To the Wild Sky

by Ivan Southall

  There was something on the sand, up near the high tide mark, up there where shell fragments and seaweed looked like a grease ring round a bath.

  ‘Gee,’ he said, in a tiny voice, and started backing away, started going weak at the knees.

  It was a body. It was Mr Jim.

  Then he stumbled and sat down heavily, backwards, and pressed the palms of his hands into his eyes and felt awfully cold and not at all hungry any more.

  ‘Oh, gee,’ he said, and started shivering, but not thinking about anything very much, not even about Mr Jim.

  After a while he got up on to his feet and headed towards the Egret, not absolutely certain that he hadn’t imagined it, but not brave enough to go back to make sure. Perhaps it wasn’t Mr Jim, anyway. Perhaps it was Gerald or Bruce. Perhaps one of them had wandered off and gone to sleep farther up the beach? He hadn’t taken that much notice of them when he’d woken up.

  But they were all there. When he got back they were all there; all like dead people, the lot of them. They weren’t dead, of course. They couldn’t be! They wouldn’t dare die on him!

  He dropped beside Colin and shook him by the shoulder, and it took a dismaying length of time for Colin’s eyes to open. Colin turned his head then, though not the rest of his body, and met the quite extraordinary relief in Mark’s young face. But nothing much registered with Colin, not for a moment or two. Then he turned over and sat up slowly, pushing himself up on an arm. ‘Morning, is it?’ he groaned. And said nothing more, for there was dried blood caked with sand on his thigh and across his midriff.

  Mark saw it, too. ‘You’re hurt!’ he squealed.

  Colin flinched from fright because it did look awful.

  ‘Does it hurt, Col?’

  No; it didn’t hurt. Felt a bit peculiar, but it didn’t hurt. He’d had a lump of chewing gum stuck hard to his leg once; it felt something like that.

  ‘Does it hurt?’ repeated Mark.

  ‘No. But I don’t remember anything about it . . .’ Colin pressed his fingers round the bloodstains. ‘Seems to be all right, though,’ he said. ‘I must have cut myself somewhere.’ Then he looked down the beach and saw that the Egret wasn’t there. ‘Crikey,’ he exclaimed. ‘Where’s it gone?’

  ‘Smashed to pieces.’

  ‘It isn’t!’

  ‘It is,’ said Mark, full of importance. ‘You come and look. You come and see for yourself.’

  ‘Crikey . . .’

  ‘Say, Col . . . How are we going to get away again?’

  Colin squinted at his brother. ‘You didn’t think he’d fly it off again, did you?’

  From the look of Mark it seemed that he might have done.

  ‘For cryin’ out loud. Fly it off again? It was a wreck last night, nip, even before this happened. We crashed, or didn’t you know?’

  Mark looked crestfallen and Colin got to his feet, his skin twitching to the irritation of the sand. He brushed it slowly away as though it was an effort to concentrate on any form of labour. He’d felt all right sitting down, but weak and horribly empty now that he was standing up. His stomach was so flat it curved inwards. Then he stretched himself and ran the palms of his hands across his ribs – Colin’s ribs stuck out, particularly when he breathed in – and looked at his watch, then held it to his ear and shook his wrist and held it to his ear again. ‘Oh, blow,’ he said. ‘Water in it, I suppose. What time do you reckon it is?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Mark was eager to be off. There were bits of the aeroplane that he thought he’d like to save and he wanted to get in first. With Colin beside him it would be all right to pick things up. ‘Coming down to have a look?’ Mark urged.

  ‘Sun’s up,’ said Colin, ‘but you wouldn’t think so, would you? Fancy finding ourselves at the beach. Haven’t been to the beach for ages.’

  Mark had been only twice in his life and the first time he’d been too young to remember it. ‘Come on, come on. Don’t you want to have a look at the aeroplane?’

  ‘What aeroplane?’

  ‘There are bits of it.’

  Then for some reason he couldn’t explain (perhaps one of the girls moved) Colin was suddenly and acutely aware of his underpants. In an instant he felt furtive and flustered and extremely uncomfortable. Suddenly, everything else was forgotten. ‘What am I going to wear?’ he wailed.

  ‘Eh?’ said Mark. He hadn’t really noticed anything amiss.

