by Peter Wells
‘Open wide,’ Geoff said, electing to pay his brother back for a small lifetime of insults.
Dirk made grim and threatening sounds.
‘But Dirt likes eating worm,’ said Geoff softly.
I lent down and, my fingers passing by the extreme heat given off by his cock, I sent a column of warm ticklish air into Dirk’s ear. His mouth, as I knew it would, fell open. A swift series of clicks happened down his throat, almost begging noises. His cock jerked up into the hard repentance of erection.
Geoff very succinctly placed the worm in the open hole of Dirk’s mouth.
I kept blowing hot air right down into Dirk’s ear.
Dirk seemed oblivious to what was in his mouth, as he squirmed and laughed and protested and cried out in rage, all mixed in together. But then, on closing his mouth, he realised what was in it. He immediately tried to spit it out, in spraying belches. But Maddy had caught hold of his head and was singing softly, in an almost sweet tune:
‘Dirty must eat the wormy. Dirty must eat the wormy. Dirty must eat the wormy.’
Obediently, Geoff and I took up the chant.
Flushing again mutinously, Dirk’s jaw began to work.
We three gathered in front of him and watched him with a kind of exhilarated glee.
‘All of it,’ Geoff ordered his brother, giving his behind a quite brutal, even proprietorial, whack.
Dirk’s eyes moved to his brother and they stayed there for a long ominous moment. His jaw began to work, and we watched him in complete silence, as he swallowed with difficulty, then tried to cough the worm up, spattering saliva and worm out in all directions.
While this was happening my brother did a strange thing: he pulled along the curtain so that a pale white light entered the hut and bathed us all.
I was amazed that the ordinary light of the world still existed.
For a long second we looked at ourselves in complete silence.
We were brothers.
Underwater
THIS WAS OUR favourite game.
Our longest running serial.
How to escape.
From a sinking car.
WE ARE LYING there in the warm shallows, little ripple of waves nibbling along the backs of our legs, hitting us softy, with sweet lips, where our legs meet.
It is summer.
The veil of water on our backs is transparent enough to be like a glaucous container which magnifies the sun’s strength so we feel its powerful imprint bearing down, stern and fabulous, rendering us (Ponky, Maddy and me) into a drowsy almost half-drugged state.
‘What would you do?’ I ask.
We watch the silent and even peaceful twirl downward of the car as it moves, irredeemably, towards the bottom.
PONKY AND I both know this from bottlefishing. We are pliant with the arcane knowledge of how one takes a preserving jar (hopefully with a narrow neck), how one ties round its mouth strong white string, then attaches a length to a floater. You fill the bottle with small snitches of white bread. You swim out to a peaceful part of the tide, far away from other swimmers, you claim a part of the sea. And then you fill the bottle slowly with the tide and let it peacefully, in a slow drone of fall, sink.
You leave the bottle alone.
You may lie on your back on the tide’s warm surface, but silently, and without motion. You must become as a lull of the waves, as the silent traverse of a cloud passing the sun.
The voices of people on the beach become thin, shadows scrape off the earth.
The floater suddenly agitates. It bobs under the weight of fish nibble. This is when you turn into a hunter.
Turning swiftly over, you penetrate the surface of the seaworld and, your eyes open, feet kicking powerfully, you enter another world.
Up above the sun lances the surface in prismatic spears, the soft sable bottom drifts and shifts, but you can see (your heart begins to pump with victory) inside the bottle, oddly enlarged is a small collection of fish. Diamond darts, rainbow scales, a moving fulcrum of dart and tinsel thither-hither, they hang, a cloud of sprats, an apprehension of intelligence gathered round the mute now disappearing white bread.
But as you approach (you the monster) dragging your own darkened shadow along with you so the light of the sun is momentarily quenched, this is when you must make your shark dive. You must attack the bottle before all the fish can withdraw. But already the school, the cloud of apprehension, has tinted and turned and glinted and flashed away into and along the vast corridor of the underwater world.
