Death horrified me only insofar that it horrified me.
Later I would come to learn from Cecilia, who told me with her nose a little upturned, that this is called tautology. Then, it was the only thing I knew for certain. I wasn't as grounded in moral grievances as Rachel, and I wasn't angry like Ollie, and yet I didn't remain white and clammy for weeks afterwards before disappearing entirely, the way Polly did. When it came to murder, I guess I didn't know how to respond- neither my brain nor my body had its own strong-willed sense of direction, so I reacted as I always used to when faced with circumstances that were more than a little confusing (not getting into music school, the aftermath of my first kiss, hearing the news of my great aunt Joan's passing)- I threw up next to the toes of my shoes, wiped the back of my hand across my mouth, had a glass of water. And that was that.
It was repulsive on a purely physical level. Surely that's not surprising. It was a horrific thing to look at- clotted blood and slack jaw. A dead body was and is a dead body, but that was and is all there is. The problem is in the context of it. Once you start considering heaven, hell, ethics, karma, justice, and the ripple effect of the event- the emotional impact it would have on all that surrounded it- it becomes more than that. More than it has to be.
A dead body is a dead body. That's possibly why I was not immediately averse to Ollie's suggestion that we needed to do something. With the body. Despite a lot of loud whispering, spitting and crying, we all found ourselves on the beach in the half-light of that morning, armoured with the no-man-left-behind attitude that we somehow managed to retain right through until the very end. There were lights starting to flick on in the windows of the houses that clustered along the bay. Boats were docked by the lifeguard station- he wasn't there, and wouldn't be for some time, for at best he was absent-minded, and at worse he was negligent, dangerous. No more dangerous than us, I suppose. But then again there had been three drownings in seven months. I've only tallied one so far. The one that Ollie and I carried in a black bag between us. It's still surprising how we managed to hold it up, just us two, with the others too overcome with something or other to touch it. It didn't matter, I thought, who touched it. If we were going to hell for this, we were already damned, and nothing we did from then on was going to do a bit to change that. Still, fear is an amazing thing, the way it fills you with the kind of godlike strength you only have the opportunity to experience once or twice in your life, probably, because it only comes in a welcome rush when you have got yourself in a trap so deep you need something like god to pull you back out.
If Cecilia, or even Polly, had been the one to tell you this story, the whole affair would have been more poetic. Lyrical. I don't think that this would alter the narrative even in the least. The way I see it, aesthetics can soften the blow, but like I said, dead weight is dead weight. This is how it went: we got the body into the boat that Cecilia untied, heard it sound hollow in the base, put some bricks into the bag, and then me, Ollie and Cecilia rowed out while Polly watched, white-faced, from the shore. She was looking at her watch, a nervous tic that I came to miss after she had gone. It made me wish that there existed some kind of search engine that was linked to a database categorising a host of people by their nervous habits. The ghosts of your past and their annoying, charming, identifying idiosyncrasies. Polly had so many, she could have broken the algorithm. So Ollie, Cecilia, the body and I rowed out. Ollie, Cecilie and I rowed back. We didn't say goodbye to one another. We all returned to our homes.
You might believe that because I seem impassive about all of it then I am more at fault than the others. But aren't the only true things- the only things we can be judged by- are actions? Actions are surely the only true things in the whole world. By this logic, any words that are spoken in an attempt to change these actions can't be anything but lies. We murdered a boy. It doesn't matter whether I regret it or not. It stays the same. It will always be the same. All the feelings that you attach to a dead body, the same way that you attach feelings to a work or art or literature, are just interpretations. Like I said, a dead body is a dead body.
