Savages

  “Don’t think about it. Just get up there,” Jonathan urged.

  Patty thought, It’s all right for him to sound so confident. He doesn’t have to risk falling sixty feet.

  Without speaking, she coiled the rope over one shoulder and under the other arm.

  “You’re a brave lass. Once we’ve found the way down here, we’ll be safe.”

  Patty nodded toward the skeleton. “She wasn’t.” She looked up at the faint circle of light. “Maybe I should practice?”

  “What for? Get up there, that’s practice.”

  She thought, Slowly but inexorably, I’m going to reach the top. Her heart had started to thump and her breath was shallow, so she made herself do deep breathing exercises, pushing at her abdomen as she breathed in slowly, sucking it back as she exhaled.

  Jonathan said, “What are you waiting for?”

  “I’m thinking myself through it,” Patty told him. She must never once think of failure; she must never think of falling, of smashing her body, of dying underground in this foul-smelling darkness like that poor skeleton. She must be determined. She must not allow her thoughts to wander toward failure. She must calmly start and not stop until she reached the top. She mustn’t falter at that point, she must know exactly what to do. If she distracted her imagination by counting, she wouldn’t be able to think about anything else. If she breathed deeply all the way up, she wouldn’t panic, because it is physically impossible to panic if you breathe slow, deep and easy.

  “If you can go up two feet, you can go up the whole way. Remember that,” Jonathan said.

  She moved forward and stood with her slim back pressed against the rough wall of the shaft. She lifted one leg at a time, bracing her feet against the opposite side.

  Better get moving.

  She pressed against the wall with her hands and moved her butt up a couple of inches. Cautiously she lifted her left foot up a couple of inches, using her other foot as a brace to stop herself from falling. She thought, I’ll count to four hundred and by that time I’ll either be at the top or I’ll have joined that skeleton at the bottom. Without discussing it, both she and Jonathan knew that if she lost her footing, she had no way of breaking her fall.

  In her navy shirt and filthy white shorts, with Jonathan’s white shirt wrapped round her head, to protect it from bats, Patty started to inch her way up the shaft, shifting her rear up a few inches at a time as she pushed the earth wall with the palms of her hands. Very soon her legs started to tremble because of the need to keep them constantly braced. To focus her concentration (and keep her imagination shut in its box) she started to count aloud. Thirty-four … thirty-five … thirty-six …

  Concentrate on deep breathing. In when she inched herself up with her butt, out as she moved her feet. Seventy-one … seventy-two …

  She longed to look up to see how far she still had to go, but she mustn’t break her concentration. Two hundred and one … two hundred and two … Every shaking muscle in her body shrieked in protest as she slowly edged her way up the shaft.

  Her arms were trembling, her whole body was shaking and dripping with sweat. It was increasingly hard to discipline her breathing, she was panting now. Five hundred and one … five hundred and two … Maybe she would reach the top by the time she had counted to a thousand. If not, then she’d just have to go for two thousand. She’d damn well do it to get Charley’s killers….

  Her legs were no longer trembling, they were making involuntary jerking movements. Suddenly she was terrified of cramp. What was that twinge? Idiot, don’t invite a cramp.

  Each movement of her feet became slower and shorter, each successive brace more agonizing; her navy shirt was now in ribbons and the rough stones and earth tore at her back.

  She couldn’t go on much longer. Six hundred and one … six hundred and two … The unaccustomed movement was tearing at the muscles of her inner thighs, while her stomach ached as if she’d just finished a fast five-mile run. She started to rasp rather than breathe. Her back, her arms and hands were bleeding and torn; she started to sob the numbers, counting in the gloom. Six hundred and fourteen … Breathe in. Push with her palms. Edge up her butt. Slowly let her breath out. Bring up left foot. Bring up right foot.

  She longed to stop and rest but she didn’t dare, because her arms might stiffen or her knees jump uncontrollably. She was keeping her knees rigid by the pressure of the soles of her feet against the earth walls of the shaft.

  Pieces of earth and stone rattled down, dislodged as she climbed upward. She longed to scream, she longed to stop—just for one minute—but she knew that she was doomed if she did so. She continued upward, upward….

