Beach Bodies, Part 3

by Ross Armstrong

  ‘The public were gunning for you. To get together, I mean,’ says Simon. ‘Wait. What do you mean, history?’

  Tabs almost blushes, an unusual colour for her, then she collects herself. ‘We had a moment at the airport.’

  ‘That… shouldn’t have happened. Why were you—’ says Simon.

  ‘I had to change my flight and we bumped into each other at the airport. We had a fleeting moment. But that’s all it was. It fleeted. It died. And then he was my best friend in here and I can’t believe Sly would hate him enough to—’

  ‘This is precisely the question,’ says Simon. ‘Do we think he did? Because that’s what I’ve been getting at. Sly was unaccounted for. You lost him. What if he saw red, planned to kill Tommy in the Love Nest, at the scene of the crime, so to speak. When you lost him, in the dark, could he have moved the body?’

  Liv shares a look with Summer for the first time in a long while.

  ‘I don’t know, I was freaking out…’ says Summer.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ says Liv, then adds, ‘I don’t know for sure.’

  ‘Then what?’ Lance shouts. ‘He moves the body, scoots outside to tap on Dawn’s window, kills her, then comes back upstairs to slit his own throat and jump out of a window?’

  Another light seems to go out before their very eyes.

  ‘That’s the person more likely than you, is it? It’s bollocks, mate,’ Lance says. ‘All you can throw is dead ends at us. I want to see what your secret thoughts are. I want to see inside that head of yours.’

  Lance reaches down towards the knife, then picks up the blue moleskin next to it. Simon’s eyes widen. ‘Your confession’s in here, Si, I’m sure of it.’

  ‘No. No,’ says Simon.

  The others note Simon’s fear as Lance, the bit between his teeth, opens up the book and smooths down the first page.

  ‘Wait,’ says Simon. ‘The storm’s stopped.’

  ‘What?’ says Lance, at this poor excuse for a distraction. ‘Oh, fuck off.’

  ‘No, listen,’ says Tabs.

  And they do, listening for the howling gale, the kind that feels like it could send you mad over a long enough timescale.

  But they hear nothing. Nothing at all.

  ‘He’s right,’ says Liv, and gets up to open the blinds.

  As half of the picture is instantly revealed out there, they find no jewels of rain falling anywhere. Justine stands, dragged from her seat, as if called upon by a hypnotist.

  Liv keeps pulling on those blinds, until the screams arrive behind her.

  Because, silhouetted in the window, is a figure holding a double-barrelled shot gun.

  Zack: Outside

  He tastes the smoke in the air coughed up by newly lit fires around the island, as he follows the curve of the coast. Using the tall trees as a buffer from the storm.

  He stops for the first time in nearly forty minutes, to see the clouds have turned a paler shade of black and the moon is bare and full, shaped like hope.

  All this, despite the fact that the wind rages on and the tide to his left has started to bark and spray more than it did when he made the decision to trudge on towards civilisation, or something like it, something like life: a police station, or even a warm-looking house comprised of kind-looking faces.

  He judges the smoke to be a mixture of wood and peat, which he remembers from trips to the west coast of Ireland with his mother. Spartan sleeping arrangements but plenty of green and sea and stew. They used to follow the coast on long walks there too, when in doubt, though no doubts in his waking life have ever felt quite like this. He sees his hands have started to turn blue. He has to keep moving.

  The phone torch only shows him the metre or so in front of his pounding feet, which gives him an uncanny sense he is not getting anywhere, like a tiny mouse on a full-sized treadmill.

  What little they were told about Tristan Da Cunha included the fact that you could walk the whole thing in little more than an hour, so he wonders why the terrain and trees don’t seem to change at all, like he’s been walking the same four steps on a loop: A crack of a twig under his right foot, will repeat four steps later. The slight stumble on his left foot will soon be echoed too. Even the line of the coast seems obscurely straight, and while it is difficult to see to the houses beyond the road on the other side of the wood, those shapes too seem so constant in the dark. A rise in a roof, then a fall. A gap of sky. Then the pattern begins again.

