The Number 8

by Joel Arcanjo

  He made no real effort to speak to her for the next few minutes while they unpacked what they needed. Not just because of his plan, but because he was feeling worse and worse by the second and talking would not help. But he made sure to keep an eye on her and he was sure that a couple of times she was about to say something to him, but thought better of it. This made him smile to himself, but not for long because even smiling hurt. He did know one thing: his plan was working.

  Chapter 30

  “Right, anyone that is going white water rafting follow Michael down to the water,” Mel said gesturing to an athletic-looking guy in his early thirties. He looked severe and not in the mood for messing about. He was fully kitted out and had a slight waddle as he made his way down to the water’s edge.

  Asmir and most of the bus followed him. Only four people hung back. Mel, Dante, Camilla and Ben. Mel and Ben because they weren’t really allowed to take part in any of the activities, Dante because his hangover barely allowed him to move, and Camilla because she didn’t want to, as she put it “break me bleedin’ hip.”

  Dante was upset that he couldn’t go but the weather had taken a turn and he might not regret dropping out a couple of hours from now. He didn’t know what Mel and Ben were planning but he knew Camilla was going horseback riding. He wasn’t even slightly interested in that so he had planned to hang around the lodge, maybe swim or walk if he was feeling better. But with the weather closing in he considered staying in and chatting with the locals by the bar.

  He quickly realized that it was early afternoon and no one was around yet. So, he wandered off to the edge of the river. For a millisecond he considered taking a swim. Then he touched the water. It wasn’t warm enough for him to even consider taking the plunge in this state. Walking it was.

  He ambled along the bank of the river until he saw a way through the dense shrubs to his right. There was a small blue rope that had been attached from the bottom to the top of the little path because it was quite steep. In his state he probably couldn’t have managed to scale the path without it. Huffing and puffing he climbed the path. At the top there were two directions. To the left and away from the lodge it wound up the valley and probably to the top of the mountain. To the right, back towards the lodge. He chose to challenge himself a little and headed to the left.

  The path followed a stream for a little while before veering sharply right. There was an incline, small but noticeable. Instead of just ploughing through it he decided to focus on the other things. The enjoyable things. Like the sounds of the birds, the rush of the river, the sweet scent of freshly mown grass and the sound that he cherished most.: silence. It hadn’t been silent in days, probably since they had been drifting along watching the glowworms in the caves. Silence was the most unappreciated commodity. Total silence was rarer than any collectible and more precious than any diamond. It was nature’s language and he loved bearing witness to it.

  So he sat on the ground at the top of the path just staring and listening. Staring and listening to the world go by. He sat completely still for almost an hour. It was almost like meditation except he really did not want to close his eyes. The area was a paradise. Everything was so green. So vibrant. From where he sat Dante could see for miles. He saw how the river wound down into rapids and then split into several smaller streams. He saw people on the other mountain. Small dots of different colors moving along the ridge line. Birds of prey circling above, soaring high and then tumbling down towards their target. Occasional breaks in the cloud where one ray of sunshine would break through like a golden beam fixated on one spot, illuminating it for all to see.

  Dante took this all in, with every breath feeling a little bit better. That was until he felt the first raindrop. It hit him right on the ridge of the nose making him blink and flinch at the same time. Then more. It was only light, but he began the long walk back to the lodge anyway. The others would be getting back from white water rafting soon and more importantly, he was starving. He hadn’t really had an appetite all day because of his hangover but it had returned, with a vengeance.

  The route back was slippery now and he had to stare at his feet all the way back to make sure he didn’t fall over. He got back to the fork in the road but this time he chose the route back towards the lodge.

  He hadn’t counted on it being so overgrown. It was clear that very few people had frequented this path in recent weeks. He had to duck and dodge all manner of branches, thistles and poisonous plants. He was just in the process of moving out of the way of a particularly spiky bush when he heard voices in the distance. He couldn’t tell where they were coming from because they were muffled and the wind had joined forces with the rain to form a deafening cacophony of noise. If he had to pick a direction it would be about one mile in the direction he was heading. Dante stopped moving, listening intently to the conversation, but not a single word was audible above the rain. He couldn’t even hear how many people were there. If he had to guess, two, maybe three and they weren’t discussing the weather. It was a heated discussion. Dante guessed it was a couple of the group that had got back early. He wanted to catch up with them and ask them how everything went. He picked up his pace and shielded his eyes from the now torrential rain. Each step made a squelching sound that added to his inability to hear the conversation. He wanted to stop and listen instead of running up on them like a crazy person, but his body was telling him to get inside quickly.

  He burst through a large bush at the end of the path and realized that he was virtually back at the lodge. He hadn’t seen anybody on his hobble down the path and now the voices were gone. He made a point of pivoting a full 360 degrees trying to spot whoever it was. But there was no one in sight. It wasn’t important. He could catch up with whoever it was inside anyway.

  He darted to the open doors of the bar. He was drenched and as he entered a group of people on the nearest table to the door turned to look at him. They didn’t say anything or really do anything at all, just stared unapologetically. Then, as if they had got bored in that short period of time, they resumed their conversation.