In the distance you see the strangely whitened legs of an elderly swimmer treading water. Your lungs are bursting. Your hand closes about the top of the jar. Inside a fish, two fish desperately try to engineer a rear movement. But you burst up through the water, into light; into sound; into warmth; and you carry in your hand the catch: one hundred and seventy sprats over one afternoon.
Ponky has taught me how to kill them with least pain. This is emetic. You simply dash their brains out in one sharp whack, swinging them by their tails. The rock becomes glutinous with a faintly red blood. Scales fall off. Tails stop twitching. Eyes become cloudy. Bodies stiff. Thus we experience death and overlook it for our own convenience.
But in those moments, of flying underwater, we have both, Ponky and I, watched the weighted bottle sink. We have witnessed miniature Titanics first of all fill partially then become weighted as a surge of sea gushes in then the weight begins to pull the vessel downward, downward, until now sinking, now falling, now twirling and catching the last rays of the sun, sending out a fitful glint of light, like a last cry, or whimper, now sinking further downward, always downward, turning and revolving, spinning downward as if the bottom of the sea is a magnetic core, as if all beings and things may find their natural destination there; to lie among the shattered sewer pipes, the old shoes, the lost bottom dentures. In its traverse Ponky and I witness again and again the final agonies of Geoff and Dirk’s uncle and aunt.
‘WHAT WOULD JA do?’
Ponky turns over, her back a special brown.
‘You have to wait,’ she says. ‘You have to wait till the car fills with water.’
She has this way of talking when she is imparting information. There is a generous heart in it, like the dark part inside a flower. But her lips form seriously, too, so you know, in your heart, you must listen, and listen carefully and slowly.
I feel a shiver running its silver slime all over my flesh. I shudder.
But how? How not to?
‘You mustn’t panic,’ she says. ‘Above all you must not panic. You must wait patiently. Conserving energy.’
I think of this.
‘You must wait for the car to fill with water.’
‘How do you breathe?’
‘Air is trapped inside the top of the car,’ Maddy then says authoritatively. I check a small rinse of annoyance inside me, that he is being a brainbox again, without my knowing anything.
‘You only need a small piece of air,’ Ponky says. ‘Trapped.’
Trapped my lips say. Trapped.
‘Yes,’ says Ponky slowly so I know I have to listen, ‘You must not panic but wait patiently.’
‘Water pouring in,’ I supply the imagery of panic.
‘Yes, you must sit there and wait until the water reaches almost the roof.’
‘Then the weight of the water inside the car equals the weight of the water outside,’ says Maddy slowly and bored.
‘I know!’ I cry out hotly, like you do when someone provides the answer to a favourite clue, thus spoiling all the joyful repetition of known responses, given in their right order, by the right person. ‘I know.’
The pressure of the external water must equal that of the internal water — then click! — a door shall open.
Ponky’s voice is now so low I must strain my ears to hear, as if in diminishing all sound down I too am straining to float out past the open car door.
‘Now!’ she cries. ‘Now! Now you must push the door open
and with the last piece of oxygen in your lungs, you must start your swim to the surface. But slowly!’ says Ponky wisely. She even raises her hand, in a strange almost judicial gesture. ‘You must swim to the surface slowly, even though your lungs are busting.’
‘Otherwise you die of the bends,’ says Maddy, losing interest and rolling over to feast his eyes on the light blitz fed directly into him by the sun.
For a second, none of us says anything. Ponk goes back to bashing out the brains of fish: quickly, efficiently, so, as she says, they feel no pain.
I get up, separate myself from gravity and pull all the world in with me as I slide off into the tide.
Changing Sheds
DIRK IS TAKING his swimming togs off under water. He struggles them off in quick excitable tugs. Up above on the surface of the sea he spouts water out, like a whale.
We have run down the pink asphalt path from the changing sheds.
