I couldn’t help grinning.
“What?” She looked as though she’d been bitten.
“Stupid bitch,” he said again. “B-I-T-C-H.”
Angela flushed with anger and embarrassment, and turned on him. “You got us stuck here,” she said, lip curling.
The inevitable accusation. Tears in her eyes. Stung by his words.
“I did it deliberately,” he said, spitting on his fingers and rubbing saliva into the cut. “I wanted to see if we could leave you here.”
“You’re drunk.”
“And you’re stupid. But I’ll be sober in the morning.”
The old lines still made their mark.
Outstripped, Angela started down the beach after Ray, trying to hold back her tears until she was out of sight. I almost felt some sympathy for her. She was, when it came down to verbal fisticuffs, easy meat.
“You’re a bastard when you want to be,” I told Jonathan; he just looked at me, glassy-eyed.
“Better be friends. Then I won’t be a bastard to you.”
“You don’t scare me.”
“I know.”
The mutton was staring at me again. I stared back.
“Fucking sheep,” he said.
“They can’t help it.”
“If they had any decency, they’d slit their ugly fucking throats.”
“I’m going back to the boat.”
“Ugly fuckers.”
“Coming?”
He took hold of my hand: fast, tight, and held it in his hand like he’d never let go. Eyes on me suddenly.
“Don’t go.”
“It’s too hot up here.”
“Stay. The stone’s nice and warm. Lie down. They won’t interrupt us this time.”
“You knew?” I said.
“You mean Ray? Of course I knew. I thought we put on quite a little performance.”
He drew me close, hand over hand up my arm, like he was hauling in a rope. The smell of him brought back the galley, his frown, his muttered profession (“Love you”), the quiet retreat.
Déjà vu.
Still, what was there to do on a day like this but go round in the same dreary circle, like the sheep in the pen? Round and round. Breathe, sex, eat, shit.
The gin had gone to his groin. He tried his best but he hadn’t got a hope. It was like trying to thread spaghetti.
Exasperated, he rolled off me.
“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”
Senseless word, once it was repeated, it had lost all its meaning, like everything else. Signifying nothing.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said.
“Fuck off.”
“It really doesn’t.”
He didn’t look at me, just stared down at his cock. If he’d had a knife in his hand at that moment, I think he’d have cut it off and laid it on the warm rock, a shrine to sterility.
I left him studying himself, and walked back to the “Emmanuelle”. Something odd struck me as I went, something I hadn’t noticed before. The blue flies, instead of jumping ahead of me as I approached, just let themselves be trodden on. Positively lethargic; or suicidal. They sat on the hot stones and popped under my soles, their gaudy little lives going out like so many lights.
The mist was disappearing at last, and as the air warmed up, the island unveiled its next disgusting trick: the smell. The fragrance was as wholesome as a roomful of rotting peaches, thick and sickly. It came in through the pores as well as the nostrils, like a syrup. And under the sweetness, something else, rather less pleasant than peaches, fresh or rotten. A smell like an open drain clogged with old meat: like the gutters of a slaughter house, caked with suet and black blood. It was the seaweed I assumed, although I’d never smelt anything to match the stench on any other beach.
I was halfway back to the “Emmanuelle”, holding my nose as I stepped over the bands of rotting weed, when I heard the noise of a little murder behind me. Jonathan’s whoops of satanic glee almost drowned the pathetic voice of the sheep as it was killed, but I knew instinctively what the drunken bastard had done.
I turned back, my heel pivotting on the slime. It was almost certainly too late to save one of the beasts, but maybe I could prevent him massacring the other two. I couldn’t see the pen; it was hidden behind the boulders, but I could hear Jonathan’s triumphant yells, and the thud, thud of his strokes. I knew what I’d see before it came into sight.
