Blessed Isle

by Alex Beecroft

He had not re-opened his eyes. “My head hurts,” he said. “The light is too bright.”

  I used to be a steady sort of man, but Garnet has always had this ability to tip me from overweening joy to despair and back again. I left the creature flapping in the bilges and pressed my hand to his face. He all but scorched me.

  Savagely, I shoved back the wool of his coat, the loosened neck of his shirt, and saw the fierce red blush where no sunburn should be. There on the hot, smooth flesh stood out the little mottled circles of typhus.

  I’m told Job in his trial never once sinned by being angry with God. I was not so restrained. I stood by the mast and screamed my voice hoarse at Him, shaking my fist at the heavens and dredging up every obscenity from my childhood I had ever carefully purged from my speech. There came no reply, and in the end Garnet had to beg me to stop, for I was making his headache worse.

  I sat down again, squashed flat like an ant under a man’s foot. I was no doctor, and even if I were, I had no medicines. I had nowhere to go. The storm had thrown me off my reckoning so far I had no hope of guessing our longitude. The empty ocean stretched out from horizon to horizon, featureless, and I knew the islands on which I pinned my hope were scattered in the Southern Ocean like a handful of sixpences on a desert of white sand. Should the wind blow one degree this way, or that, we might pass by them without even seeing them, blow onwards, adrift, a funeral barge under a black sky full of the points of teeth.

  Looking back on it now, it occurs to me that I too may well have been delirious from the heat. It seemed such a relief to give up, and yet I was weeping as I tied off the sail, put a hitch round the rudder and made as comfortable a pallet for us both as I could out of rope and our coats. I lay down there. There seemed a ceremony to it, as a woman of India lies on the pyre of her husband, perhaps not willing, but resigned to being consumed by fire together with her beloved. Gathering Garnet’s lithe frame into my arms, I pressed my wet cheek against his forehead to cool him. He lifted his chin, instinctively offering a kiss. His mouth was dry, his lips hot and rough. His breath against my face came in short bursts of fire. “Hate you,” he said. “All this time . . . You have to pick now. I’m too tired.”

  “Ssh,” I said, “go to sleep.” It must have been the end of everything, because there was such a feeling of rightness, of coming home, simply to lie there with his skin against mine, our breath mingling, our hearts slowly coming into time with one another. I closed my eyes and waited for the end.

  Let no one say death comes on demand. I woke suddenly, as if, at some instinctual level, I recognised a change. The oars dug me in the back, and my chest and thighs were damp from being pressed against Garnet’s blazing heat. An urgency had me by the heart, but it had not reached my mind. Damn it! I thought, You weren’t supposed to wake up afterwards! But I disentangled myself nevertheless and crawled back to the stern to look out.

  Night had fallen and the cool refreshed me. The sea ran on with barely a swell: a long, idle, rolling motion, smooth and black. Above us shone a spill of stars, pale gold and silver and white. I thought they twinkled. But something about that flicker kept me braced against the gunwale, gazing up. Was there a sound? A peeping? A low, restless whirring noise?

  Yes! Yes, there was!

  I bit down on my lower lip and the cracked flesh parted. Blood oozed out, salty and thick as I peered up into fitful darkness. I caught fluttering, clapping, clicking noises, an impression of swooping. Birds! And not gulls. These were a great flock of tiny, black, plover-like birds: the kind that makes their nests ashore.

  I took the tiller in my hand, the ropes of the sail in the other, and turned up into the wind to follow them.

  Hours passed. I feared for Garnet, but I knew his best hope lay in finding land, where I could find him shelter and fresh water. Medicine even, God willing.

  The birds, flying fast against the wind, scudded away before me until I could no longer even guess at them. My heart failed, but I held my course, and then, two or three hours later, I felt that unexplainable sensation a sailor gets when there is land nearby. For me it is a kind of jangle of the nerves and a breathlessness. The water feels shallow beneath me and the waves feel wrong. The air hangs heavy as though in an old, unopened room.

  The sky had turned to slate, grey-blue in the east, and sunlight filtered upwards through the sea like a candle in too thick a green glass lantern. I muffled my breathing behind my hand, strained my ears and heard it: surf. The long, uninterrupted swells of Oceania breaking on a distant shore.