  Sweat running into her eyes, trembling in every limb, Patty slowly realized that there was more light now, she could clearly see the filthy laces of her sneakers. She sobbed a little louder. Seven hundred and seven …

  The worst moment was when she suddenly felt a scratching against the top of her head and realized that she had reached the foliage at the top of the shaft. Suddenly she doubted her ability to get out. She mustn’t panic, she mustn’t think down, she must think out.

  Slowly, trembling, careful to keep both feet braced, Patty felt with her right hand through the foliage. It didn’t seem very thick or tangled, she could feel that the top of her fingers were moving freely in the air above the scratchy undergrowth. She fought back the urge to grab at the foliage for support. Slow and steady, control your breathing, slowly in … slowly out …

  Feeling now with her left hand, she tentatively pulled on the undergrowth above her, which immediately gave way. So she had guessed correctly, she couldn’t haul herself out by hanging on to this stuff.

  She slid her butt up a little more, and again inched up her legs, which were now jerking so hard they were almost out of control. With both hands she managed to clear a space above her head, then she moved her hands back so that once again the torn and bleeding palms were pushing on either side of her hips. Again, she edged herself upward, through the thicket that scratched at her face and throat.

  Keep counting. Seven hundred and twenty-six …

  She felt a beguiling air of false security. She longed to grab again at the surrounding vines, but knew they were likely to be treacherous, and break beneath her clutch.

  The most difficult part was when her head and shoulders were well clear of the undergrowth and her body still submerged. She realized how much she’d counted on watching her shoelaces, to focus her concentration; now she could no longer see them.

  Looking fixedly at the point where her sneakers should emerge, Patty slowly stretched each arm above the foliage. She was shaking as if she had a fever. A leaf floated onto her face and she spat it away, refusing to let it spoil her concentration.

  When the upper part of her body was clear of the chimney, Patty paused again. She moved her head to the left, feeling with her left arm through the undergrowth, groping for the ground beneath, to check that it was firm, that it was unlikely to crumble and give way—to slide with her back into the chimney and hurtle to the floor of the cave.

  Patty hoped she wasn’t sticking her groping hand into some creature’s mouth, she hoped she wasn’t going to throw herself sideways onto an ants’ nest.

  The ground seemed firm enough. She twisted a creeper around her left hand. With her last scrap of strength, she heaved herself up and over the edge of the chimney.

  She lay, trembling and nauseous, upon rotting vegetation. Red ants started to bite the flesh of her arms and legs.

  Patty managed to haul herself into a crouch position; slowly she edged her way toward the nearest tree trunk, hacking at the foliage with the two fish knives that had been stuck in her belt.

  It took her nearly half an hour to reach the tree and tie the rope around the silvery trunk. She scrabbled with bleeding hands for stones; cautiously, she moved near enough to throw them down the chimney. She threw three stones, which meant, “I’m up and I’m okay, and the rope is attached to the tree.??
?

  She thought she heard a cry from the shaft, but it was too faint and distorted for the words to be distinguishable. She tugged off Jonathan’s shirt from her hair and wiped her sweating face with it, then crouched against the tree. She wasn’t going to move from this spot. As agreed, she was going to whistle until he found her, until Jonathan hacked his way through to her with his machete. She wasn’t going to move one inch. There might be other natural chimneys around here. If so, she didn’t want to stumble into one.

  * * *

  Patty could hear Jonathan before she saw him. As they shouted to each other, she gradually heard the thwack of his machete, hacking a path toward her. When at last he made his final slashes through the undergrowth, Patty hurled herself against his naked sweating chest.

  “That’s my good girl,” he said, holding her trembling body against him and stroking her short, fair hair. “We’ll soon have you feeling fine again.”

  He half-carried, half-dragged her through the low, narrow tunnel he had cut through the undergrowth. As soon as they were clear of secondary jungle, he picked Patty up in his arms and gently carried her to the waterfall pool.

