Chapter 35

“WHAT DID YOUsay?”

The voice came from the other side of the clearing, and we both turned to see Zana standing there, a tube of glucose tablets in one hand, a pack of cookies in the other, her face white and shocked.

“Zana,” Angel said, her face splitting with a huge grin. “Zana, there is a boat. I made contact with a boat. We are going to be rescued!”

“Oh my God,” Zana said. She moved to the veranda and then sat on one of the cane chairs as if her legs wouldn’t hold her. “Oh my God. Did you really? Is this real?”

“Yes, it is real. We were cut off when the battery died again, but they knew where we were. They knew the island. They were too far away to come themselves; they are just a small boat and did not have enough fuel to get to us and get back, but they will radio for help. We are going to be rescued!”

She grabbed me and began dancing me around the clearing. I let her pull me around, but I felt strangely numb. Zana, still sitting silent on the wicker chair, looked similarly stunned.

Then she seemed to shake herself back to reality and stood up.

“Santana.”

“Shit.” I pulled myself away from Angel. “Angel, I’m sorry—it’s Santa. She’s not well. We were trying to get some glucose into her.”

We both followed Zana inside the villa, where Santana was still lying on the bed, her face waxen now. Zana sat down next to her and began gently shaking her shoulders. “Santana. Santana, come on, wake up. You need to eat this.” She held the tablet to Santana’s lips, but Santana didn’t do anything, just lolled in her arms, her eyes moving uneasily under her closed lids.

“Crush it,” I said anxiously. “Crush the tablet against her teeth, rub it into her gums, maybe it’ll dissolve in her mouth.”

Zana broke off some fragments and tried to push them between Santana’s lips, but Santana only moved her head away.

“Santa,” Angel barked, making us all jump. Santana’s eyes opened briefly and she focused on Angel momentarily and licked automatically at the chalky-white fragments on her lips. “Santana, don’t fall asleep. Do you hear me?” She moved across, pushing Zana and me out of the way, shoved the rest of the tablet between Santana’s teeth and then held a cup of water to her lips. “Drink this, okay?”

Santana took a sluggish sip, and I heard the slow crunch as she chewed the rest of the glucose tablet and then swallowed.

“Give her another,” I said. I had been reading the packet Zana had left on the bed, and now I held out another tablet. “She needs at least three, maybe more.”

“Don’t like them…” Santana said thickly. “Taste… chalk…”

“Santana, you will eat this,” Angel said fiercely. “I do not want to hear any of this bullshit. You will eat this tablet.” She had been crushing the tablet I’d passed her between her fingers, and now she forced the shards between Santana’s lips. “And you will swallow this water.” She held the cup to Santana’s lips again, and Santana made a face but swallowed obediently like a little child. Her eyes were fully open now, a little glazed, but focused. “And another,” Angel said sternly. This time Santana nodded and took the tablet from Angel’s fingers, chewing it. She swallowed and sank back on the pillows, but this time her eyes didn’t slide shut. I felt the panic dammed up inside me begin to seep away, leaving my knees weak and trembling.

“Jesus.” I thought my legs might give way, and sat heavily on the end of the bed. “Santana, don’t do that, do you hear me? I really thought—”

“It’s not exactly by choice,” Santana said, a little croakily. Some color had returned to her cheeks, and she managed a smile. “But yeah… I should have noticed I was going low. Silly of me not to eat anything last night.”

She picked up the glucose monitor I’d left next to her pillow and looked at the screen, and then made a face.

“Yikes. God, that was really low. Shit.”

“Is it climbing?” I asked. Santana nodded.

“Yes. Give me the rest of the glucose tablets. I might need more.”

I handed them over and Santana took another swig of the water, and a fourth tablet, then picked up the glucose blood strips from the bedside table.

“Did you hear the news?” Angel demanded as Santana stabbed her finger with a lancet. With the panic over, her eyes were shining again. Santana shook her head, puzzled, and Angel smiled like the cat that got the cream. “The trick with the battery worked. I made contact with a boat. They spoke English. We are going to be rescued.”

There was a long, disbelieving silence. Then Santana’s face broke into a huge grin.

“Are you kidding me? We’re going to be rescued? We’re really going to be rescued?”

“Don’t speak too soon,” I said warningly. I don’t know why, but it felt like tempting fate to be too sure, after everything that had happened. “They’ve got to find another ship, locate the island… I mean, don’t get me wrong, but I won’t believe it until we actually see the rescue boat for ourselves.”

“Did they say how long they would be?” Santana asked. Angel shook her head.

“No. They said they were at least three hours away from their home port. So I suppose it depends on if they manage to radio ahead.”

“And even if they do,” I said, thinking slowly, “that boat will have to travel at least three hours back to where you radioed them, probably, and then locate us from there. We’re probably looking at at least… what… four hours? Five? Maybe more.”

“Five hours,” Santana said. She spoke as if she was savoring the words. “Five hours. We have only five hours left on this fucking island.”

But then Zana spoke, and her voice was like the sound of a stone dropped into a well; hollow, chilly, bleak.

“So I have five hours left.”

“What do you mean?” Angel looked at Zana, and then across at me, puzzled. “Five hours left of what?”

“Five hours left of freedom. I mean, I killed him. I killed my boyfriend. There’s no way around that.”

There was a long silence. Then Santana spoke.

“Zana, as far as we’re concerned…” She swallowed and looked at me and Angel, seeking backup.

“As far as we’re concerned,” I said, “it was an accident. Conor fell into the sea during high winds. We all tried to save him. You and I got swept out to sea and barely made it back alive. Right?”

