by Laura Bates
Picking the fruit is harder work than Hayley had imagined. The guavas are the easiest to harvest, with their smooth, slightly textured skin turning from green to yellow as they ripen. She targets those the shade of tennis balls, twisting the stems gently until they pop off into her palm, trying not to wonder whether she’ll ever feel a real tennis ball in her hand again.
She stubbornly blocks out the memories that come flooding in, summers at the court with her mom, Dad arriving to pick them up and honking from the parking lot, stopping for ice cream on the way home. When she’d told her parents about the tour, her mom had pointed out that it’d take up half the summer holiday. ‘It’s my last chance to beat you at tennis, kiddo,’ she’d said lightly, ruffling Hayley’s hair, trying to keep the catch out of her voice. ‘You’ll be heading off to college next summer, far too busy to hit the ball around with your old mom.’
And Hayley had dismissed her. Or at least, she’d been impatient, focused on her Ivy League dreams and getting the cheer squad on her applications. ‘We’ll play when I get back, Mom, I promise,’ she’d said, carelessly. Not ‘I love you, I’ll always have time for you.’ Not ‘Mom, I’ll never be too busy to come back for a game, wherever I go to college.’ Just ‘when I get back’. And now…
No. She isn’t letting herself do this. Hayley Larkin is in control. She can’t control the weather, or the island, or the bugs, or whichever one of her teammates is playing stupid, dangerous pranks, but she can and she will control her own brain. And she is not going to break down now. On the flight home, Hayley has promised herself, she’ll let herself break. Let herself acknowledge for the first time how terrifying and lonely this ordeal has been. Not. Yet.
The low-hanging fruit isn’t difficult to reach, but they soon run out of easy pickings. Hayley stands, legs apart, knees shaking in spite of herself, as May sits on her shoulders, reaching for ripe guavas and complaining that Hayley isn’t steady enough.
‘I’m doing my best,’ she fires back, through gritted teeth. ‘You’re not exactly the sugar plum fairy, okay?’
May leaps down, landing light on her feet, catlike. She grins. ‘It’s taken a month of practice, a fortnight’s tour and over a week stranded on an island for you to stand up to me, Hayley Larkin. I like it.’
And Hayley’s smile might be a little uncertain, but it definitely reaches her eyes.
The brownish fruit that Hayley thought looked like an avocado is firmer on the tree than the wrinkled specimens she has eaten so far, tapering gently to a point like an overgrown, slightly squashed kiwi. These are harder to reach than the guavas, the tree trunks slender and tall, their leaves and fruit only appearing several metres off the ground. But May wriggles up the trees like a monkey, her skinned shins more than compensated for by the abundant bunches of fruit she finds, clinging together like clusters of dark, golden eggs. She picks them one at a time and drops them gently into Shannon’s waiting, cupped hands.
‘Did you ever think about becoming a baseball catcher?’ May asks, with a low whistle of appreciation as Shannon dives for a stray fruit and catches it in the outstretched fingertips of her left hand.
‘I’ll keep it in mind as a backup.’ Shannon grins.
They eat as they go along, digging their teeth into any fruit that splits or bruises as they pick it, letting the juice run down their chins and congeal stickily on their arms. Hayley is just piling the last mango neatly on the heap they’ve collected when she hears the faintest noise; something at once strange and deeply familiar.
‘Can anyone else hear that?’
‘Hear what?’ Jessa panics immediately, shrinking closer to the others.
‘It’s not a person, or an animal or anything.’ Hayley cocks her head. ‘Keep still a second.’ They all stand frozen, ears straining. Hayley hears the noises of the forest; a tree creaking slightly, a scuttling in the undergrowth, the rustle of leaves overhead. Then, in a moment of stillness, she catches it again: the faintest trickling noise, like somebody has left a tap on in another room.
‘Have you heard that before?’ The others shake their heads. ‘It’s always been windy when we’ve been here before,’ Jessa explains. ‘There was a lot more noise from the leaves.’
Concentrating hard, Hayley tries to follow the sound. Every few steps she has to stop and listen again, creeping forwards painstakingly, the noise almost out of reach, her ears clinging to the very edge of the sound.
