The Woman on the shore

David Rea

He can tell the woman is dead before he reaches her. It is the way her body is positioned, twisted like a rag doll. There is a map of cuts, scratches and bruises across her face and arm; the sea has cared as much for her corpse as it does driftwood, tossing her against the craggy shoreline and dumping her behind this rock; a final wave has thrown her forearm over a tyre. Her hair holds droplets of seawater, resembling tiny balls of mercury, and the blue abaya beneath her life jacket is soaked and torn.

Daniel Verity lifts the camera around his neck and takes her photograph, the delicate mechanical sound – click – carrying across the beach on the slackening morning wind. Circling her, he takes further pictures, accompanied by the sea’s angry, labouring breaths – suck, roar, hiss – and leaving an uneven ring of displaced sand around the body. Daniel scrolls through the photographs. This is the one: it makes her look like discarded rubbish, showing her arm on the tyre, casually loose, as though dangling over the side of a bath. Her bruised head is tilted back, opening her jaw into an exhausted yawn, and the rest of her face is not in view, so she will remain anonymous. He connects his camera to his phone and posts the photograph on his social media with the comment: Shame on the governments of Europe. He looks up, and for the first time, takes in the surrounding scene.

The isolated beach has the shocking quiet of a crime scene. The empty sand had recorded his arrival; his boot prints suggested the hurried path of a trespasser. Like a delayed pain after an accident, he feels a terrible sadness waking inside him. Fingering a tear from his eye, he removes his Saint Christopher from around his neck and attaches it around the woman’s. His phone beeps in his pocket. Then beeps again. Two notifications. People are starting to share his photo. Another beep. And another. He checks his phone again: nine notifications. Three more beeps. He needs to call an ambulance. What’s the number in Turkey? He feels disoriented; he must be in mild shock; however much he sees this stuff, it still gets to him. The crests of waves litter the sea’s calm surface like screwed-up and discarded tissues. Glancing at the body, he checks the news online. Most sites still carry this morning’s headlines: the British prime minister describing the refugees from the region arriving at Calais in France as a ‘horde’. He looks online for the emergency services number.

When Daniel first hears the woman gasp, he mistakes it for a wave.

Her body develops an organic presence, life percolating through to the surface of her skin. He leans over her face. Her eyelids twitch. Slits reveal dark, wet eyes. She frowns at some quickly blossoming pain and looks at him, her eyes not quite focused, her awareness still beneath a layer of concussion. Slowly, her eyelids open fully and her eyes focus on his. Daniel laughs and grips the bridge of his nose. Swallowing and standing, wiping tears from his eyes, he improvises a clumsy dance of joy with his arms flailing, a black figure against the brightening turquoise sky.

‘Mrhban,’ he greets her in his heavily accented Arabic. Dropping to his knees and breathing hard, his voice high with emotion, he adds: ‘Hunak sayaarat ‘iiseaf qadima’; there’s an ambulance coming.

Her jaw closes and her lips draw together; salt-encrusted, they wrinkle like the closing folds of an old purse. He lays his hand gently, awkwardly, on her hair, and feels her warm, hard scalp beneath. A wave comes in and inch-deep water streams beneath them. She rolls with great effort onto her side and coughs, leaving half of her blue abaya behind and revealing her tracksuit beneath. She starts shivering. Pulling his raincoat from his backpack, Daniel peels off what remains of her abaya and wraps her in it.

‘It’s okay,’ he says.

An ambulance speeds around the corner of the coast road.

Alone again, Daniel notices the cove’s Wednesday morning sounds, conveyed on the breeze like local newspaper headlines. Distant car horns protest a traffic jam. A dog barks. A pneumatic drill. A bartender strolls along the coast road, smoking and waiting for his morning shift to begin. A tingling sensation starts up in Daniel’s hand where he touched her head; he opens his post from a couple of hours ago and writes a comment: She’s alive – then, biting his top lip, saves it as a draft. He watches the waves smooth away the impression left by her body and the circle of his boot prints around it – erasing the evidence that either of them was ever there at all.

