by J G Alva
Now the tears were flowing freely. She brought a hand up to her mouth, her hand shaking life a leaf in a stiff breeze.
“What’s so bad about this island? What’s so bad about it that you want to leave it so desperately?”
He laughed.
“Are you out of your mind?” He said, quite unable to believe what he had just heard. “Look at you. For God’s sake, look at yourself. You’re nothing but skin and bone. I am not going to die on this island, Rebekah. I swore to myself that I wouldn’t. And I won’t let anything happen to you either. Sometime next month, when the weather’s steadier, I’m going to try and get off this island. I’ll get help. And then things will be alright.”
“I won’t let you!” She screamed.
“Just try and stop me,” he countered darkly.
“I’d rather die than be here alone!”
“Then come with me,” Nick said gently, taking another step towards her. “We’ll put enough food on it for two weeks. For both of us. That should be enough to last until we find help. We can do it. I know we can.”
But Rebekah was shaking her head.
“You won’t make it. If you try to go for help on that raft, you won’t make it. Either your food will run out before you find anything or a storm will wreck it, and then you’ll be dead, and I’ll be alone.”
“You don’t know that.”
“This could be our home, this island,” Rebekah said.
Nick blinked.
“What?”
“You and me. This could be our home. All we need to do is...sort out some better way of fishing. Get a net going or something. The foods out there, if we could just get it. This islands beautiful, Nick. I don’t mind staying here if I’m with you.”
“Have you gone mad?” Nick said. “I’m not staying on this island one more minute than I have to.”
“Is it me?”
Nick stared at her.
“I don’t know what – "
“Is it me?” She almost screamed. “Is that why you don’t like this island? Because you’re on it with me?”
“You’re not making any sense, Rebekah. It’s got nothing to do with you. Absolutely nothing. I’ve got a life. I’ve got a wife. My mother probably thinks I’m dead, for Christ’s sake. I can’t ignore that. I don’t want to ignore that.”
“God, there isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for you, if you asked me, Nick. I could make you happy, I really could. We could be happy. Here. On this island.”
But Nick was shaking his head.
“No, Rebekah.”
“No, listen to me, Nick, listen to me – "
“They tried to kill me!” Nick shouted, spit flying from his lips. Rebekah jumped, her mouth closing with a snap. “Don’t you understand! They tried to kill me! They can’t be allowed to get away with that. I won’t let them get away with that. And...and I think Mike is going to go after Jessica next. He has to, in order for him to be able to have Mitchell Cole for himself. That’s why I can’t stay on this island. Now do you understand?”
There was a terrible look on Rebekah’s face. Nick couldn’t place it at first, but it weighed heavy on his heart. And then he did recognise it: it was a look of total and utter hopelessness.
Rebekah nodded.
“Then go. If that’s what you want. Leave me. If that’s what you really want.”
And she turned and walked away from him.
Nick’s stomach was in a knot. He stared down at the raft, at months of toil on it, and then looked up at Rebekah’s retreating back. Damn. Damn, damn, damn. He couldn’t leave her. There was Jessica, she was in danger, but he had time...and he couldn’t leave Rebekah. He just couldn’t.
He left the raft then, running to catch her.
◆◆◆
CHAPTER 6
“What have you been doing?” Rebekah asked him, squinting at him suspiciously in the sun.
The sky was clear but there was a strong wind today, and it blew her hair every which way, slapping her in the face, in her eyes, so that she had to keep pulling it back. Nick liked her hair longer; it framed her face well.
“Nothing,” he replied innocently.
“You never usually go that far out. What are you hiding? There – in the water.”
Nick made a noise of annoyance.
“Can you do me a favour,” he said.
“Not until you tell me what it is you’re hiding.”
“Uh-uh. No deal. Can you go and amuse yourself somewhere? For about half an hour?”
Rebekah put her hands on her hips, her expression mildly annoyed but amused at the same time. Nick was a little shocked; it was a pose too adult for her. My God, she’s growing up in front of my eyes.
“And do what? Cinema? Art gallery? Dodgems, perhaps?”
“How about take a walk, enjoy the scenery. But be back in half an hour.”
“Shall we synchronise watches?”
“Ho ho. Why are you still standing there?”
Rebekah stared at him a moment, hands on hips, her eyes studying him suspiciously, before she turned and walked off.
He waited until she was a little speck at the end of the beach before pulling that morning’s catch out of the water.
When she returned the fire was burning nicely, and the lobster on a stick hung over it, cooking.
“Ta-da!” Nick exclaimed.
“My God. It’s a feast.”
“Happy birthday.”
She looked shocked a first, then all at once her features softened.
“Oh, Nick.”
“It's today, isn’t it?”
She shook her head.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It does to me. I think it’s today. Well, give or take a few days. Now, you’re going to eat this. Every last scrap of it.”
“You know I will. Haven’t I been making an effort?”
“Well. We’ve had a lot more to eat.”
“You’ve caught a lot more. Nick Mitchell, mighty hunter.”
“Ug. Here. Let me cut it up for you.”
