Every few yards we’d have to negotiate a line of stinking seaweed. I was able to jump them with reasonable elegance but Jonathan, pissed and uncertain of his balance, ploughed through them, his naked feet completely buried in the stuff. It wasn’t just kelp: there was the usual detritus washed up on any beach: the broken bottles, the rusting Coke cans, the scum-stained cork, globs of tar, fragments of crabs, pale-yellow durex. And crawling over these stinking piles of dross were inch-long, fat-eyed blue flies. Hundreds of them, clambering over the shit, and over each other, buzzing to be alive, and alive to be buzzing.
It was the first life we’d seen.
I was doing my best not to fall flat on my face as I stepped across one of these lines of seaweed, when a little avalanche of pebbles began off to my left. Three, four, five stones were skipping over each other towards the sea, and setting another dozen stones moving as they jumped.
There was no visible cause for the effect.
Jonathan didn’t even bother to look up; he was having too much trouble staying vertical.
The avalanche stopped: run out of energy. Then another: this time between us and the sea. Skipping stones: bigger this time than the last, and gaining more height as they leapt.
The sequence was longer than before: it knocked stone into stone until a few pebbles actually reached the sea at the end of the dance.
Plop.
Dead noise.
Plop. Plop.
Ray appeared from behind one of the big boulders at the height of the beach, beaming like a loon.
There’s life on Mars,’ he yelled and ducked back the way he’d come.
A few more perilous moments and we reached him, the sweat sticking our hair to our foreheads like caps.
Jonathan looked a little sick.
‘What’s the big deal?’ he demanded.
‘Look what we’ve found,’ said Ray, and led the way beyond the boulders.
The first shock.
Once we got to the height of the beach we were looking down on to the other side of the island. There was more of the same drab beach, and then sea. No inhabitants, no boats, no sign of human existence. The whole place couldn’t have been more than half a mile across: barely the back of a whale.
But there was some life here; that was the second shock.
In the sheltering ring of the large, bald, boulders, which crowned the island was a fenced-in compound. The posts were rotting in the salt air, but a tangle of rusted barbed-wire had been wound around and between them to form a primitive pen. Inside the pen there was a patch of coarse grass, and on this pitiful lawn stood three sheep. And Angela.
She was standing in the penal colony, stroking one of the inmates and cooing in its blank face.
‘Sheep,’ she said, triumphantly.
Jonathan was there before me with his snapped remark: ‘So what?’
‘Well it’s strange, isn’t it?’ said Ray. Three sheep in the middle of a little place like this?’
‘They don’t look well to me,’ said Angela.
She was right. The animals were the worse for their exposure to the elements; their eyes were gummy with matter, and their fleeces hung off their hides in knotted clumps, exposing panting flanks. One of them had collapsed against the barbed-wire, and seemed unable to right itself again, either too depleted or too sick.
‘It’s cruel,’ said Angela.
I had to agree: it seemed positively sadistic, locking up these creatures without more than a few blades of grass to chew on, and a battered tin bath of stagnant water, to quench their thirst.
‘Odd isn’t is?’ said Ray.
‘I’ve cut my foot.’ Jonathan was squatting on the top of one of the flatter boulders, peering at the underside of his right foot.
There’s glass on the beach,’ I said, exchanging a vacant stare with one of the sheep.
They’re so dead-pan,’ said Ray. ‘Nature’s straight men.’
Curiously, they didn’t look so unhappy with their condition,
their stares were philosophical. Their eyes said: I’m just a sheep, I don’t expect you to like me, care for me, preserve me, except for your stomach’s sake. There were no angry baas, no stamping of a frustrated hoof.