Rolling over on his mattress in his Brixton bedsit, stirring the beginnings of a hangover, Daniel props himself up on an arm and takes his phone, balanced on a half-filled whiskey tumbler. How long was he out on a bender for? His photo has just over 50,000 comments and has been re-posted 1.2 million times. He’s never had those kinds of numbers before; a flood of dopamine sweetens his encroaching nausea. Newspapers are full of stories about it. In some she is referred to as ‘the woman in the blue dress’, in others ‘the woman on the shore’. The German Chancellor has said that she deserves an apology from the whole of Europe, that the continent must do more to help refugees from the region. The British Prime Minister has released a statement saying he is ‘deeply moved’ by the photo.

Daniel sifts through more of the news. His plan to keep her anonymity seems to have worked; no one has been able to identify her. Journalists have been to the local morgues, and though there were several refugee women there, none had been wearing a blue dress. Daniel wonders if it is still on the sand where he peeled it off her. Another piece argues that the anonymity is a reason to be suspicious, claiming the photo was staged, a piece of propaganda for the left. How is it possible, it asks, for there to be nothing in the photo to identify the woman, for there to be no record of the woman’s death, for her to vanish into thin air? Daniel sniffs his armpit: Christ, he stinks! Leaving his clothes in a trail behind him, he walks to the bathroom and turns on the shower.

Thank Christ he didn’t post she was alive. It would probably have sent journalists out looking for her, to find out what happened to her afterwards, to invade and dismantle her life, creating a news cycle that would have petered out twenty-four hours later. He inspects his naked, beaten body in the bathroom mirror, his freckly, clammy flesh, the sickle-shaped scar across his chest from Gaza, and the Halloween pumpkin smile on his ribs from Syria.

Picking snot-congealed cocaine from his nostril, he steps into the shower. Who’s he kidding? He was never going to post that she was alive. Guilt twists in his stomach, weakening him. He wanted to create as big a political earthquake as he could. Photographs of the dead are more persuasive than those of the living. He pictures his heart, shrivelled and grey from the torments of PTSD, hardened by drugs and adrenaline, and grown over with lichen and liverworts. He gets out of the shower – he can’t be bothered to wash himself – and plods angrily back to his bedroom. Drinking the rest of the whiskey in the tumbler, he checks his email. His inbox is full of requests for comments and interviews. One from the BBC. Wiping tears of exhaustion from his eyes, he reaches for his Saint Christopher, and then remembers he had given it to the woman. He wonders if she’s seen the photograph yet. She’s bound to at some point, and then she will be the only other person in the world who knows he’s lied.

When Habiba Darwish is given her things in the hospital, her trembling fingers search them to find her small plastic wallet. Her phone has gone, but she finds a silver necklace with a pendant attached. Twisting the bedsheet in her fist, she sobs with frustration. Where has that come from? The plastic wallet has to be here somewhere. Please. Here it is. The phone numbers are still inside; the one at the top blurred into inky clouds by the sea, and her daughter’s hair clipping wrapped in tinfoil, the last thing she has left of her family. She opens the foil, releasing a small pollen cloud of hazy memories. Holding it open to her nose, she breathes in deeply; there is the faintest trace of the complex smell of her family home, opening up closed sense-memories like old capillaries. Richer in texture than the hospital around her, she can almost hear her husband’s thin voice from the kitchen, her daughter’s scampering feet on the stairs.

She has no recollection of how she got to this hospital; the last thing she remembers is getting into the smuggler’s boat. Still suffering from a concussion, she has been told she can walk around, but only for short periods. In a waiting room, there is a family of Westerners gathered around an iPad watching the BBC. On the screen is a woman lying on a beach wearing a blue abaya, her body twisted. It’s her abaya; her arm is dangling over a tyre, her bruised face. For a moment the hospital rolls backwards as though she is falling. She leans against the wall to steady herself. Then looks again. The face in the photograph is out of view. But it is her. The boat must have capsized, and she was washed up onto the beach. She looks around the waiting room, but nobody is looking back. Memories flicker. The stormy sea. The front of the boat rising up. Then waking up. The white sky. The man looking down at her. Habiba puts her hand against the hospital wall to steady herself again. The iPad screen changes to a panel of men in a brightly lit television studio. There is a close-up of one of them, talking with professional calm. It’s him. The man on the beach.

