Savages

by Shirley Conran

  They took him to his hut and laid him on the bamboo bed. Jonathan’s blue eyes stared upward—they couldn’t make the eyelids stay shut.

  As soon as it was light enough to see, they lugged the stores back up the cliff, then gathered yellow orchids and arranged them around Jonathan’s body, carefully heaping the blossoms over the muscular brown arms which now lay folded upon his breast. The flowers heaped around his bearded face had looked ludicrously unsuitable, so they removed them.

  Eventually Annie wiped her nose on the back of her hand and said, “We’ll have to bury him quickly. You know what the meat smells like if we leave it for a day. Otherwise the rats will get him.”

  “He’d want to be buried at sea,” Suzy said.

  “We’ve nothing to bury him in,” said Annie. “I think you have to sew a body up in a bag and weight it down, or it floats. The lagoon’s too shallow, and they’d see us doing it. We’ll come back later and bury him at sea, properly.”

  Silvana nodded. “A Viking funeral.”

  They considered burning him on a funeral pyre, but nobody could bring herself to do it—to light the fire and watch him burn, and risk the fire going out and having to start it again, and feeling Jonathan’s ashes blowing in their faces. So they decided to hollow out a grave with coconut shells and bury him with his clothes on, because they couldn’t bear to take them off.

  They chose a small grove of evergreen canaga trees, because it was near Annie’s prayer place and Jonathan had loved the strong fragrance of the slim, long-petaled yellow blossoms, which flowered for most of the year.

  Annie knelt by the grave and crossed herself, trying to fight down the sorrow and bitterness that welled once again in her heart as she remembered the past few days.

  At the graveside, Annie emptied Jonathan’s pockets. She handed the key ring with the carved shark’s tooth to Suzy, who also got the tiny compass on a thong that he’d worn around his neck. Silvana was given Jonathan’s fish knife. His underwater watch went to Carey. Annie said, “I’ll take his Swiss army knife. Patty can have his cigarette lighter and the rifle.”

  Then they lowered him into the grave. There was a fresh outbreak of crying, for nobody wanted to cover him with earth. They all knew what would happen to the decomposing body. Once it was buried, it would quickly be consumed.

  Afterward, as they stumbled back to the camp, the women realized for the first time that now they had only themselves to depend upon.

  Annie insisted that they eat, so Silvana quickly made a soup of dried fish boiled in water and they forced it down. It tasted disgusting.

  That night they all slept in the first hut because nobody wanted to sleep in the hut where Jonathan had lain.

  Silvana slept with her arms around Annie. They clung to each other out of loneliness.

  Annie thrust her hand in her pocket and felt Jonathan’s knife. She felt his strength as she touched his possession, and it comforted her. She whispered, “Please help us, Jonathan. Please tell us what to do.”

  She seemed to hear a voice at the back of her head say, “You ain’t had the benefit of my lack of education, but by now I expect you to think for yourselves. You know what I want you to do. Make another raft, fast.”

  * * *

  Two mornings after Jonathan’s death, Annie woke feeling as if a heavy weight lay on her chest. Sleepily she thought, You really do feel emotion physically in the area of your heart.

  The weight shifted slightly. Annie felt the warm, furry body through her shirt, followed by a sharp bite on her left breast.

  There was a scrabble of claws, a sharp yelp and the furry weight—all twelve pounds of it—lay limp on her stomach.

  Annie screamed and leaped from her bamboo bed.

  “Got it!” Patty said triumphantly. “The rats were under your bed all night. Must have been a wedding.”

  Annie said crossly, “You might have hit me with that stone.”

  “These days I don’t miss,” Patty said smugly. She flung another stone at the corner of the hut, stood up and pulled on her fishing gloves. She picked up a knife and swiftly slit the throat of the stunned rat.

  “Where is everyone?” Annie asked. The sun was up. She had overslept.

  “Carey’s on guard and Suzy’s weeping away by the fire. I told her it’s no use crying, we’re on our own.” Patty scowled to fight her tears. “Silvana’s gone tide-pooling for crabs and oysters. It’s low tide and we have no fresh food, only goddamned dried fish slivers.” She wiped the blood from her knife. “Rat stew this evening!”

