Chapter 26

WE ALREADY KNEWfrom our exploration of the island that the majority of the palm trees were close to the villas. Although there were trees and even palms in the wilder, scrubbier part of the island, they were mostly a kind that none of us recognized, without much in the way of fruit. Certainly nothing filled with the water we desperately needed.

The coconut palms were clearly imports—planted when the southern tip of the island was landscaped for the villas, and there weren’t that many of them. We had already eaten the windfalls and stripped off the low-hanging fruit. A few days ago, Angel had even picked the unripe nuts from the tree that had crashed into Romi and Joel’s villa, though it had felt like a kind of violation, watching her pick her way through the rubble, just yards from where Romi’s body had lain.

“What?” she had said when she saw me hanging back. “It is not like we can bring her back.” And I had shrugged but seen her point. We hadn’t told Joel where his portion had come from.

With all the easy fruit gone, we were left with only two options: throwing or climbing.

Initially, we tried to knock them down. Santana went first, with a startlingly hard, accurate rock that pinged off the coconut she hit and ricocheted into the forest. The coconut wobbled tantalizingly but didn’t fall. For the next half hour we all tried different trees and techniques—large rocks, small ones, sticks and pebbles, even shaking the trunk, though that felt risky given you’d be standing right underneath when the coconut fell—and the end result was three green coconuts that sloshed when we shook them, and one slightly riper one that didn’t seem to have any water in it. Better than nothing—but not the eight Conor had demanded, to release our water.

We were all beginning to droop with the heat, and as we stood in a clearing, panting and considering our next move, I found my eyes straying to the sliver of beach visible through the forest. There, knee-deep in the azure sea, was Conor, peering intently down at something in the water. Presumably he was fishing, but at the same time I couldn’t help noticing that in spite of being the tallest and strongest of any of us, he’d awarded himself the job that involved strolling around in the cool sea, while the four women were standing in the burning sun, staring at coconuts that might as well be on the moon for all we could get to them.

I was still watching him, feeling the dryness of the sand between my toes and thinking longingly of tonight’s water ration, when Zana spoke.

“I’m going to climb that one.” She pointed at a sloping palm leaning back from the villa, as if stretching towards the sea.

“Are you mad?” Angel said it matter-of-factly. “It is far too high. If you fall, you will be killed.”

“They’re all far too high,” Zana pointed out, reasonably. “That’s the point; that’s why they still have their fruit. And I don’t think I’d be killed. Look, there’s a lot of bushes and greenery underneath to break my fall.”

“Okay, but if you fall, you will break your leg,” Angel said with a shrug. “Which is the same thing, as we have no medical assistance and you will be dead from gangrene in ten days.”

“We’ll all be dead in ten days if we don’t get more water,” Zana retorted.

“Unless it rains,” Santana put in, but the silence that greeted her remark showed how likely we all thought that was. We hadn’t seen a cloud in the sky since the Valentine’s Day storm.

Still though, I thought I knew what was behind Zana’s determination to get the coconuts, and it wasn’t just our need for more water, pressing though that was. She was desperate, maybe even more desperate than the rest of us, for everyone to meet Conor’s target. If we turned up with eight coconuts… well, no one had to find out if he was willing to carry through with his threat and leave us without water. We were already operating at the limits of hydration—mouths permanently dry, lips cracked, constant headaches and dizziness. I didn’t think it would take much to tip any of us into collapse.

Zana didn’t want to find out how far Conor was willing to go. And she was prepared to put her own life at risk to avoid testing him.

“Look…” She had taken off her T-shirt and was standing in her bikini top, holding up the T-shirt, looking up at the tree as if measuring something out. “I saw someone do this on TikTok once. I really think it will work.” She was twisting up the T-shirt into a rope as she spoke.

“Zana—” Santana began, but Zana had already stepped up to the tree.

“Lyla, can I borrow your shirt?”

I nodded and pulled it over my head, and Zana laid it carefully on the sandy ground and began to brush off her feet, removing all the sand and debris. When her feet were completely clean, she tied the two ends of the T-shirt rope together, and stepped into the ring she’d made, twisting the material around her soles and ankles.

“I hope this will work.” She looked up at the tree anxiously. “The video I saw was using a rope, but this can’t be that different, right?”

“Zana, you don’t have to do—” I began, but Zana didn’t let me finish.

“I do.” The set of her shoulders was pure determination. “We have to drink.”

“Should we— Should we stand underneath?” Santana said a little helplessly. She looked around at me and Angel as though seeking answers. “Try to catch her?”

“Dieu, non!” Angel said, her voice almost comically horrified, at the same time as Zana said, “No. You might get hit by a coconut. And if I fall, better for me to fall on sand or bushes than on you.”

“Zana, wait,” I said. “Look, we can get a mattress from the other villa. Just—please, ten minutes.”

But Zana shook her head. She stepped forward to the tree, wrapped her arms around it, and gave a great leap, hoisting her legs up towards her waist and using her feet to push the makeshift T-shirt brace against the tree trunk.

For a moment I didn’t think it was going to work. I could see her feet slipping, sliding down the smooth trunk, and it looked like it was only going to be a matter of seconds before she couldn’t hold on any longer and her arms gave way too. But then, miraculously, the material seemed to catch on the bark. As I watched, Zana dug in her toes, and held her position, braced against the twisted T-shirt rope.

