Lost Girls (8 page)

“What we could do is collect more of the shrimp and use them as bait to catch something bigger and more sustaining,” says the ever-sensible Jas. But I can tell she’s as buoyed by our lucky break as I am.

“Save the big shell,” I tell the others. “It will make a great saucepan.” May and Arlene make faces at each other, but Hope rinses out the shrimpy remains and stores the shell at the back of the shelter.

“Come on, girls.” Mrs. Campbell stands and stretches. “Who’s going to help find something more to eat? And more firewood? Hope was the only one of you to come back with anything. It doesn’t look as if we are going to be picked up today.” Jas and I stand up, too. But the others just stare into the embers of the fire. “For all we know there could be bananas, birds’ eggs, edible roots, mangoes, and maybe other kinds of nuts. It’s a tropical island,
for goodness’ sake; there’s bound to be lots of edible stuff.” Mrs. Campbell’s encouragement has no effect on the others, so Jas and I set off behind her, around the edge of the forest.

It’s dark under the green canopy of tall trees, and we take turns cutting away thorny bamboo stalks with my Swiss Army knife and the boatman’s knife. It’s very hard work, and my hands are soon covered in blisters. There are countless terrible noises here; you wouldn’t believe the uncanny sounds. A huge flying bug sounds just like a Vespa. There’s a loud honking up in the branches, but we don’t see what makes the racket. Then we hear a sudden creaking, and a falling tree crashes down and just misses Jas. She’s a nervous wreck, shaking with fear. I give her a hug and a smile, and Mrs. Campbell suggests that we rest for a moment and drink.

“Half the problem is dehydration….” she explains. Then suddenly there’s a loud humming from behind us, and Mrs. Campbell shouts, “Get down!” and we duck as a swarm of bees passes overhead. God, I hate this place.

“Bees mean honey,” says Mrs. Campbell. “But they build their nests high up in the canopy. We’ll never get to it.”

“I can climb,” I say. Gymnastics is one of my strongest subjects.

“And how would you collect the honey without being stung?”

“Uh, okay, let’s forget that idea.” I feel stupid and angry at the same time.

We gather up some long, aromatic black-bean pods.

“I don’t know what they are,” says Jas, “but they might be edible, and they’ll be fuel for the fire, if nothing else.” She always talks sense. There are many newly fallen trees, uprooted in the storm. Pink orchids lie crushed under thick branches. I find a peacock feather, its golden eye shining in the gloom. The sudden beauty is so welcome.

And then we stumble upon a comb of honey, in the trunk of a fallen tree. We scoop the honey from the wax cells with our fingers and eat it then and there.

“Look out for bees,” warns Mrs. Campbell, but she eats just as much as Jas and I do. “No point in trying to carry it back to the others; we’d be stung to death.”

We are cheered tremendously by the sugar rush and set off again with high hopes of finding more good things to eat. But before long we come to an enormous gulch, completely hidden by thorny bamboo. Jas scouts around but can’t find a way through.

“We’ll have to go back—the light’s fading,” says Mrs. Campbell. I am so disappointed. All we have to show, apart from cuts and scratches and sore legs, are bean
pods, the feather, and some dry sticks and hairy lichens that will make good tinder, according to Mrs. Campbell. We follow our trail back the way we came. The Glossies don’t even ask how we got on. Hope is scratching at her legs and has long red marks on her arms where she has scratched too hard. She looks miserable. I wonder if the Glossies have been giving her a hard time while we’ve been away. I wouldn’t put it past them. The juniors are listless, too, not playing or talking, just curled up together by the cooling fire. I get my journal out and go and sit away from the others.

DAY 6 CONTINUED:

I have thought of a name for the forest—Nitnoi Forest.
Nitnoi
means “very small.” The Prince of Thailand has a poodle called Nitnoi. He came to the yacht club at Pattaya once with his poodle, and I met him. I quite liked the poodle.

While we’ve been gone Hope has somehow dragged the outboard motor up the beach by herself and placed it close to the fire: to dry it out, she explains.

“You don’t think we could get it to work, do you?” I ask her.

She shrugs. “M-m-maybe. Who knows?” She looks disappointed at my lack of enthusiasm.

“Hope, are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m okay.”

“Are those stupid girls being horrible to you?”

“M-m-may and Arl-l-l-lene? No, no m-m-more than usual.” She tries to smile.

“You should stand up to them,” I say. I mean to sound sympathetic, but it sounds like an accusation. Jas does these things so much better than I do.