  “Garnet!” I cried, nudging him with my foot. He rolled side to side limply and I, with my heartbeat held in suspense, hunkered down and shook him violently by the shoulder. “Garnet, wake up! That’s an order, Lieutenant. Help me find the land!”

  His eyes were half open, a slit of white eyeball beneath the fringe of dark lashes. But he clung to life still. He gave a little mutter, and his pulse raced visibly in his scarlet throat. I caught up the bailing bucket, filled it in the sea—the sound of breakers growing stronger in the tricky pewter twilight of dawn—and dashed the water over his face.

  Several doctors have since told me I might as well have stabbed him in the heart. The fever should be encouraged to grow and reach its climax, I now understand. This sudden cooling might have proved catastrophic. But he looked so hot, so sunken away where I couldn’t reach him, and I wanted him to wake.

  Well, I’ll know next time if, Heaven forfend, there should be a next time. I could not check to see what damage I’d done, for as I knelt there, the sun came up and the wind freshened. The boom of the sail creaked around above my head and, as I caught it, I saw over the deep dark blue of the sea a line of turquoise more vivid than the gem. Breakers dazzled in the newly minted light, and a shallow rise of land showed above them, green with trees.

  I stood out to sea once more and sailed cautiously along the line of shore, looking for a place to safely run the boat through the breakers and bring it to land. The dazzling white beach was as narrow as a ribbon—scarcely a shelf before falling away into deep water. The shore curved in like a horseshoe. I discovered it was an island little more than a mile long, the main wooded spine of it curled about a central lagoon. If I could steer the pinnace into that, we would have a gentle landfall.

  But out from that central spine curved two long arms of dunes and reefs. The water moved like serpents over them, and the breakers rolled in, lifting themselves up and crashing down on the submerged rocks. Risk the waves hurling us down to smash on the narrow rock beach, or risk the deceitful currents and razor-edged boulders buried in the inlet to the lagoon?

  I looked at Garnet. The heat in him was such that already his clothes were dry again, his face like blood. I was terrified out of my indecision. I furled the sail, shipped the oars, and rowed into the inlet.

  Had there been two of us—one to row and one to watch—we might have done better. I pulled for four hours or more, from dawn ’til past noon, finding the sandbanks by grinding gently into them, and the rocks by bumping off. My back and arms passed through cramping and into pain, and thence to a kind of thin, red, torn sensation, which distracted me splendidly from my riot of unproductive emotions. A little after noon, when I had, for yet another time, run up what looked like a promising channel and come to a dead stop, the sea swelled under the keel. The tide had turned and begun to build beneath us. I had now to fight not to be flung forward too fast. The seas rose and foamed about me, crashing down into the open boat.

  As I bailed and struggled to row at the same time, the swell picked us up, threw us down, jarring atop a reef. An oar splintered, tearing itself out of my hands. The boat shuddered, grounded, scraping itself along a ridge of rocks. Planks buckled beneath me and sprung wide, admitting rough volcanic pumice grown over with corals. Then a second wave lifted us off again, washed us over the bar, through and out into the sapphire waters of the lagoon.

  The boat sank beneath us. I held Garnet in one arm and swam for the shore.

  My
poor Harry! Such heroics, and I not conscious enough to applaud. Had it been me, I would have resented my audience’s lack of interest, but he is a better man than I. Oh, don’t argue, you know it’s true.

  As for me, I had been dreaming, though horribly real it seemed at the time. I found myself the newest recruit on the Flying Dutchman, and they would keep making me work too hard—I being the only one left in possession of enough of a corpse to handle the sails. Seizing a sudden opportunity to escape, I had dived off into the sea, their insubstantial hands clutching at me. So when I opened my gritty eyes to find myself washed ashore on a dingy pumice beach, I thought at first I was still asleep.

  But the waves tickling up my body were exquisitely cool, like a mouthful of elderflower iced-cream, sweet and fresh and clean. I breathed in and felt the air move unobstructed in my chest. Splinters of coral dug me in the buttocks with edges like shattered glass. If this was a dream, it was altogether more embodied than I was used to.

