by Chris Vick
Aya grinned. ‘Some, yes, why not? But most I remember. The stories are here, this is the book.’ She pointed at her head.
‘Are all the heroes in your stories girls?’ said Stephan, swigging rum.
‘They are in the ones I’ve heard,’ I said. ‘I love the stories. Aya, did you learn them from your uncle?’
She looked at Stephan, who sat watching her, and thought before answering.
‘Yes.’ Her voice was soft and low. ‘From Uncle. Mother too. She tells me, before I sleep. For many years.’
‘You didn’t have television, films?’ said Stephan.
‘I have seen films,’ she said.
‘Where?’
‘It is time to sleep,’ she said.
‘I do not want to sleep,’ Stephan said. ‘What is your story, Aya?’
‘I do not want to tell,’ she said, jutting her chin.
‘Why? You have a secret?’
‘What about you, Stephan?’ I said. ‘Aya saw you, before her boat left.’ I blurted it out before I could stop myself. But I was angry. I hated the way he treated her.
Stephan took a long drink, staring at Aya. And she looked back. She looked fierce and afraid at the same time.
‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I won’t tell. When we’re rescued. But you’re no fisher boy, are you?’
He put the bottle on the ground. For a second I thought he was going to hit me. But he just sighed and slumped back.
‘My father was a fisherman,’ he said. He kept on staring at Aya, as if he was seeing her for the first time. I regretted what I’d said.
‘And you?’ I pushed.
‘I do many things. We must all eat. We do not all have a rich family and an easy road to follow, England boy. My father was a fisherman and talvez, it is possible, one day I will be a fisherman too, if I make money to buy a boat. But this job can kill, you know? You can die before you are old. You work hard for no catch and no catch is no money. You understand?’
‘Yes.’
‘No, you do not. And you? Do you tell us all?’
‘Sure. I’ve got nothing to hide.’
‘Then you are lucky. And?’
‘And what?’
‘Your life, what you are.’
‘Well, I… go to school. I’ve got good mates. A dog. Mum and Dad… I… I’m an ordinary boy. I guess.’
‘And what is that?’
‘I… I don’t know.’
And I thought my life maybe wasn’t that ordinary, no more than Stephan’s life, no more than Aya’s. It just seemed normal. Or had, once.
vi
The following evening I’d been collecting firewood. It was nearly dark when I got back to the shelter.
The fire was almost out.
‘How could you be so stupid?’ I muttered. ‘Aya, Stephan, where are you? Why’d you let it get so low?’ I added a couple of logs to the embers and called again: ‘Aya!’
Outside, a breeze was picking up. Clouds were streaming across the sky, burning orange in the sunset.
There was no sign of Stephan, but I found Aya on the cliff.
The wind made her hair dance around her face and shoulders.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked. She turned, with a strange smile on her face, and held her hand out for me to hold.
‘Look!’ she said.
The sea was rolling. Black waves crashed across the reefs. The sea was coming alive again. They were the biggest waves we’d seen since arriving on the island.
‘Can you see?’ said Aya. ‘If this will happen and we are in boat?’
I could see. I could imagine.
‘We were lucky, in the storm,’ I said. ‘We wouldn’t be so lucky again.’
‘No?’
‘No, not that we’ll ever risk it anyway.’
‘And if no boat, no plane?’
‘There will be, one day.’
Aya frowned and gathered her cloak around her.
‘We were lucky, Aya,’ I said. ‘To survive the storm, to find each other, to find the island. I say luck, it feels more like a miracle.’
‘What is miracle?’
‘An impossible thing. Something truly incredible.’
‘Oh. You want to see a miracle?’ she said, with a secretive smile.
Aya reached beneath her cloak and pulled out a small coconut bowl. Inside was a wrapped, cloth package. We sat and I watched as she so, so carefully opened it.
In the evening light the stones were even more brilliant than they’d been on the boat. They twinkled and shone, glinting sapphire, emerald, cobalt blue.
