by Claire Gray
It’s as I crack my toes against a rock and swear beneath my breath, that I realise I’m all alone here on the path. I sag against the nearest tree and peer through the gloom, feeling moisture bleed from leaves and onto my skin, making various grazes sting. Moonlight hits patches of river where rocks poke out like teeth. Condensation hangs in the air, insects cry and flit from every corner and my own ragged breath hangs loudly over it all. There’s no one else here.
‘Dolph?’ I call, uncertain of how long it’s been since we last spoke. If it turns out that he never existed, was never out here with me at all, like how it happens sometimes at the end of movies, I won’t be surprised.
There’s no reply. None of the dark shapes move. I’m really on my own.
‘Shit,’ I whisper, and wrap my arms around the tree, which smells like rot and like something from my childhood. I wish Steve was here. If I make it back to town, I’m going to have to find Kadesadayurat and tell him how stupid I’ve been, how I’ve put everyone in danger and now a pregnant woman is dead. And then he’ll have to come out here with dogs and helicopters and a good first aid kit, and he’ll bring Steve home. I’m trying so hard to believe that’s possible.
‘Dolph?’ I call again, louder, reminding me of how his voice sounded when he was in the lake screaming for his girlfriend. I don’t want to think of that; it makes something bubble down there, deep in my throat.
Nothing. Perhaps he fell into the water. Perhaps Pamela has been following us all along, and has snatched him off the path. Perhaps I ought not to shout, in case she comes for me too. Is she out there? I bet she can see in the dark with those little, lizard eyes.
I’m close to running away, but instead I start back the way I came, moving over the rocks, which are sharp in places, slimy in others. Dolph could easily have fallen. How long is it since I saw him last? It could have been seconds or hours. Time has become meaningless since the moment Steve’s car tipped off the cliff.
My feet hit something soft and I trip, palms smacking the ground.
‘Huh?’ Dolph’s voice says. ‘Did I fall asleep?’
I can see him now; the glint of his eyes and the darkness of his downturned mouth. I crouch beside him. ‘Are you okay?’
‘I just sat down for a moment. I was thinking about her and it got too much. I just needed a second and then I guess, I don’t know, I just passed out. And then I was dreaming about her.’
From the heaviness of my own body, I say: ‘We need to find somewhere to rest, don’t we? This is it for today.’
‘Here.’
‘Not here.’
‘Not another temple. We spent three nights there and it’s the worst place I’ve ever been. It was Pamela’s idea for us to stay there. She said it would be one night, that’s all, and she would make all our problems go away and we could come home. It was so dark and so cold. Bats were hanging upside down off the ceilings. Maliwan didn’t even flinch but I was so scared. And we had to try and sleep in a tiny little stone room, thousands of years old and so black, like oil.’
I’m trying to properly make out his face in the darkness, so that he’s more than just a broken voice washing into my ears above the roar of the river, but then I hear something else. An engine. Cold ripples pass over my skin. I choke on my own breath. ‘What is that?’
‘A car. It could be her.’
‘We must be near the track,’ I say.
‘Shush.’ Dolph grabs hold of my shoulder and holds on tight. I can feel him trembling. It makes me start to shake too.
‘This way,’ I whisper. ‘Let’s go see. Come on.’
‘I need to find a way to kill her. I would have liked more time to prepare. It’s so dark out here.’ He tries to close his hands into fists but can’t seem to do it.
Together, we rise to our feet and move through tangled plants towards the noise, our feet slipping, insects and webs brushing our faces. Somehow we have ended up holding hands again. This has happened a few times during the walk. The second I realise this I want to let go, but can’t because he’s gripping so tight. It begins to hurt; I can feel it in my bones. And then there are headlights dancing over the thin trees, and I see Dolph’s face like a skull. I freeze, shake his hand out of mine, and watch as he continues towards the road, sidling like a maimed crab through the leaves.
‘Stop!’ I hiss.
‘Why?’
‘Danger! It’s dangerous. Hide!’
‘No, no. It’s dangerous for her. Her!’
