FOR THE NEXT quarter of an hour, in an awkward squall of silence, they followed an overgrown track to the beach. The day was growing hot, they were sweating, and both were grateful for the relief of that empty beach and ocean, its noise, its purpose, its solitude. After changing at a discreet distance from each other in the dunes, they ran into the sea together.
Amy felt the water reform her into something whole and strong. Things that a day before had seemed at the centre of her being dissolved into trivia and then washed away altogether: next week’s dining room menu; the difficulty of procuring new wool blankets for the hotel rooms; the odour of the chief barman; the sickly sucking noise Keith made as he lit his pipe of an evening.
Behind the wave line they turned, wet-faced and diamond-eyed. On the infinite plateau of ocean only their heads broke, they trod water, each gazing at the other. She felt him swim up from underneath and brush her body as he surfaced. Like a seal, like a man.
After, they rested in the cleft of a dune, where the roar of breaking waves was hushed and the wind deflected. As their bodies dried, the heat returned as a stupefying weight. Amy stretched out and Dorrigo followed suit. She let her back soak up the heat and rested her face in the dark shadow thrown by her head. After a time she burrowed around and nestled her head against his stomach. He lit another cigarette.
Dorrigo held his arm up to the white-streaked sky and thought he had never seen anything so perfect. He closed one eye and with his other watched his finger touch the beauty of a cloud.
Why don’t we remember clouds? he said.
Because they don’t mean anything.
And yet they’re everything, thought Dorrigo, but this idea was too vast or absurd to hold or even care about, and he let it drift past him with the cloud.
Time passed slowly or quickly. It was hard to say. They rolled into each other.
Dorry?
Dorrigo murmured.
You know it’s when I’m alone with Keith that I can’t stand him and I hate myself, she said. Why’s that?
Dorrigo Evans had no answer. He flicked his cigarette into a dune.
Because I want to be with you, she said.
Time had gone and everything had halted.
That’s why, she said.
Whatever had held them apart, whatever had restrained their bodies before, was now gone. If the earth spun it faltered, if the wind blew it waited. Hands found flesh; flesh, flesh. He felt the improbable weight of her eyelash with his own; he kissed the slight, rose-coloured trench that remained from her knicker elastic, running around her belly like the equator line circling the world. As they lost themselves in the circumnavigation of each other, there came from nearby shrill shrieks that ended in a deeper howl.
Dorrigo looked up. A large dog stood at the top of the dune. Above blood-jagged drool, its slobbery mouth clutched a twitching fairy penguin. He had the strange sensation that suddenly Amy was very far away, that he was hovering above her naked body. His feelings abruptly transformed. Amy, whose body an instant before had made him feel almost drunk with its scent and touch and sweep, its sweet salt rime; Amy, who a moment earlier had seemed to him to have become another aspect of himself, was now remote and removed from him. Their understanding of each other had been greater than that of God’s. And a moment later it had vanished.
The dog dropped its head sideways; the penguin’s now limp body flopped, and the dog turned and vanished. But the penguin’s howl—eerie and long, with its abrupt end—remained in his mind.
Look at me, he heard Amy whisper. Only me.
When he looked back down, Amy’s eyes had changed. Her pupils seemed saucer-like, lost—and lost, he realised, in him. He felt the terrible gravity of her desire for him pulling him back to her, into a story that was not his, and now that he had all he had dreamt of in recent days, he wanted to escape it as quickly as possible. He feared losing himself, his freedom, his future. What had a moment before aroused him so intensely now seemed charmless and ordinary, and he wished to flee. But instead he closed his eyes, and as he entered her a groan escaped her lips in a voice he did not recognise.
A wild, almost violent intensity took hold of their lovemaking and turned the strangeness of their bodies into a single thing. He forgot those short, sharp shrieks, that horror of ceaseless solitude, his dread of a nameless future. Her body transformed for him again. It was no longer desire or repulsion, but another element of him, without which he was incomplete. In her he felt the most powerful and necessary return. And without her, his life felt to him no longer any life at all.
Even then though, his memory was eating the truth of them. Afterwards, he remembered only their bodies, rising and falling with the crash of waves, brushed by the sea breezes that ruffled the sand dune tops and raked the ash that ate his abandoned cigarette.
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