I turned to Santana and Angel, and they both nodded vigorously.

“Absolutely!” Angel said. “That is what happened.”

But Zana was shaking her head. There were tears in her eyes.

“There are bodies all over this island. Not to mention the massive concussion on the side of Santana’s head. How do we explain all that? How do we talk about what happened—about the water and the hoarding and Santana’s insulin—without them figuring it out? It’s all on camera, for God’s sake!” She waved her hand at the unblinking black eye in the corner of the room. “What, you went out to confront Conor in the one place that doesn’t have CCTV and he just happened to fall in the sea and drown while I stood there and watched? They’re never going to believe that in a million years, not even if we all swore it on the Bible and our mothers’ lives.”

“But doesn’t that make our case for us?” Santana said. “If we explain what he was like—”

“If I tell them what he was like, I’ll be signing my own confession,” Zana said bitterly. “You think some Thai or Indonesian court is going to care whether he hit me? Or that he put spyware on my phone? Or that he cut up my credit cards and made me resign from my job and burned me with spent matches? What I did, it’s still murder!”

We all flinched. Santana looked stricken. Angel looked murderous.

“Look…” I said slowly. “Zana’s right. The problem is that we have a motive to want to harm Conor—not just Zana, we all do. To the point where no one will believe us if we say that we didn’t, even if we back each other up. So that’s what we have to fix. We have to make it so that Conor is a person no one would want to hurt.”

“What do you mean?” Zana said. She looked puzzled.

“We have to create a record of our time here, something that explains everything that happened—Bayer’s death, Dan’s, Joel’s disappearance, all of it—but doesn’t pin it on Conor. Something that explains about the food and the water, but makes it sound like we all agreed. Something that turns him into a man no one would want to kill. And we’ve probably only got six hours to do it in.” I looked up at the sky. The sun was already above the palm trees. “Does anyone have paper? And a pen?”

“I do,” Santana said. She pointed at the front pocket of her suitcase, and I rummaged inside and came out with a lined notebook, and a pencil. I handed them to Zana.

“I think you need to do this, Zana. Yours is the account people are most likely to believe. What day was the storm again?”

There was silence while everyone tried to remember.

“I think it was the fourteenth,” Zana said at last. “Didn’t someone mention Valentine’s Day?”

“Yes, it was,” Santana said. “I remember Dan making a joke out of it. But I can’t remember what day of the week, if that’s what you meant.”

“It was a Wednesday,” Zana said. “I got my period. I remember thinking it was a day out, that I must be stressed.”

“Okay, then let’s start the day after the storm,” I said slowly. “Dear Diary, today is Thursday, fifteenth of February. Something like that.”

“But why?” Zana asked helplessly. “Why would I do this? We’re stuck on a bloody desert island, for God’s sake. Am I really going to start keeping a diary? What would’ve been the point when we thought we were all going to die?”

“To keep track of time?” Santana suggested.

“For mental health,” Angel said, a little sarcastically.

“Maybe that’s the point,” I said in a low voice. “Maybe the fact that we all thought we were going to die is the point—you’re writing this to leave a record of what happened. In case we didn’t make it off the island alive.”

Zana nodded at that. Her face was somber.

“Okay. Yes, you’re right, I could imagine doing that. All of it, but particularly the last one, but maybe I shouldn’t say that yet. I mean, we were still hoping to be rescued at that point. Okay… so…” She began to write, slowly, reading the words out as she did. “?‘Today is Thursday, fifteenth February, and I have decided to write a diary—my head is so full of everything that’s happened since the storm last night, and I needed some way to make sense of it all.’ Is that okay?” She looked up at the rest of us and we nodded.

“What else happened that day?” Santana asked. “I don’t remember much from those first couple of days, just how much my leg hurt, and how scared I was of dying.” She put her hand to the scar on her thigh, as if reliving those first few days of pain and confusion.

“We buried Romi,” I said. “That first day— That was the day we buried Romi. And the producer.”

Zana rubbed her eyes.

“God, of course.” Her voice cracked. “I can’t believe I didn’t remember that. It seems like a lifetime ago.”

It did. It was only a fortnight, but it seemed like something that had happened on another planet, to a distant set of people only slightly related to us, and much more innocent.

“?‘We are all reeling,’?” Zana said aloud, writing the words as she did. “?‘From the storm, which seems to have blown our boat off course, but also from the terrible shock of poor Romi’s death—she was killed when a palm tree came down on her villa, crushing it to bits.’?”

“You should put something in about Joel,” I said slowly. “About how upset he was. But you should make it sound like Conor was the one who took care of him. The camera up at Joel and Romi’s villa was destroyed, so there’s no evidence who dug her out. You should make it Conor. Set it up so he’s starting to be a hero from the beginning.”

Zana nodded and carried on, writing slowly, pausing sometimes to consider a word, and then she got to the end of the first page, where she stopped, as if stumped.

“I should put something to finish up the day,” she said, looking up. “Some kind of conclusion. I’m just not sure what.”

“It should be something positive,” Angel said. “Something that makes it sound like we were all united.”

Even though the cracks had already started to show, I thought, though I didn’t say the words aloud. I knew we were all thinking it.

“You should say how many of us were left,” Santana said softly. “And that we were injured.”

“You should say that we were looking after each other,” Angel said.

“?‘Eight of us,’?” Zana said, as she wrote. “?‘Just eight. And two injured.’?” She looked up, and then swallowed, and I saw there were tears in her eyes. “?‘It feels more vital than ever that we take care of each other until the boat gets back for us…. We just have to stay strong.’?”