The Cruelty of Morning

by Hilary Bonner

  Most of her friends were virgins too. The sexual revolution might have wreaked rampant havoc everywhere else in the world by 1970, but in Pelham Bay and nearby Durraton married men still had ‘fancy women’, the contraceptive pill had yet to become freely available, young girls who got pregnant had their bottoms smacked by hysterical fathers, and books with a high sexual content, from Fanny Hill to Lady Chatterley’s Lover, were known simply as ‘dirty’ and you had to cover them in plain brown paper.

  Jenny and her friends had been ‘brought up proper’. It might not make much difference in the long run, but the rigours of doing their homework and not staying out late, added to more than their share of parental brainwashing, was inclined to protect their virginity for longer than usual.

  So long, lanky Jenny lay dreaming about what she had never quite had, and of being five-foot nothing and shaped like an egg timer. Angela Smith was five-foot nothing and shaped like an egg timer.

  A blowfly buzzed noisily in Jenny’s ear. She flicked at it instinctively and her eyes opened in an involuntary blink. There was Angela, looking smugly angelic like her name, leaning against Todd Mallett instead of a chair. Todd was totally captivated by Angela in those days. His arm was around her shoulders. His hand rested on her left breast, pretending its position was an accident. He stirred and kissed the top of Angela’s head.

  That was quite enough for Jenny. She dumped Cobbett on the lavatory roof where she felt he belonged, and jumped to her feet, shouting that she was going for a swim.

  The concrete was burning hot beneath her bare toes. Jenny ran as fast as she could along the parade to the steps, down over the pebble ridge to where the sea hit the flat rocks at the bottom of the cliffs. There are places there where the Atlantic is deep and green and the rocks form natural diving boards stretching out to sea. When the tide is high and the surf is low, it is safe to dive in and down to the sand and pebbles and weed twenty feet and more below. Jenny knew every natural diving board that Pelham Bay had to offer. Nimble-footed she ran from pebble to pebble across the ridge. Years of practice made sure that she never stumbled. Speed and fleetness of foot were the secret. She headed for the furthest of the flat rocks and sprinted into a dive. Down down into the cold water, then, floating slowly upwards into the sun again, Jenny rolled onto her back and lazily crawled seawards, looking back towards the holidaymakers splashing around in the shallows. She was a competition swimmer, powerful and confident.

  It was four o’clock in the afternoon when Mark Piddle got the call. ‘Your patch, old boy,’ said his editor.

  Mark was twenty-three years old now, a trainee reporter in the last year of his apprenticeship. He had first been to university and gained a degree. He often wondered how, because he had been an idle, although able, student, just waiting to do what he had always known was the only thing he could ever do – join the staff of a newspaper. He was spending the afternoon in bed with his girlfriend, Irene Nichols. He had moved her into his small one-bedroomed flat just two months before, and she was the first girl he had ever lived with. It was a whole new scene for Mark; he had found something he had needed for a long time, and everything else came second to the suddenly freely available sex, which dominated his life. Everything, that is, except the job that he had dreamed of since he was a small boy.

  He replaced the receiver on the phone in the living room, thinking briefly as always of the days when he would be able to afford a bedside extension. Standing there for a moment, naked, still half-erect, scratching his head, his beard and his balls, he wondered if he could manage any serious work that day. But the thought of a body found in Pelham Bay – a murder, his boss Jim Sykes had said – was almost as exciting to Mark as sex. It was just that the timing of the call had not been good. He hadn’t finished yet. Through the open door of the bedroom he could see Irene still lying on the bed, her little-girl breasts pointing towards him, and he could feel his erection hardening again.

  For just a couple of seconds he hesitated. Then he walked towards the waiting girl. It wouldn’t take long now. He was nearly there.

