Линда Ла Плант - Framed

As he continued to peer through the Day-Glo binoculars the girl dropped a ski and began to mono. The spray behind her rose at a sharper angle as she twisted her body to left and right, showing off for the mouth-breathers on the beach. Then abruptly her ski swerved aside and she vanished under the surface with a splash. The boat slowed and stopped. A moment later the girl reappeared, drenched, laughing, beautiful. She was pulled aboard, making elaborate arm movements, and her head bobbing animatedly as she explained to her companions how she came to fall off. Back on the boat she toweled herself. The man got behind the wheel again and brought the boat around in a slow circle, heading back for the first ski, which was still floating in the water. Larry shifted the binoculars, centering the blonde as she bent over toward him to coil in the trailing rope.

“Jesus...”

Her generous cleavage, grading through light tan to deepest brown at its depth, swept down through the narrow field of view, putting an ache across Larry’s heart. He took the binoculars from his eyes for a moment and blinked away stinging sweat. He refocused as the boat came nearer. The engine idled and the man left the wheel again. He hauled in the rest of the rope and put it with the rescued ski at the back of the boat. For a second he paused, facing directly toward the binoculars, then he tilted the peak of the cap up, and Larry had a clear view of his face.

Larry’s heart jolted.

He lowered the binoculars, blinked furiously, and looked again. The man had turned away. Larry dropped the binoculars and scrabbled frantically in the bag. He located his camera and pulled it out. A beach trader appeared and pushed his face at Larry. He was hung with blankets, tablecloths, and beads. He held up a fistful of pseudogold chains.

“Shove off!”

Larry elbowed the man aside, got his hands around the camera and stood up, ready for business. Focus and exposure were automatic. The downside was the wide-angle lens, which meant he had to be really near his subject to get an image of any useful size. He put the viewfinder to his eye. The boat looked like a toy and the people on board were as good as invisible. As he watched he heard the throttle open. The boat rose in the water, performing a swift smooth curve as it turned back the way it had come and disappeared behind the harbor wall. “Shit!”

Larry lowered the camera, urgently interrogating himself. Are you sure? Is the guy on the boat who you think he is? It couldn’t be! Could it? It was impossible, but there was something about him, the angle of his head, the way he moved. Larry was sweating, telling himself he was mistaken, but he fired off half a dozen quick shots in spite of the distance, then he turned to the girls on the loungers.

“Excuse me...” He tried to smile in a way that looked friendly but didn’t suggest he was coming on to them. “You speak English?”

The one nearer him nodded, frowning.

“Can you watch my gear? I’ll only be a minute.”

He was running toward the harbor before she had time to respond. She lay down and buried her face in her book again. The blanket-laden trader crept back. He glanced right and left, then squatted down where Larry had been lying. From a short distance he appeared to be trying out his sales pitch on the girls, who weren’t even aware of him. With a deft economical sweep of his blankets he enveloped Susan’s straw bag. A moment later he backed off, bowing and smiling as he melted into the crowd, taking the bag with him.

In the meantime Larry’s speed and his occasional collisions with umbrellas earned him a few curses in his serpentine run across the beach. Fetching up at a café near the entrance to the harbor he paused and surveyed the water.

“Aw, Christ...”

There were easily a hundred boats out there. He wiped sweat from his lips and chin and began running again, pumping his legs harder, going flat-out as he scanned the expanse of water and huddled boats.

Suddenly he saw it again, the one he was after, the slim cigarette speedboat with the girls on the deck and the tall man at the wheel. They were moving fast now, too fast for anyone to keep up, heading west along the coast in the direction of Puerto Banus. Larry braked, making his trainers squeak. He raised the camera and fired off three more shots in succession, for luck. A little over an hour later he stood shuffling his feet in a little shop near the beach with a sign above the door that said fotos en una hora. Behind the counter a machine throbbed impressively as it processed, printed, guillotined and finally spewed out snapshots. The woman in charge nodded to Larry as his pictures emerged, dropping from the slot onto a tray. They were warm and still faintly tacky as he took them outside and examined them in sunlight. Every shot of the boat had come out, each one dominated by an impressive expanse of blue sea. The subject was discouragingly small; there was no way of identifying the man at the wheel, but the boat itself was reasonably distinct. That could be something.

He stayed on the pavement for a while and canvassed passersby, singling out the swarthier ones who might be locals. Nobody seemed to recognize the boat, although one man did stare pensively for a couple of seconds, then pointed along the shoreline.

“Puerto Banus,” he said, without sounding sure.

Larry wandered back toward the beach, checking his memory as he went. For the hundredth time he pictured the man’s face, rainbow-fringed through the plastic binoculars. Larry closed his eyes for a second and felt the jolt of recognition again.

They’ll tell me I’m off my head.

He had to admit the scenario was touched with craziness. It was the kind of farfetched obsessive crap that burned-out insurance assessors and barmy pensioners came up with every time the weather turned hot. It was the branch of melodrama even the tabloids had grown tired of. But that didn’t matter. Larry was convinced. They could say what they liked; he was in full possession of his faculties and he had seen what he had seen. He had stared through his son’s binoculars and looked straight into the face of the late Eddie Myers.

“Oh, shit...”

He stopped and stared across at the spot on the beach where he had been lying. Susan was standing there. So were the boys, looking on sullenly as their mother bawled out a bewildered-loolang couple sitting under the umbrella. Family vacations, Larry reflected, were never the occasions for unrestrained pleasure that posters and brochures implied. At best they were a change. The boys spotted him and he smiled and made a little wave. He went across, kicking up puffs of sand, his legs shaky from the running. Susan’s scowl turned toward him. He set his jaw and hung on to his smile.

By six o clock the boys were changed and waiting to go down to dinner. Susan still raged about the place, moist from the shower, her hair wrapped in a towel. The room, a family occupancy with a double bed and two singles, was too small for strife, especially the shrill, nerve-grating land generated by Susan. This evening she aimed her rancor unflaggingly at Larry.

“I’ve said I’m sorry,” he protested. “Just drop it.” He stepped over the sodden towels left by the family and turned on the shower. At the same time the toilet seemed to flush of its own accord, and water seeped over the basin. There wasn’t a dry towel left, and he paddled out of the bathroom. “There’s something wrong with the ruddy toilet!”

Susan shrugged. “It’s when they flush it in the room above. Is it still overflowing?”

Larry searched around for some underpants, skidded on the tiled bedroom floor. “I’ll report it to the manager, it’s bloody unhygenic... Where’d you put my underwear?”