The Bonny Dawn Read online

  And there she was, coming out of the full sun into the dappled shade of the copse. He did not droop his head when her horror-filled gaze brought her to a dead, gaping stop. Then her head, pushing itself back on her shoulders, looked for a moment as if it would topple her backwards.

  The look in her eyes brought a groan from Joe, for in her gaze was reflected the dirt of life, the dirt from which he had always washed his hands. Even in thought he had tried to keep away from the dirt of life. He had wanted to think of life as fine, grand, beautiful. This complex dream desire, this God-given yet God-forbidden instinct which came into evidence from the moment the lips suckled the breast, this spring of interest and curiosity that disturbed the adolescent mind, this promise of the body for ecstatic wonder…this was the one thing he had tried to keep clean. So much had aimed to soil it. The talk of the lads at school. The lavatories, and Ernie Bowen pressing against him. Bill Chaters and Frankie Potter talking on the backshifts. And the TV: the girls wearing only tights, bending backwards and wriggling their thighs to the camera. He had wondered for a while about these cameramen focusing the light on them, but dismissed it with the thought, They won’t see it like that, it’s just a job. But now he knew his efforts were as nothing, for he was seeing himself reflected in Brid’s horrified gaze.

  When she screamed he screwed his eyes up, and he kept them screwed even when he heard her gasping breath near him.

  ‘Joe. Oh Joe. Oh my God, Joe! Oh, I can’t get it loose. Oh God in heaven! Oh, the devils! The beasts! The beasts!’

  Slowly Joe opened his eyes and looked at her. She was struggling ineffectively with the cords at his wrists, hurting him more as she tried to release him. She had not thought to take the gag out of his mouth, and as he made a motion with his head to draw her attention to his face, his own attention was caught by the sight of a man now entering the copse. He too was naked but for bathing trunks. For a minute he stood still with his hands extended away from his sides; then seemingly in a couple of leaps he was standing beside Brid, and he too was using the name of God, but going further, crying, ‘God Almighty! God Almighty!’ And to this he added, ‘The bastards!’

  It was hardly a word that a schoolteacher should use, but Leonard Morley was in the habit of using it frequently. Hardly a day passed but he would exclaim to himself, ‘The young bastards!’ It hadn’t always been like this. He could look back to the time when he had liked young lads, when he had said that Robson, or Wheatley, or Colleridge was a lad, a young devil, but still a lad. The term ‘lad’ in itself had indicated that the boy in question was a bit of a devil. And the devil had indicated that the lad was an outsize of a lad. He could remember going home to Phyllis when they were first married and saying, ‘What d’you think happened today? Some devil took Sefton’s bike to pieces, completely to pieces. It looked as if it was in a thousand bits. I thought he would have taken off, the explosion was so great.’ The funny side of this had been that Sefton was the gym instructor and advocated walking. And then there was the day that one of the lads with a knack for it had swapped some wiring around. He must have got into the school on the Sunday, and what happened on the Monday morning, especially in the chemmy lab, wasn’t forgotten for a long, long time. The lads then had been devils…but they weren’t bastards.

  He couldn’t actually remember the time when they had changed to being bastards, although he knew it wasn’t directly after the war, but in the early sixties, he would say.

  He tore at the cords fastening the boy to the tree and as he worked he talked rapidly. ‘Who did this? How long have you been here? If you can get them they’ll do years for this. My God! I would like to see them on the receiving end of a birch.’ He put his arms underneath Joe to support him and half carried him out beyond the copse to the grass. He seemed unaware of Brid, and yet, after he had laid Joe down he looked up at her and said with a note of command, ‘Run to the bank and call my wife.’

  From where she was standing, her eyes fixed on Joe’s pale, averted face, Brid did not seem to hear his words, and the man, realising this, put his hand to his mouth and called, ‘Phyllis! Phyllis!’

  As the call died away there came a movement from away behind them in the direction of the road, but he could see nothing.

  There now followed the sound of motorcycles starting up, and on hearing it Brid bit into her lower lip for she knew, as plainly as if she had seen them, who the riders were.

