The bullets did not come; the man had not seen her.
She calmed herself.
She wondered. She could save some people. Surely she could. If she tried to enter any of the cabins in the third row she would be in direct line of sight of the gunman. But would he see her if she went from cabin to cabin on the fourth row? How far could she get before he rounded the corner and began to move towards the lake? How many could she save?
She heard a burst of gunfire. Her courage deserted her. She had thought – hoped – that the men would run out of ammunition, that losing the rusted box would cost them, but they had bullets to spare. She was wounded and she was frightened. She needed to get to the water, and to the safety of the boat.
There was no hope for the children in the cabins. How many of them would even move? She must get to the water, save herself and anyone else she could. It was too late for the children in these cabins. It was not too late for her.
She continued down the path to the edge of the island, and down the narrow steps cut into the pink-grey rock, like a tunnel towards the sea below. To her right was a narrow ledge a few metres above the water.
A man on the ledge. An adult. He had cut his leg open dragging himself up the rockface.
‘Come up here,’ he said. She thought again of her father. The man smiled down at her, extending his hand, and for a moment she felt she was saved. But this man was not her father, and she was not yet safe.
The man’s hair was wild, his T-shirt torn. She recognized him, she thought. Part of the welcoming committee as they had stepped on to the dock with the other kids. Did something in the office, he had said.
As she frowned up at him she heard an engine approaching, the familiar ruck-ruck-ruck of chopper blades. She felt the rush of air, saw the water begin to swirl and dance in the downdraught, and when she looked up she saw the helicopter, forty feet above.
Christ, she thought. Thank you, Christ.
The man threw himself from the ledge into the water and vanished. She scanned the water. He surfaced, waving wildly.
She looked up again, and saw the camera mounted beneath the fuselage, saw the white-on-red of the TVZ logo. The helicopter hovered, hummingbird still, and she realized that the camera was lining up on her.
They’re filming us.
From the top of the steps a boy and a girl appeared, running as if for their lives. The boy from the woods, she realized, little Arno, with a girl she had not seen before. Another two girls appeared. They pushed past her, stood at the foot of the steps, waving. A burst of gunfire, close by. The plexiglass in the nearside door shattered. The helicopter lifted upward, turned and headed inland.
‘Where did they go?’ said one of the girls. ‘Where the fuck did they go?’
The man in the torn T-shirt began running up the steps shouting after the helicopter. ‘Here! I’m here.’ He reached the top, disappeared, still shouting.
She could see the others looking up the steps after him. One of the girls began to move past her. She put her hand on the girl’s arm.
‘We should—’ said the girl.
‘We can’t.’
‘He is the only adult,’ said Arno very quietly.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘But we are not going to do that.’
She swung the backpack off her shoulder, took off her dress.
All faces, all looking at her. The girl at her side reached out towards her, as if seeing for the first time the wound on her shoulder.
‘Did you get shot?’
‘I’m OK,’ she said.
Fear on every face.
She pulled on her pack, tightened the straps. ‘Come on.’
The helicopter was fading away. From nearby they heard the man’s voice, increasingly desperate.
‘Guys! Hey over here! Guys, we’re over here.’
A shot. Then another.
The man stopped shouting.
No one spoke. The three girls looked at her, terror in their faces. The boy too.
‘We’re trapped,’ one of the girls said quietly.
She looked up through the rock towards the top of the steps. The other children followed her gaze. She could see them thinking the same thought. The helicopter had given them away.
Every face turned towards her.
The men would be here in a minute. She had her backpack on the ground, was stepping out of her dress.
I’m the oldest person here, she realized. I’m the adult. Funny. Almost.
‘We’re trapped,’ said the girl again.
‘No.’ She set her teeth against the pain and pulled on her backpack. She pushed past the girls to the bottom of the steps, crossed her arms over her chest, jumped forward, let herself fall, body tensed and stretched like a dart. For a moment she felt only the air around her. Then the shock of the water, the roar of the sea all about her. She felt herself drop, let her body relax, waited for the water to carry her up towards the light. Her right shoulder ached, but the water cooled it and soothed it, and she found she could swim with her left arm.
Not a sound behind her. She turned to find all faces looking at her. The girls, the boy, rooted in place.
‘There’s a boat. It’s at the dock. I have the key.’
One by one they joined her in the water. Only Arno remained. ‘Arno,’ she said. ‘We have to go.’
Two gunshots nearby.
‘Arno, please.’
Arno crossed his arms over his chest and jumped.
She kicked hard. The straps of her pack cut into her wound and she winced. But if she held her body stiffly she could make progress. Two girls on one side of her, swimming strongly; on the other side Arno and the other girl. The only sound was water; water and breath.
Arno was the weakest of the swimmers. He held his head too high, kicked too hard, tiring fast. The girls swam quietly, efficiently, their bodies low in the water, pacing their breathing to their strokes.
She turned, treading water, waiting for the boy to catch her up. Her shoulder was stiff, to be sure, but she was all right. Better now than before. She would survive this. They would all survive.
She looked back at the cleft in the rock. She did not see the men.