  Since the rats had become so aggressive, Annie slept in all her clothes, even her sneakers. She rolled up her bed and hurried outside, where she found Suzy squatting before the fire, her head in her hands.

  Big, green, red-rimmed eyes looked up at Annie. “I feel so frightened,” Suzy said. “Much more than before.”

  “We all do. It’s not surprising. But nothing’s changed in the jungle. It’s no more frightening than it was a couple of days ago. You only feel that it is.” Annie patted Suzy’s shoulder. “Look around. Everything’s the same. The fear is imaginary, it’s in your head, Suzy. Don’t allow it to grow.”

  * * *

  To the north of the lagoon, the sea drew back from the black mangrove roots to reveal a black, bubbling slime, from which small crabs scuttled toward the receding safety of the water. To the south of the lagoon, Silvana waded beneath the morning sun, moving carefully around the glistening rocks, thrusting her three-foot-wide, wooden-ended net downward. This was the best time to catch shrimp, during the last couple of hours of the ebb tide when the shrimp were trapped in small rock pools and it was simple to scoop them up with the hand net.

  Following the tide out, Silvana pushed the net beneath the clumps of submerged seaweed that clung to the rocks. With a quick up-and-back shaking movement she would pull the net from the water, inspect it, then transfer the shrimp to the canvas bag hanging from a shoulder strap across her body. It was hard work, but Silvana had acquired the knack of doing it, and it was a good way to get a heap of shrimp not only for supper, but also to use as bait.

  The heavy net started to tire her arms, so she headed back to shore and laid it on the beach. She took out Jonathan’s stubby-bladed fish knife and started to prize shellfish off the underwater rocks, then drop them into her fish bag. With her right hand, she inserted the thin side of the blade beneath the shell and twisted it around so that the thick, chiseled edge of the blade was uppermost as she prized open the lips of a shell. After rounding the end of the shell, she would suddenly feel the mollusk yield to her knife, and know she had severed the muscle which had been keeping the shell tightly closed, and that it would now be easy to open to get at the flesh.

  When her fish bag was nearly full, the tide started to turn. Silvana stood upright, stretched and decided to stop.

  Then she spotted, below the surface of the water, a huge shell almost hidden by black seaweed. She had never seen such a big one; it was a meal in itself, she thought, as she knelt down and inserted the end of the knife blade. She’d never met such a stubborn shell either, she decided, after a few minutes.

  Suddenly the shell gave way. With her left hand Silvana grasped the upper half to wrench it from the rock. With astonishing speed the shell clamped shut on her index finger.

  Silvana jumped and let go of Jonathan’s knife, which flew in an arc through the air before splashing into the water. She bent down and tried to reach the knife, but it was about six inches behind her grasp.

  The shell hurt Silvana’s finger. Santa Madonna! With her right hand she felt in her bag and fumbled for a small clam, then groped below the water and tried to lever open the shell that was holding her prisoner, but without success.

  Silvana looked out to sea. The tide had now turned and was rushing back into the lagoon. Because she had been kneeling to get her knife under the huge shell, her head was about thirty inches above the water. Quickly, she calculated. The tide rose and fell about three feet in the lago
on. When the water rose, it would close over her head and she would drown unless she could free herself.

  She bent down and tried again to reach her knife. She could see it, shimmering silver in the water, and unobtainable. She tried again, with different shells from her bag, to prize open the one that held her prisoner in such pain.

  Silvana started to scream.

  There was no response and Silvana realized that she was too far down the beach for the camp lookout to hear her, otherwise someone would have come by now. The water reached her clavicle and gently lapped at her throat. She was astonished by the relentless tenacity of the shellfish, which had been gripping her finger for nearly two hours.

  She had shouted in bouts, to save her voice. Now, hoarsely, she called once more. She waved her right arm, without much hope.

  “Silvana … ?” Patty called, puzzled. She couldn’t hear Silvana, but from the cliff she could see the hand waving out of the sea.

  Suddenly realizing that Silvana was trapped, Patty flung herself down the cliff path, thinking, Please God, don’t let it be an octopus!

  By the time Patty reached her, the water was lapping over Silvana’s chin. Silvana gasped, “I dropped my knife. Can’t get my finger out … For God’s sake, don’t wait!”

