The collector
Pages 1–5
First, there is a seal with no eyes.
It is a spring tide, the beach is shrinking to a silvery half-moon, and the sheets of rock above the tideline are turning black with the unfamiliar spray. Out over the deep water, the dawn light is stretched out and thin; only the iron tip of a shipwreck is visible above the waves. Further out, the tent pole of a lighthouse props up the sky, and from there, the horizon curves into a horseshoe, all the way around the world and back to the dark anchor of the eyeless seal.
A white van is making its way down the narrow, green-spined road to the deserted beach. In the soft, unsteady sand, each turn the driver makes must be a slow and careful adjustment, as the shifting forest of dunes is precarious at the best of times. Harsh winters have lashed chunks out of them, and each day the shoreline morphs and changes further. A recent summer storm has left debris above the tideline: the delicate shells of sea urchins and clumps of orange-brown seaweed, as thick as matted hair.
The driver left with the early August dawn to get to the beach before the first walkers appeared. He drives cautiously; a few wheel-spinning moments in the dunes had set his heart pounding. There will be a man with a tractor to pull him out if he gets stuck –there is always a man with a tractor around, collecting oysters from the half-submerged traps – but Frank is booked in for a drop-off at the incinerator before lunch, and a delay would mean more paperwork.
He tries to park as close to the carcass as he can. Through the windscreen, the seal looks so pristine it might have just pulled itself out of the ocean to rest, propped up in an alert position, empty eye sockets staring blankly out to sea. Closer up there will be flies, he knows from experience, squirming things to pull the seeds of life from death. The county council usually ignore these strandings, if they hear about them at all; they are happy to wait for the animal to quietly decompose or leave on the next tide. But this seal, a casualty of the storm, has wedged itself firmly between two small mounds of rock above the shoreline and seems determined to cling on. The village overlooking the beach is teeming with tourists, with delicate stomachs and a tendency to complain, so Frank has been sent to collect what the sea will not wash away.
A gust snatches the van door out of his hands; he lets it close on top of himself, using his hips to catch the heavy force of the swing. He pulls his kit out of the van, a tarpaulin unfurling to whip in the wind like a thick, black spinnaker. Gloves. Face mask. Shovel. Bungee cords. Disinfectant. The hydraulics wheeze as the rear ramp lowers; it catches on one side, but he stamps on it with his boots until it is level with the beach. He weighs the tarp down with some metal straps and goes closer to inspect the carcass. A pair of redbeaked gulls lift their heads and scream at him as he approaches, clattering their way into the air, disappearing behind swathes of marram grass further up the beach.
Up close, the seal’s skin is sleek-dark, but swollen, like a burnt sausage; islands of black floating on cracks of red lava. The empty, gullpecked sockets are deep tunnels shaded with garnet. He reaches out a boot and taps the bulky body – once, twice, and again with the other foot – to get a sense of the weight and heft of it. Thankfully, the days following the unseasonable storm have been scorching hot, so the sun and salt have dried the carcass out. Many years hauling fallen livestock has taught him that cattle and horses are prone to leakage. Sheep with heavy winter wool are the worst, like a kitchen sponge that looks bone dry but spills out foulness once lifted. Frank considers just loosening the seal enough for it to roll back down the beach, to feed the crabs and little lives of the ocean. But the council expects an invoice from the incinerator, so a seal he must produce.
As the shrouded sun appears above the cliffs, he begins to tease the sand around the seal with his shovel. He breathes through his masked mouth as he works, testing and loosening, peeling the carcass away from the sand. As he suspected, the underside has begun to blister and rot. If the sand is fouled deeply enough, he will need to take a layer of it away with him too. Sandhoppers emerge as he disturbs the scene, their small, fingernail bodies unfolding and leaping Olympic heights into the air. Crabs too, greedy little things still grabbing clawfuls of flesh as his spade comes down a hair’s breadth from them. He splits one cleanly in two; its brain doesn’t immediately realise it is dead, and both claws still extend and return to their half of the alien mouth.
He goes back to the van and gathers up the black tarp. Lays it out alongside the carcass. Levers the hind flippers up with the blunt edge of his shovel, kicks the heavy material further underneath them. The seal rocks and settles on the tarp, and its empty eye sockets catch the rising sun as it batters its way out from under the clouds. The redness of them surprises him – bright crimson rather than brown and old, as if a heart was still beating slowly somewhere. He heaves one end of the tarp until the seal is face down, rolling the carcass up like a fat cigar. The seal’s skin is as crisp as the surface of an iced pond; his gloved palms leave grooves of damage in the blubber. He folds the tarp over the ends and secures it with bungee cords. The wrapped shroud marks a gully in the sand behind it as he drags it over to the van. The weight seems concentrated, as if there is ballast deep in the seal’s stomach and the layers of fat and skin around it are all to protect a cold, iron core.
Pages 8–9
By the time he is ready to leave, the tide has slipped away further, and the marks left by his van’s wheels are clear and stark above the tideline. Frank tries to return across the beach along the same path, lining the wheels up with the tyre tracks, but it is impossible; the new ruts are deeper than the old with the added weight of the seal. In the front of the van, a pine air freshener bobs on a length of elastic, but the smell has long been used up, breath by breath by breath
Behind him, all along the exposed beach, black dots of birds search the glint and melt of the stranded clumps of seaweed. The sand uncovered by the tide becomes wind-rippled, like a bared sheet of muscle. At the southerly edge of the beach, silt-rich drainage water seeps from the cliff down a rocky channel and into the ocean. It is barely a trickle in the summer, but in winter it floods and seethes with run-off, cutting out a new shape every time it gushes across the sand like a floodplain. Along the edges, a line of translucent sandhoppers are leaping from the space where a seal’s carcass once lay, slow and careful jumps, from one pile of seaweed to the next, searching, moving in a black procession towards the dunes.
At the top of the stream, where the water disappears into vertical cracks in the sheer cliff, there is a sagging of marram grass, a clearing that has been flattened by the unexpected weight of a body. The man in the dunes is sitting serenely, legs crossed at the ankles and fingers interlaced, as if he is simply resting, two half-lidded eyes staring out to sea. The gulls are still circling, cautious after the van’s departure, unsure if the intruder with the shovel will return. But they will eventually grow brave again, brave enough to investigate, as the morning light falls strangely on a day-old face.
