Chapter 18

“PUTAIN! ELLE ESToù, la bouffe?”

It was Angel, standing in the middle of the cabana, shrieking the words at a volume that made the birds in the trees dotted around the clearing screech and take to the wing, rising up in an indignant flock to circle and resettle.

I sighed, rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, and climbed the steps.

“I don’t speak French, Angel.”

“The food! The fucking food!” she shouted in my face. “Where is it? And the water, too.”

I looked around, blinking. The sun had only just risen and the shadows were long, making confusing shapes out of the tables and chairs, but even so, I could see Angel was right. The big stack of boxes and bottles over by the end of the cabana had gone. There was nothing there. Just the marks of footprints.

“Okay, look, don’t panic.” I tried to think. “There must be an explanation. It was there when we went to bed last night.”

Joel was coming up the steps behind me, yawning and stretching, and now I turned.

“Joel? Do you know anything about this?”

“About what?”

“About the fucking food and water!” Angel screeched. “Which has gone, if you would wake up. Putain de merde, I am on this island with fucking idiots.”

“These fucking idiots are right here, Angel,” I said a little irritably. My headache from yesterday had not gone, and I had spent the last few hours fiercely looking forward to a cool cup of water. Now my mouth was dry and my head was throbbing with every dramatic shriek Angel uttered. More than that, there was a coiling sense of dread in the pit of my stomach. Where had our supplies gone? Had someone moved them? But if so, why?

“What’s going on?” The voice was Dan’s, and I turned and saw him coming through the trees. He looked tired and worried.

“It’s the water,” I said shortly. “And the food. It’s gone.”

“Fuck.” Dan looked stricken. “I was coming to get something for Santa. Her bloods have gone very low overnight.”

“Shit. Is it her leg?” I asked. Dan shook his head.

“I don’t think so. The cut seems to be healing, but she’s having trouble getting her insulin right in this heat. I know we’re rationing the food, but that doesn’t count for something like this, surely?”

“I mean—” I waved a hand at the empty space where the boxes should have been. “I would have said not. But extra nothing is still nothing.”

“Where is the fucking food?” Angel yelled.

“What food?” came from the far side of the clearing, together with, “I have it,” from behind us.

We all swung around in different directions, trying to identify the voices.

Bayer was coming up the path from Palm Tree Rest, his face like thunder. Conor, calm and collected, was walking up behind us from the beach, with a bottle of water and a box of muffins in either hand.

“I have it,” Conor repeated equably. He held up the box. “Don’t worry.”

“You?” Angel stalked down the steps towards him, her hands on her hips. She looked like a haughty queen. “You have the food? Where is the rest of it?”

“It’s safe, don’t worry. But rats had started to go for some of the packaging, and in view of that, and your boyfriend’s elastic attitudes towards rations, I felt it would be safer over at the water villa.”

“I’m sorry, you felt?” I said at the same time as Bayer growled, “You have got to be fucking kidding me,” and Dan said, “Wait, you took our food?”

Angel seemed to have lost the power of speech. Only Joel looked unshocked. In fact, he looked more than unshocked. He looked… shifty.

“Joel.” I swung round on him. “Did you know about this?”

“I—” He opened his mouth, closed it, and then tried again. “I mean, he’s not wrong. We were going to lose half of it to rats. The water villa is a much safer place to store it.”

“Then we discuss that.” I could feel my blood pressure rising. “You don’t just wait until we go to bed and make a unilateral decision.”

“We’re discussing it now,” Conor said. He smiled, but I didn’t smile back.

“There is fucking nothing to discuss,” Bayer said furiously. The veins in his neck and forehead were standing out, and I could see one big vein running down from his jaw that was throbbing visibly. “Nobody died and made you king of this island, you fucking prick. Give me back my share or I will end you.”

He said the last words with a barely contained ferocity that sounded like he meant it literally. I think if he could have killed Conor in that moment, he would have done it.

But Conor didn’t back down. He didn’t even move. He simply set the water bottle down on the path and folded his arms.

“I’ll give you your share when you prove you can be trusted,” he said. Then he smiled. I think it was the smile that did it—at that, Bayer snapped.

He rushed at Conor with his head down, like a bull, and slammed into him with a force that I felt in my knees. Conor folded with the impact, and the two of them crashed onto the path, grappling like pro wrestlers, rolling this way and that on the sand. Angel was shrieking again. Dan was shouting, “Stop it! Just fucking stop it, the two of you!”

