I raced across the warm sand behind Sarah and I laughed joyfully. Life was sunshine, warm sand, a few rocks, the cry of gulls, the smell of salt, the steady pound and splash of the sea, the contours of a beautiful girl. Abandoned, I reached out impulsively and touched her and… she welcomed my touch.
The details of Rock Point lurched back into focus as we sprawled across the beige sand, laughing at nothing in particular.
“Here at last,” Alex said, which started us all off on another gale of laughter. There was something infectious about it, the way a particular mood just grabbed us there and then and we all felt it.
Laughing, Robert got up and stood with his back to the towering cliffs. He jigged around. Jasmine picked up a shell and playfully threw it at him. Robert laughed and dodged. The shell hit the rock face of the cliff and smashed.
“Missed,” Robert quipped as he swayed from side to side. We all howled with laughter at his antics. Robert looked momentarily puzzled, then pleased, which made us laugh more. He started a lumbering dance. Alex picked up another shell and threw it at Robert. Robert dodged again. The shell exploded against the rock. It showered the stones on the beach, sounding like rain.
“Missed again,” Robert chanted.
We all scrambled for shells, stones, seaweed, whatever, and started pelting Robert. He dodged and danced and sang and laughed.
We all laughed too. It was hysterical.
“Missed again... missed… missed again,” Robert sang tunelessly. “Missed… missed again… missed…”
I do not know whose stone it was. None of us do. We are all telling the truth. Probably.
It was a big stone. It was white and smooth and warm on the outside and had one end broken off to show its innards, which were grey and hard and cold. This stone was not the first one thrown, for many had already hit the cliff behind Robert with dull tokk sounds, sounds that had echoed dryly around the bay named Rock Point. This stone hit Robert on the head. Not on the forehead like you see in films, but on the top of his head and it made a soft noise like I'd never heard before and then it bounced off him and hit the cliff… And that made us all laugh again… so much so that I think I was the only one to see Robert fall so heavily and so saggily to the ground. And it was the next noise, the terrible sound, the echo-like splatter that his head made when he hit the rocks that made me vomit, rather than anything else.
I don't know how long I'd been shouting for, but when I stopped, the others were all crouched wailing on the sand around me and I was standing over them, telling them to be quiet.
Once I'd got myself under control, I squatted down next to them.
“Okay,” I said. “Let's check him out.”
“What are you!” Alex screamed. “A fucking doctor!”
Alex's shouting made me feel nervous, so I slapped him hard. It was a powerful blow that rocked him sideways. I thought he would want to hit me because of it, but after a moment, he nodded at me, got up and went and looked at Robert. I joined him. There was very little blood. Robert looked very dead.
“His pulse,” I said, averting my eyes from the terrible-looking hole in his head.
We both felt for his pulse and I put my hand on the left side of his chest. There were no signs of life.
Back with the girls, we huddled together, safety in numbers. Four could be strong. Four could fight and win. Four was foul, but could be fair. We were not the four horsemen of the apocalypse. We were not death, death, death and death?
“So what do we do?” Sarah asked.
I wanted to kiss her right there and then and I should have because I never got a chance later. Afterwards none of us ever spoke to each other again - not as real people, anyway. Not as we were at that precise moment. The mood was palpable.
“We bury him,” I said steadily, “and we never tell anyone.”
We all nodded as one. Four could fight and win. Four was foul, but could be fair.
We trekked over the rocks to the edge of the bay, to the farthest rock cluster and then went beyond that to the waterline, where we found two large stones set firmly in the damp sand. Alex and I dragged Robert's body out there and carefully wedged it between the two rocks. Then we dropped two huge slabs of rock on top of him. It squashed him down. Then we used the handfuls of rocks that Jasmine and Sarah brought to fill in any gaps we'd missed.
As we added stones and shingle, I couldn't help thinking about Robert building his dam and it started me crying.
“Damn his dam,” I said stupidly.
The others nodded.
“Damn his dam,” they repeated.
“Damn his dam,” we all said. Then we made it into a mantra and said it four times. Four can be fair. Four can fight and win.
“Okay,” I said, after we'd washed the last few spots of blood off the rocks. “Everyone gets their final say, then we go to Carbis Bay and from there we go to Sergeant Goddard. We tell him we played hide and seek on Carbis Bay beach and Robert hid first, then vanished.”
They nodded in agreement.
“And we absolutely swear that we were only on Carbis Bay beach for the whole day. Nowhere else. Not anywhere! No matter what they threaten or do or say! Because… if we say what we did, then… he'll come back.”
I don't know why I said that. I just did. It surprised me. Scared me too, because I knew that somehow, if we ever told anyone else, anyone at all, then Robert really would roll away the stones of his rock prison, rise up, come and find us, then kill us.
The others nodded quickly. I nodded too and deliberately left that one unspeakable image hanging over us. Then we softly said our words. In the silence that followed, we decided we would go our separate ways from the moment we left Rock Point. We would each take the secret of Robert Taylor's death to our own graves. We kept our vow. Four is fair.
I put the last stone in place and left the beach.