Dirk is laughing and wrenching his togs down at the same time, almost delirious with giggles. He has slipped his secret out from under his togs as soon as he gets under the water and now he shakes it about, screaming with laughter, drunk on the freedom of having shaken his secret out into the world.
We all take turns in diving below the water. We spout out the sea, screaming with laughter at the sheer celerity of our secret.
For we have just come from inside the changing sheds.
In there is a zoo of secretiveness, the very collection of all its covert forms, growing up like mould in the dank wateriness and wry pissy smells.
Here we glimpse, with carefully noncommittal eyes, vast donkey buttocks of ancient men, white as clotted cheese and somehow bestial as they bend, winding down their soggy old wool costumes from Before-the-War. There are also those other men whose heads turn like antennae in the shade and, with one expert flick of their wrist, they open out the misshapen dangle of their elephantine protuberances, smuggled up into dark rings of hair which blossom against the whiteness of their flesh.
All men — and even their subservient slaves: boys, growing up with aching slowness to mimic them — all men have this other x-ray on their flesh, the shape engraved over their nakedness (the ghostly shape of their togs) so, in the changing shed, it is as if we glimpsed how we might see them out in the sunlight, in broad daylight, if we possessed Superman’s sight to penetrate all things, to look beyond everything covert, to the true heart of the matter.
But Dirk, Geoff, Maddy and I know the rules of the changing shed, which is that one must always affect a total seriousness and that all momentary dalliances of glimpsing and staring must be done in a carefully choreographed casualness — this is the hidden music of this room — all men are drenched in its sound, and the speech which emits from their mouths is as if it comes from underwater it is so exaggeratedly slow and impounded by the sheer weight of being hearty — these naked giants stand there with their idiotic protuberances so casually commenting on the weather, or the score, something they always keep as a game to ululate among themselves, so as they move towards the shower (that man there with the suntanned back stroked all over with a dark coppery hair, his almost phosphorescently white bum, and that man there with a v of hair running into the small of his back like an arrow pointing down to his pleat) — they flack their towels over their backs and — all the while to cover their nakedness, convert their secrets into a null thing, they keep up a never-ending conversation about passes, catches, scrums, tackles and other prevaricating rigmarole by which men touch men, so relax and open are they, so knowledgeable are they about the arcane laws of this game — of men not touching men.
WE HAVE EACH of us placed this world inside our eyes letting our pupils grow wider with the sheer casual intensity of this world of naked men, taking place inside the darkened ellipsis of the changing sheds.
We also note the glancing blow of some strangers who register our presence, and dance a slight mocking smile upon their lips: these men, too, we know, we know that they know we know. They welcome us to this world of unpeeling and unshrouding, where some men edge a wet dank costume down their legs while they hold, tensely, a drooping flag of towel across their secret, whereas other men simply peel away as unwanted the shade over themselves and turn so swiftly that their dangle whirls outwards. They walk their nakedness across the concrete, whistling.
‘Hey watchit, Blue!’
As you run into their legs, feeling the light whip of their hairiness as it twitches across your face. Their fingers thieving through your hair.
‘What’s the hurry, Blue?’
We fill our lungs with all the oxygen of this world then race out into sunlight, blinding ourselves so we can carry the litmus of everything we see and do not see and imagine and know, and then flow throw ourselves in the sea. Here we float the ideograms and hope to fit into them.
‘LOOK!’ CRIES DIRK now, and we dive down through the aqueous depth.
For we know on the summer days the busy days there is a world down below the surface completely different from the world above the waterline. One world is strangely magnified and densified so it is as if space is given an added dimension. Flesh becomes statuesque, bled of blood and changed into a strange greenish pallor, moving with a poetic, aquatic slow motion. There we see couples bobbing on the surface joined together but as we cut down through the waterline we see them jointed in together, in one clung octopus connection, moving in abstract judders, like a fish on a hook.