‘I saw you with them. On the boat. I thought maybe I’d imagined it. You’re rich.’
‘No, I am not. This is the treasure of my village. It is easy to carry much money in jewels, easy to hide,’ she said.
‘How did you?’
‘I will tell you. Later. My story. Mais, ils sont magnifiques, non?’
‘How much are they worth?’
‘I do not know. But it is much, Bill. Much. You see some men, they steal from my people. I take back. And I will go home one day, with these jewels.’
I picked up a jewel from the cloth in her hand, a small blue pebble, with a heart of fiery light. When I held it up to the dying sun, the light inside erupted.
‘Wow,’ I murmured. Aya did the same with a white, pearly opal.
‘Yes, wow,’ she said, grinning.
We were hypnotised by the jewels. We didn’t hear Stephan creep up behind us.
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Treasure for a sultan.’
We were kids caught with our hands in the sweet jar. I dropped my jewel and scrambled in the sand and dust to find it. Aya hid the package behind her back.
We stared at him and he stared at us. No one said anything.
He stepped forward. We stepped back, closer together.
The wind rushed around us.
He took another step. We stayed where we were. He stared, crazily, hungrily. The starved wolf, unsure if the hunt was worth the risk.
Stephan spat on the ground, turned, and walked away.
*
He didn’t come to the hut that night.
We waited for him, but we didn’t go looking. I reckoned he was in a proper mood; not happy about our ‘secret’, but we thought he’d appear sooner or later.
‘I will look for him,’ Aya said.
‘No. Better to leave him be, for now.’
At some point I drifted off. I didn’t mean to, I just did. When I woke, the fire was low, just glowing twigs.
I sat up, rubbing my eyes, and added another log.
Aya wasn’t there. The wind was whistling outside. The waves a steady crash against the shore. Something didn’t feel right.
‘Aya, where are you?’ I called. Maybe she had gone to get firewood. The moonlight was strong. Or to find Stephan.
‘Aya,’ I shouted again. I stood, my body feeling stiff.
This was strange. Wrong. I walked out of the hut, checking the lighthouse and all around it. Where could they be? I ran over the island, to where the boat was. I didn’t get far before I heard them shouting.
They were making their way back from the boat. He had her arm. Aya was pulling, trying to get away, but he was dragging her.
‘Get off her!’ He let go, holding his hands up, smiling.
I ran to her but she shook me off, nostrils and eyes flaring, spitting like a snake and rubbing her arm. She backed away.
I ran at him and pushed him hard in the chest, then raised a fist, ready to hit him. He stepped back, holding his arms high, and smiling.
‘Okay, England boy, okay. But you are weak. Don’t do something stupid.’ He was right. He was bigger and could take me in a fight easy. He could bully Aya too, if I wasn’t around. But he couldn’t do both at once.
‘What were you doing?’ I said.
‘She tell you of boat? Why she is on? Why she run? She is the girl the men look for. In the port.’
‘What men? What port?’
‘Did he hurt you?’ I asked. She shook her head.
I shouted to his back: ‘What do you mean “money”?’
‘Girl has money. I knew this already. No one travels without this. Now I see the diamonds.’ He stopped and turned. ‘You give some to me, maybe I help her when we leave island.’
‘Lea… Leave?’ I couldn’t believe what he was saying. ‘Leave? How? And how could you help her?’
‘She goes back, a girl alone? What you think happen to her? She needs me.’
I followed, tripping, confused, eager. What would he show me? How could we leave? He sounded sure it was possible, that we could return to the world.
I caught up with him as he was unlocking the lighthouse door. A breath of cold wind blew out. I wanted to see, I stepped inside.
‘I can’t see anything,’ I said, my words echoing in the round chamber.
‘I get fire,’ he said, ‘then you see.’
He walked off to the hut. I screwed my eyes up, trying to adjust, to see, stretching a hand into the shadow. It felt damp and cold.
