CHAPTER EIGHT

Detritus

JACK HAD TO give up his tribe, but Roger had to give up Jack, so Ralph was not surprised when the deputy stayed on Castle Rock the first night Rachel spent on the island. He and the former Chief returned to the group on the beach to find the woman distributing the contents of one of the boxes to the eager children.

'Thank goodness I was delivering this to the island,' she said to Ralph when he sat down beside her. The boy accepted a tin of silver sardines, which he shared with her and Jack. The fish was salty, sweet and delicious. This irregular meal was extended with canned tomatoes, shortbread biscuits, and in the absence of any bottles from the boat, a few coconut shells of spring water. After the feast the children lazed on the beach, tired but satisfied.

Jack sat silently a little way off from the group, and Ralph did not speak to him, allowing the relegation to sink in. The fair-headed one and the woman were the de facto leaders now: they both sat higher up on the beach, near the platform, while the younger children and demoted older ones reclined in a circle before them.

Ralph peered into the tin box. Half the food had been devoured, so he shut it with a bang and walked back to the spring, where he again concealed it in the hollow concave left by the running water. He was satiated from the meal but still sober about their chances of being rescued. The boat and its remaining contents were surely their best bet. And if the radio and motor did not work, what then?

The children and Rachel were making fern beds when he returned. It would be another night of hard earth and coastal wind, but at least now everyone was together and sedate. Ralph lay down beside Rachel. Her clothes were still damp from the morning swim, but she was too modest to take them off. Almost immediately the entire group fell asleep.

IN THE MORNING the littluns grumbled about breakfast, so after a discussion with the only adult Ralph let them have a meagre meal of fish and tinned beans. The first box was now dangerously close to being empty.

He looked at Rachel as she daubed a kid's grazed knee with a wet strip of fabric. 'Where are you from?' he asked.

'England, originally,' she said, 'but I moved to Australia when I was twelve.'

That accounts for her accent, Ralph thought. 'I moved to the Pacific when I was twelve,' he said in a rueful voice, and Rachel laughed.

'We won't be here forever,' she said, spreading her soothing nature thickly. 'Fancy another swim today?'

Ralph was full of nervous energy and nodded emphatically. He went up to Jack, who was sitting beneath a palm tree and licking fish oil from his grubby digits. 'Coming?' he asked, and Jack gave a melancholic but appreciative nod.

This morning the sun was coy but still provided a respectable amount of heat. The two boys waited for Rachel to finish her nursery, then waded into the lagoon when she approached the waterline; the young woman tied her hair back and joined the sogging crawl to the coral. The boat was still there, jutting patiently in the froth, and they heaved themselves into it one by one. In the night the angle of the craft had become more severe, and most of the small cabin was now full of water. Ralph noted its ironic name: the Arrow.

The owner perused the scattered contents. 'Some of my stuff has been washed out to sea,' she observed. A blue tarpaulin, various domestic instruments, and a third box of victuals were all that remained. She touched the controls of the radio equipment but received nothing but crackles. 'There's no way to get this onshore without soaking it, unless we can get the boat off the coral.'

The task was impossible. For one thing the waves crashing over the ridge were furious; for another the boat was surely too heavy to unhitch. Rachel unwound a rope from her waist and repeated the process from the previous day, stuffing the motley objects into one container before wrapping it in the tarpaulin, then the three swam back to the beach with the box bobbing violently between them. The crowd of children on the sand looked like displaced refugees, but at least they were now comparatively well fed.

Ralph and Rachel lugged the box to the stream while Jack sat down morosely. The couple returned, then stopped dead when they heard a far-off sound.

'The conch!' said Ralph, recalling the piercing sound from his first day as captive. 'Must be Roger…'

Sure enough the deputy was trudging towards them from the desolate side of the beach, clutching the hollow shell to his chest just as Piggy had done. Like Jack his countenance was lugubrious, but traces of nervous hope flecked his features. The red-haired boy disappeared into the forest as his deputy approached Ralph and Rachel.

'A gift,' he said pithily, and handed the conch to the boy. Ralph fingered it in refracted nostalgia, as Roger sat down and picked at the remains of the morning meal while stealing shy glances at Rachel.

Jack had diffused into the forest, and Rachel, by nature gentle and diplomatic, got up to go after him, but Ralph met her by the palms and dissuaded her.

'He's been through a lot,' he murmured, staring in the direction the other boy had gone. He inhaled deeply and looked squarely at the woman. 'Want to see something weird?'

She nodded dubiously and he took off through the dense asparagus; ten minutes later the trees gave way and there was the shimmering clearing. Rachel's heart fizzed with adrenalin as she laid her eyes on the disembodied head for the first time. 'What on Earth…'

'That's Jack in a nutshell,' said its morbid curator. He waved a hand at the rotting face. 'That's why I didn't join the others.'

