Lost Girls (10 page)

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 Mom 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 amazing 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.

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 more 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.

“Shut up, you stupid ditz, shut up! Don’t you realize the danger we’re in?” I’m shouting. “We’re trapped on this island with something dangerous. Wild boar, maybe, or a big cat, and you’re, you’re…” I put Carly down and she runs off to Jody and carries on looking for shells as if nothing has happened. But something has changed. Not only are we not being rescued, we’re sharing an island with an animal that eats human flesh. Probably more than one. There’s no point in wasting any more time on Mrs. Campbell.

We need weapons: We could use them to hunt for food as well as for protection. I should have thought of it before. We’ll make spears. Jas and I find more bamboo stalks of the right length and thickness. I make several spears, whittling their tips with my penknife to make sharp points. Then I have a brilliant idea—I split the end of a long cane, position the Swiss Army knife in it, open to a vicious serrated blade, and tie it on with some fishing
line. On the beach I throw it as far as I can. It flies in an arc and lands blade-down in the sand. It works!

But that only works for one spear; we need more. I’m desperate to keep going, to keep busy. We should have one each at least. And if my knife is stuck on the end of a pole, I can’t use any of its many useful blades and implements.

I find one of the baked bean tins, flatten it with a stone, and then bend and cut it into a sharp cone shape, which I flatten. I fit it into the split end of the spear and bind it onto the shaft with a piece of fishing line. It looks good. I throw it several times, aiming at a fallen tree trunk. It works. I craft two more spearheads with the tins. One for Hope, one for Jas, and one for me.

“We have to keep the fire going,” I tell everybody, “and all sleep nearby.” For once nobody complains that I’m being too bossy. We’ve moved Natalie back to our camp and know that, in spite of the stench, we have to have her close to us at night.

Mrs. Campbell seems to have sobered up. Or at least she’s not as spaced out as she was. I have given up on May and Arlene, who have spent all day asleep in the sun. I don’t care; let them fry. They don’t deserve to be looked after.

But then I discover that the matches are finished. That explains why Mrs. Campbell’s able to sit up and speak. Now surely she has to pay attention.