‘Where are we going?’ I said.
‘Back to Tiree,’ he replied. ‘We’ll see what’s to be done there. Find some way to make amends; to help them sleep soundly again.’
‘Do they eat the sheep?’
‘What good is food to the dead? No. No, they have no need of mutton. They take the beasts as a gesture of remembrance.’
Remembrance.
I nodded.
‘It’s our way of mourning them – ‘
He stopped rowing, too heartsick to finish his explanation, and too exhausted to do anything but let the tide carry us home. A blank moment passed.
Then the scratching.
A mouse-noise, no more, a scrabbling at the underside of the boat like a man’s nails tickling the planks to be let in. Not one man: many. The sound of their entreaties multiplied, the soft dragging of rotted cuticles across the wood.
In the boat, we didn’t move, we didn’t speak, we didn’t believe. Even as we heard the worst – we didn’t believe the worst.
A splash off to starboard; I turned and he was coming towards me, rigid in the water, borne up by unseen puppeteers like a figure-head. It was Ray; his body covered in killing bruises and cuts: stoned to death then brought, like a gleeful mascot, like proof of power, to spook us. It was almost as though he were walking on water, his feet just hidden by the swell, his arms hanging loosely by his side as he was hauled towards the boat. I looked at his face: lacerated and broken. One eye almost closed, the other smashed from its orbit.
Two yards from the boat, the puppeteers let him sink back into the sea, where he disappeared in a swirl of pink water.
‘Your companion?’ said the sheep-feeder.
I nodded. He must have fallen into the sea from the stern of the ‘Emmanuelle’. Now he was like them, a drowned man. They’d already claimed him as their play-thing. So they did like games after all, they hauled him from the beach like children come to fetch a playmate, eager that he should join the horseplay.
The scratching had stopped. Ray’s body had disappeared altogether. Not a murmur off the pristine sea, just the slop of the waves against the boards of the boat.
I pulled at the oars –
‘Row!’ I screamed at the sheep-feeder. ‘Row, or they’ll kill us.’
He seemed resigned to whatever they had in mind to punish us with. He shook his head and spat onto the water. Beneath his floating phlegm something moved in the deep, pale forms rolled and somersaulted, too far down to be clearly seen. Even as I watched they came floating up towards us, their sea-corrupted faces better defined with every fathom they rose, their arms outstretched to embrace us.
A shoal of corpses. The dead in dozens, crab-cleaned and fish-picked, their remaining flesh scarcely sitting on their bones.
The boat rocked gently as their hands reached up to touch it.
The look of resignation on the sheep-feeder’s face didn’t falter
for a moment as the boat was shaken backwards and forwards; at first gently, then so violently we were beaten about like dolls. They meant to capsize us, and there was no help for it. A moment later, the boat tipped over.
The water was icy; far colder than I’d anticipated, and it took the breath away. I’d always been a fairly strong swimmer. My strokes were confident as I began to swim from the boat, cleaving through the white water. The sheep-feeder was less lucky. Like many men who live with the sea, he apparently couldn’t swim. Without issuing a cry or a prayer, he sank like a stone.
What did I hope? That four was enough: that I could be left to thumb a current to safety? Whatever hopes of escape I had, they were short-lived.
I felt a soft, oh so very soft, brushing of my ankles and my feet, almost a caress. Something broke surface briefly close to my head. I glimpsed a grey back, as of a large fish. The touch on my ankle had become a grasp. A pulpy hand, mushed by so long in the water, had hold of me, and inexorably began to claim me for the sea. I gulped what I knew to be my last breath of air, and as I did so Ray’s head bobbed no more than a yard from me. I saw his wounds in clinical detail – the water cleansed cuts were ugly flaps of white tissue, with a gleam of bone at their core. The loose eye had been washed away by now, his hair, flattened to his skull, no longer disguised the bald patch at his crown.