Playing Dead. Jessie Keane

you sod. Come on.

      But his body wouldn’t listen to the urgings of his mind. It said no. You kidding? Lie there and die, man, we are all out of alternatives.

      His mouth was so dry. His lips felt cracked. The sun was burning him. Burning him up. He closed his eyes.

      Bells.

      Tiny tinkling bells – now he was hearing things. Maybe this was what it was like, dying; maybe everything went blank, like his mind was blank right now. Why couldn’t he think straight, what was wrong with him . . .? Maybe the blankness came first, and then the bells. They were getting louder. He’d be hearing heavenly choirs next and, frankly, that would be nice. He could just give up, and die.

      But for now, it was just bells. Getting louder and louder. And now . . . a little movement, a little wetness nudging at his neck. Something was there. An angel, must be. Bringing him water. He forced his eyes to open.

      He looked into slitted eyes, devil’s eyes.

      Ah shit.

      Not heaven then, and no angel coming to fetch him. He was bound for hell. This was an imp, a tool of Satan, here to bring him home to eternal damnation.

      He tried to move again then, to protest, to say no, I’ve been a good man.

      But . . . had he?

      He didn’t know. Couldn’t think. Again, there was that frightening blankness, pressing upon his mind like a white wall of fog.

      The thing’s face was brown, hairy. The eyes were yellow. The face loomed over him, terrifying. Leaned closer, closer, touched his neck again. Coldness, moistness. An icy brush of metal.

      Bells.

      A bell on the neck of the thing: jangling, deafening.

      A groan escaped him and the thing twitched back, startled by the sudden noise.

      A goat. He was looking at a goat, not a devil.

      He could almost have laughed at that, if he’d had the strength. But he didn’t. All he could do was lie there. Exhausted. Damaged. His eyes fluttered closed, and he hardly even heard the soft footsteps of the boy coming closer. Damned goat nudging him again. His eyes came open, the glare of the sun, buzzards, a nut-brown human face coming in close, blotting out the unbearable heat and light.

      ‘¿Señor?’ said the face. ‘¿Se cayó?’

      He closed his eyes. He understood. Did you fall? the boy was asking him. But he couldn’t answer. He didn’t know. He didn’t know anything.

      The goatherd gave the man water, then went to alert the monks at the nearby monastery. The boy was shaking with fright because he thought that by the time he returned with the help of the brothers, the man might be dead. But, when they got there, the brothers having struggled and panted and sweated with effort as they traversed the uneven and, in parts, treacherous rocky ground, the man seemed still to be clinging to life, even though his injuries were horrendous.

      The brothers looked him over while the boy watched them nervously. They’d brought a stretcher from the monastery’s small sick room, but one look at the man – who wore nothing but a brief pair of swimming shorts – made them doubt he would survive the journey back up to the monastery.

      Both ankles were shattered into bloody pulp.

      His left arm was broken, the bone protruding through the skin, so bad was the break.

      There was a deep, nasty-looking gash on his head. Flies buzzed there, feasting on the drying blood, laying their eggs in the open wound. His lips and the skin on his face were cracked from the extreme heat of the sun. He was feverish. God alone knew how long he had lain there on this precarious rocky platform above the sea, because the man was making no sense. He needed water, and shelter. And even then, the brothers warned his young rescuer, there was every chance that he would die.

      ‘Be warned, child, he might not get through this,’ one of them told him.

      The boy, distressed, looked at the man. He had found him, rescued him. He felt an attachment for him, of course he did.

      ‘I don’t want him to die,’ he told the monks.

      ‘God may spare him,’ they said, and they looked at the man and thought that perhaps it would be better if God took him. He looked athletic, fit; he would not, they felt sure, relish a half-life. And they could already see that, if he survived, he was going to live out the rest of his life as a cripple.

      Chapter 23

      The monks had a long, hard and perilous job getting the man stretchered off the cliff and onto the nearest dirt track of a road. Once there, one of the younger brothers ran ahead to take the one battered old car the monastery possessed down to the village so that an ambulance could be called to take him to hospital in Palma. There was no phone at the monastery.

      Brother Benito went with the poor wretch, who seemed to be drifting in and out of consciousness, murmuring foreign-sounding words under his breath.

      ‘Who is he?’ asked the medics.