Free The Long Green Shore by John Hepworth Page A

John couldn’t stay away long. He wandered back to where the remnants of the game were playing cribbage. He wandered up, carefully casual, and watched their play for a while with a small slavey grin. The brown leather of his face was drawn tight over the gaunt bone and his forehead was bald to the top of his head—a skull face.
    There came a break in the play and old John moved back into his seat and sat grinning in what he meant to be a pleasant fashion but which had something of the quality of a dog that has been kicked but still wants to be friendly.
    He grinned, showing dirty teeth, and said in a hurried, confidential whisper: ‘I borrowed a few shilling up the road—what about we go back to poker again, eh?’
    â€˜I’ll run ’em round for deal,’ says young Griffo, flicking the broad around face up to each player. ‘First jack.’
    The Laird finished his last bite of toast and rich, greasy pork sausage.
    â€˜Yeah,’ he said. ‘This bloke had gone away and here’s this orchard heavy with fruit. Well, we think. It’s a pity to see those poor citizens in the city deprived of their vitamins. So we borrow a horse and dray and slave for a fortnight—taking the stuff by night and casing it up and freighting it away.
    â€˜About ten days later we get a letter from the Market Board. There’s no cheque, but a little note that says, “Dear Sir,” it says, “We have disposed of your consignment of apples but the return was insufficient to cover the cost of freight and we enclose a bill for ninepence which represents the balance of the freight charge. Trusting you will forward this amount by return mail, we remain, yours faithfully…”
    â€˜Yeah, we worked for a fortnight for less ninepence.’
    The Laird was remembering that shed at Ginty’s place where they stacked the fruit—working by the flickering yellow light of a hurricane lamp which stained the warm, sweet darkness of the shed.
    He sank gently, and aware, into the warm flood of memory…the thin, sappy smell of sawn pine from the boxes and the mellow, ripe smell of the apples, and Ginty giving them a hand—his slow, amorous voice, a voice that licked its lips and savoured the words with earthy lasciviousness—as he told the story, the long anatomically detailed story of a generous-bodied French prostitute he had lived with for a week in Paris during the last war. It was Ginty’s only story and he had been telling it every night—any time Ginty talked for more than five minutes he started to tell the story or else started to complain about his wife who was tall and thin and mean with herself.
    Ginty was dead now—a tree had fallen too soon under his axe.
    Regan held up his book but he wasn’t reading.
    This would be his first time in action. It had always been the same for him—this fear of being hurt and fear of people knowing…
    When he was only a kid, his father was trying to teach him to swim out to the reef where it ringed out about fifty yards from the shore, making a smooth pool in the surf. The ‘Blue Hole’ they used to call it.
    â€˜I’m going to teach you to swim, son,’ he said. ‘The same way as my old man taught me.’
    He picked young Regan up and threw him as far as he could out into the smooth water. And when the child came to the surface choking and crying:
    â€˜Go on! Swim! Swim!’
    But the child floundered in terror, choking and crying, and was half-drowned when the father finally dragged him in. And later, when they got home, old Regan gave the kid a thrashing, a cold-blooded thrashing, for being a coward. Old man Regan had fear in his heart, too.
    So Regan lay very still and thought of all tomorrows. Desperately he wanted to be accepted as one of these casual, hard-bitten men—as they appeared to him. But all the time the fear was gnawing at his bowels and he was afraid it must show in