After the Wedding

On our first visit to the beach we could see something going on in the water, beyond the cliffs, buggering the view. Local divers and boaters had set up a kind of makeshift no-go zone. Ropes drooped from buoy to buoy in a wobbly oval, and there were small boats with winches and ropes and that sort of thing. They were pulling something up from the sea bed.

An English family camped next to us said it had been going on for a couple of days.

“A wreck, I reckon,” the dad rhymed.

“Or buried treasure,” the mum chirped.

Dad leered at Mum and patted her head.

–

My new bride and I took it in turns to swim. We thought about asking the English family to keep an eye on our things, but we’ve learned to be careful, making friends on holiday. You end up at a bar with some couple and ten minutes in they’re on about Muslims. Brits Abroad should be approached with caution.

I went first while Paola drank a beer on our blanket. I tried to get a better look at things as I entered the water but I couldn’t make anything out. Pipes or something? A boat’s fin? It was too far away, my brain was just filling in gaps.

–

I’m not a confident swimmer — I’m a bit funny about holding my breath — but with a snorkel and mask I’m fine and for a long time I was happy following the fish around and nosing about the rocks that enclosed the beach. I reached the safe-swimming perimeter with hopes of a better view, but the boats were some way further out and the water out there fell dark, like a soup. I lifted my head from the water and tried to hoist myself up using the rope, but I couldn’t get the leverage. It wasn’t pipes they were pulling out, though. It looked more like sheets of wood or metal, dark and hard to make out against the sea.

–

When I emerged Paola was waiting at the edge of the water. She was annoyed. I’d been too long.

“I know what it is,” I told her. “They’ve found the plug.” And I grinned stupidly. I wobbled, weak with the exercise.

“What’s wrong with your skin?” she said, and reached a hand to my elbow.

I looked at my fingers, my arms. I was glistening.

“Uerh,” I moaned. “Is it oil?”

“Did you have a little tussle with a squid?”

“Everybody’s got it,” I said, and pointed to the other swimmers coming out of the water. They were glistening too, a sort of sparkly sheen with hints of red and yellow.

“It’s the works they’re doing,” a woman nearby explained. She spoke with an Australian accent and her tan was fortnight-deep with hints of pink and turquoise. “It’s churned up the sand. It’s nothing harmful, mind. Just tingles a bit.”

She was right, my skin tingled as though I’d just washed with tea tree oil. Paola shrugged, claimed her swim, and when she came out she glistened too. We went home that evening weak with the exercise and slept like drunks, which we also were.

–

By our third visit to the beach the excavation had begun to resemble a village of mud huts propped on the surface of the water. They were dome-like structures, large and small, cobbled together and merging into one another. They looked as though they’d been made from the earth of the sea bed, clay-like and stained with coral. Still, at this distance, you couldn’t be sure. It might have been a boat capsized or a reef formation.

The sands continued to be disturbed by the work. Newcomers frowned and queried and were told not to worry, and our dozing bodies sparkled all over the beach with green and blue and pink.

–

In our second week of married life, Paola was struck with a stomach bug and spent a day vomiting at the holiday home. I felt delicate myself and paced the rooms on careful steps, fetching her water and horror comics. We lost the taste for beer and ate carefully, no fish but plenty of white rice and bread. Our sleep was fitful.

–

When we returned to the beach the excavation had changed again. The domes were now high in the air and looked like the tumours you see on the backs of blue whales. The thing from tip to end almost filled the sea line, hemmed in as it was by the cliffs of the cove. At its left the thing now sloped into the sea and there were sharp edges and fissures all over its surface. To the right it tapered, tail-like and the impression of some mythical beast was so strong that twice while nodding off I did a double-take, half-expecting the monster to rear its head like a creature from a Sinbad film.

A sunken warship was the current favourite theory on the beach, though how it had wound up in these shallow waters I couldn’t imagine. We swam little that day, playing safe with our stomachs, but staggered home weak-limbed just the same, deciding that perhaps we should have waited another day.

–

On Sundays the Italians rest and the beast beyond the cove rose no further. Paola and I, by then, were fighting fit and we stripped hastily, eager to return to the sea. We’ve never been much for tanning but our skin had dulled despite our efforts to protect ourselves. We’d not developed the rich bronzing of the locals but rather a drab all-over staining, like charcoal on paper.

We swam, read and lazed the day away, dining on beer and crisps and falling steadily into a shared stupor. When Paola returned from a second dip she was giggling. The sea, she said, was dragging at her heels as she came out.

“Indeed,” I replied, and offered her another beer.