  Patty peered underwater. “I’ll fetch a hammer.”

  “No time. My knife is over there—to the right. Get it!”

  Patty waded over and retrieved the knife. “I’m not good at this, but let me try—just once—to open this shell.”

  She tried to cut the muscle that held the mollusk closed.

  Silvana screamed in pain, frustration and terror. Patty again attacked the shell. Surely a good knife ought to open it? But it didn’t.

  Suddenly, in a calm voice, Silvana said, “Cut the finger off, fast.”

  Patty looked sick. “I can’t.”

  Silvana said, “I’ve already figured out how. If you won’t do it, give me the knife and I will. Otherwise I’ll drown.”

  “I can’t,” Patty said miserably.

  Silvana pleaded, “For years you played nurse back in Pittsburgh! Now it’s real, Patty. You can’t be a coward now, or I’ll die. Cut it off, Patty!”

  But Patty couldn’t.

  “You phony Florence Nightingale!” Silvana shrieked. “Give me that knife!”

  Patty handed it to her and fled.

  Silvana hacked at her finger until the flesh was ragged and bleeding, but because of her awkward position, trapped in a crouch, she had no leverage. Red threads of her blood floated in the water as she sobbed with pain.

  She heard cries and looked up. She was not going to die alone. Annie and Patty were running along the sand toward her.

  Silvana slipped and for a moment her face went beneath the water. As the trapped woman regained her balance, Annie whipped out her knife, and peered through the water, trying to remember what to do. It had to be a clean cut; the artery would glue up if it was a clean cut. There would be plenty of blood and Silvana would feel great pain, but Annie knew she had to concentrate on making a fast, clean cut just above the first knuckle. The knife wasn’t sterilized, so the wound would have to be cauterized later. She hoped Silvana would faint.

  Annie bent down and gripped Silvana’s wrist under the water. She gave several taps with her knife to the place on the finger where she was going to cut; she was checking for displacement of water which might make her stroke inaccurate.

  Unhurried, concentrating, gazing at the bleeding gash where she intended to cut, Annie lifted her knife and struck down, as hard as she could.

  * * *

  That evening, at sunset, they brought Silvana’s bamboo bed out of the hut and laid it beside the campfire. Silvana was pale and clammy, and her breathing was harsh. Her amputated finger had been bandaged with strips of rag, sterilized by boiling them in seawater. The sickening agony had passed, leaving her weak and exhausted, but the pain wouldn’t let up, wouldn’t allow her to sleep.

  Annie lifted Silvana’s legs and placed them higher than her head on a pile of firewood. She gave her sips of hot water and gently reassured her.

  Two hours later, they were all still arguing about what they should do next. Suzy was scared of putting to sea without Jonathan. She thought it was worth risking one of the group to see if they could bribe the Katanga chief to seek help for them.

  Which one?

  Draw lots.

  Patty said, “If I drew the shortest grass, I still won’t go. It’s crazy to think of calmly walking into a cannibal village after we’ve been crashing all over their sacred site and asking them to lend us a couple of dugout canoes in exchange for a penknife.”

  “But they want us to leave!” Suzy argued.

  Patty said, “Okay, then you go ask them for help.”

  In a weak voice, Silvana pointed out that they were now well organized in the jungle. It was only when they were careless that they found themselves in immediate danger. Sure, they’d had a few problems, but think of all the problems they hadn’t had.

  They all nodded. They knew the dangers that had been avoided. Nobody had been bitten by a snake or paralyzed by a stonefish. Nobody had stood on a stingray and been stabbed by its tail. Nobody had encountered a box jellyfish—although those were responsible for more deaths than the sharks. Nobody had even seen a crocodile.

  Patty said, “Jonathan taught us how to survive.”

  “They why don’t we stick it out, until after the terrorists have stopped fighting? They can’t go on forever,” Silvana said. “Why don’t we wait until another pleasure boat passes the bay, or comes into it for a picnic the way we did? Then we can ask the captain to take us back to Queenstown. We could telephone the Sydney office, and we might be in Australia within twenty-four hours.”

  Patty said unhappily, “I don’t know what I want to do.”