The grey-green lawn had turned red. Jonathan was in the pen with the sheep. The two survivors were charging back and forth in a rhythmical trot of panic, baaing in terror, while Jonathan stood over the third sheep, erect now. The victim had partially collapsed, its sticklike front legs buckled beneath it, its back legs rigid with approaching death. Its bulk shuddered with nervous spasms, and its eyes showed more white than brown. The top of its skull had been almost entirely dashed to pieces, and the grey hash of its brain exposed, punctured by shards of its own bone, and pulped by the large round stone that Jonathan was still wielding. Even as I watched he brought the weapon down once more onto the sheep’s brain pan. Globs of tissue flew off in every direction, speckling me with hot matter and blood. Jonathan looked like some nightmare lunatic (which for that moment, I suppose, he was). His naked body, so recently white, was stained as a butcher’s apron after a hard day’s hammering at the abattoir. His face was more sheep’s gore than Jonathan—
The animal itself was dead. Its pathetic complaints had ceased completely. It keeled over, rather comically, like a cartoon character, one of its ears snagging the wire. Jonathan watched it fall: his face a grin under the blood. Oh that grin: it served so many purposes. Wasn’t that the same smile he charmed women with? The same grin that spoke lechery and love? Now, at last, it was put to its true purpose: the gawping smile of the satisfied savage, standing over his prey with a stone in one hand and his manhood in the other.
Then, slowly, the smile decayed, as his senses returned.
“Jesus,” he said, and from his abdomen a wave of revulsion climbed up his body. I could see it quite clearly; the way his gut rolled as a throb of nausea threw his head forward, pitching half-digested gin and toast over the grass.
I didn’t move. I didn’t want to comfort him, calm him, console him—he was simply beyond my help.
I turned away.
“Frankie,” he said through a throat of bile.
I couldn’t bring myself to look at him. There was nothing to be done for the sheep, it was dead and gone; all I wanted to do was run away from the little ring of stones, and put the sight out of my head.
“Frankie.”
I began to walk, as fast as I was able over such tricky terrain, back down towards the beach and the relative sanity of the “Emmanuelle”.
The smell was stronger now: coming up out of the ground towards my face in filthy waves.
Horrible island. Vile, stinking, insane island.
All I thought was hate as I stumbled across the weed and the filth. The “Emmanuelle” wasn’t far off-
Then, a little pattering of pebbles like before. I stopped, balancing uneasily on the sleek dome of a stone, and looked to my left, where even now one of the pebbles was rolling to a halt. As it stopped another, larger pebble, fully six inches across, seemed to move spontaneously from its resting place, and roll down the beach, striking its neighbors and beginning another exodus towards the sea. I frowned: the frown made my head buzz.
Was there some sort of animal—a crab maybe—under the beach, moving the stones? Or was it the heat that in some way twitched them into life?
Again: a bigger stone—
I walked on, while behind the rattle and patter continued, one little sequence coming close upon another, to make an almost seamless percussion.
I began, without real focus or explanation, to be afraid.
Angela and Ray were sunning themselves on the deck of the “Emmanuelle”.
“Another couple of hours before we can start to get the bitch off her backside,” he said, squinting as he
looked up at me.
I thought he meant Angela at first, then realized he was talking about floating the boat out to sea again.
“May as well get some sun.” he smiled wanly at me.
“Yeah.”
Angela was either asleep or ignoring me. Whichever, it suited me fine.
I slumped down on the sun deck at Ray’s feet and let the sun soak into me. The specks of blood had dried on my skin, like tiny scabs. I picked them off idly, and listened to the noise of the stones, and the slop of the sea.
Behind me, pages were being turned. I glanced round. Ray, never able to lie still for very long, was flicking through a library book on the Hebrides he’d brought from home.
I looked back at the sun. My mother always said it burned a hole in the back of your eye, to look straight into the sun, but it was hot and alive up there; I wanted to look into its face. There was a chill in me—I don’t know where it had come from—a chill in my gut and in between my legs—that wouldn’t go away. Maybe I would have to burn it away by looking at the sun.
