Karen Jennings

It was the first time that a plastic drum had washed up on the scattered pebbles of the island shore. Other items had arrived over the years. Torn shirts, bits of rope, cracked lids from plastic lunchboxes, braids of synthetic material made to emulate hair. There had been bodies too, as there was today. The length of it stretched out beside the drum, one hand reaching for it, as though to indicate that they had made the journey as companions and did not now wish to be parted.

Samuel saw the drum first, through one of the small windows as he made his way down the inside of the lighthouse tower that morning. He had to walk with care. The steps, made of stone, were ancient by now, worn smooth as silk, their valleyed centres ready to trip him up. Into those places where the stone walls had been yielding, he had inserted handholds, but the rest of the descent was done with arms outstretched, fingers brushing the rough sides in support.

The drum was the colour of workers’ overalls and remained in sight, bobbing in the flow, all the way during his reckless hastening to the shore. The body he saw only once he arrived. He side-stepped it, walking a tight circle around the drum. It was as fat as a president, two-thirds the height of a man, and without any visible cracks or punctures. He lifted it carefully. It was light, empty. The seal had held. Yet the thing, despite being light, was unwieldy. It would not be possible with his hands, gnarled as they were, to grip onto that smooth surface and carry it across the jagged pebbles, over the boulders and then up along the sandy track, through scrub and grasses, to the headland where the cottage sat, abutting the tower. Perhaps if he fetched a rope, tied the drum to his back, he could avoid the effort of the ancient wooden barrow with its wheel that splintered and caught across the craggy beach, often overturning as a result of its own weight.

Yes, carrying the drum on his back would be the best option. Afterwards, in the yard, he would hunt out the old hacksaw that lived amongst sacking and rotting planks. He would rub the rust from the blade, sharpen it as best he could, and saw the top off the drum, then place it in an outside corner of the cottage where the guttering overflowed, so that it could catch rainwater for use in his vegetable garden.

Samuel let the drum fall, watching as it lurched on the uneven surface, thudding against the arm of the corpse. He had forgotten about that. He sighed. All day it would take him to dispose of the body. All day. First moving it, then the burial, which was impossible in the rocky island with its thin layer of sand. The only option was to cover it with rocks, as he had done with others in the past. Yet it was such a large body. Not in breadth, but in its length. Twice as long as the drum, as though the swell and ebb of the sea had left it this unnatural, elongated form. The arms were strong, disproportionate to the naked torso’s knuckled spine and sharp ribs. Small, fine black curls formed patches on each shoulder blade, and another spot coloured the base of the back where it met the waist of grey denim shorts. The same curls, small, too small for a man of his size, grew on his legs and toes, across his forearms and between the joints of his fingers. They unsettled Samuel. They were the hairs of a new-born animal or of a baby who had stayed too long in the womb. What had the sea birthed here on these stones?

Already, as the mid-morning sun was rising, the curls were silvering with salt crystals. His hair too, was grey where sand had settled in it. Grains adhered to the only portion of the man’s face that was visible – part of his forehead, a closed eye. The rest of the face was pressed into his shoulder.

Samuel tutted. The corpse would have to wait. First he would tend to the drum, then, next morning, if the body hadn’t washed away, he would have to break some of the island’s boulders, creating enough stones to cover it. There had been thirty-two of them, these washed-up bodies, over the eighteen years he had been lighthouse keeper. All of them nameless, unclaimed.

In the beginning, when the government was new, crisp with promises, when all was still chaos and the dead and missing of the twenty years under dictatorial rule were being sought, Samuel had reported the bodies that washed up. There had been fewer then. Perhaps only one every six months. The first time officials had come out, with clipboards and a dozen body bags, combing the island for shallow graves, for corpses lodged between boulders, for bones and teeth that had become part of the gravelly sand.

“You understand,” the woman in charge had said, as she looked down at a scuff mark on her red patent-leather heels, “we have made promises. We must find all those who suffered under the Dictator so that we can move forward, nationally. In a field outside the capital, my colleagues found a grave of at least fifty bodies. Another colleague discovered the remains of seventeen people who had been hanged from trees in the forest. They were still hanging, you understand, all this time later. Who knows how many we will find here? I am certain it will be many. This is an ideal dumping ground. Just wait. You will see. And that is when the healing will begin, for the nation, for us all.”

But when the crew returned one by one, empty-handed, with only the washed-up corpse to show for a day’s work, she was annoyed. She rushed to the boat, her departure abrupt, without the courtesy of a goodbye. Samuel did not hear from her, nor from her department. He did not know what had happened to the corpse, or who he might have been.

