Good Morning

I slept in the clearing. I would have slept there even if I hadn't thought it best to stay away from Étienne. I'd lost my sense of smell and become selective in which moans I chose to hear, but I couldn't stand the candles. Their accumulated heat was so strong that the ceiling was wet with condensation. The drips fell like a light rain through clouds of waxy fumes, and by midnight there wasn't a dry square-inch in the longhouse. That aside, Gregorio was in my bed. I'd moved him there so he could get away from Jesse, who'd had the same incontinence problem as Bugs.

The last thing I remember before falling asleep was Sal's voice. She'd recovered enough to walk around and was calling Keaty's name. I could have told her he was down on the beach, but I decided not to. There was something ominously controlled about her tone. It was the way a parent might call for a kid, trying to draw them out of their hiding-place in order to give them a bollocking. After a few minutes I felt her torch shining through my eyelids and she asked me if I knew where he was. I didn't move, and eventually she moved away.

The only other disruption that night was the sound of someone crying nearby. I tried to make myself get up and check on who it was, but it turned out I was too tired to care.

Jed woke me around six thirty, with a bowl of rice and a boiled sweet, one of the last from Ko Pha-Ngan.

'Good morning,' he said, violently shaking my shoulders. 'Have you eaten yet?'

'No,' I mumbled.

'What did I tell you last night?'

'...Eat.'

'So.' He hauled me to a sitting position and put the bowl in my lap. The single sweet, a lurid chemical green, looked ridiculous perched on the mound of sticky grains. 'Eat this now.'

'I'm half asleep.'

'Eat it, Richard.'

I pressed a rice-ball with my fingers and dutifully began to chew it, but my mouth was too dry to swallow. 'Water,' I croaked. Jed went to get me some, and I poured it straight into the bowl. Actually it didn't taste so bad, if only because it didn't taste of anything.

While I ate Jed talked, but I didn't listen to him. I was looking at the bone-white rice and thinking about the dead Freak on Ko Pha-Ngan. I was sure the ants would have stripped him down by now. They work fast, ants. He probably never even got to the rotting stage. I pictured the Freak on his back, a clean skeleton grinning through his loose covering of leaves, dappled in a few pinpricks of sunlight. In fact I'd left him on his front, lying on his arms, but there wasn't much sense in picturing the back of his head so I revised the image to make it more aesthetic. The dappled effect was another revision. As I remember his shallow grave, no light filtered past the thick foliage above him. I just liked the idea that it did.

'Pretty,' I said, putting the sweet in my mouth. 'Maybe a monkey exploring the ribcage.'

Jed looked at me. 'Huh?'

'Or maybe a monkey would be too... kitsch...'

'Kitsch?'

'Monkeys.'

'Have you listened to a word I've been saying?'

'No.' I crunched the sweet and my tongue tingled with the sudden flood of lime. 'I've been thinking about the Freak on Ko Pha-Ngan:'

'The dead guy you hid?'

'Yeah. Do you think he's been found yet?'

'Well,' Jed started to say, looking perplexed. 'I suppose he might have been found if the girl was...' Then he slapped his head. 'Jesus Christ! What the fuck am I talking about? Who cares about the dead Freak? You should have left him where he was, and we've got much more important stuff to deal with right here!'

'I was only interested. And he's bound to get found one of these days.'

'Shut up! Now listen! One of us has to get up to the island to check on Zeph and Sammy!'

'Oh, OK... Why not both of us?'

Jed made an exasperated sobbing sound. 'Why do you think, you dozy fool? Someone has to stay here to look after the sick people, and almost all the fishing detail is out of action. Only the Swedes and Keaty are healthy, and Keaty's still missing.'

I nodded. 'I guess that means me.'

'No. It means me. I need to stay here because I know some stuff about first aid, so you'll be going up to the island alone. Are you up to that?'

'You bet!' I said brightly. 'No sweat at all!'

'Good. Now before you go I want you to find Keaty. There's about fifteen who are well enough to eat, so someone's going to have to get food for them, but I won't have time to go fishing, so he'll have to do it.'

'OK. And what should I do if Zeph and Sammy are on their way?'

'They won't be.'

'But what if they are?'

Jed paused. 'I'm trying not to think about it, but if they are then get back here as fast as you can and tell me.'

'And if there's no time?'

'Plan B.'

'...Which one?'

'You wait and see what happens. I'm positive they'll turn back at the dope fields, but if they don't then follow them to the waterfall. Then, if they get down, intercept them and make fucking sure they know not to start talking about your map.'

Across the clearing, Jesse appeared out of the longhouse. He wobbled towards the bathroom hut, got about a quarter of the way there, and threw up.

'Right,' I said, suddenly feeling immensely cheerful. After last night I hadn't expected the next day to start so well, 'I'd better find Keaty then.'

There was only one bad note to the morning. On the way to the beach I passed Sal sitting outside the longhouse and she called me over. It turned out that Bugs - who was sitting next to her and giving me the evil eye - had told her what I'd done to him. Sal wanted an explanation.

I was slick. I said that I'd been exhausted and was only catching my breath before I gave him a hand outside, and if Bugs re­membered it differently I was truly sorry, but maybe his sickness had warped his memory of the incident. Then I suggested we shook on it, and that pleased Sal a lot. She was so hassled, what with everything else she had to deal with, that she was more than ready to get the distraction out of the way.

Bugs wasn't though. When I set off again for the beach he hobbled after me and called me a bastard. He was really angry, poking his finger in my chest and saying what he'd do to me if only he were well enough. I waited until he'd finished, then told him to fuck off. I wasn't going to let him spoil my good mood.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 630