by J G Alva
The relief he felt was all out of proportion to the situation; he knew it, but could do nothing to stop it, could do nothing to stop the pleasant unwinding in the pit of his stomach and stop the shaky sigh escaping his lips. A tremor of relief started up all over his body and he could do nothing to stop that either.
With the glow of the fire to guide him, it was relatively easy to get back to the beach.
When he got close enough for Rebekah to see him he was a physical wreck, breathing hard, covered in sweat and shaking.
“My God, what happened to you?” Rebekah cried, in a voice that wasn’t quite hysterical.
Nick collapsed next to the fire and couldn’t seem to stop himself from shaking.
“I don’t feel so good,” he said.
◆◆◆
For the next three days he didn’t quite sleep. He decided it was more a kind of living death.
It started with cold. He got so cold that there didn’t seem to be any way he could warm up. He slept and woke, slept and woke, slept and woke, until he felt he had somehow gotten locked in a half-sleep, where the real world and the landscape of his dreams had merged, stitched together by some ancient tribal curse from a witch doctor. He rose to lucidity one time to find himself remonstrating Jessica for not consulting him when she redecorated their living room, only to realise that he was talking to himself; other times he was sure he was back at the house, and it was that time again after Martin had died, and the books were a mess and Nick didn’t know how he was going to cope, he was no accountant, all he wanted to do was design and see his designs brought to life, that was all he had ever wanted to do, but things were getting on top of him and he saw no way out of it, the company was a monster and wanted to eat him up; at other times his father looked in on him in his room and smiled and said everything was going to be alright. But his father had been dead for years.
He came out of one particularly bad dream and wasn’t sure he wasn’t in another one, as a young girl he had never seen before poured water from a coconut shell down his throat, her face glistening with tears, a sight that for some reason terrified him, and she was speaking to him, but what she was saying didn’t seem to make any sense:
“You can’t leave me on this island alone, Nick. You can’t. How can you do this to me? I can’t make it on my own. Oh God, Nick, oh God, don’t leave me. Please don't leave me. I’m sorry about what I said about your wife. I just...please don’t leave me, please...”
And then the visions seemed to fade, as thin as tissue paper, until they were gone altogether, and instead he became aware of a big bubble of blackness swelling up from underneath him, an irresistible thing at the edge of his vision, its only purpose to swallow him whole and Nick, exhausted and spent, with nothing left in him to fight it with, let himself be taken.
◆◆◆
CHAPTER 4
“I think...I think we’ve been on this island for about two months now,” Nick said, around a mouthful of fish.
Rebekah looked at him sharply.
“Well, give or take a day or two. I don’t know why you’re looking so shocked.”
“Neither do I,” she said, sitting on the opposite side of the fire. “Now that I think about it, of course it’s been two months but...when you say it like that. God.”
Nick threw the bones on the fire and went down to the water to wash his hands.
When he came back, Rebekah was staring in to the fire as if hypnotised.
“My favourite time was when your leg got infected,” she said, her eyes coming up from the fire to look at him, the ghost of that old fear still in them. “I’ll never forgive you for that. For making me so afraid.”
Nick stared at the fire too.
“I wasn’t exactly having the time of my life, either.”
He looked at her then, and their eyes locked.
“Anyway.” He cleared his throat. “We don’t know it was that. It might have been a mosquito bite. It might have been Malaria.”
“God.”
She looked away.
There was silence a moment.
“You looked so different then,” she said.
He stroked his face.
“No beard. And I was fat.”
“Well. A little overweight maybe. Nobody would recognise you now, though.”
It was the same for both of them. Pickings on the island were slim. Nick had managed to fashion a spear of sorts and had taken to fishing in the shallows, but it was only just enough to sustain them. If Nick put a hand on his side he could easily feel all his ribs. Rebekah had not faired any better. Even if the scar on her head had all but healed, and hair had grown to cover it – so she no longer looked like Frankenstein's monster – she was skinny, and getting skinnier, and her arms and legs were like sticks, and her cheeks were hollow. In his darker moments, he was sure that the island could not sustain them for much longer. There just wasn’t enough for them to eat.
“I don’t think they’d recognise either of us,” Nick said.
The change wasn’t just on the surface either, he decided. The island had aged them both too. Hunger seemed to be a constant companion, as annoying – and as insistent – as the gnats and mosquitos and other flying insects that dogged them incessantly, and it was this wearing, grinding ache that never diminished that was steadily eroding away their spirit. Rebekah’s eyes had a fevered look, like she was on the edge of madness; Nick hated to think what he might look like, a wild bearded man, a savage. They had long ago given up on the idea of being rescued. It was a hope they could not sustain. It just seemed too improbable, and used up too much energy…and they needed that energy to deal with their hunger. They continued to keep the signal fire going, as much as they could, but there was only so much wood to burn. It was only a concession to hope after all, and neither of them really believed in it. The fire would have to be given up in time, Nick thought. There was only so much wood lying around to be burnt, and cutting down trees took energy he didn’t have.
