Lost Girls (15 page)

This isn’t turning out to be the journal I had imagined taking home with me.

DAY 14

Still alive. Not eaten in the night.

I wake the others.

“This isn’t much of a hotel,” I joke as the others come to their senses. “No barbecue or campfire, no bacon roll or waffles with maple syrup, no fresh orange juice, no smell of freshly brewed coffee, no hot shower, no room service.”

“It’s a disgrace,” agrees Jas. “We won’t be back.”

Jody smiles shyly, happy to be with us.

“It’s the mundane things I miss the most,” says Jas.
“What I’d give for a good night’s sleep, toilet tissue, clean underwear…”

“The inside of my mouth tastes like a cave full of bat crap,” I say.

“Mine tastes like a garbage bin,” complains Jas.

“Mine’s worse. It tastes like dog poo!” Jody is delighted with herself, and we all laugh—the first laugh any of us has had for a long time.

We are on our way at dawn. No point in hanging around.

“Look at the ants, Jody,” I say.

“What are they carrying?”

“Leaves. Bigger than they are.”

Jody screams. “A snake!” Her scream sets off the gibbons, whose yells and whoops fill the forest. “No it isn’t, sorry, it’s a tree root.”

If we stop for a rest or a drink any exposed flesh gets stung by ants so small we can hardly see them, so we try to keep moving, climbing. It’s not actually raining. Instead, a low mist clings to the trees, and a thick whiteness dampens our hair and skin. Everything is clammy. But gradually, as the sun rises, the mist breaks into tatters and thin streaks thread their way into the coral-red morning sky.

Jody’s a gutsy little thing. She seems to think this is a great adventure. She’s tanned and dirty all over and her face is covered in mud, her hair tangled and stuck with leaves. She doesn’t notice the thorns. Her teddy is in my bag. She hasn’t once mentioned her sister, but maybe that’s not a good thing.

Going to the bathroom in the jungle isn’t easy. We can’t go off into the forest for privacy for fear of losing one another or coming across another snake. So we dig a shallow bowl with our hands in the leafy, muddy earth. We take turns crouching, then use big leaves to clean ourselves, and then cover our waste with leaves and earth. The other two keep watch from nearby.

Jody holds her nose and says, “Disgusting, ugh, yuck!” And I have to agree.

“Look, a pill bug!” Jas gives us little zoology and biology lectures. This particular tanklike bug trundles around on the forest floor, and when disturbed curls up into a perfect little ball. You can’t see where the segments of its armor begin and end, it is so beautifully engineered.

We gather fruit whenever we can. There’s a banana grove at one point, so we have bananas for breakfast and carry as many as we can to eat later.

“I wonder what’s happening back at the beach?” Jas says as she munches her way through one of the remaining bananas.

“Yeah, have the Glossies scratched each other’s eyes out yet?” I say. “Is Hope hanging in there, looking after Carly? Has Loopy Layla pulled herself together?”

“Who’s Loopy Layla?” Jody asks, wiping a sticky spiderweb from her face.

We are gradually getting higher and the path is all rocky now, no leaf floor, no actual track to follow anymore. It’s a matter of climbing upward until we reach the top.

We’ve eaten all the bananas. They don’t travel well. And we’ve seen no other fruit for ages, though we can hear gibbons nearby, so there must be something for them to eat.

There are so many different fruits in the market at home—durian, custard apple, jackfruit, papaya, pineapple, pomelo, rambutan, breadfruit, mangosteen, and watermelon. I’ll never take them for granted again.

But we still have plenty of water, even with an extra stomach to fill.

It’s getting hotter. I’m sweating like mad and finding it difficult to breathe. The air is like cotton wool.

A large male gibbon stoops from his branch to stare at us, and not believing his big eyes, he shrieks at us.

“Look!” I point out his mate, who is creeping away whooping and wailing in alarm, a baby clasped about
her waist. There must be more gibbons here than any other creature.

“Are we there yet?” Jody asks, and Jas and I laugh. “What?” she says.

I say, “I can’t believe you took so long to ask that, Jody.” We carry on upward until we reach the edge of a clearing.

Trees here are thin and broken, some of them blackened, maybe from a lightning strike. In the soft mud are scratch marks and paw prints. It must be a salt or mineral lick.

“We are lucky not to have disturbed anything big feeding here.” Jas peers at the paw prints.

“Maybe we frightened them off.”

Jody is delighted by the yellow butterflies fluttering down to the mud like ticker tape from a tall building.

We rest again to get our breath in the welcome cool of a narrow cave mouth, but not for long, as Jas has identified a hornets’ nest in the roof. We get to our feet and are just beginning to move out of the cave in single file, me in front, Jody in the middle, when Jas leans forward to grab my arm and I nearly stumble.

“Look!” she squeaks.

A big cat frowns at us from about twenty feet away, well camouflaged, its black stripes merging with the trees. She’s huge. Like a dark red pony.

“What is it? I can’t see anything,” Jody says in a normal voice, and the tiger turns and lopes away downhill, her enormous paws thudding on the rocks.

“A tiger! We’ve seen a tiger.” My voice has disappeared into the top of my head.

“Do you know that poem, ‘Tyger, tyger burning bright’?” Jas whispers. “She did look like she was burning, didn’t she? As if there were fire under her skin?” Her eyes are full, as if she’s about to cry.