  Joe did not hear the machines. He was conscious only of pain and his nakedness, and to remove this from Brid’s eyes he turned with an effort onto his face. Although his legs were pressed tightly together and his arms were hugging his body, his limbs still had the feeling of being stretched, and added to this was the sensation of a hot wire being drawn through the marrow of his bones. He wanted to slip away into oblivion; it would have been easy, for he was faint and sick. His mouth, which also still retained that stretched feeling, moved about some words, and the man kneeling on the grass and bending his ears to him said, ‘What is it?’

  ‘Me clothes.’

  ‘Where did you leave them?’

  His jaws moved twice before he brought out, ‘About…somewhere.’

  The man looked back to where the torn trunks lay between the slender trees and he moved hastily forward and picked them up, then went behind the few bushes, looking here and there.

  The fingers of Brid’s left hand were pressing upwards across her mouth, and her thumb was dug in under her cheekbone. The fingers were aiming to press down the fear that was filling her and which was attempting to escape in a gabble of words, a gabble of names which, strangely enough, did not include Sandy Palmer’s. It was her mother’s name, her father’s name, and the name of her Uncle John which raced about in her mind, and would escape if she did not prevent them.

  Her eyes travelled down from the back of Joe’s head to his buttocks. They were small and firm and pale compared with the skin of his back and that of his legs. The soles of his feet were turned upwards and in this moment she was surprised that she could register the fact that they were without corn or callus. They were broad-soled, flat yet shapely, the feet of a walker…But her mother, and her father, and her Uncle John. Her mother and her father and her Uncle John: the words were spiralling higher in her head, but the man stopped them from escaping by making his appearance once again with Joe’s clothes across his arm, just as a woman pulled herself up over the top of the bank as Brid herself had done only a few minutes earlier on her hands and knees. And when she straightened up, the man called to her: ‘Here! Phyllis; come and look at this. No wonder she screamed. They had him gagged and spreadeagled between these trees.’ He pointed. ‘You wouldn’t believe it…or would you? It’s what I’ve been saying all along, they’re not human any more.’ He approached the woman, talking as if Brid and Joe weren’t there, and then he turned with her and came towards them again.

  ‘They were fellows on motorbikes, I heard them go off. Couldn’t have been anybody but them. Look at this.’ He bent down and his hands came gently onto Joe’s shoulder, and his voice changed now as he said softly, ‘Turn over, boy, let my wife see. Don’t worry, she’s been a nurse.’

  Joe, after turning his head slowly to the side and glancing at the woman dressed in a short-skirted sunsuit, turned his head quickly into the grass again and pressed his body to the earth.

  ‘It’s all right, I tell you. She’ll know if you should go to hospital or not.’

  Joe’s body made a movement of burrowing, then he said, ‘Give me me clothes.’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’ The voice was gentle but brisk, and the woman, kneeling down by him, turned him over, and he, still too shaken to resist, was once again on his back. Her hands did not touch him and a silence fell on them, and then she swallowed once before saying, ‘Why did they do this? Do you know them?’

  Joe’s head moved once from side to side. He said again, ‘Me clothes,’ and this time added with a beseeching note, ‘please.’

  As the man and woman h
elped Joe to his feet Brid looked away, looked out towards the sea. She knew that Joe did not want her to look at him. She had a nice picture of the sea framed in between the boles of the trees. On the horizon right at the top of the picture was a speck she knew to be a ship. She wished she was on that ship, far away from this place. Far away from everybody in it. But not everybody…Joe. She didn’t want to be far away from Joe. Her father had said to her, ‘You move out of this house the day and I’ll skin you alive.’ That was when she had gone down to dinner. After dinner she had gone upstairs and got her bathing costume and put it in the fancy basket with a towel. She had not cared then whether or not her father came out of the front room, for she had suddenly stopped being afraid of him. Lying in bed that morning she had faced the fact that all the wanting in the world wouldn’t make him her father. He wasn’t her father, and she had always known he wasn’t her father.

