7. A NIGHT BENEATH THE MOON

Dark deeds are afoot...

It was the kind of summer night that sandy beaches were made for and David Stokesey knew it. He stood there on the firm damp sand watching the gentle waves retreat centimetre by centimetre and soaked up the moonlight. He knew there were some tucked up in their beds, some oblivious to the best beauty of them all, a summer moon-lit sea-scape, but he wasn’t oblivious. He loved it.

It was on such a night that he found himself counting his blessings. He didn’t have much of a living … there was money in ice cream, true, but you needed to sell quite a lot to be able to afford the kind of life he really fancied living, in a big house maybe, with a beautiful loving wife and her huge wardrobe of fetching clothes. But he was well aware that he could have had worse as his gift from the gods.

His parents had lived a worse life. Dad had flitted from one low paid job to another whilst mum had flitted from one lover to another. Neither mum nor dad had loved the other, in fact neither had even liked the other, not for years, but they’d stayed together for the sake of the kids. Which all went to make those kids unhappy, and his brother Glen had seen the futility of life at the age of fifteen and had ended it all.

Glen had been the one with real courage because it takes a great deal more courage than David had to end it all. To die like Glen had died, hanging from a home-made noose with nobody anywhere near to help him down and talk some love into him. No, Glen had been brave, all right.

Those had been dark days. Suicide is never a light thing and the funerals of teenage boys are amongst the darkest of things imaginable. It might have driven his parents closer together and maybe that was one of the many things on Glen’s mind as he placed that rope around his own neck, but it didn’t. Dad saw that the whole thing was his fault and turned to whiskey to lift the burden of knowledge from his shoulders whilst mum had come to a similar conclusion and decided that she just needed the oblivion of meaningless sex to take the hurt away, and had a circuit of places to stop for her particular brand of forgetfulness. Neither had given one thought to Glen and his pain, not even when it started replicating itself in his brother David.

It was cowardice that had saved David. He might have made the ultimate sacrifice like Glen had, and battled against life and hopelessness, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. So he turned to diluting his father’s cheap whiskey with his own urine and drinking the difference. His father still got drunk, but so did he, and he didn’t like it, not then and not with the help of strong spirits since.

The ice cream van was a last resort. And getting that was an unexpected but very welcome bolt from the blue. His mother’s twin brother, an uncle he didn’t know anything about because there had been a schism in her life before he was conceived and since that schism neither twin had one moment of time for the other, had passed away and, as unknown in death as he’d been in life, bequeathed his ice cream business to a nephew who had no idea he existed. The twin had died young, of cancer, and his funeral had been before David had learned of his existence or of the ice cream business, so he hadn’t even gone to that.

And so we have David Stokesey, ice cream salesman, standing on the beach at midnight with the whole world writ in the skies. Or so he thought.

And part of that whole world was Annie, the gorgeous and lithe wife of the bully William Hampton of the nudist camp. It was a strange thing, to love the woman with an even greater intensity than the hatred he felt for the man. But that’s how it was.

There could be no doubt about it, he loved Annie with every atom of his being. It wasn’t the kind of lust shown by half the men who met her and her gorgeous eyes and even more gorgeous curves, but a genuine, deep down and very personal love that was his, and his alone.

It was a wonderful night to be on that little beach, under that particular moon and with special thoughts coloured by Annie running through his head. And as he stood there a particularly adventurous wave rolled in and trickled over his naked feet, and he grinned at it, stepping back lest it splash up his legs and against his bright blue shorts.

And at that precise moment a shadow in black loomed up behind him, unseen and unsuspected, and a rock, jagged, splintery with little outcrops of diamond-sharp flint, was smashed against his head. And in that instant his thoughts of Annie and the whole wretched chaos of his youth before anything good ever came his way, were obliterated for good.

Then the shadow loomed over him. In the moonlit darkness it arched over, a disturbance in the night, invisible hands wrenched his shorts and tee shirt from him and slung both garments into the sea, along with any underwear left after an evening with Annie.

The sea then moved in, slowly centimetre by centimetre, washed around him at first and then lifted him on fingers of foam until he was rested on a jagged low shelf of rock, where he was grabbed by sharp protrusions and saved from being swept out to the briny depths when the seas started their slow retreat down the beach.

Oo0oo

“Max!” called Walter Tiny as he sauntered in the early morning, along the rocks that bordered the eastern edge of the little beach he loved so much and onto the beach that was sparkling under the new day’s sunlight as though someone had scattered diamonds on it during the night.

Max returned to him, faithful and obedient, though his doggy mind knew exactly what they were going to do. His master would walk slowly along the beach, over some more rocks until he came to that strange little camp where the people went around more naked than any dog he’d heard of. Then he would sink to the sand and stare as the naked people went about their business, men nervously with hands in front of them lest others suspect their recent excitement and women all brazen and mostly beautiful. He was only a dog, but even he knew beauty when he saw it.

Max ran off again after sniffing his master’s hand just in case it concealed something he fancied, a treat maybe, or something else, tasty and special. But it didn’t, so he ran around in a fascinating circle and barked every time he got close to Walter Tiny. And Walter laughed at him like he did every day, and the two proceeded across the tiny beach.

Then, midway, Max paused and his tail shifted from being a wagging, confusing, thing of hair and muscle, to a rigid thing of solid flesh. He had seen something he wasn’t expecting, something that needed investigating, something that needed his expert canine eyes and magnificent nose to work out what, if anything, it might portend.

He rushed to the rocks at the north side of the beach, and stared, then sniffed.

It was a man. A naked man. And he was fast asleep. So fast asleep that not even he might waken him and warn him about his nakedness.

He rushed back to his master and barked madly.

You’d best come and see this, man of mine, his barking said in an ear-splitting clamour, you'd best come and see this man, he’s lost his pants and he’s cold and dead…

And Walter Tiny followed Max to the source of his excitement, and stared.

“Stokesey,” he sighed, “it’s poor young Stokesey, and he’s dead...”

So Walter Tiny, grateful that there was a telephone signal here where a year or so ago there hadn’t been, dialled the emergency number on his mobile phone, and reported a murder.

© Peter Rogerson 24.03.19