Chapter Sixteen: Distortions And Reflections
“Bora Bora is so beautiful, sometimes you have to pinch yourself so that you know that it is not all just one big dream.”
• • •
It was Corrie who told Stuart that Ian had left.
“He didn’t say anything about going last night,” said Stuart, surprised.
“Norbert told me he just packed his bags this morning and caught the ferry. I did not see him. I have been in Papeete all day, at the hospital.”
“Papeete?”
“Yes, I caught the plane first thing this morning, and have just got back again.”
“This was for your injection?”
“Yes,” said Corrie, “It was not very pleasant. They went in here.” She lifted up her baggy tee-shirt to reveal a bare midriff. Her stomach was flat and surprisingly well-toned, revealing a definition of muscles that any athlete would have been proud of. A length of sticky plaster concealed the puncture marks.
“I didn’t think they still gave injections into the stomach,” said Stuart.
“No, neither did I,” said Corrie, ruefully, before breaking into her customary smile.
“I’ll remember not to get bitten.”
Corrie sat on the bed beside Stuart and, taking off her glasses, proceeded to clean one of the lenses with a white handkerchief. She was a spotless person, that was Stuart’s impression of her, not clinical exactly, just neat and precise. She never looked flustered in the heat of the day; her clothes were always clean and immaculately creased despite months of living out of a backpack. It came naturally to her. Stuart looked down at his own dishevelled attire. It was a skill that he had never acquired. Or, knowing that she was Swiss, was he just assigning attributes to her typical of her national stereotype? He didn’t think so. He still had some critical faculties even in the face of such beguiling beauty. Actually, without her glasses on her face had taken on a slightly different look. It was strange. Did he find her less attractive? A little, perhaps. Her eyes had shrunk slightly, throwing out the whole perfect ensemble. It was only a minute shift, but it had a skewing effect, like looking at a Picasso portrait or in a distorting mirror. She stuffed the handkerchief back into the pocket of her shorts and returned the spectacles to her face. Normal service resumed. “So what are you doing inside at this time of day?”
It was mid-afternoon and Stuart had taken the opportunity to return to the dormitory to be alone and to think. He had been lying on his bed, the large wooden shutter in front of him wide open, gazing out at the sea.
“Just thinking,” he answered, “You know.” He looked across to Ian’s bed, noticing for the first time that the linen had been stripped off and that Ian’s baggage was gone. “Strange.”
“Why?” asked Corrie, “It’s perfectly normal to move on, isn’t it?”
“Yes, just ...”
“You feel that we are somehow all bonded together from now on?”
“Well aren’t we?”
“Isn’t this the reason we did what we did, so that we could all continue doing what we would have been doing if the accident had not occurred?”
“Yes, I know that, but ...”
“I know. You do not have to explain. I was playing ... what do you say? ... Devil’s Advocate? Why do you think Norbert and I are still here? We had intended to travel back to the mainland together by now, but somehow we find that we just cannot quite go.”
“Ghosts to lay to rest?”
“Something like that.”
“What about Jenny and Mike?”
“I do not know. I have not seen them today.”
“Nor me.”
Jenny had been one of the things that Stuart had retired to his bed to consider. She had barely acknowledged his presence at the meeting the evening before. He had asked about the wrong phone number and she had pointed out that what he was reading as a ‘5’ was actually a ‘6’, but she had not shown any great enthusiasm when he had said that he would call her. OK, so the circumstances were hardly conducive for romance, but hey! it was her that had landed him in this mess. Wasn’t it?
Corrie was laughing. She had a deep, sexy laugh. He saw that she was pointing at his suitcase. He was instantly on the defensive, “I know, I know. No one travels with a suitcase. Everyone has told me. What can I say, I’m new to this game. Next time I’ll bring a backpack. For the time being, though, it’s the suitcase or nothing.”
“It’s OK,” said Corrie, “I was only laughing because Norbert thought that he was the only one to have one.”
“Perhaps we’ll form a club,” said Stuart, sarcastically.
• • •
It was the albino man. Stuart could see him quite clearly now. The rest of the scene was familiar too. The small stretch of beach. The fallen tree. The floating coconut. The motorbike track in the sand. He was standing in the middle of the beach, digging, mechanically. Shovel-load after shovel-load of damp earth was raised, hoisted to shoulder height, and then deposited behind him, forming an ever-growing pile. Stuart tried to call out to make him stop, but found that no words would come. He could only watch, powerless. It seemed inevitable that the albino would unearth the body in the sand. On and on, he dug, rhythmic and untiring. He must be stopped. He must be stopped. Stuart took a step forward and the albino man instantly turned his head, staring directly at Stuart. Stuart gasped. The features he had been expecting to see were replaced by others, part familiar, part alien in the strange framing of the albino’s body; first Corrie’s face, narrow nose and small glasses, that merging into Jenny’s rounder features and freckled complexion, this replaced by Mike’s stubbled chin and dark eyes, finally settling on Norbert’s short, fair, curly hair and wide features. The ghostly amalgamation was beckoning for Stuart to step closer, to join him, to look into the hole he had been digging. Stuart took the offered hand and the two figures stood side-by-side, silent, gazing into the chasm. There were actually two holes, not the one that Stuart had expected to see. Staring up from one, arms folded across his chest in imitation of an Egyptian Pharaoh, was Stefan. Next to him, in the companion pit, positioned in identical fashion, was Ian. The scream that had been bottled up within Stuart for so long finally was allowed free reign; one long drawn out cry of anguish which continued on and on, until it finally managed to wake him up.
