The Trial

by Laura Bates

  Brian swallows heavily, turns his head away. But there’s nowhere to go, no escape from this. ‘Okay.’ He grunts, and he lies back on the sand.

  ‘Who’s going to do it?’ Jessa holds out the sewing kit and they all stare at it, trembling slightly in her fingers. ‘Who knows how to sew?’

  ‘Well, I’m out, obviously.’ Jason shrugs.

  ‘May makes her own clothes,’ Shannon whispers.

  May shudders. ‘Yeah, with a sewing machine. I only do the buttons by hand.’

  ‘That’s still more sewing experience than the rest of us put together,’ Jason points out, and they all turn to stare at her as she stands there, crowned with the gentle rose of the evening sun, opening and closing her mouth. It’s the first time Hayley has ever seen her with nothing to say. May reaches out her hand reluctantly to take the needle as if she’s in some kind of dream.

  ‘Wait, put it in here first.’ Shannon holds out one of the tiny vodka bottles and they stuff the whole lot in, needle and thread together, and Shannon puts the cap back on and shakes it for good measure. May takes another bottle and pours it all over her hands, scrubbing them together.

  ‘Here.’ Elliot hands two more of bottles to Brian, who takes them without hesitation and gulps them both down. ‘This is going to hurt.’ Elliot takes the last bottle and carefully empties it into the wound, sprinkling it over each section as if he’s seasoning some grotesque cut of meat. Brian gasps, his face contorted in pain, and Jason and Elliot sit on either side of him, placing their hands on his shoulders and his thighs, ready to keep him still.

  ‘I’ll be as quick as I can,’ May tells him. ‘Move out of the light,’ she snaps at the others. ‘We’ve got to get this done before the sun goes down.’

  But she stops, needle poised above the glistening edge of the flesh, and Hayley sees her throat move as she swallows over and over. ‘You can do this.’ Jessa is beside her, her voice low and steady. ‘You are the strongest person I know. You can do this.’

  And before she can change her mind, May has plunged the needle through the first slab of skin and into the other side, her fingers gripping the two pieces together, and pulled the thread tight.

  Brian’s screams are guttural and ragged, quickly giving way to wet, heaving sobs. It’s not until he finally, mercifully passes out from the pain after the third or fourth stitch that Hayley takes a breath and realises she has been biting the inside of her cheek so hard that she can taste blood.

  It’s not pretty. But when May’s finished, the lips of the wound are tightly drawn together, puckered and lumpy. There is a horrible purple bruise blossoming across Brian’s calf, but it’s no longer bleeding, at least. They wrap it tightly in the cleanest T-shirts they can find and elevate it on a pile of stones in an attempt to prevent swelling and keep the wound out of the reach of sand and insects.

  And it isn’t until Hayley’s in bed that night that she hears a sound she never thought she would hear. The quiet, shuddering noise of May, crying into the night.

  DAY 12

  ‘What the hell?’

  Brian has spent most of the day resting by the campfire, carried by the others to a nest of clothes and towels they’ve made up by the fire to keep him warm. But now he’s struggling to prop himself up on one elbow, his voice alight with fury.

  As they crowd around him he extends his outstretched hand, something wet and congealed hanging limply from it.

  ‘What is that?’ May wrinkles her nose: ‘And why does it smell like it’s dead?’

  ‘Because it is!’ Brian storms. ‘It’s a handful of the fish guts we’ve been using for bait. And I just found it in the pocket of my swim shorts.’

  The others look at him, blankly, not understanding.

  ‘Does someone want to tell me why they sent me out to deep water with literal shark chum in my pockets?’

  ‘Woah, woah, calm down,’ Elliot urges. ‘Couldn’t you have left it in your pocket from when you were fishing and forgotten about it?’

  Brian is breathing heavily. He looks like a tethered bull about to rip the ring out of its own nose and go on a rampage. ‘No, I couldn’t. I always bait the hook before I go fishing and I leave the spare bait on the beach. Besides, I wasn’t even wearing these shorts then. I’ve only been wearing them for swimming. Which anybody who had been paying attention knows.’ He glares around furiously, his scowl etched deep into his forehead.

