The Trial

by Laura Bates

  Jason looks absolutely terrified. He quickly takes a few steps towards Hayley, putting Elliot between him and the noise.

  ‘I think it’s a bird,’ Elliot whispers, breathing heavily.

  A flurry of dry leaves puffs into the air and a bird the size of a rooster struts confidently out of a bush just yards away from them. Hayley’s hand flies to her mouth, the shock of its unexpected appearance making her heart leap in her chest.

  The bird is beautiful. At first, Hayley thinks it’s a peacock, with its powder-blue head and long, decorative feathers, darker at the back but shining all over with a petrol sheen. It has a little red comb on the top of its head and a red ring around each eye, with small decorative lumps like red and yellow baubles clinging to its face. Its pink scaly legs end in sharp claws that scratch and scrabble sure-footedly through the debris on the forest floor. A moment later it has seen them, and it stops, cautiously, looking more curious than afraid, cocks its wrinkled face to one side and fixes them with its little currant eye.

  ‘We have to kill it,’ Elliot breathes, barely even moving his lips.

  ‘What?!’

  ‘We need the food,’ Elliot replies immediately, his eyes darting around the clearing, already making calculations for a hunt.

  ‘It’s stunning,’ Hayley hisses, ‘and defenceless… and it’s probably never seen humans – it won’t even know how to run away – it’s not fair!’ And what she wants to say, but doesn’t, is that she feels, somehow, that the island will never forgive them if they kill this beautiful, majestic bird. Bad enough that it has been forced to accept their rough intrusion without them spilling blood as well.

  ‘All the better.’ Jason grins, moving quietly into a crouching position, his arms outstretched.

  The bird flicks its head to the other side, staring unblinkingly at Jason. With a quiet whoosh, it fans out its tail feathers, a gorgeous array of intricate black-and-white patterns, each feather tipped in blue and gold as if it has been dipped in a shimmering ink pot.

  ‘It’s like some kind of turkey,’ Elliot whispers, as the bird puffs out its green wing feathers, glinting mermaid-like, and extends its neck. It gives that beautiful call again, the pure notes scattered carelessly through the trees.

  Elliot is cautiously moving to his right, blocking off a gap between the trees. ‘Jason, block its escape that way. Hayley, see if you can get round behind it so it can’t go back the way it came.’

  ‘Uh uh. No way. I am not involved in this.’

  ‘Hayley,’ Elliot whispers out of the corner of his mouth, never taking his eyes off the bird. ‘Do you and your family celebrate Thanksgiving?’

  ‘Well, the holiday is problematic, but…’

  Elliot cuts her off. ‘Do. You. Eat. A. Turkey? Yes or no?’

  Hayley sighs. She can see where this is going. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Okay, then. This is no different than that. Actually it’s a lot more honest. We are killing this bird for survival. It is absolutely necessary. It’s not a cranberry-filled, sentimental celebration of American ego and invading brutality. It’s not cruel. It’s biology. It’s life and death. Survival of the fittest. It’s nature.’

  Hayley crosses her arms and tries not to look the turkey in the eye.

  ‘Do you want to eat something other than fruit and fish bones in the next month? Or is going to the bathroom five times a day a hobby you’re quite happy to continue?’

  She grimaces reluctantly. ‘Okay, okay. Fine. But I’m not participating. I’m conscientiously objecting.’

  ‘You’re not going to eat any of the meat then? The juicy, tender white breast meat, barbecued over a smoky fire? Or the flavoursome, tasty dark leg meat that slips off the bone?’

  She feels her mouth start to water in spite of herself.

  ‘You don’t get to eat it if you aren’t prepared to help catch it. It’s dishonest. It does the animal a disservice. Those sterile, bloodless packets we pick up in the supermarket distance us from the reality of our food chain – they separate us from respecting and acknowledging the animals we sacrifice for our survival—’

  ‘Dude, can we please just get on with it?’ Jason hisses, as the turkey starts to move again. ‘Rock on with your natural-world philosophising and all that but it’s going to get away if we don’t shut up and catch it.’

