Concentrate: get up, sensible rope-soled shoes on, she’d’ve loved some of those really silly embroidered peasantry ones but Colin said they weren’t genuine Dalmatian work, just made to fool tourists and he wasn’t being fooled, so no peasant shoes. Come on—forget the bastard ... Oh, she put her hand to her mouth; as if lightning was going to hit her, or her mother from 2000 or whatever it was miles off. Talking about her husband that way.
Resolutely she refused to let her day be spoiled.
She put in her bag everything she’d need; whether she went on the beach, the flowered bra and pants she had on’d do as a bikini like they’d had to all holiday, Colin always so ready to say indifferently, “You look fine,” and never ever bothering to buy her or even let her buy for herself, things new enough to let her convince her mirror she was still young and desirable, not even letting her go out to work and make some money to spend on herself, oh no that’d look as if he, a supermarket manager with a degree, couldn’t support his family himself. Bastard: he’d only married her to have someone to look down on. He wanted her to get wrinkled and ugly so he’d be sure she wouldn’t dare get away from him, she’d never find anyone else.
She clenched her fists, her teeth, “Forget him,” she screeched at the mirror. The maid appeared, neat and cool-looking in black and white uniform, faint puzzled air on face, mop in hand all feathers like a stuffed museum duck in dusty Millby Hall back home, “Madam?”
“Never mind, it doesn’t matter.”
“Plizz?”
“I’m going out, here’s the key,” a huge wooden-handled thing with number on like a dungeon-ward. Smile from the maid, the situation explained.
Down through the hotel’s dark corridors, past reception and the waiters, between meals watching “On the Buses” with subtitles and cackling like wicked children, out into the sun and the path round past the terrace to the beach ...
Should she have gone to the village instead. She could for once have strolled round and really looked at things she was interested in, the children and the school and what was in the shops and which houses were being rebuilt and how were they furnished and the little hidden courtyard gardens glimpsed suddenly, without the endless embarrassment of Colin dragging you along and insisting at regular intervals on trying out his German, even she who knew the language not at all knew it was as garbled as Mr. Heath’s French, stopping villagers and asking silly questions and then, if they misunderstood, didn’t or wouldn’t understand (and why should they in a place with thirty-nine dead listed on the Partisan Memorial in the Square, killed by the Germans; sentimental, he’d called her again, a fool, when she dared humbly mention that, “These people want money same as anywhere else, they don’t care whose it is.”) Colin mocked them as stupid, or insisted without a by-your-leave on photographing them, “Picturesque aren’t they; that old woman there, like a Greek Fury” never “Like, truly, herself”: everybody was that to him, some symbol, some ventriloquist’s stage dummy or spear-carrier extra in the unending performance of his own so-significant life ...
Ah, the lovely shade now, a tree that overhung the tiny fishermen’s chapel at the point, no bigger than an English garage, and crammed, she’d seen Sunday when the door opened, though she daren’t suggest going in to Colin lest he start photographing in the midst of the service, the inside crammed with wood-carved model boats, a couple of feet long each, hung like lamps from the roof, so she longed to have one to give her son, some sort of thank offering for miraculous escapes from the jaws of the sea, so the girl on the reception desk had said in her curiously elaborate textbook English. And unintentionally she relaxed there, cool in the shade yet eyes dazzled even so by the light’s reflected darting off the water, where apparently equally entranced just one boat hung, in it a local still as silence, spear from his hand trailing the water, spear, more like a trident really, doubtless seeking mussels though how he’d catch them without movement she’d no idea.
She caught herself unconsciously searching her bag to make sure she’d the kids’ stuff too, bandages and toys and towels and everything, and realized this one day at least she’d no need for more than what was there, her own towel, lovely and fluffy, not like the hotel one: Ornaja fruit-juice, the strange triangulate pack you just bit a corner off and let it trickle harsh-sweet into your mouth: sun oil, some weird local brand but it worked: and, sneaked out from its hiding place in the case, “Maigret in Montmartre”: her first chance to read it without Colin mocking her crude tastes, “a real TV addict’s choice.” Everything there—the beach only a few yards more. But somehow the heat held her paralyzed, or rather the heat she knew she’d enter the instant she left the tree’s coolness.
The receptionist passed: smile and a wave, heading toward the village. Funny girl in some ways, Mariella had talked to her one evening when there’d been a sort of party for guests and staff alike on the terrace, and dancing to a scratched ancient collection of rock-n-roll records the Head Waiter cherished like the FA Cup, or the European Cup it’d be here, something called Hajuk Zadar they all followed it seemed, name painted on walls miles from anywhere the coach had passed, “Rubbish” Colin’d said they were, fancying himself on knowledge of football like everything else. Colin had had to burst in, gushing misplaced charm on the woman and spoiling the conversation, but Mariella had found out from her a strange mixture of attitudes. A graduate of Zagreb University her father the local Communist Party chief, mayor, something like that, and her contempt apparently equally fierce for the local fishermen, idle children she called them, superstitious.
Catholics, pretending to be poor because they wouldn’t work, and for the city people she’d known, parasites, false sophisticates, bureaucrats: her father was a foolish idealist, his atheism a thin veneer, she said yet she stuck close to him, to the village. Why?
