A strange way to meet

The child was crouched, her swimsuit a splash of red against the blue of the sky and the near-white of the sand in the harsh sunshine. Her head was uncovered, her hair in its basin cut bob was pulled back at one side. The ribbon was pink, pale against the gold of her hair.

She lay back in the deck chair and watched the child in her intensity. Her own dark bob was wrapped in a scarf, her swimsuit covered by the thin gauze of a wrap. Her indeterminate eyes, neither grey nor green nor blue, were protected by the sunglasses she wore. They lazily regarded the scene before her.

The child’s attention was fixed, all concentration poured into dragging whatever it was out of the water.

The young woman’s fingers remembered how it felt to have water pull like ribbons between them, trying to grasp the elusive prize that lay beneath the surface of river, rock pool, stream or ocean.

A sudden glare of sunlight on the water, against the sand, meant that she was temporarily blinded, and when she could see again, the child had disappeared. The rock pool was abandoned. There was no sign that anyone had ever been crouched there, fishing with fingers spread, hoping to capture whatever it was that had lain there, just beneath the surface.

She closed her eyes and thought of the hotel cat, lying on its side in the shade of the portico, cooling its skin against the marble flooring at the entrance to the hotel. She thought of how it slept, front paws crossed, back paws lined up neatly, all four legs pointing to the West.

She felt a shadow fall across her, its form darkening the redness behind her closed lids. She opened her eyes again to see her mother standing in front of her.

“Are you going to lie here all day?” her mother demanded to know.

The young woman languidly raised an arm to shield her eyes from the sun’s aura that ringed her mother’s darkened form. She looked over the top of her glasses. With the sun directly behind her, her mother’s features were shrouded in darkness, but the woman could tell from her posture that happiness didn’t mark that familiar face.

“Well?” her mother insisted.

She dropped her arm and sat back into the deckchair again. She didn’t speak. She gently turned her face to one side, so that her mother’s shadow no longer cast its shade upon her closed lids.

“Your father and I want to take your brother and sister into town.”

The young woman allowed her mother’s voice to run on in this way, yapping like a terrier. She no longer listened to the words. She drifted with her eyes closed, enjoying the stillness of the day, the quiet sounds of other families playing on the beach at a distance, the heat of the sun across her body.

Her mother’s tirade ended. The young woman turned her head again to face her. She dropped her sunglasses again, to the tip of her nose, and directed her gaze at her mother.

“I’d rather stay here,” she said.

“Your father won’t be happy about this,” her mother replied, her shadow still bearing down onto her daughter’s recumbent form.

In truth, her father was never happy unless he was left in peace with a newspaper and his pipe. Driving the family here and there at the whim of his wife was not his pastime of choice.

Eventually her mother left her in peace and the woman went back to resting her body in the warmth of the sun.

She heard a splash and, looking up, saw that the child was back at the rock pool. She had brought a net with her this time. Hunkered down onto her heels, she was swishing the net through the water.

The young woman got up and walked over to where the child was working.

“What is it?” she asked. “What have you found?”

“A hand,” the child replied. “I’ve found a hand.”

The young woman looked down into the pool, expecting to see a starfish or a dropped glove. She looked down and saw that the child was right. It was a hand. It was a hand that had been severed at the wrist; quite some time ago, judging by the pallid, fraying flesh at the end of the hand, the lack of blood or rawness.

The child was insistent in her efforts to retrieve the hand, but it seemed to be stuck.

“Would you like me to help you?” the young woman asked the child.

“No, I’m alright,” the child replied, her jaw twisted and two of her upper teeth biting down on a corner of her bottom lip. She pushed on with the net. The young woman had to resist the urge to take the net from the child’s rigid hands and do the fishing herself.

She crouched down beside the little girl.

“You’re in my light,” the child said.

She moved to another position and looked down, through the clear water of the rock pool, at the hand. It was a large hand, but delicately boned. The flesh was swollen by the water it must have absorbed.

She imagined an entire body, floating out at sea, perhaps washed up and trapped in one of the coves along the bay. She saw the closed eyes and open mouth of a drowned man flash before her eyes, and it made her gasp.

The child paused in her activity and looked at her.

“Are you alright?” she asked. “You’re not frightened, are you?”

“No, I’m not frightened,” the woman replied. “I was just imagining the rest of the body.”