As she walks back to her ward, the gapped chronology of her failed sea crossing begins to assemble itself in more detail: huddled with the others waiting on the beach at night. The jerking cones of torchlight. Lifting children onto the boat. The waves slapping the sides. Waking up on the beach to feel the ground unmoving and solid beneath her. That man looking down at her. That’s right, she remembers now: he had a camera around his neck. He must have taken the photo.

She sits down, realising she’s in the visitors’ café. On a television, there are images of her bombed-out city, its dusty remains like shattered bones. The same photo of her on the beach in her blue abaya appears. The photograph is everywhere. The whole world must be talking about her.

She walks up to the television; the sound is turned down, but she catches fragments: ‘… body washed up on the beach…the widespread consternation…the refugee’s corpse…’ She looks around the café again: a man in a wheelchair stifling a yawn, a mother wiping chocolate from a toddler’s mouth. The family with the iPad is now watching a cartoon.

Does everybody think she’s dead?

Back in her bed, she inspects the silver pendant she’d found amongst her possessions. It depicts an old man carrying a child on his shoulders across a river. A nurse explains that it is Saint Christopher, the Christian patron saint of travellers. On the back of the pendant there’s an inscription:

To Daniel

Safe travels

Love Mum

Daniel. That must be the photographer’s name. This must be his.

Did he give it to her?

In the hospital’s internet café, she searches online. Rubbing the Saint Christopher with her thumb, she finds out more about its owner: Daniel Verity. An award-winning photojournalist, who’s worked extensively in the Middle East and has been covering the European refugee crisis. What on earth happened? Did he find her, take the photograph, and leave her for dead? Why didn’t he check her pulse? No, she remembers now. When she woke up, he’d been dancing. That’s right. And he’d got down on his knees and put his warm hand on her head; he told her there was an ambulance coming. So it must have been him who telephoned for one. She finds his email address on his website and begins typing.

Dear Mr. Verity,

She rests her fingertips on the keys, then makes two angry fists. Can she trust him? Pushing her tongue into her cheek, she looks at her photo on the beach again. That’s strange. The early morning sky is pale turquoise, but when she was put into the ambulance, she remembers there being full daylight. Did it really take so long for the ambulance to arrive, or – she yawns, rubbing her eyes like a tired child. Or did this Daniel Verity take her photo first and then call emergency services sometime later?

Dear Mr. Verity,

Please respect me and keep this message private. I am the woman you photographed on the beach. I am at the Bodrum State Hospital in Turkey. What happened?

Habiba Darwish

She presses send.

Crouching in a pointed shadow outside a row of dusty white tents, Daniel watches the latest load of refugees arrive off the bus. Across the way, a woman is laying damp clothes on the line hung between tents. A bulldozer passes, leaving clouds of swirling dust. Flies dot haggard faces and tent walls are bloodied with splattered mosquitoes. When he visited Bodrum State Hospital, he was told Habiba Darwish had gone; nobody could tell him where. And so he has driven here to this Godforsaken place, the nearest refugee camp; over the past two days he has walked every square inch of it countless times, between the tents, along the perimeter fence. Perhaps she’s already moved on from here too.

He watches a petite woman dressed in a black abaya, walking slowly along the wire mesh fence as if hypnotised, knotting and unknotting her reddened fingers. She looks about her with the blank eyes of an animal. A girl does a cartwheel across her path, laughing, and the woman jerks backward then walks carefully around her. Just there, in the angles of her face and the fading bruise on her head, she reveals herself. It’s Habiba. Daniel looks away sharply as if slapped.

He cannot get over how short she is. His memories and photos carried no indication of her size, and he had always imagined her to be large, but she must be less than five feet tall. He catches her eye; she takes a few moments to register what she is seeing. She looks to her left, narrows her eyes, and mouths some words. Smiling a huge smile of disbelief, she walks towards him with steady purpose. He stands to greet her, brushing the mud from the back of his jeans, and all at once her face tightens, and she is on him, thrashing, kicking and pulling his hair.