I drag him back down amongst the scratchy bushes. He’s still trying to pull away when the vehicle appears; a car slightly larger than Steve’s.
‘You won’t be able to do anything to her right now,’ I whisper. ‘We’re too weak. Look at the state of us. We need to get back into town and sleep and eat and come up with a plan. If we go out there now, she’ll really kill us. I know she will.’
The car stops right in front of us. The engine cuts out and the insects become impossibly loud, but not loud enough to cover Dolph’s breathing, which is coming out in whistles and whines.
‘Shit,’ Dolph squeaks, pressing himself into the ground. ‘That’s a police car.’
‘Oh, thank God,’ I say, and start to get up. ‘Maybe Steve’s with them. Steve!’
But then my face is flat upon the dirt, and Dolph’s full weight is on my back. I feel his knees sharp against my legs, and his hot, wet breath on my neck. I try to scream but just get a mouth full of mud, grit against my teeth. I struggle to turn my head and he presses a hand to my face, smothering my voice and making it hard to breathe.
I see a door open and a dark figure steps out of the car. A pulse beats hard all through my body, out of time with Dolph’s heart which is beating against me, even faster than my own. I can feel the trembling of his body through my clothes.
Something is said in Thai, and then a torch comes on in the man’s hand, the light flickering at first but then strong like a pouring liquid, sweeping over the plants and through the trees.
Chapter Thirty-Three
As insects crawl across the side of my face and mud works its way up my nose, I try to understand what the man with the torch is shouting to other men inside the car. I can’t get it; my Thai is less than basic. But there is a tone to their voices which makes Dolph wriggle even deeper into the muck, forcing me down with him.
When the man walks a couple of feet into the undergrowth and kicks at a tree, Dolph’s whole body jolts and tightens around me. The man coughs, then he returns to the car and they rumble away.
Dolph springs off me and then sits on the ground in a heap, crushing his hands beneath his knees to keep them still. He can barely speak.
‘They’re looking for me,’ he says. ‘Whatever it was that made you and your friend come out here, has made them come out here too. And, just like you, they’ll be certain that I’ve done something terrible. And I haven’t. You know that? I haven’t done a thing.’
‘I could have gone out there alone,’ I say in a flat sort of voice. ‘You could have let me go.’
‘You would have told them I was here. You still think I’m the bomber, don’t you? I’ll turn myself in for the murder once I’ve killed Pamela. And I’ll take the blame for the bomb too if you want, if that will help anyone. What else is there to do? I’ll never go back to work. It would be better just to die.’
The sound of the vehicle fades and we just sit for a while, staring wordlessly towards where the empty road lies invisible in the darkness.
‘I hope Steve was in that car,’ I say. ‘I hope he’s safe.’
‘He’ll be fine. You’ll be fine too. You’ll see,’ Dolph says.
I don’t say anything. I rest my chin on my knees and try to calculate the hours until dawn, trying to work out if I can make it. I stare towards Dolph; the energy that I need in order to hate him fizzes and sparks inside me but can’t quite catch alight. I think that he is starting to fall asleep, but then he gasps and snaps his head up from where it had wilted towards his chest
.
‘You were lying to us before, when you said his body was on the beach, weren’t you?’ he says. ‘I’m starting to think maybe I can’t trust you. Are you even really a journalist? I know nothing about you.’
‘Yes, I am and we really saw it.’
‘It can’t have been him. It must have been someone else.’
‘It was definitely him. Definitely,’ I say, close to furious that Dolph can be distrustful of me when he is the one who has been hiding in the jungle for ill-defined reasons.
‘I just don’t understand that.’
‘Why not?’ I demand.
‘His wife buried it. She buried the body out here somewhere.’
‘Did you make her do it? Is that why she was so angry at you?’
‘No! She wanted to do it. Honestly, this was all her. She was ordering us about the whole time. And now I keep thinking about how close she was to me; I could see those tiny blue diamonds in her ears, and I could have reached over and pulled them out through the fucking flesh.’
