by Heide Goody
"Oh?"
His lined brow knitted with consternation.
"Aberdaron and the surrounding area appears to have suffered a mass outbreak of honesty."
He suddenly looked round at a rumbling sound.
"Is that my car?"
~ooOOOoo~
Ben braced himself against the glove box as the cut down kitchen chair that was his seat jumped around inside the British Leyland Allegro.
"Brilliant idea of yours," said Ben as the car bounced down the track.
"I don’t think I invented sex," said Jayne.
"Ha ha," said Ben deadpan. "And you’re sure no one else will be coming down."
"I’ve padlocked the gate. Owen’s done for the day. It’s not fishing season. We will be undisturbed."
The sun had not quite set but the Porth Meuwdy valley was so steep-sided that the sun had completely vanished from sight and darkness was already descending. Jayne parked at the top of the slipway to the sea, tucked in between a stone-built boathouse and a pile of stacked lobster pots.
Ben rubbed his buttocks as he got out.
"These chairs are impossible to sit on."
"Ah, but they’re an integral part of the plan," said Jayne.
She opened the doors, removed the kitchen chairs and stacked them to one side. She climbed back in and rolled out the sleeping bags she had brought with her into the empty floor space.
"And our love nest is complete."
Ben got back in. It was surprising how spacious a car was without any seats.
"Clever," he said. "You don’t think…?"
"What?" said Jayne.
"Is this romantic enough? Two sleeping bags on the floor of an Allegro?"
"With the sweet aroma of seaweed and the sight of old Peter’s lobster pots for company? It’s what we’ve got and, besides, it’s not the surroundings I’m interested in."
Ben leant in and kissed her.
"It’s cold," she said.
"Sleeping bags?"
"Sleeping bags."
Ben was half inside his sleeping bag when Jayne coughed pointedly.
"Unless you’re a truly astonishing man," she said, "it’s unlikely were going to be able to have sex whilst in separate sleeping bags."
"You want to squeeze in?" he said.
Jayne unzipped the side of his sleeping bag.
"We’ll zip the two together and make one big bag."
"Wow. You’re not just a pretty face."
"Wait until you see the rest of me."
~ooOOOoo~
Ewan thanked Lydia as she passed him a fresh mug of tea.
"Lydia," he said. "I've been meaning to ask you. Have you asked Jessie to find you a man? I found another one of those poor unfortunate fellows trapped up by the shed again yesterday. He'd been birdwatching off the road to Porth Oer and she'd herded him all the way up here."
"Well, really dad, that would clearly be a ridiculous thing to do," said Lydia, avoiding his gaze. "So, tell me about the outbreak that you're working on."
"The first cases were reported yesterday afternoon. Huw, the dodgy butcher in Capel Bryn told all his customers to avoid the pork and ham joints as he couldn’t guarantee that they had actually come from pigs."
"You’ve had an eye on him for months," said Agnes.
Ewan nodded.
"He told everyone who came in the shop that at least half of his meats had come from Irish ponies."
"Overcome by guilt?" suggested Nerys.
Ewan shook his head.
"The traffic warden in Pwllheli wrote apology notes on every ticket she issued, most explaining that she would like to quit her job but she now depends on the income since her husband ran off with a librarian from Bangor."
"Embarrassing."
"This morning, a headteacher in Pwllheli loudly declared that her students were disgusting trolls, as ugly and as unemployable as their parents."
"She’ll be in trouble when the parents find out," said Lydia.
"It was at a parent/teacher meeting," said Ewan.
~ooOOOoo~
It might have been winter but the mere act of wriggling down inside a sleeping bag in their clothes had made Jayne all hot and bothered. She also realised that, even in a doubled up sleeping bag, there wasn’t that much room for two people.
The number of elbows they had between them seemed to have multiplied tenfold. She had already poked Ben twice in the face whilst taking off her dress. Ben in return had given her a sharp jab in the boobs while undoing his own trousers.
