5. AN ICE CREAM EACH

Is the Naturist site owner right to be suspicious?

“When I was a child and my folks brought me to the seaside there’s one thing I loved doing above all others, and that was staring into rocky pools of sea water and at all the creatures in them,” said Trayda as she and Angela clambered over a rocky outcrop that was home to a myriad of small crawling or darting creatures, with green fronds of weed providing a home for them.

“Me too,” smiled Angela, “and, you know Tray, I sometimes wish I was still a little girl in my little girl swimming costume carrying my little girl bucket and spade, and without a care in the world!”

They paused as they left the confusion of brown, grey and charcoal coloured rocks with their jagged peaks and tiny shiny valleys. The beach, now that they’d reached it, was possibly larger than they’d thought, and there were a few other people there, two youngsters probably on their first holiday away from their parents in each other’s arms, lying on a towel under the sun, then an elderly couple on canvas chairs too small for them, and a man with a dog chasing stones thrown for him.

“It’s rather nice here,” murmured Trayda.

“The sort of place to bring a fellow if one ever finds a suitable candidate,” agreed Angela, whose mind seemed to be increasingly preoccupied by her search for suitable candidates.

“Let’s go back and finish our retrospective by having an ice cream each,” suggested Trayda, “you never know, the ice-cream man might be your cup of tea!”

“Or it might be a woman, and I’m oriented the way I am,” sniffed Angela, “curse that red head in Tesco’s! But she did show me what toe-rags some men can be.”

“Hey, it’s not just men! Look at what I did to prove I’m no angel,” said Trayda, “and it cost me dear. I thought me and Don were set forever until I made that one mistake.”

“It was a big one, though,” agreed Angela, “and not unlike the one my ex made, I suppose.”

They had reached the rocky outcrop again, and started climbing up, careful because it was the sort of rock that might have weathered until it was smooth, but hadn’t.

“Ouch!” exclaimed Trayda as she scuffed one foot against a particularly sharp blade of flint.

“I’ll check you when we get back to the caravan,” promised Angela, noticing a trickle of blood oozing from the injury.

“Ice cream first, though,” promised Trayda, trying to forget her injury even though her ankle stung.

The ice cream van was in the hand of David Stokesey, who was chatting to another stall holder, one Morden Foster of the burger van. As they approached they overheard a snippet of a somewhat heated conversation that sounded less than friendly.

“I know you need the trade, but you didn’t have to try and nick mine,” protested the burger man, “after all, matey, if a punter wants a burger he’s hardly likely to settle for an ice cream cone, then, is he?”

“I never did anything,” grunted David Stokesey, “only said as sometimes I don’t like the sweet fragrance from your quarters!”

“And got the health people on my back!” remonstrated Morden Foster, “reckoned there were rat droppings near my van, and there weren’t, and never have been. I run a clean ship, I do, and spend half my time making it cleaner. Anyway, I’m not responsible for what runs around near my van any more than you are responsible for what runs about near yours!”

“I never mentioned rodents...”

“You got them looking, though, didn’t you? You got them peering into every corner, and when that old guy got a tummy bug at the end of last year everyone blames it on me even though it was obvious he’d caught something that was going round! And there was nothing wrong with the burger I sold him! Nothing wrong at all.”

“Hey fellows, keep it down,” called Trayda. She’d heard enough and knew that quarrels like this one, maybe quiet at first, can explode into violence at the drop of a hat when young men are bored.

“Who’s the ice cream bod then?” asked Angela, though it was clear that David was. “We want some service.”

“Not a burger, then?” asked Morden in a weaselly voice.

“Maybe later,” Angela said lightly, “but at the moment it’s ice cream weather, and that’s what we want.”

Morden Foster shrugged and walked off. “I’ll get my fryer all warmed up, then,” he grunted.

“Best clean it first,” whispered David.

“What’s this all about then?” asked Trayda.

“Oh, it’s nothing really. I complained about the smell of burgers and old Sid from the caravan site mentioned it to the health people, and Morden didn’t like it one little bit. Now what can I get you? Ninety-nines?”

“Yes please. Two of them,” smiled Angela, “we’re trying to recapture the innocence of our youth.”

“Two it is, then,” he grunted, “it’s the right weather for it.”

oo0oo

“You’re getting dressed,” mumbled William Hampton to his wife, Annie. He owned the naturist camp, Happy Valley, though there wasn’t a real valley anywhere near, and both of them spent most of their lives as naked as the days they’d been born. It was William’s belief that a happy camp site is one where there are no divisions between owners and guests, and anyway both he and Annie quite enjoyed the freedom that nakedness gave them.

“I’m popping to the Shell and Cockle,” she told him, “I just need a few minutes to sort my head out.”

“What’s wrong with your head?” he asked curiously.

“It’s you,” she said, “you’ve stopped showing any interest in me at all.”

“But I love you!” he blurted out, “you know I do!”

“You could show it a bit more, then.”

“I tell you at least once a day.”

“But telling me isn’t doing it,” she said, suggestively, “sometimes a woman wants to be held nice and close, to see her man from close up and to feel his breath against her skin...”

“So you need to go to the pub! Have you got a lover there? Someone with breath so sweet that it sweeps you off your feet?” he asked.

“Of course not!” she almost exploded, “ it’s somewhere we both go sometimes. You know that. And if I had a bloke waiting for me don’t you think it would have got out by now? Don’t you think you’d know all about it? Folks round here can’t keep their mouths shut, not for one moment. Anyway, I've seen the way you look at those teenage girls playing tennis, you know the ones I mean, and that’s as pervy as anything!”

He decided to ignore that largely because he felt a little ashamed at his fondness for women as young as they were. But they presented him with a sight that took him back to his youth, and that was years ago. True, he was still in his forties, but he knew that his youth proper was done and dusted and in the past.

“When will you be back, then?” he asked.

“I won’t be long,” she said, “you won’t have to wait up for me because I’ll be back before it’s dark.”

“Okay, then. By the way, you look nice.”

She knew she did. The same age as her husband, she could have passed for a woman years younger. Her figure was unchanged from what it had been in her twenties and she lived a healthy life in a healthy environment with little in the way of pollution in their neck of the woods.

The truth was, she was too aware that the man she’d married had morphed into someone on the brink of middle age, and had watched him as he’d let himself go in a way she hadn’t. He was developing a middle-age paunch and there were a few sandy streaks in his dark hair. And when he walked around, naked and proud, in her eyes he was beginning to look foolish. And it wasn’t just him. Their guests proved to her one thing: men, as they grew older, needed clothes more than women did. And in an environment where there were no clothes that concept stuck out like a sore thumb.

She pecked him briefly on the cheek, and turned to go. Dressed for summer, and for a warm summer at that, her brief cotton dress caught the least of breezes as she walked, and the flowing movement turned him on a great deal more than her naked self ever did.

She’s like a painting of a perfect women, he told himself, a truly beautiful painting, and someone’s gone to the trouble of framing it in the perfect frame. That’s what her dress does for her. Frames her perfectly.

When she was out of sight he pulled a pair of shorts and a tee-shirt on, and set out to follow her.

He wanted to be sure of something.

© Peter Rogerson 22.03.19