“It’s not important,” Annie said. “Suzy has her neck-thong compass.”
But Suzy couldn’t find it.
Carey looked at her wrist. Jonathan’s watch was still ticking away. She said, “Your Swatchwatch still working, Patty?”
Patty nodded and looked at the dial. “Thursday, March fourteenth, five past six.” She shook her right hand. Burned by the rocket, it throbbed painfully. “But we have no idea where we are.”
Annie said, “We can steer by the sun, our watches and the stars.”
“We can’t steer,” Patty said crossly. “When you dumped the outboard, you also dumped our rudder. We’re drifting. We’re helpless.” She blew on her burned hand, which seemed to soothe it.
“We can tie an oar to that ring on the back of the boat,” Annie suggested, “and use it as a rudder.”
From her pocket Suzy pulled off the lid of the lemon-drop tin and reported, “We also have two gold watches that don’t work, three engagement rings and five wedding rings.”
“Maybe we can use them as bait,” Patty said.
“After breakfast,” Annie decided. “Use the rifle butt to smash the coconut, Silvana. Suzy, collect the milk in the bailer.”
Having swallowed a great deal of saltwater during the night, the women were very thirsty. One water container was quickly emptied, as they ate the coconut. They all knew that anyone stranded with only a little water should immediately ration it and drink nothing for the first day while the body lived off the water stored in its tissues.
“Four pints isn’t going to last long,” Patty said again. Jonathan had told them that a healthy person could live up to thirty days without food, but without water he or she could only live a maximum of ten days, in ideal conditions—and far less in the tropics. “After two or three days without water, we’ll become delirious, then die,” she said flatly.
“Cheerful, aren’t you?” Suzy said. “We do have some water.” She looked down at her fingers, the tips of which were wrinkled like walnuts.
“We needn’t worry about it for four days,” Suzy said. They each needed a pint of water a day to keep fit—but they could survive on a total of one pint a day, rationed among the five of them. As there had always been plenty of fresh water at the camp, the discipline of water rationing had not been imposed on them.
“You mustn’t move about much,” Suzy warned, “or you’ll lose sweat. Douse your clothes with seawater to keep cool and avoid sunburn, but don’t hang your legs overboard because of sharks and barracuda. Let your clothes dry before sunset or you’ll catch a chill. Sleep as much as you can.”
“Didn’t Jonathan also say something about food?” Carey asked.
Suzy nodded. “Digestion uses water, so the less drinking water you have, the less you should eat. Count two parts food to one part water.”
“That’s fairly easy to arrange,” Carey said bitterly.
Nobody laughed. Nobody had said anything to Silvana about leaving the locker catch undone. They all remembered how difficult it had been to move during that raging black storm. Nevertheless, each woman felt that, had she shut the locker, the catch would not have come undone. They also remembered that Silvana had been responsible for letting Carlos escape. They conveniently forgot the mistakes and wrong decisions that each of them had made during the last four months.
“You mustn’t drink urine,” Suzy continued, “because it makes you more thirsty. So does seawater. Seawater aggravates your thirst and dehydrates you. You get delirious, then you die.”
Carey said, “If you get thirsty, suck a button; it makes you salivate.”
They sat in glum silence, until Annie said brusquely, “Two-hour watches, southeast course. Patty takes first watch. Suzy and Carey, start fishing, fast.”
“We lost the tackle overboard,” Suzy said.
“Unravel the boot laces,” Annie suggested. “Make a line of them. Try smoked fish for bait. Or a diamond engagement ring—the sparkle might attract something.”
Patty said, “Hey, we need the smoked fish.”
“Not unless we have a pint of water each,” Suzy said. “So it’s best to use it as bait—fast, before we’re forced to eat it.”
Suzy was soon fishing from the bow, using two hooks improvised out of sharp slivers from the empty bamboo containers. One was tied to a diamond ring, the other was concealed in a bit of smoked fish.
