Andrew Hurley - The Loney

Faster and faster the sand was liquefying around the tramp’s body, running away from under him and making him turn slowly on to his side. A larger crack appeared, running out of the top of his head to where Father Wilfred was kneeling. The water filled it on the next wave and widened it so that a great cake of sand broke and the body suddenly rolled and fell and floated. He hadn’t realised it until now, but the tramp had been lying at the very edge of a deep trench.

What made him reach out and grab the shirt, he wasn’t sure. It was instinctive, he supposed. He caught a sleeve and taking it firmly in his grip he dragged the body towards him, feeling for the first time — and with a shock that made him take hold with his other hand as well — the strength of the sea as it was pulling away from the land.

As the water in the trench lowered, the walls became apparent. They were made of a grey substance that was neither sand nor mud. He slipped down, dug in his feet, and slipped further. The outgoing water was moving apace, its speed increasing as it neared the narrowing bottom of the gulley, where he now found himself up to his knees. A section under his foot gave way and disappeared and he fell and ran the side of his face down the wall, tasting the gritty sulphur of the sludge. He let go, floundered, felt the water sucking him, tried to regain his grip, but the body was hurried away. He pushed himself upright and waded after the body a few paces before it was clear that it was pointless and although it was washed back towards him a few times as the tide engaged in its last ebb and flow, it was with the same mockery as a child who holds out a ball for its playmate only to snatch it away. Eventually the body sank out of sight.

He got out of the water and went up the beach and crossed the line of weed. He leant against the pillbox and wiped the mess off his face and stared at the sea, wondering if anything might reappear. But already it seemed that what had happened was unreal. That only minutes before he had been clinging to the sleeve of a corpse. There was no evidence of the old tramp at all now. Even his boots had gone.

It was shock, he supposed, the cold that was making him shiver, but he was terrified. He had almost been dragged into the sea, yes, but it wasn’t the sea that he was afraid of.

He felt alone.

More alone than he had ever felt in his life. It was a kind of nakedness, an instant disrobing. His skin prickled. A cold eel slithered in his stomach. Feelings that he thought he had left behind in childhood on those nights he had cried himself to sleep over another dead brother or sister surfaced and spread and overwhelmed him.

Was it pity? No, he felt nothing for the tramp. He was from the Other world and had got what he deserved. Wasn’t that so?

Why, then, did he feel so altered? So abandoned?

It was the place itself.

What was it about this place?

And then it came to him.

He had been wrong about everything.

God was missing. He had never been here. And if He had never been here, in this their special place, then He was nowhere at all.

He tried to dismiss the thought as quickly as it had come, but it returned immediately and with more insistence as he stood there watching the gulls flocking for the crustaceans left behind, and the clouds slowly knotting into new shapes, and the parasites swarming in the carcass of some thing.

It was all just machinery.

Here there was only existence coming and going with an indifference that left him cold. Life here arose of its own accord and for no particular reason. It went unexamined, and died unremembered.

He had fought with the sea for the dead drunk’s body with the same futility with which Xerxes had flogged the Dardanelles with chains. The sea had no concept of quarrel or possession — he had only been a witness to its power. He had been shown the perfect religion. One that required no faith. Nor were there any parables to communicate its lessons, because there were none to be taught. Only this: that death was blank. Not a doorway, but a wall, against which the whole human race was mounded like jetsam.

He felt like a drowning man himself, flailing about for something to hold onto. Just one thing that might help him stay afloat a little longer, even if it was bound to sink in the end.

After what seemed like an age, he put on his shoes, and walked for an hour back and forth, as the dusk settled, from one end of the beach to the other, searching the dunes, the rock pools, the deep channels.

Finding nothing.

Mummer had corralled everyone into the sitting room to listen to Hanny read. The elderly folk sat on the sofa. The rest stood behind them. The armchair that Father Bernard had been given that rainy night when we’d first decided to go back to Moorings, was now set out for Hanny instead. He sat down and Mummer kissed his face and handed him our Bible.

Hanny smiled and looked around the room. He opened the Bible and Mummer knelt down at his side.

‘There,’ she said, turning a few pages and pointing.

Hanny looked around at everyone again. They were all waiting for him to begin.

He stared down and put his finger on the page and began to read. It was from the end of Mark — the passage that Father Wilfred often branded onto our mortal souls as we sat in the vestry after Mass.

The disciples had refused to believe that Jesus had risen from the dead, but we were not to be like them. We could not be afraid to see Him in all his glory.

‘“These signs will accompany those who believe,”’ Hanny read. ‘“In my name they will drive out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up snakes with their hands; they will place their hands on sick people, and they will get well.”’

As Hanny spoke, a murmur of excitement ran through the room, and they knew that God was among them. Mummer was sobbing. Farther went over and put his arms around her. Mr and Mrs Belderboss had their heads bowed and were praying quietly, encouraging others to do the same. Miss Bunce and David stared as Hanny read slowly and carefully, but never once faltered on a single word.

Father Bernard glanced over at me. One day I thought I might be able to explain to him, to everyone what had happened, or have to, but what I would say I didn’t know. I would only be able to give them the facts as I remembered them, as I’m writing them now.

***

I’ve left this part until last, but it must be set down as well as everything else. When they come asking questions, as they surely will, I need to have things straight, no matter the horror.

Doctor Baxter says I ought to worry less about the minutiae of life and look at the bigger picture, but I have no choice and the details are important now. Details are truth. And in any case, I don’t care what Baxter says. I saw what he scrawled on my notes. It was only a few words that I glimpsed before he closed the file, but it was enough. Some improvement, but continues to exhibit childlike worldview. Classic fantasist . What the hell does he know anyway? He wouldn’t understand. He doesn’t know what it means to protect someone.

***

I’ve walked down those cellar steps again and again for the last thirty years, in bad dreams and small-hours insomnia. I know every footfall, every creak of wood. I can feel the damp plaster under my hand as I did on that foggy afternoon as Clement and I inched down in the dark, holding the wall, holding Hanny.

He had lost consciousness by the time we reached the bottom and we had to drag his full weight to a mattress in the middle of the floor that had been freshly stained around the buttons. He slithered from our grip and fell heavily. Clement knelt down and placed a grubby pillow under his head.