Chapter Three
He should have been torn to shreds. Priddy decided he couldn’t
be seeing right. The smile was probably a scream.
Not waving but drowning was a joke, a cliché or a line from Stevie Smith’s poetry,
depending on your disposition. I was much
further out than you thought. The dark head
vanished into a trough between waves. Priddy jammed the grappling
hook into the shingle. Threaded the rope through its ring and
snapped the knot tight. The life belt had a big carabiner at the
back. His hands were slippery from his scramble down the slope and
he dropped the torch: missed the catch on his first and second
tries. The lighthouse, which until now he’d regarded as a soulless
tube of concrete, swept a beam like saving grace across him at just
the right moment.
The
third try opened the clip. He secured the belt to the rope and ran
for the sea. This was a good rescue method because, even if he
personally drowned in the process, the guy in the water would still
stand a chance if he could tow himself inland by the rope. It
seemed a fair trade-off. Priddy waded in.
Christ,
it was cold! The North Atlantic Drift wasn’t the benevolent force
it had once been along Cornwall’s western shore. Even the great
whites were snacking on tourists elsewhere these days. He breasted
the first wave and the second, and the third smacked him right in
the face and took him under. He’d forgotten how hard the shore
shelved. It didn’t matter—was much more peaceful underneath the
surf than in it. Once his guts stopped trying to implode from the
shock of immersion, he plunged strongly forward, cleaving the
pulverised foam. He’d got a good fix on his drowning man. If he
just kept one hand on the belt, kicked through the few more yards
of the washing-machine maelstrom, he’d find him. The only trouble
was the sucking undertow. He’d have to breathe at some point, and
the back-dragging current was making short work of the buoyancy of
the belt. The turbulence flipped him—wig over love-handles, as Kit
might have said, in the wild days of their youth when they’d never
imagined ever having to worry about either—and he lost track of
which way was up.
Something seized him round the waist. The water took his
scream in a handful of bubbles, his last lungful of air. Every
giant-squid story he’d ever come across flashed through his mind,
the tales he’d listened to on the harbourside when the old
fishermen got bored enough to start spinning yarns, the comics he’d
collected to scare his eight-year-old self shitless with by
torchlight under the duvet. He fought, kicking savagely, and the
coiling muscular strength tightened, hoisting him skyward, up and
up into the wild night.
The
eerie thing was that he could hear singing. Not one voice but
hundreds, as if half-a-dozen male-voice choirs had washed ashore on
Hell’s Teeth. The song spiralled up, skeined and shattered on the
wind, fractured into laughter that bounced off the cliffs and
became a single voice, resonant and close to his ear.
“What’s the point of the lighthouse if you come charging down
to do the job yourself?”
Priddy
got his face out of the water. He was able to do this because he
was being held clear of the undertow by the shipwrecked mariner,
who didn’t look shipwrecked at all up close. Who looked annoyed and
amused all at once, and more than anything else bloody gorgeous,
the kind of face Priddy had only seen before in medieval portraits
of Spanish princes, sculptured and haughty and not the least bit
concerned by the heaving surf. Some kind of superhuman bloody
swimmer, as well—maintaining position with powerful strokes of his
free arm, his grip on Priddy almost casual.
So far,
his hallucinations had done everything but piss him off. He had to
believe this one was real. Arrogant bastard, putting lives in
danger for kicks, and where was his crew? “The point of the
lighthouse,” Priddy choked, spitting out seawater, “is to keep
twats like you away. Let me go!”
The
Spanish prince obeyed. Priddy sank like a stone. A second passed,
sluggish with cold in Priddy’s blood, then two, then five, and then
his captor/saviour tired of the joke and punted him from below as
if he’d been a dolphin’s beachball, lifting him again. Was he
wearing jeans, or a rolled-down wetsuit? He was naked from the
waist up, skin hot and electric when Priddy grabbed at him, but his
muscular backside scraped Priddy’s palm like wire, rough enough to
draw blood. The steep-pitched beach rushed up at him and he hit it
belly-flat and hard.