She sat on the other side of the fire from him while he broke the shell and passed the pieces to her. She ate them greedily, moaning a little at each bite, smiling through all of it.
Nick studied her. She looked so much better than she had in months previous, filling out in most places on her body. She had been true to her word since the day of the argument over the raft, where his promise to stay on the island had come at the price of a promise of her own, that she would eat as much as Nick could catch for her. To this end Nick had thrown his energy in to fine tuning his hunting technique, going farther and farther out to get the bigger fish, using bait which he hadn’t tried before, sometimes standing for hours in one spot, waiting for the fish to get used to him and come within range of his spear. And it had worked. They had even managed to catch a couple of the rats that lived on the island – though none of them seemed to be Daddy Rat – and even though the thought of eating rat hadn’t been particularly attractive, the meat itself had been delicious, more palatable than it probably actually was because of its difference to their normal diet of fish, fish and more fish.
Rebekah took a big chunk of the lobster in her mouth and Nick watched her chew it; the juices leaked out of her mouth and down her chin; she reached up to wipe it off with a hand.
“Oops,” she said, around the mouthful, and grinned foolishly.
“Happy birthday, Miss Wheeler. And may I ask the age of the fair maiden?”
Rebekah gave him a put out look, and Nick thought again how it was too much of an adult gesture for her, my God she’s turning in to a woman already, when the hell did this happen?
She waited until she had swallowed and then said, “eighteen.”
“And you don’t look a day over twenty.”
“Oi.”
“I bet this time last year you didn’t think you’d be spending your eighteenth birthday on a tropical island with an old bearded beach bum.”
She pointed
at it.
“I like the beard.”
Nick put his hand through it.
“I feel like a tramp.”
She cocked her head, studying him.
“It makes you look older.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“With all your dark hair, I thought your beard would be dark too, but it’s a little bit blonde at the edges.”
“I’ll let you in on a little secret.”
“Oh?”
He leaned forward and in a conspiratorial whisper said, “I dye it.”
She laughed then, long and rich, a good sound, Nick decided, a very good sound, and not heard often enough in his opinion.
“God, if I only had some mayonnaise to go with my birthday dinner.”
“Alas, madam, that is beyond my capabilities.”
“Or even some salad cream. Do you know, before we landed on this island, not a day went by where I didn’t have mayonnaise with at least one meal, if not all of them.”
“Mayonnaise with cornflakes? Good God. Hopefully this absence will cure you of your addiction.”
“I don’t think so.” She became serious very suddenly and fixing him with a blue eyed stare said heavily, “thank you, Nick.”
They stared at each other a moment, comfortably, and then they both broke in to a smile.
“My pleasure. Now, were you serious about learning how to fish?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. Because that’s your next birthday present. Fishing lessons.”
As they waded in to the water, Nick with his spear and Rebekah with one of her own that Nick had made for her, slightly smaller, she said, “when I’m fishing – and let’s face it, I’m probably going to be better at it than you – "
“Oh, really?”
“ – You might be able to take a little bit of a break. You look tired, Nick.”
“I’m fine.”
“Hey.”
There was something in her tone that made him stop, and turn to her.
“Thank you, Nick. It’s been my favourite birthday. Ever.”
“Then you’re easy to please.”
“I mean it. It’s been wonderful.”
He smiled and nodded, the compliment accepted.
“Hey. It’s not over yet.”
“Well.” Rebekah wrinkled her nose. “I thought I’d say it now because it’s probably all downhill from here.”
◆◆◆
He went to his place in the woods again, careful that he wasn’t followed, and as he was busy with his own pleasure Rebekah popped in to his head out of nowhere, her face, the way she tilted her head when she was particularly interested in something, the smile, the eyes, eyes, eyes, and he came shortly afterward, and there seemed to be a new dimension to it, he was shuddering with the pleasure of it and couldn’t seem to stop.
Jesus Christ, she’s eighteen, he thought, disgusted with himself, but she filled his mind, and he hurried back to the beach to see her.
◆◆◆
The watch came off two days later.
Nick was breaking off branches for firewood when it got caught on a knot on a tree and the metal strap came apart.
Nick stopped as it came off his wrist and watched it fall to the floor. He stared at it a moment, feeling sad in a way he couldn’t understand, and then dug a hole and buried the watch. It seemed like the right thing to do.
◆◆◆
“What does Mitchell Cole do?”
“Huh?”
“Your company. What does it do exactly?”
Nick was turning over rocks at the far end of the beach in the ongoing hunting tutorials he had been giving Rebekah for the last two weeks. The crabs, however, were surprisingly adept at getting away from him.
“Oh. Lots of different things. But principally, we design and build machines, or machine parts, for various industries: automotive, medical, aerospace. That sort of thing.”
Rebekah was frowning.
“Give me specifics.”
Nick flipped over a rock and saw the crab dart out of sight into a hole.
“Damn it. Well. For example, one of the projects we did was a triple flow switch. For an endoscopy tube. You know, the one that goes down your neck with a camera on it to look at your insides.”