Some way along the beach I glimpsed Jonathan, tiptoeing down towards the sea. From that distance the mixture of blood and white skin made him look like some pie bald freak. He’d stripped off his shorts and he was crouching at the sea’s edge to wash off the sheep.
Then, Ray’s voice, very quietly: “Oh God,” he said, in such an understated way that I knew the news couldn’t be brilliant.
“What is it?”
“I’ve found out where we are.”
“Good.”
“No, not good.”
“Why? What’s wrong?” I sat upright, turning to him.
“It’s here, in the book. There’s a paragraph on this place.”
Angela opened one eye. “Well?” she said.
“It’s not just an island. It’s a burial mound.”
The chill in between my legs fed upon itself, and grew gross. The sun wasn’t hot enough to warm me that deep, where I should be hottest.
I looked away from Ray along the beach again. Jonathan was still washing, splashing water up on to his chest. The shadows of the stones suddenly seemed very black and heavy, their edges pressed down on the upturned faces of—
Seeing me looking his way Jonathan waved.
Can it be there are corpses under those stones? Buried face up to the sun, like holiday makers laid out on a Blackpool beach?
The world is monochrome. Sun and shadow. The white tops of stones and their black underbellies. Life on top, death underneath.
“Burial?” said Angela. “What sort of burial?”
“War dead,” Ray answered.
Angela: “What, you mean Vikings or something?”
“World War I, World War II. Soldiers from torpedoed troopships, sailors washed up. Brought down here by the Gulf Stream; apparently the current funnels them through the straits and washes them up on the beaches of the islands around here.”
“Washes them up?” said Angela.
“That’s what it says.”
“Not any longer though.”
“I’m sure the occasional fisherman gets buried here still,” Ray replied.
Jonathan had stood up, staring out to sea, the blood off his body. His hand shaded his eyes as he looked out over the blue-grey water, and I followed his gaze as I had followed his finger. A hundred yards out that seal, or whale, or whatever it was, had returned, lolling in the water. Sometimes, as it turned, it threw up a fin, like a swimmer’s arm, beckoning.
“How many people were buried?” asked Angela, nonchalantly. She seemed completely unperturbed by the fact that we were sitting on a grave.
“Hundreds probably.”
“Hundreds?”
“It just says ‘many dead’, in the book.”
“And do they put them in coffins?”
“How should I know?”
What else could it be, this Godforsaken mound—but a cemetery? I looked at the island with new eyes, as though I’d just recognized it for what it was. Now I had a reason to despise its humpy back, its sordid beach, the smell of peaches.
“I wonder if they buried them all over,” mused Angela, “or just at the top of the hill, where we found the sheep? Probably just at the top; out of the way of the water.”
Yes, they’d probably had too much of water: their poor green faces picked by fish, their uniforms rotted, their dog tags encrusted with algae. What deaths; and worse, what journeys after death, in squads of fellow corpses, along the Gulf Stream to this bleak landfall. I saw them, in my mind’s eye, the bodies of the soldiers, subject to every whim of the tide, borne backwards and forwards in a slush of rollers until a casual limb snagged on a rock, and the sea lost possession of them. With each receding wave uncovered; sodden and jellied brine, spat out by the sea to stink a while and be stripped by gulls.
I had a sudden, morbid desire to walk on the beach again, armed with this knowledge, kicking over the pebbles in the hope of turning up a bone or two.
As the thought formed, my body made the decision for me. I was standing: I was climbing off the “Emmanuelle”.
“Where are you off to?” said Angela.
“Jonathan,” I murmured, and set foot on the mound.
The stench was clearer now: that was the accrued odor of the dead. Maybe drowned men got buried here still, as Ray had suggested, slotted under the pile of stones. The unwary yachtsman, the careless swimmer, their faces wiped off with water. At the feet the beach flies were less sluggish than they’d been: instead of waiting to be killed they jumped and buzzed ahead of my steps, with a new enthusiasm for life.
