Boy Overboard by Peter Wells

Author:Peter Wells [Peter Wells]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781775532002
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand
Published: 2014-12-15T05:00:00+00:00

I LOOK AT her shoes. They are made of white kid, so dainty that they are made from the inside of an arum lily.

‘You’re not dressed right,’ I say sternly. For it is not easy to enter and become a member of our unique club — Ponky Maddy and me.

‘I’ve got,’ I say, boasting calmly, ‘I’ve got a record from the dump which plays advertisements from many different radio shows. Ponky and Maddy and me play radio announcers. We’ve got at least five records,’ I say airily, rich as Croesus. I’ve got, I’ve got, I’ve got …

‘O,’ she says turning her sun on me, full of admiration. ‘O, can we go there please? It sounds, it sounds …,’ then she says it, ‘heavenly. You will take me with you?’

We are standing on the cliff-edge.

‘That is where lovers jump,’ I say.

‘How many?’

‘Many,’ I say. ‘About two.’

She gazes down the cliff. A long way down we can smell the beach, tinny and strange. For this is the rubbish dump side. Where lies the treasure.

‘They were crushed,’ I say in an offhand way. ‘Their legs went into their stomach. Never walked again.’

‘O,’ she says. ‘Shall we jump? Kiss me,’ she says. ‘Come and stand close here.’

She walks out. To the cliff-edge.

I, who hate heights because I know the enticement of plunging, now feel no fear.

I walk towards her.

‘Come on,’ she says, and she laughs then a pure wild laugh, ‘Come on,’ she says ‘Come here and kiss me. Let’s be lovers who jump,’ she says.

She is looking out to sea; I realise in one instant I could push her down. I realise I cannot stop myself from murdering her and getting in her car, and then driving away, perhaps even becoming her, but instead, just as I get right up to her, halting my momentum forward, she turns, sensing me there right near her and the sea glittering all round her head, she turns and seeing me so nearby she simply smiles to me and says to me as she has learnt in the movies, in a low voice somehow right at the back of her throat, so I learn in that moment I must go to the back of her throat with my tongue to retrieve it, she says, ‘Kiss me, handsome, kiss me, handsome. Hard.’

And I do.

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