‘What do you mean it was all her?’ I say, loudly, because he seems to be drifting away into a deep state of muttering and ripping up weeds from the ground.
‘Maliwan killed him by mistake. She hit him and then, I don’t know, he fell badly, I guess. And then his wife just sort of took over.’
‘I don’t understand why she would do that,’ I say, staring at him. He’s just a shape in the darkness; a slightly different shade of black.
‘She really didn’t mind that he was dead. She was maybe even pleased. How can I explain it? These last few days it’s been like going down a tunnel, the tunnel getting tighter, the light growing smaller at the end of it and the tunnel smells like death.’
‘You’re talking like you have a fever,’ I say. ‘You should sleep.’
‘She wanted to help us. She knew about ... well ... about how her husband was. And once she started helping she wouldn’t stop helping. So, it was like it was her thing, not our thing, and we were just along for the ride, doing whatever she told us to.’
‘I’ve heard things about him.’
‘I didn’t know a thing about it. I had no idea until Mal told me. She got drunk and she told me. I didn’t know what he was doing to her. I should have been able to tell. You must think I’m stupid.’
‘No. People can hide things.’
‘She was eighteen when she started working there. And he was doing that with her pretty much from the start. And that’s why she hit him. She shouldn’t even have been there that morning. She’d quit the day before but had to go back for something. She wanted to ask him something. He fell down and was bleeding everywhere. We didn’t even know Pamela was there. She’s in the States most of the time. I think, if she hadn’t been there, we would have phoned the police ourselves and told them what we’d done. Running just seems stupid. It never works.’
‘You’re really not a terrorist, are you?’
‘No, I told you.’
‘Me and Steve have accidentally been chasing the wrong story. We thought we were hot on the heels of a terrorist. We went off in completely the wrong direction. It’s all my fault.’
‘Well, you can’t write about this.’
‘I wouldn’t know where to start,’ I say.
We sit in silence a while longer, the crickets picking up volume around us. He’s not a terrorist but he is something.
‘I just don’t know why he would have ended up on the beach,’ Dolph says after a while, his voice muffled like he maybe has his head in his hands.
‘Did you actually see her bury him?’
‘No. Maliwan wasn’t feeling well so we were sitting down for a while. I guess Pamela dragged him off somewhere. I didn’t look. I didn’t want to see. But she said that she buried him. I saw her holding a shovel at one point.’
‘When you find her, you can ask her,’ I say.
‘Yeah. I guess so. I’m not so bothered about that though. I really just want to hurt her for what she did to Mal. And the baby. Oh, God, the baby. She’s taken everything from me.’
‘I really am sorry,’ I whisper into my knees. I can hear him snuffling.
‘I hate her so much. I wish I could go back in time.’
‘What were the three of you doing last night?’ I ask then. ‘We saw her, you know, she gave me and my friend a lift into town. We didn’t know who she was.’
‘Last night? She wasn’t around last night. We didn’t see her. She’d just arranged to meet us today with some supplies. We were all alone.’
‘But she was out here,’ I say. ‘And you don’t know anything about the bike either? You don’t know who was shouting?’
‘No, no,’ Dolph says, rocking backwards and forwards. ‘Please, stop with the questions for a bit, will you? I don’t want to think about all this. I just need to rest. I need to close my eyes a while.’
I nod slowly. ‘Come on, we should find somewhere to shelter. It’s not good here.’
We struggle to our feet and step into the road where the car has left deep tracks in the mud. We go the same way, our feet slipping in and out of the grooves.
Chapter Thirty-Four
I wake up in all kinds of pain. Opening my eyes, I find that ugly flowers have bloomed around us while we slept. I don’t try to move yet. Dolph is pressed against me, his arm wrapped around my waist. We were cold last night. It’s funny that I don’t mind lying this way, when usually I hate to even shake hands. It’s like how I can hold a spider in my palms when I’m drunk. Dolph probably thinks he’s holding his dead girlfriend.