Crouched in the middle of the boat, Annie and Silvana made head coverings, to shield them from the sun. Each woman hacked off the bottom of her tunic, then Annie carefully pulled threads from the fabric to sew with. Silvana made needles by piercing slivers of bamboo with a knife tip to form the eye. Each three-foot length of khaki cotton was cut in half, sewn together so that it was eighteen inches wide—about the size of a hand towel, then halved and sewn into a bag. Annie draped each hood over Silvana’s head, to position the eye slits and attach rattan ties. “We look like the Ku Klux Klan,” Suzy said.
As the day grew hotter, the glare from the sea gave them all a headache, and they were grateful for the head hoods. Carey appointed herself in charge of the bailer and regularly doused everybody with seawater. The sea was no cooler than lukewarm—sluggish, not very refreshing, and smelling strangely stale. The humidity was over 80 percent. There was no wind and no movement around the exhausted occupants of the tiny dinghy, only that searing arc of orange overhead, indifferent to their misery.
Carey supposed that the boat moved, but it made no discernible progress; it seemed to hang, helpless, on the motionless, silent blue ocean.
By midday Carey’s eyes hurt badly. She felt nauseous and the jungle ulcers on her legs were throbbing more than usual, perhaps because of their prolonged immersion in seawater during the night.
“Got a bite!” Suzy reeled in and landed a nine-inch dark brown sea snake.
“Watch out!” Patty warned. “They’re dangerous.” In silence they all watched the repulsive, wriggling beast.
“I’ll use it as bait,” Suzy said. With her fish knife, she briskly sliced the snake. “Now you can have your engagement ring back, Carey.”
Shortly afterward, Suzy directed Patty toward a patch of seaweed. When they reached it, she carefully hauled every scrap aboard, saying, “You’ll have to imagine that you’re in a sushi bar.”
Annie said, “Check that it’s fresh. If it’s slimy or limp or smells fishy, we shouldn’t eat it. Rub a little between your fingers, to check that it doesn’t smell of acid.”
Suzy inspected the seaweed and shook a few small creatures from it. “More bait! I’ll cut it into strips.”
Annie said, “We should try to trap a bird, if we see one. With a snare.”
Suzy looked dubious. “Do you think any bird would be crazy enough to get near enough for us to slip a noose over its head?”
Carey held her head in both hands. She gasped, “God, it’s hot! I have to lie down, Annie, just for ten minutes. Will you take my line, Silvana?”
Carefully, Carey positioned herself full length in the boat, with her body under the center seat and her head in the shade under the stern transom, between Patty’s feet. Silvana and Annie hunched on the center transom. Suzy leaned with her back against the forward locker. The clothes, boots and weird headhoods of the women made them hotter, but protected them from the glare of the sun and the reflected glare off the water. Annie wouldn’t allow anyone to remove her life jacket.
The heat, Annie thought, was like opening a stove with your face too close to the door. They huddled in the boat, longing for dusk when the merciless sun would drop out of sight behind the horizon and release them from that torturous white glare.
Suzy said, “Imagine, last night we were throwing rainwater out of this boat as fast as we could. Do you think it’ll rain again tonight?”
“There’s a good chance,” said Carey. “We’ve had two storms in two days. Why should tonight be different?”
Each woman slept fitfully in the early morning, a brief escape from the relentless su
n. That afternoon Silvana caught three small, flat white fish. The women wolfed them down raw, including scales and slime. They kept the bones to suck, the eyes and entrails to use as bait.
The sea and the sky remained empty.
At four o’clock, each woman drank a single mouthful of water. Carey still lay, apologetically, in the bottom of the boat, where she was damped regularly by Suzy.
In the bow, Silvana jumped. “Filio di putona! A shark just pulled the line from my hand!” She looked ruefully at the burn mark on her palm. “It was so unexpected! And quick!”
“He’s not alone.” Annie nodded at the sea behind them. Three large, black, triangular fins could be seen above the water.
Suzy said, “We’ve got ourselves an escort.”
Annie sighed. “No hands over the side. We’d better stop fishing.”
