by J G Alva
“But not great.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But you didn’t exactly not say it.”
“Rebekah.” Nick sighed, and then stopped. He made a gesture in the air, a sort of these-things-take-time gesture. “You’re young. You’re seventeen. I’m a little old to be...making comments like that.”
She sniffed and wiped her eyes again.
“You’re not that old.”
“I am. I’m ancient. You said so yourself. I feel about a hundred and eighty years old. A hundred of those years have been spent on this island, mind you.”
They sat together in the shade, staring out at the horizon.
“It feels like that, doesn’t it,” Rebekah said.
“Hm.” Nick nodded.
“Sometimes it’s hard to remember what it was like before we got here.”
“You’ve got to hang on to that. You start believing this is all there is...it’ll be the end of you.”
“I suppose so.” She picked up one of Nick’s hands and examined it, tracing its lines with her own hands. Nick stared down at the top of her head, amused. Her hair was longer now, down to her shoulders, and bleached almost white by the sun. Her clothes were getting a little frayed at the edges – as were Nick’s – and where the skin poked through on her shoulders and back it was a deep golden brown.
“You looked a bit weird when I came up on you on the beach,” she said, and smiled. “It looked like your head was going to burst like a great big melon.”
“Hm.”
“One great big ripe melon.”
“Well. I was worried about you.”
She looked up at him.
“You were?”
“Yeah.”
Rebekah smiled, clasped his hand, put it in her lap and said, “good.”
And that was the discovery: that he could not survive on this island without her.
◆◆◆
There was a little cloud cover when the sun set that night, Nick was pleased to note.
The only downside of this was that, with the cloud covering what little moon there was, the night was black. The night was totally, and completely, and impenetrably black. Like oil.
“It’s a bit chilly,” Rebekah said in the dark, long after they should both have been asleep.
“Good,” Nick said cheerily. He put a hand up in front of his face and couldn’t see it. “Might be rain.”
There was silence a moment.
“If there’s going to be rain, shouldn’t we set up some sort of shelter?”
“Hm. Might be a good idea,” Nick conceded. “And something to catch the water maybe. And store it.”
The sea lapped gently at the beach. Some way behind them, something scurried through the undergrowth and was gone. Rats, probably. Or the one big rat: Daddy Rat.
Rebekah cleared her throat.
Struggling with something, maybe embarrassment, she said, “can you...can you come a little bit closer. I feel sort of...lonely.”
Nick thought about it, well he felt lonely too, all the wanting in the world wouldn’t bring Jessica in to his arms but Rebekah was here so why not? He stood up and moved a foot along the sand to where he thought she must be lying.
“You there?”
“A little bit further.”
He moved closer again and kicked her.
“Oops. Sorry.”
“That’s it,” she said, amusement in her voice. “Kick a girl when she’s down.”
He lay down beside her with a sigh, with what he considered was an appropriate distance between them.
“It wouldn’t hurt if you...got a little bit closer.”
“I don’t know,” Nick said. “I might end up in your armpit.”
Rebekah said nothing. From nowhere Nick had the idea he might have upset her, and for some reason he felt a little put out with her that she would turn the silent treatment on him, and make him feel guilty.
“That might not be fun for either of us,” he added, and as soon as it had left his lips he immediately regretted it.
Still Rebekah did not reply.
In the dark he heard something, and didn’t recognise it until he realised that Rebekah was crying.
“What’s the matter?” He asked gently.
“Nothing,” she said miserably.
“Well, there must be something wrong, because you’re crying.”
There was a sob filled pause.
“Why did you say that?” She asked, in a small voice.
“Say what?”
“About my...armpit?"
"What?"
"It's hard for a girl to be a girl in this place. You know. Without…cosmetics and things."
“Oh for God’s sake, Rebekah, it was a joke.”
She sniffed.
“Was it? I didn’t find it funny. Sometimes you can be...really cruel. There’s two of us on this island but sometimes it feels like there’s just me. You push me away.”
Nick sighed tiredly.
“I don’t.”
“You do. Look at you now. You don’t even want to touch me. I’m scared, and I’m lonely, and you know that, and you still don’t want to touch me. You’re not going to catch anything.”
“I’m married, Rebekah.”
He heard her turn toward him in the dark.
“All I want is for you to put your arms around me. Just once. I hardly think that’s grounds for divorce. Maybe even your beloved Jessica would understand.”
Nick sighed again but did not move to put his arms around her. She was right, it wasn’t betraying Jessica, but he still didn’t feel right about it.
He stared up at the ceiling of the sky trying to make some shapes out in the dark but he might as well have been looking at a matt black screen for all the detail there was in it. He conjured up an image of Jessica in his mind, as he had done every night, and every day, and probably every other minute since he had gotten here. He didn’t think that she was dead. It didn’t feel like she was dead, and although he had no rational explanation for this feeling he trusted it. He thought if she was dead he would feel it, an emptiness, a pain. The reverse could be true of course, she could be a little skeleton at the bottom of the ocean somewhere, picked clean by crabs, but he didn’t think so. There were worse things than death, of course. She was a pretty woman, it wasn’t inconceivable that one of the pirates had taken her for his own amusement, and that she was at this very moment tied to a bed on one of the lower decks of the pirate ship being systematically raped by the whole crew. The thought tore at him. He wanted to blot the thought out but now it had formed in his mind he couldn’t seem to get rid of it.