But at least contact had been made.
She hadn’t even bothered letting Ben struggle with her bra and had slipped it off herself. She did her best to ignore the fleeting look of panic that appeared on Ben’s face when her breasts were unleashed. It might have been her imagination but he seemed almost unwilling to touch them as though either he or they might explode if he did.
He also seemed to be having issues with her underwear, although she suspected that might be her fault. In a perhaps misguided effort to layer sexiness upon sexiness, she had put on a thong, and a pair of French knickers and a suspender belt. Already one of the suspender straps had pinged free like a mousetrap and snapped one of Ben’s fingers. In his hasty desire to cover up the incident and gain access, he had managed to tie her underthings into a cat’s cradle of lace and elastic.
"Here," she said and crouched down into the sleeping bag to resolve the Gordian knot of lingerie he had created.
She freed herself and then found herself wedged sideways with her head thrust against Ben’s stomach.
"Bit stuck here," she said with some difficulty in the confined and increasingly hot space.
"Hang on," said Ben and tried to angle himself away from her.
She put her hand on his groin and he made a noise like someone going over the first big dip of a rollercoaster. He wriggled involuntarily and she slipped free.
"You’ve got a condom on already," she said, reporting back on her explorations. "You slipped that on without me noticing."
"I put it on back at the house."
She tried to straighten her tangled hair, hoping her face didn’t look as flushed as it felt.
"Aren’t you meant to put that on when you’re… you know, standing to attention?"
"I did," he said.
"But since then, driving down, you must have…" She looked into his eyes. "Blimey, boy, how long have you had that stiffy?"
Ben looked up in thought.
"I’m going to go with nineteen ninety-eight," he said and kissed her.
And then finally he put his hands on her naked breast and neither he nor they exploded and nor did he attack them as if he was kneading a ball of dough. And then, very, very slowly one of his hands began to crawl south down her body, like a hyena approaching the corpse of a lion, hungry yet fearful that it might leap and…
"Oh, God," she sighed.
Ben kissed her more deeply. She rolled against him, reached down to take hold of him.
"Ow," he exclaimed.
"What did I do?" she said.
"There’s something digging into me," said Ben, arching his back.
Ben pawed at the object through the sleeping bag material.
"Has your dad left some tools in the car?"
"Probably."
"Here it is," he said, grasping something.
There was a click and Jayne felt the earth move but definitely not in a good way.
"Handbrake!" yelled Ben as the car began to roll forward.
Jayne swore, raised herself up on her hands and looked out of the windscreen. Ben was scrabbling for the handbrake but Jayne already saw that it was too late. The car had crested the top of the short, steep slipway and was accelerating rapidly towards the waterline.
In the final moment of blind panic, Jayne recalled reading a Cosmopolitan magazine survey in which forty percent of men had declared that they would want to die in the throes of passion with a naked woman astride them. Sadly, Jayne had no time to e
xplain to Ben how lucky he was to be in such a position. No time at all.
One minute later, after a lot of splashing, shrieking and stumbling, Ben and Jayne staggered into the shallows, accompanied by the loud usage of more swear words than it was decent for any person to know. Something huge, translucent and rubbery drifted against Ben’s thigh.
"Jellyfish!" he squealed.
Jayne pushed the water-filled condom aside and hauled her goose-pimpled fiancé onto the slipway.
"G-God, I’m sorry," he shivered.
Jayne looked at the sea. The roof of the orange Allegro stood just an inch above the waves, like a discarded lilo.
"Dad loved that car," she said.
"At least we’ve saved the s-seats," said Ben, pointing to the kitchen chairs up by the boathouse.
"We’ve got to get home before we freeze to death," said Jayne.
"We’re naked," said Ben, pointing out the obvious.
"You’re still wearing your socks," she replied.
Ben looked down at his sodden socks.
"This is the first and last time I’ll forgive you for wearing your socks to bed," she said.
