Raf got up:
“I’m going to help Alfonz.”
He walked on the stones which slowly gave way to the thicker and thicker grass of the meadow. It was alright, he had been cunning enough, they did not suspect anything.
“Well, well, how excited our good friend Raf is about that chick,” said Max as he flicked his cigarette end into the sea.
“Yeah,” said Samo, “but I bet he’s still a virgin.”
“What else do you expect? He’s so clumsy that he wouldn’t be able to find his aim even if he found a woman stupid enough to let him try!”
They giggled quietly and turned towards the horizon, which was unbroken by ship or dry land.
Ana stopped in the harbour, which looked deserted. The sea there was greasy and dark, the bay itself was darkening, the lights in the houses were on, the hill behind the village had already obstructed the sun. There was no trace of the ferry and it seemed as if it would never return again.
She walked on the large paving stones and avoided stepping on the lines. She looked back at the shop which was now probably a bar and became aware of the pensioners on the bench. Because they were not talking and because of the twenty-metre distance she could not be sure whether they were looking at her.
Old men.
“I don’t want to get old,” she said to herself, “I want to stay as I am now,” she added and felt silly. And a bit sad.
She stood there in the middle of the old men’s horizon, the horizon which they had probably been staring at every evening for decades. She felt like a stranger and it was not a pleasant feeling. She went to the left side of the bay, stepping from the paving stones onto a concrete path, which after a few metres turned into the base of the monument.
The plaque said exactly what her uncle had told her: ‘Dedicated to the villagers who died in the war’. She could hear his voice again, telling her very casually and she was quite sure, honestly, the number of the victims worthy of the monument: zero. It really bothered her that that was exactly how much she understood about it all.
Her Mum and Dad had sent her to stay with an oddball. She believed he must have changed in the years since her Mum last saw him, so that his sister knew nothing about his illness, the strange attacks he was having. She hoped it was nothing dangerous or contagious. Her fear of the latter had nothing to do with reason. She remembered another detail from her childhood and she thought how strangely vivid her memories were that day. Maybe they were like that because she was far away from the flat where they all originated. Anyway, she used to think that being in plaster was contagious. No, that’s not quite right. She did know that you had to break (or at least badly twist) a limb before you got it put in plaster, but at same time meeting anybody with one always produced this strange fear in her that she would become like that too. It had taken her years to learn to control the fear to the extent where it stopped being obvious to other people, but the feeling never quite disappeared.
She looked at the large monstrosity, the back of which had already fused with the dark sky behind. There was a group of clouds in the east which did not seem to be moving at all. Behind one of them she could make out the outline of the moon, which was not too far from the ragged edge of the cloud. Maybe she would be able to finish her walk in the silver moonlight.
The tank. A terribly ugly machine, which did not belong there at all. She looked towards the pensioners and wondered how they must have felt when the army positioned that monstrosity right at the tip of their bay. The second most visible point on the island was probably chosen only because the first had already been occupied by a lighthouse.
The barrel was pointing towards the hill and the plug at the end had been soldered on very badly, half of it sticking out. A large five pointed star had been white until someone had hastily and carelessly painted over with red.
Why had they not removed this monument? Had the old men on the bench just got used to it as a part of their horizon or could they simply not be bothered? A heap of old rusting metal, a military reject, which…
In the middle of the turret she noticed a small white sheet of paper with writing on it. She was standing too far away to be able to read it. She tried to get nearer, touched the metal and immediately withdrew her hand.
It was pleasantly warm, as you would expect from metal which had been standing in the sun all day, but it was also greasy. There was nowhere she could wipe the grease off her hand. She decided to go down to the sea and she immersed her hand in the water but it just slid across her fingers without removing anything. She had to rub her skin on a rough stone.
She threw an accusing look at the metal and started walking towards the other side of the bay where the lighthouse flashed into the darkness.
“I think we should take the drinks down to the cellar while there’s still some daylight", said Alfonz.
They were still lying on the beach and the two cigarettes glowed in the dark. They had eaten the last sandwiches they had brought from home and had just had a good belch.
“Take it, take it,” said Max and Raf could feel Alfonz looking at him but he continued looking at the sea. He just did not feel like getting up. Alfonz would manage on his own.
Alfonz hesitated and when none of his friends took any notice of him he went to the house. He got the torch and started thinking how he would manage the torch as well as the crate of beer. He turned the torch on, put it on top of the beer bottles, lifted the crate and started walking towards the cellar entrance. He would manage.
Only when he reached the stairs did he realise that his solution was flawed — the side of the crate cut off the bottom part of the beam from the torch. The stairs went down and Alfonz’s light only shone on the ceiling. He tried to lean the crate forward but that made the torch slide so he had to just hope that after all those years all the stairs were still there and safe.
He tested each one first with the tip of his toes, then the rest of his foot and only then did he transfer the whole of his weight plus the load onto it. He counted each stair before standing on it, as if counting meant giving it a name, making contact, a request to be able to trust it.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
Alfonz was aware of his heart beating. Suddenly it contracted, pushing all the blood out into the rest of his body. “Fear, this is fear!” realised Alfonz and he could not believe it. He racked his memory to find a reason, a comparison with a similar situation in the past. The nearest feeling was the one of returning home in the middle of the night, walking through the woods when suddenly tiny lights appear in the distance and you are not sure whether you have walked so fast that this is already home or whether the lights are the eyes of wolves (or other beings?) waiting for you. On top of it all, fear was too mild a description of how he felt: he could not move or breath. He flexed his muscles trying to tear himself out of this state but it did not work. His only hope was to give his fear a name, to identify it. He thought of a woman. Not any particular woman and especially not the neighbour from his village. It was an unreal being, a conglomerate, the collective noun for women. He was afraid of women. It was that simple. On the fourth step of a strange house he was overcome by fear raised to the thousandth potency, which appeared in its milder form whenever he thought (dreamed about?) losing his virginity. How could that small fear grow into a wall pressing against him? Pushing him back, out of the cellar, away from the woman?
He tried once more to push himself forward and this time he broke the barrier. He had given his fear a name and thus overpowered it. He stepped onto the next stair without testing it. His fear was gone. The only trace of it was a very unreal memory, which already seemed unbelievable to him.