Stig Dagerman - Island of the Doomed

But in fact it’s the English girl who’s leading them both to a certain place she has in mind, a quiet, undisturbed place that people rarely go to. Sometimes, she glances up at him when he’s not looking and sees her reflection in his contented smile and if she hadn’t made up her mind what she was going to do, she’d scream and run away from him because it’s all so disgusting, the stench of his body, the musty dampness he presses into her cloth when he clasps her tightly, the fear of failure, although he’s not yet aware of it, restricting his muscles and making his tender movements so horribly brutal.

She blesses the moment they arrive at the cliffs which fall steeply down to the beach at this point. There are two big rocks leaning towards each other in an embrace, and between them is a crevice, wide enough to let a big person pass through; it’s the same crevice Tim Solider climbed down when he was chasing the box of his dreams; but there are no birds there now, the whole of the flat ground they’re standing on and all the ledges on the cliff face are speckled with bird lime, and in the sunset it looks as if the rock is criss-crossed with red veins, as if the cliff face is bleeding.

He lets go of her because he’s uncertain now, he hadn’t expected anywhere so bare and inaccessible, and everything here is naked, everything so ruthlessly obvious when there’s no darkness to hide in, no tall grass to give protection, and he’s afraid his weakness will trickle all over his face and expose him, and in near-panic, he wraps his arms round her and presses her tightly to him in desperation.

‘Shall we go into the grass instead?’ he whispers, whispers because he’s afraid his voice will tremble if he speaks out loud. ‘This place is no good.’

A wave of sweat and dirty animal warmth breaks over her and she struggles to wriggle free, struggles, but struggles gently so that he won’t have the slightest suspicion. She caresses her way free from his embrace, takes hold of him under his chin and raises it towards the red light and sees that all he wants to do still is to throw her down, bite her, and make animal love to her.

‘Just a little while,’ she says, ‘we’ll just stay here a little while. Then we can go into the grass and we can roll around together and you can bite me while it’s all happening.’

And she notices with satisfaction how provoking little words can excite him, she doesn’t need a whip to keep him there, all she needs is a few hot little words.

She grips him gently by his damp shoulder and pulls him down and they sit side by side on the cliff and watch tips of the rocks apparently burning away in the red, gradually fading light.

‘What’s it like, doing it with me?’ she suddenly asks. ‘You see, I’m so inexperienced, I don’t know anything about it, maybe you noticed it was my first time.’

He bursts out laughing, and for that laugh alone she’d have done what she’s going to do anyway, for nothing else but that.

‘Don’t worry about that,’ he says, slapping her hard on the back. ‘Don’t you worry yourself about that. I gave myself a good wash afterwards.’

Her fingers suddenly became so full of desire to strangle him, but she has to control herself a bit longer, he’s so much stronger than she is after all, and he’d only get even more excited and fling himself on top of her and yell: You’re hot stuff! like he did that other time. Oh, he just lay there full of power and desire and translated her hatred into love.

‘Why did you bite me?’ she asks, stroking the hard membranes of his lips, ‘why did you bite me so hard?’

He bursts out laughing again and fumbles awkwardly after her fingers.

‘Why did you bite me, come to that?’ he asks. ‘You weren’t exactly ice-cold yourself, you got your teeth stuck into me all right. You don’t realize you’re doing that sort of thing, you see, you just do it because you’re feeling so wild. You did just the same, but you didn’t know that, did you?’

And he grows more eager and he starts pawing her body and damp, cold hands start jumping like toads over her thighs.

‘Once,’ he whispers animatedly into her hair, ‘once I had a bit of skirt who bit my ear, nearly bit my ear right off in fact, when we were doing it. You can feel the scar if you put your fingers just here.’

Nothing is too horrible to happen, nothing is so disgusting that it can’t happen to her. He grabs tight hold of her wrist and her fingers throb with pain as she feels the bow-shaped scar on the inside of his ear.

‘Can you feel it?’ he whispers, and she can hear how excited he is at the memory of it all and she lets her hand fall.

Then she asks straight away, so that her silence won’t alarm him, how it all happened, how they came to the boil together like that, as she can’t remember much of what has happened since the boxer died, there’s just a big white vacuum between then and now, and of course he delights in telling her all about it, with broad, boastful gestures, and that’s exactly what she’d expected. And as he’s telling the story, he remembers his great discovery, how she helped him to recover his will, and he feels he must mention that as well, and indeed stress it because it can help him achieve the right degree of superiority.

‘And so the captain said,’ he concludes, placing her poor head between his legs, ‘and so the captain said: I forbid you to do that, I forbid it in the strongest possible terms; but later, when it had happened anyway, he said that since I’d done it even so, we can take it like men.’

Men, she thinks, men. Blowflies more like it. Men. Blowflies. They crawl from one thing to another with all their filth and spread their wings and, the next time they meet, boast about how terrific it was to defile this or that bit of cleanliness.

Someone goes past in the grass quite close by, and they both sit up with a start for their separate reasons; but no one appears, and soon all is quiet again.

Now it’s so dark that everything that’s supposed to happen should happen, the stones are still glistening and when he looks into her eyes he can see a little red gleam and for the sake of that red gleam he thrusts himself upon her with his mouth and bites her lips hard.

‘Your eyes looked so bright and enticing,’ he says afterwards as she lies curled up in his arms, quivering with pain.

She strokes his hair which is cold and damp and sticky and clings to his skull like a thick, thick skin, and she whispers, ‘Darling, before we go into the grass, can I ask you to do something for me?’

‘Ask me whatever you like.’

‘But I don’t know if I dare, it sounds so odd.’

‘Go on, say it.’

‘Well,’ she says, trembling a bit, but he just thinks it’s because she can hardly wait to get into the grass, ‘it all happened so quickly last night and I knew so little about it, I knew so little about my body and I knew nothing at all about yours. Can I, perhaps, can I see what you look like naked?’

He gives a whistle as he gets up and she’ll make him pay for that whistle when the time comes, and for the horrible, disgusting way he flings his clothes off.

Then she cuddles up close to him and guides him very carefully to the edge of the crevice. They both look down and the sea is glittering red as if it were full of sunken lighthouses. He’s standing right on the edge with just his feet clinging hard but unwillingly to the hard stone and gazing down at the beach thirty yards below and the gap is suddenly filled with soft dusk and all the sharp edges of the cliff are smoothed away and for a giddy moment he can feel the water sucking its way in between the rocks. Then she says slowly from just behind him, breathing heavily into his right shoulder, ‘Just wait here a moment while I go into the grass. Stand just like that, don’t hold on to anything with your hands, just relax, relax, that’s right.’