Pig Island Read Free Page A

copy: ‘What in fuck’s name is that ?“
    This was the important bit. You could feel the guys on the boat inching forward in curiosity, staring at the beach where a creature no one could put a name to moved ponderously through the foliage at the water’s edge. It stood at about five foot eleven; the BBC technicians figured this out from comparative measurements using sun and trees. In most ways it appeared like a naked human being—the video showed its back from the waist down; the upper half was concealed in shadow. Except it wasn’t human. There was something dangling from the base of its spine. Estimated to be about two feet in length, the same battered brown flesh as the body, it looked just like a fleshy tail. It banged once on the back of the creature’s legs as it moved.
    Even in that stifling bungalow, with the sun coming through the picture windows, lying in great squares on the dingy patterned carpet, and Lexie a few yards away in the kitchen, I got this crawl of discomfort across my skin. I leaned nearer to the TV and stared at the wavery brown line of empty beach, the camera holding steady on the island in case the beast reappeared. A full three minutes elapsed until the tourist gave up waiting and turned the camera back to the other men on the boat. They stood at the gunwales, all four of them in their Bolton Wanderers shirts, holding the stanchion line and staring in silence at the spot on the beach where the creature had been.
    The people at the BBC reckoned it was an actor, someone in a costume. Their AV unit had worked on the Bluff Creek Bigfoot film, and they thought this video had some of the same hallmarks: Sasquatch, as we all knew, was just some guy in a Hollywood gorilla suit—and the technicians decided that was probably what was happening in the Pig Island film. The problem was, because the video was taken from a boat about two hundred yards offshore, because the ‘creature’ emerged from the trees at frame 1,800 and had disappeared into the foliage by frame 1,865 (at a rate of thirty frames per second that meant a shade over two seconds), and because the movement of the boat had the picture jumping all over the place, the Beeb couldn’t get a good enough image to analyse it any closer. They could only say what it appeared to be.
    Half beast. Half human.
    “I’ll put your lighter in the rucksack,” said Lexie, suddenly, from the kitchen. “I’m putting it in the front pocket.”
    I paused the video and turned to look at her. She was standing at the table, her hair held back in the Alice band she’d got for her snobby job, and a pair of shorts I had a vague idea I was meant to notice. I didn’t answer her straight off. Her voice was kind of casual, but both of us knew how serious she was. I’d ‘given up’ smoking months ago and I reckoned I’d hidden the occasional sneaky rollie pretty well. Except now there was the lighter.
    I watched while she zipped up the rucksack.
    “It was in your jacket pocket,” she said, reading my mind.
    “I got it for the stove. There’s no pilot.”
    “Yeah,” she said, laughing. “You’re so transparent.”
    I laughed too. Just a bit. “Transparent or not—I used it for the stove.”
    “OK,” she said lightly. “OK. I believe you. You’re so believable.” She set her tongue at the back of her front teeth and smiled up at the ceiling. Her smiling made the sinews in her neck stand out. She’d got skinny recently. I waited a few more moments to see if we were going to pursue this. Not dropping the smile or taking her eyes off the ceiling, in that same high voice she goes: ‘And there was tobacco in the shorts you had on yesterday.“
    “You’re going through my pockets now?”
    “Yes. My husband lies to me about smoking so I go through his pockets.” She dropped her chin then and met my eyes and I saw she’d flushed a deep purplish colour—like her cheeks were bruised. “My husband thinks I’m stupid. So I have to fight