Months later, possibly as much as a year, he found three small bodies washed up side by side. A young boy, a girl, a baby in a blanket. In those days, the lighthouse’s radio still worked and he’d contacted the shore to report the case. The woman called him back, her voice clipped by the static. “What colour are they?” she demanded.

“What?”

“What colour are they? The bodies. What colour?”

He was silent.

“What I am asking is, are they darker than us – their skin – that is what I want to know. Are they darker than you or me?”

“I think so.”

“And their faces? Are they longer? What are their cheekbones like?”

“I don’t know. They’re children. They look like children.”

“Listen, we’re busy people. We have real crimes to deal with. Actual atrocities, you understand. We cannot come out every time another country’s refugees flee and drown. It is not our problem.”

“What must I do with them then?”

“Do what you like. We don’t want them.”

By then he had already started his vegetable garden beside the cottage, had used his wages to import soil from the mainland, ordered seeds and clippings. And to protect all of that new growth, he had begun to fashion a dry-stone wall around it. He gathered rocks, fitting them together one on top of the other, until they were high enough, stretched far enough to form a barrier. When all the loose stones of the island had been collected, he ordered a sledgehammer and used it to break apart the many rocks and boulders that comprised the coastline. Slowly the island began to change shape. Had a helicopter been in the habit of flying over, its pilot would note the widening of the small bays, the curves where serrated edges had once been.

Samuel continued with the wall along the perimeter of the island until everything was encircled. It was into this outer wall that he began to introduce the bodies, selecting spots for them on the farthest part of the island where the stench of their decay would not reach him. This attracted gulls, of course. For weeks they hovered and cawed around the wall, trying to peck their way in. With time he had learnt to make these parts sturdier, so that they bulged a little around their contents. Yet even so, sometimes the gulls managed to break the wall and pick at the body inside. In those places where corpses were left to disintegrate unaided, the stones often collapsed.

Most times before burying them, Samuel went through their pockets for objects of identification. But there had never been anything of significance. Not beyond an old man’s fist, lumpen with a wad of foreign money squeezed to pulp in his grip. Samuel had buried him with it.

Beside the drum, the body stretched out still. Samuel half-nudged, half-kicked it with annoyance. The impact caused the arm to shift, the head to roll from its position and reveal the face. Both eyes opened briefly. The throat growled and fingers on the outstretched hand twitched, gripping hold of a pebble beneath them.

Samuel shuffled backwards. “Hello,” he said softly. Then, “Hello.”

The man did not move again. But there was now the visible slow throbbing of a pulse in his neck. Up-down, up-down it beat as the sea washed onto the pebbles and away again, mirroring the pulse.

Samuel counted. Fifty beats. Two hundred. Three hundred and fifty. At 500 he turned to the plastic drum, wrapped his arms around its middle and lifted it awkwardly in front of him, unable to see as he stumbled up the shore beyond the high water mark. He laid the drum on its side, chocked it with pebbles and then returned to the body, counting 100 more pulses before making his way up towards the headland through the well-worn paths he never altered.

The gulls arrived while he was gone. They stood a few metres from the man, calling uncertainly, darting forward with low heads. One of them flapped its wings, approached the right leg and took an awkward peck at the man’s shorts. But by then Samuel was on the sandy path, pushing the heavy barrow in front of him.

“Get away there! Go on! Get away!”

The birds rose, hovering low, as Samuel struggled through the boulders and onto the pebbled shore. He left the barrow beside the man and removed some rope from the bowl of the wheelbarrow, walking to where he had left the drum. He tied a rope around it, twice across the middle, twice along its height, and fastened it to a tall boulder. There were no trees on this part of the island. Only dry, leafless scrub that snapped if touched.

He returned to where the man lay, put a hand under each armpit, and tried to pull him towards the barrow. The body would not move. It was too heavy. Samuel grunted as he tugged, hoping that the body could be yanked loose from whatever it was that held it in place. Minutes followed, his arms aching, the small of his back aflame. He cried out, falling backwards as a pebble came loose underfoot.

Now the body was on top of him. The weight of it, and the smell too, decidedly foreign. A foreigner’s damp hair, a foreigner’s sweat and breath. Samuel pushed the man off, lifted himself up. The hair under the man’s arms was coarse and long in contrast to elsewhere on his body. As Samuel heaved, he had felt himself pulling them out, those rough long strands. They stuck to the sweat on his wrists and forearms, working their way under his fingernails. He rinsed his hands and arms in the sea, before grabbing hold of the man again.