When she finds him an hour later, he is kneeling on the parched ground and chewing the side of his nail, staring with worried, puffy eyes at children practising headstands. He puts a cigarette between his lips with trembling fingers and leaves it there, unlit and dangling. With his pale, freckly skin and thin strawberry-blonde hair, he is the odd-one-out here, a watchful stranger. There is no camera, only a bulging rucksack by his side. He glances at her when she crouches beside him.

‘I thought you’d have your camera with you,’ Habiba confesses in a soft voice; she looks at him.     

‘It’s back at the hotel. I’m actually on my way to your part of the world. To cover the war.’ Daniel rubs at a callous on his palm, lights his cigarette and asks, ‘Where…where are you from exactly?’

She tells him, and the conversation peters out. They watch a woman washing her clothes at one of the outdoor taps, next to children sitting in a row at a tent’s entrance. Their coughs and sneezes fill the air.

‘I worked at the university there,’ Habiba says. ‘Researcher.’ She searches his face for several seconds, making some calculation, then looks away again. ‘Did you post my photo before you called the ambulance?’ she asks.

The wind trims the ash from Daniel’s cigarette, blowing its end molten orange. He nods. ‘I honestly thought you were dead.’

Habiba draws her knees up to her chest and wraps her arms around them. ‘How did you know?’ She leans her forehead against her forearm.

He shrugs. ‘I’ve seen a lot of corpses.’

‘Did you check? Did you check my pulse?’

He shakes his head, picking angrily at the dried mud on the hem of his jeans. ‘The truth of it is I set out that morning to find a refugee’s corpse. Those beaches. There have been mornings when they are like open graveyards.’ He looks at Habiba’s dusty trainers. ‘I wanted to put it on social media … shove it in the face of Europe’s governments.’ He puts out his quarter-smoked cigarette and lights another. ‘They’ve done nothing, you know… and the longer I’ve photographed the refugee crisis, the angrier I’ve got.’ He picks up a stone and turns it in his fingers. ‘That morning, I was angry…tired… hung-over.’ He takes a long drag from his cigarette, and smoke jets from his nostrils. ‘I’m sorry. I’d completely lost perspective.’

Four or five turtledoves float indolently over the camp’s perimeter fence, topped with razor-blade wire.

‘Do you have family anywhere?’ Daniel asks.

Habiba’s face twists with painful emotion, and she waves the idea away with her hand.

‘Okay,’ Daniel says. ‘Look…I’ve brought you money. So you can get out of here. Get to Europe. You can get a crossing on a fibreglass boat for 4,000. Here, take this bag.’ He lays his bulging black rucksack beside her. ‘There is a good life jacket inside. And there is enough money to bribe your way for a while, at least. There’s £4,000 in Turkish lira for the fibreglass boat, and almost another 4,000 in euros. That’s all the money I could get for the moment. I’ll get you more. It’s all in a waterproof money belt.’ They both keep their eyes on the bag. ‘I’ve put a load of phone numbers in the phone.’ Daniel looks at her. ‘Mine is the first one. Call me anytime. There’s a phone charger in there, first aid kit…I’ve covered quite a bit of the refugee routes through Europe, and I’ve tried to put together a list of suggestions.’

‘What do you want?’

‘Nothing. I want to help you. It’s the least I could do.’

‘No more photographs?’

‘No more photographs.’

She lays her hand gently on the rucksack. ‘I can’t swim,’ she whispers.

‘What?’

‘I can’t swim.’

Daniel takes her hand and clumsily kisses one of her knuckles.

‘The second number in your phone is the Turkish coast guard,’ he says. ‘Just in case. If you’re on the boat and the sea is rough, call them. Promise?’

‘Promise.’

‘I should be able to get to Greece and meet you there somewhere. We just need to stay in touch.’

Daniel turns the stone in his hand and throws it towards one of the soldiers guarding the camp. It lands near his feet. He looks at Daniel and then walks on. Children start singing in one of the tents.

