Peter Davies - The Welsh Girl

“Cunt!” he says, snatching at her wrist. She doesn’t know the word, it’s not in her schoolbooks, but she knows the tone, pulls away, curses him back in Welsh.

“Speak English, will you?” he tells her, turning her loose.

She leaves him there, then, wiping the blood from his lips with his sleeve. She recalls a flirty argument they had over the bar one night last week. He’d wanted her to teach him some Welsh, but she’d laughed at his pronunciation and he’d got mock mad. “Ah, what’s the point?” he said. “Why don’t you just give it up and speak English like the rest of us?” She’d turned a little stern then, mouthed the nationalist arguments about saving the language, preserving the tongue.

“Oh, come on,” he hisses after her now. “Play the game. I didn’t mean it. Come back, eh? We’ll do it proper. Comfy like. Get a mattress from a chalet, have a lie down.”

But she keeps going, slipping a little on the tiles, tugging her skirt down, shoving her blouse back in, and she hears him start to chuckle again, the laughter ringing off the tile walls. There’s a last shout from the deep. “Who were you saving it for, eh? Who you saving it for, you Welsh bitch?” He spits wetly.

She expects him to come after her then, feels her back tense against his touch, won’t run for fear he’ll give chase. But before she reaches the opening, she hears shouts, a harsh scrape of feet on the concrete above. It’s as if she’s willed her own rescue into being, and yet she cowers from it. Torch lights dance over the cover of the pool. Despite herself, she turns to Colin with a beseeching look— to be found like this! — but he’s already past her, his head in the shelter of the tarpaulin, peering out. She tries to button her blouse, fingers fumbling. “Shite,” Colin breathes, but the lights and the footsteps are already receding and she slumps against the wall, her heart hammering. The thought of being discovered, the near miss, makes her stomach clench. Her throat feels raw. She looks back at Colin, wanting to share their escape, but he’s scrambling up the ladder, and a second later, he’s gone.

A clean pair of heels, she thinks; the English phrase so suddenly vivid it’s blinding.

She’s soaking, she realizes: blouse stuck to her back, hair plastered against her neck, a sliding wetness dragging down her legs. Her body feels heavy, waterlogged, her arms shaky, too weak to pull her up the metal ladder, and she clings to the cold rail as if she might drown. It’s a few moments before she can climb out of the pool. There are shouts at the other side of the camp, where the barracks have been built, but she hurries the other way, back over the playground, the tarpaulin ruffling behind her. The seesaw and roundabout are still, the swings rocking gently in the breeze. She finds the bike where he left it, propped behind a chalet, and climbs on, noticing as she hitches up her skirt that the seam of her slip is torn. Catch-stitched, just as her mother taught her. It will take five minutes to mend with a needle and thread, but she suddenly feels like weeping.

She pushes off, pedaling hard, although she finds it makes her wince to ride. She doesn’t care that she’s stealing his bike. She’ll throw it into the hedge outside the village. He’ll never ask about it, and if he does, she decides, staring at her pale knuckles on the handlebars where his fingers have curled, she’ll pretend she’s forgotten her English.

IT’S DUSK, THE SUMMER SKY still light, but the sand at their feet in shadow. It slides away as they descend the dune, and ahead of him Karsten sees old man Schiller stumble, struggling to keep his balance with his hands up.

They’d been squatting in the lee of the sea wall, hands on heads, for what seemed like hours before Karsten felt the stiff tap of a muzzle on his shoulder. He’d looked up, opening the arms pressed to his ears, and realized the bombardment had stopped.

No, not stopped — he could still make out the sizzle of shells high overhead — but the targets were more distant. Retreating, he thought. Nearer, there came the thin chatter of small-arms fire, then nothing. He heard his knees crack as he stood.

“Think they mean to shoot us?” Schiller had hissed as they moved out, and young Heino muttered, “We deserve it.” Karsten had told them to shut up.

Now, as they round the bluff and see the makeshift stockade before them, he notices their pace pick up, Heino’s bandaged right hand glowing like a lantern held up before them.

From a distance, the stockade looks as if it’s built of driftwood, the barbed wire wrapped around it like seaweed, but close up Karsten recognizes the fence posts as the blackened stumps of their own shore defenses, shattered in the bombardment. Inside, he slowly lowers his arms, feeling the tight ache in them, the unaccustomed strain.

It feels like freedom just to put his hands down.

He stays close to the wire, walking the perimeter until he’s at the eastern end of the enclosure, nearest the sea. Between the hulks of beached landing craft, he watches the white lines of surf advancing one after another, listens to the gravelly draw of the tide on the sand.

His father’s trawler had been lost at sea twelve years earlier, the body never found, and his mother had moved them as far inland as she could, but Karsten never stopped missing the water. His father had been a submariner during the Great War, and Karsten had joined the Kriegsmarine hoping to follow in his footsteps, only to be told he was too tall for a U-boat. He’d had to settle for the field-grey uniform of the naval infantry and a life overlooking the Channel from shore defenses.

The squad had swum out there only last week, draping their uniforms over the tank traps and wire like washing on a line. What he’d give to run into the surf now, strike out through the waves, blinking in the salt spray. He shouldn’t have encouraged the men, of course. They were late back to barracks, but he was self-conscious of his new stripe, didn’t want to seem a tyrant. Besides, it was the first truly hot day of the year, and now he’s glad he let them.

When he turns back into the stockade he sees what’s wrong at once. He, the boy, and Schiller are the only ones here. We’re the first, Karsten thinks, sinking down. The sand, when he touches it, still holds the silken warmth of the long summer day, but when he pushes his fingers below the surface, the grains are chill and coarse.

HE HAD THOUGHT himself such a good soldier these past four months, had taken to the army as if his whole life, all eighteen years, had been leading up to this. Already in their initial week of basic training he knew he could carry more, march farther and faster than the rest. He’d been working as a guide for hunters and hikers in the Harz Mountains since the age of fourteen, and once he’d mastered the cadence of drill, the rest came easy. He’d hauled heavier loads for dilettante hikers — yards of coiled rope, ice axes in April, and once the head of a buck, a hunter’s trophy, the antlers gripped over his shoulders and the neck dripping blood down his back with each step. He’d hurried back alone before nightfall to skin the carcass and lug home forty pounds of venison for his mother.

Even the petty disciplines of army life came naturally to him. He was used to taking orders. He’d been helping his mother run her pension in Torfhaus, at the foot of the Brocken, since his father’s death. Officers, to Karsten, were just demanding guests to be placated with good service. The pension was small and poor, the furnishings more threadbare each season — a great comedown for his mother — but it was always her proud conviction that so long as they were sticklers for cleanliness and neatness, the place could preserve a kind of rustic charm. She taught him to polish the silver, and then to iron and make beds with starched precision, all before he was ten, and he thanked her silently each morning at inspection.