Even when she’s standing right on top of it, she doesn’t see it at first. The forest floor is so overgrown, and there is so much debris and clutter: vines and dead leaves sprawling over one another. But she can hear it, a soft trickle, and as they scrape away moss and mud with their hands they find it, a little spring, bubbling up amongst some rocks and flowing for a few metres in a shallow stream before trickling away between some bushes.
‘It must run down from the top of the hill and under the ground.’ Shannon traces the path with her finger. ‘But it only comes up here in this one spot – it’s so quiet and small, it’s no wonder we never spotted it before.’
‘Well, I’m glad we found it,’ Jessa grins, pulling off her shoes and socks and sighing in pleasure as she dips her hot, sandy feet in the cool water.
‘Never mind washing our feet, we’ve got water!’ Hayley feels elated and buoyant, like a huge weight she didn’t even realise she had been carrying has lifted from her shoulders. ‘We won’t have to rely on rain and coconuts any more. We can collect water from here and boil it to clean it.’ She’s surprised that nobody else seems to be as excited as she is. Don’t they realise how precarious their situation is?
‘Ew, ew, ew, ew!’ Jessa jumps up, scrambling to put her shoes and socks back on, physically recoiling from the stream.
‘What, what?’ May scans the water for some horrifying predator.
‘Sorry, nothing major, but there are leeches in there.’ Jessa points and they all lean forward, spotting the slug-like brown creatures glistening in the water.
‘Just when you thought this island couldn’t get any creepier.’ After her morning brush with bugs, May looks like she is taking the leeches personally. But her outraged face is so funny Hayley can’t suppress a giggle, and before she knows it, she is crying with laughter, infecting them all with it, giddy with the relief of that tight, tight knot in her stomach unwinding just a little.
* * *
That afternoon the girls lie on their backs in the shade of the fruit trees. The clouds have lifted and a light breeze has swept away the thickness of the morning air, leaving Hayley feeling fresher, less constrained. She watches lazily as the dappled sunlight plays across her forearm, highlighting the soft, dark hairs.
At home, she’d have been worried about them. For years she’s fought a pitched battle with her mom, who doesn’t believe in arm waxes, and calls her body hair ‘a beautiful part of my beautiful daughter’. A beautiful part she’s been teased about since grade school, leaving her self-conscious and always pulling sleeves down over her wrists. ‘Just because you’ve never seen them before doesn’t mean they’re not normal,’ Grandma used to say, stroking her hands with long, papery fingers. ‘You just haven’t seen them because all we see are white models with blonde, invisible hair.’ She ran a gentle palm down Hayley’s arm. ‘It doesn’t mean this is any less beautiful, just because they choose not to show it to us.’
‘I know that, Grandma,’ she’d moaned, cutting her off quickly before she launched into the tirade about who ‘they’ are. ‘The problem is, nobody else does.’ The breeze strokes her arms, gently, and she closes her eyes, yearning for her grandmother’s touch. The hair doesn’t seem to matter so much here.
She has almost drifted off to sleep when Jessa speaks in that small, almost childish voice. ‘Is it any of you? Honestly? Look, no judgement, I swear, and I won’t tell the guys, but I’m scared, and I just want to know what’s going on. So… is it? Any of you?’
Hayley glances around. Jessa is looking determinedly straight up at the clu
mps of green mangoes huddled amongst the leaves above her head. There’s liquid pooled at the corner of her eye. She and May are curled around each other like squirrels, May’s arm slipped loosely over Jessa’s hips, Jessa cradling her bad arm with her good one. They’re breathing slowly, as if they’re using each other’s heartbeats to tether themselves.
Shannon is like something out of a classical painting, her dark waves of hair spread out across the floor, her slightly hollow cheeks still, tiny veins visible under her translucent eyelids. It looks like she’s already asleep.
Nobody answers.
* * *
When Hayley wakes, disorientated and warm, the sun is much lower and the forest is striped with slanting shadows. She gently rotates her cricked neck, propping herself up stiffly on her elbows. Her eyes are still heavy with sleep, her scalp damp and hot.