The child regarded her solemnly. “Yes,” she said. “There will be one somewhere.”

The young woman crouched and watched the hand as the net swished about it, almost catching it, but never capturing it firmly enough to pull it from its resting place.

“I think I need something else,” the child said, relinquishing her hold on the pole of the net. “Watch my net for me,” she instructed. She waited for the young woman to nod her compliance before hurrying off along the beach, back to where her family were unconcerned at her absence.

The young woman reached down into the water. She was close enough to the hand to touch it. She had to lean forward slightly, and almost lost her balance. She dipped her hand and then her wrist and then her arm until she was up to the elbow in the warm water of the pool. The water turned her flesh a ghostly colour. Her fingers touched the hand. They stroked its back and travelled down its fingers, to where two of them were lodged into a crevice in the rock.

Gently, she worked her own fingers into the crevice, trying to loosen the pale dead fingers of the hand. Beneath her fingers, the dead flesh felt soft and cool, despite the warmth of the pool’s water. It felt as though she were making love to the hand; as though this were the hand of her lover and she were cajoling him to take her hand in his.

She could not budge it, though. She pulled her hand from the water again and sat back slightly, rocking onto her heels. Looking up, she tried to see where the child had got to. She gazed down the beach in the direction that the girl had run, but she could see no sign of her.

She returned her vision to the hand in the pool. Her little brother would have been thrilled by this discovery, she was sure. He would have blundered in and taken over and ruined the small girl’s day, all so that he could claim the hand as his trophy.

The young woman thought that maybe she should tell someone about the hand; some figure of authority, perhaps, like a policeman. She looked down at it, lying so peacefully in its watery home, and decided that it was unfair to disturb it with authority and questions and investigations at the hands of scientists.

A slight breeze had picked up. She wished that she had the knack of telling the time by the position of the sun. She had a feeling that the day was drifting away from her. She looked behind her, down the beach again, and saw families picking up blankets and taking down windbreaks.

The girl was running up the beach towards her.

Breathless when she reached the pool again, she said, “I need my fishing net.”

The young woman pulled the net from the pool and handed it to the girl.

“I suppose the hand will be gone tomorrow,” she said, looking down at it, fishing net in hand.

“Was it here yesterday?” the young woman asked.

The girl shrugged. “Dunno,” she confessed. “Only got here today.”

She took one last look at the hand, drinking in its form, burning its impression onto her brain. Her body emanated regret, then she released all the tension, smiled brilliantly at the young woman and, with a cheerful goodbye, made her way back down the beach.

The young woman watched her go, then turned back to the hand. She couldn’t, in all honesty, leave it there. Now that she knew that it existed, she would think about it constantly; she would wonder if it had been washed away; she would look for it every time she came to the beach. It would become an obsession.

It already was an obsession.

She stared at it, trying to decide what to do. The breeze that was building up to become a wind pulled at her wrap, and she tied it more closely around her. She pulled the scarf from her head and let her hair blow free, enjoying the feel of the wind pulling it away from her head as she looked down into the pool.

The hand lay there, pale with a hint of green about the flesh. She thought about art class, and the way the teacher had informed them that skin tones always need a hint of green about them to make them seem more realistic. She looked at the hand and thought that the hint of green made it seem less real, not more so.

She regretted not wearing her watch. She placed her right hand around her left wrist, where the watch would have been. She looked at the hand and realised that it was a right hand. It was a right hand that had once belonged to somebody.

She recognised that the more detail she gave to the hand, the more squeamish she was becoming about touching it again. She stopped thinking about it so precisely and plunged her own right hand back down into the water, grabbing the severed hand around the knuckles and pulling. At first it didn’t move, and she almost stopped; the vision she had of ripping out two of the fingers and leaving them behind made her stomach turn.

Again, she moved her own fingers down into the crevice where the middle and forefinger were lodged. It was narrow, but she was able to manoeuvre her fingers a little, and then a little more, until she had loosened the dead man’s fingers enough.

Then she gripped the hand again and pulled.

The hand came up out of the water, and she almost fell backwards onto her behind. She put her left hand out to steady herself, jarring the wrist, and then stayed in that position, staring at the hand dripping water from its surface down her arm.

She was holding the hand aloft, as though it were an Olympic flame, or a trophy she wanted the world to see.