He turned on his side and reached out for Rebekah thinking this is one way to blot it out but Rebekah pushed his hands away.
“It’s too late now,” she said miserably.
There was more silence. Nick felt so sad that he wanted to cry himself, and put his arm over his eyes and willed himself to keep back the tears.
“This island isn’t so bad,” Rebekah said. “But with you here it feels like hell. You’re not a nice person.”
Her words stung him. She hated him, he could hear it in her voice, and he thought well we have something in common because he hated himself too, and he welcomed her hate, deserved it even.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said acidly. “You might have been unlucky enough to have been stuck on this island with Charles Manson.”
She hesitated.
“Who’s Charles Manson?”
His head came up.
“You don’t know who Charles Manson is?”
“No.”
God, I feel old, he thought.
“A psycho killer. A real nasty man.”
“Related, are you?”
Nick laughed. The sound was forlorn in all that great big empty silence.
He put his arms around her; he didn’t think about it, he just did it, and although Rebekah struggled against him for a few moments, telling him to get off, he would no
t, and in the end she relented, and settled more comfortably against him.
“Better?”
She mumbled something.
“What?”
“A bit maybe,” she said, clearer. “What do I owe you for this?”
“Hm.” Nick thought. “A week’s worth of fishing?”
“I don’t need it that much.”
“I’m sorry, Rebekah,” Nick said, surprised at the words, and even more surprised as more came tumbling after them, “I’m not much good to you. Feeling sorry for myself, I suppose. I should be more for you but...I don’t know how.”
“You are more,” she said. “You saved my life.”
His head came up, surprised.
“When?”
“When I went overboard. I don’t remember anything. You must have kept my head above water, stopped me from drowning.”
“Oh.” He settled back down. “That. Well. You saved mine too, don’t forget. When my leg got infected. I remember you giving me water, and trying to make me eat.”
“I didn’t know what else to do,” she said helplessly.
“You did good,” he said, and squeezed her, and with the mood changed between them they both fell immediately asleep, neither of them moving much throughout the night, too comfortably locked together for either one of them, even unconsciously, to want to untangle themselves.
◆◆◆
In the morning, a light rain began, and Rebekah and Nick danced around in it, their heads up and their mouths open to receive it.
◆◆◆
Another month went by…although in truth somewhere along the line Nick had surely forgotten to mark the calendar rock, so there might be as many as four days missing, so the exact date was impossible to pin down. He looked at the lines on the calendar rock and wondered why it was he bothered to record anything, and then scoured another line in it. The rock told him it was probably the middle of July; that was his best guess anyway.
Their breakfast that morning consisted of two crabs that Nick had managed to uncover in the rocks at the far end of the beach. They cooked them over a small fire, listening to them sizzle and pop.
“I had a dream last night,” Rebekah said.
“Oh?”
“Mm. About the...pirates, I suppose. And then when I woke up this morning I remembered what happened. All of it, I think.”
“The dream?”
“No. What happened on the boat.”
He looked at her with some surprise.
For some reason she would not meet his eyes. He didn’t understand this sudden furtiveness in her.
“Well?” He pressed.
“I was below deck when I heard the first shots. That’s what I remember. I was behind the engine. God, it was noisy in there, and hot, but I still heard the gunshots. Tat-tat-tat-tat-tat. It scared me, but I also thought it might be an idea to find out what was going on. Not the best idea I think I’ve ever had. Probably ranks a little bit below running away in the first place.”
Again, a quick look from those furtive eyes.
“I poked my head out of the engine room and saw that tall man with the moustache being pulled in to the lounge area at the end of the hall. The...pirate pulled the door too behind him but it didn’t shut completely, so I crept closer and hid in the doorway to the right of it, and listened. I thought he was going to torture him or something but...they were just talking.”
“What were they saying?” Nick asked.
Her eyes flicked to his once more and then away, and she took a deep breath as if she was about to climb a steep slope.
“The pirate guy was speaking in broken English, so I knew who was who just by listening. The tall guy...he was telling the other one that only you were to be killed – he gave a description – and that when that was done, then he would get the other hundred thousand promised him.”
For a moment Nick couldn’t take in what she had said. It didn’t make sense. A hundred thousand? What? The amount seemed to bounce around in his head like a drop of water on a hot skillet. A hundred thousand to have me killed? Two hundred thousand, if it was only part of the payment. But his mind could not digest it, could not digest anything, not even the sun beating down on his skull, he felt stifled suddenly, and wanted to rip off his shirt and go running down the beach and splash in to the water and start swimming, and not stop.
“This was just a dream,” Nick said, but there was a catch in his throat.
Rebekah shook her head ominously. Her eyes were haunted.
