It’s a hot morning, strange for the season. There’s a smell in the air we don’t recognise, and it wakes us in our beds.
Initially it’s almost pleasant, ammoniac and slightly sweet, a bit like a hospital after the cleaner’s been. We get up and peer out windows, merely intrigued. But when we open those windows and inhale the full force of it, we know something’s not right. Under the bleach there’s another, deeper smell, seething like an infection. We pull on our clothes, sniffing the fabric; we check the kitchen, look in on pets, gaze down at our own suspect bodies. It’s not us. It’s coming from outside.
We get in our cars and go down to the water. We don’t know why we go that way, only that everybody else has made the same dreamy decision. We drive slowly, looking from car to car and into mirrors at each other, smiling odd, still-waking smiles, trying to keep a calm camaraderie, but soon enough we have to wind up the windows and concentrate. Our children in the back seat, still half-asleep; the dog’s snout pressed urgently against the window we won’t open. The land spreads out on either side, flat and sandy and unaltered. The dull hills watchful in the rear-view mirror.
When we get down to the shore, to the car park on its jut of rock, we pull our handbrakes, open our doors and cover our mouths with our sleeves. Someone retches. We blink against a burning in our eyes. Some of us are briefly blinded. We close car doors, we stand at the edge, we try to look out over the beach. We all hear how quiet it is, but some of us think the quiet is weird and some of us don’t think anything at all.
We squint at the sand, expecting the usual shallows, seagulls, weeds. There is a strange, painterly quality in the light. There are birds down there, but they aren’t right either. They shouldn’t be crows, or this busy.
The light, however admirable, is all wrong. The sun shines too brightly, giving the scene a strange exposure. There is too much sand. The birds are stark shadows, attacks without pattern. The sun has misjudged things. This much clarity is in poor taste.
Gradually, the smell is revealed, as if the clear light marks it out as visible against the beach. The details build a complex of memories: bait left out in summer, maggot roadkill, freezer failure, vinegar and, finally, our asphalt squid. With that last, we realise what it is we’re looking at. The light isn’t shimmering off the sea like it’s supposed to. The light is bouncing off hard, still sand, and something else, many things, slick and lumpish things.
How do we see what we can’t imagine?
We swallow mouthfuls of air and breathe through our sleeves. We stare at the mess before us, at the sheer ugliness strewn across the seabed, and we look from side to side, at each other, and back at our cars, and again at the sprawl of what-the-fuck. The field of there-is-no-nice-way-to-put-this. We blink our eyes against the bleachy tingle. And one of us is the first to speak. We don’t remember who it is. But one of us says, ‘That stinks.’
Down on the beach, there are bodies. Hundreds, maybe thousands of them. The bodies are all sizes, lying like pieces of raw chicken on the sand and weeds. The lumps stretch out into the distant haze. An uncountable number, disappearing into the distance. We cannot fathom how, how many, how.
And they stink. How they stink! The smell is baroque; it is white noise, it is aggression. We keep blinking, covering our faces, but we can’t make it go away.
‘Fug, that reegs,’ Trent says, through the thick of his sleeve.
He’s the second one to speak. We all say something similar. Something to the bloody hell effect. We say it through our sleeves and palms and under our thumb-shut nostrils. Even the squid wasn’t like this, though maybe we’ve forgotten, in a single year, what she really smelled like, and can only remember the oily magic, the promise of her appearance, that sick belief in rescue: Asphaltica. A joke. But played by whom?
Hurt now, we look across for the waves. We turn on them, ready to accuse. If this is some attempt at comedy, we want to say, it isn’t funny. Enough now. Come on. Wash this up.
But the waves aren’t there.
We look to the known exposure of low tide.
It isn’t there.
How can we see what we can’t imagine?
In the sea’s place, patches of shallow seagrass compost, loosing their gases to the air like a side dish to the main perfume. Rocks poke out of the shredded weeds. Exposed molluscs gasp. The sun hits the still, glistening land-that-was-water and is merciless in its attentions. We watch a group of crows working this part of the buffet as a team, poking the eyes from distant corpses. There will be more of them. It is going to smell worse. It is not yet dry, only beginning to decompose; it is only a matter of time.
Oh, in the distance there’s a silver splinter edging the base of the cloud; it’s indistinct, too far away to see if it’s moving. And so (we breathe in, delicately, just to the throat) it hasn’t evaporated. Not a whole ocean. That much couldn’t be lost.
We are nearly grateful.
But the fact of it is that the waves – the shore – the water itself has recoiled. It has pulled away, embarrassed, from the mess it has made. Its cowardice shocks us as much as the bodies. It feels personal.
It is personal.
Why didn’t Sam tell us?
We turn around. We open our mouths to ask her, since we can’t very well ask the sea, but she isn’t where she should be either.
There’s no sign of Ivy, but Ed is with us, behind us, and we feel safer seeing him here, fleshy and material. He’s standing at the open door of his car, and before we can speak he presses his lips together, blows up his cheeks and sighs through his teeth like a man who has eaten too much. Pffffff.
‘Well,’ he says. He looks down at his open hands. ‘I suppose it was only a matter of time.’ Our mouths are still open, so we close them, then open them again to breathe. He puts his sleeve over his face and inhales through it. Over the cuff, the eyes have the same upbeat sparkle in them as always. They reassure us, those dear periwinkles, even as he gets in his car.
‘After all, she’s just a kid,’ he says, as if marvelling. Then he closes the door.
Nobody tries to stop him. When he raises a hand to give us a wave through the tinted glass, we raise ours back. What else are we supposed to do? We are decent people. We watch dumbly as his flash car backs out of its spot and exits the car park. We watch as its rear end shrinks, bouncing on the broken road, and we keep watching as it vanishes into the distance.
The smell makes it hard to think. We can’t make out his meaning. Later we will break it up, try to consider its components. In the moment we can only reach for the surest rail. He must be going on ahead to make announcements, adjustments, to find a way forward, a solution, to notify the right people. This belief brightens and dims like the apparition of light on the distant waves. We look over our shoulders at that light, and it beats sharp lines into our retinas.
The light only strikes the surface. The water beneath says no no no. The water beneath and far, far away says this ruins everything.