by Ann Kelley
Hope has dug a shallow trench around our campsite to take rain water away down the beach. I should have thought of that. But she doesn’t stop there.
“I’m going to split some b-bamboos and make a m-more waterp-p-proof roof.”
I help her carry large bamboo poles onto the beach and watch as she splits them lengthways with my penknife. Then we carry them to the camp. Hope pushes six tall poles into the sand to make three corner supports. For the roofing she arranges the split bamboo across several straight branches, overlaid alternately to interlock with one another to make it waterproof. It looks very practical. I’m impressed.
All this takes until the early evening, and after we’ve eaten we’re all tired and subdued and go to our sleeping bags early. I read by the light of my flashlight, trying to lift my mind away from our troubles. I can’t think about our predicament all the time; it’s too upsetting. But I can’t block out the sounds of the other girls crying. We’re all on our own, really, thinking about our homes and parents and wondering why they haven’t come looking for us.
There was no rain in the night so Hope’s roofing material wasn’t tested. There were more weird noises—moaning and wheezing and crashing—and Jas and I clung to each other, silent and terrified. Luckily the juniors slept through it. I’m exhausted; I’ve never felt more tired. The sky is overcast: purple and yellow, like an old bruise. I hate this place. I hate everything about it—the damp, the sand in our sleeping bags, the jungle, the insects, the sea, the sky.
There’s nothing to eat except coconut, but we have water. I try to gather enough energy to go back to where we found the mangoes, but I can’t lift myself. Jas is still dozing.
Dad once told me you can live for ages with only clean water. He would be all right here. He did a lot of survival training exercises when he joined the SAS. I remember asking him about things he ate when he was dropped from a helicopter into a jungle somewhere. He said they had nothing with them—no emergency rations or anything. They were dropped two at a time and told to find their way to the coast as quickly as possible. They had no compass, no water, no matches, no sleeping bags. None of the luxuries that we have—freshwater practically on tap, sleeping bags, coconuts all over the beach, fishing gear. He and the other soldier dug up roots with their bare hands, and tried different leaves and fruit. We’re lucky, I suppose, compared to them.
He told me about an edibility test you have to follow if you don’t recognize a plant, and I suddenly remember that I wrote it up in my journal, inside the back cover. I suppose I was trying to prove to him that I listen to what he says. I dive into my sleeping bag and pull the notebook out as if I’ve discovered some priceless treasure. I’m grinning like a mad person. The others look almost irritated by my sudden burst of activity, so I head over to where Natalie’s lying and read the list to her, as if it’s a bedtime story. I’m glad I have the list. If I die the survivors can follow the instructions:
Edibility Test
Always choose young shoots or leaves, not old or withered plants.
Crush and smell the plant/leaf. If it smells of peaches or bitter almonds, discard it.
If it’s a strange fruit or unidentifiable root, squeeze juice or rub gently on tender skin—like your armpit. If you break out in a rash or it itches, don’t eat it.
If there’s no irritation you can go to the next stage, which is to place a small bit on your lips. Wait a few seconds to see if there is any reaction.
If not, try a little on the corner of your mouth.
Then on the tip of the tongue.
Then under the tongue.
Chew a small portion. If you don’t get a sore throat, irritation, stinging, or burning, swallow some.
Wait five hours without eating anything else, and if you aren’t sick or dying, it’s edible.
The experiment should be tried by only one person.
Natalie’s face is calm, and I wonder if she can hear what I’m telling her.
“I seem to remember he said roots always have to be cooked,” I say to her.
Her expression doesn’t alter.
“You wouldn’t eat a raw potato, would you?”
Still nothing, but I’m sure she’s listening to me.
“I should have paid more attention,” I tell her. “He always wants me to listen to him, but I always want to go and do things. It drives him crazy.”
I return to the list.
Plants to be avoided:
Avoid any plant with a milky sap (except dandelion).
Avoid red plants.
Avoid fruit with tiny barbs on stems and leaves, as they will irritate the mouth and digestive tract.
Avoid old, withered leaves. Some develop deadly toxins when they wilt.
Avoid mature bracken.
“Haven’t seen any here anyhow,” I reassure Natalie.
6. Only eat fungi if you can positively identify them.
After I’ve finished, I suddenly remember a story Dad told me. He and his men were desperate for meat, so when they found a wild boar trail they followed it, and ended up being hunted themselves. They had to climb into trees to escape. Dad said that the wild boars were very smart and attacked from the rear. Apparently, the tuskers gore you to the ground and eat you alive. I shudder and decide that this is a story Natalie doesn’t need to hear.
I can’t get her to take any water. I squeeze a moist cloth over her chapped lips, but she just lies there, water trickling from her mouth onto her throat and around to the back of her neck. I can’t look at her leg anymore. Should we try to amputate it? We have a knife or two. No anesthetic apart from whiskey, though, and no clean rags to bandage the stump. The remaining towels are too dirty. The bugs might kill her. I suppose I could wash our T-shirts in boiling water and use them. It might save her life.
I can’t believe I’m having to think like this. What would Mom do? I wish she were here.
Why hasn’t anyone come for us?
