“Tell me.”
“I did it.”
“You did it?”
“I did it.”
“You hurt yourself? How?”
“Wall.” He nodded to one of the arches of the brick vault and she saw the bloodstains.
“Why?”
“I want it to stop.”
“What do you want to stop?”
“Everything. I want everything to stop.”
She pretended not to understand. She can see now that she was a coward. She can see now that if she had been braver, if she had really loved her brother, she would have taken a knife down those dark stairs and slipped it between his ribs and let him die in her arms.
Night comes and in the darkness, after the shearwaters have flown ashore, she hears animals that are neither seals nor birds. She hears lions and leopards and wolves. She hears the clanking of chains. She hears drunken shouting and the crackle of a fire and something large breathing close to her ear. She hears the air going in and out of its nostrils and smells the rot of its yellow teeth. She feels the heat of its breath.
Grey light. Intense cold. A fine rain is falling. She cannot move her leg. She cannot move her hand. The world is a tiny, bright thing, so small she can hold it in her hand.
She looks up to the fringe of green grass high above her head. That was the place she had come from. There was a bed somewhere up there. But if there is a way back she is unable to see it from here. She can move her other leg a little. She thinks about trying to stand so that she can find a route but this rock is a kind of bed, too, and she has a memory of the other bed blowing away. She can smell the ammonia on her breath. She looks down at her damaged hand. One of the fingers is the wrong shape. It looks like a badly drawn picture of a hand.
She is in a garden. There are fountains and lavender bushes covered in bees that rise in angry, humming clouds when her cousins hit them with sticks before the nurse drags them away. She trod on a bee once and her foot swelled to twice its size. There are bowers, too, where she can sit out of the heat of the sun. From her favourite she can look down over the wall to the quays and to the ships entering or leaving the harbour. She likes to imagine the countries from which they have come, the countries the old men talk about, countries made entirely of sand, countries where the people have skin as black and glossy as plums, countries where there are water lizards as long as a rowing boat.
She is playing with a hoop made of stripped willow branches, the ends tapered and bound together with little spirals of fibre. If no one gets in the way she can run alongside it, batting it with a stick to keep it rolling, and do a circuit of the entire garden.
It is the most beautiful garden in the world. She never wants to leave. If only she could remember where it is.
There is a high wind and the sea explodes on the rocks below. The moon is full and the waves come in like black hills with a crest of blue snow, swelling and flexing and dropping onto the rocky shelf where they turn to freezing spray which falls on her like rain. She thinks how calm it must be out there, under those waves, in that dark that goes down and down, where the dolphins swim and the jellyfish drift on the current and the forests of seaweed swing back and forth, so much better than up here where everything hurts.
Dawn comes. Her throat and mouth are dry and she cannot generate enough saliva to swallow. Her lips are cracked and bleeding. She can see nothing but fog through her right eye.
There is a flock of gulls standing farther down the rock, all looking out to sea, preening their grey wings with their orange beaks and shaking out their feathers. Their eyes are little yellow stones with black holes drilled through them. The ocean is beaten silver. The seals have come back.
She can hear the cymbals again, a distant, high ringing that comes and goes on the breeze, now louder, now quieter. She wonders if there is something wrong with her ears. Then she hears the faint but unmistakable sound of a big animal growling, that lazy rumble like a barrel on cobbles. The gulls scatter and the seals slip into the waves, leaving only circles of wash behind them.
Everything is briefly still and silent. Then she sees him. He is a big man, naked except for a ragged cloak of red cloth, taller than she remembers from the boat, and more muscular. His head is too large and there is blood on his face. A leopard pads at his side. Behind him are six naked men and six naked women. Some have made themselves crowns and belts of creepers and green branches, some are carrying freshly killed animals — rabbits, foxes, pheasants.
He stands in front of her, breathing heavily. His chest and shoulders are covered with wiry black hair and she can see now that he has horns. There is dung on his legs and his penis is thick and erect. He bends down and picks her up. She can smell wine on his breath and the rot of his teeth. He licks her. She recognises him from somewhere. She does not feel frightened. No one can hurt her anymore. There is no longer enough of her to be hurt.
He turns her over and lays her down and pushes himself into her. The movement back and forth inside her is the movement of the waves back and forth against the rock, the coming and going of the birds, the pulse of day and night, summer turning into autumn, to winter, to spring to summer again, the heart squeezing and releasing, the pulse of the blood.
Then they are on top of her, the men and women, biting, tearing, ripping her skin, pulling out her hair, breaking her fingers, gouging her eyes, hacking out the fat and muscle, pulling free the greasy tubes and bags of her innards till she is finally free of her body. Rising now, she looks down at the skeleton lying on the rocks, gulls picking at the remaining shreds of meat and gristle. She sees the grass blowing in the wind, the fringe of restless surf, the island shrinking till it is no more than a lump in the fastness of the sea, the sea an azure tear on the surface of the globe itself which shrinks rapidly in the haze of the sun as she floats into the great, black vault, becoming a buckled ring of seven stars, Corona Borealis, the northern crown.
She is immortal.
BUNNY
He loved Mars bars and KitKats. He loved Double Deckers and Galaxy Caramels and Yorkies. He loved Reese’s Pieces and Cadbury’s Creme Eggs. He could eat a whole box of Quality Street in one sitting and had done so on several occasions, perhaps more than several. He loved white chocolate. He was not particularly keen on Maltesers, Wispas and Crunchies which were airy and insubstantial, though he wouldn’t turn his nose up at any of them if they were on offer. He disliked boiled and gummy sweets. He loved chocolate digestives. He loved Oreos and chocolate Bourbons. He loved coconut macaroons and Scottish shortbread. He would never buy a cereal bar but a moist, chunky flapjack was one of the most irresistible foods on the planet.
He loved thick, sweet custard. He loved Frosties and Weetabix with several dessertspoons of sugar. He loved chunks of cheese broken from a block in the fridge, Red Leicester preferably or cheap, rubbery mozzarella. He loved Yazoo banana milk, the stuff you got from garages and service stations in squat plastic bottles with foil seals under chunky screw-tops. He could eat a litre tub of yogurt if he added brown sugar or maple syrup.
He loved hot dogs and burgers, especially with tomato ketchup in a soft white bun thickly spread with butter. He loved battered cod and chips with salt and no vinegar. He loved roast chicken, he loved bacon, he loved steak. He loved every flavour of ice cream he had ever sampled — rum and raisin, Dime bar crunch, peanut butter, tiramisu…