I awoke later to find that we had slept past sundown. There was light still at one side of the sky but the cliffs reared up blackly and the first few stars had come out. Despite the lateness of the day the beach was near-full with gently snoring bodies. I woke my wife and we hurried back, eager to climb the steps over the rocks before the last of the light fell.

–

On Monday the divers were back. They’d brought larger boats today with crane-like appendages and there was a pontoon stacked with scaffolding. The excavated thing now towered over the skyline like a giant’s thumb and its shadow lengthened gradually over the swimmers as we fell into afternoon.

My wife and I had become veterans of the beach by now. We had our own spot. We knew most of the faces around us and were happy to leave our blankets and things in their care. When newcomers arrived, pale and dazed and staring at the thing in the water, we reassured them as we had been on our first day.

The sea was now a rich broth. The waves bulged when they reached the sand and when they were drawn away they went back stickily. When I returned to land the sea gave me up with a smacking sound.

Again we slept and awoke with the sun gone, and dressed by moonlight. A number of other families were waking up about the same time and we whispered to each other as we gathered our towels and clothes. The thing in the sea appeared now only as an absence of stars, and we hurried over the rocks from its terrible presence.

–

On the last day of our honeymoon we returned to the beach. Local news had got wind of the excavation and were making a nuisance on the sand with a camera and a loud man. The families we knew had set up already and many had taken to the sea, which today had developed a rubbery skin, like leftover rice pudding. When we first stepped onto the skin it stretched to hold our weight, but as the sand fell away my foot punctured the surface and the water beneath oozed about my ankle. It was warm and pearly, like the fluid that forms around an infection. Up and down the water’s edge there were more of these ruptures; some fresh and spurting pus, others older and half-congealed. Paola’s feet fell through moments after mine and she slid knee-deep into the sludge.

We strode on, tearing the skin until we were deep enough to tug it, blanket-like, over our heads. We swam together now and though we could see little of each other through the fluid our limbs would tangle every now and then and we’d grab and cuddle. Sometimes we collided with other swimmers and a friendly etiquette developed of half-blind smiles and thumbs-up gestures.

The perimeter rope no longer frightened me. When it fell beneath my foot I swam on, diving low and breathing the soup sea into my lungs. Below us, the seabed fell away suddenly and the ocean’s texture thinned. We felt the cold on our toes. I reached for Paola’s hand, she a braver swimmer than I, and we waded on to confront the jagged features of the behemoth.

If the divers were hoping to raise this thing wholesale they had work ahead of them. Its gnarled and crusted surface fell away into the blackness below. Floating there before it with no clearer an idea of what the thing could be, I felt the touch of a quiet but persistent sadness. I couldn’t place the feeling. It lingered in my stomach like an obscure strain of repulsion and I tightened my hold on Paola’s hand.

–

When we returned to the shallows the sea was so filled with swimmers that we struggled to make headway. Anywhere you placed your hand it would fall upon a limb, a belly, a breast. Instead we punctured the surface, climbed atop and walked the rest of the way to the beach. The sea’s skin had thickened substantially, and we stepped with ease. At first we avoided the heads of the contented bathers beneath the surface but they soon became so numerous and so close-knit that we were obliged to hobble over them like stepping stones.

–

On the beach, people were clawing their way out of the mush. It stretched to retain them. Some made it to their blankets still enveloped, themselves now tendrils of the organism.

Paola and I slept quick and deep and I awoke from a dream of worms, feeling both hungry and nauseous. Hearing shouts and cries of alarm I looked out, across the water. The boats out there were tipping, wobbling, capsizing. The thing was turning in the sea of its own accord.

All at once the sea line was dragged away like a cloak as the thing lifted itself into the sky. The heads and feet of hundreds of bathers could be made out, tiny with the distance, embedded in the froth of the ocean’s coattails. On the sand around me people were coming to their feet and giving chase. They were frantic. They reached and grabbed at the ocean’s skin but it was now so thick it proved difficult to tear or to gain a foothold within. A few who, likely, had been walking the sea’s skin could be seen sliding and spinning over its surface. Some managed to burrow their way into the jellyish mass. Others did not and were tossed to the sand, fleas shaken from a dog’s coat.

–

When my wife awoke she looked, blinking, at an open horizon. The Mediterranean Sea had flowed in to fill the space that had been made and already the waters were calm. The beach too was near-empty, only stragglers like us left behind and, weeping, we held each other for a long time.

Christian Butler-Zanetti is an author, visual artist and musician living in London. He is the creator of Spineless Authors’ Night, a monthly open mic event for new and emerging authors and poets. Christian is a member of the post-punk band The Pheromoans and sound collage duo The Teleporters. He also performs occasionally as the appalling poet and fringe figure Mad Headed Octogram. His website is christianbutlerzanetti.wordpress.com.