Death by Water

by Alessandro Manzetti

  “You guys!” she screeched, her arms waving. Jonathan cupped his hands around his mouth and bawled a reply:

  “What do you want?”

  “Come and see,” she replied.

  “She wants us to come and see.”

  “I heard.”

  “Come on,” he said, “nothing to lose.”

  I didn’t want to move, but he hauled me up by the arm. It wasn’t worth arguing. His breath was inflammable.

  It was difficult making our way up the beach. The stones were not wet with sea water, but covered in a slick film of gray-green algae, like sweat on a skull.

  Jonathan was having even more difficulty getting across the beach than I was. Twice he lost his balance and fell heavily on his backside, cursing. The seat of his shorts was soon a filthy olive color, and there was a tear where his buttocks showed.

  I was no ballerina, but I managed to make it, step by slow step, trying to avoid the large rocks so that if I slipped I wouldn’t have far to fall.

  Every few yards we’d have to negotiate a line of stinking seaweed. I was able to jump them with reasonable elegance but Jonathan, pissed and uncertain of his balance, ploughed through them, his naked feet completely buried in the stuff. It wasn’t just kelp: there was the usual detritus washed up on any beach: the broken bottles, the rusting Coke cans, the scum-stained cork, globs of tar, fragments of crabs, pale yellow Durex. And crawling over these stinking piles of dross were inch-long, fat-eyed blue flies. Hundreds of them, clambering over the shit, and over each other, buzzing to be alive, and alive to be buzzing.

  It was the first life we’d seen.

  I was doing my best not to fall flat on my face as I stepped across one of these lines of seaweed, when a little avalanche of pebbles began off to my left. Three, four, five stones were skipping over each other toward the sea, and setting another dozen stones moving as they jumped.

  There was no visible cause for the effect.

  Jonathan didn’t even bother to look up; he was having too much trouble staying vertical.

  The avalanche stopped: run out of energy. Then another: this time between us and the sea. Skipping stones: bigger this time than the last, and gaining more height as they leaped.

  The sequence was longer than before: it knocked stone into stone until a few pebbles actually reached the sea at the end of the dance.

  Plop.

  Dead noise.

  Plop. Plop.

  Ray appeared from behind one of the big boulders at the height of the beach, beaming like a loon.

  “There’s life on Mars,” he yelled and ducked back the way he’d come. A few more perilous moments and we reached him, the sweat sticking our hair to our foreheads like caps.

  Jonathan looked a little sick.

  “What’s the big deal?” he demanded.

  “Look what we’ve found,” said Ray, and led the way beyond the boulders. The first shock.

  Once we got to the height of the beach we were looking down on to the other side of the island. There was more of the same drab beach, and then sea.

  No inhabitants, no boats, no sign of human existence. The whole place couldn’t have been more than half a mile across: barely the back of a whale.

  But there was some life here; that was the second shock.

  In the sheltering ring of the large, bald boulders which crowned the island was a fenced-in compound. The posts were rotting in the salt air, but a tangle of rusted barbed-wire had been wound around and between them to form a primitive pen. Inside the pen there was a patch of coarse grass, and on this pitiful lawn stood three sheep. And Angela.

  She was standing in the penal colony, stroking one of the inmates and cooing in its blank face.

  “Sheep,” she said, triumphantly.

  Jonathan was there before me with his snapped remark: “So what?”

  “Well, it’s strange, isn’t it?” said Ray. “Three sheep in the middle of a little place like this?”

  “They don’t look well to me,” said Angela.

  She was right. The animals were the worse for their exposure to the elements; their eyes were gummy with matter, and their fleeces hung off their hides in knotted clumps, exposing panting flanks. One of them had collapsed against the barbed-wire, and seemed unable to right itself again, either too depleted or too sick.

  “It’s cruel,” said Angela.

  I had to agree: it seemed positively sadistic, locking up these creatures without more than a few blades of grass to chew on, and a battered tin bath of stagnant water to quench their thirst.

  “Odd, isn’t it?” said Ray.

  “I’ve cut my foot.” Jonathan was squatting on the top of one of the flatter boulders, peering at the underside of his right foot.

  “There’s glass on the beach,” I said, exchanging a vacant stare with one of the sheep.