  Dante continued stomping through the bar. The bar staff shot him looks of displeasure as he caked their perfectly clean floor in mud. All he could do was apologetically mouth “I’m so sorry” in their direction. In the far corner of the room were the stairs that he had to ascend to get back to the room. Each stair was a battle trying not to slip in his sodden trainers and break his nose, but he managed it. Breathing hard he entered the huge room expecting to see a large number of the passengers sprawled on their beds or heading to the showers. But there was no one other than Camilla. She was lying on her bed reading a book. When she spotted him she lowered her book an inch or so to reveal some professor-like spectacles. She raised her book again before realizing what she had just seen and doing a double take.

  “What the ’ell ’appened to you?” she asked, lowering her glasses in one fluid motion.

  “It rained.” Simple but accurate summation of events.

  “And you thought it’d be better to walk through that bar and up them stairs than them ones over there?” Her thick Devonian accent was even more evident than it had been the previous day.

  Dante had no idea what she was on about, but he followed her pointed finger with his eyes. To his right was another door. It was partially open and he could see that it led directly to the lodge’s back garden. He could have walked a couple more meters past the bar door and would have avoided trampling through the bar creating havoc. Now the bar staff’s contempt made complete sense.

  “Oh…” he said, unable to come up with anything better.

  “Yeah. Oh, is right.”

  He walked very slowly back to his corner, trying not to let his skin touch the edge of his soaking clothes. Luckily, he had left his towel and shower bag on top of his opened suitcase. He reached for the towel, grunting as his back made contact with the freezing material of his shirt. He took off his shoes quickly and threw them in a plastic bag. He would dea
l with them later. He didn’t bother to dry himself properly, instead he grabbed his towel and headed straight for the shower.

  When Dante reappeared in the room, people were beginning to return. He hadn’t anticipated this and had only exited the shower in a towel. Nothing covered his top half. It didn’t bother him too much that his physique was exposed, it was more that there was no privacy in a room that housed every single person on the bus. In fact, he was proud of his physique. He wasn’t hugely muscular but he was athletically built and very toned. When he was younger he had taken Kung Fu and he’d never really lost the core strength he had built up over the years he had practiced it.

  As he strode into the room he held his wash bag in one hand and his damp clothes in the other. It was a strange sight but obviously not too unappealing as a few of the girls were checking him out. He was flattered by this, especially because one of them was Annie.

  “What happened to you?” she asked, eyeing his wet clothes.

  “Small incident that involved a long, muddy walk and a lot of rain.”

  “So that was you that trudged in all that dirt in the bar?” she asked, turning her head away to fight a smile.

  “Yes, so you went through the bar too?” he said excitedly, before turning to Camilla and saying, “She went through the bar too.”

  Camilla didn’t even give him the satisfaction of a response.

  “No, actually I didn’t. I just heard a few of the bar staff complaining about it. They used some pretty choice language too. I won’t repeat it, too delicate for your ears.”

  “Ah man. I completely forgot we could come in through the side. Mel’s gonna have my head for this.”

  “Yeah, well, you should’ve come with us.”

  “Of course, how did it go?” Dante asked, trying to put on a shirt. He was feeling a little self-conscious.

  “It was epic, Dante. You remember that instructor?”

  “The one that looked like he had just left the military yesterday?”

  “Yeah, him. It was all just an act for Mel. He was so much fun. He taught us the basics and let us do what we wanted. We fell in, we jumped in, we did it all.”

  “So how was the actual rafting though?” Dante asked after not hearing any real mention of being in the boat.

  “Yeah, it was soooo good. Asmir was in our raft and you should have heard him. He was screaming like a soprano the whole time just like on that swing we did.”

  “It’s weird, right?”

  “Very. But the best part was the rapids towards the end. We had to be careful not to fall in there. The instructor told us that if we fell out and got pinned to a rock, chances are, we wouldn’t make it.”

  “That’s comforting.”

  “It wasn’t too bad though because it rains here a lot this time of year and when the river is high you are less likely to be pinned to a rock. But also, the river is more powerful so either way, it’s dangerous.”

  “Wish I had gone now. I probably would’ve been OK.”

  “At least there’s pictures. You can see us in action.”

  “True.” Then Dante remembered the muffled conversation. “Hey, who was walking by the river like twenty minutes ago? I heard someone over there. It sounded pretty heated.”

  “Twenty minutes ago? Whereabouts?”

  “Just on the path that runs parallel to the river, about 200 meters that way,” he said pointing the direction to her.

  “It couldn’t be anyone from white water rafting.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we only got back by bus five minutes ago.”

  Chapter 31

  “What did you hear?” Annie asked, breaking his thought pattern.

  “I’m not really sure. An argument maybe. Or just excited chatter. It really could’ve been anything. It could've been a mothers’ meeting for all I know.”

  “How many people were there?”

  “Once again, I have no idea. Two, three, maybe four, I really couldn’t tell you.”

  “So, to sum up; you heard an unknown number of people talking about, well, anything at all and this concerns you?”

