Alex Garland - The Beach

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. Françoise 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 Françoise 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 madeher 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.

Étienne 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 somepeople 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 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 flying thick and fast. It was a crisis after all. Whatever else a crisis causes, it causes a buzz, so everyone wanted to be in on the act. Étienne and Keaty, tending to Sten and Karl respectively, were instructed, 'He needs water!' and 'Put him in the recovery position!' and 'Hold his nose!'

Hold His Nose was directed at Étienne — said by one of the Yugo girls - because you have to hold the victim's nose while giving mouth-to-mouth to stop the air from escaping. I thought it was a stupid thing to say. You could see the air bubbling out of the hole in Sten's side so his lungs were obviously fucked, and anyway, you couldn't imagine anyone looking more dead. His eyes were open but showing the whites, he was as limp as rags, and there was no blood coming out of his wounds. In fact, just about all the advice was stupid. Karl could hardly be put in the recovery position while he was jerking around and screaming, and I didn't have a clue what use he'd have for water. Morphine yes, water no. But in emergencies people often seem to call for water, so I assumed it was said in that spirit. The only person talking sense was Sal, who was yelling at everyone to get back and shut up. No one took any notice though. Her role as leader had been temporarily suspended, so her good suggestions were about as useful as the bad ones.

The whole scene left me feeling flustered. I was telling myself,'Alert but calm,' and waiting for my head to come up with the kind of suggestion that was needed. Something that would cut through the chaos, creating a stern efficiency that was appropriate to the gravity of the situation. Specifically, something like the way Étienne had acted on the plateau. With that in mind, I considered pushing my way through to Sten and saying, 'Leave him, Étienne. He's dead.' But I couldn't shake the idea that it would sound like a line from a bad movie, and I wanted a line from a good movie. Instead I pushed my way backwards through the crowd, which was easy as most people were trying to get closer.

As soon as I was out of the circle I began thinking a great deal more objectively. Two realizations hit me at once. Number one was that I now had a chance to get my cigarettes. Number two was Christo. Nobody had even mentioned the third Swede, who might have been on the beach, wounded and waiting for help to arrive. Possibly even dead like Sten.

I dithered for a couple of moments like a cartoon character, first looking one way, next the other. Then I made my decision and ran down the longhouse, passing the few squid-sufferers who were still too sick to see what was going on. I lit up on the run back, taking two matches to catch the flare of the phosphorus. Just before I ducked out of the longhouse door, I shouted, 'Christo!' but I didn't wait to see if anyone had heard me.

Through the jungle, I cursed myself for not having also grabbed a torch. I couldn't see much apart from the red glow of my cigarette, occasionally brightening as it burned through a spider's web. But having recently walked the path in darkness, en route to seeing the phosphorescence a couple of nights before, I didn't have too much trouble. The only mishap was walking straight into a bamboo thicket which had been recently cut for spears. My tough feet were OK. It was my shins and calves that got cut, which bothered me because I knew they'd sting if I had to go into the salt-water.

On the beach, however, there was enough moonlight to see clearly. Across the sand were deep tracks where Karl had dragged Sten. He seemed to have reached the beach about twenty metresfrom the path to the clearing, come down, missed the entrance to the path, and doubled back. Christo, I noted as I dropped the butt, couldn't have made it as far as the shore. In the light from the moon, the sand was silver. The odd coconut husks and fallen palm branches were black. If he'd been there, I'd have seen him.