‘How do you mean it’s all your fault?’ Behind me, at the open doorway, stands a nurse and the policeman. I push past them and into the hallway.
‘Hey,’ the policeman calls, but he doesn’t follow me. I look back and they are both just standing looking.
‘Who is that?’ the nurse asks the policeman.
‘I know her old man,’ he says.
For an hour I walk the blackened main street, and people turn to look at me, in a way that I can’t read. I try to smile back at some of them, some sympathetic sort of smile that would be appropriate, but they turn away if I do that. There’s a silence of so many people looking. No one asks questions. No one says anything, they just look and all of them see me. And all of them look that quiet look.
The post office, the pub and the co-op are fine, but the fish shop is dead, and outside it I can see the fish man sitting on the bonnet of his car and just looking. There’s no one there to help him because everyone is looking to their own problems. He must sense me watching because he looks up, and he just stares at me. I put my hands deep in the pockets of my shorts and keep my head down. I think I hear him shout something, but probably not, probably no one heard. I don’t look behind me, I turn down the street that takes me back down towards the beach. Somewhere I hear the scratch of a walkie-talkie, I hear my name on the wind.
I take myself far far away from what I am worried about, I think only about how I will sit for a while on the beach, and then I will go home and at home I will go to sleep and in the morning I will start to think straight again, I will wake up a changed and better person and I will be able to think clearly about the past week, about Flora, about Denver, their parents and the town. I walk quickly and soon, in the baking heat, I am on the beach again, the place with the reedy dunes where the soldier crabs pop their heads out of their holes and tick their moustaches at you, but today, no matter how still I sit, no faces appear out of the sand. There is nothing to be frightened away by a flung-out hand, nothing will be conducted in the way that it should be, and I am still not thinking clearly.
I hear twigs snap behind me and I ignore it. Up the beach come six or seven men and a woman. I don’t move. The human eye. If I move, where will I end up? If I move I’m guilty. And I stay put until I can see who they are, walking with a purpose, all of them. One man is Andy Carter and my blood bellows in my stomach. The woman runs the bread shop. I have a memory of her when I was younger, giving out the stale iced buns to kids on their way home from school. The fish man is with them, with the same look he’d given me half an hour before. The other faces I recognise but not enough to name — I have never been interested enough in learning these people’s names. I keep still, like a leveret; my shorts are sand-coloured, my T-shirt green, they will not see me if I remain still. But I catch in Andy Carter’s face that he has seen me, and I wait a breath to try to work out a plan and at the last moment, I get up and run. There is a shout behind me, a scream from the bread-shop woman and through the earth I feel them coming. If I can make it round the headland, I can hide until I can take my boat and get away. I am a fast runner for my year, I am tall and long-legged.
Someone tackles me to the ground and the wind is knocked out of me, and there is not enough air in me to say I’m sorry, it was an accident, there is just a cronking sound that comes from my chest, and my T-shirt is being pulled over my head, my arms and legs are pinned by the weight of bodies and there is a sudden scalding-hot pain, the sound of yelling and waves and the steady bleat of my own voice above the sound of a stick whistling through the air and being brought down again and again on my back. I flip like an eel in the sand, and see Andy Carter, his face a red crease of fury, and I see the fish man with his face less certain, but the fish man says, ‘Let him take his turn and then we’ll get you home.’ The bread lady looks away from it all and out to sea with her hands on top of her head, and I am tossed back onto my stomach by the fish man and the other nameless men and the blows come again and each time I feel flesh being torn and I am a wet bag of meat like Denver, torn and open and not human any more. My hand digs into the sand to hide itself, it is like the pink claw of a galah.
From down the beach, there is someone else’s scream, a burning-hot scream, and the stick stops and there is just enough air in my lungs that I can make the smallest of screeches when I breathe out. My face presses against the ground and through one eye I see four bodies on top of Andy Carter, holding him down and making him stop. A ringing in my ears like the birds, a squalling in my chest.
27
I woke up with a jolt and Dog was standing at the foot of my bed, ears pricked. It sounded like a dog fight out in the bottom field. There was nothing to see out the fogged window. I opened it, took the torch from my bedside table and shone it out there. A scream of something and the beam caught the black shape, just for a second, and the sheep, white blurs in the top corner of the field, huddled. The noise was still there, guttural, and the sheep called out.
‘Jesus fuck.’ I pulled jeans on over my nightshirt. Dog stayed still, his eyes wide, tail straight out behind him. I grabbed the gun from the cupboard and banged the bedroom door closed behind me so Dog wouldn’t follow, flew down the stairs and smashed my palm flat against Lloyd’s bedroom door twice before I got to the front door and crammed my feet into my boots. I heard Dog scratching and barking upstairs and the sound of Lloyd opening his door, and then I was gone into the dark, running blind.
I’d put down the torch when I’d picked up the gun, but I would shoot whatever came at me, whatever it was that was snapping and slobbering in the dark. I held my gun out in front of me in case I ran smack into a tree, and by the time I made it to the fence, I could see the shape darting around the huddle of sheep who were crying now and who were far away from me, still, and the shape was taller and wider than a man, but it disappeared when I tried to aim, when I looked too hard at it. The noise kept me on it, kept me following, a panting, a deep mucus sound with a whine at either end of it. For a second, I had it in my sights, and I understood what I was looking at, thought it had turned to look at me too, and then I fired and the sheep scattered. The sound of birds taking flight from the woods. I heard my name being called, and Dog shrilling at my bedroom window — my head throbbed hard enough that I sat right down in the wet grass and pressed it into the ground.
A torch beam wobbled from far off, and I saw the Christmas colours, the green grass and white wool, a smear of red, the steam rising.
Lloyd was a hand on my shoulder. ‘Are you hurt?’ he said, and I sat up and wiped my eyes, then covered them over with my hands.
‘I shot something,’ I said though there was barely enough air to say it.
He picked up my gun and took himself up the field. Between the crying of the sheep and the whinnying of Dog in the bedroom came a shot.
I heard Lloyd tramp back across the field and started to feel the cold dew against the heat of blood. When he shone it at me his torch took away any night vision I had, I couldn’t see his face, but I could tell from his breathing, like something an old dog would make, that he had done something he didn’t like.