Habiba follows the other refugees out of the smuggler’s van. The quick gasps of footsteps on the sand. Bursts of anxious whispering and the explosive thunder of waves. There must be another dozen refugees waiting. The smuggler had promised a fibreglass boat, but there is only a rubber dinghy bobbling in the shallows. Habiba takes out her phone and texts Daniel: Getting on boat. Very frightened. Thirty minutes to Europe. That’s what everyone says. Thirty minutes, though that is surely impossible with the wind and waves tonight. Angry commands are given to walk into the water. Torches switch in the air. Habiba wades in and becomes a link in the chain of arms lifting children from the shore to the boat. ‘Yallah,’ the smuggler shouts, shoving a cattle prod into someone’s back. The sea sucks at her legs, pulling her off balance, and she stumbles onto her knees, holding a child to her chest and swallowing seawater. The crowded dinghy registers every movement on board, transmitting a subdued trembling panic along its length. Beneath the boat, in the broad depths of the Aegean Sea, parrotfish nibble speculatively at sinking Turkish coins; fragments of white and pale green clothing recall jellyfish. On the sandy flats of the Greek coastline, a cuttlefish hovers over a mobile phone emitting tiny silver bubbles.

There are instructions to sit. Elbows and knees. They’re told there are oars on board if they need them. A mother and father fold themselves around their baby. A couple tightly entwines next to the sleepy-looking helmsman. Habiba suddenly feels she is no longer sailing towards Europe but away from her homeland; she is leaving her family behind, abandoning their unburied bodies. The smuggler is up to his chest in the water, pushing the side of the boat and steering it out to sea; the helmsman starts the motor.

Habiba keeps her eyes fixed on the distant lights of Kos. One of the lit windows on the island gives onto a café, where an old man is watching the news on a wall-mounted television. There are images of a large protest in London about the refugee crisis; from the circling helicopter, their banners look like flotsam and jetsam across the sea of heads. A river of people streams out of Trafalgar Square, streaked with blue from the dresses and abayas many are wearing. Numerous placards show enlarged copies of Daniel’s photo of Habiba on the beach. Many others display Daniel’s original comment on the photo: Shame on the governments of Europe! The screen changes to the British Prime Minister at a press conference. Across the bottom of the screen, there is a summary of his statement: Britain will welcome 20,000 more refugees from the region.

There is a refugee camp in Serbia where Habiba sleeps fitfully in a tent for two days and wakes with a fever. When she sees her colour-drained reflection in a derelict shop window, she doesn’t see her front tooth chipped to a tapered blade, or the faint sketch left by her deepest cuts — she sees her daughter grown into a woman, wearing an exhausted look of surprise.

Still, she goes on. Twice a day, at a newsstand and duplicated on the television screens in a shop window, she sees Daniel’s photograph of her on the beach. Like rain inflaming arthritis, the image awakens pain in her bones. Two weeks later, on the edge of a makeshift refugee settlement, she sees it again in the form of a small piece of graffiti. The artist has spray-painted across the top: NEVER FORGET. Someone else has spray-painted over one corner: REFUGEES GO HOME. BORDERS SAVE LIVES. Through the fragmentation of her trauma, the swamp of her grief and the numbness of shock, she feels she is somehow imprisoned inside the photograph, trapped in the hours of that morning; she will forever be a sleeping ghost on the peripheries of foreign lands, stripped of everything she used to be.

On the outskirts of a forest on the Bosnia-Croatia border, in sleet blown diagonally by the wind, she meets Daniel for the third time. He gives her more money and refreshes her supplies: new clothes, tarpaulin, batteries, painkillers, and blister cream for her first-aid kit. They walk together through the forest for more than a week, subsisting on protein bars and chocolate, moving only at night when Habiba feels safer. After the first dozen hours Daniel gets the shakes as he withdraws from alcohol. The darkness is more susceptible to sound than daylight, registering their breathing and whispering and the rustle and hiss of their clothing. They have been told there are landmines in the forest, left from the Bosnian War, and so they take turns to walk ahead searching the undergrowth with a torch. They avoid any talk of what has happened between them, how the photo has swayed public opinion, discussing instead the minutiae of the journey, the difficulty of crossing the next border into Slovenia.

