The Island

by C. L. Taylor

  It’s a panic attack. It’s just a panic attack.

  But his body has stopped listening to his mind and his breathing is sharp and shallow and the sea’s growing darker and narrower and his world’s turning black.

  This is what death feels like, says a voice in his head.

  He tries to shout for help but there’s no air in his lungs. It takes every ounce of energy to crawl out of the sea and back onto the sand.

  Danny lies on the sand for what feels like for ever, waiting for the final lurch of his heart. But his heart doesn’t stop beating and he doesn’t black out. Instead, very, very gradually his pulse begins to slow, his breathing deepens and his vision returns to normal. He reaches his fingers into the sand and rakes it over and over, relishing the sensation of the soft grains under his fingertips. Every muscle in his body feels weak and exhausted and his brain feels numb. It was a panic attack, just a panic attack. Honor’s not going to die.

  As he continues to dig his fingers into the sand he hears a soft whimpering sound from further up the beach. He freezes, listening intently. The sound gets louder. It’s not whimpering anymore. It’s a screech of pain. He looks towards Jessie, the only other person on the beach apart from him. She’s lying with a blanket wrapped around her but one corner is in the fire and flames are leaping at her feet.

  Chapter 27

  JESSIE

  Eighteen months earlier

  Tom hasn’t been himself for weeks. He’s never really been keen on spending time with the family, not since he hit his teens anyway, but we hardly see him anymore. It’s not as if he’s at work, he quit his job as a service station chef a couple of months ago. He just hangs round the house all day, playing PlayStation and watching films in his room or else sneaking down to the shed at the bottom of the garden to drink and smoke. Mum and Dad don’t know what to do. They’ve tried sitting him down and having a word with him. Dad went for the tough love approach, Mum was more understanding, but it didn’t change anything. It’s as though my brother’s built a huge, invisible wall around him that none of us can smash through. Mum got in touch with a couple of his friends to ask if they knew what was wrong but they said they hadn’t seen him for ages. They’d invited him out for drinks, they told her, but he’d either turn up for one and then leave or not turn up at all.

  Dad thinks Tom’s struggling because most of his mates have left London. Unlike my brother, who went to catering college, his friends went to university in different parts of the UK, then got jobs elsewhere and haven’t come back. I’ve seen some of their Instagram accounts, showing off about their fancy cars, their action-packed holidays and their fit girlfriends. Tom still lives at home and he split up with his girlfriend six months ago. When I asked him why, he just shrugged and said, ‘Shit happens.’

  I think that’s when Tom really started getting depressed. Because that’s what’s wrong with him. Depression. I might be young but I’m not stupid. I know that’s why he stopped going to work and lay in bed all day after they sacked him. There’s a part of me that feels sorry for him but I’m angry with him too. He’s all Mum and Dad can talk about – Tom this, Tom that. What are we going to do about Tom? I know they’ve tried to get him to go and see the GP but he didn’t turn up. When Mum confronted him about it he said there was nothing wrong with him and he just wanted to be left alone.

  Earlier tonight he came down to the kitchen while I was doing my homework, a bottle of vodka and a pack of fags in one hand, and he stood at the counter, staring at me. I looked up at him and said, ‘All right?’ and he shook his head and said, ‘No, not really.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Life.’

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’

  ‘Everything.’

  ‘So change it then.’

  He laughed then. ‘I wish it was that easy.’

  ‘Just get a job,’ I said. ‘That’ll help.’

  He gave me a long look then said, ‘Will it?’

  ‘I dunno. At least then you’d have some money to do stuff.’

  ‘Like what? Buy stuff I don’t really need? Go out drinking? Go on holiday? All that stuff is meaningless.’

  ‘No, it’s not.’

  ‘No, I guess it’s not when you’re fifteen.’

  I rolled my eyes.

  ‘Jessie,’ he said softly. ‘Do you ever think about death?’

  I sat back in my seat and stared at him. ‘No.’