“I saw another one,” says Jody.

“What, where?”

“Over there, where your tiger went. It was orange.”

“You imagined it, Jody.”

“No, I didn’t. It was floating, and very tall.”

I sigh. A real tiger is enough to have to deal with without one of Jody’s imaginary versions.

“Okay,” I say. There’s no point in arguing.

We’ll have to be even more careful now. Once again, I wish we didn’t have Jody to take care of. If the tiger had seen the small child, God knows what would have happened. The fact that there are tigers here changes everything.

Fear turns my sweat sour.

We are all moving more carefully, constantly looking around. Jody is wide-eyed with excitement.

DAY 14—PROBABLY

MONTH—MAY

DATE—24, OR SOMEWHERE AROUND THERE

YEAR—1974

PLACE—AN ISLAND SOMEWHERE IN THE GULF OF THAILAND

We are on an island with tigers!

We have stopped for a rest on a boulder and as the rain has stopped I take the opportunity to update the map. No ants, thank goodness. We can see the summit. It’s still a long way off, about two hours more I think. First
we have to get beyond a huge bare rock, rounded but steep sided, like a beached whale. I think I can make it up, but Jas is dubious and says we’ll have to skirt the rock, go the long way round. We’re getting short of water and coconut and there’s nothing I recognize as edible fruit here. Our sweatshirt “socks” are shredded and torn.

“My scratches hurt, and there’s no space on my arms for any more bites.” Even Jas is miserable.

“I could go on alone to build the fire. I don’t mind,” I say, but I am actually quite reluctant to do it on my own. A fire needs constant feeding and more than one pair of hands to gather sticks to feed it.

“No, don’t do that, it’s getting late.” The voice of sanity speaks and I’m secretly relieved.

“Okay. Let’s camp here and finish the climb tomorrow.”

“I don’t want to stay here,” Jody pipes up. “I don’t like it.”

“What do you mean, you don’t like it? What’s wrong with here?”

“Mikey doesn’t like it.” Jody, who has been so brave, suddenly collapses in a heap and sobs. I feel her brow. She’s feverish.

“I want Natalie…. Natalie… where’s Natalie?”

Jas and I cry with the poor thing for her dead sister and, if we are honest, for ourselves. And once we’ve started, there’s no stopping us.

After dosing her with salt and water we take turns carrying Jody piggyback. We’re all exhausted. Maybe she has malaria—we’ve been bitten enough times. Or dengue fever. The anti-mosquito spray ran out days ago. I think longingly of my lost mosquito coil, useless anyway without matches.

We have to keep resting and drinking water. We’ll have to ration it now until we find more. Jody is unable to walk.

“Honestly, Jas. Let me go on alone,” I plead. “This is going to take forever.” But she’s having none of it, insisting on carrying Jody. Perhaps if we find a decent place for them both to sit, she’ll change her mind.

Our Hansel and Gretel ribbons are nearly gone. I’ve had to halve them in size today so that we won’t run out. I keep looking around to take note of landmarks to remember on our descent. Things like a lightning-split tree and a particularly tall palm; that huge rocky mound. As we climb the rocks grow more prominent, and steeper sided, and it becomes impossible to get out the map and fill in the details.

Cicadas chirp nonstop and are so loud we can’t hear one another speak. My head feels as if it’s going to split open.

We can smell the overpowering sweetness of the flowers before we come across a little bush of green lemons or
limes. Oh, the freshness of the harsh, sharp juice! We squeeze some into Jody’s mouth and she shudders at the taste.

“We won’t get scurvy, anyway,” says Jas, squeezing the contents of one of the fruits into her open mouth. Then suddenly she sits bolt upright. “Listen!”

“What is it?” My heart is pumping hard.

“Water—I hear water. And I can smell it,” says Jas.

It’s the most wonderful sight: A waterfall drops about twenty feet into a rocky pool, and black water slithers over pebbles into a stream. We all fall to our knees and drink, then paddle in the pool. The water stings my scratched legs, but its freshness soothes. Close to the stream there’s a flat rock surrounded by fallen trees.

I try again. “This looks like a good place to camp. You could look after Jody here while I carry on.”

Jas gives in eventually.

“I don’t want to leave you, either, but it’s necessary,” I tell her. “If I don’t build a fire that can be seen while the weather’s clearer, we’ve got no chance of ever getting off this island.”

We’ve chosen a place with no dense cover nearby for a tiger to hide in. They have a spear, my Swiss Army knife, water and salt, coconut, limes, Jas’s flashlight, and a sleeping bag. We agree that they will spend the night on the rock and that Jas will take Jody back to the beach at
daylight if she’s well enough. I’ll check to see if they’ve gone on my way down.

“I’m going to crack this fire business,” I assure them. “You’ll hear it crackling and sparking, and you’ll smell the wood smoke and see the flames. I won’t be far behind you.”

I have the backpack, which I have filled with tinder material—hairy lichens, coconut husk, and small twigs—in case there is nothing suitable at the summit, as well as my own flashlight and my spear.

I say, “See you later, alligator.”

“In a while, crocodile.” Jas smiles bravely.

I hope they’ll be all right. I refuse to think about tigers. No point in worrying about things that haven’t happened.