Conor had pulled himself upright, and now he was backing away from Bayer, towards the cabana steps, but Bayer rushed him again and they both fell to the ground again, their bodies thumping against the wooden stairs in a way that made the whole cabana shake. For a few minutes there was nothing but confusion, their bodies rolling this way and that, first Conor uppermost, then Bayer, then Conor again. And then, somehow, Bayer was on top, straddling Conor. He pulled back his fist and punched Conor square in the face. Blood sprayed everywhere, spattering across the sand, and then Conor twisted out of Bayer’s grip and was on top of him, straddling him like a bull. He was hitting Bayer again and again in the head, Bayer’s skull bouncing off the steps with every blow.

“Stop it!” Angel was screaming. “Stop it, you’re killing him!”

And then suddenly… suddenly I knew she was right. Bayer was no longer fighting back. In fact, Conor had him by the front of his T-shirt with one hand, hitting him with the other, and Bayer’s body was flopping like a rag doll with every one of Conor’s punches.

“Conor!” I shouted. “Conor, for God’s sake, stop, stop right now!”

For a minute I wasn’t sure that Conor had heard me. And then, with what looked like a supreme effort, he got ahold of himself and let Bayer’s shirt go.

Bayer fell back onto the steps with an audible thud, and Conor stood up and staggered over to the bushes, spitting blood out of his mouth.

Angel rushed across to Bayer, and I followed.

“Bayer,” she was crying, kneeling beside him. “Bayer, are you okay? Wake up! Fuck, Lyla, help me, he won’t wake up.”

“Bayer?” I crouched beside her, touching his cheek. There was no reaction. In fact, no sign of life at all that I could see. The blood in his nostrils wasn’t bubbling, and I couldn’t detect any trace of breathing, though it was hard to hear anything above Angel’s stifled sobs.

“Bayer.” I slapped his cheek very gently and then pulled back an eyelid. My stomach turned uneasily. Beneath, the pupil of his hazel eye was dilated to a glassy, uniform black—and it didn’t contract as the light hit it. I pressed a hand over one ear and put the other to his chest but could hear nothing above the sound of Angel weeping. “Angel, I’m sorry, could you be a little quieter?” I felt horrible asking her, but it was impossible to hear anything with her gulping next to my other ear.

“Angel,” Dan said softly. “Angel, come and sit over here with me for a second. Just a second, okay?”

He led her a few feet away, and I put my ear back to Bayer’s chest, right over his heart, and held my breath, the better to hear.

There was nothing. No familiar thump and whoosh. No gurgle of lungs struggling to breathe as they filled up with blood.

I felt my own heart begin to beat faster, so fast in fact that I could hear it pounding in my ears, making it harder to be sure that it wasn’t Bayer’s. Instead, I sat up and put my fingers to Bayer’s neck, over the big vein that ran down from below his jaw, the vein I had seen pulsing with anger just a few minutes before.

There was nothing there.

I felt a sickness rise up inside me.

“Joel,” I called. “Joel, can you come here for a second?”

Joel came hurrying over, his face anxious, and I pulled him down next to me and said very quietly, “Joel, I think… I think Bayer is dead.”

He went white.

“You’re kidding me?”

“I wish I was. Can you hear anything?”

Joel pressed his ear to Bayer’s chest, closing his eyes. There was a long, long silence, broken only by the sound of Angel’s quiet sobs from the other side of the cabana, and Conor hawking and spitting blood into the sand. When Joel raised his head, there was a fear in his eyes that hadn’t been there a few minutes before and, very gently, he shook his head. I felt my stomach drop.

Angel must have sensed something about our interaction, because now she stood up, her expression wary.

“Bayer? Lyla, is he okay?”

“Angel, I—” I stopped. How the fuck did you say this?

“Is he okay?” she demanded, more forcefully, stalking across the decking towards us. I stood too.

“Angel, he’s— I think… I think Bayer is dead.”

Her scream echoed around the clearing, sending the birds shooting up into the clear blue sky with alarm, and the fruit bats shifting uneasily on their branches.

Conor had turned and was looking at us, perplexed. It seemed like he hadn’t heard what I’d said—and perhaps he hadn’t, with his ears still ringing from the fight. The front of his T-shirt was running with blood, and he was pinching the bridge of his nose as if trying to stem the flow.

“Angel?” he asked, as if confused. “What happened?”

“You fucking monster!”