  ‘Enough. Whatever the hell is going on here, it ends now. I could have freaking died.’ His voice is shaking with fury. ‘I still might, if we don’t get out of here soon.’

  There’s deadly silence.

  ‘Whoever you are, this needs to stop. Now. Before anyone else gets badly hurt.’

  ‘We need to know what she wants!’ Jason sounds hysterical, his eyes skittering from one face to the next.’ Whoever’s doing this. And don’t look at me like that, May, because it’s obviously a girl. Everyone who’s been seriously injured is male.’

  ‘Jason,’ May deadpans. You weren’t injured at all. My leech bites hurt worse than your sore feelings after you got scared by a few shards of broken glass.’

  And before Jason can argue, Jessa steps between them, hands raised for calm.

  ‘Jason’s right. We can’t stop it unless we know who’s doing it, and why.’

  ‘What do you want?’ Jason shouts, half laughing, gesturing wildly around the circle. The silence is total. A log hisses and falls inside the centre of the fire and Hayley feels her pulse jump in her throat.

  ‘We don’t know for sure it’s a girl,’ May says, stubbornly. ‘We’ve all had our blood sucked, too, remember. And I was almost given alcohol poisoning.’

  ‘Yeah: I see your leeches and your cocktail afternoon and raise you almost being killed by a damn shark,’ Brian yells, furiously, white flecks of spit flying out of the corner of his mouth.

  ‘We don’t know what species of shark it was,’ Elliot says, in a conciliatory tone. ‘It probably bit you by accident, Brian, because it thought you were a seal or something. If it had really wanted to attack you, you’d be dead. There are actually very few species of sharks that are dangerous to humans in these waters; it might have been a lemon shark or a sand tiger…’

  ‘Or a hammerhead or a blacktip,’ Jason breaks in, angrily. ‘We grew up in Florida too, Elliot. You might know more than most about your little fire-starter tricks, but you’re not the sole authority on sharks.’

  ‘So we’re not doing this any more, okay?’ Jason sounds commanding, but Hayley can hear the frustration in his voice. It’s all very well making angry threats into thin air, but they fall flat when there isn’t any response.

  Hayley closes her eyes and tries to put herself in the shoes of whoever might be doing all this. And even though she isn’t certain, she has a nagging feeling that whoever it is wants something.

  Most of the attacks have had worse psychological than physical effects. If the attacker wanted Elliot dead, they could have finished him off while he was unconscious that night. If they really wanted to hurt Jason, the glass shards could have been used to stab him, not to scare and confuse him. The leeches were more shocking and disgusting than actually harmful. Following the pattern, Hayley decides that the shark bait was meant to create exactly the kind of terror she saw on Brian’s face in the sea, not to cause an actual attack. It’s like somebody is trying to make them understand something, to send them a message.

  If only they had the chance to communicate, Hayley muses as she wanders up the beach. If the person doing all this somehow got what they wanted, the attacks might stop. Suddenly, she is seized by an idea.

  ‘Write it down!’ Her voice comes out breathy and high-pitched, her cheeks flushed. She’s digging frantically in a pile of stuff that’s been left just inside the hollow tube of the plane, re-emerging triumphantly with a ballpoint pen and Elliot’s dog-eared sketchbook. She races back to the group.

  ‘Write. It. Down.’ She repeats, urgently, her eyes shining around the expect
ant faces. ‘I’ll leave the sketchbook out tonight, away from the camp. Whoever is doing this can tell us anything they want. We’ll check the book in the morning. And no tricks. Nobody keeps watch. No handwriting analysis – use block capitals if you like, whatever. Just take the chance to tell us what you want. Or what you want us to know. What we need to do to end this. okay? Please. We’ll do whatever it takes – just tell us what you want.’

  There’s no answer except the incoming tide, which sounds like a mother soothing her baby. Shush. Shush. Shush.