  “They’re so deadpan,” said Ray. “Nature’s straight men.”

  Curiously, they didn’t look so unhappy with their condition; their stares were philosophical. Their eyes said: I’m just a sheep, I don’t expect you to like me, care for me, preserve me, except for your stomach’s sake. There were no angry baas, no stamping of a frustrated hoof.

  Just three gray sheep, waiting to die.

  Ray had lost interest in the business. He was wandering back down the beach, kicking a can ahead of him. It rattled and skipped, reminding me of the stones.

  “We should let them free,” said Angela.

  I ignored her; what was freedom in a place like this? She persisted:

  “Don’t you think we should?”

  “No.”

  “They’ll die.”

  “Somebody put them here for a reason.”

  “But they’ll die.”

  “They’ll die on the beach if we let them out. There’s no food for them.”

  “We’ll feed them.”

  “French toast and gin,” suggested Jonathan, picking a sliver of glass from his sole.

  “We can’t just leave them.”

  “It’s not our business,” I said. It was all getting boring. Three sheep. Who cared if they lived or—

  I’d thought that about myself an hour earlier. We had something in common, the sheep and I.

  My head was aching.

  “They’ll die,” whined Angela, for the third time.

  “You’re a stupid bitch,” Jonathan told her. The remark was made without malice: he said it calmly, as a statement of plain fact.

  I couldn’t help grinning.

  “What?” She looked as though she’d been bitten.

  “Stupid bitch,” he said again. “B-I-T-C-H.”

  Angela flushed with anger and embarrassment, and turned on him. “You got us stuck here,” she said, lip curling.

  The inevitable accusation. Tears in her eyes. Stung by his words.

  “I did it deliberately,” he said, spitting on his fingers and rubbing saliva into the cut. “I wanted to see if we could leave you here.”

  “You’re drunk.”

  “And you’re stupid. But I’ll be sober in the morning.”

  The old lines still made their mark.

  Outstripped, Angela started down the beach after Ray, trying to hold back her tears until she was out of sight. I almost felt some sympathy for her. She was, when it came down to verbal fisticuffs, easy meat.

  “You’re a bastard when you want to be,” I told Jonathan; he just looked at me, glassy-eyed.

  “Better be friends. Then I won’t be a bastard to you.”

  “You don’t scare me.”

  “I know.”

  The mutton was staring at me again. I stared back.

  “Fucking sheep,” he said.

  “They can’t help it.”

  “If they had any decency, they’d slit their ugly fucking throats.”

  “I’m going back to the boat.”

  “Ugly fuckers.”

  “Coming?”

  He took hold of my hand: fast, tight, and held it in his hand like he’d ne
ver let go. Eyes on me suddenly.

  “Don’t go.”

  “It’s too hot up here.”

  “Stay. The stone’s nice and warm. Lie down. They won’t interrupt us this time.”

  “You knew?” I said.

  “You mean Ray? Of course I knew. I thought we put on quite a little performance.”

  He drew me close, hand over hand up my arm, like he was hauling in a rope. The smell of him brought back the galley, his frown, his muttered profession (“Love you”), the quiet retreat.

  Deja vu.

  Still, what was there to do on a day like this but go round in the same dreary circle, like the sheep in the pen? Round and round. Breathe, sex, eat, shit.

  The gin had gone to his groin. He tried his best but he hadn’t got a hope. It was like trying to thread spaghetti.

  Exasperated, he rolled off me.

  “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”

  Senseless word, once it was repeated, it had lost all its meaning, like everything else. Signifying nothing.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said.

  “Fuck off.”

  “It really doesn’t.”

  He didn’t look at me, just stared down at his cock. If he’d had a knife in his hand at that moment, I think he’d have cut it off and laid it on the warm rock, a shrine to sterility.

  I left him studying himself, and walked back to the Emmanuelle. Something odd struck me as I went, something I hadn’t noticed before. The blue flies, instead of jumping ahead of me as I approached, just let themselves be trodden on. Positively lethargic; or suicidal. They sat on the hot stones and popped under my soles, their gaudy little lives going out like so many lights.

