Ghost of a Shark by Neil James

The monster on the beach lies on his side – bigger than a boat, sadder than the ocean. The seafront’s deserted at dawn, so I leave my bike in the empty car park, next to the tariff sign that upsets the tourists. My shoes imprint into the wet sand as I approach him, the creature from another world. 

Every step feels like I’m walking in a dream, like I’ll wake up at any moment and laugh at the absurdity of it. Sharks don’t wash up on beaches round here! You’re dreaming, Louis!

Only I’m not, because I’m getting closer and closer to him, and he’s refusing to disappear. The mass of him looms large through the light morning rain. Soon I’m standing over him, able to touch him if I want to, but I don’t. I just stare. Even this close, he doesn’t look entirely real.

Dead things don’t though. Mum looked like a waxwork at the chapel of rest. I only glanced for a split second, then turned away and told Dad I didn’t want to see her. I couldn’t allow that face, so frozen and pale, to be my last memory of her. That night, I studied all my photographs of her to block it out – every Christmas and birthday and summer holiday photograph, trying to fix the images into my mind – her smiles and summer dresses and hands on my shoulders, but none of them seemed real either.    

I tell myself it’s okay; that this is not the same thing, that it’s safe to look at. A shark is just a shark, and it’s an exciting thing for a kid to see.

The first thing I study is his mouth– wide open like you’d see on posters for the Discovery Channel, a cavern of teeth and decay that stinks worse than the bins at the back of the fishmongers.

Next, it’s his eyes. They seem impossibly small, like two forgotten marbles, black and embedded into the ground.  

Then there’s the skin that looks like rubber. The enormous body. Days before, it would have cut through the ocean, powerful, majestic, every muscle controlled by instinct. Today it’s reduced to this – a lump of meat.

No one ever told me what to do if I find something dead on the beach. I know what to do if I’m locked out of the house, or the chain comes off my bike; I even know where to report it if some strange man tries to talk to me by the public toilets, but literally no-one has ever said, if you find a shark’s corpse on the beach, here’s who you should call.

I look across the sand towards the ice-cream cafe in the hope that Brenda will walk over and tell me what to do, or better still, take control of the situation like an adult should. Then I can just stand back and watch the drama unfold. There’s no-one here though, not this early on a Saturday. 

I even wish Cottee were with me. Not that he’d have a clue what to do either, but at least he’d have already come up with some mad theory about how the shark had got here, which we’d laugh about until someone responsible showed up.

A crazy thought enters my head. I should talk to the shark. “How did you get here?” I say. “You seem like you’re a long way from home.”

“Yes I am,” I reply, putting on a growly voice. “Can you carry me back to the sea? I’d like to go home now.” I laugh, but not properly. I’m just trying to kid myself that I feel okay.

 An even crazier thought follows. What if I’m the only one who can see him? What if Brenda from the cafe does walk across, or Dad turns up in his car checking up on me like he does sometimes, and I point at the shark, but they look at me all strange. “Can’t you see it?” I’ll say. “It’s lying there dead on the beach, twelve feet long,” and they’ll be like,

“Louis, there’s nothing there, what on earth are you talking about?”. When I turn back, it’ll be gone – an empty space on the sand, where only seconds before, a dead shark had almost certainly been.

Cottee’s brother used to see stuff that wasn’t there sometimes. He’d say there were voices in the walls talking to him. The doctors took him away somewhere, some sort of hospital a few miles out of town. I don’t really know what happened to him after that. I never ask Cottee about him because he told me not to mention him anymore, so I don’t.  

Touching the shark might help me. You can’t place your hands things on things that aren’t there. I daren’t though. I half expect him to come to life and lunge at my arm the moment my fingers brush against him. Ridiculous. He’s been dead for some time. There are flies crawling across him, and seagulls are landing close, strutting over and pecking, then retreating, just as uncertain as I am.

Someone else is here. He’s just a guy out jogging, a soldier-type with cropped hair and sharp features, running across the beach – the sort of person I see sometimes but who doesn’t see me. The sort of person who runs past me most mornings, eyes fixed ahead. But not today. He looks over, slows down, then stops.

“What the hell?” The look on his face is one I’ll probably see a lot today. “Is this real?”

