On the Third Day

by Rhys Thomas

  A woman turned to her. Her face was still puffy with sleep and her hair was a mess. She was younger than Miriam, but not by much. Miriam looked at her and smiled. The woman waited for a moment, trying to recognize her without success, but smiled back anyway.

  ‘Hello,’ she said.

  A sudden jolt of empathy crashed through Miriam and she was lost. The stranger came towards her without hesitation and threw her arms around her. Miriam’s own arms remained at her side, limp and useless. The stranger’s body was warm and relaxed. There was an easiness in the embrace.

  ‘Hey, it’s OK,’ the voice whispered into her ear. ‘There’s no need to cry.’

  At some point they sat down on the dry grass and spoke openly and happily in the illumination. Being together as a group made them stronger than the sum of their parts. She glanced at Joseph occasionally. He was sitting away from the others but when they asked about his father he answered politely and honestly. They offered their condolences to him and he accepted them graciously.

  The night drew on but nobody moved. The children had been safely asleep in their beds but Miriam had woken them to bring them on to the grass to share the night with everybody. Mary sat between Miriam’s legs and used her mother’s arms as a blanket beneath which she fell asleep again but Edward remained awake, sitting next to his grandmother with his head on her shoulder, listening to the people talking but saying nothing.

  The night was warm, even with the gentle breeze. They swapped their tales, discussed once more the nature of what had fallen on the world and chatted hypothetically about what the world would be like when all this was over, when the world went back to normal.

  The crack of dawn appeared and it was with the fading of the night that they all stood up, some of them on tiptoe, to face the east and the sky of the new day. Soon it would reveal the source of the bright, white light that had drawn them here.

  They murmured and joked and talked about what a lovely time they had had that night, the best in months, they said, as the sky lightened with the promise of a sunny summer’s day. The sky turned indigo and then violet and then lilac and inch by inch the sun came up over the edge of the land. It burned a line of watery light out across the horizon like a golden meniscus and as it did the lines of the stricken ship appeared from the gloom.

  The vessel was massive. The tiny waves lapped the hull that grew from the water hundreds of feet into the air, skewered at an angle. A great shadowy gash had been torn aft. Countless ships had been ruined against those cliffs, but surely none of this size. Hundreds and hundreds of cargo containers stretched along its deck, their colours emerging with the dawn: red, green, blue, yellow.

  It was a quarter of a mile out. They watched for an hour more as the tide receded to reveal the full extent of the tear in the ship’s side.

  ‘What do you think happened to the crew?’ someone said, but nobody needed to answer. They had been watching the ship with the breaking dawn and not one person had appeared on deck.

  Far out to sea, just visible above the waves, were rafts of floating debris, some large, some small. The tide had waned but some of the debris had found its way up on to the beach during the night, including one of the large containers.

  Miriam looked at the mess and wondered who would clean it up, or whether it would be simply left to rot.

  The morning brought new winds with it. The people from the village were tired and cold and ready to leave. They each said their goodbyes and walked to their cars and the brief happiness of being together as one scattered on the breeze. Some of them drove down to the beach to see if there was anything they could salvage; others drove back towards the village and out of sight. They had come and gone like a wave washing up and down the shore. When the last car disappeared from view Miriam watched the line of bare road and felt the melancholy return to her bones. Her mother put her hand on her shoulder. Miriam kept her eyes on the road.

  Mary did not like the ship. When she saw it in the full light of day she started crying and Miriam lifted her up and rested her head on her collarbone. The scale of the boat was what Mary hated. It was too massive for the bay. It consumed most of the horizon. It listed with an ominous, distressed portent. Miriam wondered if the tide, now that it had turned, would be able to move it. And where it would go.

  More flotsam had been washed up on to the beach and she could see eight containers popping their heads above the shallow waters of the bay. Any others that had been washed out must have sunk to the sea floor. Through Joseph’s binoculars she could see things in the gash of the ship: floating crates, pieces of wood, cloth.

  At eleven o’clock that morning more cars arrived but these were not from the village. News had spread of the ship that had run aground near the lighthouse and people had come to see what they could take. They drove past the house and down the hill towards the beach, parking up in the large car park that had for so many months lain empty.

  Joseph went up to his father’s bedroom and watched the cars for the rest of the morning. None of the people who had come stopped at the house. A number of campervans passed – families who had come to live on the move.

  ‘What happened to it?’ Edward asked.

  Miriam ran her hand over the top of his head, through his soft hair.

  ‘It crashed on the rocks.’ She was finding it hard to stop herself crying all the time. Just hearing Edward’s voice spiked her emotions. ‘The rocks are dangerous around here. That’s why there’s a lighthouse – to warn people. The captain of the ship came too close to the shore.’

  ‘But it’s facing straight forward, like it drove in on purpose.’

  She couldn’t answer that. Edward was right. Either the whole crew were dead and the ship had veered off course or somebody had steered it deliberately into the cliffs.

  She took Joseph his lunch and joined him at the window. He didn’t look at her when she came. She opened her mouth to speak. It was time.