“Err.”
“Two tubes were attached to the camera, one for lubricant, to allow the camera to go down smoothly, the other to suck up excess fluid.”
“Sounds complicated.”
“It was a good job. I was pleased with it.”
“What else?”
“We designed and made pinions for gear boxes. For Landrover.”
“And a pinion is...?”
Her looked at her, surprised that she didn’t know. But then again, why would she?
“It’s a reduction gear.”
“Right. Totally unhelpful. So do you just design them and then make them? Or do you design them and get somebody else to make them?”
Nick made a face.
“I’m useless at the practical side, always was. I’ve always been a design engineer, but I could never really build anything, practically, with any great success. When I started out, I used to ship them to other companies to build, but I was forever having problems. You know, they never made them on time, or they didn’t follow the drawing correctly. So I decided to set up a workshop of my own, with skilled men to build the parts from my drawings. And that’s how it works. I design them, do the drawings, and then pass them on to the guys on the factory floor to build them.”
“How many people do you have working for you?”
“Thirty two.”
“Wow. And you were the head honcho?”
“Yep. This crab is a pain in the ass. I think he’s psychic. He seems to know what I’m going to do before I do it.”
“Do you think the company’s still going? I mean, in your absence.”
Nick stopped, stood up.
“Yes. It was a pretty successful company, if I say so myself. And they wouldn’t need me to keep going, not for a while. There’s enough designs, for existing contracts, to keep them going for another year. At least. The starting handles alone were going to last for another six months.”
“Starting handles?”
“For generators. We used to make ten thousand of them a year. We had a big machine that used to just run them off, one after the other. We made so many of them, it made you wonder just how many generators there were out there. Gotcha.” Nick stood up, holding the crab away from his body as its pincers opened and closed menacingly, and smiled proudly at Rebekah.
“I get the feeling that was luck more than skill.”
“The skilled hunter always makes it look easy.”
“It didn’t look easy.” They stared at it. “It would go lovely with some mayonnaise. You don’t have any mayonnaise on you, do you, by any chance? You didn’t fall off the ship with a jar tucked under your arm or anything?”
“I think I’ve told you this before, but sadly, no.”
“Shame. I love mayonnaise. Did I tell you I’m the first certified mayonnaise junkie?”
“I’m trying to think. Maybe two or three thousand times you’ve told me...”
They made their way back to the beach, Nick holding the crab carefully; he had had enough nips from their pincers on his time on the island to know that he didn’t want any more.
“So how much is Mitchell Cole worth? How much is Michael Ross going to get if he gets away with it?”
“He won’t get away with it,” Nick said heavily. He stopped walking, sighed. “Our annual turnover was about six million.”
Rebekah looked a little taken aback.
“Six million pounds?”
“Yep.”
“Wow.”
“But you don’t get to take home six million. You’ve got to take out operating costs and things like that. But we estimated our gross profit margin was going to be about thirty five percent by the end of the year. That’s the best profit margin
we’ve ever had.”
“And now he has it.”
Nick looked at her.
“Yes,” he said darkly.
They continued back to the beach in silence.
◆◆◆
CHAPTER 7
Something seemed to happen between them over the next six months, some change.
Nick supposed it had been happening before her eighteenth birthday, but it was that day, more than any other, that seemed to be the start of it.
He thought it was the fact that she was eating better than she had since they had first arrived on the island that was responsible for the change in her appearance, but it became clear to him that it wasn’t just that, that the changes in her were the changes of a girl becoming a woman. She seemed to have more of a curve in her hips, more weight to her thighs, and her breasts; her faded turquoise top suddenly seemed pushed to breaking point. It was on one of their many fishing excursions out in to the big blue, as Rebekah bent to retrieve their catch from the water at their feet that Nick found himself looking down her top, at the plentiful amount of flesh that was there, good curves, her skin gold from the sun, and it took all of his willpower to turn his eyes away from her. The seat of her trousers filled out as well, straining at already strained seams, and it was a good shape, and several times when she bent over in front of him, without any self-consciousness, his eyes were drawn to the shape of her like iron filings to a magnet.
But it was more than that. The change was in her. She was now a woman…and what was more, she was aware of it. And aware too that, despite his best efforts, she was having an effect on him.
Women knew. Women always knew.
And she was a woman now, in the flesh and on paper. And a very attractive one. At times he found it hard to remember the skinny little tom boy he had come on shore with, all knees and elbows. This thing before him now was something altogether different. There seemed to be a glow about her. Her face was longer, her lips redder, her skin clearer, her eyes an even more sharp, piercing blue. He found himself making excuses to touch her, on the shoulder, at her elbow, on the small of her back, and when he became aware of what he was doing – establishing ownership, he thought, with something like dismay – he made himself stop, because it wasn’t right, she was eighteen years old for God’s sake, and he was thirty seven now, fast approaching forty, she could quite easily be his daughter, and she trusted him, and he wouldn’t betray her like that, he couldn’t, it wasn’t the man he was.