  Annie found that hard to believe. Patty just didn’t want the responsibility for making a suggestion that might be a failure.

  Annie said, “I don’t think we should wait for Prince Charming to sail by. I want to build another raft. We’ve done it before, so we can do it again.”

  “Sure,” said Suzy. “That way, we can become experts. We could end up winning prizes for raft-making at this rate.”

  Carey said, “I agree with Annie. We should build another raft, as fast as we can. Silvana can do full-time lookout duty because she can’t do anything else.” She tried to keep the resentment from her voice. They were all as angry with Silvana for incapacitating herself as they had been with Suzy, whose carelessness had started the sequence of events that led to Jonathan’s death.

  Squatting in the firelight, they no longer looked like women but like scrawny scarecrows. Their unkempt hair framed lined, brown faces, in which the eyes stared from sunken sockets; none of them carried a spare ounce of fat. Only Silvana and Suzy still had pronounced breasts, and each woman’s skin was now slack. They looked alert, but there was a relaxed air about them.

  The metamorphosis from those women in their colorful beach clothes who had climbed onto the spotless deck of the Louise was not only physical. Nearly four months of basic survival living had altered their outlook, and none of them would ever be the same again, Annie thought as she looked around the firelit circle.

  Four months ago timid, self-effacing Annie could not have voiced and upheld an unpopular opinion, and neither could the passive and permanently depressed Silvana. Patty now had to face the fact that when it came to the crunch, she was a coward, and this had nearly cost Silvana her life. Big, calm Carey was now fiercely protective of Suzy, and was clearly ready to attack Patty physically if she gave any more trouble.

  They had all come to understand that Suzy’s apparent selfishness had been defensive armor. Looking at scraggy Suzy’s dirty face, Annie doubted whether Suzy would ever again attach as much importance to her appearance as before.

  Instead of their Pittsburgh surface friendliness, their feelings were now deep and passionate. Silvana, Carey and Suzy
would have nothing to do with Patty. Patty pretended not to care; she tried to be pleasant to Annie—helping her with small jobs, offering to take her turn at lookout. Warily, Annie refused her offers. She didn’t want the women to allow their emotions to divide them into two factions when they were at their most vulnerable. They now had no man to help them, to fall back on, or to blame.

  Crouching, Annie said, “From now on, we can’t afford to quarrel. We must all work as a team, to do what we have to do.”

  “Well, what do we have to do?” Carey said.

  Annie said, “Whatever we decide to do, we must stick to it. We can’t stop and argue all the time, the way we’ve been doing this evening.”

  “Maybe we need a leader?” Carey suggested.

  The others all immediately disagreed.

  “None of us are leaders, we’re not like Isabel,” said Suzy, breaking the taboo on mentioning their dead.

  Carey said, “I don’t mean a president or a gang boss, I don’t mean someone who orders us around. I mean someone who clarifies aims and jobs and opinions—a sort of nonvoting chairman.”

  Patty said nastily, “I suppose you want to be leader.”

  “Hell, no,” Carey said. “I don’t want you all blaming me whenever things go wrong. I don’t want to be the fall guy. Maybe we should take turns being leader?”

  “For how long?” Silvana asked. “Isn’t it a little pointless to take turns, when we’re such a small group? When our lives are at stake, surely we should have the most suitable person as our permanent leader.”

  “Who’s suitable?” Patty asked. “Who’s got the forceful magnetism, cool courage and that sort of shit to be our Joan of Arc?”

  Carey said, “We need someone who can listen to everyone’s ideas, summarize the situation and then decide what to do.”

  Annie nodded. “Someone who can assess our strengths and weaknesses with tact.”

  “And never insist on more than we’re capable of,” Suzy suggested.

  “Someone who can encourage us,” Silvana added. “Someone whom we can all trust.”

  So they voted. Nobody wanted remote Silvana or sharp-tongued, bitchy Suzy, who was always flying off the handle. Patty was neurotic and too impulsive for safety. She’d certainly make the best fighter, but maybe not the best thinker. Carey was a possibility, but she still see-sawed between aggressiveness and timidity and you never knew which mood would be next, and her practicality and discipline irritated Silvana and Patty, who interpreted this as bossiness.