She gave a kind of incredulous laugh, straightened, and hugged the tree farther up the trunk, and then repeated.

It was working. Unbelievably, it was working. Beside me Santana gave a whoop, half-terrified, half full of glee.

“Go Zana!” Angel shouted. And she was going, in a series of awkward, almost bunny hops up the trunk of the tree. It was strange and ungainly, but it was as if every jump gave her more confidence that she could do this, that she could reach the top. As she got higher and higher, I found my palms were sweating with moisture I could ill afford to lose, and my heart was thumping. She was past the point where a fall would mean bruises, and well into the height that could mean broken bones or worse.

“You can do it!” Santana yelled, and Zana gave a choking laugh.

“I’m okay! I’m doing it!”

“You’re incredible!” I called. She was almost at the top now, reaching out for one of the branches to try to pull herself up the last few feet—but no sooner had she hooked her arm over it, than I realized something. It was browned and desiccated, and I could see it was cracking as she began to put her weight on it.

“Zana!” I shouted. “Don’t—”

But it was too late. There was a tearing crack, and the whole branch fell, whistling to the ground where it landed with a crash that sent the birds and bats scattering through the trees. Zana gave a terrified cry and grabbed hold of the trunk. Her feet had slid several feet down the tree, but somehow, miraculously, she’d managed to halt her fall. There was a long, tense silence as she clung there. I could see her arms shaking.

“Zana?” Santana called. “Are you okay?”

“I’m—I’m okay.” Her voice was trembling. “I’m fine.” She reached up, cautiously this time, and repeated the bunny hop. “I’m okay.” Her voice was steadier now. One more hop, and she was back at the canopy again. This time she reached up, testing the branches one by one, before grabbing hold of a green one, and hooking her arm over it. “I’m here. I can just…” She was leaning out, precariously, reaching for one of the green coconuts closest to her. She managed to twist it… twist it… and then it fell with a thump to the sand below.

We all let out slightly hysterical whoops and shrieks.

“Fuck yeah!” Angel shouted. “You are a goddess, Zana!”

Another coconut. We had six now, counting the overripe one. Then another. Seven.

We were all cheering, and Zana was reaching out at full stretch for the last coconut in the bunch when she stopped, staring at something in the distance.

“Zana?” I called up, but she didn’t answer, only hung there, frozen, looking over the top of the forest towards the sea and frowning against the sun. “Zana? Are you okay?”

And then, suddenly, she was slithering down, fast enough to take the skin off her palms, yelling something that I couldn’t make out.

“What? What are you saying?” Angel cried plaintively. “Please enunciate!”

“It’s a ship!” Zana shouted. She almost fell the last six feet, crashing to the sandy ground with her feet still tangled in her torn-up T-shirt. “I saw a ship.”

It took a minute for all of us to understand, and then Santana let out a shriek like a steam engine.

“Fuck! The beacon!”

We dropped everything and began running towards the beach, only for Angel to remember halfway that her lighter was up at the cabana. She doubled back, and the rest of us ran on, ripping pages out of a copy of The Woman in Cabin 10 that Santana had snatched up as we ran past our villa.

We were panting and out of breath by the time we reached the ruins of Ocean Bluff and the beacon we’d made. I saw that Zana’s feet were bleeding from her hasty descent down the tree. Santana began stuffing the torn pages into the center of the beacon, her hands shaking.

“Where’s Angel?” she yelled, and I looked back down at the beach, shading my eyes against the glare of the sun. No Angel, but Conor was there, still knee-deep in the ocean in front of the water villa, his fishing spear in his hand. He was looking up at us, frowning.

“There’s a ship!” I yelled down to him, stabbing my finger towards the misty shape, far out to sea. “There’s a ship, help us get the beacon lit!”

He didn’t respond, but then I saw Angel appear from the forest, waving a lighter, running through the dunes towards us. She crested the little hill and then dropped to her knees in front of the beacon and began frantically clicking at the lighter.

“Light. Light! Allume-toi, espèce de merde!” she was begging it. And then, suddenly, the lighter flared into life, and she was holding it out to the paperback pages Santana had scattered across the debris. First one caught… and then another… and then the whole mass was burning, the flames licking at the straw roof that was beginning to sullenly smoke.

We all began waving our arms, shrieking even though it was impossible that the ship would hear us. It was almost at the horizon, and I wasn’t even sure if we would have been able to make it out, if Zana hadn’t spotted it from her forest perch.

“Come on!” Santana was yelling. “Come on you, fucking piece of shit, turn around. Turn around!”

The bonfire was really smoking now. A great plume of white smoke was rising into the still air. It seemed impossible that the ship wouldn’t spot it.

Down below on the beach, Conor was standing, looking out to sea, shading his eyes, but he wasn’t dancing and screaming like the four of us on the headland. He was standing stock-still, staring intently at the horizon as if trying to make out what the ship was doing.

“It’s turning,” Santana said, her voice pleading, breathless. “Is it? It’s turning, I really think it’s turning.”

But as we watched, it became increasingly clear that it wasn’t. It wasn’t turning. It was continuing along the horizon, until at last it disappeared completely.