plunging down to strike at some unseen target. Maybe the boat. Maybe flesh itself-
Angela’s tormented screams had ceased. I rounded the beach-head a few steps ahead of the sheep-feeder, and the ‘Emmanuelle’ came into sight. It, and its human contents, were beyond all hope of salvation. The vessel was being bombarded by endless ranks of stones, all sizes and shapes; its hull was smashed, its windows, mast and deck shattered. Angela lay sprawled on the remains of the sun deck, quite obviously dead. The fury of the hail hadn’t stopped however. The stones beat a tattoo on the remaining structure of the hull, and thrashed at the lifeless bulk of Angela’s body, making it bob up and down as though a current were being passed through it. Ray was nowhere to be seen.
I screamed then: and for a moment it seemed there was a lull in the thunder, a brief respite in the attack. Then it began again: wave after wave of pebbles and rocks rising off the beach and flinging themselves at their senseless targets. They would not be content, it seemed, until the ‘Emmanuelle’ was reduced to flotsam and jetsam, and Angela’s body was in small enough pieces to accommodate a shrimp’s palate.
The sheep-feeder took hold of my arm in a grip so fierce it stopped the blood flowing to my hand.
‘Come on,’ he said. I heard his voice but did nothing. I was waiting for Ray’s face to appear – or to hear his voice calling my name. But there was nothing: just the barrage of the stones. He was dead in the ruins of the boat somewhere – smashed to smithereens.
The sheep-feeder was dragging me now, and I was following him back over the beach.
‘The boat’ he was saying, ‘we can get away in my boat – .’ The idea of escape seemed ludicrous. The island had us on its back, we were its objects utterly.
But I followed, slipping and sliding over the sweaty rocks, ploughing through the tangle of seaweed, back the way we’d come.
On the other side of the island was his poor hope of life. A rowing boat, dragged up on the shingle: an inconsequential walnut shell of a boat.
Would we go to sea in that, like the three men in a sieve? He dragged me, unresisting, towards our deliverance. With every step I became more certain that the beach would suddenly
rise up and stone us to death. Maybe make a wall of itself, a tower even, when we were within a single step of safety. It could play any game it liked, any game at all. But then, maybe the dead didn’t like games. Games are about gambles, and the dead had already lost. Maybe the dead act only with the arid certainty of mathematicians.
He half threw me into the boat, and began to push it out into the thick tide. No walls of stones rose to prevent our escape. No towers appeared, no slaughtering hail. Even the attack on the ‘Emmanuelle’ had ceased.
Had they sated themselves on three victims? er was it that the presence of the sheep-feeder, an innocent, a servant of these wilful dead, would protect me from their tantrums?
The rowing-boat was off the shingle. We bobbed a little on the backs of a few limp waves until we were deep enough for the oars, and then we were pulling away from the shore and my saviour was sitting opposite me, rowing for all he was worth, a dew of fresh sweat on his forehead, multiplying with every pull.
The beach receded; we were being set free. The sheep-feeder seemed to relax a little. He gazed down at the swill of dirty water in the bottom of the boat and drew in half a dozen deep breaths; then he looked up at me, his wasted face drained of expression.
‘One day, it had to happen -‘ he said, his voice low and heavy. ‘Somebody would spoil the way we lived. Break the rhythm.’
It was almost soporific, the hauling of the oars, forward and back. I wanted to sleep, to wrap myself up in the tarpaulin I was sitting on, and forget. Behind us, the beach was a distant line. I couldn’t see the ‘Emmanuelle’.