Something—some force—had thrown him ashore like a fish. He
scrambled out of reach of the next wave, got to his hands and knees
and hauled out. He stared back at the swimmer, now sculling
leisurely back and forth among the waves. “How are you doing that?”
he yelled, rubbing water out of his eyes. “You should be drowning.
You should be freezing to death. Who the hell are you?”
“Don’t you mean what?”
“I’m sorry?”
“They always mean what, when they ask that.
What the hell are you. No
point in explaining, is there? It’s not as if I’ll ever see you
again. Take care of yourself, lighthouse boy—for you, I almost wish
I could—”
He
vanished. Coughing, clawing his way upslope, Priddy watched the
spot where the waves had closed over his dark head.
Christ, had a shark got him after all? He exploded back to
surface. His hair threw out a perfect arc of foam and a terrible
sound ripped from him, somewhere between a roar and scream, as if
he was being hewn up the middle or torn into shreds from below.
Priddy lurched to his feet and stood swaying, expecting to see a
blossom of blood in the water. In for a
penny, his recently-acquired deathwish
said, and the plain ballsy Cornishman in him concurred. He got
ready to dive again.
“Stop!”
The
raw-voiced command froze him dead. The swimmer was holding up one
imperious hand. He was choking and spitting out saltwater now ,
though, like a normal human being, and clinging to a plank from the
boat with his free arm. “What?” Priddy yelled in bemusement. “What
the hell are you doing?”
“Did you touch me?”
“Did I...” Priddy tried to shake his ears clear. “You
touched me, mate.
You slung me out of the water.”
“No. Did you touch me—tava, merouche?”
Priddy
knew the first word from his long-ago Cornish lessons. The second
sounded like an elegant sneeze and meant nothing to him. “You want
to discuss this right now?”
“No. I am drowning now, thanks to you. I am bloody freezing to death. I hope
you’re happy.”
If there
was no shark involved, Priddy didn’t have to go back in the water.
He found the rope, reeled the life belt in far enough to grab it.
“Heads up!” he shouted into the wind. “Grab this and I’ll pull you
in.”
“So undignified!”
“Take it or leave it, you nutcase. Here it comes!”
He threw
hard and well. The belt landed within the lunatic’s reach. Even
then he hesitated, looking back and forth between his spar of wood
and salvation. Priddy, beginning to shiver with cold and reaction
on the shore, gave the rope an impatient tug, and took up the load
in relief when at last the drowning man made up his
mind.
Towing
him ashore was easy after that, just hand-over-hand on the slippery
rope, heels digging deep for purchase. He wasn’t getting much help
from the opposite end. Maybe shock was finally catching up with the
sailor: just when Priddy thought he was back in his depth and able
to clamber for safety, he folded down into the breaking surf as if
his legs had given out on him. Well, he could drown just as well in
two feet of water as twenty, and losing him now would be a shame.
Looping the rope over one arm, Priddy ran to find him.
“All right. Got you.” Had he, though? His armpits were chilly
as abandoned cockle shells. Priddy had hauled enough swimmers to
safety to know that warmth lingered there even when every other
inch had dropped to hypothermic clay. One poor lad had died of cold
right at his feet. That had been a bad day, a beginning to
childhood’s end. Not again,
please, he prayed to a God whose
bad-tempered biblical antics had made him an atheist since
kindergarten. “Come on, mate. You still with me?”
Not a
flicker of response from the regal face. His head was drooping over
Priddy’s arm. And either he’d been sleeping in the buff when his
boat ran aground or there’d been a hell of a party in progress on
board: he was stark bullock naked, no jeans or rolled-down wetsuit
at all. His long limbs trailed helplessly as Priddy dragged him far
enough out of the breakers that the next big one wouldn’t snatch
them both back, then a little bit further just to make sure. Once
he had turf underfoot and hard-packed dune sand, he laid him down.
In the strobe of the lighthouse he noted—abstractedly, just as he
couldn’t help but observe the wild beauty of the night—that this
was the loveliest man he’d ever set eyes on. He had to bring him
back. Somebody somewhere would break their heart
otherwise.
He
opened the perfect mouth: wonderingly unspooled from it a length of
seaweed. Other than that, the airway looked clear, and he shook the
insulation blanket out of its pack and covered up as much of the
supine body as he could before leaning in to start
resuscitation.
