Evie Wyld - All the Birds, Singing

Lead weight gathers in my belly. ‘Please,’ I say. I’m not sure what it is I’m pleading for, but it has some effect on the man. He squints at me.

‘You’re John Whyte’s daughter.’ I nod and he sighs. ‘Look, I’m going to assume you’re as good a bloke as your old man. I’ve got the toilet to use, while I’m gone you can do what you like, just don’t touch him.’ He picks up a paper he’s been sitting on. ‘Leave those grapes outside, and remember — I know exactly who you are.’ He puts his thumbs into the space between his stomach and belt, ‘And if a nurse comes in, I didn’t see you.’

I put the grapes down on his empty seat. ‘Thanks,’ I say.

He walks away, his shoes squeaking on the floor. I open the door to Denver’s room, where he is encased in a plastic cover, like a small tent. There’s a smell in the room, at the same time familiar and so alien that the breath stops in my throat — the deep-fat fryer.

A machine pumps air into the body inside the plastic. The sound is calm and regular, a steady wheeze. I can only catch glimpses of Denver’s body, dark patches of pink between white bandages. If he is awake I wonder what he knows, this new order of things, no arms or legs to use, just flesh, cooking while he sits inside it and stares at the ceiling through the tent. My mouth is bone-dry. There’s the smallest sound from the tent, like a squeal, the noise of fat spitting in a pan. The thing under plastic lives, and I wipe my palms on my thighs and move closer.

‘Denver?’ I am waiting for an answer that won’t come. ‘It’s Jake.’ Somewhere a series of beeps sound. The pump feeds him air. ‘I’ve come to say I’m sorry.’ I move closer and try not to look at his face. His eyes are covered over with pads of cotton, so he cannot even stare at the ceiling, but I am glad not to have to meet the gaze of the eyeballs. In the moist cave of his mouth is a thick plastic tube. It is impossible to tell which of the other tubes carry urine or pus or drugs, all of them are Dettol-brown. I breathe in through my mouth to avoid the smell, but I still get the taste.

‘I don’t know if you can hear me,’ I say like they do on the TV. ‘I just wanted to say that I didn’t mean for this to happen.’ I leave a long pause like he might respond. I can’t remember any more what it is that I expected to happen. ‘And I want you to know that if you wake up, I’ll tell them it was me, I won’t let them hurt you.’ It had sounded so heroic when I’d practised it in my head. But in my head, Denver was still a complete body, maybe with a few scars about him, maybe even an oxygen mask over his face for the smoke inhalation. He was not this wet wound of meat. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I say again. ‘It’s all my fault, I never thought it would get so out of control. The fire—’

‘How do you mean it’s all your fault?’ Behind me, at the open doorway, stands a nurse and the policeman. I push past them and into the hallway.

‘Hey,’ the policeman calls, but he doesn’t follow me. I look back and they are both just standing looking.

‘Who is that?’ the nurse asks the policeman.

‘I know her old man,’ he says.

For an hour I walk the blackened main street, and people turn to look at me, in a way that I can’t read. I try to smile back at some of them, some sympathetic sort of smile that would be appropriate, but they turn away if I do that. There’s a silence of so many people looking. No one asks questions. No one says anything, they just look and all of them see me. And all of them look that quiet look.

The post office, the pub and the co-op are fine, but the fish shop is dead, and outside it I can see the fish man sitting on the bonnet of his car and just looking. There’s no one there to help him because everyone is looking to their own problems. He must sense me watching because he looks up, and he just stares at me. I put my hands deep in the pockets of my shorts and keep my head down. I think I hear him shout something, but probably not, probably no one heard. I don’t look behind me, I turn down the street that takes me back down towards the beach. Somewhere I hear the scratch of a walkie-talkie, I hear my name on the wind.

I take myself far far away from what I am worried about, I think only about how I will sit for a while on the beach, and then I will go home and at home I will go to sleep and in the morning I will start to think straight again, I will wake up a changed and better person and I will be able to think clearly about the past week, about Flora, about Denver, their parents and the town. I walk quickly and soon, in the baking heat, I am on the beach again, the place with the reedy dunes where the soldier crabs pop their heads out of their holes and tick their moustaches at you, but today, no matter how still I sit, no faces appear out of the sand. There is nothing to be frightened away by a flung-out hand, nothing will be conducted in the way that it should be, and I am still not thinking clearly.

I hear twigs snap behind me and I ignore it. Up the beach come six or seven men and a woman. I don’t move. The human eye. If I move, where will I end up? If I move I’m guilty. And I stay put until I can see who they are, walking with a purpose, all of them. One man is Andy Carter and my blood bellows in my stomach. The woman runs the bread shop. I have a memory of her when I was younger, giving out the stale iced buns to kids on their way home from school. The fish man is with them, with the same look he’d given me half an hour before. The other faces I recognise but not enough to name — I have never been interested enough in learning these people’s names. I keep still, like a leveret; my shorts are sand-coloured, my T-shirt green, they will not see me if I remain still. But I catch in Andy Carter’s face that he has seen me, and I wait a breath to try to work out a plan and at the last moment, I get up and run. There is a shout behind me, a scream from the bread-shop woman and through the earth I feel them coming. If I can make it round the headland, I can hide until I can take my boat and get away. I am a fast runner for my year, I am tall and long-legged.

Someone tackles me to the ground and the wind is knocked out of me, and there is not enough air in me to say I’m sorry, it was an accident, there is just a cronking sound that comes from my chest, and my T-shirt is being pulled over my head, my arms and legs are pinned by the weight of bodies and there is a sudden scalding-hot pain, the sound of yelling and waves and the steady bleat of my own voice above the sound of a stick whistling through the air and being brought down again and again on my back. I flip like an eel in the sand, and see Andy Carter, his face a red crease of fury, and I see the fish man with his face less certain, but the fish man says, ‘Let him take his turn and then we’ll get you home.’ The bread lady looks away from it all and out to sea with her hands on top of her head, and I am tossed back onto my stomach by the fish man and the other nameless men and the blows come again and each time I feel flesh being torn and I am a wet bag of meat like Denver, torn and open and not human any more. My hand digs into the sand to hide itself, it is like the pink claw of a galah.

From down the beach, there is someone else’s scream, a burning-hot scream, and the stick stops and there is just enough air in my lungs that I can make the smallest of screeches when I breathe out. My face presses against the ground and through one eye I see four bodies on top of Andy Carter, holding him down and making him stop. A ringing in my ears like the birds, a squalling in my chest.

I woke up with a jolt and Dog was standing at the foot of my bed, ears pricked. It sounded like a dog fight out in the bottom field. There was nothing to see out the fogged window. I opened it, took the torch from my bedside table and shone it out there. A scream of something and the beam caught the black shape, just for a second, and the sheep, white blurs in the top corner of the field, huddled. The noise was still there, guttural, and the sheep called out.