by Claire Gray
‘You should maybe see a doctor when we get back,’ Dolph says then.
‘I would think they’re all busy,’ I say, ‘tending to people’s burns and blown off limbs.’
‘I’ve got a guy. He’s a doctor and a landscape painter. My parents know him, vaguely. I could set you up with him.’
‘No, thank you,’ I say, something about this suggestion makes my bare toes curl, and I step a little further away from Dolph. ‘Why don’t you go see him?’
‘No, I don’t care about me anymore,’ he says, and I see his lower lip crack and begin to bleed.
‘Okay, well, I’ll be fine. Don’t worry about me either,’ I say. I nearly shut up, but then I add: ‘I mean, just yesterday you were on the verge of murdering me. So, I’ll not take your concern too seriously.’
‘But I didn’t murder you, did I? Isn’t that what counts? And I’ve apologised for that, haven’t I? Didn’t I say sorry to you yesterday?’
‘I’m not sure you did, no. Just forget about it.’
‘But I am sorry. I am. We were never really going to do it.’
‘Okay.’ I shrug. He stares at me with wet eyes, so I give him a nod, just to round off the conversation.
Dolph’s mouth moves for a moment and then he clears his throat to say: ‘You owe me an apology too, you know. Pamela only went really insane after you turned up. I think, perhaps, if you hadn’t come out looking for us, Maliwan would still be alive.’
I stare at him for a moment, his face going in and out of focus. ‘She was going to kill you both anyway,’ I say, but I’m not sure of this at all. My cheeks go cold and my vision fades out for a second, white stars flashing inside my eyeballs. I try to blink the haze away and stumble through a pothole that I can’t quite see.
‘She didn’t have to die like that,’ Dolph is saying. ‘Maybe if things had happened another way, I would have been able to save her.’
I nod and let him blame me, feeling the blame deep inside.
We walk on, passing the warm bottle between us. I keep my eyes on the horizon and will buildings to appear there. We keep to the edge of the track so that we’ll be able to dive quickly into the trees if we hear anyone coming.
‘I’m going to find her today,’ Dolph says, his words coming out slowly.
‘What will you do after that?’
‘Kill her, I guess.’
I believe him. ‘We should try her hotel. We’ll find Steve first, and then we’ll all go together.’
‘You don’t have to help me,’ he says.
‘I do. You’re right about this being my fault. Partly, at least. I’ll help you find her.’
Chapter Thirty-Five
Somehow, we’ve reached Steve’s pale pink house. One of the neighbours have their radio tuned to what sounds like a sports channel, although we can’t understand the commentary; the radio, an old fashioned one with crackling speakers, is propped on a window ledge of the building next door. Children are playing further down the street. I can hear them very loudly as I put a hand against the front door to steady myself; it’s like they’re beating a ball against the inside of my head. My knees shake. We’re this close to the house, but I still might not make it. Just behind me, Dolph is biting on his fingers and looking up and down the road.
‘You say this is your boyfriend’s place?’
‘No. My boss. You met him, remember?’
‘Oh, shit, yeah. I’m sorry.’
I need Steve to be on the other side of this door. If he’s not here, I’m going to be forced to imagine all of the terrible things that could have happened to him, and I’m going to fall apart completely. I don’t even have a key for the front door, but usually Steve leaves it unlocked. I try it now. It opens with a click. The radio next door erupts in cheers.
The living room is filled with sunshine. This place is so nice; I don’t want to soil it with my grime and hateful thoughts. The patchwork quilt which I’ve been sleeping under has been left carefully folded on the couch. I stare at it, and will Steve to enter the room, to burst out of his bedroom. He doesn’t. Behind me, Dolph slams the door. I want to scream at him to leave, to take his pain elsewhere.
‘He’s not here,’ I say. ‘We’ve left him behind.’
‘Anything to eat?’ Dolph asks, his face just centimetres from the back of my head; I can feel his breath shifting my hair against my neck.