That thought gets me moving. I sit up, rubbing my arms back to life. They’re damp, soft to the touch like playdough, and covered with insect bites. Dolph doesn’t stir. What if he’s died in his sleep? But his chest is moving as he breathes. His face is like milk and his eyelids are a heavy shade of purple.
We’ve spent the night beneath a huge tree, nestled between its roots like characters from a fairy tale. We’re not far from one of the temples; a big one that tourists like to visit. Last night, I planned on leading us to the temple to sleep but we only made it this far. Dolph had started muttering things I couldn’t understand and my legs finally gave out completely, sending me to the ground so that I cut my knees on top of the grazes already there. He dragged me beneath this tree and I slept the darkest sleep I’ve ever slept.
I need to eat something. It makes me dizzy to lift my hand to my face. I’m afraid to look down at my body because I know it is damaged, and I think that to see the cuts, the ground up toenails, lumps and holes, will only make them hurt more. I decide not to wake Dolph. I’ll come back for him after I visit the temple. It can’t be far away; we walked into a sign for it last night.
I’m going there because I’ve remembered that people live around here; some of the poorest islanders, who make a little money selling things to tourists. We forgot about that last night. Perhaps I can find someone and ask for help. We need help at this point; I don’t think we can make it on our own. Maybe someone will give us food or water, or give us a lift into town.
Stumbling through a clearing, I see the temple not far away; crooked towers and damaged walls. When I came here before, with Lena, children ran over to ask us for money. Now I’m here alone, limping and trying not to fall.
People live in huts to the side of this main approach. I move that way but it’s too quiet, even for this time of the morning. And sure enough, there’s nothing here but a row of shacks, all abandoned and partially dismantled. I go inside each one. All I find is a bottle of whiskey, half empty and with greasy fingerprints all over it. The liquid is exactly the right colour to be piss but I unscrew the top, sniff and sip. It is whiskey; just watered down. I drink it in scratchy gulps as I walk back to Dolph. It starts to warm me a little, but it makes me sick too. All of a sudden I need to pee, and I step into the trees to squat there, holding onto rough branches so that I don’t fall.
Something rustles to my left. Too large and noisy to be a bird. I stand
and straighten my clothes. There’s a rustling again. It could be the wind or a monkey, but I run back towards Dolph, twisting my head like an owl to check if I’m being chased, tripping over my own feet and practically sobbing with the fear of it.
Dolph wakes as I approach him. He sits up in a rush and looks around, his fingers clawing the ground. I see his face change as he remembers where he is and what he’s doing. He waves at me and then puts his head in his hands.
‘I think I heard someone,’ I pant, passing him the whiskey. I feel drunk already. I felt drunk before I started drinking.
Dolph puts the bottle to his lips. He doesn’t grimace at the taste like I do.
‘No one’s here,’ he says, looking past me at the empty track.
‘I think we should get moving. What if she’s out here looking for us?’
‘Okay,’ he says, his voice barely there. ‘You all right?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, how do you feel?’
‘I feel like I’m really old. My body doesn’t work anymore. I want some pancakes and a bath.’
‘Is that what old people do in England?’ he asks, without any real interest.
‘What? No, it’s just what I’d like to do.’
‘I’d like to drink a gallon of coffee. And bacon. To eat.’
‘Bacon would be good.’ I nod. Dolph isn’t really thinking about food. The expression on his face does not match his words. His eyes flicker. In a clumsy rush, I say: ‘I’m so sorry about Maliwan. Really, I am.’
‘We should start moving.’ He gets slowly to his feet. ‘Think you can make it?’
‘I hope so,’ I say, with a sickly grin. I start walking, moving like a spindly insect. He’s just as clumsy beside me. I expect we look quite amusing, struggling down the track like this in our ripped clothes. Amusing or horrifying, I’m not sure which. I start to think about Steve, but shut the thought off before it can grow. I’m glad of all the practice I’ve had at pushing horrible ideas away. I’ll keep them at bay until I get back to Steve’s house, but if he’s not there, then I will let all the thoughts in, every single awful last one of them.