and a lime double thick for me,” says Simon. “David, what about you?”
“Same.”
“Okay, can we order?”
“No, wait,” says Ricky. “I’m not sure. Maybe a cheeseburger. But it’s so damn –”
“Greasy,” says David. “We know. Can we order?”
“Jesus, man, what’s the bloody rush?” retorts Ricky, his voice rising in real anger. “You’re always in such a hurry, both of you, trying to pressurise me.”
David flashes an amused glance at Simon, his large eyes knowing. Simon smiles back, equally sly. Ricky observes their complicity, by no means for the first time. He stands isolated and helpless, locked outside an invisible bubble that springs instantly into being but dissolves with painful slowness.
“I’ll have a plain hamburger,” he says at last. “But no onion or pickled cucumber, and no –”
“Barbeque sauce,” says Simon. He chuckles at the rhythm of the interruption joke, at the irritation it produces.
They stand at the counter and place their order, faces made sickly by neon light. The kitchen inside is steel and steam and bubbling oil, manned by sweating staff and their jaundiced master who coughs out his hoarse commands.
The food comes swiftly. They sit at one of the precast concrete tables, wolfing down their hamburgers. Simon doesn’t just eat: he worships the acid sonata of charred meat, pickled cucumber and the crude slice of raw onion that tops it, threatening constantly to slide out under the pressure of his grip. Nothing could ever be so delicious, so tangy and squirting to the bite, except Chinese food. He savours the salt air and the pleasing repetitions of tinny pop music, scored in turn by the surf thundering so peacefully, and the piccolo of plover flying off their nests in the dark, ever distracting predators from their eggs. He sips the lime double thick through its double-thick straw, slowly, for fear of brain freeze. When his food is gone, he emerges from this long tunnel of delight and realises that Ricky and David have finished long before. They are debating what to do next.
“Let’s go to your house and listen to records,” David suggests.
“Whose house, my house?”
“No, his house,” replies David, pointing at Simon.
“I don’t want to go to my house,” replies Simon. “I’m sick of my records. Let’s go to your house.”
“No, my mother’s there. I’m sick of my mother. Let’s rather go to Ricky’s house.”
“We can’t do that,” replies Ricky. “My mother’s sick of both of you.”
“I know that,” says David, staring away moodily.
“She really is, I mean it.”
“I know you mean it.”
“Well, let’s go to my house,” says Simon. “We can listen to some records.”
“Great idea,” says David, as if it were Simon’s idea in the first place. “We’ll do it.”
They get up and saunter across the wide field that separates the beach from Marine Drive. They haven’t gone far when they encounter a group of slightly older boys with as little to do as they have. This group is migrating in the opposite direction, towards the beach. They are Simon’s cousin Paul Abelson, Steven Marcus, his cousin Lawrence Marcus, Gary Steinberg, and Jonathan Kessel.
“What are you guys doing?” asks Lawrence, a rotund boy with a lively, devilish face. “Do you want to join us?”
“Nothing serious,” replies David. “We were just going to Simon’s house to listen to music. What are you guys doing?”
“You’ll see – want to join us?”
“Sure we’ll join you,” replies David, all democracy forgotten.
“We’re going to do a tug-of-war across the road,” says Gary Steinberg. He is dark, an astonishingly handsome boy.
“What’s that?”
“You’ll see. You can be in my team.” He laughs, his teeth flashing, and adds, “But not the other two you’re schlepping along. Lawrence, they’re in your team.”
David glances at Simon, mystified. Ricky follows after, his face roiling with anger, unseen behind the group. Simon drifts along somewhere in the middle, silently pleased to be there, resting in the group mind that propels eight boys towards an unnamed, unlit road following exactly the curve of the littoral. This little road diverges from Marine Drive and serves as a boundary between the field and the beach itself, finally meandering into the Pollock Beach parking lot.
“This is what we’re going to do,” explains Lawrence as they reach the road. “You’ll see what I’m going to do.” He crosses the road to the sand dune opposite and returns with a handful of sand. He pours it carefully down onto the neglected tarmac, forming the beginnings of a cable of sand nearly an inch wide that will stretch across the road.
“This is what we’re going to do,” he continues. “We’re going to finish this line. Then we’re going to make two teams of four, one team on each side, one guy behind the other.”
He wipes his forehead with the back of his hand, as if the effort of collecting the first handful of sand and of explaining his plan makes him sweat.
“Like a tug-of-war team. We pretend we’re holding on to a rope. And when a car comes, we wait till just before it reaches us. Then I’m going to shout, ‘Now!’ Then we all straighten up, like a tug-of-war fight – you get it?”
“Then what?” asks David.
“Then what? The driver will think we’re pulling a real rope.”
“And then?”
“He’ll get a hell of a fright and slam on his brakes.”
“And then?”
“We run like hell.”
There is a brief silence as the group contemplates this device.
“It will never work,” concludes Gary Steinberg. “You should rather pull your wire.”
“I do anyway,” says Lawrence. “It will work, because it’s dark. It’s an optical illusion.”
“It can’t work,” says Simon. “There isn’t a real rope.”
“That’s the point, dummy. We’d get killed if we had a real rope.”
“Well, stop arguing, you dorks,” interjects Paul Abelson, “because there’s a car coming.”
They turn as one and see a car turn into the road at the junction, about half a kilometre away.
“So what?” objects Jonathan Kessel caustically. “We haven’t put down the rest of the sand yet.”
