no way I’m going to be able to drink any more tonight, so I discreetly bring the bottle down to waist level, under the water, and let the beer merge with the sea. I bob into the waves the way I’ve seen John do it – head first, no arms, nutting the water – and, shivering with cold, feel their pull, stronger than it ever seems in daylight. I can understand now the kick of a nighttime suicide from the beach – a swim right back into the hungry hole of your Maker.
‘Come on, girls!’ Toe-rag calls to those of us close to the shore – me and fat Colin included. ‘Watch your feet – the crabs bite at night!’
‘Fuck the crabs!’ John calls from farther out, his head coming in and out of view between moonlit waves. ‘Just no one piss in the water—’ He disappears briefly. ‘It attracts the sharks.’ Back into view, then gone again, his disembodied voice carrying over the swell. ‘Big bastards, hang around all summer looking for virgin meat.’
‘You should be all right then, Caz!’ Toe-rag calls, struggling to keep his head above water as he twists about close to me. A hand comes up clutching what I take at first to be seaweed, but then as he tosses the soggy mass in Caz’s direction I see that it’s his pants. ‘Here, wash these for me, would you? John won’t mind.’