  I glanced towards the kitchen door, hoping Mum and Dad would walk through it. But the door was shut and Mum and Dad weren’t in. They hadn’t been out in for ever, not even to the cinema, and when they were offered a weekend on the Isle of Wight to celebrate one of their oldest friend’s fiftieth birthday they agonized over it for days. I heard them, chatting in the living room about whether it was a good idea to leave me and Tom alone. Mum was worried that Tom would get too drunk to look after me. Dad said that I was sensible enough to knock for the neighbours if anything happened. It took him a while to convince her but he got there in the end. I was pleased. With any luck they’d have a brilliant time and wouldn’t be so stressed out when they came back.

  ‘I do.’ Tom leant back against the counter and folded his arms over his chest. ‘I think about death a lot.’

  ‘Well, you shouldn’t,’ I said. ‘That’s morbid.’

  ‘I’m not scared. I used to be, when I was kid, but I’m not anymore.’

  He might not have been scared of death but I was scared of him, listening to him talk like that. I felt completely out of my depth. Was he thinking about killing himself? Was that what he was hinting at? Well, he needed to get that thought out of his head straight away. I had to change the subject.

  ‘You know the NCT group are thinking about Greece next summer, don’t you?’ I said. ‘For the group holiday.’

  ‘Why are you telling me?’ He laughs dryly. ‘I haven’t been for years. I’m too old for that crap, Jess. What twenty-three-year-old goes on holiday with their parents and a bunch of randoms they met bouncing on birthing balls?’

  I’d thought mentioning a holiday would give him something to look forward to but he wasn’t interested. There had to be something I could say to stop him thinking dark thoughts and give him something to get excited about.

  ‘Will you teach me how to bake?’

  He laughed softly. ‘You? Bake? Since when?’

  ‘Since Bake-Off. I want to learn how to make cakes and… and bread.’

  ‘I’m not exactly Paul Hollywood.’

  ‘I don’t care. Will you teach me?’

  The strangest expression passed over his face and he rounded the counter and wrapped me in his arms.

  ‘You’re such a kind-hearted girl, Jessie. Stay that way. Don’t ever let go of that bit of you.’ He hugged me tightly and kissed me on the top of my head. ‘I love you, you know that, don’t you?’

  I stiffened. We weren’t a very huggy family and physical affection made me feel awkward. So instead of saying, ‘I love you too,’ I said, ‘Yeah, yeah’ and wriggled out of his arms.

  I wake with a start. The alarm clock on my bedside table glows 1.43 a.m. Something’s wrong, I can feel it in the pit of my belly, but it isn’t until I sniff the air that I realize why I’ve woken up.

  Smoke. Instinctively I turn to look out of the window, shoving the curtain out of the way to peer outside. Directly below my bedroom the garden is shrouded in darkness but light is dancing in the window of the shed at the end of the path. Light… or… I squint my eyes. Flames!

  I slam open the door to Tom’s room but there’s no one inside. I pound down the stairs and, without stopping to pull on my shoes, I yank open the kitchen door and run down the path in my bare feet, heart pounding.

  ‘Tom!’ I thump my fists against the shed window then jump back as the searing heat of the glass burns into my flesh. ‘Tom!’

  I run to the door. I can feel the heat radiating off the wood like a furnace so I rip off my T-shirt and wrap it around my hands. But when I shove on
the door it doesn’t budge an inch.

  ‘Tom! Tom! Someone help me! Help me!’

  I go back to the window and look inside. Where the piles of hay for my guinea pig used to be now there’s a column of flames, licking the back wall of the shed from the floor to the wooden shelves holding Dad’s tools. My heart races as I search the flames and the thick black smoke for my brother. Maybe he’s not in here. Maybe he went to the pub with his friends? But then I see him, a dark, slumped shape on the floor, pressed up against the door.

  ‘Tom! Tom, wake up!’ I stare in desperation at my neighbour’s house. A bedroom window light comes on and a figure appears at the window. ‘Help!’ I wave my arms. ‘Help!’

  I run back to the shed door and throw myself at it, not registering the heat that radiates down the right side of body. I throw myself at the door again and again, screaming my brother’s name. I need to get him out of there. I need to… I need to…

  I stare desperately around the garden, looking for something, anything I can use to break open the door, and then I see it, the ugly ornamental water fountain Dad bought for Mum one Christmas. It’s plastic and it runs on batteries but it’s heavy. I pick it up and approach the shed, still screaming my brother’s name.

