The Year of Dangerous Loving. John Davis Gordon
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again, flailing and gasping.
Now the moonlit point was only ninety yards off, now eighty, the current threatening to carry them past it into the open sea beyond. Olga screwed up the last of her desperate strength and gasped ‘Nearly there …’ She thrashed and kicked with all her crying-out exhausted might, trying to steer across the treacherous current, and Hargreave was racked afresh by cramp and his head twisted out of Olga’s hand and she shrieked and grabbed his chin again. She thrashed as Hargreave tried to kick through his gut-wrenching agony, and then Olga could not fight on. She simply could not go any further, and she looked wildly at the point: it was only thirty yards off, and she cried ‘We’re there – kick!’ Hargreave kicked and kicked with the last of the agonized endurance, rasping, gasping, coughing, gagging, drowning. Then Olga’s exhausted foot found the sand.
It was the sweetest feeling in the world. She trod on the sand, sobbing, trying to say It’s okay – I’ve got you – but no words came out. She thrashed and plodded and dragged Hargreave to the rocks.
She lay flat out on her belly in the moonlight, long hair matted in sand, gasping her breath back. Hargreave lay spreadeagled beside her, trembling with exhaustion.
‘You saved my life …’
‘My fault … Shouldn’t swim … with so much booze …’
‘Never had cramp like that before …’
‘I have. I should have known better …’
She rolled over on to her back, arms outflung, and looked up at the stars. Her breasts and belly and thighs were covered in sand. After a minute, she said, ‘How are we going to get you back to the boat?’
‘I’ll swim.’
‘No, you risk your life. And mine.’
Hargreave sat up wearily. ‘You could fetch the dinghy,’ he said.
‘Yes. Of course.’
‘Can you row?’
‘I can learn.’ She heaved herself into a sitting position.
Then Hargreave realized that he had forgotten to put the swimming ladder down before he dived in. ‘Oh Lord … You won’t be able to get aboard, the gunnels are too high.’
Olga stared out at the yacht lying out there in the moonlight, registering this information: then she dropped her head and giggled. ‘Oh no! And we are naked on the beach.’ Then Hargreave saw the funny side of it despite himself. Olga laughed: ‘So the only solution is to walk naked to the village and borrow some clothes!’
‘Borrow us a sampan while you’re about it.’
‘Me?’
‘You’re the pretty one!’
Olga threw back her head in the moonlight and guffawed. She collapsed back on the sand, arms outflung. ‘This is so funny. Naked in Hong Kong! But what are we going to do, darling?’
Hargreave stood up, grinning. He walked into the water and washed the sand off his hands. ‘Climb up the anchor chain,’ he said.
Olga sat up again. ‘Of course!’
‘Haven’t done it for years; it’s damn hard, but it can be done.’
‘Not you – me,’ Olga said emphatically. ‘At gymnastics we had to climb up ropes, my arms are very strong. Look!’ She bent her elbow and made her biceps hard. ‘So impressive! I am not letting you swim out there and drown.’
‘In an hour the tide will have turned and whatever causes cramp will have gone away.’
‘No, I am not letting you …!’
‘Al Hargreave may be unathletic but he’s not a complete prick. Would Errol Flynn have let his girl swim out there alone to climb anchor chains? Sean Connery would do it in his dinner jacket.’ He spread his arms. ‘Relax. You’re marooned in the hot China night on a deserted beach with your very own yacht out there – all we’ve got to do is climb up the fucking anchor chain. What could be more romantic?’
‘With my own true love?’
‘So come here and let me wash that sand off your beautiful body.’
She did not have to save his life again when they finally swam out to the boat when the tide had turned: she stayed beside him but the cramp did not return. She was as good as her word about rope-climbing: while he clung to the anchor chain she put one foot on his shoulder, grabbed the chain above his head, stood, then went hand over hand up the short distance to the bows. She grabbed the gunnel, then swung one leg up under the rail, lost her grip and crashed back into the water with an undignified flash of naked flesh. Giggling, she tried again. This time she succeeded. She wriggled under the rail, and got to her feet.
In the morning they sailed to the yacht club. Hargreave left Olga aboard while he took a taxi to the Marine Department and completed port-entrance formalities: he got her admitted into the colony as his crew-member without a hitch – the young Chinese immigration officer recognized him and did not query Olga’s profession of singer recorded on her Macao identity card. ‘Have a nice sail, Mr Hargreave.’
They had a lovely sail, for the next week. That first day he circumnavigated Hong Kong, to show Olga the bustling industrial development and the beautiful bays and luxurious apartment complexes on the other sides of the island. ‘So much money – so much work!’ He anchored in Repulse Bay for the night amongst dozens of yachts and pleasure junks out for the long weekend. They sat on deck in a beautiful sunset, the jungled mountains looming up, the shore lined with the lights of gracious apartment blocks, music and laughter wafting across from the boats.
‘We were told at school,’ Olga began, ‘that the West was terrible, only very few people were rich, all the rest very poor, without enough food, dying of cold. Our teachers showed us movies of New York in the winter, the hoboes freezing while the rich people ate in restaurants and all their children took drugs and all the pretty girls had to be prostitutes. The American army were well-fed because their only job was to conquer Russia to make us slaves. And the whole of Europe was the same, our teachers told us, and England was worse, because you have a queen. I remember, when I was a little girl, when Prince Charles married Diana, we were shown a movie of them at Buckingham Palace after the wedding, on the balcony, the crowds of people outside, and our teacher told us the crowd was demanding bread.’
Hargreave smiled. ‘And you believed your teacher.’
‘Of course, I was only about ten. Even my father and mother believed it. I wanted very much to be a soldier for Communism to help those poor American and English people, to give them food, so their children could grow up happy like me. And when they showed us pictures of the Berlin Wall to keep out all the nasty West Germans and Americans, I clapped. I was very patriotic, darling, when I was ten.’
‘And then?’
‘And Africa – our teachers showed us such pictures of little black babies crying with nothing in their stomachs and flies on their noses and their mothers’ breasts all empty, and we were told this was the fault of the capitalists who were making them work in their factories and mines, who killed all the wild animals and chopped down all the trees for firewood in London and New York. And we saw many pictures of brave Russian and Cuban soldiers fighting to free them from such misery. And, oh, I wanted to be a soldier. I was going to be a parachutist, darling!’
‘A parachutist?’ Oh, he loved her.
‘Jumping out of the sky with my machine-gun and shooting all those nasty capitalists. And when we saw movies of the Americans fleeing out of Vietnam – oh boy, I wanted to marry a soldier so much!’
Hargreave laughed. ‘And when did you change?’
‘When