• • •
He was relieved to find that he was alone in the dormitory. He must have been asleep for hours. It was daylight again. He was still wearing the same clothes as the day before; had not taken anything off to go to sleep; had just collapsed on top of his luggage and all the bedding. He looked at his watch. Almost ten o’clock. God, what a weird dream. The details were already fast-fading, such that the more he tried to recall them the less he could actually remember, it felt like the mental equivalent of trying to catch up with someone by running the wrong way up an escalator Ultimately, he knew that the memory would be lost to him altogether. Back home he very rarely had dreams. Not anything he could recall, at any rate. Perhaps travel had stimulated his mind? Or experience? He had never really understood people that talked about their dreams: there were the ones that believed dreams to be the excess baggage of everyday thought, a mishmash of chaotic messages, taken out each night like the rubbish. These were the scientific types mainly. No, that was not strictly true, the scientific types generally did not dream at all in his experience, Benzene rings excepting. Then there were the ones that considered that their dreams were some sort of premonition, a guide to a future course of action, a mystic oracle on the way to live one’s life. In this same category are the people who think their dreams are telling them something predictive, like which horse is going to win the next Grand National or who will play the next James Bond. Finally, there was symbolism. That great hotchpotch of religious iconography and pagan superstition. Apples meaning infidelity. Pomegranates meaning fertility. Rabbits meaning fertility. Bulls meaning sex. Fire mea
ning sex. Snakes meaning sex. Perhaps he had been missing out on something?
Stuart had still not discovered the name of the Canadian girl who slept in the bed next to him, and since she had already departed the lodgings that morning, that status quo was not likely to change. Neither Norbert nor Corrie’s bunks looked as though they had been slept in, but he knew that they were both so fastidiously neat that he would not have been able to tell, in any case. The sheet on Mike’s bed was drawn back. He had taken to waking and rising very early. The remainder of the dormitory was unused. The big festivities on Bora Bora now all over, there were fewer tourists and travellers remaining on the island. Stefan and Ian’s beds were empty. Where was Ian planning to go to? Stuart could not remember if he had had a conversation with the insignificant Englishman as to his particular travel itinerary. He thought that perhaps he had, but he had been someone that you listened to without actually taking any notice of the words; someone that you could not imagine actually saying anything of enough interest to take the trouble to register. Australia? Had he said Australia? Or was that where he had been journeying from? What did it matter anyway, he was never likely to chance upon him again, even if they were travelling in the same general direction. It was a big world out there.
An object on Stefan’s bed suddenly caught Stuart’s notice. He had overlooked it at first because it had looked so commonplace, but now he realised that it was anything but. He did not need to cross the room and sit on the corner of the soft mattress to identify that it was Stefan’s guidebook, but he could not stop himself from picking up the well-thumbed volume and flicking through the pages. There was evidence of Stefan’s small, crabby writing on almost every page. There were big crosses through the ferries which had sunk, there were neat corrections made to timetables, there were ticks beside places of interest and brief notes where greater comment was apparently considered necessary. The last few blank pages at the back of the book were almost completely filled by what looked like a daily journal. Stuart’s automatic reaction was to close the book and leave Stefan’s private musings just that, but curiosity got the better of him. After all, this was evidence, wasn’t it? There might be things written here that might be better off unseen by other prying eyes. It seemed a sacrilege, but once you had aided and abetted the concealment of a dead body, the destruction of a few pages of diary was surely no big deal? His eyes skimmed over the words. His knowledge of German was very limited and, combined with the minuteness of the script, he found that he could make very little sense of the account. Even so, he was able to recognise his own name written in several different places, each time spelt S-t-e-w-a-r-t! How many times did he have to tell people!
“Nothing incriminating, I hope?”
Norbert was standing in the doorway of the hut, smiling. He walked across to Stuart and took the guidebook out of his hand. Stuart gave it up, unresisting.
“I don’t know. I can’t read German.”
“No?”
“No. Why did you keep it?” asked Stuart, “I thought all of Stefan’s possessions had been ...” He hesitated to say the word.
“Disposed of?” helped out Norbert.
“Yes.”
“It seemed a waste to throw it away,” said Norbert, “Neither Corrie nor I had a guidebook and since it appears that we may be staying on here rather longer than we had imagined.” He left the rest of the sentence unsaid.
“You don’t think it is rather dangerous to keep?”
“No, not all. Guides get passed on all the time. I think the one we have for New Caledonia was left behind by a guy where we were staying who was leaving.”
“Travelling light?”
“I have never been able to do it,” said Norbert.
“Me neither.”
Norbert noticed Stuart’s anxious expression. “Don’t worry,” he tried to reassure him, “There is no one looking for Stefan.”
“Not even the cheese-thief?”
Norbert raised his eyebrows, “That remains to be seen.”
“No more messages?”
“None. Oh well, yes, one,” Norbert’s tone lightened, “It is the reason I was trying to find you. Jenny is outside at reception. I think she wants to invite you on a bicycle ride.”