‘Hello?’ I said. I don’t know why. There was no reply, just the wind washing stale air from the chamber. I didn’t move any further. I didn’t trust Stephan not to lock me in.
‘You coming?’ I shouted.
The shove hit me hard in the back. I fell over, banging my face on the ground. The door shut and locked. Loud and final.
I was left in darkness.
*
I shouted ‘Aya’ till I was hoarse. I pushed, banged and kicked the door, till my hands and feet screamed in pain. I looked at the keyhole, it was locked with the key still in it.
Then there was silence, filled with questions and me hating myself, my own stupidity. Why had he locked me in? What did he want from Aya? What was he going to do to her? I hoped she was hiding. And if he’d found her, I hoped she was fighting. She had the knife.
And I knew, suddenly, horribly, that he could kill her, or she could kill him. Because there were no rules on the island. No laws. Not human ones, anyway.
The steps spiralling up inside the lighthouse had long gone. There were holes in the wall, old windows, but they were high. There was no way out.
I was in a chamber, a prison with a single round wall.
I shouted, and kicked the door again, knowing how much it would hurt, realising now I was stupid to think we were safe, stupid to believe that Stephan had a way off the island.
England boy. That’s all I was.
I was mad. With him, with myself, with everything.
I knew I had to get out and fight him. Kill him if I had to.
‘Don’t think that,’ I said.
*
My eyes adjusted to the light. I noticed more holes higher up in the tower. They might have been windows once. I knew if I could reach the first one, I could climb out. But it was many metres above me. I felt along the walls with my hands, and found rusted metal spikes jutting out horizontally. They must have held the steps once. They didn’t look as though they could take much weight. But I was light. And desperate.
The first spike broke under my foot. But the second held and I quickly placed my foot on one higher and reached to grab another with my hand. I held onto the wall, scared I’d fall at any second, bearing my weight between the spike I held and the one I stood on.
They bit into my feet. It was agony, like climbing a ladder of blunt knives. But slowly, carefully, testing each spike, I heaved myself up, trembling, each step worse than the last. One metal bar was rusted and rough, cutting into my foot. Blood trickled between my toes. I climbed, I had to, and found the window, hauling my body through the hole, over the stone, scraping my stomach till it bled. The wall felt unstable too. I swung my body around to get my legs pointing downward. It was a long way to the ground. Sick-making. Too high. But the bricks bearing me felt as if they might give way any moment, and I had to jump. I half-fell, half-leaped, landing with a thud.
I was hurt. My ankle had twisted hard, the soles of my feet were cut, but I staggered into the dusky light.
‘Aya!’ I shouted. ‘Aya!’
I stumbled to the beach, but as I got close I heard Gull crawking. I followed his cries.
They were north, along the eastern cliff, a spot where layers of rock made giant steps down to the sea. Gull swooped and dived, flying close to them, then veering away.
They were facing each other, shouting in Arabic. I saw Stephan lunge at her. She dodged. He sounded furious. I wondered why she wasn’t running.
It was only when I got closer that I saw that Aya held the knife, brandishing it frantically to keep Stephan away. He could take her easily, if he got hold of her. But she had the knife. It glinted in the moonlight. Her eyes were wild and her teeth bared. I knew she would use it rather than lose.
‘Hey!’ Aya saw me. Stephan used the moment to grab her wrist. They fought. But he would win.
‘Stop!’ I yelled.
They wrestled and spun, in some crazy, messed up dance. Now he had both her wrists in his hands.
He pushed Aya towards the cliff. I saw her twisting manically in his grasp, but he was pushing her further, faster, using his strength. He wanted to force her to the edge.
She dropped the knife, right on the edge. He pushed her away and tried leaning down to get it, holding his other hand up in case she rushed at him. He grasped clumsily for the knife, but teetered, losing his balance. And disappeared.
Aya looked down where Stephan had fallen, then ran to meet me.