"Okay," said Ben.
Jayne couldn’t help but reflect for a moment that the cold did weird things to the human body. A dip in the chilly sea appeared to have reduced Ben’s wedding tackle to a tiny wrinkled ball of skin no bigger than an acorn. Whereas her nipples were now painfully proud and hard and probably would now explode if Ben so much as looked at them.
"We need to find clothes," said Ben.
"Where?" she said. "I’m not going back in for them and nor are you."
Ben cast about and then pointed.
"I’ve got an idea."
~ooOOOoo~
The Ship Hotel was boarded up while repairs were being made to the WI-inflicted damage from the night before so Michael and Clovenhoof went to the Ty Newydd Hotel across the road. Michael bought Clovenhoof his customary Lambrini but, feeling that the ascetic spirituality of the monastery had rubbed off on him a little, Michael ordered only a mineral water for himself.
Despite the chill of the evening, they took their drinks onto the beachfront terrace where they could talk privately.
"We have a mystery on our hands," said Michael.
"How do they make Lambrini taste so bollock-bouncingly fantastic?" suggested Clovenhoof.
"No. The monastery."
Clovenhoof nodded.
"Indeed. Why would a bunch of dress-wearing men choose to live in a draughty castle with only other dress-wearing men for company?"
"You’re not taking this seriously," said Michael with a harrumph.
"I don’t take anything seriously," said Clovenhoof.
"You know, this could be the reason for my presence here."
"What?"
"On Earth. The Almighty sent me here for a purpose and perhaps this is it."
Clovenhoof gave a violently loud bark of laughter.
"You arrogant arse, Michael. You have been sent here as a punishment. You joined an attempted coup in the Celestial City."
"I didn’t know that was what St Peter was doing!"
"Then you’re a fool as well as a twat! Point is, you weren’t sent to Earth, you were sent away from the Celestial City. There is no purpose to life on Earth and you have no mission."
Michael shook his head dismissively.
"And yet we have been presented with this mystery."
"What mystery?"
"One," said Michael, counting on his fingers, "I find myself on an island that, unless I’m a sleep-swimmer, I had no way of reaching. Two, there’s a monastery dedicated to a saint who must exist yet is neither in Heaven or Hell. Three, there has been a sudden spate of unnaturally truthful utterances across the area, possibly sparked by a preserve from a winter-flowering fruit tree."
"The Jam of Truth!" declared Clovenhoof with theatrical pomposity. "Are you kidding me?"
"No, There’s something going on." Michael paused in sipping his drinking. "And something else occurred to me. There are peacocks on Bardsey."
"So?"
"You know what peacocks symbolised to early Christians?"
"No, I don’t know and I don’t c- God’s balls! Is that who I think it is?"
Clovenhoof was on his feet and pointing along the beach. Michael turned.
Two figures approached along the sands, scuttling around the rocks to stay as close as possible to the sheltering cliff. Both were wearing luminous orange life jackets. One seemed to be wearing some sort of short skirt fashioned from strands of kelp. The other carried a strategically positioned clump of gorse over his groin. Apart from that, they were naked.
"That’s Ben," said Michael.
"And Jayne," said Clovenhoof.
"Not particularly dressed for the weather."
Clovenhoof nodded and then waved vigorously.
"Coo-ee!" he shouted.
Clovenhoof saw Ben look up and, although he was not a good lip-reader, particularly at a distance, Ben’s unheard response to being spotted was perfectly clear.
"I think they’re trying to hide from us," said Clovenhoof.
"You, perhaps," said Michael.
There was the sudden clatter of claws and Jessie rounded the corner onto the terrace, some form of clothing clamped into her mouth.
"She’s brought them clothes," said Michael. "That dog really is a marvel."
Clovenhoof grabbed Jessie as she went past and dragged the underpants from her mouth. He stuffed them deep into his pocket and released her.