A hand
closed in the hair at the back of his neck. For less than a second
it imprisoned him—long enough to pull him down and plant one
enthralling kiss on his chilly mouth—then let him go. The survivor
sat up, straight from the hips, abs clearly in as beautiful shape
as the rest of him. “It’s happened,” he declared. He clapped his
hands to his thighs, ran them down his shins and took hold of his
feet. “Hasn’t it? Look at me!”
“I can see you,” Priddy said wryly. The wind had flipped the
blanket aside, and he reached to grab it before it blew away.
Nothing was hidden at all. “Put this on, before you catch your
death.”
“Wait a second. Wait.” The stranger finished examining his
feet. To Priddy’s consternation, the exploratory touch climbed back
the way it had come—calves, knees, and finally—unashamed;
lean-muscled thighs spread wide—long handsome cock, which was
either slightly erect or remarkably big, and either way should have
been much less impressive in weather like this. “Oh, wow. External
John Thomas! Gonna have to be careful of that.”
The wind
howled. Hailstones began to lash out of the west, bringing the sea
to a boil. Priddy wrapped his strange catch in the blanket, drawing
it round the broad shoulders as best he could. “Right, mate,” he
said, raising his voice above the gale. “I dunno who you are, or
how you survived that wreck, but you’re either off your face or
hypothermic. You don’t have to tell me what happened to your vessel
and your crew, but...” He paused, listening. Far off in the
distance, the storm was breaking up into the throb of helicopter
blades. Lights appeared over the cliffs. “...you will have to tell
search-and-rescue. For God’s sake let’s get you
indoors.”
“Absolutely. Name’s Merouac, by the way. Like Kerouac,
only...”
“With an M.” Priddy stepped round behind him, ready to hoist
him up. Those armpits were lovely and warm now, as if the weird
bastard had flicked on some instant central heating. “I get
it.”
“Wait. Has Kerouac happened yet?”
This guy
was confused even by Priddy’s broad standards. “Happened, as
in...”
“Lived. Existed. Written.”
“Yeah, he’s happened. Come on—up you get.”
“Yes. You are going to have to help me, I’m afraid. I haven’t
used this pair before.”
Drunk,
high, hypothermic or plain nuts. Priddy checked off the
possibilities as he dragged Merouac, Kerouac-with-an-M, back up the
rockface and onto the great foundation cube of the lighthouse. None
of the labels quite fit. For one thing, although the various
questions and pronouncements were wild, they were articulate,
crisply formed in a beautiful vibrant bass that sent a thrill
through Priddy’s marrow. For another, whatever had been wrong with
the guy was wearing off rapidly. With every step he was taking more
of his own weight. Halfway up the steps, he dispensed with Priddy’s
support and began to spring ahead of him, an astounding bloody
sight, stark naked in the sweeps of the lighthouse beam, blanket
draped dashingly over one shoulder. Priddy, who was flagging by
this time and losing strength as fast as his companion found it,
struggled not to stare at the mesmerising arse-crack as he moved.
“Yes!” Merouac yelled, attaining the top step and reaching to hoist
Priddy up the last few. “Got it now. It’s been such a long time.
But it’s just one, two, one, two, isn’t it? Left, right. Do you
want to go dancing? Do you have a horse?”
“What?” Priddy stumbled, and was grateful when a strong hand
stopped him from measuring his length on the concrete. Gone were
the days when he could leap into the sea on a rescue mission and
come out unscathed. He was much better, but he’d dropped so much
weight and muscle, and the doctors had said he might never regain
the coordinating circuitry he’d fried in the Penzance club. “No, I
don’t have a horse.”
Merouac held him by the shoulders and looked him over
sympathetically. “Oh dear. Are you very poor?”
“Poor enough, but I’d be poorer still if I had a horse... I
have a car, if that helps. Do you need to be somewhere?”
“A car?”
Merouac sank his hands into his hair—rich brown-black hair,
delicately feathering over his brow, and weirdly already dry—in
what looked like a rush of delight. “I’d forgotten about the cars.
No, I don’t have to be anywhere. But you look freezing. We’d better
get you inside.”