  ‘Who was it?’ asked Irene, in the ringing tones of the commonest area of Durraton, which Mark always pretended he did not notice. In fact it grated badly, in spite of his loudly proclaimed socialist ideals. As the son of Durraton’s vicar, Mark had been educated at a minor public school, populated mostly by farmers’ sons, which had given him an average education, an above-average arrogance and sense of his own importance, an even more above average obsession with sex and all its possible variations, and a distinctive accent which he was just beginning to learn to tone down to a universally acceptable level.

  ‘Jim,’ he said, deciding on a show of totally false indifference. ‘Still thinks he’s working for a national daily, silly old bugger. Our rag doesn’t come out until Thursday, but he just has to ring me up in the middle of a Sunday afternoon, doesn’t he? “My patch” indeed!’

  Irene wanted to know what the story was. Mark was too busy to answer. His hand had slipped down between her legs. Typically he thrust three fingers into her without warning. She instinctively flinched, but he pushed all the harder. She was willing enough; even when he hurt her. That was why he had moved her in, to the dismay of her parents, who believed, quite correctly, that he was using her. His own parents pretended that they did not know Mark was living with anyone – let alone a girl from the lowliest council estate for miles around.

  Mark was still at an age and way of thinking when all he required from a girl was a good time in bed. Actually, for him it was an attitude that was never to change much.

  He never hit Irene – he was not violent in that way – but the sexual act was an act of aggression much more than of love for Mark. Their frequent protracted sessions left Irene more or less constantly slightly bruised and battered inside and out. But Mark excited her. He was someone from way beyond her limited horizons. And she doted on him, more like a puppy dog and its master than a young woman and her lover.

  Mark was chewing on her breasts now. Her nipples were hard as buttons. She began to fidget obligingly. She had got used to the fingers harshly pushed inside her, and they were not hurting so much. With his other hand Mark shoved her legs upwards, spread them wide apart, and began to play with her bottom. She flinched again. He reached for some of the cream on the bedside table. It was not so bad then. Soothing almost.

  Anxious as ever, she spoke to him in drawling throaty tones dedicatedly copied from bad American movies. ‘You’re not going are you?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ lied Mark. He rolled over between her legs, startlingly aware of his own desperate horniness again and sure in the knowledge that Irene would demand no further arousal. He drove himself into her. She was ready at any time for anything he wanted to do to her with little or no preparation. Anything at all in exchange for the certainty that he would let her be there that night and the next morning and the next night. Ashamed of his thoughts he hammered into her, bigger and harder and more selfishly than ever.

  He thrust inside her so forcefully she slipped towards the side of the bed, so that her head and shoulders were over the edge. He had his hands on her shoulders, forcing her downwards. This made her pelvis swing up towards him, and seemed to force her open even more. He was a long way inside her and it was sensational. He knew he must be hurting her back, but he couldn’t stop. His mouth was on hers, his teeth bruising her lips. His tongue down her throat made it impossible for her to protest. Ultimately the top part of her body slipped off the bed, so that she was balanced on her head and shoulders, wedged on the floor against the side of the bed with her legs flailing helplessly in the air while he was still in there hammering away, relentlessly pressing her into the floor. The top of his body weighed a ton on her chest and shoulders, and he had his hands on her wrists now, pinning her down. His legs were still on the bed, and by kneeling slightly he was able to force himself into her even more powerfully. He liked the feeling of her total helplessness. He was so far in he thought he wa
s going to touch his penis with his tongue as he thrust it into her throat. God, he liked it this way.

  Irene could not move any part of her body except her legs. Ineffectively she tapped her feet against his back. He seemed to like that too. He was literally, grinding her into the carpet. She could feel her back beginning to give with the strain when finally, with one last triumphant push, he reached orgasm.

  For her it was near agony. For him it was ecstasy. He took his tongue out of her throat and shouted out to her what he was doing to her and what was happening to him. As he lifted himself off her and fell back, she hauled herself onto the bed alongside him and clung to him tightly the way she always did. She got very little from him sexually and even less emotionally, and she always followed their brutal apology for love-making with the same embarrassing plea.