I slap at my neck as if there’s a spider there, and we go to the fridge and lean into it, devouring things from their packets, tearing with our fingers, spilling food down our chins. The cold air makes a pulse beat inside my bruises. We eat like this for minutes, our bodies making little noises, and then our eyes meet and we start to laugh. We laugh hard enough for my stomach to turn, and I shuffle away to stick my head into the sink, staring at the row of cacti there on the window ledge, and the dead flies behind them. Out in the yard, that stray cat is sunning itself. Flies are out there too, hovering over the animal. At least flies won’t get to Maliwan’s body, I think out of nowhere.
‘Are you okay?’ Dolph asks, struggling to stop the laughter. His face is wet.
‘I don’t even know what’s funny.’
‘Nothing’s funny. We’re losing our minds.’
The sickness passes and I flop down on the couch.
‘I need to go back to the temples and look for Steve,’ I say, trying to keep some momentum going. It would be so easy to lie down and stay down for a million years. How will I get out there? I’ll have to hire a car or a moped, and I should find a weapon. Someone on this island will be selling guns if I ask around in the right places. I don’t know how to use a gun but there’ll be a YouTube video for that.
‘You don’t want to sleep a while?’ Dolph says, interrupting my thoughts.
‘No, I can’t sleep. You can sleep a while if you want. You can have this couch. It’s comfy.’
‘I’m going to look for Pamela.’ Dolph is leaning against the sink, staring at his toes. There’s mud on the floor around him. I’m sure we brought it in with us.
I’m trying to think of a way to say goodbye to him when the front door opens, sending a delicate shaft of daylight across the grubby carpet and into my face, dust hanging in the light like glitter, and my face warm like someone’s holding a match against it. For a moment, I can’t focus on the figures moving through the doorway, but as they stagger towards me they take shape and I see that Steve is here, holding Maliwan upright on her feet.
Chapter Thirty-Six
‘We were so close to getting picked up by the police. They drove right by in that same car we’d seen earlier, do you remember, Lucy? They didn’t spot us; it was so dark and we hid at first in case it was Mrs Shuttleworth. When we realised it was the police we jumped out and started waving. At that point, we really didn’t care about getting arrested or explaining what the hell we were doing out there. We just wanted to get somewhere safe. They did stop and shine a torch around but we couldn’t get to them in time before they drove on. I guess they didn’t hear us shouting over the noise of the river. I really thought we were going to die at that point. We just gave up and stayed right where we were at the side of the road. I didn’t sleep all night.’ Steve looks at Maliwan and says: ‘I was watching to make sure you didn’t stop breathing.’
Maliwan, who is curled around Dolph on the couch, smiles at Steve. Dolph and I share a look but don’t say anything.
‘And then we walked all the way back here, certain that the two of you must have died. The longest walk of my life. I need a fucking vacation now, if I didn’t already.’
‘How did you two find each other?’ I ask. I’m sitting on a striped deckchair which Steve has produced from a cupboard. It’s covered with a fine layer of sand, my feet don’t touch the floor and I’m trying not to fall asleep as I sink into its folds.
‘I went back to the temple and he was waiting there.’ Maliwan shrugs.
‘We didn’t see you. I was diving and diving. You can’t even swim,’ Dolph says. He l
aces his fingers around hers and holds on tight.
‘I just popped out of the car when it hit the water. I was okay. I hurt everywhere but I’m okay.’ She looks down at her body like she still can’t believe that it’s intact. Then she remembers something and pushes a hand into her pocket, pulling out the knife. She holds it flat in her palm so we all can see it. ‘I got this back. It fell into my hand as I was coming out of the car. I went straight back up to the cliff so that I could stab Pamela with it. She’d just tried to kill us all. She tried to kill my baby. I thought she had killed both of you. But she was gone already. I didn’t know what to do so I went back to the temple.’
‘I got lost,’ Steve admits. ‘I heard a motorbike and shouting so I knew there must be some kind of a problem. But I was too slow getting back. I had trouble even finding the trail. You got knocked out, Lucy?’
‘Yeah, but I’m okay. And you made it back here,’ I say. ‘That’s the main thing.’
