'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 grey-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 colour, 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 towards 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 leapt.
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 is?' 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 dead-pan,' 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 grey 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 never 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.