  ‘You do love me, Mark, don’t you?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’

  It was barely a minute since he had thrust himself into that knee-trembling gut-weakening climax, but Mark was young and strong, bursting with unspent energy, eager to get on with his life. He swung his long legs over the bed, ran his fingers through his curly fair hair and, turning slightly, looked down at the girl who would let him take any pleasure he asked for. He knew he should feel something more than he did for her. He actually wanted to feel more. But the harsh truth was that once she had satisfied his intense sexual appetites he didn’t feel anything. Nothing at all.

  ‘Gotta go,’ he said.

  ‘But I thought you weren’t going.’

  ‘Oh come on Irene. Get real. This is work.’

  She pulled the sheets and blankets around her neck and watched him dress. His towering height and the spread of his shoulders seemed to fill the room. Sometimes it was as if that baby face and its halo of curls must really belong to somebody else. Sheer power surged from every inch of Mark. His limbs were thick and big-boned, but his body was lean and sinewy and totally masculine. It was covered by a film of fine down, soft and shiny. A faint, almost transparent fuzz coated his legs, belly, chest and arms. There was even some of this fuzz on his shoulders and back. Around his penis the hair was longer and silkier but still curiously soft.

  He coaxed his genitals into a pair of stretch underpants and pulled on his faded blue jeans. He fastened his flies carefully and adjusted his balls as he did so. The mirror reflected a satisfying bulge and he knew that Irene was watching him as she always did. Amazingly he felt a slight stirring again. He ignored it but he was tinglingly aware that the bulge had grown larger. He put on a checked Levi shirt, leaving several buttons undone to show his suntanned chest. Strange that a man so fair did not burn in the sun. But Mark tanned easily. His skin was a gleaming pale gold. He shoved a notebook into a rear pocket of his jeans and a handful of loose change from the dressing table into one of the side pockets.

  For the last time he approached the bed. He slipped his right hand under the bedclothes, widened Irene’s legs, quickly felt the wet stickiness there, squeezed his fingers together, and with his usual roughness, plunged them into her.

  Abruptly he left her. As he strode through the living room he glanced casually over his shoulder and called out ‘Bye.’

  Irene was swiftly out of bed. She had wrapped Mark’s towelling dressing gown around her and stood peering nervously around the bedroom door.

  ‘Will you be late?’ she called.

  The answer came through the already closed front door.

  ‘Dunno.’

  Mark bounced down the stairs, wondering about the lineage possibilities from the nationals, and whether, if he put his mind to it, he could find something that would last the week for the splash – front page lead – in the Durraton Gazette, and give him a bit of an edge on the big boys. He unbuttoned the breast pocket of his shirt where he always kept his car keys, and gave the balding tyres of his ancient battered Mini Cooper a vaguely anxious glance as he unlocked the door and slipped into the driver’s seat.

  ‘Crazy,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Only a bloody reporter would be expected to go and ferret out cops when he can’t even afford to keep his car legal.’

  He knew he could still live at home with his parents and save himself a fortune, he had done so for his first year or so on the paper after university, but there was no way he could conduct the kind of sex life he wanted and needed from Durraton Vicarage. The back seat of the Mini did not lend itself to the games he liked to play.

  He firmly dismissed all further thoughts of sex.

  The prospect of getting to grips with a major story had already wiped out any initial feelings of irritation at being disturbed. The girl he had left in his bed was now a million miles from his mind. She no longer mattered – anyway she would still be there for him when he returned, whenever that was. The violent private joy which had so recently engulfed his whole being had happened to another man. Now Mark was on the real job.

  Mark lived at the top of Pelham Bay – on the edge of the woodland leading down to the cliffs and less than a mile from the beach. Born, bred, and schooled locally, he had many friends and contacts in the area. He knew his way around, and as he wound along the coast road had already decided which of his contacts he would visit first. Bill Turpin. Who else?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Down by the beach it had been business as usual. Just up from the slipway, Bill Turpin’s lads – bare-chested and belligerently beautiful – were handing out the deckchairs.