  With much labour I turned my head, my spine having been replaced by seaweed and my flesh with jelly. There lay Harry, quite exhausted, his mouth hanging open and holes in his stockings. No hat, no shoes. Urchin-like, bruised about the face. The sun shone yellow on his umber stubble and his closed eyes. Even fast asleep, he looked thoughtful, sceptical, and sad. I used to wonder in those days whether he was capable of joy at all.

  Beyond him, the sun shone like adamant on a lagoon the unnatural, iridescent blue of a peacock feather’s eye. Through the dazzling light and colour there lazily sailed towards us the black, triangular tip of a cruising shark’s fin.

  I don’t know how we got up the beach, both of us so spent, but you can be assured we did. And fast—stumbling and falling and dragging one another up, out, away from the water. After perhaps five feet, the beach gave way to moss. Dwarf trees rustled about our waists and the light danced in gold-green stars upon our feet. Harry clutched my upper arms as we fell down together for the final time. “You . . .” he gasped. “You . . .!” A wild glitter of the eyes and then he lunged forward and crushed me, his hands knotting painfully in my hair as he sobbed into my neck. I, being weak and ill and not immune to sentiment, began to cry as well. Partly because I felt so dreadful, partly because of everything we had lost. Mostly, I believe, simply because he had begun it and I could not stop.

  If you think this was unmanly, dear reader, I challenge you to do better under similar circumstances.

  We shared what must have been the world’s dampest kiss—tears and seawater and snot between us as I held onto his ears for comfort. We shifted closer, little by tired little until we were lying entangled. Then we slept in the dappled sunshine for a day and a half.

  When we woke, that first morning, we made love. Nothing needed to be said; we both understood it would happen as soon as we had the physical resources to allow it. It was sweet and weary and gentle, just kisses and the stroke of calloused palms. Afterwards I held Harry tight and mourned for all the things he had had to lose to make this possible. I wished I had the power to give his prudishness and his confidence and his career back to him. And in a petty part of myself, I wished he might have come to me despite them, instead of needing to be ruined first. But I will say that holding on to him afterwards, in the warm glow and satisfaction of coitus, I entertained the inexcusable thought that the past months had been worth it.

  Thus began our eight months as castaways. For such a long time, there’s little to tell of it. Well, it was a little place. The main island lay like a sausage curled in a pan, somewhat less than a mile long, and narrow. Five minutes’ walk across, and nowhere was it possible to get away from the sound of the sea. From the ends of the main island curled causeways of sand and rock, underwater at high tide, but perfectly dry at low, and if one faced the lagoon, at the end of the left-hand causeway lay two smaller wooded isles. I estimate perhaps a hundred acres of green land, all in all. A hundred and fifty if one counted the sandbanks.

  The island where we found ourselves proved exceptionally suited to life. The trees were of two sorts, the one with small white flowers the shape of octopus tentacles, the other with leaves that turned round as buttons where the saltwater dashed against them. In one sheltered spot, the trees grew to eight feet in height, like honest, decent English trees. Beneath these, we made our camp. But the majority of the forest, though composed of the same species, was stunted by constant storms and spray.

  Both kinds of tree bore leaves which, we discovered from experimentation, might be eaten, though those of the button plant needed to be stewed first. And both sorts provided wood fine-burning for fires, and heavy and durable as iron for tools.

  Birds nested everywhere. Grey birds nursed their eggs in shallow scrapes beneath the trees. Black-plumed seabirds dozed on the sandbanks in raucous chattering heaps. Among the branches of the trees darted slender white birds with sloe-like black eyes, like ghostly crows. And all of these were innocent, trusting creatures who never learned to flee at our approach. Good eating.

  I suppose you think we did nothing but eat and fuck the whole time. Hah! Well, that wouldn’t be so far off the mark. Yet we did improve our domain. Once I had recovered from my fever, and my leg so far improved that I could limp and swim, we returned together to where the boat had gone down—one of us to retrieve what could be salvaged, the other to keep the sharks away.

  This, I loved. You have to picture it: the water is clearer than glass, its depths turquoise. Little fish swim about us and we have not troubled with clothes. Harry swims like a merman, all of him tanned light biscuit brown. I’m looking up at the shafts of light through a silver dancing roof and watching them slip like tongues over the planes of Harry’s chest and belly and privates.

