Prison Ship (22 page)

Barrie carried on staring into the fire, moving his head slightly from side to side. He seemed to be collecting his thoughts.

‘We were walking over the ridge at the top of the valley,' he finally said. ‘Then Mr Bell just stopped dead in his tracks and fell forward. I look around and he's got a spear through him. Straight out of the blue. I ran off as fast as I could, didn't I. No point staying to help someone with a spear straight through him.'

‘What happened to your face, then?' said Richard.

Barrie looked him hard in the eye. His mood was
changing from morose to angry. ‘Ran straight into a tree I did, as I tried to get away.'

‘And where's Bell now?' I asked, feeling increasingly perplexed by this turn of events.

‘How the bleedin' 'ell should I know,' said Barrie. ‘Savages must've carried him off to eat him.'

We sat there as the forest grew dark around us. My anger with Richard faded. I needed to talk to him. Barrie was being too shifty. He didn't look like a man who had just survived a near-fatal encounter with the natives. Neither did he seem upset about the death of his friend.

We stoked up the fire. No one said a word. The brass buttons on Barrie's jacket glinted in the firelight. One of them was missing.

We slept fitfully that night. I woke often, with hunger burrowing at my innards. They say that when a man is starving the body begins to eat itself – how else would starving men begin to resemble the skeletons they may soon become? I couldn't help but think about my body gnawing away at my vital organs.

Dawn brought the promise of another bright day. That cheered us a little. I couldn't have faced a day of cold and driving rain.

Barrie was especially listless that morning, and didn't stir when Richard and I roused ourselves. We set off
together to look for food, glad to have the opportunity to talk alone.

‘Sam, we've got to watch ourselves here,' said Richard as soon as we were away from our camp. ‘Do you believe that story about Bell?'

I shook my head. It was a huge relief to be able to talk. ‘This is really bothering me,' I said. ‘The way he's behaving – it doesn't make sense.'

‘I reckon he killed him when the two of them had an argument,' said Richard. ‘He's been really angry about the way Bell's held us up.'

‘But we can't be sure,' I said. ‘I know he's a rotten bastard, but I can't believe he'd kill his mate.'

Richard shook his head. ‘Who knows? Maybe there is a mob of savages round here? Maybe they plan to pick us off one at a time?'

We walked on in silence. I began to feel light-headed and sick with hunger. My brain pounded with every heartbeat, and there was no strength left in my limbs.

We wandered back to the cave around noon. Barrie had gone. ‘Probably looking for something to eat,' I said. We walked up hill, scouring the ground. ‘Never know what you'll find if you keep looking,' said Richard.

Standing on an escarpment overlooking the valley, we spotted a thin column of smoke half a mile away to the north.

‘Don't know what's happening there,' said Richard.
‘Could be Barrie cooking up something for himself. Could be these savages he's warned us about.'

He sounded unconcerned. My mind was telling me I ought to be angry with Barrie for finding something to cook and not telling us about it, or frightened for my life because we were so near to natives who might kill us. But in truth, I was so weak I felt only indifference.

‘Let's go and have a look,' I said wearily.

‘Let's go tomorrow,' said Richard. He sounded even more dispirited than me.

We both sat down. Within seconds Richard had gone to sleep. I nodded off soon after.

When we awoke the sun had sunk so it was closer to the top of the high valley, and I judged it to be around the middle of the afternoon. Our short sleep had refreshed us, and we set off towards the fire we had seen.

We walked on, quiet and fearful. There was a chance Barrie had been telling the truth and we were blundering towards hostile natives.

I knew we were close when the faint smell of burning wood began to reach my nostrils. There was another smell too which I could not at first place. It was a little like pork. Then I remembered where I had encountered it before. It was the smell of human flesh burned in battle.

Richard, who was walking in front of me, stopped dead in his tracks.

I drew breath to speak, but he beckoned me to silence.

Ahead of us in a clearing, by a clump of rocks, was the remains of a smouldering fire.

‘Stay very still,' Richard mouthed to me.

We waited. The trees rustled, the occasional bird squawked far away, and the shadows grew a little longer.

When we both began to shiver with cold, our patience ran out. Hoping no one was lurking there we headed into the clearing.

The fire told us little. There was a long charred stick lying half in and out of the black ash. The rocky outcrop near to the fire was bothering me. I just felt in my bones we were being watched. Any moment, I expected a spear to sail across the forest and impale me.

I pointed to these rocks, and the black entrance to a cave inside them.

Richard laughed. ‘No point not talking now Sam,' he said. ‘If anyone's here they'll have heard or spotted us by now.'

I walked towards the entrance.

Standing at the side I leaned over to peer in, expecting a spear through my head at any second.

Inside there was a faint stench of blood, like a butcher's shop. Fear boiled up inside me, but I stayed where I was. ‘Easy Sam, you've been in battle and survived,' I whispered. ‘There's nothing here you haven't faced before.' I stood inside the entrance of the cave and waited for my eyes to get used to the dark.

‘Richard, come here.'

There in the corner was the outline of a body. ‘Help me move him into the light,' I said.

We grabbed an arm each and dragged. He was stiff and awkward to move. We both knew at once it was Bell. He had been shot through the forehead.

There was something else even more horrific. His trousers were missing, and flesh from his buttocks and thighs had been sliced away. There wasn't much more left of him to eat. The rest was as scrawny as a starving dog.

I felt prickly hot and sick in my stomach.

Richard was white as a sheet.

‘We can't be certain it was Barrie, can we?' he said.

