Swell
What he sees from the top of the little dune changes everything. All around him is suddenly re-rendered with a new aching sharpness and clarity.
Fine cuts and flurries of wind carve little whorls of fragile delicacy across the crusty top of the sand, so beautiful that it hurts inside.
Razor blades of light cleave the angled edges of the bare cliff, lying perfectly still and baking at the end of the beach. The cries of a pair of sea eagles pierce the silence as they wheel on invisible airs under the blue intensity of a sky being honed on the whetstone of a white-hot sun.
Emerging from the deep longshore channel, little waves break on the sand with a sound like crystal shattering, followed by sharp little cat hisses as the water spreads and retreats over its narrow bed of round pebbles.
He breathes. The tangy salt slices the seaweed into sharp and delicate slivers across his tongue. He feels his soul sliding along an ephemeral knife-edge of ecstatic and timeless being. His mind is full of joyful anticipation, a lust to perform and a complete absence of fear that is unfamiliar to him.
Surprised by this flood of feelings, he laughs aloud, freude, oh freude!
Enjoy it whilst you can, old man, he tells himself, this pleasure ignited by the capricious whim of the feckless gods. Daughter of the heavens it might well be, for what he sees from his lookout, what has wrought this joyous change in his world – is swell.
Gorgeous clean swell, breaking in clean white lines right across the reef – less than a kilometre from his lookout.
Best Not To Ask
“Best not to ask, darl,” says Vicky.
But she does ask, after lunch when they lie together lazy and replete, lying prone across the bed gently stroking the golden hairs on Jacko’s stomach silhouetted against an oval patch of filtered mid-afternoon sun on his skin.
She asks, and she feels the stomach muscles tense into patches of knotted rope under her fingers. He leans across to open the bedside table and she rises into a kneeling position next to him so not to impede his movement. She is admiring her own body in the wardrobe mirrors opposite when he rolls back smooth and quick. Her first thought is how strangely beautiful it is, a carved blade of bright shiny stainless steel, with deeply serrated front edge that somehow harmonises with the smooth surface around it, like a piece of art.
He draws the curved tip of the blade around the contours of her right breast. A little whimper escapes from her lips but she is unable to move. She sees a hairline of blood arcing across the bottom of her breast, following the course of the blade like the red condensation trail behind a high-flying silver jet. She hears laughter and splashes from the pool outside. Her heart throbs in her ears. From far away she hears You need to learn what you don’t need to know. She feels the quick slaps on her face, tastes blood in her mouth, a bright red smear across the silky white sheets as she is thrown over and entered from behind.
Now she is sobbing, violated, terrified, alone in the room – the knife is gone, Jacko is gone and gusts from an approaching rainstorm buffet the bamboo slats, banging them to and fro inside the windows.