Jarred McGinnis
The first monster from the sea was a boar. Amongst the cream of waves, a speck of black. The speck grew. A head became visible, then ears discernible, the yellow glint of eye reflecting the bright summer sun. And, tusks. Long, curved crescents that hummed violence. Opalescent with sea water, they cut the waves like the prow of an ancient warship. The beachgoers watched the beast born from the salt water. They held out their phones in selfie-salutes. Mothers gathered babies with nervous anticipation. Children squealed with excitement following potbellied fathers towards the shore. In the hateful pit of me, of us all, we wanted something to happen on this too-safe island.
I was sitting fifty feet from the first victim. I watched the man with the shaved head hike up his orange-and-blue swim trunks before taking a picture of the animal as it emerged. His gold chain and watch sparkled in the sun. His large hairless body gleamed with sunburn. He was typing into his phone when the boar broke left, ran straight towards him and, before he could react, drove the three-foot scimitar of tusk up between his legs, skewering him. It flicked its head and the body bounced and rolled towards the water line.
The animal barrelled through a blue-and-white-striped windbreak, trampling a family, leaving a baby to scream and thrash in the sand at the disruption of her feed. A keening of voices rose as we began to realise what was happening. Bare-chested young men tried to stop the beast with the pointed ends of closed umbrellas and grill tops. The beach was sown with abandoned sandals and flip-flops. Crumpled towels lay everywhere as if the bodies they had wrapped had evaporated, leaving behind the whiff of burned paper and hair.
Most people stood motionless with flat, empty expressions, holding on to each other. Others threaded through the crowd with their phones on record to accuse the dead. Remember that video showing the elderly woman, grey hair in a bun, her grandmotherly roundness tucked into a black one-piece, carefully stepping towards the body of a young girl? In the distance, you could make out the boar as it continued to rampage the beach. I was there, I swear, just out of shot.
Howls of sirens drew closer. Men in tactical gear surrounded the boar as it obliterated an ice-cream van, its tinkling rendition of ‘Jerusalem’ refusing to succumb. The pop of their handguns felt an inadequate and nervous response. As the men grew familiar with the pleasure of the bright-red daubs bursting amongst the coils of fur, their confidence built. When the beast turned and charged, their fusillade stilled it in seconds.
The boar drew a long, deep breath. Then exhaled. The sand wisped and settled.
Eyes aimed at the animal’s chest, waiting for another heave. A hundred fingers curled around the curve of a hundred triggers. The smallest flex of muscle and their mechanism would happily acquiesce a hundred times. But, the monster was dead. One by one the guns relaxed their stances. Radios blathered hisses and commands. A single clap turned into several then shouts and cheers were added. A soldier took off his helmet and handed his phone to have his picture taken next to the vanquished creature.
The boar jerked back to life and bit off his legs, roaring a rusty, throaty squeal. It stumbled to its feet and charged towards a forensics crew who had been spooling out plastic tape. Another roar of gunfire felled the animal. TV-news-production trucks gathered with the flies as flower tributes multiplied in the setting sun.
In the following days, the TV and radio were all tragedy chatter. Hashtags trended. Celebrities made video appeals. There was this one girl who died. I don’t remember exactly why she was famous but it really drove home the senselessness of it all. I retweeted some stuff about her. Nothing else existed except the personal stories of the victims. We consumed their last minutes with our morning tea and toast. Their tragic ends fortified our bones. It became such that no one questioned who was on the beach that day, because we were all there.
We took the kids down to the beach where the Boar emerged. It seemed the right thing to do. The stench of dying flowers was overwhelming. Tributes piled up until the sand was no longer visible and the beach became a pixelation of red, white, pink and green. A bank of flowers, easily taller than a man, had accumulated beneath the pier for those who couldn’t quite be troubled with the dozen or so steps onto the beach. The naked stems of lilies tumbled in the surf. As soon as our youngest boy reached the promenade the smell of perfume and decay turned his insides out. His hysterics had a liturgical air that people seemed to approve of. We stood in reverence with everyone else until he was hollowed out, emptied of bile and tears. When his mother scooped him up, he slept an angel’s sleep on her shoulder as we looked for where we parked the car.