The others are stirring too, Jessa yawning and blinking and Shannon sitting up, pulling her hair back into a ponytail. It’s Hayley who sees them first, but the shock hits her so hard she can’t even speak. She sits there, frozen, feeling ice rush through her veins. But something in her face makes Shannon look down, and her scream is enough to send the others leaping to their feet.
‘What, what is it, where?’
‘Our legs,’ Hayley manages, in a strained whisper. They all look down.
‘Get them off, get them off NOW!’ May is high-kicking, thrashing her leg around like a can-can dancer. But it doesn’t make any difference. The leeches are stuck fast.
Four or five fat, globular bodies clinging to each of them, dotted from their thighs to their calves, their pulsating, balloon-like stomachs swollen, suggesting that they have been feeding for some time.
Jessa is doubled over with what Hayley thinks are silent tears, until she draws a trembling breath and lets out a shriek of laughter. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ she wheezes, her shoulders shaking. ‘You just look so funny. It’s like you’re trying to make your own foot fall off.’ And she dissolves into tears of helpless laughter again.
‘I’m. So. Glad. This. Is. Entertaining. To. You.’ May speaks through gritted teeth, each word punctuated with another wild flail of her legs. When the leeches remain stubbornly in place, she squeezes her eyes shut and reaches down to try and pull one off. ‘Grossgrossgrossgrossgrossgrossgross…’
‘Wait,’ Jessa shouts, grabbing May’s hand to stop her. ‘I had a leech bite when I was river fishing once; you can’t just pull them off. They can regurgitate bacteria into your bloodstream or leave their mouth parts behind in the wound and get it infected.’
‘MOUTH PARTS?’ Shannon looks utterly disgusted. And something about her outrage, about the way she says ‘mouth parts’, tips Jessa back over the edge, until she’s wheezing with laughter.
‘You just have to use your fingernail – slide it under the mouth to break the suction, then you can flick them off.’ Jessa demonstrates, her fingernail nudging under the thin end of one of the leeches that is gorging on her thigh. It subsides, reluctantly, leaving a horrible little wound that immediately starts to trickle blood.
‘It’ll bleed for a while,’ Jessa says, matter-of-factly. ‘When leeches start feeding they release something into your blood to stop it clotting so they can get full quicker.’
‘I think I’m gonna be sick.’ May gingerly starts to prise off her leeches, copying Jessa’s technique.
Hayley looks down at her own unwanted passengers and almost gags. ‘Don’t think about it, don’t think about it, don’t think about it,’ she whispers to herself, as she slides her fingernail under the end of one, feeling the slight release as the suction breaks and flinging it as far away from her as she possibly can. She shudders and wipes her hand on her dress.
A few minutes later they stand, panting amongst the shadowy trees, their legs striped with long, narrow trickles of blood.
‘Remind me never, ever to fall asleep near a stream again.’ May shudders, trying to stop the wound on her thigh from bleeding using the edge of her tattered violet cheerleading skirt. ‘I still feel dirty.’
Jessa has stopped laughing. She’s standing very still. ‘I don’t think the leeches made it from the stream on their own,’ she says, suddenly.
‘What do you mean?’
‘The last time I got bitten by a leech, it was only because I was wading thigh deep in a river for two hours trying to catch a fish. They aren’t exactly speedy creatures. Look where we are. The water is at least fifteen yards away. I find it very hard to believe that two dozen leeches somehow made it out of the spring and across all these leaves and rocks and vines and then evenly divided themselves up between us…’
Hayley’s stomach feels cold. ‘What are you saying?’
Jessa looks angry. ‘Someone did this. No way it just happened by coincidence.’
Shannon looks from the stream to the clearing and back again. She slowly starts to nod. ‘I think you’re right. I didn’t believe it before, but I’m starting to think something really creepy is happening on this island.’
‘Well, who was it?’ May sounds furious, like she’s reached the absolute end of her tether. ‘Which one of you bitches put a blood sucker on my leg?’