‘Barely. What a fucking witch,’ Steve spits. ‘Pamela Shuttleworth. What the hell was she doing? Maliwan says she was trying to help in some way but I don’t see that at all. You know it’s horribly bad for you to be knocked unconscious. We need to get you to a doctor.’
‘There’s something I should tell you all,’ Dolph says. He was resting his cheek on the top of Maliwan’s head but he raises his head now, brushing her hair smooth with his hand.
We all look at him and wait for him to speak. He takes a while to manage it, the shape of his mouth changing as he considers which word to use first. Eventually, he says: ‘After Lucy blacked out, Pamela told Maliwan to tie her up, and…’
‘I didn’t want to,’ Maliwan cuts in. ‘She told me I had to. I tried not to do it tight.’
‘While you were doing that,’ Dolph continues, ‘Pamela was talking to me. She said that if we went to the police and confessed to everything, she’d make sure the baby was always looked after, and she’d give us all the money we ever needed.’
‘But you did do everything,’ I say. ‘She didn’t kill her husband, Maliwan did. Why would she need to pay you, and why did she even want you to do that after she’d taken the trouble to bring you out to the temples to hide?’
‘That’s kind of what I said. But she laughed and said that things were more complicated than I realised. And then she said that we were going to have to kill you too, and we’d have to tell the police we’d done that. I said no. She said we didn’t have a choice about killing you, but we did have a choice about what happened afterwards.’
‘We still might go to prison,’ Maliwan says. ‘And now we’ll have no money for the baby.’
‘I have money. My family has more money than the Shuttleworths. I keep telling you that.’
‘But I don’t want to take your money. I take money from the men I don’t like, not from you.’
Dolph stares at her for a moment, grinding his teeth, but then he snaps his gaze back to me, and keeps talking: ‘Anyway, I keep thinking about it. When we had his body in the trunk, it sounded like it was moving around. We figured it was just the road. The road was bumpy. And then when we were staying at the temple, we thought that we could hear ghosts wailing.’
‘They were ghosts.’ Maliwan nods.
‘No, what if it was him? And, as well,’ he says, looking at me, ‘you said you heard shouting and someone stole your bike. And then his body turned up on the beach. That couldn’t have happened, could it, if he was buried.’
‘He wasn’t dead when you took him out there,’ I say, suddenly understanding. ‘She killed him out there, or let him die. How badly hurt was he?’
‘A lot of blood,’ Maliwan says. ‘I hit him with one of those, what are they called, the horse head.’
‘A bookend,’ Dolph says. ‘A metal one.’
‘And when did this happen?’ Steve asks.
‘Friday. The morning after the bomb went off.’
‘I quit the day before,’ Maliwan explains. ‘But I was very worried about my mum, because I give her most of my money and there was a month I hadn’t been paid for yet. I knew he wasn’t going to give it to me. And then I heard he was going away for a while because of the explosion, so that really meant I would never get it. I thought if we went back to the resort and if I told him about the baby he would give me the money. But he just laughed at me and said awful things.’
‘Like what?’ Dolph says.
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Weren’t you there?’ I say. ‘I thought you were there.’
‘I was waiting outside the room. She thought I’d put her off while she was talking to him. Then she came out and she had blood all over her. I thought he’d hurt her but actually she’d hurt him.’
‘And then Pamela was there,’ Maliwan says. ‘I didn’t even know she was on the island. She only comes here once a year and usually none of us even see her. But she wasn’t upset at all.’
‘She didn’t even look surprised,’ Dolph agrees. ‘She had us wrap him up in all this plastic sheeting. His feet stuck out the end of it with white socks on and blood on the toes. There was blood all over the floor. So much of it. I never thought for a second that he wasn’t dead.’
‘Jesus,’ Steve says.
‘And she didn’t even introduce herself. I had to try and work out who she was. She had on tons of expensive looking jewellery but her hair was messed up across her forehead, all sweaty. She looked like someone coming out of a party in the early hours, all dishevelled. She reminded me of the people who visit my parents’ apartment each weekend. They’re always drinking and snarling at each other.’