No guessing without sufficient evidence, Maigret would say, or would he. Speculating, her mind engrossed, Mariella moved automatically as a lizard dominates the hottest part of the beach, a sloping stretch of the concrete like an invalid bed. Oil rubbed smoothly on, an instant regretting Colin wasn’t there to do her back: then stretch out, eyes shut, do the back first, head down on arms, snuggle into relaxation: and still her mind on the puzzle of the receptionist.
She knew why her own interest: Colin obviously fancied her. She knew the signs by now: the stares when he thought Mariella wasn’t looking, the sly avoidance of the subject if she mentioned the woman, all the traces of his usual approach, one thing that at least did let her feel one up on him, to be able to see through him and at the same time to realize how shocked he’d be at how transparent his feeble attempts at luring women just by staring at them, feeling too superior doubtless to try to chat them up, really were. Probably thought he’d only to look at them and they’d fall at his feet, blinded by his glory.
Still she’d near as dammit done that once.
Of course she was only a young girl then, she’d excuse ... Oh, forget it.
A slight shiver between her shoulders. Must be a slight breeze up. Open eyes, read a few pages of Maigret. No good, couldn’t concentrate, kept having to look back to see which was the victim.
Look out at the fisherman, a few yards further on now, still in the same position, as if he, boat, spear and all had beamed like Captain Kirk: no sound of rowing, anyway: all unshaven he was, but they were real muscles under that scruffy sleeveless shirt. Saw her look, and waved, a minimal wave, like royalty to the crowd. Thought she was eyeing him up, did he ... hot shame ... eyes shut again ... and a trance deep now coming on, as if she sank below the mirrored surface of the sea, down among the small fish ... into coolness and silence ... a shadow, a cavern, something biting at her ... hot ... Maigret’s pipe, what was it doing there ... hand grappling at her thigh ... wide awake ... embarrassed look round, had anyone seen her sudden electric movement ... must’ve been a wasp or mosquito or something ... hand moved round ... no sign of a spot: daren’t scratch properly, what would people think ...
&nb
sp; Not many on the beach now, anyway, with most of the English lot off on the coach ...
Thoroughly wakened, wondering how she came to think she’d rolled over on her back: in her half-sleep perhaps.
A look far over at the ore ships: eyes scanned round and, just a few feet away along the beach, where she was sure they’d not been a minute or two before even, the Germans ...
Both their eyes seemed to meet hers with a kindly pity as if to say “We knew you’d have to look at us. Don’t worry, we don’t mind being adored ... don’t be embarrassed child, it is permitted if you show proper respect.” Superior bastards ... or bastard and bitch, really ... thought they owned the Earth, she could tell just looking at them.
Brother and sister the waiter said they were: and the Hotel had all the passports, so it was probably true.
The brother, such a suave cripple he was, beard and elegant movement like, had he been twenty years older, Svengali the Master to the life: the sister, hipbones swelling up like an old church’s arches out of the yellow bikini so small you’d think the Germans suffered cloth rationing. Arrogant bastards—so self-consciously, no self-confidently beautiful, and probably, Mariella thought, pleased in this heat-daze she too could do the kind of psychological assessment of people Colin thought only he could do, it was their very arrogant aloofness that seemed to make each of the English coach party, and Colin most of all, try to make up to them, as if they were the only interesting people among all the sardine-tin identicals each British tourist thought all his or her fellow travelers were ... Colin, ah that was good the way several evenings when he thought Mariella wasn’t looking had approached them glowing with his conviction that to him soul-kinship with Germans was as natural as breathing, and each time been so coldly rebuffed ... even the way he took it out on her with even more than the usual contempt for her words or opinions, till she almost gave up speaking at all, even that was worth it ...
And now, despite her dislike of them, Mariella could not help watching their every move, feeling somehow they swelled and filled the vast space of beach and sea and far-off mountains as if it were a tiny room too small for them, till they seemed to press up on her body like large people in the Underground, never doubting the space was theirs by right that by some flaw or accident of the universe she for this instant occupied.
The girl put the black book, diary it must be, she seemed to be scribbling in, world-indifferent, every time Mariella saw her, alike at meals or in the bar or on the beach aside, and dived into the water, breasts shark-sharp appearing instants later at the surface as she floated up on her back: the man on the boat seemed almost to lose his statue quality for an instant, in fact to teeter and lose his grace of heron-balance as he looked at her.
The brother, wasted leg twisted as if to point to her like setter’s nose in an aristocrat-hunting film, otherwise, with his face at least, ignored her.
Seeming to look straight through Mariella till she closed her eyes again in fright, hoping, like the terror of a childhood nightmare, doing that’d make it go away.
When she, against her will, and having, so childishly she was ashamed of herself, counted 100 to make it safe, as a compromise between fear and impulse, opened them again, he was gone ...