At length, he was able to lift the shoulders onto the wheelbarrow. His buttocks leaned against the wood as he caught his breath. Then, with an exhalation, he moved around to the side of the barrow, dragging the torso upwards so that the skin of the back caught on the splintered wood. The head lolled against one of the handles, both arms hanging down the sides. He stuffed them into the barrow, forcing them to fit in the space. But the legs remained extended, comical.

By now his own legs were shaking. His hands. He crouched in the sand a moment, looked over the water to the fog of the horizon. He thought it before he said it: “I’m old.” As though frightened by the words, he stood up in haste, taking the cracked heels of the man and pushing until the knees buckled the legs into triangles. Bending, shoving, he positioned the feet so that they balanced on either corner of the barrow. Then he took the remaining rope and plaited it around and over until feet, knees, arms were locked in place, the entire giant body was trussed and shrunken and wholly deformed.

And yet, despite his precautions, the body tipped, it twisted, the head especially nudged Samuel’s hands as the barrow cobbled over the pebbles. The wheel stuck with every rotation, so that soon he began to anticipate jolts, pauses, and put the barrow down in advance, clearing the obstacle, observing the damage done to the wheel, before beginning again.

Once the man groaned and Samuel waited to see if his eyes would open again, but they did not. So he pushed on, through the wet sand of the water-carved alley between the boulders, so narrow that the sides of the barrow rasped, and one of the man’s knees grated against a jagged edge and began to bleed lightly.
Then they were out of the tunnel, off the shore almost, with only the steep incline up loose grey sand to halt them. But the wheel stuck again, it would not be pushed, and Samuel backed away, ready to give up. He had tried, hadn’t he? He had done enough. He would untie the man, bring food and water if he woke, a blanket maybe, and that would be enough.

He did none of those things. He came forward again, tried turning the barrow around, almost hopeless in the soft sand. He moved backwards, pulling the barrow up the path, even though he thought his arms might tear, thin as paper they felt. And then it was stuck again, and he was back down on his knees, fire in his legs. He was all sand now. His shoes held it, as did his pockets, the creases of his neck, the arcs of his fingernails.

But then, at last, came the breath of the headland, of a soft breeze through yellow grasses, and a solid dirt track lined with clusters of small pink flowers and green-thorned weeds.

Above them rose the lighthouse. It had been white once, last plastered in the middle of the previous century, before the colonial government left them to their independence. Now it was flaking, dull, with orange swathes where metal fixtures had rusted and leaked their age. Around the base of the tower, short scraggly trees grew, their trunks and branches cast westward by the prevailing wind so that they seemed ever in flight, and Samuel often wondered, before he stepped out of the door in the morning, whether he might find that they had fled after all.

The cottage door was old and heavy. It stuck in the jamb, fat with moisture from the sea air. Samuel had to put a shoulder against its grey hardness to force it open. He pulled the barrow over the single step, and dragged it through the small dark entranceway with its clothes-hooks, anoraks, hats and worn-heeled boots, into the living area.

He untied the ropes that had kept the man in position. Then he slowly tipped the barrow over until the man fell out onto the threadbare carpet. Samuel repositioned the limbs, the neck, checked on the knee that was no longer bleeding, and took an old cushion, its original design faded to dun, and placed it under the man’s head.

There was a couch in the room, a table with a television that did not work, and a bookcase full of video cassettes and old magazines. Beyond those objects there was only a three-legged stool, speckled with paint stains and long-ago trails of woodworm. Samuel sat on it, feeling the creaking unsteadiness of it beneath him.

He watched the face of the man where he lay. A wide mouth in a narrow jaw. He appeared to have no hair on his face at all, not even eyebrows. He might have been in his early thirties, though Samuel would not have been surprised to learn that he was in fact older or younger. How long might the man live? he wondered. How long would he lie on Samuel’s carpet in Samuel’s home? He rattled his fingers on the table, smoothed a hand over his face. Was it to go on like this, then? This incessant movement in his home. His home that had been his alone for eighteen years of solitude. Was it to be this? This breath, this youth, this life?

He could not bear it. It was taking over the small cottage, seeping into the floor and walls and he began to feel breathless, to gasp his panic. He tried to reason with himself. The next day the supply boat would come, as it did every fortnight. It would come and he would hand the man over to them. They would have to take him. They had that obligation.

But he remained unsettled. And on the floor, as though in mockery of all he was thinking, a vein seemed to emerge from the depths of the man’s calf, to surface, swollen and alive, pumping life through him.

Samuel stood abruptly, and stumbled out the back door. He would go and fetch the drum. When he returned, he hoped, the man would be dead.