The fire is useless as a signal—no flames, only a thin wispy smoke trail, which is immediately dispersed by the strong wind. Hope points to the juniors. They’re making their way back along the beach, their arms full of coconut husks and, more important, coconuts. I still can’t summon the energy to respond as brightly as I know Hope wishes I would, but Mrs. Campbell saves the moment.

“That’s great, girls,” she calls to them. “With coconuts we won’t go hungry or thirsty.” And she sets about opening one of the shells, hitting it with the boatman’s blade. Eventually it cracks open and we all have a sip of the milk, a thin white liquid that tastes sweet and refreshing. The flesh is half set, a jelly-like substance like yogurt, rather disgusting, but we eat it ravenously. What I wouldn’t do for a glass of iced star-fruit juice.

I reopen my journal and write:

If we ever leave here I am never going to eat another coconut as long as I live.

And then I tuck it away.

Mrs. Campbell opens another coconut shell and takes it to give to Natalie. She is back in a moment.

“Where’s Natalie?”

“We put her over there. We couldn’t stand the smell.” Arlene shrugs her pink shoulders and makes a face. She points to a blue sleeping bag farther along the top of the beach.

“You did what?” Mrs. Campbell runs to where they’ve left the little girl, under the wispy shade of the casuarina trees. I follow. The smell
is
pretty unbearable. Mrs. Campbell is leaning over the child, holding her head up to give her the liquid. Natalie splutters and the milk trickles out the side of her mouth. She looks awful, flushed and dry-mouthed. Mrs. Campbell presses more milk to her lips, and this time she takes a little.

“I’ll have to change her dressing.”

“I’ll help, Mrs. Campbell. Should I heat some water?”

“And just what will you heat it in?” The sarcasm in her voice is hurtful.

“Coconut shells? They’ll hold more than Jas’s clam shell.”

“Good idea, Bonnie—brilliant!” One moment she’s being horrid and the next she’s trying to be nice. I don’t get her.

I stand the shells, jammed between rocks, over the embers of the fire, and the water soon warms up. The difficult thing is carrying the hot shells up to the patient. In the end I use my T-shirt as an oven mitt and push the shell into the sand near Natalie.

“Don’t you think the stream must come out on the beach somewhere, Mrs. Campbell? We can’t climb to the Gorge of Gloom for water all the time.”

“Oh, Bonnie, stop nagging!” Mrs. Campbell shouts at me, and I cringe at her sudden change of mood. She carries on tending to the sick child, and I hide my red face under my hair.

Mrs. Campbell tests the warm water with her elbow, like seeing if the bath is too hot for a baby. It is, and her jerking arm knocks the coconut shell over, and all the water spills onto the sand.

I start again from scratch, but don’t leave it to heat for so long. This time it is the right temperature and Mrs. Campbell bathes Natalie’s leg. She hardly makes a sound.

“Why does it smell so bad, Mrs. Campbell?” I ask.

“It’s the infection, Bonnie. It’s not looking good. I think it’s gangrene.”

The leg is swollen all the way up. I hold my nose. I can’t help it.

“You don’t have to stay. I can manage now.”

“Okay, if you’re sure.”

The sun has come out at last and the bigger girls are swimming in the fishing pool, the juniors splashing in the shallows. I run back to the edge of the sea and stare out at the laughing girls. There’s a huge black cloud on the horizon.

I look back and see Mrs. Campbell sitting and smoking, six feet of sand between her and Natalie.

DAY 7

Cried myself to sleep last night. Mrs. Campbell’s useless as a cadet leader, useless as a caretaker, useless as friend. I hate her.

Rain all night, and we didn’t get much sleep, what with the hooting of the gibbons and the unidentified screams and coughs.

This morning the rain’s stopped and the wind has dropped, thank goodness. Little spots of silver dance on the sea and it almost makes me forget the awfulness of the past few days, though I’m worn out from crying.

“You okay, Bonz?” Jas looks worriedly at me. “You don’t look so good this morning.”

“Think you’re a better sight, do you?” I snap. Don’t know what’s the matter with me. I never yell at Jas. She wanders off to wash. I ought to run after her. Apologize. But I’m too tired and sore and miserable. I sit on a tall rock at the water’s edge. On my own.

