Lost Girls (6 page)

At least this trek will give me an opportunity to fill in more features on my map, and I try to take mental photographs so that it will be as accurate as possible. Dad will want to see it when I get home. We clamber over slippery rocks, helping the juniors and Hope where it’s steep. There are narrow paths and climbing vines to cling to, and we are now in a small jungle of palms, the high leaves clapping like wild applause in a football stadium. No birds, though. I wonder if they were all blown away in the storm. Or did I imagine that cloud of birds? No one else saw it. Steam rises from the forest floor and surrounds us like a fog, and when we stop for a rest I take out my map, quickly draw three palm trees, and label it the “Forest of Murk,” or the “Maze of Mosquitoes.”

I’ll decide later.

The air is full of biting insects, and we flap at them constantly as we walk. Thank goodness Mom packed a brand-new tube of insect-repellent cream. I share it with the others. It only has to last a day or so.

Suddenly we come to a halt, almost crashing into one another.

“Oh no!” Arlene has walked straight through a huge spiderweb and has bits of it stuck to her hair and clothes.

“There’s the spider, Spider-eyes, it’s in your hair,” jokes May, and Arlene screams.

“No it isn’t, don’t be silly, May.” Mrs. Campbell is hot and frustrated. We all are.

“Look out for snakes.” May has the last word, as usual. Hope keeps tripping over lianas and roots of trees. She has taken off her one-eye specs and put them away, so now she is practically blind. She’s had to hand over the care of Natalie to Mrs. Campbell, but because she’s not very strong, we bigger girls take turns carrying the poor kid.

We climb uphill for quite a while, resting every few minutes. It’s hard work and our shoulders are aching like crazy. Everyone has sores and cuts. I try wrapping large leaves around my ankles to protect them and it helps. Some of the others copy me. “You’re a genius,” Jas tells me, and we both wrap leaves around Hope’s ankles.

All of a sudden, just as we’re beginning to think we’ll never stop climbing, we hear the sound of running water. It’s a rushing stream, where tall canes clatter and palm fronds whisper and we top up our water bottles. There are huge moths, I think, not butterflies; they’re enormous. Lizards dart under rocks. You know they are there
but they disappear as soon as you look at them, like tiny green ghosts. Long spearlike leaves shiver and tremble.

“Look, a hornbill!” Jas points to where the top-heavy bird is sitting high up in a tree. At least one has survived, then. Just then, with a
whirr
of wings, several hornbills appear, and go to roost in the same tree. They land with a loud zipping noise. Their wings look like hands of thick fingers spread wide. Scarlet hibiscus flowers glow like lamps from the dark shade of the foliage.

Jas keeps up a running commentary on what we can see. I know she’s trying to keep our spirits up, but the juniors aren’t interested in anything.

“Here’s our freshwater supply,” Jas tells us.

“But we’ve got enough bottles to last.” May is unimpressed.

“Let’s hope so,” Jas replies, so quietly that I think I am the only one to hear.

The wind is less noisy under the shelter of the trees, but as we finally reach the top of the hill a terrific blast hits us and we can hardly speak. We look out at the windward side of the island, where huge waves are battering the shoreline. I can’t imagine anyone being brave enough to sail here to come get us if it’s still this rough tomorrow.

We’re in a good place from which to view the island. I sit down and take out the map to make more drawings. There’s a thick jungle over toward the west, hidden by a
low mist clinging to the mountaintop. The island is almost the shape of a circle, but with a long thin tail, like a tadpole—Dragon Point—and has only one big beach as far as we can see: our landing beach, Storm Beach, in the east. There are others, which make very thin white lines on the edges of the jungle. I try to draw them in the correct places.

Nobody says much for a few minutes. We’re trying to catch our breath. “We better go back to the original cave, I think,” says Mrs. Campbell. “I don’t think we’ve seen anywhere better than that to shelter us from the wind.”

May and Arlene explode.

“No, no! I’m not going back!”

“You gotta be joking! We climbed all this way and you want us to go back?”

The juniors are silent, too exhausted to speak. Natalie is pale and sweating and her breath smells bad. Jas lays her down on the ground and rubs her sore arms.