  * * *

  Of course, Hayley keeps watch. She places the sketchbook far down the beach, away from their sleeping places, a good distance from the small glowing circle of sand lit by the campfire. Like the others, she pretends to go to bed, but she waits, lying in the silence of sticks and leaves for what feels like hours, her whole body tingling with excitement and anxiety, until the sky is black as soft velvet. She creeps out quietly, leaving some clothes bundled up in case anybody checks her shelter, then sets off, sneaking along the beach, seeing nobody. In spite of the danger, there’s a small, irrepressible part of her that can’t help bristling with excitement and tingling nerves: her first stakeout.

  The sleeping shelters are dotted along the treeline: anybody who wanted to reach the sketchbook covertly could melt into the trees, make their way through the forest in the darkness and emerge onto the beach further along, unseen and unheard. Hayley continues through the dark gloom of the trees until she is beyond the book, which lies innocently on the sand, just visible in the soft moonlight. She finally emerges when she is level with a big rock, about twenty yards further along the beach, and she rushes to crouch in its shadow. She peeks around the seaward side so she has a good view of the book, but can’t be seen by anyone walking towards it from the trees.

  It takes about half an hour for her electric excitement to fade to a buzz. Then another hour for it to descend into stiff, unrelenting boredom. Her butt feels heavy and numb, her arms ache from pressing against the hard rock and her ankles are being bitten to pieces by sandflies. She shivers, wishing she had brought an extra jumper, and tries to shift her position quietly, lying down uncomfortably on her stomach, sand prickling her elbows.

  After a few hours she feels stupid, freezing and exhausted. Had she really believed that someone who had managed to avoid detection so cleverly this far was going to just walk up and write down a full explanation of their actions?

  Eventually, Hayley feels her eyes closing. She tries to fight it, digging her fingernails into her palms and training her eyes on the shadowy place where she left the sketchbook, but the weight of her tiredness presses gradually and unstoppably down on her until she can’t fight it any longer. With a little sigh, she rests her head in the crook of her elbow and drifts off to sleep.

  * * *

  She wakes at dawn, unused to the thin, early light, her shoulder and hip aching. The beach is deserted. The fire is out, and the trees stand like silent witnesses to a motionless night. Still Hayley races to the sketchbook, grabbing it up and rifling through the pages with trembling fingers, clumsy in their haste. There’s nothing but Elliot’s drawings. A hastily sketched exterior of Oak Ridge, with its imposing bell tower and rolling lawns; a few drawn courtside during practice on tour; one of the squad on the plane just before they crashed. She flicks through it again, more carefully, to be sure. The pages laugh back at her, as smooth and blank as ever. Her heart rate slows to normal. She tucks the dog-eared book under her arm and starts to trudge back towards the camp.

  The sky is fizzing orange at the horizon, fresh dawn waves lapping at the beach. And that’s when she sees it. Letters four-feet high, scraped starkly into the smooth, wet sand.

  JUSTICE.

  DAY 13

  A storm is brewing as they gather in the camp later that morning. The usual cacophony of the birds is strangely absent and the island feels still and silent. An unsettling heat weighs heavy on the camp, the humidity in the air almost beginning to crackle with electricity.

  Hayley is pacing back and forth in front of the white, crusty embers of last night’s fire, running her fingers through her salt-stiffened hair until it stands up wildly, waiting impatiently while the others assemble, some squinting and yawning, some wandering curiously over to examine the word carved into the sand.

  She feels like everything is coming to a head. Finally she has her proof, confirmation that somebody has been trying to tell them something all along. That somebody has been trying to ask them all a question, or to answer one, perhaps.

  ‘Justice?’ Brian yawns widely, his eyes bleary, still sitting in his makeshift bed by the fire where he slept last night. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘No idea, mate.’ Jason shrugs.

  ‘It has to be about the end-of-tour party,’ Hayley bursts out, more loudly than she intended. The others look at her, all except Elliot confused or suspicious. Elliot is quiet and watchful. ‘It just has to be,’ Hayley rushes on.

  ‘Look.’ She points to the word in the sand. ‘My question was “what do you want?” And the answer is: “justice”. We know bad things happened that night. We have to work out who was involved and why.’

  ‘The night of the party?’ May looks slightly panicked. ‘Are you still banging on about that? What makes you so sure that the party has anything to do with this?’

