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 realised 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 1, World War 11. Soldiers from torpedoed troop-ships, 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.’