“Okay, okay, we’ll go a little way back and sleep by the stream.” Mrs. Campbell sets off back down the hill. She doesn’t even offer to help us carry Natalie.

“I’ll carry her, Jas.”

“Would you, for a while? I’m exhausted.” Her thick, dark hair sticks to her forehead and scalp like a helmet.

An hour later we are lying uncomfortably in our
sleeping bags on rocks or leaf litter near the stream. I don’t want to risk taking my journal out here, so I try to memorize the sights and sounds. I name this place the Gorge of Despondency, or, like A. A. Milne, I could call it Eeyore’s Gloomy Place. I know—the Gorge of Gloom.

There’s no overhead shelter, but thankfully the rain has stopped, for now, though the trees drip on us still. We have eaten the rest of the tinned fish and beans, and some dried apricots. Mrs. Campbell said to chew them thoroughly before we swallow them or they’ll swell up in our stomachs. Who cares? That’s the least of our worries, I would have thought. Mosquitoes are tormenting us in spite of the repellent; Hope is particularly eaten up by them.

“Is this really the best place to camp?” I ask nobody in particular. Jas is too busy trying to get comfortable to meet my eye, and the others ignore me.

“Let’s just make the best of it, shall we?” Mrs. Campbell says after a few moments and I smile awkwardly at her.

Every few minutes I watch her press a damp cloth to Natalie’s closed mouth. Jody sleeps. Carly still hasn’t spoken. Even Jas is rather quiet tonight. She has placed her sleeping bag near mine and is sharing it with Carly. Jody is tucked in close to Jas on the other side. Mrs. Campbell is next to Jody, and the other girls are farther
down the slope, not happy, and complaining all the time about the damp and discomfort. But it’s suddenly dark and I’m so exhausted I could sleep for days. Somehow my toothbrush has gone missing. I would give anything to be able to brush my teeth.

The dark begins to dissolve.
Another awful night. I was too uncomfortable to get much sleep, what with my headache and itchy legs, and the sound of Hope slapping herself and swearing, but mostly I was worried about the “explosions” we saw. What has been happening?

And then, as we all climbed out of our sleeping bags, Arlene found a leech on her leg. Mrs. Campbell got it off with a lit match. All of us had to remove our clothes to see if we had any leeches. We all did. I had two on my stomach. Gross!

It’s light enough now for me to write in my journal.

DAY 4—HELL ISLAND (MIGHT NAME IT THAT)

Boat comes today, thank God. I desperately need a shower.

“You don’t need to waste matches, Mrs. Campbell. Look!” Jas points to an inch-long bloated leech on Mrs. Campbell’s leg. “They’re land leeches; they don’t suck as strongly as water leeches. You use your fingernail to push the end with the small oral sucker. That detaches it. Then flick the other end at the same time. See, it comes off easily.”

Jas never fails to amaze me.

I notice a raised angry rash all over my legs. I shouldn’t scratch it—it’ll get infected—but it’s difficult not to.

Mrs. Campbell insists we wash our hands and faces in the stream before breakfast—dried apricots and raisins, with cold freshwater. Thank goodness it’s stopped raining. Once we’ve eaten we set off.

I’m worried about Natalie. She’s stopped moaning and is limp and pale now. There were six leeches on her neck this morning, like tiny vampires. Her sister, Jody, is almost as pale. The other girls are fine, except Hope, who can hardly see to walk down the hill. We have to help her, telling her when there’s a rock on the path or an overhanging spiky vine.

“Didn’t you bring a spare pair of glasses, Hope?” Mrs. Campbell asks.

“No, M-Mrs. Campbell, I broke them the d-day before we c-c-came. Dad says I’m c-c-c-congenitally c-c-c-clumsy.” Hope’s occasional stutter is getting worse.

“W-w-w-what did you say?” mocks Arlene.

“Hopeless Hope…” May shouts.

“Don’t be so cruel,” I bark.

“St-st-stutterer!” they shout together in unison.

The Glossies are so ignorant. I kick sandy soil in their direction and they run away laughing.

We head back to Storm Beach to wait for the boat. It seems like weeks ago that we landed here, not days.

