Qinmeartha and the Girl-Child LoChi (11 page)

5

I was standing hip-deep in shallows about a hundred metres away from a long beach of grey sand. I didn't take this in for a while, because the abrupt, unexpected transition from one medium to another – from water to air – caused a resurgence, although thankfully in far less severe form, of that same pain I'd felt when my old, landbound corporeal body had ripped itself free of the body I inhabited now. I clutched my stomach and bent half-over, vomiting up what seemed like half the ocean but stank far worse than any sea water I'd ever encountered. All the decay of centuries of people and animals and plants swallowed up by the oceans seemed to have been concentrated in the jelly that came pouring out of me. It settled as green-grey scum on the rolling surface of the water in front of me, allowing itself to be pulled apart only with difficulty.

Finally my gut was empty and the water in front of me was clear of my puke. I straightened slowly, my stomach feeling bruised and beaten. There was a stiff breeze in my face and spray against my groin and chest.

Ahead of me was the beach, and I began wading clumsily toward it. As my vision cleared I began to take in my surroundings. Wherever this was, it was not the world I had left an indeterminate amount of time ago when the hatch had chopped Naomi Fredriksen's neck and my senses had fled me. The sky was like peach-coloured silk: when I looked at it I was looking at a
surface
, not at the unfathomable depths of an atmosphere. The sea water was a grayed version of the same hue. There were palm trees at the back of the beach, giving it a backdrop, and they were in a profusion of reds, oranges, pinks and the same peach as the sky. The beach itself seemed to be of infinite length: as I gazed to either side I could see the straight gray line of it diminishing until it was lost in the horizon. But the people on the beach, I decided as I came closer to it, seemed normal enough.

Who knows how many people stood or lay there, some singly, some in small groups? I could see thousands, I'm sure, but that was only along a relatively short stretch of sand. Beyond a few hundred metres to either side of me, distance blurred the details. Even though the beach wasn't crowded, there must have been millions there.

My emergence from the water, puffing and spluttering, attracted the attention of some of the people nearest to me, and a couple of them, a man and a woman, started to wade out through the little breakers in my direction. At first I couldn't tell if they were friendly or hostile; there was nothing I could do about it if they were antagonistic, because there wasn't really anywhere I could retreat to except deeper water, so I just kept ploughing on shoreward. Even as I got near enough to see their faces I still couldn't tell their intentions: their expressions were grim, their gazes lacked any signs of emotion.

"Where am I?" I said stupidly.

My voice, long disused, was a bray.

"Where am I?" It was still the only thing I could think of to say.

This time they heard me, but neither answered. They were reaching out their arms toward me, either to greet me or to seize me.

I let them grab me by the elbows. What else could I do?

"Who are you?" I said.

Still no reply as they turned in the water and began half-leading, half-dragging me toward where a dozen or so others just like them – the same blank expressions, the same empty eyes – watched us.

I tried again to get some response out of my two escorts. "I'm called ..." I began.

I stopped wading. The man and woman to either side of me kept plodding steadfastly on, my elbows locked in their grip, so that my toes dragged along the sandy bottom until I had the sense to start walking again.

I was horrified. Somewhere during my long undersea journey I'd lost the memory of my name. I hadn't lost my identity, I didn't
think
I'd lost my identity, but with my name had gone a large part of my sense of who I was. I began running through a sort of litany of memories I had of myself, placing myself in the world I'd come from: my job, the tragedy of those latter years of my marriage to Marion, Naomi Fredriksen and a few others like her who'd gone before ... Everything was there, my memories seemed complete except for that one vital datum of my name, and yet would I have known if there'd been anything else missing – lots of other pieces of the jigsaw missing? I conjured up my father's face, my mother's, even my grandmother's. I recalled that my grandfather had died of leukemia before I was born. I relived in fast-forward the time at age ten or eleven when an off-duty policeman had brought me home having caught me scrumping apples, how he'd got chatting with Dad about cricket and had stayed for tea, my crime forgotten about until later, at bedtime, when my mother treated me to a quiet, spitting verbal tirade so severe I didn't get to sleep until three in the morning ...

Hundreds of other memories like that went racing in a gaudy kaleidoscope across the screen of my inner vision in seconds, rather as I imagine it must be like for dying people seeing all their life flash before them. But still I couldn't dredge up my own name.

"I'm
me
," I mumbled to myself.

The soundless man and woman led me up the sandy slope a few metres beyond the waterline, then let go of my arms. The others who'd been waiting for us by the waterline seemed to lose all interest in me now that I was here, and so, to my astonishment, did my two escorts. Having gone to the effort of bringing me here, they just drifted away aimlessly, the man bumping into someone else so that both staggered. In the world from which I'd come there would at least have been some apologies exchanged, or perhaps an altercation, but here the two people just resumed their balance and my ex-escort carried on his way before, having gone a few metres farther, he slumped down to seat himself on a vacant patch of sand. The woman who'd helped bring me in through the shallows was already lying down on her own area of sand, supporting herself on one elbow, staring out to sea without any apparent expectation of seeing anything there beyond the rolling waters.

I looked all around me, searching for any sign of expression on all those blank faces. But it was as if the people's bodies were uninhabited.

I let out a wordless shout, hoping to startle some reaction out of someone.

Nothing.

I went up to the person nearest me, an elderly woman, and spoke directly into her face, telling her some nonsense about the weather being remarkably nice for this time of the year.

She moved her head slightly so that she could see the water over my shoulder, but that was the only response I got. The same pattern repeated itself when I tried to coax some recognition of my presence out of various of the other beach people: there wasn't the remotest flicker of acknowledgement in their eyes. I tried some of the children – there weren't many children there among the adults, but there were a few – with high hopes they at least might have retained enough youthful curiosity to be tantalized by something novel, but their small bodies seemed as unoccupied by the spark of consciousness as everyone else's.