She ran at him, slapping and hitting and screaming. Conor didn’t try to fight back or restrain her, just fell back, his arms up, protecting his face, and it was Joel and I who had to run to try to hold Angel back, prevent her from scratching out Conor’s eyes. When we finally had her, she was panting and weeping, and Conor’s face was adorned with several long scratches in addition to his bloody nose.

“Tu es un monstre!” she was sobbing. “You have killed him. You killed him.”

“It was an accident,” Joel said helplessly. “Angel, please, I’m so sorry, but it was an accident.”

Angel yanked herself out of our grip.

“Leave me alone. Leave me fucking alone. I am going to get us out of here. I am going to leave.”

And then she turned and ran, away from the cabana, down the path to the staff quarters and, presumably, the radio.

The rest of us looked at each other, our expressions silently reflecting the unfathomable horror of what had just happened. Bayer was dead. Dead. I didn’t think I was the only person having trouble processing the realization. Dan looked like he was going to throw up. Zana was sitting on the edge of the cabana steps next to a bleeding Conor, and her face was completely colorless. I thought she might be going into shock.

“You’d better go with Angel,” I said to Joel, who was standing at the end of the path, looking at the clump of trees where Angel had disappeared. “Show her how it works.” Keep an eye on her was the unspoken message. There was a sick feeling in my stomach, and I was having unpleasant mental images of Angel stomping on the radio receiver in a rage if she couldn’t get through to someone. Joel nodded, turned, and walked after her, and then I turned back to Bayer’s body, wondering how the hell it had come to this.

WE BURIED BAYERat sunset, and I’d expected that Angel would be weeping, but she wasn’t. It was as if she had cried out all her tears, and now she simply stood, stone-faced, as the rest of us threw handfuls of sand onto his sheet-shrouded body in what was fast becoming a sickly familiar ritual.

I knew from Joel that the radio call had come to nothing, as had all the others, and that it had taken him a long time to persuade her to put down the handset and conserve the battery.

For the rest of the day she had simply lain in the villa, her face to the wall, refusing to talk to anyone or gather coconuts, or do any of the other tasks that we had divided up to try to eke out the rations—fishing, picking fruit, and rigging up a crude rainwater collection system over in the staff quarters.

Now, as the day drew to a close, we trailed back from Bayer’s grave to the cabana, where Joel was already stirring up the fire, and I found that in spite of my grief about Bayer and my worries about Angel, my stomach was growling at the prospect of something that wasn’t tinned.

“I’m so hungry,” Santana said as she limped up the path towards the cabana, and I nodded.

“Me too.”

We were approaching the steps and I found myself slowing, almost as if I were reluctant to tread on them. This was where Conor and Bayer had fought. This was where Bayer had broken Conor’s nose, and where Conor had hit him so hard Bayer had collapsed. This was where Bayer had died. You could still see the marks of the scuffle in the sand, see the blood in the bushes where Conor had tried to staunch his streaming nose. I hadn’t been back here since it had happened, neither had Angel. And now, somehow, we were all going to be expected to sit around, pretending nothing had happened.

Perhaps Santana had noticed my steps faltering, because she said, “Are you okay?”

I shook my head. Of course, she hadn’t been here at breakfast.

“I—I’m fine. It’s just—” I put out a hand, gesturing to the steps. “That’s where it happened. The fight.”

“God, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. Were you there? It must have been awful. Did he hit his head?”

I flinched. Her words had brought back the smack, smack of Bayer’s head cracking against the step as Conor hit him. I didn’t know what to say. Yes, he had hit his head. But somehow that didn’t do justice to how it had unfolded, to Conor’s quiet, calculated violence. All I knew was that I wasn’t ready to talk about it. Luckily Dan’s footsteps, coming up the path behind us, gave me an excuse to change the subject.

“How are you feeling? Dan said you were having trouble with your pump.”

“A lot better. It’s just hard to get the dosing right in this heat. It affects how fast your body processes the insulin.”

Something had occurred to me, with her remark about the heat, and I asked, “Isn’t insulin supposed to be refrigerated? How long will it last?”

Santana shrugged, but not in a kind of don’t know, don’t care way, more, helplessly, like someone who doesn’t know the answer and has no way of finding out.

“I have no idea. It’s supposed to last about a year if it’s sealed, but that’s at fridge temperatures. I’m keeping it in the fridge anyway, just because it’s cooler than the rest of the villa, but it’s bound to be degrading. I don’t think it’ll go toxic or anything, I think it’ll just be less effective, but who knows what that means. I guess I just have to cross my fingers and use extra if I need to.”

“And how much did you bring?”