  Hayley takes a deep breath. There’s no byline to hide behind here. She has to speak up, to tell them everything. ‘I’ve been thinking for a while that something must have happened that night but now I know it, and I think you all do too. For one thing, all this only started once we got here. The party was on the last night of the tour. The night before the crash…’ There’s something else, too, something nagging at Hayley’s subconscious. Something in one of the sketches in Elliot’s notebook. She’s missing an answer that’s right there in front of her, but every time she tries to grasp it, it slips further away. ‘It has to be connected. It’s the only thing that makes sense.’

  ‘Except it doesn’t, does it?’ Jessa frowns. ‘If something happened that night and this is about revenge –’ she glances uneasily at the letters on the beach – ‘or, okay, “justice” – they’d be taking it out on the person who’d done that something, surely? But it’s not just one person being attacked here, is it? We’ve all been targeted. We can’t all be guilty, or lying, can we?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Hayley clenches her fists in frustration. ‘I just… somehow I just know it’s all connected. But I can’t prove it because…’ she pauses, awkwardly, her heart racing. ‘Well, because I don’t think any of you have told me the truth about that night. Not all of it anyway. It feels like everybody is hiding something.’ There’s a long silence, and nobody contradicts her. She sees Elliot and Jessa quickly glance at each other and then look away. May is chewing her lip, studying Shannon. Jason and Brian are both determinedly looking down at the sand.

  ‘How can you talk about justice when there’s absolutely nothing just about this situation?’ Brian demands, frowning angrily as he shifts his position and his face creases with pain.

  ‘At least what happened to you wasn’t deliberate,’ Elliot retorts, ‘that stuff was probably just in your pocket by accident.’

  ‘Says the kid who slipped down some rocks and started this whole thing by pretending he was pushed,’ Jason interjects, scathingly.

  ‘According to the guy most likely to have done it,’ Elliot spits angrily back at him.

  ‘I didn’t push you, okay?’ Jason is breathing heavily, his cheeks flushing. ‘Stop putting me on trial!’

  ‘That’s it!’ Hayley yelps, her voice electric with excitement. ‘That’s it. A trial. A trial to get to the bottom of this once and for all. To find out the truth. And to determine justice.’

  ‘Okay, Nancy Drew, what are you suggesting exactly?’ Shannon is sardonic, reclining in the narrow strip of shade thrown by a palm tree, looking supremely unconvinced.

  ‘I think…’ Ha
yley takes a deep breath and tries to sound authoritative. She’s been thinking about this since she first saw the letters scraped angrily into the beach. ‘I think we have to, sort of, testify.’

  ‘Testify?’ May chews a nail anxiously. ‘Testify to what, exactly?’

  ‘What happened that night,’ Hayley lets the words rush out in a jumble, worried that if she doesn’t win them over now her idea will come to nothing. ‘We think we don’t know the answer, but we each have one piece of the puzzle. We each saw different things, did different things at that party. If we put the pieces together, maybe we’ll be able to see the bigger picture.’

  She pauses, twists a foot in the sand, lets the warm grains trickle up soothingly between her toes. She closes her eyes for the briefest moment: she’s on a family holiday, somewhere else, sometime else, relaxed and happy and only worrying about what kind of pizza to order for lunch.

  Her eyes snap open and she takes a deep breath – ‘I think, somehow, if we all try and work out what happened, we might be able to offer it. Justice, I mean. To whoever is asking for it. We work out what happened, we each admit the part we played that night and we come to a group decision. If someone is guilty, we admit that. We all agree. Like a jury. Maybe that will offer a kind of closure.’

  The tide is still coming in, little rivulets of swirling, foamy water sliding into the grooves of the letters, already smoothing and flattening their edges, preparing to erase them completely.

  ‘Sounds like you know an awful lot about what this mystery person wants,’ Jason says, eyeing Hayley suspiciously as he tears the flesh away from a mango stone. There is a large, stringy piece stuck between his front teeth, and it waggles up and down when he talks. ‘How do we know you’re not just trying to orchestrate your own weird revenge “trial”, Hayley?’