Sam Thompson - Communion Town

What a nice place, Andie said, so bright. (It was bright; a textbook lay on the windowsill, and the inpouring light kicked a spray of buttercup yellow from its cover across the white wall.) Did Dawn live by herself? Dawn explained that her flatmate, another assistant at the school, had given up her job a week ago and moved out without warning. It had left Dawn short for the month’s rent.

Andie was shocked to hear this, but then delight broke across her face. What if, listen, she’d stay here. Not for long, just for now, for a while, the rest of the month at least. It was the perfect idea. She could change her ticket no problem. Dawn needed someone to help with the rent and Andie was sick of staying in hostels, she’d love to see what it was like to really live somewhere. They’d be flatmates.

Dawn didn’t know what to say. But, well, why not?

Once Andie had changed into a white summer dress that, she said, she had not yet worn, they went back out. It was late afternoon, and the town was full of foreign backpackers and families on holiday. They walked down to Tall Quays, where Andie exclaimed appreciatively and held Dawn’s arm as they looked over the parapet, then back up the seafront to where rollerskaters stitched around pedestrians and prams, occasionally pointing their toes in opposite directions to whirl to a stop. Dawn and Andie left the path and picked their way down the stony beach.

Tarry clutches of lobster pots lay here and there, and the reek of decaying fish rose everywhere from the water and the pebbles. Gusts of wind battered along the strand. Andie stopped to watch some men launching a boat, rattling it down the stones and splashing in after it, thigh-deep, roaring at each other. She laughed when the wind snatched at her dress and chucked sheaves of her hair across her face. Dawn observed the long central groove of Andie’s abdomen appear under the thin wind-flattened fabric. Some youths with bicycles had stopped above to watch, too.

Andie barely looked any different now from her long-necked, gracefully equine school self, except that she had become a fraction fuller in the upper arm and around the waist. Dawn was able to judge these changes because she had spent a lot of time over several years gazing at Andie. She knew the appearance of her arm crooked on an exercise book, and that of her neck bent forward, revealed by fallen hair, viewed sidelong from the next seat. She knew well the stances Andie adopted when viewed full-figure from a distance, long after they had ceased to speak. Today Andie was no longer quite so self-contained in her movements. When she was excited — when she expressed astonishment at a detail of the life of a language assistant, or as she tried to pick her way back up the pebbles while evading the wind — her eyes seemed to point askew for a moment.

They climbed back up to the promenade. Andie licked her upper lip and said she could taste the salt. Among the trestle tables and the bunting, the young men were now laying a series of small bonfires. Here the promenade was not marked off from the sea by any railing: instead the ground sloped straight down into a broad, shallow slipway. As they watched, one of the men chased another into the water, shouting, then pushed him so that he fell, and immediately dived headlong after him. They began to wrestle, coughing and hooting.

Dawn explained that these were the preparations for a festival they had every year. Tomorrow there’d be a kind of party. No, she wasn’t intending to go, it wasn’t like that. It was really just for the locals. An indigenous tradition. Andie noticed that the tables were arranged in a bulging semicircle, as if backing away from the city towards the sea. I wonder why that is, she said; but Dawn didn’t know.

They walked on. Andie had been working as a receptionist in a solicitor’s office until a few months ago, but she was going to apply to train as an actress when she got back home. She had always liked drama at school. Not that this was enough in itself, she knew, but what could you do except give it a good try? When it was a passion there was really no choice. But that was for next year. For now she was seeing where her travels took her. To begin with, she and a friend had been travelling together, but it hadn’t worked out and they’d gone their separate ways. Don’t look so worried, she told Dawn, it’s not a problem! Anyway, she preferred travelling by herself. Really, that was the whole point.

Before they could say anything else, a body blocked Dawn’s path. She tried to move past but he dodged to keep in front of her. He was doing it on purpose. The young man’s arms were spread, his palms exposed. He was watching for her reaction. He wore a sag-necked T-shirt and threadbare, bleached-out cotton shorts; several other young men, identically dressed, were loitering on the far side of the street. One drawled out a comment either on the accostment or on something else entirely.

She tried again to walk on and again the youth prevented her. She ought to know better how to deal with this, she thought furiously. She was supposed to know her way around here. She couldn’t guess what he wanted from them. She risked a look at his face. His lips were dark red, and narrow as a cut except for a central cherry; his eyebrows were dense bars, so regular and sharp that they might have been plucked. She realised that she knew him. She had seen him around the language school, and he’d been in one or two of her classes. She was nearly certain his name was Charles. They had never spoken, but now, seeing her recognition, he grinned, and spread his palms wider.

He pointed from Dawn to Andie and back, establishing the relationship between them. He introduced himself to Andie and, when she looked blank, Dawn translated for her. Andie gasped in happy comprehension and told him her name in return, separating the syllables with care.

But the conversation went no further, because a small young woman with dark, short hair appeared beside them and spoke sharply to Charles. Her voice was low-pitched and hoarse. The rhythm of her words matched the jabs of her forefinger in the air, but Charles didn’t seem troubled at all. He gave a quick humorous bow to Andie and Dawn, then walked away with the girl. He caught her hand with a darting motion and twined his fingers into hers. For a moment she tried to resist.

In the streets, later that evening, several men made a show of admiration. Dawn had not had time to put in her contact lenses and once, as they walked, a man seated on a street-corner bollard made an obscene observation, in a loud, cordial voice, about girls in glasses. Andie asked what he had said, and then had to stop walking in order to laugh. The youths killing time on the streets, with their tar-streaked shins and stained cotton shorts and their body hair showing dark through their T-shirts, had a way of gaping, with heads forward and mouths hanging, that implied a violent, voluntary stupidity. Dawn could imagine them battering their skulls together like goats until their foreheads were dented enough for the lives they wanted.

Up ahead the preparations for the festival looked complete. Flags and banners fluttered from the lamp posts above the tables and the unlit bonfires. A group of men in cut-off trousers dumped an enormous tuna fish, bigger than a person, on the paving stones. Andie grabbed Dawn’s arm at the sight of it. Once the men had laid it out, dappled and gleaming, they moved away, wiping their hands off on their thighs. They were replaced by five women with knives and buckets, who began to butcher the fish, wrapping lumps of its meat in paper and passing them to a school of small girls who darted around the carcass.

Dawn explained that, as far as she understood it, the festival was for the city’s unmarried men. It was supposedly a celebration of some figure of archaic local folklore, some legendary personification of the city. But all it meant was that they had a barbecue, sang and danced, and took part in feats of strength and machismo: wrestling, drinking competitions, games of luck with painful forfeits. The meal was prepared by the city’s unmarried women, who also waited on the revellers, but didn’t themselves take part. It began in the afternoon and continued into the night.