  ‘I haven’t got any clothes.’

  ‘Swipe me,’ said Mark, ‘neither you have.’

  It had been Carol who had moved, for now she threw out an arm and rolled over and groaned like someone in pain. Colin didn’t wait for anything else. He bolted. He ran this way and that like a startled rabbit, and finally into the cover of the foreshore trees. And when he got there he stood behind a tree trunk hugging himself, panting and trembling and wondering what on earth he was going to do. It wasn’t as if he had been caught by surprise and could duck into his bedroom and pull on a pair of jeans, or that the other fellows had anything to give him either.

  ‘Aw, crikey,’ he shuddered. ‘It’s the real end.’

  Mark trailed in after him, scratching his disordered hair. The sand was getting on his nerves. ‘You’re decent, you know,’ he said. ‘Honest you are. I’d say if you weren’t.’

  ‘I’m not,’ said Colin sullenly. ‘It’s the sort of thing that would happen to me.’ Mark wondered then whether he should say something about Mr Jim, but if he said anything they’d have to act on it and that was an awful thought. If he kept his mouth shut the problem might go away somewhere.

  Carol was surprised when she sat up, for in effect she was alone. She thought she’d heard voices but there was no one, only three sleeping figures and the clearly defined tracks of footprints in the sand.

  She felt awfully depressed; there was a blackness inside her and a nagging sense of foreboding, of disaster. It was such a desolate and silent beach. Waves were thudding and birds were crying, but they added to the silence; they took nothing away from it.

  She drew her knees up under her chin and felt a perfect mess. And she was cold and hungry and sticky and afraid. Where were they? Where had Gerald brought them? He’d been flying to Coonabibba, not to the sea. Because it was the sea; it was the ocean that lay out there, grey and gloomy and sombre and enormous. And the shoreline was so forbidding; leggy, twisted trees with dark, dirty green leaves, and rock outcrops, and rubbish that looked like the spoils of a storm strewn along the sand.

  It was Gerald’s birthday. The thought saddened her even more. She turned her head to him. He was asleep. He still looked exhausted and so awfully young, like a little boy. She reached out a hand to him but didn’t touch him, dropped her hand in the sand near his face and said, ‘Oh, Gerald . . . We’re all going to die. We’ve got nothing to eat. Where have you brought us, Gerald?’

  Jan said, ‘Hi.’

  Carol turned sharply, guiltily. Jan’s clouded eyes were looking at her.

  ‘Hi,’ Carol said, after a pause. (What was Jan thinking?)

  ‘Do you really think it’s that bad, Carol?’

  ‘Well, where are we?’ Though it wasn’t really a question.

  ‘I don’t know. Looks like a desert island to me. But how could it be?’

  ‘There’s been a storm. Even the aeroplane’s gone.’

  ‘Yeh . . . Yeh; it’s not the sort of thing you’d expect, is it? Do you think we’d better see if anything’s been washed up? We might find some of our things.’

  ‘I suppose that’s where Mark and Colin have gone . . . I’m hungry, Jan. Are you?’

  ‘Starving.’

  Jan shivered on to her feet and brushed the sand from her clothes and wriggled uncomfortably. There was more sand in her clothes than on them. ‘Cold, isn’t it? Perhaps we’ve gone south, Carol.’

  ‘It’s very early. There’s no sun, you know.’

  ‘Hasn’t rained though.’

  ‘Would we know if it had?’

  Jan kicked
her shoes off vigorously and flexed her toes. ‘Come on, let’s see if we can find anything. Once the tide starts coming in again we’ll lose it all.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what we will find.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  Carol choked on it. ‘A body.’

  Jan froze. It was awful. She’d forgotten about poor Mr Jim. After a while she sat down again and turned her head away and started crying softly. She couldn’t face the thought of finding poor Mr Jim.

  Mark edged down behind them and stood a short way off waiting for them to see him. If it had been only Jan who was awake he wouldn’t have cared, but he was frightened of Carol. In fact, many things were beginning to frighten Mark more and more. All sorts of vague fears about the sea being there and the Egret not being there, about the absence of familiar things, about Mr Jim, about the unspeakable gulf that seemed to yawn between him and his parents. Even Colin’s pants. What sort of a joke was it when a fella didn’t have a pair of pants to wear? And didn’t look like getting any, either.