Rachel breathed in her disturbance, then exhaled it. 'Well, at least none of you got hurt.'

This innocence, this optimism was heartbreaking to Ralph. A tidal sorrow welled within him as he stared with renewed distress at the Lord. 'Please don't say things like that…'

Rachel could feel the anguish pulsing from his body. 'There's something you're leaving out, isn't there.' She touched the boy's shoulder with a warm, compassionate hand, but he flinched it away, walked closer to his morose guardian, and stroked the dried blood on its nose.

'I can't tell you about it. Please don't ask. Please.' Tears were brimming behind his blue eyes, and he fought to control them. Boys don't cry.

Rachel now had more questions than ever, but to ask them would clearly be painful for the boy. She gazed at him with genuine pity. 'You look so tired for one so young,' she said softly, then, unsure how to change the subject, she walked away quietly and left him alone in the clearing, a statue carved by invisible natives: frozen, and resting a hand on the head.

JACK STARED INTO the stream but there was no reflection. Perhaps it was just as well, for he had never really liked his freckled, impudent face. Happy and eternal, the water gurgled invitingly down to the pool on the beach, but the boy sought obscurity and took off in the other direction. The rivulet was bedded by silver stones, some rendered golden by the water, others lost to a milky diffusion, while verdant ferns awned over the mossy rocks at its edge; after a time this vegetation grew too dense to walk alongside it, and the stream soon disappeared underground.

Aimless yet occupied, Jack continued walking towards the island spine, and presently encountered the jutting hill on which Ralph and Roger had clashed. At the foot he espied what he thought was a snake in the grass, and realised it was a spear; warily he approached it and recognised the knife marks left in it by his deputy. In the indifferent sunshine the weapon seemed pathetic – violence had lost its appeal.

Suddenly depressed, he walked back towards the beach and stopped at the stream again. Rachel was there, bathing her feet. She was skirtless. Feeling a subtle pang in his chest, Jack sidestepped behind a tree to watch the woman. Though a little too young to feel compelling concupiscence, female beauty still called to him through the impending years of transition. Now granted a rare opportunity for voyeurism, he ran his eyes from the smooth thighs to the curved spine, and over the clothed shoulders as Rachel dipped her hair in the flowing liquid.

In an emergent, enigmatic way he was attracted to this vulnerable pose, and fell to fantasising – of the unseen woman Mowgli grew up to marry – and Jane, about to be pounced on by tigers – and the paintings by Daniel Ridgway Knight that his schoolmaster loved so much: the peasant women in pallid bucolias, humble yet erotic; the boat, the picnic, the distant dreaming spire; the frills of flowers, and horizons that never touched the sky, but were always overlined by olive trees and olio meadows…

How Jack longed to see a steeple in his distance.

THE BOY WITH red hair was still absent when Ralph returned to a bustling scene on the beach. Now the hunters were gatherers, neutered but eager to scoop for ferns and branches under Rachel's direction. The boy stopped by the palms and looked at her admiringly; he could tell she was a teacher. What a school trip this was…

Henry, Sam and Eric spread the tarpaulin out then whipped it over a rudimentary bower – at once they could see that it would provide shelter from the persistent coastal currents, and indulgently stopped their work to enjoy this refuge.

Rachel sat down by the platform, exhausted, and Ralph joined her, appreciative of her prior compassion. 'There's something else I can tell you,' he sidled, his furtive tone arousing the woman's interest. 'There are others here besides us.' Rachel looked at him in surprise, so he went on. 'A few nights ago I saw someone on the other side of the island. A man. I tried to talk to him but he told me to go back to the hunters.' He deduced as though for the first time: 'Either he's up to something and doesn't want to be interrupted, or he has plans that actually involve us.'

Rachel was perturbed. 'If there's something else you should mention, now is the time,' she sterned, but Ralph was insistent. Piggy and Simon were ghosts now. Though the thought of the grave still persisted…

'I tell you there's a man here, possibly two. I don't know any more than that.'

The littluns yelled playfully under their cobalt cover.

Rachel stretched her back. 'Smells fishy,' she said. 'Perhaps this island is private property and they think you're trespassing?'

'Or they shot down our plane,' said Ralph, abject and paranoid. His whole countenance was furrowed by tiered superstition. 'I'm going to go back there tonight. Will you come with me?'

Rachel considered her boat, its radio, the emaciation around her. Unlike Ralph, she thought that other adults were potentially on her wavelength. 'Alright,' she said. 'We'll go tonight.'

Relaxed and resolved, the boy lay down in the sand, and watched the younger ones frolicking by the bower in the tepid afternoon light.