  The phone torch shows its 20 per cent battery warning and he now knows there was dubious wisdom in not picking up the Maglite torch the fisherman left behind. He was concerned that, were the power-out darkness the fisherman threatened to come to that murderous villa, it would give rise to still graver acts. Simon had said that those lights would never go out because of the back-up generator, but they’d long since started to consider everything he said a half-truth, if that. Judging from the fact he saw the lights go out in the distance before he decided to walk on, he considers himself correct, both about Simon and the decision to leave the torch. But that doesn’t help his current plight: Fifteen per cent left now.

  He turns to his right, his steps quickening, as his numb hands struggle to grip the phone. He staggers on, back towards the road.

  ‘No, no,’ Zack mouths as the outline of the triangle of a villa takes shape, and appears to be exactly where he came from. Treading water all this time, the gale and the leaves underneath taking him nowhere, tugging him back like he was on reins, the chill playing tricks on his mind. ‘No, no.’

  He feels the terrain change underfoot as he nears the road. A change is as good as hope. At least, he thinks, he was able to traverse the wood easily. A darker tale might have left him there to die. Instead it seemed to let him through like it was expelling him, ushering him this way.

  How he’ll explain his fruitless time outside to those that have stayed in, he doesn’t know. If there’ll be anyone alive to explain to – he’s not sure about that either.

  Closer now, his feet on the road, he sees they’ve managed to light candles throughout the house; warm light if not kind faces, yet, beckoning him closer still.

  He shines the weak torch desperately both ways as he crosses the road, knowing that if a car were to veer out of the dark, and if the driver were at all distracted, he would be turned to roadkill; a villager feeling the inconvenient bump of a stray dog, and sparing a brief grimace before getting on with their lives.

  His solace, as he tenses his lean and toned frame against the wind, is that he can’t hear any engine out there. He can barely hear anything at all, in fact. Even the wind seems to have called a truce with his ears.

  The villa stands in front of him, that triangle roof, lifting its diagonal lines to meet at a point. It must be a design replicated around the island. Because he knows now, this isn’t the villa he came from, which means he isn’t going quite as mad as he thought. Which is something.

  Staggering closer to the house, he makes to knock on the front window, pausing to consider how friendly what’s inside may be. Then he crunches his ailing knuckles together, scrambles to his right, and raps three times on the wood of the door.

  But nothing comes and Zack is too cold to wait, so he slides his way down the side of the house, smoothing one hand along its outer wall for comfort.

  The wooden side gate is open, so he carefully steps inside. Light spills out, leading him to a window, where he sees two plates of half-finished food on a table laid with a gingham cloth and doilies to complete the picture.

  Zack stalls. He hopes they’ll take pity on him, hopes they’ll understand, but perhaps they don’t like outsiders, particularly ones halfway inside their back garden, who have come unannounced.

  He knocks, twice. Shadows in the hallways. The noise of a door. Zack grips on to the ledge, brainstorming the best way not to scare someone into violence, but all he comes up with is simply standing there, a figure at the window, as a man walks into the kitchen.

  Denim dungarees
and a baseball cap, a portly man, who takes the dishes and places them into the basin. Zack knocks again. But the man doesn’t stop. Perhaps he thinks it’s the general rattling of an old house, a banging door, the distance noise of storm weather. Zack knocks again. Nothing. Perhaps the kitchen tap is louder than one would think, or the man is deaf. Or has deafening music on in there, Zack thinks, but he also thinks he’d hear it from here, due to the thin window panes.

  The man is scrubbing away at the last plate, when the house lights burst back on. Electricity returning to join the candlelight. He leaves the plate, distracted, and looks around. Then he wanders up to the window. Zack waves, and he passes him by, somehow still not seeing him apparently, and he heads back out the way he came, closing the kitchen door. Zack sees a gun behind it.

  His hands feel warmer, but he knows that’s not a good sign. His whole body is turning numb, his mind is fractured. He isn’t going to make it any further out into the island and he doesn’t trust the man is friendly.

  He crawls along to the back door; the rear of the house quite different to their villa, overgrown, no pool, no fancy outdoor kitchen.