Besides fish unwillingly, and wayward whales, obviously, animals have been coming out of the sea for years. It was remarkable but nothing we paid much attention to. Most of them were benign. Sodden cats skulking, eyes darting as they trotted towards a clump of sea grass to hide and groom the brine from their fur. Dormice by the handful. The occasional pangolin might garner a few lines in the local press. I once saw a swarm of bees emerge from the Firth of Clyde. In ones or twos, sometimes in shotgun shot-blasts, they flung themselves into the hovering, swirling, buzzing mist above as it drifted shoreward. Sometimes, the animals that emerged were a welcome wonder. A trained seeing-eye dog, a golden retriever who only understood commands in Albanian, shook itself dry and trotted up to a young boy in a wheelchair. A male passenger pigeon, a species extinct for one hundred years, startled a surfer in Cornwall by resting on his wet-suited shoulder, looking just as bewildered as the young man. The animals that came from the sea had one thing in common. They all had the smell of burned paper and singed hair.
Behind our house lay a strip of forest. Forest is too grand a word; think of it as a hedge with aspirations. A staggered line of old yews, beech and ash with the occasional prickly holly to shelter piles of fly-tipped rubbish. I sat on a discarded bathtub flipped over like a fat poodle soliciting belly rubs. Staring at the house, replaying pointless battles at work fought by email and PowerPoint, I rolled myself a cigarette and blew smoke towards the house. Rollies at my age, who was I trying to fool? Daydreams about affairs with women I knew and didn’t floated past my attention without any real conviction. I thought about taking down the bike hanging in the garage. Get myself in shape, finally. No excuses this time. Then, inevitably, I’d think about the cancer. Two years previously, I got breast cancer. Yes, men get it too. Everyone used words like ‘fighting’ and ‘beating’, but we knew in this battle I hadn’t fought anything. I had been a vessel to be filled with modern medicine’s best guess. When my wife drove me to my appointments, and I pretended her kale smoothies played a part in my recovery. To save my life, my participation was optional. That bothered me over and over.
The sour smell of burning hair and paper wrinkled my nose. Dabbing out my cigarette against the tub, I sniffed at it. Does tobacco go off? Even the rustle in the bushes behind me didn’t register as I set to roll another. As I took that first lungful, my brain finally did the arithmetic. I spun around and jumped onto the tub. I may have squealed. A two-foot gerbilish beavery kind of creature, a coypu I figured out later, fluffed and nibbled at the innards of a torn bin bag. Its grey eyes made me think of the industrial ball bearings my company made. It was untroubled by my presence. The carbonised stink of the animal between us, I felt all the hate and anger I had been accumulating. My arms ached with the burden of my do-nothing, for my own life, for those people on the beach. I heard the echoes of spray-tanned politicians yelling into bouquets of microphones that something must be done. The animal paused its foraging, as if it had had a revelation of an important affirming truth. It looked up at me as if it was about to reveal this wisdom.
I clubbed in its head with a pipe. Its leg spasmed then stilled but the weight of the galvanised steel against the animal’s body was a pleasure. I continued to pound at it. The fatigue in my muscles felt post-coital. I marvelled at how easy it is to unstitch a living creature and that I had done it. In the brush nearby, my eye was drawn to a wriggling of pink. A clutch of coypu babies squirmed and chittered with hunger. Fag ends, packing-peanuts and animal hair padded the shallow hole. The burned stench thick on my tongue, I shoved a mound of dirt over the squiggly, squeaking nest and tamped it down. When I came back into the house, my wife asked me why I was flushed. My shrug was a sufficient answer and she asked me to deal with the kids. I read them their bedtime stories while I thought about what I had done. Goodnight bears, Goodnight kittens, And goodnight mouse.
As the sea’s animal-attacks became more commonplace, the victims faded from our attention. The newspapers tried to fit all the memorial portraits until the front pages became a tilework where you had a general idea at the hairstyle and maybe could make a guess at the person’s ethnicity. Their stories in multitude became as insignificant as our own. Their deaths seemed to be less tragedy and more cautionary tale. What were they doing on the beach anyway? She was out late, a bit drunk, wearing a skirt that made it hard to run – of course a Kamchatka brown bear opened her ribcage like a tin of baked beans.