  There’s a curtain of flames behind the window now. As I hurl the fountain against the glass they blow out towards me, licking at my hands, my arms and my neck. It’s so hot I feel as though I’ve been dropped into the heart of a volcano.

  And everything goes black.

  Chapter 28

  DANNY

  Danny sprints across the sand as Jessie twists and turns on the sand, sobbing and flailing. He picks up a flip-flop, lying abandoned beside a rucksack, and brings it down hard on the blanket, slapping out the flames that were licking at Jessie’s feet then he rolls her across the sand, moving her a safe distance from the fire.

  ‘Stop! Stop!’ she screams.

  He stops rolling her and crouches beside her. ‘You’re OK. It’s all right. It’s over.’

  She stares up at him, her face and hair crusted with sand and her eyes wide and fearful, then she wriggles out of the cocoon-like blanket and shuffles away from him. ‘Danny, what the hell were you doing?’

  ‘You were on fire!’ His heart is still thumping like a boxer, his whole body buzzing with adrenaline. ‘You were shouting for help.’

  ‘I was dreaming!’ There are tears in her eyes now and he watches, horrified, as they spill down her cheeks. ‘I was dreaming about my brother.’

  He looks from her distraught face to the blanket, lying in a heap at her feet, and then to the fire. He can still see the indentation in the sand where she lay. There’s no way she could have kicked the blanket into the fire with it wrapped so tightly around her. Someone must have put the corner in the flames. He glances back, towards the jungle, half expecting to see evil eyes glinting out at them from between the trees.

  ‘What did you say your phobia was?’ he asks Jessie.

  She looks at him and frowns, her face wet with tears and her eyes red and shining. ‘What?’

  ‘On the first night, when we were sitting around the fire. What did you say your phobia was?’

  ‘I… I…’ She runs her hands over her face, brushing the sand from her cheeks. ‘Vomiting. I said my fear was vomiting.

  Why?’

  A cold chill pricks at Danny’s spine as he glances back towards the forest. ‘You lied, didn’t you? Like I did.’

  ‘I don’t… I don’t understand what that’s got to do with anything. Danny, I just woke up. I don’t know what’s going on.’

  His gaze drifts towards the sea and the small patch of sand where he’d had his panic attack. One of you is going to die. He’d narrowed down his list of suspects to Jessie and Meg, and he’d been so sure it was Jessie he could barely bring himself to look at her when she and Milo came back from swimming round the island. But Jessie’s worst phobia just came true and there’s no way she faked it. He saw the flames!

  ‘What is it, Danny?’ Jessie asks. ‘What are you looking at? What’s going on? You’re scaring me.’

  He doesn’t reply. Instead he reaches down, selects Jefferson’s rucksack from the pile near the fire and hauls it onto his back.

  ‘Danny!’ Jessie calls as he runs into the jungle. ‘Danny, where are you going? What’s going on?’

  Danny runs at a steady pace, or as steady as he can in a pair of Milo’s flip-flops that slip and slide under the soles of his damp feet. He grips the rucksack straps with both hands and keeps his gaze fixed on the jungle floor. It’s as though the motion of his body has cleared his mind, and the fog of dark thoughts that have been plaguing him for days are gone.

  When he arrives at the small cave, hollowed into the cliff by millions of years’ worth of weather, he shrugs off the rucksack and drags it inside. He discovered the cave when he was looking for Honor on the first day and ended up jumping off the cliff to get back to her. He’d peered inside it, half expecting to see a snake or some other kind of creature slithering within, but it was unoccupied. Now, he drops to his hands and knees and crawls inside. There’s just enough space for him to sit down, legs crossed, with the rucksack in his lap. He eases Jefferson’s neatly packed belongings onto the ground and sorts through them. There’s some food – dried meat strips, a couple of cans of corned beef, some beans and several bottles of isotonic water. There’s also a first-aid kit, some paracetamol and ibuprofen, a waterproof sheet and a length of cord. He unravels the cord and wraps it around each of his hands and pulls, hard. Strong, good. He places it on the floor then flips open the first-aid kit. There are bandages inside, wound tightly and unopened, some wads of dressing and some tape. He sets them down by the cord, along with both bottles of water and some of the food, then he crawls back out of the cave and straightens up. Taking a deep breath he screams at the top of his lungs.

