Rocking Horse Road by Carl Nixon

of the sea lettuce was not
bad. Small bits of driftwood were easy to find where
they lay along the high-tide mark and our pile soon
grew until it was waist high.
    Jim Turner and Jase Harbidge tried to wrestle a
sun-bleached log from the sand halfway up the first
dune, but it was larger than they had thought and
buried deep. We all joined in, digging with our hands,
exposing more of the dry wood until it came free. It
was dragged over to the pile and dumped on. More
sticks were found and several more logs. The heap of
driftwood grew and became a pyre that eventually
rose above even Jim Turner's head.
    When it was almost dark Roy Moynahan used
his cigarette lighter on a small pyramid of kindling
at the base, into which someone had stuffed some old
newspaper. If there had been any wind to speak of, or
if we had been less careful in choosing only dry wood,
the whole idea would not have worked. As it was, the
wood caught surprisingly quickly. The flames soon
engulfed the pyramid and, as Roy stepped back, they
licked upward. Ten minutes later we had a bonfire
that surpassed any of our expectations. It was like a
fire you'd see in a movie about castaways; huge and
glowing on the beach.
    Soon after that, the sun went down behind the
long backbone of mountains to the west. Later still,
daylight's reflection off the clouds faded from red to
pink and then into white before vanishing altogether.
Our faces grew flushed with the heat until we had to
shuffle backwards to cooler spots.
    Grant passed the beer around. The bottles were
still wet from the ocean. We took turns using the
bottle opener he had initially forgotten and had been
forced to go back to retrieve. Jim Turner tried to open
a bottle using only his hand. It was a trick he had seen
an uncle perform at a wedding but Jim only succeeded
in cutting his palm. We had no glasses and drank
straight from the bottles. When we put the glass to
our mouths we could taste salt. The beer itself had a
flavour that surprised us. It was dark and something
like liquorice. Whether this was intentional, we
didn't know, but we weren't complaining. At the
time, we had very little to compare it to. A beer was
a beer as far as we were concerned. It was what men
drank when they gathered in groups.
    We sat on the sand, spread out in a broad crescent
with the fire between us and the ocean. There was
no wind to stroke up the waves and they were a low
murmur, and an occasional flash of white foam in the
darkness beyond the edge of the firelight. With the
brown bottles in our hands, our thoughts jumped
and flickered like the flames but always came back to
Lucy.
    Mark Murray spoke. His crazy white-boy Afro was
a halo in the light from the fire. He did not turn his
head but directed his words at the flames as though
they were a new type of fuel to be burned along with
the driftwood. 'When Lucy was nine or ten . . .' was
how he began.
    When she was nine or ten Lucy used to come to his
house and play with his older sister. He remembered
how the two girls had locked him out of his sister's
room, and when he persevered in trying to get inside
they had driven him away with shrill, girlish threats.
It must have been winter because he recalled that Lucy
had been wearing a pink jersey with a picture of a cat
knitted on the front.
    Someone else chipped in with a memory of Lucy
Asher . . . on the children's swings, long past when
she was a young girl, swinging high, just for the joy
of it. She was wearing jeans and swinging her legs
forward and back to build up momentum. But what
was remembered most was the way she hung at the
top of each movement, legs outstretched, head flung
back. In memory she was neither moving forward nor
going back, but suspended as though undecided.
    Someone remembered a day when Lucy was in the
playground at school with two or three of her friends.
Apparently she was doing nothing much.
    Lucy behind the counter of the dairy. There were
so many variations on this one memory that they were
hard to