On the still sea, the boat lay motionless and helpless. Nothing moved. Not the slightest breath of wind ruffled the surface of the ocean, which shone like a gun barrel in the glare. There was nothing in sight, just that white-hot circle overhead, burning slowly from one side to the other of the flat, black, glittering ocean, broken only by the sharks’ fins cutting lazily through the water.
Suzy asked, “What time is it?”
Patty snapped, “It’s ten minutes later than the last time you asked. What the hell does it matter? You can watch the sun, can’t you? Knowing what time it is won’t make the sun go down faster.”
Huddled in the dinghy, the women moved as little as possible, because the gunwales of the now-lightened boat were still only six inches above the water.
The sun beat orange-red through Carey’s closed eyelids, and her temples throbbed to a steady beat. There was no sound except that of the sea gently slapping the hull.
“Carey, it’s your turn on watch,” Annie said. She’d considered letting Carey off, but had a nasty feeling that they might all be similarly inert within twenty-four hours and she didn’t want to set a precedent.
Carey pulled herself up with difficulty and stared at the water. “They’re waiting for the picnic,” she said thickly.
Seven dorsal fins now surrounded the boat, all swimming at the same slow, steady speed.
“That one to the left must be twenty feet long, maybe more,” Carey said. “He’s easily twice as long as this boat.”
“They won’t bother us if we don’t do anything.” Annie sounded more sure than she felt. “They’re just curious. They won’t attack us if we don’t provoke them, and if there’s no blood.”
All the women knew their shark drill. If you found yourself in the water with a shark, you didn’t splash and you moved as slowly as possible or your vibrations would attract the shark’s attention. You didn’t try to swim away, because you’d never move fast enough to escape a shark; a shark’s top speed was over sixty-three feet a second. Jonathan had drilled them never to evacuate in the sea, and never to enter the water if they were bleeding from any cuts or at the time of their menstrual cycle—because sharks love blood. They can scent it from a great distance, and their blood lust drives them to a feeding frenzy.
The boat suddenly jerked into the air.
“The bastard bumped us!” Carey yelled.
The stern jerked up again. As the boat tipped to starboard, Carey grabbed the top of the oar with both hands and rammed it down over the stern as hard as she could.
“Ha! I hit the bastard!”
“Carey, put down that oar!” Annie called out sharply. “Sit down here with us, or they’ll all bump us. Carey! … Suzy, stop her!”
Suzy scrambled to the stern, grabbed Carey around the waist and pulled her backward. As Carey crashed down on top of Suzy, the oar flew over the back of her head, hit Annie, then went flying overboard.
“Leave it!” Annie yelled, clapping her hand to her eye. The oar was tethered to the dinghy.
Carey started to cry.
Suzy said, “Annie, is your eye …?”
Annie said, “It doesn’t matter, really.”
Carey snapped, “Oh, stop being so saintly, Annie. It’s driving me crazy.”
Annie said, “It’s all right, I understand.”
Carey burst out, “And stop being so goddamned understanding!”
“Stop this!” Silvana cried, so loudly that they all turned in surprise. “We’re all on edge, because of our thirst, because of this dreadful sun and those villiaccos.” She swore again as she pointed to the glistening black fins stalking the dinghy. “We all know how to survive in the jungle, but we know nothing about the sea. So we must learn. We’ve done so much already. We must now do a little bit more.”
“We’ll have another sip of water,” Annie decided. “Let’s try to hang on—and shut up—until sunset. Then we’ll be able to think better, decide what to do.”
“Do we have any choice?” Patty said.
“You know there’s always a choice,” Annie said shortly.
After sunset, in the few minutes before dark, the women drank a little more water.
They all knew what it’s like to feel thirsty, but they had never imagined the physical agony of dying of thirst. It was a raging, maddening desire that consumed the mind. The pain of hunger had passed, but the agony of thirst got steadily worse. On the tropical sea, they breathed in hot air, and as their faces were covered with hoods, they breathed out hotter air. Their throats were dry, their swelling tongues were thick in their mouths, their lips started to crack and so did their voices. The merciless sun slowly robbed them of their will and their humanity, leaving them nothing but an exhausted body that longed only for water: they could—literally—think about nothing else. Worse still, they were surrounded by temptation, but they knew that the punishment was absolute and inexorable. If you drink saltwater, you die fairly fast and in agony.
