The water closed over my head. My eyes were open, and I saw my hard-earned breath flashing past my face in a display of silver bubbles. Ray was beside me, consoling, attentive. His arms floated over his head as though he were surrendering. The pressure of the water distorted his face, puffing his cheeks out, and spilling threads of severed nerves from his empty eye-socket like the tentacles of a tiny squid.
I let it happen. I opened my mouth and felt it fill with cold water. Salt burned my sinuses-, the cold stabbed behind my eyes. I felt the brine burning down my throat, a rush of eager water where water shouldn’t go – flushing air from my rubes and cavities, ’til my system was overwhelmed.
Below me, two corpses, their hair swaying loosely in the current, hugged my legs. Their heads lolled and danced on rotted ropes of neck-muscle, and though I pawed at their hands,
and their flesh came off the bone in grey, lace-edged pieces, their loving grip didn’t falter. They wanted me, oh how dearly they wanted me.
Ray was holding me too, wrapping me up, pressing his face to mine. There was no purpose in the gesture I suppose. He didn’t know or feel, or love or care. And I, losing my life with every second, succumbing to the sea absolutely, couldn’t take pleasure in the intimacy that I’d longed for.
Too late for love; the sunlight was already a memory. Was it that the world was going out – darkening towards the edges as I died – or that we were now so deep the sun couldn’t penetrate so far? Panic and terror had left me – my heart seemed not to beat at all – my breath didn’t come and go in anguished bursts as it had. A kind of peace was on me.
Now the grip of my companions relaxed, and the gentle tide had its way with me. A rape of the body: a ravaging of skin and muscle, gut, eye, sinus, tongue, brain.
Time had no place here. The days may have passed into weeks, I couldn’t know. The keels of boats glided over and maybe we looked up from our rock-hovels on occasion and watched them pass. A ringed finger was trailed in the water, a splashless puddle clove the sky, a fishing line trailed a worm. Signs of life.
Maybe the same hour as I died, or maybe a year later, the current sniffs me out of my rock and has some mercy. I am twitched from amongst the sea-anemones and given to the tide. Ray is with me. His time too has come. The sea-change has occurred; there is no turning back for us.
Relentlessly the tide bears us – sometimes floating, bloated decks for gulls, sometimes half-sunk and nibbled by fish – bears us towards the island. We know the surge of the shingle, and hear, without ears, the rattle of the stones.
The sea has long since washed the plate clean of its leavings. Angela, the ‘Emmanuelle’, and Jonathan, are gone. Only we drowned belong here, face up, under the stones, soothed by the rhythm of tiny waves and the absurd incomprehension of sheep.
Human Remains
Some trades are best practised by daylight, some by night. Gavin was a professional in the latter category. In midwinter, in midsummer, leaning against a wall, or poised in a doorway, a fire-fly cigarette hovering at his lips, he sold what sweated in his jeans to all comers.
Sometimes to visiting widows with more money than love, who’d hire him for a weekend of illicit meetings, sour, insistent kisses and perhaps, if they could forget their dead partners, a dry hump on a lavender-scented bed. Sometimes to lost husbands, hungry for their own sex and desperate for an hour of coupling with a boy who wouldn’t ask their name.
Gavin didn’t much care which it was. Indifference was a trade-mark of his, even a part of his attraction. And it made leaving him, when the deed was done and the money exchanged, so much simpler. To say, ‘Ciao’, or ‘Be seeing you’, or nothing at all to a face that scarcely cared if you lived or died: that was an easy thing.