The wind has died. I walk down toward the shore. A load of small jellyfish have washed up on the beach. It’s a battalion of Portuguese Man o’ War—Men o’ War, I suppose they should be called—and their sting can be very painful if not fatal. Their deflated balloon bodies float in the swimming pool. Trailing purple tentacles are wrapped and trapped around rocks like badly tied parcels, drying in the sun, stranded by the falling tide. I sit on a rock and study one of these totally alien creatures, which is moving constantly, like a bulbous transparent nose sniffing for food. There’s a neon blue-green puckered line along the edge of each balloon, like a scar.
No one can swim now—not in the pool and not in the sea. No paddling, either.
Jas joins me on my rock. “We’ve been invaded,” she says, and I nod.
“They aren’t actually jellyfish,” she begins to explain, as we sit mesmerized by the gentle motion of the weird things, but suddenly—
“Plane, a plane! Jas! They’re looking for us!”
“Fire, we must have fire—”
“Matches! Where are the matches?” We run up the beach, yelling.
But Mrs. Campbell has the matches, and she’s not here. We wave our arms, take off our T-shirts and flap them like mad birds, screaming into the sky, but the plane is heading away. In a matter of seconds it’s gone. At first we just stare at where it was in the sky, and then Jas and I throw ourselves onto the sand and sob in frustration. A few minutes later the others come dawdling back along the beach with Mrs. Campbell, who wears a hibiscus blossom in her hair and has a cigarette hanging from her lips.
“Where the hell were you? There’s no signal fire, and you’ve got the matches.” I hurl the words at her as if they are rocks. I wish they were.
“Miss Goody Two-shoes!” She throws the matches at me. The packet is nearly empty. The matchbook has a logo with a naked girl on it advertising Tallulah Bar, Pattaya, one of the seedier hangouts in town where bar girls strip.
An odd memory suddenly hits me from about a year ago:
I’m alone with Mo
m in the car. We’ve been shopping in Pattaya for school shoes and we stop at a junction. While we wait to turn right, I see a car I recognize leaving the parking lot of Tallulah Bar. I remember Mom tutting at the flashing neon sign of a life-size naked dancing girl. But my eyes are staying with the car. The woman in the front passenger seat has her hair tied in a knot on her neck, and an amazingly wide smile. She’s smoking, and tucking a stray strand of dark red curly hair behind her ear. Jas’s father, the driver, is looking at her and talking animatedly. She leans into him, then bends her head to his shoulder.
“Who’s that with Jas’s dad, Mom?”
“Where?”
“Redhead.” Their car, a black Mercedes, has turned the corner away from us.
“Didn’t see,” she said. I’m not sure she’s telling the truth. Of course it could have been totally innocent. Maybe the colonel was simply giving her a lift. But I don’t think so. They looked so… intimate.
Now I glare at Mrs. Campbell. That red hair! How come I didn’t realize before? I feel even more furious. My best friend Jas’s father! Her mom is so pretty, or was until she had the baby and the migraines.
I look quickly at Jas. I am not going to tell her of my suspicions. She would die.
“Don’t you want to be rescued?” I snarl at Mrs. Campbell. “Don’t you care if we don’t get home?”
She sighs, as if I’m hardly worth talking to. “To be honest, Bonnie, no, I don’t care. And anyway, I think you’ll find that maybe there’s no home to go back to.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, just what do you think was going on when the explosions happened?”
“But… but even if there was an attack, which there couldn’t have been, we’ve seen aircraft looking for us, and if there’s no smoke we have no chance of being spotted.”
“How do we know they are friendly aircraft?” she answers, and I am stunned into silence.
Jas says, “Of course they’re ours. No one could overcome our military just like that. That’s crazy!”
“Well, light your stupid fire if you want. I don’t care either way,” Mrs. Campbell says dismissively.
“That’s not good enough,” Jas says. “We need to rotate and make sure there are two fire-keepers at all times.” Jas is very strong and supportive at times like this, and the others turn to her, too.
“Yes, Layla, we want a fire even if no one rescues us—otherwise we’ll have to eat raw fish,” the Glossies plead with her.
“Okay, okay. Point taken. We’ll light a fire. May—you and Arlene look after the fire tonight. I’ll take over at midnight.”
“Jas and I will do the dawn watch,” I say. “And Hope can look after it during the day. The juniors can help gather wood whenever they can. We’ll need all we can get. And they can’t swim—the place is infested with poisonous jellyfish.”
I take some grim pleasure in their squeals of horror as I turn on my heel and walk away. Apart from Jas, I talk to nobody for the rest of the afternoon.
There’s a section of beach near the rocks of Dragon Point where the sand is damp enough to build sandcastles, and Jody and Carly have made a really high castle with a moat. They’ve decorated it with shells and colored seaweed. Each day, after the tide has eaten away at its foundations, they rebuild it, rearranging the decorations and replacing faded flowers. Like the banyan, that part of the beach is theirs, and we older ones don’t use it. They have also built a simple seesaw using a washed-up old plank of wood that’s covered in goose barnacles, balanced on a large palm trunk. I watch them doing handstands and cartwheels, childish activities to block out the awful things they should never have had to witness.