‘I’m so slow,’ said Arno as he drew level with her. ‘Sorry.’
‘Shh,’ she said, because as he spoke the smaller of the men appeared in the cleft in the rock, his pistol in his right hand. If the man turned, if he saw them …
‘Listen to me.’ She put her arms on Arno’s shoulders. ‘Take two deep breaths and dive to the bottom.’
‘Two?’
His eyes widened. She could feel the panic in him. He wanted to look back.
At the steps in the cliff the man was looking to his right, straining to see on to the ledge. In a moment he would turn to his left and he would see them as they swam for their lives and everything would be lost.
She felt Arno gasping air. ‘Swim down, Arno. Grab a rock. Hold on.’
She pushed his shoulders beneath the surface; she turned, caught the eye of one of the girls. The girl nodded and slipped below the surface.
She kicked down to the bottom. The water was peaty and dark, but she found the boy quickly, his arms wrapped around a boulder. Bubbles spilled upwards from his mouth. She wrapped her own arms around his, brought her face very close, made sure that he could see her.
She smiled, but Arno did not respond. She could feel him trying to free his hands.
She shook her head, tightened her grip on his arms.
Panic in his eyes. Arno, please, she thought, you have to hold on.
He was grimacing, making a strange kind of Mmmm sound.
Please. Just a little longer.
He began to struggle. So tiny yet so strong.
She let him go. She saw a dark shadow above her as his body reached the surface. He thrashed there for a moment. She watched, certain that he had given himself away, certain that the bullets would strike him, that his body would seize, that blood would leak from him in dark clouds.
Instead his body calmed; she saw him begin to swim again. She released her grip on the boulder, came up facing the rock staircase, certain that they were discovered, but the man in the police uniform was gone. Ahead of them the three girls surfaced. They swam on, the island to the left of them, treading water from time to time to wait for the boy.
No one spoke.
As they swam she began to see the corpses at the water’s edge. You could see people hiding too, boys and girls that the men had not found, though you saw them clearly from here, cowering into crevices in the cliffs or hiding in the underbrush. Gathering near the children were the news helicopters: three of them now. Filming the children as they hid for their lives. Revealing their presence.
Where were the police? The army? The camp staff, even?
She began to plan. The boat was held at the dock by two ropes. The engine was in position, the electrics on. They would come on board at the stern; she would be at the console in seconds, the key would turn, the boat would slip its mooring, reverse quietly out into the fjord.
It helped to know what she would do, what she would say. It held at bay the terror that threatened to engulf her.
The men would not hear the engine before she gunned it towards the mainland.
Everyone down.
Stay out of sight.
They were going to make it.
Through her backpack she felt her phone ringing. Still there in its ziplock bag.
Can’t speak now, Dad.
Funny.
Almost.
The boat was in sight now. Ahead of her were the girls. Behind her was Arno. She waited until he caught her up.
‘I’m going to go on board first,’ she said. Her voice sounded foreign to her, unreal. Out of breath, though she was barely swimming.
The boy nodded. She could see that he was near the end of his strength.
‘Need to let the others know. You be OK, Arno?’
‘Yeah.’
She pressed on towards the girls, swimming swiftly, ignoring the ache in her shoulder. Two minutes. Maybe less. Keep them out of the way.
Everybody stay low.
The water in front of her flicked as if slapped. Twice. She heard the gunshots as they echoed from the far banks of the fjord. She turned to face their attacker, though she knew that she should not; she stopped swimming, though she knew that she must not.
There he was, the short man. He was standing on a rock near the water’s edge. His black shirt was open at the neck. There were sweat patches under his arms. His pistol was raised, held in both hands, braced. He was looking at her, she realized. Sighting up. It was casual, matter-of-fact, without malice.
Behind her was Arno. Brave little Arno.
For a moment Arno flailed. Tiny waves radiated out from his body, lapping towards her across the mirror-black surface.
She looked up at the man. Please, she thought. Not Arno.
How calm the man was. His gaze did not waver. He closed his left eye.
She felt the bullet strike. It crushed her clavicle, tore into the wall of muscle behind, obliterated the lung tissue that lay in its path, lodged itself deep within her.
She gasped. The man paused. The sound echoed back at her.
She saw the man check her position; she saw him check his own position; again she saw him close his left eye.
All was lost now, she thought.
This is the end of me.
PART ONE
The Foreigner
1
The apartment building stood on heavy concrete pillars, held tight to the rock below by deep-driven steel spikes. Øvre Øvrebøhaugen 4: an address I could spell but never pronounce. Inside, the dark rooms were low-ceilinged and triple-glazed, built to hold the winter at bay. But today the Nordic summer heat had forced us out on to the terrace at the back.
I felt a low vibration through the concrete of the terrace. The apartment windows trembled in their metal frames.
‘Thunder,’ I said, though the day was bright and the sky was clear.
‘Thunder,’ agreed Elsa, watching me over the top of her glass.