The sea is enormous; I’ve never seen such huge waves. We have all our belongings bundled up and ready. The sleeping bags are still damp, but it doesn’t matter, as we can wash and dry them at the Laundromat when we get home.

I glance around at all of us and suddenly realize how awful we look. May and Arlene have mascara and red lipstick smudged all over their faces, and their hair looks like squashed bales of straw. Glossy no longer. Hope is, well, Hope, only more so—no glasses, so her poor eyesight makes her look like an angry pink giant. (She’s at least five foot ten.)

Mrs. Campbell doesn’t look much like a duchess right now, either—more like what Mom would call trailer
trash. She looks exhausted, wrecked; her eyes are red-rimmed, and she has frown lines at the corners of her mouth. Her hair is stuck to her head. She keeps swigging from a bottle and I know it isn’t water. We’re bruised and scratched and bitten to bits. May is dabbing nail polish on her chigger bites.

“Does that help the itching?”

“Yeah.”

“I think you should share it with the juniors,” I say.

“Do you? Well, back off, Bonnie MacDonald. It’s mine.” Now she’s putting curlers in her sticky hair again.

The juniors are all in a heap, like frightened monkeys. Natalie is totally out of it, shivering and sweaty, pallid and clammy. Occasionally she wakes and moans, her eyes disappearing up into her head. Mrs. Campbell has made her as comfortable as possible in her sleeping bag.

Jas, the only one of us still looking human, stands on the fallen trunk of a palm tree, her hands shielding her eyes, watching for the boat. She looks like a heroic Amazon warrior.

They know we are expecting to leave today, so someone should come, no matter what.

Two hours later there’s still no sign of a boat. Nobody has spoken for ages—our eyes have been searching the sea.

“It was
this
beach, wasn’t it?” Mrs. Campbell sounds desperate.

It’s about midday. The sun, if we could only see it, is immediately overhead.

“I don’t think he’s coming,” Arlene said, sobbing.

“Shh, you’ll set off the juniors.”

We wait, and wait, and wait. The interminable screech of wind is driving me insane. My eyes are sore from sand. I can’t even write in my journal in these conditions. Mrs. Campbell walks off toward Dragon Point, at the end of the beach. Suddenly she waves her arms frantically and runs back along the shore toward us, but she’s not smiling.

“Hope, stay with the juniors. You others come with me.”

“W-why is it always m-me who has to babysit?” Hope flops down on the sand.

We follow Mrs. Campbell.

“What is it, Mrs. Campbell?” Arlene asks.

“The boat—it’s wrecked on the rocks. Our boat…”

“The boatman?” I ask fearfully.

“I don’t know. There’s no sign of him.” She puts her fists to her mouth.

We scramble onto the rocks and look where she points. The tail of the dragon, the black rocks, form a long, spiky reef. The waves break over them with great intensity, and then I see it. The broken back of the hull, its ribs shattered, water pouring through the broken bones. The
outboard motor is still attached to a chunk of the stern, its propeller emerging from the sea between waves.

“Oh! No!” The boat is not a boat anymore; it’s more like a dead seabird, or a child’s toy, small and smashed and dead.

“Oh my God!” shouts Arlene, sobbing in horror.

“Where is he, where is he?” May is hysterical.

“There’s nothing we can do,” says Mrs. Campbell.

“But can’t we get to him? He might be here somewhere; he might be alive.” Jas starts to clamber along the slippery rocks, out toward the wreck.

“Come back—it’s too dangerous.” Mrs. Campbell tries to stop us, but Jas and I jump from rock to rock and crouch to stay on when a large wave breaks over us, the wind tugging at our wet hair and clothes. Then there’s a big gap where no rocks are showing and we can’t get any farther without plunging into the foam, and we aren’t brave enough. We can’t see the boatman. We call and call, but there’s no reply. He’s gone, drowned, lost.

Mrs. Campbell doesn’t scold us when we scramble back to the shore. She’s crouched, her hands over her face, crying. May and Arlene are huddled with her. There’s nothing to say. After a few moments, she rises from the sand and heads back toward the others. Hope has been standing, watching us. They know something’s wrong. There’s no point in hiding the truth.