The Beach

prospect of seeing Etienne again. I’d been having second thoughts about the kiss. I still didn’t think I’d been at fault, but I could see why Etienne had thought I was, and I was sure that our next meeting would be awkward. So as I pushed open the longhouse door, I also pushed thoughts of the Swedes to the back of my head, with no more consideration than a vague decision to worry about it later.

My immediate impression inside the longhouse was that some kind of division had occurred while I was away. A tense silence greeted my arrival, shortly followed by a low buzz of noise. At the near end was my old fishing detail, along with Jesse, Cassie and Leah, another member of the gardening detail. At the far end, in the area of my bed, were Sal, Bugs, and the remainder of the gardening and carpentry details. Moshe and the two Yugoslavian girls were sitting between the two groups, apparently neutral.

I assessed the situation. Then I shrugged. If a division had occurred, choosing sides wasn’t going to be an issue. I closed the door behind me and went over to my old detail.

Nobody spoke for a couple of seconds after I sat down – which gave me a brief scare, automatically assuming that the split was related to me. A chain of events quickly began to form in my mind, connected to the kiss. Perhaps Etienne had told Francoise, and Francoise was furious, and everyone had heard, and the tension was nothing to do with divisions in the camp but an embarrassed reaction to my arrival. Fortunately, I was way off track, as was shown when Francoise leant forwards and took my hand. ‘There has been trouble,’ she said in a hushed voice.

‘Trouble?’ I withdrew my hand slightly clumsily, glancing at Etienne, who was watching me with a completely unreadable expression. ‘What kind of trouble?’

Keaty coughed and pointed to his left eye. It was badly puffed up. ‘Bugs hit me,’ he said simply.

‘Bugs hit you?’

‘Uh-huh.’

I was too shocked to speak, so Keaty continued.

‘I turned up with the fish around four and hung around with Jed in the tents. Then I came to the longhouse about half an hour ago, and as soon as Bugs saw me he jumped up and threw a punch.’

‘…What happened then?’ I eventually said.

‘Jean pulled him off, and then there was a massive argument between that lot…’ He gestured to the group at the far end. ‘…And this lot. Personally, I stayed out of it. I was trying to stop my nose bleed.’

‘He hit you because of the squid?’

‘He said it was because I wasn’t around to help last night.’

‘No!’ I shook my head angrily. ‘I know why he hit you. It had nothing to do with being missing last night. It was because he shat himself.’

Keaty smiled without humour. ‘That makes a lot of sense, Rich.’

I struggled to keep my voice steady. My tongue felt thick and I was suddenly in such a rage that I could actually see blackness around the edge of my vision. ‘It makes sense to me, Keaty,’ I said lightly. ‘I know the way his head works. It was the knock to his pride, slipping around in his own shit. That’s why he hit you.’

I stood up, and Gregorio caught my arm.

‘Richard, what are you doing?’

‘I’m going to kick his head in.’

‘At last, ’ said Jesse, rising. ‘That’s exactly what I’ve been saying we should do. I’ll help.’

‘No!’

I looked around. Francoise had also stood up.

‘This is too stupid! Both of you sit down now!’

At that moment there was a jeer from the far end of the longhouse. Bugs was calling to us. ‘Oh let me guess! The cavalry’s arrived!’

‘I’m going to stick a spear in your fucking neck!’ I yelled back.

‘I’m worried!’

Jesse howled. ‘You’d better be fuckin’ worried! You’d better be very fuckin’ worried!’

‘Is that right, you Kiwi cunt?’

‘You’ve got no fuckin’ idea how right it is!’

Then Sal was standing too. ‘That’s enough!’ she screamed. ‘Both of you! All of you! Enough!’

Silence.

The two groups stared at each other for a long thirty seconds. Then Francoise stabbed a finger at the ground.

‘Sit!’ she hissed. So we sat.

¦

Ten minutes later I was crawling up the walls. I wanted a cigarette so severely I thought my chest was going to cave in, but my supply was at the other end of the longhouse and there was no way I could get them. In an effort to help, Cassie rolled a joint, but it didn’t do much good. It was nicotine I needed. The dope only made the craving worse.

Not long after, Ella brought in the food she’d cooked, but she’d burned the rice and without Unhygienix’s magic touch the fish stew tasted like sea water. Plus she had to hand it round in the most uncomfortable atmosphere imaginable, which baffled her and made her think it was her cooking. No one bothered to explain, so she left the longhouse nearly in tears.

Jed stuck his head through the door at eight fifteen, gazed around curiously, then disappeared.

So that’s how the time passed, a succession of tense episodes, all serving to distract us from the fact that the Swedes still hadn’t returned from fishing.

¦

At a quarter to nine the longhouse door banged open.

‘Oh there you are,’ Keaty started to say, but the words dried up in his throat.

Karl was half bent over, barely illuminated by the candles. It was the expression on his face that instantly informed us there was something badly wrong, but I think it was his arms that had choked Keaty. They seemed to be absurdly dislocated, jutting out from the top of his shoulders. And there was what looked like a tear in his right hand. Between his thumb and forefinger the split continued down to his wrist, so that the two halves hung like a limp lobster claw.

‘Jesus Christ,’ said Jesse loudly, and all over the longhouse I heard movement as people rose to get a better look.

Karl took a single heavy step towards us, moving into the brighter candlelight. That was when we realized that the mutilated arms belonged to the person he was carrying on his back – Sten. Abruptly Karl collapsed, toppling forwards without making any effort to break his fall. Sten slipped off him, balancing for a moment on his side, then rolling over. There was a ragged semicircle of flesh missing from his side as large as a basketball, and the remainder of his stomach area had been flattened to no more than four inches thick.

Etienne was the first to move. He barged past me, almost knocking me to the ground. When I looked up, he was bending over Sten, trying to give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Then I heard Sal call behind me, ‘What’s happened?’, and at once Karl began yelling at the top of his lungs. For a minute he yelled non-stop, filling the longhouse with high, frantic sound that made some people cover their ears or yell equally loudly, for no apparent reason other than to block him out. It was only after Keaty had grabbed him, shouting at him to shut up, that he managed to form an intelligible word: ‘Shark.’

? The Beach ?

68

The Third Man

The stunned quiet after Karl said ‘shark’ only lasted a heartbeat. Then we all started jabbering again as abruptly as we’d all shut up. A circle quickly formed around Karl and Sten – the same kind of circle you get in a school-yard fight, jostling for position whilst keeping a safe distance – and suggestions started