Daniel explains how the asylum system for the 20,000 refugees is going to work in Britain, but Habiba finds it difficult to concentrate on what he’s saying. The nights fill more and more with blown flakes of disassociated memories from the war. A tower block façade blown away, revealing a stack of living rooms, recalling doll’s houses. A mourning dove flying down from a crumbling school, landing on a fallen billboard of the President. The drone of distant helicopters. Her hands crawling like panicking spiders around her daughter’s corpse, trying to find a pulse or heartbeat.

Yet she has noticed that underneath, some unused part of herself has been enlarged by this journey across a continent, like a muscle which has been exercised. Towards the end of the week, as his shakes begin to subside, Daniel talks about family holidays when he was a boy, how they would go camping in forests like this one. When he was scared of the dark, his mother would put her alarm clock under his pillow, telling him that if he closed his eyes, its ticking would become her heart. ‘I often wonder if she would be proud of me now,’ he says, ‘what I have done with my life.’

Amongst the complex emotional grit of their physical proximity, they slowly discover an unexpected pearl of ease. Doing the work of a year of friendship, the morning drama on the beach and its aftermath have stretched wide the borders of their relationship.

‘When I first got married, I moved into the top floor of my husband’s family home,’ Habiba says, bringing up her personal life for the first time. ‘In the mornings my mother-in-law and I would beat the rugs on the rooftop. She was very encouraging to me in the early stages of my marriage. She told me she’d had a dream that I was pregnant…and I checked and I was.’ This becomes their habit: to kindle some warmth from the winter dark with their memories. Daniel’s memories avoid any mention of his life as a photojournalist; Habiba’s skirt the edges of the war. However far they walk, however many hours pass, the moon follows them between the silhouetted trees, faithfully watching.

‘It’s very…’ Habiba says.

‘What?’ Daniel steps on the brake of his MG Metro; there is a sheep standing in the middle of the country lane up ahead.

‘Very different. Does it snow every winter? I’ve only ever seen pictures.’

‘Some winters. Are you hungry? I’ve brought some cheese and pickle sandwiches.’

Habiba says she’s fine and winds down the passenger window, letting the quiet chorus of birdsong and occasionally bleating sheep into the car. England. A bee hovers by the hedgerows, landing on some honeysuckle, making the plant waver. A large white butterfly flutters out from the undergrowth, and a dragonfly appears motionless in the warm, still air. Daniel puts the car into first gear, and they set off again. Away to Habiba’s left there is a vast expanse of English countryside, a patchwork of fields dotted with copses, a river and an oast house. Over to its east, perhaps fifty miles further away, is an entirely different weather system. Pewter clouds are banked together, casting miles of fields in shadow. On its edge, the sun sends beams of sunlight through dispersed clouds; it is raining there and a faint rainbow arcs.

The car gathers speed. This view, wide enough to contain more than one season, these luxuriant hedgerows, this sinewy country lane, Daniel beside her, frowning at a passing thought, driving her to a new home: for a moment it all gathers together to make Habiba a small, vague promise. She glimpses that her life has no shape, that it never will now have a shape she will really understand, but the empty world is somehow still abundant, and unfolds endlessly in airports, cars, country lanes, fields, rivers, rainbows, sheep, snow.

Taking out the phone Daniel gave her, Habiba finds Daniel’s original post of her unconscious on the beach: Shame on the governments of Europe. She scrolls through the comments, which become a waterfall of grey through her tears.

‘Everything okay?’ Daniel asks.

Habiba nods and sniffs. It takes a minute of scrolling to reach the end; she wipes her eyes clear with a sleeve. The last comment was posted several months ago; the storm of outrage coming to an abrupt stop with a single weeping emoji. She takes a selfie; she presses the comment button, adds the photograph and writes a comment of her own:

I am the woman in Daniel Verity’s photograph…

When she looks at the selfie, she sees only a stranger, a weary wretch with pink eyes; she blinks several times, releasing a single fresh tear down her cheek, and types the rest of her comment:

and I am still alive.

Rubbing the Saint Christopher against her dry lips, her thumb hovers over the post button.