We surface gradually, with all the mischief of a thief, and see the couple (not yet engaged) serenely thinking their secret is hidden, a flagship of deceit. Down below again we see the man’s hand slide down and in the strangely delayed world of underwater — that province of wrecks and drownings and cars sinking slowly downward — we see the man’s hand struggle to release his secret from his togs, but the whole weight of water, we know, would render him ineffectual.
A different law rules down here.
Underneath the surface.
We see old breasts floating, and the varicose-veined legs of ancient women nobbled as they bounce up and down on the ocean floor; we see hands making covert adjustment, and one day we swim underwater, holding our breaths and see, yes, the soft effulgence of yellow piss flower and bloom out of Mr Casper the councillor’s togs. We witness his deflowering. (Up above he is grave with dignity as he attempts to direct the traffic of the entire beach, raising his hand in noble gestures, upholstering his slack body with the invisible robes of plush velvet and dyed rabbit.) Yet with what joyful vehemence down below does he piddle! The craven smile of all tricksters distorts his noble face on the surface. ‘What a beaut day,’ he yells out to Mr Lamb, converting the area of water around him into real estate.
This knowledge we throw off as superfluous as we dive down, screaming and giggling to look at the white greenness of Dirk’s bumcheeks, all dimpled with little craters and mountains, with threads of sun-shade flowing all over them. His cock hangs out, semi-hard at a strange angle, like a railway signal half paralysed. Its head, with the slit eye, looks suddenly comic and … alone.
Geoff dives down and pushes himself through Dirk’s legs. He upends him. As Dirk sinks I see his face, the wreck of his face: his pretended upset. But then as he layers back into the soft eiderdown of sea, as he sinks, laughing, I feel his eyes reach up towards me, and in them is a form of gilded wire, so for one long moment we hold in perfect stillness.
The nub of his cock is the last thing I see.
Geoff alone stands there. He serenely smiles. And he places his hands on the very top of the sea’s surface, balancing.
The Secret History of the Beach
THE BEACH IS full of secrets and we penetrate every one of them. There are temples on this beach, shrines which have a special place in our new brotherhood.
Geoff, Dirk, Maddy and I know every one of them, for we, led along by Maddy, have investigated them, lingered before them, sat in them by the hour, waited in them thoughtfully and read every message on the walls.
> One of the chief temples is the bus-shelter.
This shrine, as is perhaps suitable for such a notable, yet somehow sublimely anonymous and overlooked building, is a cross between a municipal amenity and a building carefully shaped to suggest holidays, beaches and freedom. On one hand it is painted a thick municipal grey, yet its roof is luxuriantly tiled, the ends of it, Maddy has pointed this out, arch up into little municipal gods: spirits guarding the temple. (Typically, Geoff, Dirk and I have not seen these gods, or rather, in seeing them, we have no way of comprehending what they might mean, their significance, so we have, as it were, undone what we have just seen, carefully unstitching any embroidered meaning, preferring the comfort of eternal blankness.)
But Maddy has instructed us on what we are, in fact, seeing so now we nod, knowledgeably, not even knowing what we are agreeing to, so greedy are we for knowledge in any form. This temple has been, perhaps, carefully drawn up by a weary young architect, hoping to make something of what is really only a tram terminal, by giving it a slightly elegant shape, deep eaves, a tiled roof, he has also created two deep bays in which there are seats for those who would be eternally waiting.
The fact is, however, these bays exist only as a form of waste space, a necessary separation for the ablutions of each sex.
We had of course crept into the women’s toilets which offered much less interest than the barnlike nature of the men’s toilets. Open to the salt air, the doors had pointed palisades which gave them an embattled look, as if we were in fact in some kind of redoubt.
Each time we entered this little side chapel, we would look for new words, new scrawlings, new and inventively desperate or covert messages. The urinal was always covered with a beautiful green slime, water running perpetually as if it must be ready at any hour, at any depth charge of night, to receive new pilgrims searching for what lay behind or within the secret of all secrets.