  That’s where the trouble had lain, and still lay; he wasn’t her father. She had known that if she met him on the stairs, or in the kitchen, and he tried to carry out his threat she would fight him, tooth and nail; she would fight him to get out and go swimming with Joe Lloyd. He had been sulking in the front room when she came downstairs. Her mother had been in the kitchen when she passed through and she had said no word to detain her, and Brid knew that in defying the man she called father she was scoring one against him for her mother.

  As she had hurried along the road towards the beach she had thought, I’m seventeen and if I wanted to marry, I could; he couldn’t stop me. Joe likes me, he does, and I like him. I do, I do. I’ve never met anybody I like as I like him. He’s different. Not nasty. He could never be nasty. Not even when…Her thoughts had skipped away from the subject and she had covered some distance before she had said to herself, ‘What if he’s only being nice and not serious?’ And there had come a longing in her, a prayerful longing that Joe Lloyd would be serious, for she saw in his seriousness a means of escape. She would stay at home for ever and ever, as bad as it was, rather than marry anybody; yes, rather than marry anybody. Then she had scrambled down to the beach and up the bank towards the trees…and she had seen Joe.

  He had looked terrible. Without being told, she had known who had done this thing. Yet her mind would persist in ignoring his name. She could not even think of the name ‘Sandy Palmer’; it was as if he didn’t exist. But there were those who did exist, and they were her mother and father and her Uncle John.

  The woman’s voice came to her now, saying, ‘Come and sit down,’ and she was surprised when she turned to see them all sitting down, the man and the woman one on each side of Joe. Slowly she went and sat down opposite Joe but did not look at him, nor he at her. The man was saying, ‘Now take my advice and go to the police. If they can do this once they’ll do it again. They’ve only to get a taste for this kind of business, for anything abnormal, and they are away. You say you know who they were. What’s their names? Tell me; perhaps I know them.’

  Joe lowered his head still further. If he were to say Sandy Palmer the man would say, ‘But why did he do it?’ And could he say to him, ‘He did it because he thought I was out all night with her, with Brid, when we only met at four o’clock.’ And then the man would say, ‘Four o’clock! Four o’clock this morning? But why did you want to meet at four o’clock this morning?’ To see the dawn. It sounded funny now, daft, even improper, to ask a girl out at four o’clock in the morning. They would reckon that things could happen at four o’clock in the morning the same as they did at ten o’clock at night. Sandy Palmer had thought that…Sandy Palmer. He would get Sandy Palmer, and by God he would leave his mark on Sandy Palmer. Not in the same place as Sandy Palmer had left it on him. No, he wasn’t that putrid. He could never stoop to that, but, by God in heaven, he would give Sandy Palmer something he would carry to his dying day, he would that.

  ‘It was Sandy Palmer.’ Brid suddenly blurted out the name, her head and chest bouncing forward as if she were being prodded in the back.

  Swiftly, Joe lifted his head to look straight into Brid’s eyes: it was as if she had spoken his thoughts aloud. He saw that she was still terrified. This was a new side to Brid. He hadn’t had much time to find the sides to her, but this one he judged was part of her make-up; this fear-filled side came over in the trembling of her voice as she mentioned the name Sandy Palmer, and before he could say anything the man took it up, his voice hard.

  ‘Sandy Palmer? Well, one needn’t be surprised any more. Sandy Palmer…I know Sandy Palmer. How did you come foul of Sandy Palmer?’ But without waiting for an answer the man went on, ‘Was it at Telford Road School? He went there, didn’t he? I had him before that.’ Leonard Morley stopped abruptly. His mind having groped back, he actually knew now the first time he had thought of boys as bastards. Sandy Palmer could only have been about eleven at the time. He remembered Sandy Palmer. Oh yes, by God, he did! For Sandy Palmer had left his mark on him, in a way, as well as on this boy. He hadn’t been long at the Bodden Moor School; it was his third move since the war and he was unsettled. He remembered realising very quickly that a number of the boys at this school were tough lads. Sandy Palmer was one of them. Each had the same habit of filling the classroom with the gases from his body. They did it purposely, methodically, orderly, in rotation. To them, it was a belly-aching laughter game. Their faces would be tight with unexploded laughter. Their eyes round and bright, their nostrils would quiver as they sniffed the polluted air, and they would all be looking at him fixedly, their eyes, saying, ‘What now, chum?’ He should have had more sense than talk to them about this sort of thing. He had had enough experience to know that he should have got the ringleader on one side without witnesses and boxed his blasted ears, given him a kick in the backside, or shaken him until his teeth rattled, all metaphorically speaking; but no, he had had to address the whole form; and it was no other than Sandy Palmer who had run across the playground, right past the common-room window, yelling, ‘What d’you think? Old Morley gave us a lesson on fartin’.’ That was the day he acquired the name of Farty Morley.