Nick hated it here. What on paper might appear as a paradise to some was in fact nothing but a living hell, because if they weren't suffering in the heat then they were scrabbling for food every minute, always conscious of injury lest Nick once again fell in to the sickness that had afflicted him not long after they’d first arrived. He was tired all of the time, and some of that was lack of food, and some of that was the constant assault of the heat, and the bugs, and the dirty drinking water – a strange taste even after boiling it in coconut shells over the fire – but most of it he thought was a lack of hope. And he saw no way to restore it. They were here. That was it. This was their reality.
◆◆◆
There was a rock beyond the beach, almost as tall as he was, with one side almost completely smooth, and it was on this Nick tried to keep some sort of calendar, by scouring a line on it at the beginning of each day.
He went to it that morning and looked at all the lines marking its surface and couldn’t quite believe they had been here so long. He scratched another line in it with a sharp piece of stone he had found, put the stone at the base of the rock, stared at the lines again – my God where had the time gone? – and returned to the beach.
Rebekah was sitting in the sea, an antidote to the heat. Nick sat down beside her, the coolness of the water enveloping his legs.
“The thing of it is,” Rebekah said, and there was a small, sorry half-smile on her lips, “there’s nobody I really want to go back to.”
“What – "
“I remembered the other day. It came back to me suddenly. I was washing my clothes and the label...the label brought it all back”
“What do you remember?” Nick asked, interested despite himself.
“My aunt. Not an unkind woman, just totally useless when it came to raising a seventeen year old girl. I can understand it, in a way. I’m not her child, but...It takes effort to be that cold. And she was very cold. I know why I was on your boat. I ran away. I hid on board, below deck. When you stopped at on
e of the other islands I was going to...disappear.”
Nick thought about that for a minute, and then made a face.
“A little hard to do that in the Seychelles, isn’t it?” He said. “For a little white girl?”
“Really? We’ve done it.”
Nick had to concede that that was true. But then again, was it? The authorities had given up looking for them, that much was obvious. That was even if they had bothered looking at all. So the conclusion he had come to was that they believed there was nothing to find.
They had been written off for dead.
They both got up at the same time and walked back to the fire, which to Nick’s surprise was still burning.
“When we get off this island,” Nick began, but Rebekah interrupted him.
“If.”
Nick gave her a warning look and began again, “when we get off this island, you can come back with me. Jessica and I will look after you. Least ‘til you’re old enough to fend for yourself. Then I’ll give you some money for a flat. Or something.”
“Thanks, Dad.”
“Are you mocking me, child?” Nick said, with a smile. “That’s it, you’re grounded.”
“How come you haven’t got any kids of your own?” Rebekah asked, her head cocked to one side.
“What?”
“You look like you’d be a good father.”
“Oh.” Nick stared at the fire, got up, prodded it a little with a stick, and then threw the stick on top of it. “We couldn’t.”
“Oh.” Rebekah thought about that. “What – you couldn’t or...?”
“Both of us couldn’t. My, uh...my sperm count was too low and Jessica...Jessica had an ectopic pregnancy when she was younger. It damaged her fallopian tubes. That kind of closed the door pretty quickly on that one.”
He could hear the longing in his own voice and was surprised at it. Had he wanted kids that much? Maybe he was getting old.
“So the perfect woman does have some faults.”
“What?” Nick said, anger rising up in him.
“I’m sorry,” Rebekah said, her eyes downcast. “I’m just tired. I didn’t mean it.”
“I should hope not.”
There was silence a moment. The fire popped and crackled.
“Do you miss your wife?”
“Yes,” Nick said curtly; it came out angrier than he meant it to.
“Please don’t be angry with me. I said I was sorry.”
Nick sighed, and with the sigh the anger left him.
“Yes. I miss her. She was...she was the love of my life.”
◆◆◆
The island, all in all, took about four hours to circle, but that wasn’t necessarily an accurate assessment; if the island had been bare and smooth Nick thought he could probably have walked around it in less than an hour.
Nick estimated that it was about a mile in length, maybe half that in width, with the big lump of the hill in the middle. Only about three types of plant life had managed to grow under these difficult conditions: the rigid grass, the spindly bushes that grew to waist height in the dry earth, and the flat twisted trees that covered most of the island. You couldn’t really count the Coconut Palms, there was only a handful, and they were more like nervous tourists than residents. As far as the animal life went, there didn’t seem to be anything bigger than the rat he had discovered sniffing at Rebekah when they had first arrived. It would provide food for them both for a couple of days if he could catch it, but he couldn’t catch it. And this was their second biggest problem: food. Nick wasn’t quite so worried about that, as the sea seemed to be an endless larder of scaly treats, and he was getting better with the spear. They were almost guaranteed something substantial for every meal time. Almost.