  Through the door, he can see the man watching television in the other room. It must’ve come back on when the power kicked in, and now it’s got his attention. It’s mostly snow and sparks, but Zack can make something out in it.

  He turns the handle of the back door and a burst of classical music rings out. Zack wouldn’t know it, but it’s Wagner. Beautiful, but stern, rising to moments of ferocity. He’s sure the man will turn now, but he doesn’t, must be the deafening music. Zack takes a step inside.

  He sees the gun. He sees the man rise to give the screen a whack on the side. Surely, he knows it’s the scene beyond the screen, the storm in the panorama of the window in front of him, that’s interfering with the signal. But he gives no quarter to the television; two manly whacks on the side of the old woodchip-pattern from the man’s huge shovel-hands. And yes, the picture becomes clearer…

  Sunshine, a party, light-blue skies.

  Zack has no time to analyse it. He moves his hand to the gun.

  When he looks back, the man stands there, staring at him.

  He must’ve caught his figure in the TV reflection. The man shows no expression, no aggression, nothing. Zack’s hands shake, wound around the gun.

  The man reminds Zack of someone. The fisherman. It must be him! And yet it can’t be. This man lives so much further away, is half a foot shorter and far more cumbersome. But the same face…

  A small town. Everyone related. It clicks. Perhaps that inbred hunch wasn’t as wild as it first seemed.

  The man gestures him to leave, not in anger, in practicality. A ‘you got what you came for’ palm. Zack nods, sees those fisherman’s eyes in the other man’s head one more time, and before he turns, takes a look at the clearing picture on the old television screen behind the man.

  Tabitha, Dawn, Liv, Summer. They’re in the box in front of him. Are they scared? These endangered species. He thinks they are, their scrunched-up faces: red, blotchy, pained, not how they normally would be on screen, not a risk any would take, the producers were quite particular about keeping up standards.

  Then, there’s Tommy. Like a ghost inside the machine.

  It’s a repeat from the other day. When Zack’s biggest problem was how to become the big man of the house, when they thought this island couldn’t dream of rain, when everything was so perfect, or thereabouts.

  A repeat, a repeat, a repeat: it’s some sort of game in the pool. They are all paddling, Tommy clutching onto Summer’s legs, the flirt, as Liv, Dawn and Tabs swim just behind them, watching on.

  Zack sees himself on the sidelines, straddling a blow-up turtle. He remembers it now. It all reassembles itself like a recalled dream.

  The man smiles, showing tenth-rate teeth, seeming to recognise him from the screen. Zack sees he has a hearing aid now. For a moment they take each other in, as the TV throws coloured shadows onto the wall next to them, and the string music plays on and on.

  Zack gives him a silent wave, keeping his eyes on him, as he backs away.

  Back out in the storm, he jogs, hoping his body holds out a little longer, and noting how difficult it is to run holding a large two-barrelled shotgun.

  00.32 a.m.

  The firelight is augmented by a scattering of lamps, dragged in during the last hour. Meanwhile, Lance and Liv, who were elected to read the moleskin and then summarise it for the rest of the group, look paler as they turn each page.

  Tabs requested she wanted to be able to see everyone’s faces while they did this. Justine said overhead lighting made her uneasy; that harsh white light that rains on you from above, she said, reminds her of the overly lit rooms of her childhood.

  Each chose their position in the room, Tabs getting as far away from Lance as possible. She was coupled with him in the first week and at the time he kindly claimed they hadn’t ‘pashed’ because she was ‘a fridge’, while Tabs put it down to him being ‘a prick’ who saw all woman as ‘tit-stands’.

  Huddled around the sofa in a semi-circle, some enjoy the peace of this silence that has broken out, some just wait for the storm to begin again.

  Zack lies by the fire, in a coma-like sleep, shaking less as he thaws out, the long gun in his hand. No one has dared to suggest taking it off him, even as he settled down to sleep.