Annie saw to it that they drank their water ration very slowly, using the water only to moisten their lips and throats, then gargling it before swallowing.
The ate a little fish, then they lay inert in the boat and stared up at the moon.
“Maybe we should keep ourselves awake as long as possible at night,” Silvana suggested. “Then we will sleep by day, and avoid the torture of the sun.”
In an effort to distract themselves, they recalled their favorite smells. This started off well enough with pinewoods, wet roses and mown hay, but when Annie wistfully said “baby hair,” Silvana started to cry.
Patty flung a sinewy arm around Silvana, and the silence was broken only by the gentle lap of the waves, as the women fought back tears. They had set out so well equipped, and with such high hopes. Now they had next to nothing—hardly even hope.
Crouching in the stern, Carey felt ashamed. She burst out, “How did this happen? How can we have fallen apart in only twenty-four hours?”
FRIDAY, MARCH 15
At sunrise on their second day at sea, there were only three pints of water left. The day followed the same pattern as the previous one, except that Annie kept to their strict ration of water.
Suddenly Suzy screamed, “I can’t stand this anymore! I can’t stand this stiff-upper-lip stuff! Don’t you all realize that this time, we really are going to die? We’re going to be eaten by those goddamn sharks!” She pointed wildly to the black fins that surrounded the dinghy.
“She’s right,” Silvana sobbed. “I can’t take any more either! I just want to go to sleep and never wake up!” She shook her fists at the sky and shrieked, “How much more can we take? How much more do we have to suffer? Why?”
“Shut up!” Carey croaked. “Save your strength. Save your voice. Don’t waste your saliva.”
“Carey’s right,” Patty gasped. “Every move you make now will shorten your life.”
“Think about your children,” Annie urged. “Think of your families. Don’t give up!”
All day they sweltered, becalmed under a blazing sun. As they grew weaker and more enervated, they were all also plagued by throbbing headaches and waves of nausea.
They ate the
last of the fish and most of the seaweed. They dared not fish again, for fear of attracting the closer attention of the sharks that swam beside the boat. They huddled together, waiting only for the sun to drop out of sight. Heat had driven the life from their bones.
Below the boat, the sea looked green and blue, deep and cool, inviting as an April stream. With her chin on the gun-wale, Suzy gazed into the depths of the ocean.
“Don’t look down,” Carey said, tugging at Suzy’s pants. “Your turn to lie flat.”
Suzy took her turn in the bottom of the boat, while Carey listlessly replaced Patty. There was no need to steer; the boat floated obediently on the flat water. Occasionally Carey skulled over the stern to get it moving slightly and correct their course. Disturbing its own reflection, the boat glided through the water and its image broke into a thousand pieces.
The women waited for sunset, the dark, and their water ration.
Blood orange, the sun fell toward the horizon. A glittering crimson path shimmered from it to the dinghy across the mirrored surface of the sea.
That evening, it was harder for them to talk. They wanted to talk in order to keep awake, but their lips were cracked and bleeding, and anyway they had nothing to say to each other.
Talk petered out half an hour after sunset.
Patty said bitterly, “Well, Carey, now we’re totally self-reliant. How do you like it?”
“You know this isn’t what I meant by self-reliance,” Carey said.
Patty said tartly, “If this isn’t, I don’t know what is.”
“Go on, Carey,” Patty taunted. “Tell us how inner strength and self-confidence are going to help us out of this mess.”
Carey said crossly, “Self-confidence is simply knowing what you’ve been capable of in the past, so you’re pretty certain you can deal with that sort of situation in the future. And it’s also being prepared to stick your neck out just a bit farther. If you can swim a hundred yards, then you can probably swim much farther, and if it’s vital for you to swim half a mile, then you probably will.”
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