Slowly, she lowered her arm and brought the hand closer to her body. She held it palm up, her own palm snug against its back. She looked at the lines, the puckered skin, the strangely plastic appearance of the flesh.

Suddenly, she remembered where she was, and that anyone could walk by and see her sitting there holding a severed hand in her own.

She wrapped the hand in the scarf she had been wearing, then stood and walked briskly back to her deck chair. She placed the hand into her beach bag. At no point did she think to feel scared or disgusted or worried. She wasn’t even surprised at her actions. It was an occasion for which nobody could prepare; something where your reaction would only become clear when you had to face it.

The young woman was glad that she was calm, that she hadn’t had hysterics, and she thought that the tone had been set by the child’s dispassionate interest in the hand. To the child, it had been a matter of fact that the hand was floating in the rock pool, and it made logical sense to try to retrieve it.

She picked up her bag and folded the deck chair, returning it to the booth and reclaiming her deposit. As she received the coins into her hand, warm from the deck chair attendant’s pocket, she liked the fact that she had a hand in her bag and the attendant didn’t know it.

She walked back to the hotel. She made small talk with the desk clerk as she collected her key, then she made her way up to her room. The lift attendant smiled politely at her and they ascended in silence.

Once in the room, she looked for a place to keep the hand. She didn’t yet know what she was going to do with it, just that she wanted to keep it. She placed it at the back of the drawer where she was storing her underwear.

She closed the drawer just as her family returned from their afternoon in the town.

“Oh, you’re back, then?” her mother said, on seeing the young woman come out of her room.

“Yes, it would seem that way,” she replied, quietly. Then, more loudly, she said, “I’m going to bathe and get ready for dinner.”

Her mother grunted some form of approval of her eldest daughter’s attention to hygiene and appearance and disappeared into her own room.

The young woman drew herself a bath in the bathroom down the corridor. She lay back in the warm water that was gritty from the bath salts and looked at her hands. She tried to picture on her own body where the hand had been severed. She thought just above the wrist bone was the most likely place. There would still have been bone to cut through; all those tiny bones that connect the hand and the arm.

The skin at the end of the hand had been ragged. She decided that this could have been the effect of being washed by the seawater, or by small creatures nibbling away at the flesh. Equally, though, it could have been whatever blade was used to do the severing.

She wondered if the other hand was floating somewhere out to sea. She wondered about the rest of the body, and had the same vision again of the bloated corpse with open mouth and closed eyes, arms outstretched, but with no hands there to catch hold of anything.

When she returned to her room to dress, her young brother was stretched out on her bed.

“What are you doing in here?” she asked, busying herself in the wardrobe, choosing a dress to wear to dinner. “Come on, I need to get dressed. Out you go.”

“I’m bored,” he said, not moving.

“Teddy, I’m serious. I need to get dressed and you’re too old to watch. Besides, you need to wash up for dinner too.”

Her brother was ten years younger than she. He was beginning to change from the sweetness of being very young to the brutishness of double figures.

“What did you do today?” he asked her, still not moving from the bed. His hands were behind his head and he had his feet up on the ruby red eiderdown.

She turned to look at him. “I stayed at the beach and I helped a small girl fish something out of a rock pool,” she told him.

“We went to see a ruin,” he said.

“Was that not fun?” She pulled stockings from the underwear drawer, catching a glimpse of the hand wrapped in her scarf and feeling an illicit thrill run across her and through her.

“You’ve just gone pink,” her brother said. “Are you thinking of him again?”

The young woman didn’t speak. Now that she had seen the hand again, all she wanted was for her brother to leave the room so that she could look at it.

She knew, though, that she would have to wait until she was alone and everyone else had gone to bed. She would have to get through dinner, and then cocktails in the lounge, listening to her parents and the friends they had made at the hotel talking about dull subjects, while some limp son of one of the families tried to make conversation with her.

Her pinkness and silence on the matter was the thing that finally forced Teddy to leave the room. Younger brothers have a natural abhorrence for the thought that their older sister is daydreaming about a man.

The door clicked shut behind him, and the young woman was finally able to peel back the scarf a little. The flesh peeped out, almost luminescent in its paleness, and she ran her fingers along the skin.

The smoothness of it out of the water surprised her. She stroked it gently and wondered how it would have felt when it was still attached to whoever had once owned it.