  The mist was disappearing at last, and as the air warmed up, the island unveiled its next disgusting trick: the smell. The fragrance was as wholesome as a roomful of rotting peaches, thick and sickly. It came in through the pores as well as the nostrils, like a syrup. And under the sweetness, something else, rather less pleasant than peaches, fresh or rotten. A smell like an open drain clogged with old meat: like the gutters of a slaughterhouse, caked with suet and black blood. It was the seaweed, I assumed, although I’d never smelled anything to match the stench on any other beach.

  I was halfway back to the Emmanuelle, holding my nose as I stepped over the bands of rotting weed, when I heard the noise of a little murder behind me. Jonathan’s whoops of satanic glee almost drowned the pathetic voice of the sheep as it was killed, but I knew instinctively what the drunken bastard had done.

  I turned back, my heel pivoting on the slime. It was almost certainly too late to save one of the beasts, but maybe I could prevent him massacring the other two. I couldn’t see the pen; it was hidden behind the boulders, but I could hear Jonathan’s triumphant yells, and the thud, thud of his strokes. I knew what I’d see before it came into sight.

  The gray-green lawn had turned red. Jonathan was in the pen with the sheep. The two survivors were charging back and forth in a rhythmical trot of panic, baaing in terror, while Jonathan stood over the third sheep, erect now. The victim had partially collapsed, its sticklike front legs buckled beneath it, its back legs rigid with approaching death. Its bulk shuddered with nervous spasms, and its eyes showed more white than brown. The top of its skull had been almost entirely dashed to pieces, and the gray hash of its brain exposed, punctured by shards of its own bone, and pulped by the large round stone that Jonathan was still wielding. Even as I watched he brought the weapon down once more onto the sheep’s brain pan. Globs of tissue flew off in every direction, speckling me with hot matter and blood. Jonathan looked like some nightmare lunatic (which for that moment, I suppose, he was). His naked body, so recently white, was stained as a butcher’s apron after a hard day’s hammering at the abattoir. His face was more sheep’s gore than Jonathan—

  The animal itself was dead. Its pathetic complaints had ceased completely. It keeled over, rather comically, like a cartoon character, one of its ears snagging the wire. Jonathan watched it fall: his face a grin under the blood. Oh, that grin: it served so many purposes. Wasn’t that the same smile he charmed women with? The same grin that spoke lechery and love? Now, at last, it was put to its true purpose: the gawping smile of the satisfied savage, standing over his prey with a stone in one hand and his manhood in the other.

  Then, slowly, the smile decayed, as his senses returned.

  “Jesus,” he said, and from his abdomen a wave of revulsion climbed up his body. I could see it quite clearly; the way his gut rolled as a throb of nausea threw his head forward, pitching half-digested gin and toast over the grass.

  I didn’t move. I didn’t want to comfort him, calm him, console him—he was simply beyond my help.

  I turned away.

  “Frankie,” he said through a throat of bile.

  I couldn’t bring myself to look at him. There was nothing to be done for the sheep, it was dead and gone; all I wanted to do was run away from the little ring of stones, and put the sight out of my head.

  “Frankie.”

  I began to walk, as fast as I was able over such tricky terrain, back down toward the beach and the relative sanity of the Emmanuelle.

  The smell was stronger now: coming up out of the ground toward my face in filthy waves.

  Horrible island. Vile, stinking, insane island.

  All I thought was hate as I stumbled across the weed and the filth. The Emmanuelle wasn’t far off—

  Then, a little pattering of pebbles like before. I stopped, balancing uneasily on the sleek dome of a stone, and looked to my left, where even now one of the pebbles was rolling to a halt. As it stopped another, larger pebble, fully six inches across, seemed to move spontaneously from its resting place, and roll down the beach, striking its neighbors and beginning another exodus toward the sea. I frowned: the frown made my head buzz.

  Was there some sort of animal—a crab maybe—under the beach, moving the stones? Or was it the heat that in some way twitched them into life? 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 realized 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 toward the sea. From that distance the mixture of blood and white skin made him look like some piebald 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 onto 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 I, World War II. Soldiers from torpedoed troopships, 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-gray 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.”

  “And do they put them in coffins?”

  “How should I know?”

  What else could it be, this Godforsaken mound—but a cemetery? I looked at the island with new eyes, as though I’d just recognized it for what it was. Now I had a reason to despise its humpy back, its sordid beach, the smell of peaches.