  ‘Look at them,’ he said, cutting her off.

  Down on the beach, just in view, crowds of people were wading through the shallows to collect the things that had come off the ship. Some of the containers had cracked open and spilled their loads into the sea. The people ran up and down the sand and loaded the bounty into their vehicles.

  ‘I should go down there, I suppose,’ he said. ‘See if there’s something we can use.’

  Miriam watched the tiny frames of the people. They looked like matchstick men.

  ‘There’s a lot of them down there.’

  Joseph stared out of the window.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ he said suddenly. ‘Why did it have to happen here?’

  ‘Joseph,’ she said.

  He turned to her.

  ‘What are we going to do?’

  ‘We’ll just have to see what happens.’

  ‘That’s not what I mean.’

  They looked at each other. The plate of food she had brought for him was heavy in her hand.

  ‘Do you still think I’m a good person? After everything I’ve done?’

  She remembered him how he had been a few weeks before, climbing in the cherry trees and laughing with the kids. He didn’t seem like the same person.

  ‘Here.’

  She held up his lunch – potatoes and baked beans, cooked on the gas camping stove. She looked past him and out of the window and her thoughts were cut short. Something out in the bay caught her eye.

  ‘What’s that?’ she said, pointing.

  Joseph picked up the binoculars from the windowsill and peered through them. There was something coming from the crack of the ship’s hull, moving quickly. As it emerged from the darkness Joseph could see it was a rowing boat. The man inside it turned the oars in powerful circles. His shirt was soaked red and blood covered the lower half of his face, from the mouth down; the speed with which he moved the boat through the water was like a trick of the light, an illusion.

  He beat his path through the waves towards the sand. Joseph and Miriam ran out to
the edge of the cliff and called down to the people on the beach to warn them but they were too far away for their voices to carry.

  They saw him soon enough. Some of them stopped their foraging and watched his approach. When the boat glided to a stop in the sand he jumped down quickly and waded through the water, waist deep, his arms swaying from side to side.

  A few of the people walked out to greet him, thinking him a survivor and in need of help.

  Miriam told her mother to take the children inside.

  Three of them went into the water to help but when they came to within a few yards of the boatman they stopped. Miriam watched not with horror, but curiosity. She was desensitized to it now. The people turned around in the water and headed back to the shore as fast as they could. Their legs were deep and they tried to run too fast. Two of them fell and thrashed around in the surf. Watching from such a distance through the binoculars and not being able to hear them gave what was happening a cartoonish quality.

  The oarsman leaped on to the back of his first fleeing victim and they both disappeared into a white froth. The infected man’s body emerged. He was holding his victim underwater, pinning him to the seabed with his knees, barely able to keep his head above water himself. After what must have been a minute the white froth calmed and the sea circled around the infected man’s waist as a blue plain once again. He stood up and his victim’s body bobbed to the surface. He pushed it back down again and looked around.

  ‘Christ,’ said Joseph. ‘Why didn’t anyone help him?’

  Miriam smiled at that. She looked through the binoculars again with a calmness she could not understand.

  The other two men had reached the shore. They turned to face the sea. Everyone on the beach was looking at the boatman. They had all nudged tentatively towards the waves.

  Miriam saw somebody running towards the water, a young-looking man wearing a tracksuit. He paused at the water’s edge and lifted his arm up. The sound of the gunshot was loud even up on the cliff top. It cracked up the rocks and over the wind. The infected man didn’t fall. He kept coming into shore, waving his arms in the air.

  The people standing around him urged the gunman to fire again. It took four shots until the boatman finally fell into the sea. When his body hit the water it darkened with blood around him.

  She remembered the first time she had seen an infected person become violent, on the patch of wasteland near Joseph’s flat in London. She remembered the speed with which he had run from the bushes. His legs were machine-like. She remembered how he had struck that poor man without hesitation. What had been his name? She remembered his sister, the priest. Her name was Grace. But she could not remember the name of her brother, who had died to protect her. She felt ashamed for forgetting. Her eyes watered. Why couldn’t she remember?

  ‘I guess we know what happened to the ship,’ said Joseph.

  ‘Did you see the way they goaded that man into shooting him?’ She lowered the binoculars until she could feel their weight pulling her arm down.

  ‘He had to do it.’

  ‘I know,’ she said, staring at the sea gulls in the sky.

  She turned and walked towards the house. Down on the beach she watched the little matchstick people treading carefully towards the man they had just helped kill, their tiny bodies moving slowly through the waves.

  By late afternoon the tide had marched halfway up the beach. More cars had arrived steadily throughout the day and the sea was full of debris.

  The dark gash in the cargo ship’s hull had disappeared underwater and the entire structure seemed to have listed still further. It was tilted so precariously it looked like the whole thing might topple on to its side. It reminded Miriam of an old poem Henry had loved when they first met. Perhaps it was a trick of the light but it seemed to slump visibly, drunkenly, inch by inch, degree by degree.

  Joseph and Miriam were standing in the front doorway.

  ‘If anybody comes don’t let them in. No matter what they say,’ he said.