In the water now, moving toward his sister far out now at the edge of vision, his movement making it seem as if the Byron-crippled leg that turned his swimming into a fierce, misshapen, yet curiously graceful, greatness full even Leviathan or Ahab-whale thrashing, becoming an inherent total part of himself so that she couldn’t imagine him perfect, a blond perfection too terrifying to permit other life on earth around it, terrible enough even in this state as if torn by great pincers all along one side from the womb so that leg became horrid, flaccid, shrunk and yet swollen with purple scar or mouth-like lumps, and arm of the same left side turned oddly outward and so milk-white, birdbone-transparent slim, so huge a contrast to the tan of the rest of him.
The water fountained as brother and sister met: they seemed to enwrap in some game like a so-slow-motion football action replay or car crash and then sink.
A few minutes later, when Mariella looked again, a black speck marked the girl still swimming outward: the brother was ashore again, laid still where he had been before as if he’d never moved: he seemed waiting for something, perhaps her eyes on him: his eyes curiously hooded and yet perplexingly seeming, one anyway, the left one, bigger than it should have been, unblinking like an owl’s eye or Henry Ford’s: yes, it was true, the two halves of his face didn’t match—embarrassed, after all one shouldn’t stare at cripples, even if it hadn’t been his leg she was looking at, she tried to pull her eyes away
And couldn’t help seeing, in his tiny modern trunks black as those sea urchins the kids nearly kept stepping on and then bringing up to the surface with pointed sticks to dance upon their spikes in the process of dying into husk on the breakwater, revenge Colin encouraged for one he’d stepped on the first day here, that in those black briefs a huge bulge had appeared—and her eyes could not move, trapped like nut between nutcracker ...
And for an instant she wished Colin’d appear and keep her safe—she’d even be glad to see all the rest of the English party back that doubtless now as every day were celebrating the absence of licensing hours in this country by having their first flask of wine at just the time the pubs would have legally opened up back home.
The pattern seemed to be repeating at ever-diminishing intervals, as if time was accelerating: her eyes closed again to shut out this further event, or sight rather as solid and precise on her eyeballs as an event: inside her head a vision like the “facts” that become so precise yet unrecapturable of half-sleep half-awake early morning states spelled out what could happen if her eyes by mistake should open: that black bulge could swell and burst her like a kid’s balloon, shooting aimlessly in terror round a room emptying its air to nothing, or could even worse burst all over her horribly, a slime sac like that squid’s in the old Captain Nemo film or even worse because pitiful as well as horrible the one all curiously peacock color, a little thing, only two big tentacles like a squid really, glistening hopeless and doglike under a fisherman’s arm the way you’d carry a bagpipe, the day before yesterday on the market, exposed to sun and buying eyes and yet terrifying because so detached from ordinary reality, as her knee was that time when about ten she’d fallen in a half-demolished house and stuck it on a rusty girder and it had all swollen and begun to drip vile green pus and she’d been at home all lost, waiting for mum or dad to come home from work, not daring go for help for fear of their anger at her not being where she should be or having disobeyed instructions not to go in the old houses. And the green pus creeping out till she longed to touch it, lick it, see what it was like to taste, and the swelling winking at her and even the pain company in a way.
And was convinced as she lay there, sweat creeping down her back and hair, that he was watching, that German, smiling in a complicity of complete understanding of what she was thinking, not even contemptuous that she daren’t open her eyes and see him watching, merely understanding like some godlike parent, the lie they used to tell ’em in R.I. courses before she was old enough to be sure she knew better.
The beach seemed so silent it must have emptied in, her sleeplike thoughts drummed out, emptied of everybody but her and him as if a WWIII filmset ... sleep must’ve crept over her like an escape because suddenly there was Colin’s voice in her ear saying, “Where has Robert got to now?”—irritation and unwillingness to go look himself and risk disruption of his own smooth self-absorption mixed as smooth as gloss: she’d have to move, and she was so comfortable ... it wasn’t fair ... what was the bastard saying now?
Opened eyes, straightened up onto her arms, head up and the light filling it like a blow: figure above her, still speaking.
And before she could clearly take in that it couldn’t be Colin, couldn’t be, he wasn’t here, the voice suave, nameless accent which was really absence of recognizable accent, �
�I said have you ever been to the castle?”
She gasped, hand to mouth, fear or just shock: but he ignored her, ignored even it seemed any possible response she might make to his question, not really taken in anyway out of this doze she had been dragged from, this safety of warm blackness so suddenly lost.
The German’s eyes were fixed on his sister emerging all petulant gold, some mutter of gutturals and hair thrown back in a shower of droplets, out of the water: and, just as Mariella tried to frame herself, started to say ... “I don’t know ... do you mean ...” he suddenly reached in his trunks and before she could even think or protest, pulled out a bulky skin-diving knife and drove it quivering into the sand hilt-deep only inches from her outstretched hand that seemed to go before her not yet-shaped words like a messenger.
So that was what the bulge in his trunks had been ... horrid the sudden disappointment she felt, and then she tried desperately to recover her social manners. His face was knotted, gaze fixed on the knife, interest in her apparently completely gone, sister now out of sight behind rocks. “No, no we kept meaning to climb up there, if you mean the castle up there behind Gradina, but we haven’t had time, and besides it’s so hot for such a climb, isn’t it?”
The Year's Best Horror Stories 14 Page 27
