You picked up a stone and threw it hard, overarm towards the horizon, dusting the sand from your fingertips onto the oversized woollen jumper that hung low beneath your zipped up cagoule. I watched you from a distance, making fists with my toes and pushing them into the sand, the grains bunching together, pushing up into the spaces between my toenails, filling the gaps. I looked down and thought about the people I’d read about being enveloped by quicksand, over hours and days, until they drowned or died of sunstroke.
I tore my feet out from the ground and leapt up onto a rock, crouching as I peered into the pools below. I brushed a long plait of seaweed from one and watched as a crab moved quickly away from me, hiding, burying itself. I caught it and held it between thumb and index, its pincered claws nipping at my fingernails and pulling at the crossovers and ridges of my fingerprint. I held it up to my face for a moment then lowered it back down into the pool and I said something to you that you didn’t hear. I said it again, louder, impatiently, and you looked up at me and said you didn’t mind.
We walked further along the beach, the backs of our trainers held between scissored fingers, our socks balled up and stuffed inside. We looked for the flat stones that, even in his last few painful days, he had pointed to with his nose, lifting them carefully with his front teeth, the ones we’d called his cucumber teeth – because they looked like cucumber seeds – a high-pitched bark commanding us to skim them over the cresting waves so that he could lumber in clumsily after them.
We walked out toward the beach huts and Romany caravans that littered the clifftops; crumbling, chalk-white facades towering high above us. You walked ahead, towards his favourite spot, and swung your backpack around your front. You unzipped it and took the small plastic urn containing his ashes from the opening, returning it quickly and zipping the bag back up as you spotted something moving in the water. You pointed, then I saw the blood too and quickened my pace, moving with long strides to the floundering gull chick that lay at your feet, holding its broken wing in its beak, pulling its bloodied body over itself, again and again, cawing, somersaulting away from us.
A dog or something must have done it, you said.
He wouldn’t have done that, though, we agreed.
The wound in its wing was deep, raw, grim. You said we should take it in, to the RSPB or something, and you took off your cagoule and draped it over the bird, scooping it up, flinching backwards as the bird blindly stabbed at you from beneath the thin, blue waterproof shell.
Can you take it? you said, handing the bird to me. Your arms are longer. It won’t be able to reach you as easily.
I took the bird and we moved slowly back the way we’d come, you slightly ahead of me, googling numbers for local vets on your phone.
All of them are closed, you said. It’s Sunday. Crazy there’s no kind of help on a Sunday. What are you meant to do?
We carried on walking, my arms growing tired under the weight of the gull. You looked panicked, deranged, not making any sense when you spoke to the families that passed us, children peering fearfully from behind parents’ legs. Large hands holding them back, safely away from us.
We should just put it out of its misery.
We can’t, you said. It’s just a chick. A baby.
What then?
I can put it out, in the sea. That way it won’t be predated. It’ll just float away and die in peace.
Predated?
It’s what they say on Springwatch.
You took off your jeans and I held them, along with the backpack containing the urn. You took the cagoule from the bird and picked it up, wading into the sea, yelping as the tide wrapped itself around your thick, pockmarked thighs, clawing at the bottom of your jumper so that it pulled down tightly around your shoulders.
You stopped when the water reached your navel and you lowered the bird into the granite-grey water. The gull folded its good wing into its body and lifted its head, letting out a mewing, choked alarm call to the gulls that circled in the sky above. You moved your hands beneath it, building a small current so that the bird moved away from you, further out toward the low sun.
You waded back to the shoreline then, shivering, and I stood away from you and watched as the gull ebbed slowly, surely back to land, grabbing and tugging at its fucked wing, somersaulting over the shallow waves, over and over, again and again, back to us.
Jesus Christ, you said, pulling your jeans back on. What now?
The bird looked humiliated, too weak to peck at us now. I moved into the dunes and selected a rock big enough.
It really is the kindest thing to do, I said.
You can’t, though, you said, scooping the bird back up into your cagoule and holding it to your chest. You haven’t got it in you. It’s just a baby.
So we sat down in the dunes, the bird beside us, wounded and defeated, the backpack containing his ashes at my feet.
Maybe if we put it under the wheel of the car?
Imagine the noise, though. The crunch.
We sat longer, for over an hour, asking couples and families that passed if they knew of anywhere that could help. I leaned away from you when you spoke, and when you laughed in the way I knew you couldn’t help.
It was getting colder now, darker too. You retreated, shivering, into a dip in the dunes so you could piss, leaving me with the bird. I sat for a moment then picked it up and moved further from you, deep into the dunes, into long, thick reeds, and placed it on a paving slab that sat amongst the beachgrass. The bird barely moved, shuffling into the centre of the slab and tucking its head under its good wing. I picked up the biggest rock I could find then closed my eyes and held it over the wretched thing until my shoulders began to give. I heard you shouting my name as I let go. The hard, dull, crunching thud reverberated up through the ground, up through me, through my feet, my legs, my chest, lodging itself firmly in my throat as your voice filled my ears.
Where are you? you shouted. Where did you go?
And I turned back to you, peering at the bird through the glare of the setting sun, catching a glimpse of its smashed, broken skull, of the spattered pinks and purples and reds and viscous yellows.
I shouted to you, told you to stay where you were, a sea swell forming around us, the darkness growing as I met you between the dunes.
Let’s go, I said.
We haven’t spread his ashes, though. Where’s our bird? Where is he?
We’ll do it next time, I said, holding my arms out, catching your shoulders, turning you back around and pushing you towards the car, towards home. So that you couldn’t see what I’d done.
Mark Holmes is a writer from Newcastle upon Tyne. Having worked variously in bars, bookshops and building sites, he is now studying towards a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Northumbria. He regularly contributes to Nutmeg magazine, When Saturday Comes and The Football League Paper and in 2020 was the proud recipient of a Northern Writers’ Award for his work-in-progress debut novel. In his spare time he enjoys online-poker, grain alcohol and whittling. You can find him @mhmarkhlms.