  In Pelham Bay things had been the same for as long as anyone could remember. Bill Turpin, getting older, but still raking in the holidaymakers’ cash just like shovelling sand off the beach. And a succession of young bloods, meaningless St Christophers nestling among newly sprouting body hair, showing off their bronzed torsos to the straw-hat brigade.

  On this hot August Sunday, the deckchair boys leaned luxuriously sullen against the sea wall. Theirs was the summer job for the budding Romeos of Pelham Bay, and has always remained so. Some things never change. An ideally idle way for students and professional loafers to make some beer money and eye up the imported talent. A job calling for little or no mental effort.

  Old Bill Turpin habitually wore baggy grey flannels and grubby gym shoes without laces, so he shuffled when he walked. He was shirtless and weathered ebony by years of sun, salt, and wind – mostly salt and wind as he lived in Pelham Bay. Against his dark, gnarled body, even the deckchair lads seemed pale, plump and baby-like.

  Bill had been born sixty-six years earlier in a fisherman’s cottage just back from the harbour in the fishing village of Brinton, set on the river estuary just a few miles up the coast from Pelham Bay. He was a man fashioned by the cruelty of the times in which he had grown to manhood and then to middle age, his life blighted forever by forces and quarrels of which he had little knowledge and over which he had no control.

  He came from a long line of fishermen. Men who knew from some deep instinct inside them where the fish would be that night. In season they caught salmon in the River Brin, stretching their nets across the river to trap the shoals of big rich fish swimming upstream to spawn. More often they sailed out to sea at night to catch herring and mackerel and whiting, and came back the next day or sometimes several days later with holds full of fish that they sold at the quayside.

  It was a way of life the young Bill Turpin was naturally expected to follow, and did as surely as day followed night. Bill was born just late enough to escape service in the First World War, but two of his elder brothers died in the trenches. Bill could still remember the day his family learned that his brother Edgar had died. His father, a quiet, undemonstrative Devonian, had wrapped his strong brown arms around his sole surviving son and held him tight.

  ‘They’ll take you away over my dead body, son,’ he had muttered. ‘I’ll swing before I lose another lad in the trenches.’

  That war ended in time to save Bill Turpin. But it seemed he was destined to suffer at the hands of warring nations. In 1933 he married. He was twenty-nine years old. By local standar
ds then he had taken his time in settling down. When he did wed he was sure as eggs were eggs that curly-haired Dorothy, twenty-year-old daughter of the village butcher, was the girl for him. Life seemed straightforward. It did not occur to Bill or his father, growing old now, but still fishing, that the world would be crazy enough to launch itself into another mighty bloodbath.

  Bill’s only sadness at that time was that he and Dorothy had no children. Then just as once again a world war was looming, the miracle happened. Dorothy found she was pregnant and gave birth to twin girls. The fisherman’s happiness was complete. When his call-up finally came – he was pushing forty but the navy needed his seaman’s knowledge and his boat – he was so convinced of his own strength and powers of survival that he saw the war as just a brief interval in his domestic contentment.

  And he felt that in many ways he was a lucky man.

  The government commandeered his solid wooden fishing boat to use as a minesweeper to detect the German acoustic mines which were detonated only by metal-hulled ships. Bill was trained as a naval officer to skipper his own vessel. There was security for him in that. He was fighting on his own territory, after all.

  Then came the telegram telling him his wife and daughters were dead. A crippled German bomber had emptied its load over Brinton before crashing into the sea. A freak accident. The pilot had ditched the bombs to lighten his aircraft. He scored a direct random hit on the cottage where Bill had been born and where he and his wife had made their home with his widowed father. The whole family were asleep in bed when the bomb dropped. Grandfather, mother, and baby daughters died instantly.