Finally I gave up.

"Well
be
like that, then. See if
I
care."

At a party or in a pub or the office my campy mock-petulance might have raised a smile. Here, it fell on deaf ears.

The only sound on the beach was the rhythmic play of the breakers. Now that I thought about it, even they seemed oddly apathetic by comparison with those on any shore I'd come across in the world I'd left, as if the water weren't water at all but some mildly viscous oil. The spray breaking against me when I'd come up out of the sea had been vigorous enough. I fancied that the lethargy of those on the sands must infect the waves as they drew toward the land – a pretty illusion, however implausible.

I set off to explore, stepping over or around the mindless beings as and when they got in my way. I still had some remnants of courtesy left at that stage. My first target was the wall of riotously coloured trees at the back of the beach.

As I got closer to the vegetation, trudging through sand that, unlike the ooze of the sea floor, sank beneath the weight of my footsteps so that progress was slow and frustrating, I realized that no wind shook those leaves and branches. The trees and bushes were completely still. Coming closer still, I saw that they weren't really trees and bushes at all. It was like looking at a portrait on oils. From a distance the detail the painter's put on the canvas seems astonishing, with every last hair carefully put in place, but if you bring your face up close to the canvas you see that in reality the brushstrokes, however meticulously applied, are relatively coarse: it's your own mind that has created the chimera of impossibly fine detail. These trees were the same. The foliage I'd seen from farther down the beach as countless little leaves was in actuality just swirls of colour with some extra detailing at the edges. When I looked above the trees, my earlier impression of the sky as a surface rather than a deep ocean of air became stronger than ever, and this effect persisted when I turned and looked back out to sea.

I wasn't anywhere
real
. I was in the middle of an artifice. I was standing on a stage, looking more intimately at the props and scenery than any member of the audience could.

And yet this place
was
real. I could smell the brine, feel the sand underfoot. When at last I reached the wall of trees and bushes and put out a hand, I could feel the leaves even though I still couldn't see them.

This was a reality – it just wasn't as complete, as
finished
, a reality as the one I'd been accustomed to. I spent a long time wondering if this was because it was a work still in progress, or if it might have been left uncompleted, or if it was just that it had been put together somewhat hastily. It's a question I've in a way answered since then, although the
exact
answer still escapes me: it could be all three of the ones I initially guessed at, or a combination of one or more. But at least I have, I think, worked out why the beach and its world didn't have the same level of detailed realization as the world I'd left when I'd drowned.

I also worked out over the ensuing days – weeks? months? years? who could tell how much time was passing when there was no hunger or thirst to use as a clock, no nightfall, no tug of sleep? – why it was that the others there were so completely mindless. They lacked all the attributes we associate with human intelligence, or any intelligence at all, simply because nothing ever really changed. The air always had the same brisk chill: not precisely cold, but never warm. The breakers pounded in their listless way against the sand. Further out upon that endless sea the waves rolled, each indistinguishable from the next. These provided the only motion to watch, and the motion was a repetitive one. There were no
events
to keep one's brain alive. On the beach, people's minds were numbed by the boredom into nothingness.

I tried to create a few events. I'm not altogether proud of some of the things I did. I shouted. I danced. I pushed standing people over. I scooped up water in my cupped hands and threw it in their faces. I picked up a man and carried him into the shallows, where I stuffed his head underwater in an attempt to get him to fight back against drowning ... which of course he didn't, because he was already drowned, and after I'd left him his lifeless body either floated back to the sand or was fetched by two of his fellows – I was so disgusted with him, and myself, that I didn't stay to watch. I forced more than one woman over onto her back and spread her legs, but I didn't have the physical ability to proceed any further with the act of rape – and, even if I'd been physically capable of an erection, I'd have been rendered impotent anyway by the complete lack of response, by the vacuous, incurious gaze the women turned upon me. I beat a man in the face with my fists until the pain made me stop, but his features remained unmarked and he showed no signs of any pain to complement my own.

Why was it that my own mind stayed alive, even though teetering fast toward insanity, whereas everyone else's seemed to have died? This was another question that occupied me for a while.

I thought, and still think, that it was thanks to Naomi Fredriksen. In life she had represented just a casual liaison to me, a matter of two people arriving at a mutually satisfactory arrangement. Yet the horrific manner of her death, the last thing I'd seen while conscious in the world of the truly alive, gave my mind something to hang onto, a reference point that helped me remember all the
rest
of the living world. The breakers weren't the only moving thing for me to look at: because of witnessing Naomi's ghastly death, I also had memories I could watch.

For a long time I roamed up and down the beach trying to find Naomi, to thank her, perhaps to jolt her mind, too, into activity through the mere presence of someone she'd known in life. I never did find her. I don't think I ever could have. This was the beach where the drowned people go. Naomi hadn't lived long enough to drown.

What I did discover eventually on that infinite beach was someone else like myself. I saw her before I realized I'd done so, and heard her a moment later. She was sitting on the sand with her knees up to her chest and her arms around them, and weeping like a child.

"Hey there!" I called in the general direction of where the sound was coming from, still half-convinced the sound of weeping was a hallucination, yet another sign I was going nuts.

She looked up, and that was how I knew which of the countless figures before me was her. For one instant longer her face remained distraught, and then she let rip with a great howl of glee and pushed herself to her feet.

"I never thought I—" she began, starting to lumber through the sand toward me, her arms wide.

"At last—" I cried, doing much the same. You've seen the scene a thousand times in soap operas. We were far up from the waterline, so the sand was powdery and hard to run through.

We hugged each other close, pulled apart for a proper look at each other, hugged each other close again, sobbing and laughing like idiots in turn.