‘So, she suggested burying the body out in the forest?’ Steve asks. ‘Didn’t you think that was strange? Didn’t you wonder why she was helping you?’
‘Sure,’ Dolph says. ‘It was really strange. But the whole situation was, and I sort of just did what she said. She had a way of speaking that made us take notice. And we were so scared. We didn’t know what to do. It was easy to just follow someone else’s instructions, at first anyway.’
‘What were you doing at the Imperial Hotel when I saw you?’ I ask. ‘Was that right before it all happened?’
‘No, that was just after it all happened. I was supposed to check out that day anyway. I didn’t want to just disappear and leave all our stuff there. I still owed a bit on the bill. That would have been suspicious, wouldn’t it? So, yeah, we drove straight there afterwards. I’ve never driven so fast in my whole life. The roads were quiet, so it didn’t matter. Oh, but then I hit a monkey. I got out to look and blood was trickling from its ears. It died. Its fingers curled up into fists, like how spiders’ legs are when you find them dead in a corner.’
‘I hate the monkeys,’ Maliwan says. ‘People say that he brought them here, so who cares?’
‘I carried it to the side of the road. It was warm, and the weight of a child.’
‘That’s horrible. Don’t say that,’ Maliwan frowns at him.
‘You must have driven past me,’ I say. ‘I was on that road. Wait, was he in the boot of your car when it was parked at the hotel?’
‘Yes.’ Dolph nods. ‘And Maliwan was curled up on the backseat but you probably couldn’t see her. When you came out shouting my name I thought perhaps you knew everything, like his arm had come loose and was hanging out the back of the car. I didn’t know who you were but you had this look on your face like you were onto us.’
‘Oh, I didn’t know anything. And I’m still not sure of much now. I’d just finished talking to him. I said goodbye and then you guys arrived, smashed him round the head, packaged him in plastic and got back to the Imperial Hotel before I arrived there. He was waiting there for me.’
‘What happened to your car?’ Steve asks. ‘You dumped it in town.’
‘Yeah.’ Dolph nods. ‘She agreed to let us come into town so we could pick up some supplies. We just went to the little shop by the beach because everything was chaos in the centre, with the bomb going off and all. But once we had
our stuff she said we had to leave the car. She drove us back out and left us there.’
‘To make it harder for you to escape,’ Steve says.
‘I guess. And we didn’t buy anywhere near enough food. We’d run out by the next day. I tried to catch a bat but it was too fast.’
‘She’s asleep,’ Steve says, nodding towards Maliwan, who has collapsed against Dolph’s chest. ‘I think I might do the same, just for an hour or so. This is a lot to process and I’m not quite at my best.’
We let Dolph and Maliwan have the couch, and I share Steve’s bed, sleeping right along the edge wrapped in a sleeping bag. I’m immediately too hot but don’t have the strength to escape from it. I think about how, when we wake up, we’re going to have to start investigating the bombing on Main Street all over again. We’re right back where we started. I close my eyes tight and picture the road outside my hostel, trying to focus on it hard enough that the flames lick my skin, trying to find a clue somewhere in the scene. I fall asleep and dream of it.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Maliwan’s had a shower and is wearing some of my clothes, which are slightly too large for her. She keeps grabbing the waist of the shorts to pull them back up. We’re crouched together beside the bag which I stuffed full of my belongings when I crept back into the horror of my hostel bedroom. I’m looking for a hairbrush amongst the bundled-up clothes, loose charging cables and dog-eared books.
‘I had one. I don’t know, maybe I didn’t pack it. I actually haven’t brushed my hair for a while, now that I think about it.’
‘It’s okay. I can just tie it back,’ Maliwan says.
I sit cross-legged on the floor and watch as she pulls her hair tightly into a ponytail. She looks better now that she’s slept and washed, and I can see, beneath the vest top that I’ve lent to her, the smallest dome of a baby bump.
‘How are you feeling?’ I ask, looking from the bump to her face.