Then I noticed a line of thread protruding from the clenched knuckles of Bell's stiff hand. I tried to open his fist. It wouldn't budge, and I had to get the knife from my belt to prise the dead hand open. There it was, the button from Barrie's jacket.

‘Oh sweet Jesus,' muttered Richard. ‘He killed him so he could eat him. Good thing neither you or me went out hunting with him.'

Bell's eyes were still wide open and he had a desperate, imploring look upon his face. At once, I could picture the man's final moments, down on his knees begging Barrie not to shoot, hand clasped to his friend's jacket. And I imagined Barrie looking coldly into his pleading eyes and pulling the trigger on his pistol.

We walked back in silence. Then Richard said, ‘What the hell are we going to do?'

‘Keep away from Barrie, that's what,' I snapped. Wasn't it obvious?

Richard thought about this, then he said, ‘We don't
exactly
know what happened. Bell might have attacked Barrie. Maybe he didn't mean to kill him. Maybe he killed him in a fit of rage and then decided to eat him because he was dead. We can't just assume he killed him to eat him and we're necessarily his next dinner.'

‘Richard. I don't want to take that risk. I think we
should just head off on our own.' I felt convinced this was the right thing to do.

‘I don't agree,' he said. He sat down on a rock. ‘Let's think this through. He's got a loaded pistol, an axe, and a knife in his belt. All useful for hunting or defending ourselves if the natives ever attack us. We've got a couple of knives, a fishing line and the clothes we're standing up in. If we go back to the camp to collect our tins and blankets, we'll see him there. Besides I want to know where he is and what he's doing. I want to watch the bastard like a hawk. If we run away, we'll be constantly wondering about him stalking us. We'd have to kill him to stop him following us. Could you do that?'

I shook my head. What a choice. ‘He's a tough bugger,' I said. ‘I wouldn't want to have a fight with him, would you?'

‘Only if I thought I'd win,' said Richard. ‘He's a brawler, is Barrie. He's probably spent his life scrapping dirty in London drinking dens. Look, let's go back. I think it's best for now. If we can get away from him later, and be sure he won't follow us, then we'll do it.'

Dusk was falling as we approached our base. The events of the afternoon were almost too bizarre to take in, but in my half-starved state of mind I just accepted them. Now I could smell cooking. For one horrible moment I wondered if Barrie had brought back a bit of Bell for us
to eat. I was so hungry I had begun to wonder what human flesh tasted like.

Barrie greeted us cheerfully, suspiciously so. He hadn't been this nice for the entire journey.

‘Daaah, I was hoping you pair wouldn't come back,' he laughed. ‘Then I could have had all this fish to meself.' He was playing the roguish Cockney uncle. ‘So how come you two spent two days fishing by the river and caught nothing, and I get two big ones in a single afternoon?'

We said nothing, but our eyes were staring at the fish baking on the fire. ‘I've had one of them already – the smaller one mind. This one's for the pair of you,' he said.

My mouth was watering so much I thought I was going to dribble.

Barrie took the fish from the fire, chopped its head off with his knife and carefully lifted away one side of white flesh. Then he peeled away the skeleton in a single movement. ‘No bones there, sir,' he joked. ‘We aim to please.'

Neither of us knew what to make of this friendly Barrie. We were too hungry to care, and ate the white flesh as slowly as we could bear. We knew it was fatal to bolt your food then choke or throw up.

Barrie asked us what we'd been up to. Richard had his wits about him, and told him we'd been looking for food in a part of the forest well away from Bell's butchered corpse.

We felt stronger after our meal and that evening Richard suggested to Barrie that we move on. ‘You got lucky fishing,' he said with plausible logic. ‘There's nothing here to eat, so let's carry on east. We're bound to reach the coast sometime soon.'

We all nodded our heads.

Next morning Barrie led and we made brisk progress. I walked behind trying to convince myself that we were doing the right thing sticking with him. If there were any natives out here, I supposed, the three of us being together would make them less likely to attack us. Barrie on his own, or us two boys, would be easier prey.

Three hours later we found another kangaroo apple tree with five fruits on it. It was a meagre crop, as before, but we all ate one then and there, and Barrie suggested we keep the other two for as long as we could stand to. ‘We might not have anything to eat for the rest of the day, after all.'

Further down river, late afternoon, Richard caught four small bream while I hunted for plants to eat and Barrie gathered sticks for a fire. That night we slept under a clear sky. It was freezing cold but it didn't rain. We shivered miserably in our blankets despite the fire and the food inside us, our breath curling out of our mouths and noses and into the black sparkling sky.

The next day the river we were following made a brisk turn to the north. We argued sourly about whether to carry on following it, or continue plodding east. I managed to persuade them to stick to our plan. ‘We can't be that far away from the sea, we've been walking for ever.'

We crossed the river at a shallow point, wading up to our waists in slow-moving water. I had a vague sense that we were getting more and more hopelessly lost, although I had yet to feel we were going round in circles.

Then our luck ran out. Two days we pressed on, through endless thick bush, our hunger returning to haunt us. We were driving ourselves to extinction. At the end of the second day without food, we found another cave. ‘Shall we stop here to rest?' I said. Barrie and Richard both nodded. They looked gaunt and filthy. I imagined I looked the same.

As we gathered wood for a fire, Barrie muttered, ‘You and your stupid plan. I knew we should've stuck to the river.'

I looked at Richard for support, but he just shook his head sourly.

I spent a sleepless night shivering in our cave and drifted off just as the sky was growing lighter. That morning I woke to see Richard and Barrie hunched together in animated conversation. They looked a little
guilty when they realised I had woken up and was watching them.