Instead we became drawn by the large portrait above the fold of the monster that caused the carnage. We all became instant experts in zoology, biology and ethology thanks to twenty-four-hour news and its animated infographics. We quoted the habitat range (not usually including Norwich) of the Florida panther. Wildlife encyclopaedias replaced serial-killer biographies and crime procedurals on bestseller lists. Invasive species (e.g. grey squirrels, crawfish, knotweed) were no longer our fault. The sea had turned against us and sent forth creatures smelling of ash. We wove conspiracies. The smell of burned paper and singed hair that hung over Manhattan for days after 9/11 was no longer a coincidence. We sought answers and as answers are so hard to find, we got angry. Anger felt like the conclusion we were looking for.
A year after the Boar, a wall was being built along the thousands of miles of coast to keep out the animals from the sea. The whole family, wife too, did its part. We stalked the forest behind the house to stove in the heads of creatures great and small. Afterwards, we settled in around the television to cheer our military and the lurid night-vision silhouettes of apex predators with unspooling innards.
I pulled the car over to laugh at the chimpanzees. They moved in an infantrymen’s file formation through the thick mud of a tidal causeway. Their absurd arms, though sensible for African forest canopies, flopped and splashed in cold British muck. They floundered, their fur caked and matted, but they doggedly processed towards the shore. Two chimps dragged a motionless third, its bowed legs dragging pitifully behind. Tourists left their idling rentals to watch. The falling pound and the novelty of the sea animals had been a boon to the tourist industry. Police cars and Support Unit vans arrived as the apes collected at the shore visibly exhausted. I told my wife to stay in the car with the youngest while the older boys and I went for a better look.
The chimps huddled to pick mud and seaweed from each other with a meditative patience. More police gathered. More tourists gathered. The apes chattered into each other’s ears as the crowd churned and grew restless. The boys and I got caught up with the excitement. I felt happy-drunk, watching their ridiculous grimacing heads swivel, big monkey-ears flopping, stupid brown eyes wide with fear. We cursed the chimpanzees. The police told the crowd to get back in our cars and leave. So, we cursed the police. News vans appeared as if by precognition and their antennae rose towards heaven.
We pushed forward and the police formed into a line of black batons and chartreuse hi-viz jackets. My oldest – he’s fifteen – with his shirt pulled over his nose ran forward and launched a rock over the shouting crowd and police. As soon as the missile was launched, he did a victorious fist pump and swaggered away. He’s always been my favourite. It fell short of the animals, but they scattered. On the packed earth and asphalt the comedy gait of the creatures became sinister. The chimps moved with purpose. They bared their teeth and screeched at the crowd. They banged driftwood on the ground. The animals returned to their huddle only to be interrupted by another stone thudding to earth nearby. Every human, tourist and police, was yelling. Teeth bared and brows furrowed, spit flew from our snarled mouths. My middle boy, barely ten but tall for his age, searched about for rocks so the oldest and I could sling them at the animals. It felt great to be doing something as a family again. The line of police burst into a flurry of batons to push us back. Behind them, the chimps darted back and forth as if pacing a cage. Someone got a direct hit. The crowd exploded into cheers. The animal, screaming and thrashing, held its broken arm.
The next rock smashed through the window of a blue Ford Fiesta on our right. Everyone flinched and looked around confused until we realised the chimps were throwing the rocks back. They rushed the line of police. Their howling screeches seemed to be everywhere at once. Black fur and teeth flashed. A grey-muzzled chimpanzee was jumping on the chest of a fallen riot cop as it bashed wildly at his face with a chunk of driftwood. I gathered the boys and legged it.
We got into the car and sped away. The boys and I laughing, talking a million miles a minute. Still out of breath, I tried to explain to my wife what happened and my oldest was re-enacting his beautiful first throw. My youngest looked between his brothers, glowing with admiration. My wife picked something from my hair. I examined the pink chunk of curd, maybe it was brains. I put down the window and tossed it out.
‘Who wants fish and chips?’ I asked.
The car erupted in cheers and clapping.
From the great gleaming white wall, we ate our takeaway and watched the continuing melee below until the sun set. From this height, the dead bodies were insignificant, black, punctuation marks. Tiny toy cars burned and popped black smoke. Helicopter gunships strafed the beach. How much it all looked like a video game and one that we were winning. Afterwards we drove along the coast and marvelled at the serene moonscapes of our coastal towns.