The Swap - By Antony Moore Page 0,87

rocks, black from the mist, lay like great whales beached on a foreign shore, in a reassuringly wall-like formation. Once over the whales' backs, though, they stepped onto a great disc boulder that marked the edge of the cliff and from which they could look down the spinning drop to the sea below.

'Shit.' Harvey stepped back and put his hand to the great blue-whale rock that reared up beside him. 'I haven't been up here for ages. I'd forgotten how high it was.' Dreams of falling, of rolling down the sides of cliffs, clutching onto tufts of grass that slipped from between his fingers, returned to him. That was the advantage of London, of course: you only had muggers and skinheads infesting your sleeping hours, and the likelihood of being blown into the sea was virtually nil. Maisie did not share his concern and stepping right to the edge of the great disc, looked down for a long time at the waves boiling against the base of the cliff below. She breathed deeply the stinging salt water in the air and it scoured her lungs, cleaning away the residue of the last few days in London. Harvey stayed back on the whale's flank, patting its smooth, cold, damp sides for reassurance with one hand and feeling for his cigarettes with the other. Before he could locate them, she turned back to him, her hair flying in the wind, a blizzard of curls. Striding forward she looked at him as she had looked at the sea and he felt it carried in her eyes, the green of the deep water washed over him and made him gasp. She pulled up his jumper and ran her hands, icy soft from the wind, over his chest.

'Fuck me, Harvey,' she said in a voice he had not heard before. 'I need you, right now.' And Harvey, wide-eyed with fear at what sex on the edge of a cliff might entail, but also suddenly consumed by the desire to be desired in this all-consuming sort of way, turned her and pushed her back against the whale's side. Then with a passion that he would later characterise as 'a bit D.H. Lawrence', he scrabbled the buttons of her jeans undone, tore them down and, kneeling on the wet rock buried his face in her crotch before standing and having what he would also later refer to as 'an old-fashioned knee-trembler'. The wind beat their bodies but they felt no chill, indeed Harvey was sweating like a racehorse by the time they finished. As they ended she gave a great howl into the wind and listened to it as it was whipped away from her, over the whale's soaring flanks and off inland. Harvey too cried out, though with a more grunting intonation that wasn't carried at all but seemed to stay for ages as a sort of echoed, animal noise under the rocks. She clung to him for a bit and then with a little laugh found her knickers round her left ankle and restored them and her jeans. Harvey turned from her and putting his back against the whale, dragged in great gouts of air. He really wouldn't have eaten that breakfast if he'd had any idea . . . He groped in the pocket of his unbuttoned denim jacket, found his cigarettes, somewhat crushed, and then spent several cursing moments attempting to light one in the swirling eddies of the wind.

'That was amazing, Harvey.' They had returned to the hotel and were now, red-faced from the sting of salt in the air and from their exertions, sitting in the bar drinking hot chocolates. Still breathing rather heavily, Harvey nodded his agreement. He was already busy writing up the memory in his mind for future repetition to several of his friends. Much of his teenage years had been spent attempting to orchestrate knee-tremblers on headlands, and mostly it had been a history of terrible failure and shame. But now when his mates played that 'strangest place' game and someone came up with 'in a hammock on a catamaran' or whatever, at least Harvey could provide a half-decent riposte. He grinned at the warm place that he had prepared to keep the memory; it was already part of the new bit of himself that he was calling the Maisie'd bit. It was a part of himself that he wanted to see a lot of.

'You seem to bring something out in me,' she went on, making it