  Chapter 29

  JESSIE

  ‘Jessie! Are you OK?’ Milo comes rushing towards me as I stumble out of the sea and make my way across the sand. ‘What’s happened? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

  I shake my head but it doesn’t clear my thoughts. ‘I’ve just been for a swim to the cove we found. Something really horrible happened and I thought some time alone would help, but I’m still a bit freaked out.’

  ‘Is it them?’ He gently guides me down onto the sand then wraps an arm around my shoulders. ‘Have Jack and Josh come back?’

  ‘No, no. Nothing like that. I had a nap, like I said I would, by the fire. And I had a really upsetting dream. About…’ I search Milo’s eyes, ‘about Tom. I was outside the shed, trying to get in to save him and—’

  ‘It’s OK.’ He pulls me closer. ‘It’s OK, Jessie. You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.’

  ‘No, no. I do. I really do.’

  It is as though the dream has unlocked something in my brain and there’s so much… stuff… swirling in my head that I have to talk to let it all out.

  Milo listens intently, his eyes not leaving my face as I tell him everything – about my brother’s depression and the conversation we had in the kitchen.

  ‘I freaked out when he started talking about death,’ I say. ‘It scared me so much. I felt completely out of my depth and I didn’t know what to say, so I changed the subject…’ Hot tears roll down my cheeks. I try to rub them away but new tears immediately take their place.

  Milo pulls me into a hug, pressing my cheek into his chest. I can hear his heart pounding – strong and steady – and I close my eyes. Talking about Tom makes it real. As words leave my mouth images flash up in my head: my brother’s face, his tired eyes, the long, loose shape his body made pressed up against the kitchen counter, the pack of cigarettes in his hand and the bottle of vodka by the sink. I don’t want to relive what happened. I want to slam the door shut in my brain, lock it and run away. Every muscle, every tendon, every ligament in my body is tensed and primed to pull away from Milo and scrabble to my feet. But I c
an’t keep doing that. I can’t keep running for the rest of my life.

  ‘It wasn’t your fault.’ Milo strokes my wet hair back from my face. His eyes are shining with compassion, his brow is knitted into a frown and his mouth is a thin, worried line. ‘You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘But it was. Don’t you understand? It was my fault. I shouldn’t have gone to bed. I should have stayed up all night talking to him. I should have hidden the lighter or poured the vodka down the sink. If he’d never set foot in that shed he might still be alive.’

  ‘But…’ He pauses uncertainly.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Your brother’s death was an accident, Jessie. That’s what the coroner ruled. Tom got drunk, passed out and dropped his cigarette. That’s what started the fire. He didn’t commit suicide. He didn’t mean to die.’

  ‘And that’s what makes it so much worse.’

  ‘It was an accident, Jessie; a terrible, tragic accident. You couldn’t have known what was going to happen. No one could.’

  Milo holds me as I burst into tears. I haven’t talked about Tom’s death to anyone other than the police and Mum and Dad, and even then I didn’t go into detail because I didn’t want my parents to have the same awful images in their heads as I do. Telling Milo about my brother is like reopening a scar; the pain’s as fresh as the day Tom died.

  ‘You have to let it go,’ Milo says softly. ‘This weight that you’re carrying around inside you; you can’t torture yourself with could have been for the rest of your life. Tom wouldn’t want you to do that. I didn’t know him as well as you did but I’m pretty sure of that.’

  ‘But I don’t know how to let it go. I keep rerunning what happened that day in my head. What if Mum and Dad hadn’t gone to the Isle of Wight? What if I hadn’t gone to bed when I did? What if I’d taken Tom’s lighter? What if I’d stayed up all night talking to him? I was the only person who could have stopped what’d happened and I didn’t, Milo, I didn’t…’ My voice cracks. I feel as though someone has stuck a knife between my ribs and they’re gutting my heart.