He vaulted the terrace railing to the beach twelve feet below and trotted over to the bedraggled pair. Ben, with the wide-eyed panic of a cornered animal, jiggled on the spot, unable to decide where to run and then, seeing there was no escape, stopped and stood still.
"Go on," he said. "Laugh. It’s what you do."
Clovenhoof pointed at Jayne’s life jacket.
"Owen said I couldn’t keep mine."
"Well, we had to sort of… borrow these ones from his boat," she said.
"You stole them? Why?"
She gave him a blank stare.
"We were naked," she said.
"And afraid of catching our death of cold," added Ben.
Clovenhoof tutted.
"And, you know, if I had stolen one, I wouldn’t have heard the end of it."
Jayne gave him a withering look.
"Well, you know what, you can have mine –"
"Thanks."
Clovenhoof reached forward and unzipped her jacket to take it from her.
"- when I’ve finished with it!" she shrieked.
Spring finally came to Bardsey, and the island acted as a handy stopover for multiple species of migratory birds who returned to Britain every year in the perpetual belief that the summer climate would suit them perfectly.
For the monks, they noticed mainly that both the temperature and the rainfall had gone up. However, there was only a light drizzle in the air as Brother Sebastian showed Abbot Ambrose some of the external repairs to the monastery stonework.
"What do you think?" said Sebastian with a dramatic flourish of his arms.
The abbot looked at the wall and the large shaped stones where a gaping hole had once been.
"When did you get this done?" he asked, incredulous.
"This weekend, Father Abbot. Owen brought the materials over on the boat."
"One weekend’s work? But…"
The abbot was struck speechless. It was seamless, better than the original even.
"You like it, don’t you?" said Sebastian.
The abbot nodded.
"You have worked something miraculous here, brother."
Sebastian grinned.
"Ready for the surprise?"
He stepped forward and rapped the repaired wall with his knuckle. It gave a hollow echo.
"It’s fibre glass!" he said. "Brilliant, isn’t it? Looks like the real thing. Costs next to nothing."
The abbot felt something sag and
snap inside him.
"It’s not real."
"Nope."
"And so, inside, there’s still a hole."
"A covered hole."
"And the unsupported ceiling stones in the corridor?"
"Will still need propping up. But just until we raise enough money to make the proper repairs. But it’s all secure. Perfectly safe."
Sebastian thumped the genuine stonework to make his point. A piece of stone fell from on high and landed on the abbot’s open-sandaled foot. The abbot winced.
Sebastian was about to offer his apologies when a much larger stone detached itself from the wall above and slammed into his own foot. Sebastian hopped around, hissing and gasping and trying very hard not to swear. He thought he heard the abbot say something that sounded like, "vengeance seven times over" but he was so intent on rubbing his squashed foot that he couldn’t be sure.
By the time he had soothed the pain away and was able to stand properly again, the abbot was simply stood, gazing sadly at Sebastian’s fibre glass wall.
"You’re not happy, Father Abbot?" said Sebastian.
"It’s very clever, brother," the abbot said in a dead voice. "Ingenious."
He turned and walked away.
Suddenly, the abbot felt very old. He was very old, of course, but at this moment he felt ten thousand years old as though the weight of history was going to bear him down to the ground and crush him.
He struggled under that weight all the way to the orangery. The prior sat in his bath-chair and, for once, the abbot felt older and more frail than his brother.
"I think I’ve had enough," said the abbot, approaching the prior and sitting down on the wooden wall of one of the raised beds.
He looked at the prior and, in one of those rare moments, the prior looked back.
"No point asking you. You’ve had enough too."
The prior blinked slowly.
"Look at this," said the abbot, produced a glass jar from his pocket and placed it on the bed wall next to him. Congealed apple preserve clung to its insides.
"They turned it into a jam," said the abbot and almost laughed. "God alone knows what effect it had on them. There are rumours."
The abbot put the jar away.