  “No, not really,” he lied, “I just wanted to know who it was and why they were standing in the rain by an overgrown path having a loud discussion.”

  “There’s a name for that you know.”

  He was silent, waiting for her to make whatever joke was coming next.

  “It’s called being nosy. Who cares what some random people were talking about in the rain?”

  I do, Dante thought. But instead he said, “You’re right, it’s stupid.”

  Annie went off to shower, while Dante got dressed into something comfortable and lay on his wafer-thin mattress. If it wasn’t some of the passengers, then it must be a couple of the locals from the bar. Maybe it was the table who had given him a strange look. But something about it didn’t sit right with him. They had stopped so suddenly and disappeared so quickly as he had gotten near. But as he lay there, he decided to put it out of his mind, at least for a while.

  Dante lay still. He was warm, exhausted and his head was still hurting. This combination sent him to sleep within three minutes of laying his head on the pillow.

  He was awoken by Asmir shaking him lightly.

  “Food time, D. Well enough to eat?”

  Dante groaned and wiped his eyes. He looked at the clock on the wall opposite. He had been out about an hour. A few of the late rafters were getting dressed but it was clear that most people had already gone. He felt groggy, but he knew he had slept well because he had woken up in the same position he had fallen asleep.

  “Let’s go,” Dante said as he pushed himself to his feet.

  He filled Asmir in on what had happened that afternoon, explaining that he wished he had taken Asmir’s camera to the top of the mountain. He attempted to explain it to him, but he still wasn’t fully awake and ended up slurring his words while trying to be poetic about it all. Then he mentioned the strange conversation and Asmir had a very similar reaction to Annie. He cracked a few jokes and mocked Dante a little bit but even Dante had to admit it sounded odd.

  Then it was Asmir’s turn and like Dante had expected, his version of events was a far cry from Annie’s. He described how treacherous the trip had been and how brave each and every one of them had been. He explained that the instructor had forced them to jump into the river from nearly ninety meters. When Annie had told it, he was pretty sure it had barely been twenty, but he let him continue. His final tale was so fantastical that he actually had to stop Asmir in his tracks.

  “So you’re telling me that Becki was pinned to a rock in the rapids, so you dived out, freed her and swam with her, unconscious on your back, to the edge of the river?”

  “Is that so hard to believe?” he asked, clearly offended.

  “I am more likely to believe in Bigfoot, Az. I heard you were screaming the whole way round and that you forced them to sit you at the back.”

  “Firstly, Bigfoot is very real and I wouldn’t be surprised if they were around this area and secondly, I was not screaming. It was more like a manly howl.”

  “Either way, it’s embarrassing,” Dante grinned, delighted that he was able to wind Asmir up so easily.

  Asmir ignored this statement completely.

  “As for the story, ask anyone, it’s true.”

  “Oh, I will, Az. I can’t wait to hear this one from someone else’s perspective.”

  With that, they made their way down to the bar. Dante had wanted to find his hooded sweatshirt and keep the hood up to avoid detection, but Asmir had rushed him, so he was exposed. But as he reached the final stair, he breathed a sigh of relief. All of the bar staff that had been on earlier had been replaced. None of them had seen the mess he had made, so he felt comfortable.

  Asmir and Dante sat at the end of a long table next to Carl and Dick. It was clear that Asmir was more than a little annoyed to be sat so close to Dick. They hadn’t got on from the word ‘go.’

 
“Well, if it isn’t the little pig who went ‘squeeee, squeeee, squeeeeeeeeeee’ all the way home,” Dick shrieked.

  “Well, if it isn’t the idiot that’s going to be eating the rest of his meals through a straw if he doesn’t shut his face,” Asmir growled, his rage evident.

  Dick murmured something under his breath and that was it. It was clear that Dick was everything that Asmir hated. Arrogant, close-minded and most importantly, racist. Apart from Asmir, he hadn’t even made an effort to talk with any of the other passengers who weren’t white and English. He found his niche and only ventured out to verbally abuse others. Dante knew it wouldn’t get to the point where it turned violent because he knew Asmir would break him in half. Asmir wasn’t the biggest guy in the world, but he was very strong for his size and when he got angry, he tended to get violent pretty quickly. Dick needed to watch himself.

  The evening went by without another altercation. Most of the passengers were telling stories about the funny moments while white water rafting. All Dante could do was listen and laugh at the right points. He felt a bit left out and it didn’t help that he was still feeling a bit queasy.

  It was early when he excused himself and made his way back to his small corner bed. It was just him and the book he had brought with him. He had loved getting to know all these new and interesting people, but today had been a day that he was happy to spend alone. He read for about half an hour until the bright lights in the room began to give him a headache. His headache had flared up again and he found it hard to keep his eyes open. So, slowly and in a deeply relaxed state, he fell asleep. Excited for tomorrow and thankful for the day.

  Chapter 32

  Asmir was still wide awake and the life of the party. He was telling stories he had embellished a great deal, but they were going down a treat. But he had been annoyed that Dante had left him alone to sit next to Dick while he went to sleep. It wasn’t typical of him. He was usually there, next to Asmir whenever there was a new story to be told, but not tonight.