The lagoon has all the colors of a peacock’s feather. Pink coral heads are visible, and red and purple seaweed swirls, lifts, and falls on the gentle waves. The palms’ feathery heads quiver in the breeze, and huge butterflies flutter on the suddenly brilliant flowers at the top of the beach.
It is paradise
, I tell myself. Or it would be, if it weren’t for the dead birds rotting on the tide line, hundreds of them. Fat flies swarm over the broken gulls, parakeets, bush turkeys, even peacocks. I catch sight of a rat moving among the carcasses. That’ll freak out the Glossies.

Hope and Jas come down the beach armed with plastic bags.

“We can’t let anyone swim until we’ve cleared the birds,” Jas calls over to me, a kind of
Can we be friends again?
tone to her voice, and I’m glad. I swing down from my rock and make enough of a commotion to send the marauding rats back to where they came from.

Hope, Jas, and I spend the whole morning gathering the corpses in a stinking heap, intending to bury them at
the other end of the beach, but it’s a disgusting job. We bind the plastic bags around our hands and wrap T-shirts over our mouths and noses.

Once the beach is mostly clear of rotting creatures, Carly and Jody paddle around. They have taken off all their clothes and seem happy enough, though Carly still hasn’t spoken as far as I know. Hope and I are washing their things in a freshwater spring that Jas and I found on the way back from the burial site. It was only a matter of searching along the top of the beach. It bubbles up by rocks just inside the bordering trees, and then disappears again under the sand.

“It’s a happy coincidence that the stream is well away from the latrine,” I told Mrs. Campbell, but she didn’t respond.

“Do you think w-we are going to get r-r-r-r-rescued, Bonnie?” Hope looks vulnerable without her glasses, like a blind owl.

“Yeah, sure we are, Hope. Now that the wind has dropped they’ll send a boat.”

Hope doesn’t look convinced. “I wish I hadn’t b-broken m-my glasses,” she says. “I can’t see a thing. It’s like living in a thick m-mist.”

“Have you always worn them?”

“Since I was very little. M-m-mom says she’s going to get m-me contact lenses soon. And she’s going to get
m-my t-t-t-t-teeth fixed. But Dad says why b-b-b-b-bother? It w-w-w-w-won’t make me look any m-m-m-more human. Is this shirt clean enough, do you think?”

We hang the clothes across a fallen palm trunk and turn when we hear happy shrieking.

I can’t believe my eyes. May, Arlene, and Mrs. Campbell are skinny-dipping in the fishing pool. They’ve done nothing to help all morning. And then I realize there’s no fire—they’ve allowed it to go out. They come up the beach, naked. I’m embarrassed but also very angry.

“Mrs. Campbell, shouldn’t we keep the fire burning as a marker for anyone coming to rescue us?”

She throws herself down on the sand, ignoring me once again. I march over to her and stand with my hands on my hips, looking down at her.

“Shut up, Bonnie MacDonald. You’re so bossy,” May says, stretching out close to Mrs. Campbell.

“Oh, they’ll find us now that the weather’s improved,” Mrs. Campbell mumbles and rolls a cigarette. I can’t remember ever feeling this angry before: She’s wasting matches now.

“Your cigarette smells funny, Mrs. Campbell.”

“Herbal,” she says, sucking in deeply.

Oh yeah, right, herbal. Pull the other one.
I don’t trust myself to speak and walk away. Jas looks at me, her eyes asking me what’s happened, but I shake my head
and drop cross-legged onto the sand, my head in my hands.

The day crawls on. No one comes. We don’t see any boats, planes, or helicopters. When I suggest a hunt for more provisions, only Jas says yes. No one else wants to come. All the others do is swim and muck about. It’s as if they are on holiday. It’s as if Sandy hasn’t died, or the boatman. As if Natalie isn’t seriously sick. As if we aren’t stuck here until someone finds us.

Hope mopes on her own, the only girl with all her clothes on, though she looks far too hot.

“Coming?” I ask, but she shakes her head.

“Then keep an eye on Natalie, will you?”

Hope nods and moves closer to where Natalie is lying.

“It’s one thing the juniors acting as if nothing’s happened, but you’d expect Mrs. Campbell and the others to act responsibly,” I grumble.

“In denial,” says Jas. “All in denial.” (Her mother’s a psychologist.)

“But think about it, Jas. Who knows we’re here? No one. If the boatman had made it home it would be different, but there are hundreds, well, dozens of islands. How will they know where to find us?”

“We haven’t seen any boats or planes today.” For once Jas can’t look on the bright side. “Why? Why aren’t they
even looking for us? Something awful must have happened at the base.”