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 smelt anything to match the stench on any other beach.
I was half-way 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 grey-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 stick-like 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 grey 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 falclass="underline" 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 that 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 towards the beach and the relative sanity of the 'Emmanuelle'.
The smell was stronger now: coming up out of the ground towards 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 neighbours and beginning another exodus towards 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 realised 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 towards the sea. From that distance the mixture of blood and white skin made him look like some pie-bald 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 on to 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?