We had loved this place when we first saw it – so much space, so close to town – but our daughters never did. There was something about the austerity of the buildings that silenced children, that made them speak to each other in monotones or whispers. Everything was low-slung and hard-lined, the wooden cladding painted black, the concrete grey and weathered. Everywhere there were stern little signs – play no ball, ride no bicycle, feed no birds – and children very quickly got the message that they were tolerated but never welcome: at Øvre Øvrebøhaugen the only voices that carried were old.
Today, though, none of that mattered. Midsummer’s Eve was our anniversary. Seventeen years married. Today our elder daughter was at summer camp, our younger daughter at a friend’s, our baby son asleep in his crib. And besides, we’d be gone in a week.
On a stone patio table stood two hand-cut martini glasses, emptied now. Elsa was smiling at me as she always used to smile, running her fingertips across my palm. Upright and lean, her dark blond hair scraped and casually tied, her eyes keen and sharp.
Those eyes of Elsa’s: the eyes of a wolf, shot through with ice. Her irises are always a shade too blue, a fraction too pale. Nordic eyes, you might be tempted to say, though no one here has eyes like Elsa’s. Even now, at times, I feel tracked by an alien intelligence.
She turned my hand over, made a play of looking at my watch. ‘How about another?’
‘We have twenty-five minutes.’
‘We do.’
I picked up the glasses.
On the kitchen wall hung three metre-square prints, all colour and photographic grain. Elsa was a photographer. Her work in the years before the children came had been very pure; very expensive; very art. All looming shapes, shot without a lens on the camera. Carmine 12, Cinnabar 44, and Burnt Umber 11.
‘Why are they so out of focus?’ people would ask.
‘Keep thinking about that,’ she would reply. ‘Because the lack of focus is important.’
I could never look directly at Elsa’s pictures without a stab of guilt. She would tell me she was done with photography, that she had said all she had to say about colour and form, that she loved having time to spend with the girls, but these vast images followed us everywhere, a reminder of a time when my wife was the promising one and when I had no career to speak of.
A cloud of tiny insects hovered around the fruit bowl. I selected the lemon with the heaviest skin, cut two long strips with a peeler, trimmed the edges straight with a long knife.
From the freezer I took a steel cocktail mixer already filled with ice cubes; two cut-crystal martini glasses, each with a wooden spill on to which I had threaded three olives; and an ice-frosted bottle of gin. I poured a few drops of vermouth on to the ice, then cradled the glasses and the mixer in my hands, jammed the bottle between my right forearm and my chest, and walked carefully back on the other side of the apartment. Here the windowless walls damped down the sounds of the world to a dull hum.
I paused in the box room. In his wooden crib our tiny blond baby curled and uncurled his fingers, wrapped himself tightly into his soft panda, limb against limb. He sucked at the panda’s draggled snout with milky lips, as if seeking sanctuary from some unknown force. I stood, watching his chest, listening for the sounds that told me what I already knew.
In. In. Out. Those soft reedy breaths, almost inaudible. An everyday miracle.
Franklin Curtis his name was, though he did not yet know it.
Elsa was looking out towards the hills when I returned. I placed the glasses on the table as silently as I could, slipped the gin bottle from under my arm with my left hand. I poured gin into the cocktail mixer. The ice fissured and cracked. Elsa turned.
‘That sound. Never fails.’
Her transfixing irises; the merest suggestion of a squint.
I stirred gently, poured the liquor into the glasses, held
back the ice with the spoon. Elsa watched me all the while. Her eyes flicked to the glass as I set it in front of her, then flicked to me.
‘How do you get them so perfect, Cal?’
Always the same words.
‘Everything has to be very, very cold,’ I answered, as I always answered. ‘Your olives …’ I stopped.
‘What?’ she said.
‘You haven’t actually tasted it.’
‘Oh, Cal. Don’t screw up the ritual.’
I smiled, waiting for her to taste. She raised the glass to her lips, took a sip. Winced slightly.
‘It’s good,’ she said.
‘But not perfect.’
‘All right.’ She sighed. ‘There’s a shade too much vermouth, and I feel like you didn’t check the strength of the olive brine. What? Stop looking at me like that.’
‘Like what?’
‘You’re laughing at me inwardly.’
My wife, who lives by a code of honesty so brutal that it used to terrify me. And still does. Who told me when we met that she preferred men to be taller and a little better looking, but that she liked my smile and was in the mood for sex. I made a joke about penis size to cover my confusion. She didn’t laugh.
‘The size of your penis is not relevant. Tonight we shall have non-penetrative sex.’
I was crushed, but strangely elated. I could see that Elsa was out of my league, taller than me in her heels and beautiful with it, supple and strong and used to attention.
‘Of course,’ I said, as though non-penetrative sex made perfect sense, given the imbalance between us.
And oh, the many colours in her dark blond hair, and oh, the jut of her thigh and the warmth in her ice-blue eyes. And later, when we were both breathing hard, naked in her vast wooden bed, our lips almost touching, our eyes locked, she said, ‘Please don’t circle your thumb on my clitoris in that way, Cal.’
‘All right. Just …’
‘Thank you.’ Her voice so soft, her eyes smiling at me.
‘Just … Did I misread something?’
She sat up. ‘Misread how?’
The Island Page 3