Their biggest problem was fresh water. Nick didn’t know when the rainy season was – and there had to be one, the pools on the island pretty much guaranteed that – but he just hoped to God it was soon, as most of the water amongst the mushroom shaped rocks had evaporated or tasted too bad to drink. In fear of it being many months before water fell from the heavens, Nick had begun rationing what little water they had. This did little to help their situation. Their throats and mouths were always dry, their lips cracked, and even desultory conversation became a strain. Nick amused himself in his bleaker moments by imagining a rescue vehicle turning up after a year and finding their sun dried bodies on the beach, paper dry skin on sun bleached bones, their hands clasped around each other’s throats. During the day, when they were both sniping at each other, it was less amusing.
But though she seemed to nettle him with increasing fervour, and though he grew to find her company almost unbearable, he came upon a startling discovery not long after their two month anniversary.
Nick had gone off to collect more water early one morning and when he had returned Rebekah had not been anywhere on the beach. For a moment he couldn’t reconcile the knowledge that she was always on the beach with the open empty sand in front of him. For a wild moment he thought a ship had arrived while he had been busy, and that she had jumped on it and sailed off, with no thought for him. It was irrational, all their insults and abuses were nothing of any note, she wasn’t spiteful enough to punish him in this way by abandoning him, was she? no no of course not but he began to get angry just the same, as if she had betrayed him. He was being stupid, he knew it, and yet the anger continued to build on itself, up and up, until it began to be replaced by fear, and the irrational certainty that she had just...vanished. It was ridiculous, it was impossible but...he could not quite convince himself that that wasn’t what had happened. Just like that, one minute she had been here, the next she had simply blinked out of existence. And then he started to wonder if she had ever really existed…Had she really been on the boat? Or had his mind made her up, so he wouldn’t be alone? It was crazy…but he couldn’t quite talk himself out of it. With that irrational certainty fixed in his mind came the crushing weight of solitude, a real thing, like a heavy load he was carrying on his back, and he dropped the coconut shells full of water in the sand and went tearing down the beach, screaming her name, knowing he was in the grip of panic but unable to stop himself.
He was at the far end of the beach when he heard her voice floating to him.
He turned to find her behind him, picking up the shells he had discarded in the sand.
He came back, his heart galloping away in his chest, and what replaced the panic was his good friend anger.
“Where the fuck were you?” He demanded.
She pointed back over his shoulder.
“I just went for a walk,” she said.
“I didn’t know where you were. Jesus Christ, you could have been lying in the jungle bleeding to death for all I knew. If you’re going somewhere you have to tell me where, otherwise I’ll just worry about you.”
Rebekah stared at him for a moment, and then threw the shells in to the sand.
“Like you tell me, you mean,” she stormed, angry herself. “What about that time you decided to explore the island, and it got dark and you weren’t back – I didn’t know where the hell you were! Did you stop to think for one minute that I might be getting just a little bit nervous about things – "
“This is different. I’m the adult, I’m responsible for you.”
“Good job you didn’t think that when you slipped into a coma. You weren’t responsible then. Even for yourself.”
“You’ve got one hell of a mouth on you for a seventeen year old girl. You really have, do you know that?”
“I’m stuck on this island too! What – am I not allowed to talk now as well? Bad enough I should be cut off from society, that I am going to be denied an education, that I’m going to be denied sanitary towels – "
“Oh God,” Nick groaned, putting his head in his hands.
“ – But you want me to stop talking as well!”
Rebekah stared at him as Nick, calmer now and faintly amused by the situation, tried to stop a smile coming to
his lips.
“That’s not what I meant. And you know it.”
“I don’t know many men – and I’m not likely to now, am I – but I hope to God they’re not all like you.”
“Ha,” Nick said. “No other man would put up with you.”
“Least they’d treat me like a woman.”
“You’re not a woman. You’re seventeen.”
“Nearly eighteen – "
“For God’s sake, Rebekah – "
He saw with some alarm she had started to cry now, and a little voice in the back of his mind thought what a waste of moisture.
“I’m never going to know what it’s like to kiss a man, to fall in love with a man, to have babies...I am going to grow old on this island and die like a – like a – like an o-o-old maaaaaaiiiiidddddd – "
Nick came to her and hesitating briefly, thinking why do I always feel vaguely uneasy about touching her, took her in his arms. Rebekah sputtered and sobbed in his hands like a dying motor.
“Better now?” Nick asked softly.
Rebekah nodded, wiping the tears from her cheeks.
“We’ll be rescued,” he said, but wasn’t sure he believed his own words. “Don’t you worry about that.”
They started walking back down the beach to where their unofficial camp was, behind the black stain on the sand where they usually made up the fire.
Rebekah stopped suddenly and turned to him.
“Am I ugly?” She asked.
Nick was taken aback.
“What?”
“Am I ugly? Or am I...sort of okay? I know I’m probably no Jessica Mitchell, it just would have been nice to know if I...stood a chance out there.” She flapped a hand at the horizon.
Nick laughed.
“It’s not funny, Nick,” Rebekah said, her expression hurt.
“I know it’s not, it’s just...”
“What?”
Only a woman would worry about her looks when they were probably going to die of dehydration he thought, but didn’t say it.
He looked at her and said solemnly, “you’re not ugly.”