Yarns Without Threads 

He found as he walked, pushing the unwieldy bike, that the brushwood fence did belong to Zoe Village. A few yards down it there was a large sign offering, in three languages, swimming, tennis, sauna, yoga, meditation techniques and several sorts of therapies - algotherapy, aromatherapy, thalotherapy - he'd never heard of before. Discouragingly, a message at the bottom stated that this was not a public camp site. Holidaymakers by reservation only.

Dim, undersea light filtered through the blue tent nylon and somewhere distant a bell, also undersea, was going melodiously bong bong bong. Birdie sighed, stirred and looked at his watch. Eight fifteen. Too early. But already his mind was swimming up through the undersea light into full wakefulness. ... The bell that he'd thought was in his dreams was still bong bonging in the distance, and he unzipped the tent flap and looked out to see if he could find any reason for it.

Three children were playing on the other side of the path, on a little hillock of sand facing his tent. The sun streamed through the trees, flecked with grains of pine pollen, on to brown naked backs, legs, buttocks. There were a girl of about eight and two younger boys, all sleek and unselfconscious as salmon and entirely naked. 'Nice,' thought Birdie. 'Nice for little kids to be able to play in the sun with nothing on.' The girl noticed him, threw a quick smile and said, 'Bonjour, monsieur.'

'Bonjour, mademoiselle,' he replied gravely.

The girl and the little boys shouted with laughter and dashed off through the trees. Somewhere from the other side of his camping patch he could hear a woman's voice calling them. He felt as pleased as if he'd seen a trio of red squirrels.

The previous night he'd found a lavatory block about fifty yards from his tent, so he strolled over to it in tracksuit trousers and bare feet, enjoying the feel of sand that still had the coolness of night about it, although the sun was warm on his shoulders. The urinals were at one side of the block in the open air, and in daylight he found that mildly embarrassing. As he was standing there another man wandered up wearing a tracksuit top that swung open over a brown and pendulous chest, a gold medallion, and nothing at all below the waist. His round tanned stomach and his penis swung as he walked.

'Bonjour, monsieur.'

He gave Birdie a smile full of sparkling white and gold teeth and strolled away, buttocks swinging in time with his stomach. A free and easy sort of place, Birdie decided. Just how free and easy he discovered as he walked towards the source of the bell noise. 'Mathilde, what did you do with the cream?' The cry, in German, came from a woman bending over a table outside a caravan. She was a large woman and the table was low. It's one thing on a sunny morning to see three naked children playing like squirrels in the woods: quite another in foreign country and still un-breakfasted to be confronted by the naked white buttocks of a woman who carries plenty of insulation between bones and chair seat. She looked up, saw Birdie and said in English, 'I am sorry. I thought you were my daughter.'

Spluttering words of apology in three languages and keeping his eyes firmly on her headscarf, Birdie shuffled past, then broke into a run. This brought him to the main drive of the camp and into a whole procession of people. Families mostly, husband, wife and children. Some middle-aged couples with the sort of lined faces and lean bodies that go with determined fitness and a sprinkling of younger people, including some startlingly good looking girls. They were all walking, purposefully but unhurriedly, towards the sound of the bell. But what was a lot more disconcerting for Birdie than the purposefulness was the fact that almost every one of them was stark naked. Not quite all. A few wore the tops or bottoms of tracksuits. Here and there, standing out like exotic birds among the flock, were shorts and sun dresses, and, even among the otherwise totally bare, there seemed to be a fashion for ethnic-type headbands. But, apart from that, simply skin. White skin, mostly, of the new arrivals. Glossy copper, like car bodies straight from the spray works, of those who'd presumably been around all summer. Just a few patches of red as bright as his own throbbing shoulders. Breasts pert, breasts melon-like, breasts dangling. Penises thin as sticks of bamboo or curled up in thick bushes of pubic hair. Buttocks with taut muscles under shining skin, like demonstration models of the anatomy of walking. Plumper buttocks that swayed to a private rhythm of their own. As fast as he dragged his eyes away from one awful fascination, another pressed in front of him.

It was about two hours after that that he met Olivia. ... She was so deep in her thoughts that Birdie was within a few feet of her, had asked her the question, before she saw him.

'Why did you bring Deborah here?'

In the instant it took her to turn and look at him she'd blanked out any surprise. And her answer was in the same tone of desperate patience as when they'd first discussed Deborah's school holidays several weeks before.

'You agreed to it. And you're not doing any of us any good by behaving like this.'

'I wouldn't have damned well agreed to it if I knew where you were bringing her. Does the solicitor know about it?'

'You realize I could get a court order to stop you trailing us like this. It's harassment.'

'I said does the solicitor know about it?'

'About what?'

'About bringing a fourteen-year-old girl to a bloody nudist camp. Sleeping in the same tent as her mother's lover.'

She said, patiently, 'Naturist is the word. They don't like nudist.'

'I don't like it either. And what do you think it's doing to her? Bending and stretching all over the place with crowds of gawping perverts.'

'For heaven's sake, Arthur . . .' (She'd never called him Birdie.) 'For heaven's sake, Arthur, do they look like perverts?'

She waved a hand at the long stretch of beach in front of them. Kids and parents flying kites, falling off surfboards, putting up striped canvas shelters against the wind. The screams of a toddler who'd probably just had it broken to him that there was no ice cream stand rose above gulls' cries and waves.

'Just like any other families on holiday. And probably a lot healthier than most.'

On his way to lifeguard duty at the pool Birdie passed the tennis courts ...

This part of his duties was mercifully less complicated than the children's exercise class. He took over a whistle on a white rope toggle and a blue cloth cap from a beautiful but bored French boy, these apparently being the lifeguard's badges of office. The beautiful French boy had worn nothing else, but Birdie patrolled in his khaki cycling shorts. After a few circuits he gave up patrolling and sat on a high stool by the railings, taking in the scene. The sun was past its peak, slipping down towards the pine woods, and the temperature was perhaps in the low seventies. There were only a few bathers left in the water, and these mostly determined exercise swimmers doing their daily ten lengths or so, but the flagged pool surround was still quite crowded with people taking in a last dose of the sun before dinner. Birdie had never seen such a spread of relaxed nudity. It reminded him of an exhibit of champion potatoes he had guarded, along with its silver cups, as a very young constable at an agricultural show. There were scrubbed and translucent King Edwards with their rounded contours tinged pink, red Desirees whose bright skins seemed too tight for the flesh inside them, tender little Channel Islands, big brown Pentlands, ready to be oiled and baked and served with rock salt. Some of them were as glossy as if they'd come fresh from the deep-fryer. He watched, fascinated, as a King Edward sat up to rub lotion on its pink bits or a tender young Channel Islands rolled from its back to its front. As with the potato stand, surprise struck him at what were usually commonplace things. So there were that many kinds of potato, he'd thought. Odd to have lived so long and not known it. So there are really so many different sorts of bodies, he thought now.