“I don’t think so.”
“But you’re not sure?”
Rebekah gave him a small half shrug.
“What was the tall guy’s name?” She asked. “The one with the moustache?”
Nick blinked, came back to the conversation.
“Oh...Mike. Michael Ross.”
Rebekah nodded.
“When you’ve talked about him, Michael, I assumed he was the same man I saw, but this other guy, the pirate, he called him Castle. Does that make any sense?”
Nick’s mind seemed to come to a juddering halt; with this last bit of information there now seemed like there was no way he could deny it, no way he could wriggle out from beneath the weight of this terrible revelation. Castle. Good God, could it be true?
“Nick? You don’t look so good.”
“Huh?” He came back to her. “No. No, it’s fine.”
“If it was the same guy, why did he call him Castle?” She asked.
Nick, mildly annoyed at the distraction, said offhandedly, “he got the name when he was in the Navy. Apparently, at port, he had to hold some piece of land in a fire fight. Everybody gave up on it but him, and he held it for a day and a night before reinforcements came. So they called him Castle.”
Was that how he knew the pirates? From his days in the Navy?
“Oh,” Rebekah said, in a small voice.
He heard her only dimly. Nick’s mind was reeling. Was it true? No no it couldn’t be…and yet the trip had been Mike’s idea, even coming to the Seychelles had been Mike’s idea, my God had he been planning it even then? But Nick’s mind couldn’t go down that road just yet, it was too much of a stretch.
“Did they say anything else when you were listening?”
Rebekah shook her head.
“No. Just that nobody else was to be harmed. Only you.”
“And they actually mentioned my name?”
She nodded.
“Nick Mitchell, I heard them say. And that Mike Ross described you as well.”
Nick fixed her with a hard stare and said, “you’re not making this up?”
“No! My God, why would I?”
Nick shook his head, staring down at the sand. His mind had gone blank with shock.
“I thought about not telling you...I didn’t know if it was the right thing to do.”
Nick looked at her.
“Why not?”
Rebekah shrugged, uncomfortable under his hot gaze.
“I don’t know.”
Nick frowned down at the sand. Mike? Mike have me killed? Frankly, it was unbelievable. Why? Why the hell did he want me killed?
“Nick?” Rebekah said tentatively.
“Uh...” Nick got up; he felt Rebekah’s worried eye on him. “I...I’ve got to think about this.”
“Okay.”
“I’m going to take a...to take a walk.”
“Okay. Don’t go too far.”
He nodded absentmindedly, turned, and began walking.
◆◆◆
At some point he became aware that he was shaking and couldn’t make himself stop. So, some part of him had accepted it, but his mind still shied away from it and all its implications, it was too terrible, why did Mike want him killed? That’s what it came down to, and all the reasons he could list seemed so superficial, at least to him, so pointless that it hardly seemed worth the risk. Was Mike psychotic? That would explain a lot, but if he was then he was the best actor in the world. To a certain extent that was hi
s job, he was Head of Sales, and when he sold products or gained contracts in essence he was selling himself, a guarantee, that’s how it worked, if you liked the guy then it usually swayed you from two products that didn’t have much between them, and Mike was likeable, he had that down to a fine art, he was a good salesman because after ten minutes in his company he could make you feel like your troubles were his troubles. But Nick couldn’t believe that Mike had a psychotic personality, couldn’t picture him pulling wings off birds, even stalking women and then cutting them up, it was impossible to stitch any of these images with the smiling, easy going man he had taken on as his second in command. Second in command, hell, Nick was grooming him for partnership and Mike must have known that, the guy already had half the responsibilities for running the place on his plate, and Nick knew he could trust him with it, but of course he now knew that that wasn’t Mike at all, Mike had set him up, to be killed, my God, to be killed, why, for fuck’s sake, why?
Nick stopped, coming back to himself, and found that he had walked off their beach all the way to the smaller beach farther along the coast with no memory of the journey. He looked out into the bay, at the perfect blue line of the horizon barely discernable from the faultless blue of the sky, a demarcation noticeable only because the sea was half a shade darker. A wave came up and hit the finger of rock poking out from the land, and Nick jumped, head whipping around. He found that every muscle in his body was tensed, as if for a fight, and he made himself relax. Was it money then? Was that it? That he wanted Mitchell Cole for himself, and not just part of it, not just the part that Nick would have offered almost automatically in a couple of years but all of it. But that didn’t work either, because without Nick, ownership of Mitchell Cole would pass to Jessica, and she wouldn’t just hand it over to Mike. Would she? No no of course not, unless –
A shudder overtook Nick and he went down to the water’s edge and splashed his face.
No, Jessica wasn’t involved. He simply wouldn’t accept that. If she was having an affair with Mike he would have known about it, or at the very least suspected. And why plot with Mike to have him killed when she had a comfortable existence to begin with? They were never hurting for money, he had always given her everything she had always wanted. No. There was no reason to think she was involved. It wasn’t possible. He loved Jessica and he was a hundred percent certain that she loved him back.