We hugged. She pressed her face into my neck.
‘Did he hurt you?’ I said.
‘Non,’ she mumbled. ‘I have honour.’ I tore myself from her, and ran to the edge.
He’d fallen most of the way down, splayed on the reef-rock, among barnacles and seaweed. He was on his back, one arm an upside down L and one leg at a right angle. His eyes and mouth gaped open. His head hung over the edge of a pool. In the moonlight I could see the water darkening with blood.
I climbed down painfully, till I was a few metres away.
I didn’t call his name or watch his lips for breathing, or check his eyelids for a flicker of life. He was dead. I knew it. I’d thought Aya might have been dead, the day I’d found her, floating on that barrel. But I saw how this was different. How certain this was.
This wasn’t Stephan, it was a shell of a body.
Aya followed me down. We watched the body for a long time without speaking.
‘Why?’ I asked finally. ‘Why were you fighting? Did he want to take our boat?’
‘No. He cannot make the boat work out at sea.’
‘Then why?’
The look on her face scared me. As if she’d seen a demon, as if she was a demon.
‘He want my jewels. He say will help when we go back. But I do not give.’ She spat, looking coldly at the body. Then her eyes softened, and she looked at me.
‘We fight, I did not mean—’
‘It’s okay, it was an accident. I know. I saw.’
But everything had moved so quickly. Did I see what had really happened, or only what I wanted to see? That he had fallen…?
‘He fell. It was an accident,’ I said more firmly, and I was grateful that I hadn’t had to fight him. Because what might have happened then? What would I have done?
A wave flooded over the rocks and into the pool, filling it, taking a wash of bloodied water to the sea.
‘We can’t leave him here,’ I said. ‘The tide’s coming in.’ The rocks were steep, easy to climb up or down, but not carrying a body. ‘Should we have a funeral or something?’ I said. ‘Do you have a funeral for someone you’ve just ki—’
‘The water will come,’ Aya said. ‘The sea will take.’
It wa
s as simple as that for Aya.
We stood, watching.
I saw their shadows first. Then the fins. As the water rose, more of the shelf was covered and the pool became part of the sea.
More of them arrived. They surfaced, diving and darting, this way and that. They weren’t huge. But big enough. They searched, desperately, for the source of blood, but they couldn’t reach him.
‘We can’t just stand here,’ I said.
Aya climbed down and waded to where Stephan’s body was. She edged it through the shallows, along the shelf of rock. She gave it one final push. The body tumbled into the sea.
The current took the body, a conveyor belt carrying it to open water.
The water bubbled furiously. Fins flicked the surface. Tails thrashed.
‘Don’t look,’ I gasped. Aya didn’t blink. Then the shadow came. Grey in the dark blue. It was huge. The body was pulled under. The sea erupted.
‘Look away,’ I said.
But Aya didn’t look away. And neither did I.
*
We watched the water long after the sharks had gone.
I hadn’t seen this coming. None of it. It was awful and sudden. I remembered times I’d had that same sick, punched feeling. The day Grandma told us she had cancer. The day Dad told me he’d lost his job. The second the rope snapped and I saw Wilko and the others vanish into the waves.
‘Awful things happen,’ I said to Aya. ‘Things that happen before you know what they really are.’
I felt numb. Sort of horrified. But only in a distant kind of way.
We hadn’t known Stephan long. But I knew I should feel more than I did. And maybe I should have been worried about that. But I wasn’t. I just accepted it.
I wasn’t ‘England boy’ any more.
vii
A storm was coming. Not like the one on Pandora. That had come from nowhere. This was going to build. The waves steadily got bigger, and the winds stronger. We gathered as much wood for the fire as we could. I took a palm leaf from the beach and swept the floor of the hut. We carried tins to the cave and filled them with water.
We made the hut our place instead of Stephan’s. I found his t-shirt in the corner. I could have worn it. Instead I got the fire stoked and used a stick to poke it into the flames till it was gone.