On the beach at Brighton in the south of England the shore is made up of countless pebbles. Beneath the weight of your feet they squeak and the give is more than on soft sand, so that to walk even the distance from the promenade to the water’s edge feels like a trial of uncertain outcome: each single step is not quite fulfilled to its assumed potential, and you begin to feel your mass is hanging back in your body and must be wrenched forward with great effort.
We went there one day in March and despite the sun, the air and water were still very chilly, and also very still. I was with three friends I knew well, and a fourth lanky fellow I had only recently met. One of my friends, a girl named Samantha, lay down on the pebbles very still and after some time she asked us to cover her. To heap the pebbles onto her in handfuls would have hurt her because of their weight, and so my friend and I placed them upon her body one-by-one.
Each pebble was a slightly different hue of the tan of the shore as a whole, and would have had an average oblong diameter of about five centimetres. Their weight could be felt in an open palm, but could then be easily thrown some distance out into the water.
My friend and I worked quickly and methodically, first of all placing some onto her stomach, and then around the outline of her legs, torso and head, working to build up a foundation. As the pebbles began to build up around her she seemed to be becoming encased from underneath. After some time we had covered: her legs, her crotch, her stomach, her torso, her arms, which she lay crossed over her chest with the palms of each hand flat against the flat above her breasts, her neck, and her hair. We had to fill in the gap between her two thin legs, and around where her feet angled upwards a broader foundation developed as the pinnacle stones kept slipping down from atop her toes. With the stones built up around her head, and after she repeated her authorisation, we placed the pebbles carefully onto her forehead, over her ears, into the hollows beneath her cheekbones, onto her chin, and then onto her cheek bones, her brow, and with smaller pebbles on the space above her top lip, below her nostrils. She was now almost unseen, even in her black clothing, and was just another mound of pebbles amongst the other mounds that rose and dipped all along the coastline. Up close all that could be seen were her nose, her lips, and her grey eyes, which looked straight ahead. And then, we placed a few final stones over both of her eyes, now closed, and over her mouth and the bridge of her nose, so that all that really remained exposed were her nostrils through gaps in the rounded pebbles.
We told her to make a sound when she wanted us to remove the pebbles because we realised now she probably could not have gotten free by herself.
We sat back. Some people walking by closer to the water looked back at the small mound, noticing what we had done, but they must have sensed no cause for alarm, with four of us sitting there nearby, and the lanky fellow reading his book the whole time. I rubbed my hands together, and found they were now pleasingly coarse and dry, as though setting. The stones slowly shed a fine dust as they grind together under their own weight, or people’s footsteps, and so the squeaking is in fact the sound of their own disintegration; I thought that some way beneath where I sat, it probably all gathered together as silt.
After a few minutes, long enough for my mind to momentarily forget about her, we asked Samantha if she would like us to remove the pebbles and she said through nearly closed lips, Yes, and then, when I asked again to be sure, she said, Yes, again, but more forcefully in a way that would seem rude if she had spoken English as her first language.
Squatting beside her, the same friend and I quickly removed each stone one-by-one, starting at her face and head, then at her neck, and so on, down her body. She lay still while we removed most of the stones that covered her and only moved her body when she had been almost completely freed. As she went to sit up some of her hair that was caught pulled sharply.
Afterwards she said it had become very cold beneath the pebbles, and she said she did feel she couldn’t have freed herself, but that she had liked the sensation of the weight upon her body. I remembered her as saying it had felt like ‘the weight of everything,’ but that phrase sounds much too contrived for her, and is probably my own confection. I remember thinking at the time that I would have liked to have the same experience, and now, in fact, when I recall it a trick in my memory makes me feel the sensation of the weight of all those pebbles on my own body, my own arms and neck and torso, even the sharp pull on my hair, though it is something I never experienced.