  ‘OK.’

  She agreed with him. There were so many people that their presence was more intimidating than comforting. Not seeing anyone in so long had almost tricked her into believing there was nobody left. Seeing the people last night had comforted her because they were laconic, sleepy and gentle. But the people who had arrived that morning were not like that. They were hungry for new possessions, and there were lots of them.

  ‘I’ll take the car down, have a look around and come straight back,’ he said.

  ‘OK.’

  There was a moment’s silence.

  ‘We can talk when I get back.’

  Miriam nodded.

  ‘There are things I need to tell you,’ he said.

  Miriam watched him go and locked the front door. When it was closed she pressed her forehead against the cool wood and waited for a moment with her hand on the latch. The house was quiet. She went through to the back where her mother was sitting in the garden. She smiled when she saw her daughter. Miriam sat down next to her. The sky overhead was a rich blue. A few cottonwool clouds drifted beneath it.

  ‘Mum, what do you think Joseph did to that man? Crowder.’

  Her mother’s eyes were closed and she was enjoying the breeze blowing across her face.

  ‘I think it’s best not to know about it.’

  ‘Don’t you think it’s important?’

  She found her eyes wandering to the back corner of the garden, to the patch of wall beyond which lay Dora’s grave.

  ‘I think he’s gone. It doesn’t matter how he went. All that matters is that he’s gone.’

  ‘I didn’t know you thought that way,’ said Miriam.

  ‘I’m tired, Miri. The things we learned before – etiquette, codes, things like that – don’t seem to count any more.’ She opened one eye and looked at her daughter. ‘What difference would it make if I thought any other way?’

  ‘Are you OK, Mum?’

  ‘I’m fine, honey. Just ignore me. Sometimes it all gets on top of you, you know?’

  Miriam picked a fleck of dust off her sweater and flicked it off her fingers. ‘I know.’

  ‘Still,’ said her mother, ‘we soldier on.’

  She was using the binoculars like a telescope, looking through the left lens with her right eye. She would watch the people on the beach through the magnified lens and then close that eye just as she opened the other so that in a moment the world appeared close, then far away, then close. The wind blew softly against her face and for a moment it seemed like the world was a benevolent place again. The sunlight was warm. It crept into her bones and she could feel them thaw.

  Across the cliff top she could just about see the bench where Henry had proposed to her. She had feared that the memory of finding the dead body on it would usurp all the happy memories, but it hadn’t. She still remembered more than any other the day that Henry had asked to marry her. That memory was the strong one. Her heart had won it back. She didn’t know how or why, but there it was.

  She tried to look for patterns on the beach. The people looked like an ant colony streaming up and down the sand in lines, a world in miniature. She watched them in a trance. They were hypnotic. After a few moments they started to look like a big organism moving as one.

  At first, when some of them stopped walking, she did not notice. The gears of the organism had cranked down but the thing still operated. There was nothing in the air to suggest a change had taken place. No cloud crossed the sun to block out the light. There was no sudden gust of wind. All that had happened was that some of the people had stopped walking.

  It was only when all the others stopped, and then slowly approached those who had fallen still, that she noticed something was wrong. She lifted the binoculars again. In a human wave that swept all along the beach, people started to sit down in the sand. She swallowed but there was no saliva in her mouth. Her mind started to race. She looked frantically for Joseph on the beach but the faces were too small to see. With her he
art pounding she dropped the binoculars and ran towards the cliff path as fast as she could.

  There were people running to and from the car park. When she ran out on to the beach the sudden increase in volume shocked her. It was so loud. She had forgotten the sound of people.

  It was difficult to see how many were ill. The scene changed every second. Some were screaming, some were groaning, some were shouting. Some were on their knees, hugging those who were sitting down, begging them to come back.

  She couldn’t see Joseph anywhere. She was running across the sand, trying to make her thoughts orderly. She tried to remember what he was wearing. Yes, his gold T-shirt with the burgundy 77 on the front. That was it.

  People barged into her. She looked towards the water. At sea level the true enormity of the stricken tanker loomed above her. It was the monster in her nightmare, stretching back for ever and ever, huge and terrifying.

  The sand grew wet underfoot and she stopped at last, putting her hands on her knees, willing air into her empty lungs.

  ‘Joseph,’ she said under her breath.

  Her mind loosened and clouded. She felt like she had floated out of her body and was watching actors playing a scene. Joseph’s shoulders were hunched over and he was absolutely still. He was sitting with his hands stretched out to his knees, his head slumped over his chest.

  ‘Joseph,’ she said, this time louder, calling to him.

  Joseph did not answer.

  She had never looked into his eyes in the same way she had Henry’s and so she could not tell if the same thing that had been lost from Henry’s eyes had been lost from Joseph’s. Joseph was ill, the Sadness was through him, but she could only make that connection through Henry’s ghost.

  Further up the beach there was the bang of gunfire. She looked up just as a body fell to the ground. A man held up a silver pistol, shoulder height, arm’s length. He turned his head towards Miriam and smiled. And started walking towards her.