They’re all staring at each other. Hayley feels her cheeks getting hot, feels a prickle of shame and fear, as if they might see guilt written on her face, even though she knows it wasn’t her. The others look just as panicked as she does.
‘It wasn’t necessarily one of us,’ she points out. ‘We all woke up at the same time. What if it was one of the boys?’
‘Yeah, we think we woke up at the same time.’ May narrows her eyes suspiciously. ‘But how do we know one of us didn’t sneak up, get the leeches, then lie back down and pretend to be asleep again until we all woke up?’
‘What, and cover her own legs in leeches too?’ Jessa has a point.
‘Well, yes, obviously,’ May storms. ‘To cover her tracks.’
‘We don’t have any way of knowing, do we?’ Shannon automatically takes control. ‘So let’s get back to the camp. If someone is really trying to sabotage us, it’s better if we’re all together.’
Hayley likes the idea of safety in numbers. But it isn’t lost on her that they might also just be running right back to the person who attacked them in the first place. Everything is so uncertain. It’s like trying to find her way through fog. Suddenly, something else occurs to her.
‘What if something happened to the boys while we were away?’
They crash back through the forest, ignoring the thorns and branches that tear at their hair and skin, jostling the fruits they’re carrying in haphazard armfuls.
But the camp is quiet, the boys subdued There’s fresh fish cooking over the flames and a huge pile of firewood nearby.
Jason freaks when he sees Shannon’s legs.
‘You’re not just messing with me now,’ he shouts, at nobody in particular. ‘You’re messing with my girl, and I will destroy you. Whoever you are, you don’t mess with me or what’s mine, you hear me?’
‘Were you guys together all day?’ Jessa asks, seriously.
‘No,’ Elliot answers at once. We were fishing and fetching firewood and stuff. Between that and, you know, bathroom breaks, we all went off into the trees at some point. It could have been any of us.’
Jessa raises an eyebrow.
‘Not that I’m saying it was me!’ he stutters. ‘It wasn’t me, I swear. But it could’ve been. I mean, except that it wasn’t, obviously. We all had the opportunity is all I’m saying. On the upside, really great news about the spring, though.’ He trails off nervously and turns to tend the fish.
Hayley and the others race to the sea, scooping up handfuls of water and rinsing their legs over and over again. But somehow no matter how much water she douses her skin with, no matter how much she welcomes the sharp tingle of salt in the wounds, Hayley still feels gross, as if the leeches have left behind slimy trails that won’t wash clean.
* * *
She visits the plan
e in her dreams again that night. But everything is happening in slow motion. She’s floating like an astronaut in a cloud of fruit pots, loose pages and pom poms, the others drifting past her with wide, unseeing eyes, terror frozen onto their contorted faces. She knows the plane is going down, knows there is nothing she can do about it, but still she tries to struggle, fighting against the heavy torpor of her limbs, wanting to make them move faster, wanting to run to the front of the plane, to help the pilot, or grab the controls… something, anything. But instead it’s happening torturously slowly, and she can’t speed it up, can’t speed herself up. There’s nothing she can do but wait for the inevitable impact.
She’s outside the plane now, watching it plummet towards the sparkling surface of the water, inch by inch. She tries to scream but her voice doesn’t come out. She sees the island, and she’s falling towards it, alone, so close now she can see every individual grain of sand, so close that she feels her whole body tense in terrified anticipation…
And then it’s gone, and there’s just her mom’s face, strained and fearful, her eyes boring into Hayley’s, her fingers gripping Hayley’s shoulders so hard it hurts. ‘Hayley.’ She’s trying to tell her something, trying to warn her, but Hayley can’t hear her properly, the wind is howling in her ears and her mom’s voice is distorted. ‘You’re not looking hard enough.’ Her mom is fading, her fingers are slipping away, she’s being pulled in the opposite direction, they’re back in the plane and the force is too strong, smashing them into the sides of the cabin… ‘You’re missing something, Hayley…’ Hayley strains towards her, trying to reach her with every muscle in her body, but she’s being pulled backwards, can’t see or hear her any more, and she wakes in the dark with tears in her eyelashes and her mom’s name on her lips.