  ‘Fine. I’ll do it.’ Hayley starts inching to her right, trying to creep around behind the turkey. But it’s too clever for her, or she’s too unskilled a hunter. As soon as she moves towards it, it starts to panic, kicking up the leaves and scrambling to run, letting out a horrible, screaming gobble, lurching towards the gap between Elliot and Jason.

  Jason and Elliot both dive towards the bird like line backers, Jason half crushing it beneath his body, its feet clawing helplessly in mid-air, its body writhing, still making that awful squalling screech, so different from the melody of its earlier call.

  ‘Kill it,’ Jason squeals, panting, twisting his face to the side just in time as the bird arches its neck backwards, trying to peck him with its sharp, curved beak. It rears and its beak dives again, scalpel-like, finding its target this time as it sinks into Jason’s forearm.

  ‘Argh!’ He screams and rolls to the side, and the bird half rises, scrambling straight towards Elliot now, blind with panic, its shining feathers dirty and stuck with leaves, some broken and twisted, sticking out horribly at the wrong angles.

  ‘It’s suffering,’ Hayley screams, and she finds herself lurching forward, her hands reaching out for the bird’s neck, thicker and firmer than she’d anticipated, muscular beneath her fingers. And without really knowing what she is doing, without letting herself think too clearly, she twists with all her might, wrenching the gleaming blue softness to the side with a sickeningly muffled crack.

  There’s quiet. Its body lies grotesquely spread and broken, legs sticking comically up in the air, robbed of its grace and elegance. Its beady eye, it seems to Hayley, is trained on her still, reproaching her.

  ‘Come on,’ Jason mutters, and there’s a kind of shame on his face as he grabs it up by the neck, so its heavy body dangles limply by his leg.

  ‘Oh man,’ Elliot groans, pulling a single, blue green feather from his hair. ‘May is not going to like this.’

  * * *

  Her tirade begins the moment they trudge back into camp with the dead bird. ‘What gives you the right to take away its life? You’re murderers, you know that? Murderers. I just hope you can live with yourselves after you’ve picked its greasy carcass clean.’

  ‘May.’ Elliot takes the bird, sits down and calmly starts to rip out great handfuls of its jewelled feathers, twisting and bracing against its body as he wrenches them out of the skin. ‘We have to eat. Okay? You literally wouldn’t be here if your ancestors hadn’t killed animals to survive. Humans are carnivores. Get over it.’

  ‘Humans also used to live in caves and walk around naked,’ May retorts, spikily. ‘Are you suggesting we do that too?’

  Brian raises a hand: ‘I would just like to say for the record that I for one would have no objection to that.’

  It turns out plucking the bird is the easy part. Disembowelling it and removing the wings, feet and head are far more of a challenge with only sharp stones to help them. Hayley has to turn away as Elliot hacks at the bird’s neck, flecks of blood and chunks of raw flesh spattering out in wet bursts. When it’s finally done, he pulls out the slick, shining mess of its innards, saving them carefully in a plastic airplane food tray to use for fish bait.

  But when it is finally prepared, threaded onto a long spit over the fire with two forked sticks to rest it on, the rich, smoky smell of meat and sizzling golden skin calls irresistibly to her tastebuds. Hayley’s stomach growls and clenches like a wild thing as drops of translucent fat drip down to crackle in the embers.

  ‘For the first time ever,’ Brian says, watching hungrily as Elliot turns the stick to roast the bird’s pale belly, ‘I can honestly say this is the kind of spit roast I
am most excited about right now.’

  Jason guffaws, while Jessa and Hayley exchange embarrassed looks but say nothing. Suddenly Hayley is powerfully reminded of an afternoon in the seventh grade, when she’d sat uncomfortably in her plastic chair while the boys in her science class excitedly passed a novelty pen along the lab bench, taking it in turns to turn it upside down and watch while the skimpy bikini slowly disappeared to reveal a nude, busty model grinning blankly back at them. She wishes she knew what to say now just like she wished then, but somehow the words to describe how gross it makes her feel just won’t come. And she knows, like she did then, that she’d be called a prude or accused of being uptight if she tried to object. So she says nothing at all.

  They eat the bird the moment it’s cooked, crouching in the sand around the fire, tearing off pieces of meat with their fingers and stuffing it into their mouths, the crispy skin melting away. The meat is deliciously, satisfyingly chewy after a week of sinking their teeth into soft, yielding fruit. May watches them from a safe distance, throwing them the occasional accusing glare while she chews sourly on some strips of coconut they’ve experimentally dried in the sun.