  He hated the nickname, loathed it. It made him curl up inside. Sandy Palmer had left the school when he was twelve, but the nickname had stuck.

  At this moment Leonard Morley was hating Sandy Palmer more than was Joe. Joe’s mind was muzzy, but the man’s, in the main, seemed to be clear with a hard clearness, polished with years of classroom restraint; but with a section cut off as if by a thick plate-glass window behind which his turbulent thoughts were allowed to boil. He had a longing for Sandy Palmer to return. He could see himself rolling on the ground, pounding his fists into Sandy Palmer’s face, beating out of him not only the humiliation that the nickname had carried, but all the nerve-stretching, mind-explosive irritations of all the little bastards he had been forced to suffer.

  The words ‘Come on! Come on! Snap out of it,’ being briskly spoken by the woman to her husband, startled Brid somehow, for the action that had accompanied them, the tapping of the man imperiously on the arm, reminded her of a scene in the kitchen at home with her mother saying, ‘Come on! Come on! snap out of it. Get going. Snap out of it.’ This scene on top of the cliff had taken on a semblance of home. She didn’t know this man and woman from Adam, yet it was as if she had been with them for years.

  Now turning, first to Brid, then to Joe, the woman said, ‘Look, we’ll go down and get our things, we’ve got a little stove. We’ll bring everything up here and make a cup of tea, eh?’ And Brid looked to see Joe’s reaction, and when he acknowledged the words with small jerks of his head, Brid followed suit.

  ‘All right. Fine. That’s a good idea.’ The man was on his feet. He was smiling slightly and was looking somewhat boyish. He too looked from Brid to Joe and his voice took on a light note as he said, ‘And then we’ll all go in and have a dip. A dip won’t do him any harm, will it?’ He had turned to his wife, questioning, but quickly returned to Joe, saying, ‘That’s what you came for, isn’t it, a dip?’ With a swift body mov
ement he was down on his hunkers, his face level with Joe’s, and speaking low and earnestly now, with bitterness threading the words, he said, ‘Go in and have your dip. Keep to your purpose; don’t let them budge you an inch. If you came here to swim, swim. If you allow swine like Palmer and his gang to deviate you one inch, they’ve won. You’ve got to go on and do what you want to do in spite of them. Go right through them. D’you understand?’

  Joe’s head had been slightly drooped, but now he was looking at the man eye to eye. The fellow was right. If you let them frighten you, you were finished. If he remained frightened now he would never see Brid again. He could see himself avoiding this beach, avoiding the club and George’s; in fact moving away altogether, just because of Sandy Palmer and what he would do next. No, the man was right. ‘Go through them,’ he had said, and that’s what he would do. He could see his future actions clearly, he could see them reflected in the man’s eyes. He would get Ossie to go with him. Yes, he would ask Ossie to go with him. He would go to the house, Sandy Palmer’s house, and say, ‘Look, I could have gone to the police. I could have had you locked up for what you did to me. But come on, we’ll fight it out. You bring one of your chaps, I’ve got mine.’ And they would go to some place on the fells. The light he was seeing in the man’s eyes seemed to dim, and with it his heroic action of having it out with Sandy Palmer the clean way. No. It couldn’t be like that; that was the way things were at one time, the way his dad would have done it, but you could not do it now. If he beat Sandy Palmer, Sandy Palmer would catch him one dark night and he’d have his pals with him. They would waylay him and beat him up. He knew the procedure; it had happened to other blokes. He had heard about them now and again in the club, and yet that club was supposed to be a good club where things like that didn’t happen, because no louts or beats were allowed in.