“About three months’ worth. I always overpack. But that’s three months under normal conditions.” She didn’t say what we were both clearly thinking—that this wasn’t in any way normal.

“And what happens—” I stopped, trying to think how to put this, but there didn’t seem to be a tactful way to do it. “What happens if you run out?”

“I die,” Santana said simply. “Within about thirty-six hours. So I have to hope the boat comes before then, don’t I?” There was a long silence, broken only by the spit and crackle of the driftwood fire as Joel turned the octopus he’d laid across the embers. Then Santana gave a brittle laugh. “On that note, I wonder if Conor will let me have a beer?”

“Grub’s nearly done,” Joel called, as the others came into view, and Santana and I moved across to the table, where Joel had begun putting chunks of barbecued octopus onto plates, along with the now depressingly stale bagels and croissants. Angel picked up the largest portion, but she didn’t move to sit down. Instead she turned wordlessly away, presumably intending on taking her portion back towards her villa.

I opened my mouth, intending to say something—to ask if she was all right perhaps, though that seemed hopelessly facile—of course she wasn’t all right. Her boyfriend had died, this morning, not ten feet from where we were eating now.

But Conor’s voice forestalled me.

“Put that back.”

“I am sorry, what?” Angel said. She stopped in her tracks and looked back, one eyebrow raised in haughty distain. She was staring at Conor like he was something she had scraped off her shoe.

“You heard me.” Conor moved closer. Not for the first time I noticed how tall he was—he had a good six inches on Angel, who was tall herself, and now, without apparently even trying, he exuded a kind of physical menace as he stood over her, forcing her to look up at him. “Put that back. You didn’t contribute a thing today; you don’t get first pick of the food.”

“Conor,” Joel said uneasily. “Come on, mate.”

“What? This is a collective. We all contribute, we all eat.”

“Conor, her boyfriend died this morning,” Santana said. At your hand, was the unspoken coda, though it hardly needed stating. It was too fresh for anyone to have forgotten. “Give her a break maybe?”

“I am giving her a break,” Conor said calmly. “I’m letting her eat. In spite of the fact that she’s done nothing all day. But this”—he gestured to the size of the portion—“is taking the piss. I’m not letting her take the piss.”

“You’re letting her eat?” I couldn’t stop the words coming out, incredulously. Conor turned to me. His pale eyes were ice-cold.

“Yes. Do you have a problem with that?”

“Conor—” The voice was quiet, but it made us all stop, more in surprise than anything. It was Zana. She moved across to where he was standing, uncomfortably close to Angel, and put a hand on his arm. “Conor, maybe… just this once?”

Conor said nothing. His face was impassive, but I had the sudden disquieting impression that he was holding his emotions in check, and only barely.

Then he turned and smiled, but there was nothing about the smile that gave off warmth. It was the coldest, most frightening expression I’d ever seen.

“You’re right. Just this once. Go ahead, Angel.”

“Fuck you,” Angel said. She pushed past him, back to the table, and slammed the plate down, flicking her fingers at it with a contemptuous gesture. “I don’t want your—” She stopped, searching for the English word, and then with a noise that was more expressive than any sentence, she gave a snort of fury and stormed off into the night.

There was a collective exhalation of breath, and we all picked up our plates.

“Should someone go after her?” Dan said, a little uneasily. “I don’t like to think of her all alone in that villa.”

“Leave her,” Conor said. Dan looked across at me and Santana, then shrugged and sat down, and began picking at the fast-cooling octopus.

“This is really good,” Conor said. His voice was almost cheerful, as if he was making an effort to smooth over the altercation that had almost just happened. “Bravo, Joel.”

“Thanks,” Joel mumbled, and we all chorused our thanks, and then began to eat. But the shift from overt tension to faux cheerfulness was unnerving, and I knew I wasn’t the only person whose appetite had disappeared.

Gradually though, as the food hit stomachs, and Conor passed around bottles of beer from the fast-dwindling stash, people began to relax. Dan was asking Joel about the octopus he had caught, and some fish he had seen over by the edge of the reef. Joel was drawing a map in sand on the decking and marking up other places he thought would be worth trying.

“I’m impressed,” Santana whispered under cover of the conversation. I looked up from trying to cut my octopus.

“By Zana?”

“Yeah. She stood up for herself! Go Zana.”

I nodded. But I was looking at Zana, who was sitting, staring miserably over at Angel’s empty plate, without even touching her own food. Her face looked stricken, as if she was wondering what she had done. And I found myself wondering what her outburst might be about to cost her.