 I nod.

“Where’s it come from?”

“It was here when I went past. I don’t know. It’s mad, isn’t it?”

“Have you told anyone it’s here?”

“Not yet, no,”

“Unbelievable,” he says, and we both stand staring.

A minute or two later and a grey-haired woman in a navy anorak has joined us. She’s walking a large black poodle on a lead. “What’s this?” she asks.

“A shark,” the man and I answer together.

That’s how the next few conversations go as well. People going about their early morning business, their lives all interrupted by the appearance of a dead shark. One man wearing glasses confirms that it’s a great white. I ask him if he’s a shark expert, but it turns out he’s seen Jaws five times, so he knows exactly what great whites look like. There are seven or eight of us before long. None of us had to walk over, but all of us did. It turns out that no one really knows what to do or what to say.

“Should we ring the police?” asks anorak woman. It sounds ridiculous, but no one says anything, because it seems like no one’s got any better ideas.

“Try the council, bulky waste collection,” suggests one man.

“They won’t even take fridges, mate,” replies the jogger and some of the adults laugh.

We don’t have time for any other suggestions though because other people have started to arrive. Two boys who left my school last year are the first on the scene. I don’t know their names, but I used to see them hanging around the corridors smoking and tripping the younger kids up. They’re swearing and shrieking as they sprint towards us.

 “Mental this is!” shouts the bigger one, and straight away he’s kneeling right next to the shark’s face as his mate takes pictures on his phone.

“Get on top of it,” the friend suggests. “That’s right, sit on it,”

“It stinks, mate.”

“It doesn’t matter, you wimp. Get on,”

Anorak woman’s tutting, but what’s the etiquette for finding a dead shark on the beach?

“Leave it alone,” she says eventually. “The scientists will probably want to look at it and see how it got here.”

The boys ignore her though and continue taking pictures. Before long other people are doing it too – crowding round the shark, posing for selfies – lying next to the shark, arms around the shark, riding the shark, one kid’s got his head in the shark’s mouth and looks like he’s about to be sick afterwards. Oh look, now the shark’s got a hat on, and all the while phones are out and what a great laugh it all is.

I wonder whether Dad’s heard about the shark. I doubt it because social media’s not his thing and it’s too early for the news crews to be on the scene. The story will be spreading like wildfire online though and more and more people are arriving; people all desperate to see death on the beach.

The funny thing is, I know what will happen next. People will turn up – not like the people on the beach right now, but important people in white overalls and plastic gloves. They’ll cover the shark with a tent and put a cordon around it so no one can get close anymore. People will get bored of staring at the tent and saying how strange it all is, and they’ll go and find something else to do. Then one day, everything will be gone. There’ll be nothing left, and I’ll stare at the sand, unsure whether any of this really happened.

Once he’s a memory, I won’t be able to see him fully in my mind. That scares me – that I can’t remember whole pictures. Instead, I’ll have to recall his eyes and his teeth separately, then try to join the fragments to form a complete shark. It’s impossible though. The eyes I’ll remember won’t ever look exactly like they should. They might be too small, or they might be bigger, or maybe a slightly different shape. The teeth won’t be exact either. They’ll be sharper or not sharp enough, or a different shade of dirty white, or there’ll be too many, or too few. The shark in my head won’t be this shark, because this shark will be gone forever and all that remains is the ghost of a shark my brain created.

And how will I be sure it was ever anything more than that? Sure, I can find pictures and say, ‘It’s okay, you’re not going mad like Cottee’s brother, it was all real!’ but what I’m trying to hold on to can’t be captured on paper or screens.

It’s like my favourite photograph of Mum – the one where the two of us are on the bumper cars at a fair when I was four years old. I can see the colour of her hair, and I can see her smile, and I can see her sunglasses, but I can’t see her, no matter how hard I look, or how often. And I can’t remember her. I just say that I can, and I pretend to myself that she’s always with me and living on in memories, and all the other bullshit I have to say to pretend I’m okay.

It’s so bloody hard to explain this. All I know is that things go, and when they never come back, you question whether they were ever here at all.

Neil James

Image – A shark in dark water from Pixabay.com