  Carefully, Annie removed what remained of Patty’s navy shirt. Silvana tenderly bathed her scratches and dried them with her own shirt. Softly, Annie gently rubbed antiseptic cream on the wounds.

  As she watched, Suzy realized for the first time that she, like Patty, would soon be dependent on this bunch of women, whom she had never before trusted. They said they were going to teach her to swim, and Suzy didn’t like the idea. She trusted the water no more than she trusted the women. Trust was alien to Suzy’s nature; she loathed the idea of dependency, and was as suspicious of it as a wild animal scenting a trap.

  Carey hadn’t returned from her fishing trip. Jonathan went to look for her, while the four other women peeled off their clothes and bathed naked in the waterfall pool, except for Silvana, who swam in her black lace underwear.

  By the time Carey joined the other women, Patty had recovered enough to help her teach Suzy to survival-float.

  Patty explained, “You don’t move, Suzy. You hang in the water, like a skydiver, with legs and arms apart, loose and relaxed.”

  Crouched on the sea rocks, Suzy snorted. It was hard to persuade her into the water, because the entire pool was out of her depth. The two swimmers treaded water with Suzy clinging between them, an arm around each neck.

  Eventually, using the empty plastic water container as a float, Suzy lay, clumsily spread-eagled, with the container bobbing beneath her stomach. As she floated by herself around the pool, flanked by Patty and Carey, she crowed with delight at her achievement.

  Then came the nasty moment when the plastic container was pushed out of the way. Patty and Carey crossed their arms under Suzy’s stomach while she got used to the idea of hanging in the water.

  Patty said, “Try dipping your face underwater, to get used to the feeling.”

  Suzy’s body immediately went rigid and her head jerked upward. “I can’t! I won’t! You can’t make me!”

  Patty and Carey said nothing, but waited. After a few minutes Suzy’s mutinous fear subsided; she knew that this was for real. Jonathan had made it clear that he wouldn’t allow her on the raft if she couldn’t swim.

  Within half an hour, Suzy was confidently survival-floating.

  They had no soap. Annie and Silvana rubbed their bodies and hair with handfuls of sand before they dived in. Silvana had never seen another naked female adult. Embarrassed, she wouldn’t remove her black lace underwear, but couldn’t help shooting furtive glances at the bodies of the other women. She had thought that women were all pretty much the same shape except that some were bigger than others; but these bodies were all a different shape and the breasts differed as much as the noses of their owners. Patty’s long, narrow body was lean, like that of a boy, and her breasts were small and pointed. Annie was very white and soft; her breasts were like halves of a tennis ball, with little pink stick-out nipples. Carey had large brown nipples; her body was big and solid like a Botticelli maiden, except that she still had some tan from the summer. Suzy had the legs and midriff of a twelve-year-old child, but there was nothing immature about her big breasts and small, high, dimpled backside.

  While the other women larked around in the pool, Silvana felt self-conscious, as though they were looking at her. Treading water, Silvana pinched her behind; it felt as if she were digging her finger into an overripe avocado. She felt ashamed of her body and vulnerable. Although nobody was likely to do so, she felt that at any moment the others might point scornfully at her and jeer.

  Afterward, as they sat on the rocks, Annie distributed their clothes; she’d soaked them to disperse the sweat. Dressed in their wet clothes, the women felt relatively cool as they scrambled up the rocks and back to their camp.

  Before the swim, Carey had caught four small parrotfish. She found this a disappointing catch; she had a proper line, she knew how to fish and there seemed to be plenty of fish in the lagoon. Now Jonathan gutted the fish and they roasted them over the campfire, spiked on branches. Bits of fish were raw and bits were burned, but nobody complained.

  After the fruit course—raw coconut again—Jonathan refused to let Carey smoke one of her own cigarettes. They were the only cigarettes that the small group possessed—a valuable, fast way of dispelling leeches and mosquitoes, which hate smoke. The most deadly form of animal life that threatened them was the mosquito, one female type of which carried malaria.

  “Just one cigarette,” Carey pleaded. “Please. I’ve been smoking two packs a day since I first went to college.”

