‘And do they put them in coffins?’
‘How should I know?’
What else could it be, this God-forsaken mound – but a cemetery? I looked at the island with new eyes, as though I’d just recognised 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 odour 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 realised 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.