  When he arrived at the villa, sodden and terrified, he made his way through the broken gate, gun raised, and took an accidental horror tour that included the two new bodies, but finding no intruder in the garden he tapped on the patio window. The fact he hadn’t started shooting was decent reason for them to believe he was on their side. Which took their attentions firmly back to Simon.

  Liv finishes the last page and closes the book. Lance takes a walk, fists locked under his armpits.

  ‘Well, doctor,’ says Liv.

  ‘I’m not a doctor,’ says Simon.

  ‘Oh we know,’ she says. ‘We know everything.’

  Tabs taps Zack, but despite a flutter of his eyelids, he is still deep asleep, and the group had agreed not to wake him.

  ‘Oi. Don’t mug us off,’ says Summer. ‘What’s it say?’

  ‘It’s about all of us,’ Liv says.

  The seconds tick by, Liv, Simon and Lance playing a game of chicken over who’s going to be the one to break the not-so-good news.

  ‘Yes, this is not fair,’ says Justine. ‘You must tell us what you know, or—’

  ‘First… I wanted to mark the passing of Sly by saying a few things about him. Summer. I’m so sorry,’ says Simon, steepling his fingers, his middle one pressing into his pursed lips, his head cocked sympathetically to one side. ‘I’m sure Sly told you all about his time in the army.’

  A sea of confused looks greet Simon.

  ‘Yes, he did.’ Summer says, becoming more remorseful as she speaks. ‘He saw some terrible things… did things he regretted. He didn’t want to tell anyone else, because he worried about what you’d think of him. But he believed that everything he did was to protect his country. It sounds corny. But that still means something, I think. I know this place runs on gossip and I’m sorry not to share it with you all. But, I’m proud I kept his secret…’

  She trails off when she sees the faces looking at her have changed.

  ‘Something to say,’ says Simon. ‘Roberto? Come on, I can see a thought written right through you.’

  ‘Yeah, sorry love,’ says Roberto. ‘He did actually tell me that. Think it was just us two though.’

  ‘And me,’ says Lance. ‘Just the boys.’

  ‘Ah,’ says Tabitha. ‘See, he told me late one night, when it was just us. Said he didn’t want to tell you, Summer, cos he didn’t think you’d get it.’

  ‘What is this, Si?’ says Lance. ‘Just another little diversion from you, is it?’

  Summer frowns as the others hold their tongues. Then throws up her arms as she says, ‘What the hell are you
trying to—’

  ‘He told me too,’ says Justine. ‘Quite a lot of detail. Quite harrowing.’

  Liv nods, she was evidently told.

  ‘Yes, I wanted to say I was sorry, not just to Summer, but to all of you. Because Sly isn’t here to say it himself,’ says Simon. ‘You see, he tried to create a bond by telling each of you that you were the only one who knew his secret. It started with me. Then I watched it happen to each of you, too.’

  Roberto blows out, placing elbows on knees and hands to his head.

  ‘What’s even more interesting,’ says Simon, ‘despite the pretty in-depth telling, is that it’s complete nonsense.’

  Summer would be genuinely furious if real emotions came easy.

  ‘I looked into it. The army had no record of him. He didn’t miss a day’s work the whole time he said he was in Syria. The man was a fantasist, very interesting really. And very sad.’

  ‘But,’ Summer says, ‘what he told me about the death of his friend. He told me he found a dog in the rubble. There were so many things…’

  ‘Yes, and they’re some of the first stories that come up when you search the internet for soldiers’ experiences in Syria. He really was very deep in it. I decided it couldn’t go unsaid. And it isn’t such a bad place to start. Quite appropriate. All things considered.’

  And they’re back where they started. In the mire of silence, with no one willing to pull them out.

  Lance stares down at Simon, who seems a little lighter already, having turned the tables somewhat. And the pressure physically starts to tell on Lance. ‘It’s about how we were selected,’ says Lance. ‘Is that a fair assessment. A good place to begin. Si?’

  Simon neither nods nor shakes his head, but his ‘no comment’ is useless. Everything he knows has already been written down and will be used against him.

  ‘The start of the book details his worries about the… sort of people… that were selected. The kind the producers wanted,’ says Lance.