Hope is crouched nearby, squinting at little ghost crabs running in and out of their tunnel homes, shifting sand and making new holes. They have a complete underground system of tunnels. When one gets frightened away from his own hole he panics and tries to get into another hole, whereupon he’s chased out by the real occupant. I like watching them, too, but the sand flies bite if you sit in one place for too long. Hope is so badly bitten now she hardly seems to notice.
Everyone is subdued this evening, after the argument about the fire. I’ve had a gruesome thought, one I can’t even bring myself to share with Jas. What if we dig up Sandy’s body and use her red sleeping bag as a flag? It would be very visible from the sky. Or we could use Mrs. Campbell’s red petticoat. Much better. She doesn’t wear it much anymore anyway. The wind was tearing it and making it difficult for her to walk, tangling it in her legs. So now she wears only her torn blouse and bikini bottoms. Her fair skin is sunburned and spoiled by bruises and scratches.
Jas shuffles closer to me as we sit watching the flames.
“I don’t care what she says,” she whispers to me. “At least we know someone is looking for us.”
Later in the night I wake with a strange smell in my nose. Not Natalie. On the beach, close to the fire, Mrs. Campbell is sitting cross-legged, with May and Arlene on either side of her. I watch as the faint glow from the embers lights up their mascara-and lipstick-smeared faces, and I see the flare of a thick cigarette pass from one mouth to another, and then another. Loopy Layla is smiling broadly and tucking her hair behind her ears, and the Glossies are giggling. I feel outraged. I’m so angry I want to be sick.
I nudge Jas awake so she can be witness to the scene, too.
“What’s up?” she asks.
“Look at them.”
“What are they doing?”
“What does it look like?” I say.
“Smoking pot?”
“I think so.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“She’s unbelievable.”
I wonder if Mrs. Campbell could be right about the base. Has it been destroyed? Are my parents safe? Do we really not have homes to go back to? I take out my journal.
Why are our problems always so much worse at night? Mrs. Campbell and the Glossies are smoking pot.
ten
KOH TABU, DAY 10
Hungry all the time.
Think Natalie’s dying. I hate LC.
Why didn’t Mom come with us?
Natalie doesn’t whimper or anything. Jas and I have stopped trying to do anything about her leg. We just sit with her when we can, telling her stories, hoping she can hear. Perhaps we should try to amputate. If she’s going to die anyway, it wouldn’t hurt to try, would it? Except she might die in excruciating pain. I feel guilty all the time.
We have a good supply of coconuts, and some mangoes, but it’s not enough to cure the hunger pangs. My stomach makes the most awful noises. We can’t catch shrimp due to the Man o’ War invasion of our fishing pool. What I wouldn’t give for a half-pound cheeseburger with fries. I thought Mrs. Campbell was supposed to be a survival expert. She hasn’t even bothered to look at Natalie’s leg for two days.
The juniors are listless. They were playing skipping games with a long piece of liana as rope, but now they’ve no energy and they are sitting in the banyan tree, swinging their legs, staring out to sea. Clouds race across the sky and the wind is very strong again. There’s an orange tinge to everything, including the waves, except where they break on the reef. There they fragment into tall sprays of peach and luminous green.
Mrs. Campbell, May, and Arlene Spider-eyes have become inseparable, and all they do is smoke, do one another’s hair, and lie around half naked, giggling and stupid. When we’re not sitting with Nat, Jas, Hope, and I spend all our time gathering firewood and looking for food. Hope is good at reaching figs on high branches and dragging heavy logs to the beach.
We spotted a helicopter yesterday, but it came nowhere near our island. It was a very long way away. There are so many little islands, and they all look alike, densely wooded like small mountains in the sea. There must be at least thirty between us and the one we were supposed to camp on.
“If they k-keep on looking they are sure to f-f-find us eventually, aren’t they?” said Hope. “M-maybe we should be mo
re proactive about g-getting help,” she added.
“How do you mean?” I ask.
“B-build a r-raft or something.”
“How on earth can we do that? Anyway, it’s too rough; it would sink, and we’d drown.”
“We built a c-camp. We could use the same m-materials for a raft.”
“It wouldn’t float.”
“Light m-more fires, all along the b-beach?”
“We can barely keep one fire going, let alone more. No, that’s stupid.”
“W-w-well, w-what do you suggest, then?”
“I don’t know. Write SOS in the sand.”
“The sand gets c-covered every high tide.”
“We’ve got no other means of signaling.”
“Okay. We’ll g-get the juniors to help c-collect as m-many stones and big shells as they can. We’ve already got quite a f-few.”
Hope has a point, and it would give them something to do, and help take their minds off Sandy’s death and Natalie’s leg. That’s the idea, anyway. We work the beach, heads down, looking for rocks and shells.
There’s a scream.
The red sleeping bag has been dragged from its original burial place and torn apart. Sandy’s body is gone. Carly has Sandy’s bloody teddy bear in her arms.
I pick her up and run to Mrs. Campbell.
“Mrs. Campbell. Sandy’s body—it’s gone.”
Her eyes roll in her head, not focusing on anything. May giggles.
