Read The Love Beach for Free Online Page B

pedalled; snaking out across the path, moving everywhere, occupying the limbs of the forest. His white shirt and his cream tennis shorts, which he had bought in Dock Street, Newport, clung to him as though needing his protection in this foreign, heated place.
    He went through a placid village after a mile. Its palm-knitted houses were pushed halfway into the trees, just their noses sticking out, reminding him, in a sudden, nostalgic burst of the way people in South Wales used to leave the noses of their cars poking out of their garages, just to show off.
    There seemed to be nobody about. Some bright washing was fidgeting on a rope line outside one house and there were several slim legs of smoke moving up from behind some of the dead brown roofs. The houses had little patches of vegetables set around them like skirts, hens and chicks investigated squares of sunlight, and masses of wild flowers, pushing into the clearing from the trees, were trimmed and gathered so that each dwelling place had its own brilliant cushions of colour. At the centre of the settlement there was a wide track, much broader than the one which had brought Davies there. It cut the place in half and was eaten up by the trees beyond the most extreme of the houses. A carved wooden figure, a tribal god about the size and attitude of a small jockey, stood by the track, and a few paces away a bus stop, properly painted and with a waste‑paper basket around its middle as though to keep its modesty. The sign said: 'Sexagesima Transport. City Centre Service. Queue other side.'
    He left the village at an ungainly circus pedal watched by the six wide Melanesian women who came, sedate as wooden ships, to the centre of the road as he turned away. They watched him, discussed him, and then turned and voyaged back to the places from which they had emerged.
    Walled jungle closed about Davies, pressing the wet heat close to him. He was wearing his British woollen socks with ugly open‑thonged sandals and it seemed to him that the sweat was dropping from the points of his toes as he worked his legs.
    .Then, with theatrical suddenness, the trees and under. growth fell away, he rode on to soft white sand, gently bumpy, looked up and stopped amazed. The beach was bowed over by courteous palms and spiky pineapple trees. The ocean, churned by the storm, tripped over the outlying coral reef and ran quiet and shame‑faced on to the beach. And lying, lined, alone and littered along the beach were the dead rusted bodies of great steel invasion barges. The bevelled snout of one reared above his head as soon as he emerged from the forest to the beach, petrified in its death attitude, jammed into the island in the place where it had come ashore twenty‑three years before. Its brothers lay straddled the whole length of the beach, most of them the same shape and size, but some smaller and three or four gigantically bigger.
    Davies felt as though he walked among monsters. He placed the cycle against the first barge, touching its flanks, feeling the surface rust powder away in his fingers. Then he went slowly along the battlefield. He felt choked, strangely frightened, to see them left and lying like this. Their square shadows were thrown forward by the late sun, some reared up, their prows high, others nuzzled the ground in the manner of a dying bull at the fight. The landing flaps of some were down, others had never dropped. Here and there, painted numbering and lettering, the square cornered 'us', had survived to show who had joined the battle that mattered nothing now.
    He walked the length of the line of metal ghosts. Halfway along the head and shoulders of a small pointed‑bowed vessel sat sunk in the sea like an old man taking a decorous bathe. Beyond it the white tape of the surf falling over the coral and the ocean journeying out to the horizon. The retreating storm was still on the far edge of the world, black below and topped with pink, yellow, and purple clouds, fluffed and