Jonathan was not to be seen. His shorts were still on the stones at the water’s edge, but he’d disappeared. I looked out to sea: nothing: no bobbing head: no lolling, beckoning something.
I called his name.
My voice seemed to excite the files, they rose in seething clouds. Jonathan didn’t reply.
I began to walk along the margin of the sea, my feet sometimes caught by an idle wave, as often as not left untouched. I realized I hadn’t told Angela and Ray about the dead sheep. Maybe that was a secret between us four. Jonathan, myself, and the two survivors in the pen.
Then I saw him: a few yards ahead—his chest white, wide and clean, every speck of blood washed off. A secret it is then,” I thought.
“Where have you been?” I called to him.
“Walking it off,” he called back.
“What off?”
“Too much gin,” he grinned.
I returned the smile, spontaneously; he’d said he loved me in the galley; that counted for something.
Behind him, a rattle of skipping stones. He was no more than ten yards from me now, shamelessly naked as he walked; his gait was sober.
The rattle of stones suddenly seemed rhythmical. It was no longer a random series of notes as one pebble struck another—it was a beat, a sequence of repeated sounds, a tick-tap pulse.
No accident: intention.
Not chance: purpose.
Not stone: thought. Behind stone, with stone, carrying stone-
Jonathan, now close, was bright. His skin was almost luminous with sun on it, thrown into relief by the darkness behind him.
Wait—
—What darkness?
The stone mounted the air like a bird, defying gravity. A blank black stone, disengaged from the earth. It was the size of a baby: a whistling baby, and it grew behind Jonathan’s head as it shimmered down the air towards him.
The beach had been flexing its muscles, tossing small pebbles down to the sea, all the time strengthening its will to raise this boulder off the ground and fling it at Jonathan.
It swelled behind him, murderous in its intention, but my throat had no sound to make worthy of my fright.
Was he deaf? His grin broke open again; he thought the horror on my face was a jibe at his nakedness, I realized. He doesn’t understand—
The stone sheered off the top of his head, from the middle of his nose upwards, lea
ving his mouth still wide, his tongue rooted in blood, and flinging the rest of his beauty towards me in a cloud of wet red dust. The upper part of his head was split on to the face of the stone, its expression intact as it swooped towards me. I half fell, and it screamed past me, veering off towards the sea. Once over the water the assassin seemed to lose its will somehow, and faltered in the air before plunging into the waves.
At my feet, blood. A trail that led to where Jonathan’s body lay, the open edge of his head towards me, its machinery plain for the sky to see.
I was still not screaming, though for sanity’s sake I had to unleash the terror suffocating me. Somebody must hear me, hold me, take me away and explain to me, before the skipping pebbles found their rhythm again. Or worse, before the minds below the beach, unsatisfied with murder by proxy, rolled away their grave stones and rose to kiss me themselves.
But the scream would not come.
All I could hear was the patter of stones to my right and left. They intend to kill us all for invading their sacred ground. Stoned to death, like heretics.
Then, a voice.
“For Christ’s sake—”
A man’s voice; but not Ray’s.
He seemed to have appeared from out of thin air: a short, broad man, standing at the sea’s edge. In one hand a bucket and under his arm a bundle of coarsely cut hay. Food for the sheep, I thought, through a jumble of half-formed words. Food for sheep.
He stared at me, then down at Jonathan’s body, his old eyes wild.
“What’s gone on?” he said. The Gaelic accent was thick. “In the name of Christ what’s gone on?”
I shook my head. It seemed loose on my neck, almost as though I might shake it off. Maybe I pointed to the sheep pen, maybe not. Whatever the reason he seemed to know what I was thinking, and began to climb the beach towards the crown of the island, dropping bucket and bundle as he went.
Half blind with confusion, I followed, but before I could reach the boulders he was out of their shadow again, his face suddenly shining with panic.
“Who did that?”
“Jonathan,” I replied. I cast a hand towards the corpse, not daring to look back at him. The man cursed in Gaelic, and stumbled out of the shelter of the boulders.