There is a man in his bathroom, cleaning his ears of sand with a flannel’s tip. He hums, as he does so – dum-di-dum …
And there is a mother telling a story. She has her child in front of her, in his dinosaur pyjamas. He sucks the end of a white cloth, holding the cloth with both hands and he listens to her with eyes like the world. Have I told you the story of the silver in the fields? She is Hester – a true Bundy, with the dark Bundy eyes – and she knows her stories. She has the voice for telling them. She is Parlan, after all.
Can you hear these things? Each of them?
A gull is calling out – ark ark ark! It stands on the chimney of a cream-walled house.
And can you hear this: the brush of legs through long grass? At this moment, a young man is walking. He wears jeans which are damp and frayed at the hem. The lace on his left boot is undone, and its plastic ends tap against rocks as he goes. There is sheep dung pressed underneath this same boot; he feels it with each footstep so when he comes to a stile he puts this boot on the step and scrapes his sole against it. He twists his leg, checks. Then he climbs over the stile and briefly, as he climbs, he looks over to the house with the washing line. He narrows his eyes to see it – the striped socks, the yellow front door. He sniffs, steps down.
Brush brush. Through the grass.
It is early evening. This young man is fair-haired, freckled. He has caught the sun today – his cheekbones are pink, and his scalp feels sore. It has been the first day of sun in a long, long time and he’d not expected it. None of them had. He knows, in time, his skin will peel.
He is Sam Lovegrove, and he is twenty-two, and when he reaches the coast path he heads west.
The sea glints. In the distance, he sees Bundy Head.
To his right, the cove called Sye appears. It starts to show itself. As he walks, the cove widens and he looks down into it. It is a fleeting glance, nothing more, for he does not expect to see anything. Nobody goes to Sye – it is a small beach, with no sand to speak of; its high cliffs make it shaded and cool. Who might go there, and so late in the day? No-one. And so he glances, that’s all. A sweep of the eyes. But there is something down there today.
He stops. He stops so sharply that his right foot slips.
Sam takes two small steps towards the edge. What is …?
Then he says oh shit. Oh God. Oh my God …
* * *
Me, the forager. Or the salvager, perhaps – crouching in the wet sand to gather what is left. Is that what stories are? The debris of a life? The remains that can be dried, passed on so that a little of that life is passed on too, in its way? I have lost so much. So much I have never had, and so much of Parla I have looked for meaning in. And I miss it – I miss the island. I miss its pebbled strands, its button-eyed voles, and the weightless bones of cuttlefish that fitted the palms of my hands. I miss the people who I called family, or tried to; I miss how magical a winter’s night sky could be for I’d never seen a falling star until I stood on that island, and I’ve not seen one since. And I miss him above all others – how I miss that one man. But at least I have my stories, sand-covered. A well-told story takes me back to Lock-and-Key.
Oh, the stories. So many.
A thousand strange things have been washed up on Parla’s shores – loo seats, dolphins, a list of dreams in a sealed plastic bag. But it has never had a story which begins with Sam Lovegrove saying oh shit, oh God on a Wednesday evening as he runs down to the beach with his sunburnt shoulders and his left bootlace slapping back and forth, back and forth.
And it’s never had this: a man, half-naked. He is lying on his front, his face against the shingle. He is dead-looking – still, white-skinned.
I know some wonderful stories – but this is the beginning of the best of all.
Two
He stumbles down to the beach. A steep path through gorse leads him there. He jumps onto the stones and the noise is sudden – the crunch of his heels, the clatter of rock against rock. He staggers, and then falls. Sam lands on all fours. The stones are powdery and the dark cracks between them are darker with old weed. He stares for a moment. Then he rights himself.
On, towards the shoreline. Over brownish wrack.
Oh God, he says. Oh …
It is not plastic, or sacking.
It is a human body. It lies at the water’s edge. Its upper half is out of the water; its legs are still being lapped at by the tide. It lies on its front and the head is turned so that the man’s right cheek (it is definitely a man) is pressed into the stones, and his right arm is raised above his head. He wears a white vest, or part of one. Sodden, dark-grey shorts.
Black hair. A black beard.
Shit …
Sam looks away. He breathes heavily through pursed lips. He tries to steady himself, puts his hand on his chest. Could he turn, go? No-one need know. No-one has seen me coming here. And wouldn’t the sea come back and take it? Carry it out? Sam shakes. His hands are shaking and he thinks, a dead body … He has not seen one before.
But he cannot turn and go. He must stay; he knows he must.
He looks back. The man’s skin is white. It is perfectly white, like fish meat. The arms are thick, muscled. His back, too, is strong-looking – there is a deep groove where his spine is.
He is tall. Was. Was tall.
Oh … His stomach clenches. He half-bends, as if he will vomit, and he expects this – he braces, locks his jaw. But nothing comes.
The body lies ahead of Sam. He tries to calm himself for he knows what he must do. He knows what needs to be done, right now, and so he lifts his left foot and steps towards it. He brings his right foot to join his left.
No smell. Would there not be a smell?
And flies, he thinks. There are no flies.
Carefully, Sam comes in. He draws level with the body and starts to lower down. He is tentative, scared of falling or getting too close. The stones shift, as his weight does, and he thinks and what about the eyes? He has found dead sheep before. They lose their eyes to gulls – the soft, jellied flesh is the first part to be eaten – and Sam feels nauseous again. His tongue tightens. But he has no choice: he has to see the face. He knows this but he does not want to and he is shaking as he crouches down. His breath is fast and his heart is thumping against his ribs so that they hurt and he does not want the eyes to have been pecked away or sucked out by fish. He does not want the mouth to be open, as if still fighting for breath.
Oh God oh God …
Sam puts his palms down on the stones. He brings his face alongside the dead man’s face. Nose to nose.
The man opens his eyes. Not fully, not wide – but his eyelids flicker and there are two black crescent moons of eye.
Sam yells. Falls.
He scrambles backwards, crab-like, shouting holy fuck oh my God, and as he tries to stand his left foot slips and the stones give way so he turns onto his front and crawls frantically on his hands and knees, and then he finally clambers up the beach and turns around.
There is the sea, and a gull’s screaming, and there is a sound which is coming from Sam – a whimpering, a half-sob. His grips his hair with both his hands. Not dead is what he thinks. Not dead not dead, oh Jesus. He looks at the skin, the beard, the mouth which is moving now as if trying to speak or trying to clear itself of salt or sand or pebbles and the eyelids still flicker, and the right hand flinches. The fingers find a stone and try to close upon it.
Shit. Listen.