  Hayley’s brain plays tricks on her. There are moments when she feels almost normal, as if this life is something she knows, something expected. Her body cannot sustain the sensation of shock and fear, not for days on end. So there are times, even whole hours, when life just goes on. Even in the strangeness of the situation they can almost mimic normality, for a few suspended moments here and there.

  ‘That wants cleaning,’ Shannon says, nodding at the greasy plastic tray they used to serve the turkey, which is exactly what Hayley’s mother would have said, and Jason nods, and sits still, which is what her father would have done. Shannon picks it up and takes it down to the sea and Hayley sees her mother’s back curved over the sink as she bends to scrub it.

  DAY 9

  At first, Hayley thinks it’s just the birds again.

  The screeching of their morning calls, so shocking that first time, has almost become as expected as the morning light filtering through the leaves, tickling her eyelids open.

  But this is something different. It’s a male voice, urgent and angry, the words coming so fast she can’t make them out. Hayley scrambles out of her makeshift bed, scattering sand everywhere in her haste, and waits impatiently for her eyes to adjust to the usual shocking brightness.

  The boys are gathered round the campfire, where Elliot is attempting to re-use yesterday’s spit to cook some fish for breakfast. (Not very successfully, if his frustrated expression and the number of blackened fins charring in the fire are anything to go by.) Shannon and May are emerging from the trees with yet more firewood, and Brian is standing in front of Jason, frowning like he’s trying to make sense of what he’s shouting. Hayley hurries over, still half asleep, Jessa stumbling after her, drawn by the rumpus.

  ‘I’m telling you, there’s a fucking psycho on this island!’ Jason is apoplectic, his usually placid face reddened with panic, a vein pulsating in his neck as he gesticulates wildly at the sand around his feet.

  ‘Great shards of glass, sticking up all around my bed like knives coming out of the beach,’ he shouts. I almost cut myself to ribbons when I woke up, I only just saw them in time. It’s a threat, some kind of sick game someone’s playing.’ He breaks off, chest heaving, looking accusingly around the circle as if he expects somebody to apologise.

  ‘Sorry, you’re saying someone surrounded you with pieces of broken glass in the night?’ May stifles a yawn, not bothering to hide her unconvinced expression. ‘Broken glass from where, exactly?’

  ‘From the plane crash,’ Jason yells, a ball of spittle flying from his lips. ‘They must have taken them from the wreckage – huge, sharp, jagged pieces—’

  ‘Could they have blown in there or something?’ Jessa looks as confused as Brian.

  ‘They didn’t blow there,’ Jason explodes, looking like he’s about to have an aneurysm. ‘They were planted! It was like waking up in the jaws of a glass crocodile. Oh, for Christ’s sake, look, I’ll show you.’ And he grabs Jessa by her uninjured arm and drags her along the beach with the others trailing behind in various stages of wakefulness, their expressions ranging from perplexed to bemused to politely sceptical.

  The sand around Jason’s makeshift tent is smooth and soft, unblemished by glass or any other debris for that matter. He stops dead, staring at it in disbelief.

  ‘It… it was there.’ He looks around, taking in May’s smirk and Jessa’s sympathetic smile. ‘It was all right here, I swear.’ He gestures helplessly at the empty beach. ‘Glass everywhere, sharp pieces…’

  ‘Maybe you had a bad dream, J.’ Shannon puts a supportive hand on his back, rubbing it soothingly. ‘It wouldn’t be surprising after everything we’ve been through, to have a vivid nightmare like that, get confused…’

  ‘I’m feeling pretty compos fucking mentis actually,’ he roars, and her hand drops like a stone.

  ‘COME ON, YOU GUYS!’ Jason shouts, his eyes swivelling wildly from one face to the next. ‘Are you seriously telling me this doesn’t fit in with all the other weird shit that’s been going on? Elliot gets pushed off a cliff—’

  ‘Bit of an exaggeration, it was more of a small hill—’ May holds up her hands as Jason eyes her as if he’s about to explode: ‘Sorry, sorry, go on.’