  He waited for the girls to turn round but they didn’t and he felt awkward, wondering what to do with himself. A fella felt a complete nut standing there. He edged closer and said, ‘I say . . .’

  But they didn’t hear him because the breeze was coming in off the sea, so he went towards them dancing on his toes to make out that he had just come in from a run along the beach. ‘Hi, there,’ he called. ‘What’s cookin’?’ He should have done that in the first place, but it wasn’t easy with Carol being there.

  ‘Hello,’ said Carol. ‘Where’s Colin?’

  ‘Around,’ said Mark with a shrug, and dropped a few feet from Jan, but she turned her head away. He didn’t know she was crying and thought that she, too, had developed a hate on him. He felt more unwanted than ever. So the things he had wanted to say about Colin’s pants were not said. Even the things he might have said about Mr Jim were not said either. He grew silent and miserable and drew sad little circles in the sand with his fingers.

  After a while Jan asked, ‘What was that about Colin?’

  Mark turned his head slowly in her direction but didn’t really look at her, because that was where Mr Jim was, up that way, behind her. ‘He’s around,’ he said.

  ‘Around where?’

  ‘Oh, somewhere. I don’t know.’

  ‘He hasn’t salvaged anything, then?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Salvaged anything! Picked things up! Gone looking for things?’

  ‘No . . .’

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ She sounded irritable and unfriendly.

  ‘Nothin’,’ he said, and got up and walked away and sat on his own, turning his back on them. He felt so glum that a great big tear dribbled down his cheek. He had a jolly good mind to tell them about Mr Jim, just to make them unhappy, too.

  ‘Golly,’ said Bruce. ‘Just look at my ankle. I knew I’d done something.’

  ‘So you’re awake!’ said Jan. ‘About time.’

  ‘I told you I’d broken it. Look at it. Black and blue.’

  ‘It’s bruised, that’s all, or sprained or something.’

  ‘Strike me pink!’ roared Bruce. ‘Where’s the Egret?’

  Gerald sat up sharply, almost as though prodded with a pin, then fell back giddily, his head swimming, his stomach turning over, and instantly Carol was at him, like a hen with a chick, fussing. ‘Oh, go away,’ he said and struggled up again, this time on his hands and knees.

  ‘The Egret’s gone, Gerald,’ Bruce shrieked and Mark ran over, his tears forgotten, because the boys were awake and if they wanted to know anything about the Egret, he knew the lot. ‘Yeh, yeh,’ he cried, ‘all in bits. Smashed to bits. I’ve seen it. I’ve been down to look. Come on, come on, I’ll show you.’

  Gerald moaned. It was quite frightening, because he was down on all fours and his eyes had widened and his teeth were showing. It was so startling that when it happened it was immediately more important than anything else. Then Gerald scrambled away down the beach for five or six yards on his knees before he managed to flounder to his feet.

  ‘He’s flipped!’ Bruce cried. He tried to get up, tried to follow Gerald because he was running towards the sea, but his leg gave way with an excruciating twist of pain. It was Carol who went after Gerald, and then Mark; Mark not in too much of a hurry because Mark was a very frightened little boy. In fact he went only a short distance then looked back, appealing with his hands for Bruce’s support, but Bruce had to be counted out. Mark screamed, ‘Colin! Colin! Colin!’ And then ran back up the beach to where he had left his brother in hiding.

  ‘This blooming leg,’ Bruce shrieked and turned on his thunderstruck sister. ‘Go after them, you dumb Dora.’

  Carol caught up with Gerald down where the engine was lying, though what she’d do if he turned on her she didn’t have the faintest idea. She was almost sick with unbelief, almost sure in her heart that Bruce was right; and she was panicking inside, emptying inside, for she had no understanding of this sort of thing. It was part of the world that was hidden from people. But when Gerald realized that she had come up behind him, he changed. His mood fell away, seemed to peel off him like a disguise reluctantly shed.

  But he said nothing and when she touched him he held on to her hand, squeezed it for two or three seconds, then let go. After a while, he said, rather strangely, ‘So what? It was insured.’ Then suddenly sobbed: ‘It was a lovely little aeroplane. It worked so hard for me. It’s not fair.’