  “Then you’d finish these in half a day, so why not pretend they’re already finished?” Jonathan said.

  Patty suggested, “Maybe you can find a leaf substitute in the jungle. The natives smoke a native tobacco in their long pipes; it must grow around here someplace.”

  “I wouldn’t count on that,” Jonathan said shortly.

  In the searing midday heat, they slept again; it was too hot to do anything else.

  Later, they built a proper campfire. Patty and Carey dug a pit, about the size of a baby’s bath, scooping up the dirt with the empty coconut shells. Jonathan trimmed a couple of saplings at the branch division until he had two Y-shaped pieces of wood each about a foot long. He buried one of these supports at either end of the little pit and across them he placed a stout stick of green wood, from which he hung a metal bucket of water.

  “In the future,” he said, “all our water has to be purified by boiling and then it must be filtered through my socks, to catch almost invisible bits of twig, leaf and other vegetation.”

  Suzy stopped laughing when she realized he was serious. She was the camp water carrier. He’d showed her how to draw water from the river, the pail tied to her waist by a long length of rattan, in case she let go of it.

  “Any fast-flowing water that runs over sand will have been filtered,” he explained, “but there may be a village upstream of that rope bridge, and when there’s a village, there’ll be rats, and where there’s rats, there’s rat piss, and that pollutes the water.”

  Jonathan and Carey followed the river upstream, until they reached a stream that ran into it. Later, Jonathan brought all the women to the edge of the wide, fast-running stream, where he taught them how to fish. Carey carefully demonstrated the techniques to the other women.

  As they trudged back to camp with three small trout and a freshwater shrimp the size of a lobster, Jonathan said, “This time, you each gut your own fish.”

  “Yuk!” said Suzy.

  After their evening meal, as they squatted around the camp-fire in the dark, he cut up one of the mosquito nets to make veils that tied under the chin—like beekeepers’ veils—for the floppy white sun hats they’d saved from the Louise. They would take turns using the other two mosquito nets at night, with priority going to anyone who fell ill.

  “Okay!” said Jonathan as he finished the veils. “Pretend i
t’s Melbourne Cup Day. Hats fit to lead in the winning horse. Try ’em on for size.”

  “Try my mudpacks first,” Annie said. She had mixed up a billycan of black mudpack, using earth and water from the riverbank. This was to be slapped on legs and ankles to protect them from mosquitoes and to soothe their sting.

  On the previous night, there had been fierce arguments over the four pairs of leather fishing gloves, which could protect hands from mosquitoes. They were all grateful for the huge white cotton fishing shirts from the boat which protected the top of the body, but beneath their skimpy shorts, Suzy and Patty’s legs, and everybody’s ankles, had been mercilessly bitten.

  Looking at one another’s muddy faces, topped by the ludicrous veiled hats, the women started to laugh—for the first time since their tragedy.

  Annie said, “We’ll wash it off every morning when we dip.”

  “And after the dip you’ll hold a foot inspection,” Jonathan said. Their feet were going to be even more important than their hands. Sneakers were to be washed every night and dried by the fire. Feet were to be bathed every evening in hot saltwater to harden them. “And don’t, for God’s sake, break a blister. Once you get foot rot or jungle footsores, you probably won’t get rid of them.”

  Patty held her head in both hands. “I need a nurse right now. I’ve had a headache ever since I climbed up that chimney. Isn’t there any aspirin in the first-aid box?”

  Although it contained a battered packet of aspirin, the first-aid box was a disappointment. The tin was rusty and none too clean, and the contents were old and used. The tube of antiseptic cream had been squeezed nearly empty, as had the tube of insect repellent. Half the calamine lotion was gone, and there was very little adhesive tape left on the roll. Nevertheless, the box contained a couple of bandages, a small pair of scissors, a tube of lip-blister cream, a tin of talcum powder, a broken thermometer, a bottle of smelling salts and a small, dirty jar of anonymous ointment.

  Jonathan picked up the small jar and rubbed some brown ointment on the center of Patty’s forehead. “It’s tiger balm, opium-based. Removes headaches and hangover.”