She wondered whether it would have been smooth and warm. As she stroked, she imagined its owner using that warm smooth hand to stroke her. Turning her head slightly, she caught sight of her reflection in the mirror. She had gone pink again. The pleasure of thinking about such a warm, strong hand had lent her skin a rosy hue.

She pulled the scarf back around the hand and closed the drawer.

As she walked down with her family to the dining room, she couldn’t stop thinking about the hand. It was an attractive hand, and she found herself building a man that went with it. The fingers were long and slender; the bones in the hand were fine, lending it an elegance of composition.

Eating a piece of chicken, she frowned as it came to her that even a man of such apparent elegance must have done something in order that someone would cut off his hand.

“Are you alright, dear?” her mother asked from across the table.

The young woman looked up at her and remembered where she was.

“Yes. I’m quite alright, thank you,” she said, remembering to smile, and continuing with her meal.

After a little while of eating, she suddenly asked the question.

“What do you suppose someone would have to do in order to have their hand cut off?”

Everyone stopped eating and looked at her. Her family, people at other tables nearby, the serving staff. Everyone went still and looked at her with a mixture of horror and surprise on their faces.

“Well, in a Muslim country, because they had stolen something,” her father said, after a pause.

“And in this country?”

She looked at him insistently. He coughed a little, choking on some morsel of food he still had in his mouth. He took a sip from his glass of water before answering.

“I really don’t know,” he said.

“You do ask the most preposterous things,” her mother said.

The young woman remained silent for the rest of the meal. She didn’t notice that a young man was watching her from across the dining room.

He pulled her out onto the terrace while everyone else was sipping sherry in the lounge after dinner.

“Why did you ask that question at dinner?” he said, holding her by the arms and staring into her face.

“Let go of me,” she said, not struggling, but not welcoming his closeness either.

He released her arms.

“Sorry,” he said. “But will you tell me why you asked it?”

“I don’t know,” she replied. “I was just curious, I think. It struck me as an interesting question to ask.”

“I saw a hand in one of the rock pools earlier today,” he said, lowering his voice and bending his head towards hers. He took hold of one of her hands. “You saw it too, didn’t you?”

She looked down at his hand holding onto hers then looked back up and nodded.

He let go of her hand and sprang back.

“I knew it!” he exclaimed.

Some of the people talking near to the French doors looked around.

“Shhh,” she whispered. “Don’t draw attention.”

“Sorry,” he said, sheepishly.

“What’s your name?”

“Bob,” he said.

The young woman looked at him steadily. He returned her gaze without discomfort.

“Bob,” she said. “I have it in my room.”

He looked puzzled. “You have what in your room?” he asked.

“The hand,” she said.

His eyes widened. “You have the hand in your room?”

She nodded.

“Do you think I’m mad?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. He paused, then, “Can I see it?” he added.

She nodded again. “I’m in room 204,” she told him. “I’ll go up now, say I’m tired. You follow me up in a few minutes.”

“You seem very expert at this,” he said as she began to walk away from him.

“Oh,” she said breezily, “I’ve read too many Agatha Christies is all.”

Her mother smiled at her as she crossed the room to her parents.

“I see you were talking to the Tatchell boy,” she said.

“Mmm,” her daughter replied. “Goodnight, mother, father. I’m feeling done in, so I’m going to go up.”

She gave each of her parents a kiss on the cheek and left the room.

She waited ten minutes for him to follow her. She was about to give up and go to bed when the tentative knock came.

“Is there anyone else around?” she asked through the door.

“No,” came the reply.

She opened the door to her room and let him in.

“Where is it?” he whispered.

She moved over to the chest of drawers and opened her underwear drawer.

“It’s in here,” she said.

“With your – bits?” he asked, blushing slightly.

“Nobody else but me is going to go in this drawer,” she said, pulling the scarf-wrapped hand from its hiding place.

She placed it onto the bed and opened out the scarf. They both stood and looked at it.

“What are you going to do with it?” he asked eventually.

“I hadn’t really thought,” she said. “I just knew that I couldn’t leave it there to be washed out to sea again.”

“You should take it to the police,” he said.

“I suppose I should,” she replied.

“What’s your name?” he asked her.

“Angela,” she said.

“Like an angel.”

She laughed.

He was holding her hand.

They stood and looked down at the other hand lying oddly on her bed.

“It’s a strange way to meet, isn’t it?” she said.

© J R Hargreaves February 2007