  By then Jan was there, but standing back, all muddled up, embarrassed, turning her big toe into the sand, and Bruce was surer than ever that his leg really was broken, and Colin had come to the edge of the trees with Mark.

  ‘What’s all the fuss about?’ said Colin. ‘You said Gerald had gone off his nut. I reckon you’re the nut.’

  ‘I’m not, you know,’ declared Mark with heat. ‘Even Bruce said so and every one was runnin’ in circles. I thought he was goin’ to run into the sea and drown himself.’

  ‘I reckon you ought to run into the sea and drown yourself.’

  ‘Come on back with me, Col. Don’t hide any more.’

  ‘I want some pants first.’

  ‘Oh blow,’ said Mark and pouted. ‘Well, I’m not goin’ back either. I don’t like ’em. They’re all nasty to me.’

  Jan wasn’t sure whether or not she should drift out of the picture. She always felt like something tacked on when Gerald and Carol were together, but this was different, because Gerald wasn’t well. (Colin had said that hours ago, hadn’t he? Perhaps Colin had been a jump ahead of the lot of them?)

  Gerald was so peculiar; he’d been peculiar in the aeroplane. Perhaps something had happened to him, snapped, perhaps. That was the word that grown-ups used. She’d heard before of people doing odd things after they had been through a terrible ordeal. Was that why he had flown on and on and acted so strangely at times? She’d watched him from the corner of her eye in the aeroplane; she’d seen his long periods of intense agitation, his fast-changing moods, she’d seen him talking to himself, she’d seen his wide-eyed horror though she’d tried not to look, just as she had seen it again this morning.

  Jan tried to grapple with the thought, but it was hard. More the sort of thing that grown-ups would know how to handle. When grown-ups started talking about things that disturbed the mind they always sent children out of the room. Was it possible that Gerald’s mind was disturbed? Was this what people meant by that phrase?

  How were they going to handle Gerald if he turned violent? Bruce was the only one strong enough (Colin was such a weed; so thin) but Bruce had been hurt. She felt guilty about Bruce because she had called him a big baby; but it was Gerald who was the baby; Bruce was the one who was really hurt.

  Jan went back to him and said, ‘Gerald’s all right; I think.’

  Bruce grimaced. Anyone with two sound legs must be all right. He was beginning to feel very sorry for himself.

  ‘I’ll take a look at it again, if
you like,’ Jan said.

  ‘Arrgh. What good’ll that do? You don’t care.’

  ‘If you’re hurt of course I care. I thought you were putting it on.’

  ‘Putting it on! And it’s black and blue!’

  ‘Well, you always make the most of everything.’

  Bruce scowled and Jan bent towards him. ‘You hurt me, sis,’ he said, ‘and I’ll crown you.’

  ‘Well, let me look at it!’

  ‘What are you going to do? Put it in splints or something? You’ll make it worse. If you really cared you’d go for a doctor.’

  She dropped back from him. ‘Be fair, Bruce. Where are we going to find a doctor?’

  ‘How do I know? And how do you know until you look? There could be a town back there for all we know.’

  ‘You know very well there isn’t.’

  ‘I don’t know any such thing. Just because there’s no one round here doesn’t mean there’s no one around anywhere. Who’d be down at the beach at this hour, anyway, on a morning like this, cold as bloomin’ charity?’

  It was a point. It really was. There could have been a town back there, maybe half a mile, or a mile, or five miles away. There might have been a town round the next headland, the headland on the left or the headland on the right.

  Bruce could see that he had made his point; not that he had thought of it until he had said it. ‘Well?’

  ‘I suppose you’re right,’ Jan said, ‘and you’re not the only reason either, are you?’

  ‘You mean Gerald?’

  ‘I mean Mum and Dad and everyone. They’ll be frantic. They’ll think we’re dead . . .’

  That was what Carol wanted to say to Gerald, too; that they should be up and moving, doing something, going somewhere; but Gerald still seemed to be two people, his real self and a stranger. Carol could sense it and Gerald was convinced of it.

  The stranger seemed to be running round inside him in a panic, as though trapped in a cage, as though trying to get out. And how and why had he come to be on the beach? Hours had been cut out of his life and the missing hours worried him desperately. Had he behaved like a Hennessy or disgraced himself?