  ‘Then someone practically gives May alcohol poisoning…’

  ‘Oh, so now you believe me?’ May cuts in, sounding aggrieved. ‘The other day it was all May’s a drunk, May can’t hold her liquor, but now you think I was telling the truth, do you?’

  ‘Well, I didn’t know it was a pattern then,’ Jason protests. ‘But look at it – add in blades of broken glass surrounding my bed and you’ve got a pretty obvious spate of attacks.’

  ‘Nobody actually did anything to you, though, right?’ Jessa asks. ‘I mean, they didn’t cut you or attack you with the glass?’

  ‘They could have done,’ Jason splutters. ‘It’s a threat, don’t you see? They’re letting me know they could have stabbed me to death in my sleep if they wanted to.’

  ‘Who would want you to know that? Who would have any reason to threaten you?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I did not imagine it. It was not a dream. Someone was trying to scare me, or threaten me, or cut me,’ Jason hisses between clenched teeth. ‘Not that I am scared,’ he adds quickly, ‘I’m just angry. This is getting stupid and dangerous and it needs to stop.’

  Privately, Hayley thinks that Jason’s rage-fuelled outburst sounds exactly like fear. A particular, male kind of fear. But this doesn’t seem like the best moment to mention it, so she keeps her mouth shut.

  ‘This is getting pretty damn weird, bro,’ Brian says, uneasily. ‘What the hell is going on?’

  * * *

  Hayley thinks about it all day. She mulls over everything that has happened while she stands knee-deep in seawater, her arms aching as she scrubs the few pieces of clothing she’s worn in rotation for the whole of the past week. She takes herself back to the moment Elliot fell, the confusion and shouting, the feeling of the wind whipping her hair into her eyes, the straining, desperate hope for a miracle from the sky. She tries to make herself step into the memory, to look around for signs of anything unusual – to recall a shadow, or a figure that might have slipped into their midst quietly, at the edges of her vision. But there’s nothing except her imagination. Sometimes it shows her a masked figure, hovering in the trees. Sometimes one or other of her teammates: Shannon, shiftily looking around before her fists shoot out to shove Elliot in the back, or Brian and Jason nodding silently to each other and pushing him over in unison. Sometimes her feverish brain even shows her own scarred hands reaching out, forcing Elliot over the edge. Could she have done something like that, in the trauma and the shock of the storm and forgotten it? Her mind feels like it’s spinning out of control, trying to find something real to grip onto.

  She picks at t
he problem while she stands for hours on fishing duty through the afternoon, her feet slurping into the wet sand, the hot sun beating down unforgivingly on her shoulders, the limp line trailing off into the water, catching nothing.

  She turns each of her teammates each like stones, trying to identify possible suspects and motives, none of them convincing. Could it be Elliot? Finding ways to hurt the classmates he’s clearly had hostile feelings towards for years, taking revenge for their life of luxury and the advantages it gave them? But he was the first one to be attacked. Could he have faked his own accident to divert suspicion away from himself? It doesn’t seem very likely, considering how badly he could have been hurt. None of it makes any sense.

  ‘Any luck?’ May splashes out towards her wearing just a black sports bra and a pair of cut-off shorts, on her way to the daily swim she swears is keeping her sane. (‘And fit, because you know the press is going to want to talk to us when we get out of here,’ she airily informed everyone on the third day, when she started the regime.)

  ‘Not much.’ Hayley shows her the backpack she has slung over one shoulder, containing just one small, grey fish. ‘Hey, May, this might seem like an odd question, but…’ She shields her eyes, watching May closely. ‘Do you remember anything strange happening at the end-of-tour party?’

  ‘Strange?’ May freezes, her neck muscles tautening. ‘No, definitely not. It was just a normal party.’

  ‘Did anyone seem to be acting strangely?’ Hayley presses, and May’s eyes dart from side to side as if she’s trying to work out what to say.

  ‘Well, I guess everyone was relieved the tour was over, and happy to celebrate our win, right?’ she replies, cautiously.

  ‘Shannon was certainly in a celebratory mood,’ Hayley says, watching May closely. May takes a step back and loses her footing, splashing down into the sea and swallowing a mouthful of saltwater. She gets to her feet, coughing as water streams out of her nose.