  And then the shark comes, and it’s all a game of speed and teeth and death. Can I strike him in the gills strong enough, hard enough, to deter him while I go up to breathe? Will he turn and tear my arm off? Well, as I am here writing this, I think you can guess the answer to that.

  In this way we salvaged the tarp and the sail, the marlinspike, bucket, empty water barrel, and numerous ropes. Our campsite in its hollow became positively civilized as we rigged the sail for a joint hammock and the tarp over it for a roof. We used the bucket to boil things, warming stones first in the fire and dropping them in. The resultant stew inevitably tasted of ash, but one got used to that.

  Water was our greatest physical problem. When we first crawled ashore we found numerous pools of it, but over the next few weeks they gradually dried up. We realized then that there was no source of water indigenous to the place. Yet even this was not a great trouble (except on one occasion I will detail below), for in general rain came at least once a fortnight and replenished our pools, our barrel, and our rudimentary well.

  Thus in every bodily sense we were provided for. Indeed, our cups ran over with plenty. Plenty of food and drink, though not very fine. Adequate sunshine and shelter and firewood and peace and liberty to indulge our natures with no condemnation and no risk.

  Harry spoke of it as a Blessed Isle, like Avalon. His face would shine, and everything braced in him would soften, until he looked as though he had indeed regained his youth. And when he did so, an unnamed emotion would slither in my breast like an adder, poisoning my mood for days. I began to feel a sympathy for all those poets who have written about spleen and black bile and the dark hound that sits at the door of the soul, gnawing away at its joy.

  Though it grew from day to day, I did not speak of this to Harry. It would have been like snatching the slice of birthday cake from a child’s hand and stepping upon it. But the melancholia would not be ignored. I took to wandering off in search of solitude, having to suppress violent anger when he sought me out. There was no place in the tiny speck of land to which one could withdraw and be certain of remaining alone.

  Harry must have sensed my uncharacteristic surliness, for he became solicitous, trying to draw me out, make me talk. Seeking me out when I tried to find a moment’s peace. This was the s
tate of affairs between us when the water began to fail.

  Three weeks passed without rain, and then a fourth. The shallow pools dried. The well yielded less each day; a cup between the two of us, and that salty. We angled the tarpaulin above us to allow morning and evening dew to drip into our barrel, and at dawn harvested a mouthful each, brown with oak tannin. We pulled green leaves from the trees and chewed them to keep our parched mouths moist. The chicks had hatched and grown. There were no more eggs to harvest, no more sooty broth. We ate our meat raw and sucked out the blood.

  When the next storm rode up from the north—racing waves, boiling clouds, and solid sheets of falling water—we danced for joy, naked, coated in mud, and altogether savage. Rain splashed and gurgled and murmured all about us, slicking our skins, filling the well, filling the barrel and overflowing as Harry pinned me against the slick grass with a hand to the back of my neck. We coupled in the downpour, the storm’s violence echoed in our blood.

  Afterwards I looked at myself in one of the many pools that remained. Steam smoked up from them and wound about the boles of the trees. Silver misted the leaves above my head, where white, doleful-eyed birds sat on black branches looking down at me. In this ethereal setting I looked into their mirrored surfaces to learn who I was, and I was utterly shocked at the result.

  Had you asked me what I expected to see, I would have said Hyacinthus. I had, for some time now, given up the wearing of clothes. I thought to see the long smooth lines of classical beauty. The winsome youth who tempted Apollo. You’ll say I’m vain, no doubt. Perhaps I am. But I have been called handsome too often to claim not to know it.

  I thought to make a charming rustic picture, nude as an Arcadian shepherd, with my black hair artfully tousled and a few well-placed leaves. Instead I saw a Caliban. My hair and beard stood out in elf-locks all about my face, solid with mud and twigs, matted and nest-like. When I rubbed the caked dirt from my cheeks, I found my skin had tanned quite brown. Grazes and a gouged red wound showed where, in the vigour of our pleasure, I had not noticed myself being pressed onto stones. My limbs had lost their graceful smoothness and become corded with unsightly sinew and muscle. My thigh was banded with red twisted scars that might have been scattered worms.