Lost Girls (28 page)

“No, it’s all right. I’m not the least bit sleepy. Hungry, though.”

“It’s not breakfast time yet. You’ll have to wait.” I wag my finger at her.

“What I wouldn’t give for a hot chocolate,” she says.

“Mmm, with a jam doughnut,” I add.

“A doughnut!”

“Mmm, and a thick slice of toast with honey and peanut butter.”

“Oh, stop!” Jas says.

My mouth is watering. “Coconut?” I offer.

“No, please, not coconut!” Jas says, and we giggle.

“God, I’d kill my grandmother for a whole roast chicken with roast potatoes, sausage stuffing, peas, and gravy,” I tell Jas. “D’you know what Gran says when she’s hungry? She says, ‘I could eat a scabby wee bairn.’ ”

Jas laughs at my hammed-up Scottish accent, and Layla stirs in her sleep.

“No shortage of scabby bairns here,” Jas says.

As we start the day’s climb, my thoughts turn to Layla. She’s been quiet, treating Jas and me like equals, almost.

I suppose it was a sort of hero worship I had—we all had—for Layla Campbell. She’s pretty and tragic, like a heroine in a romantic novel. The kind of novel Mom
despises. I realize I’m thinking about Layla as if she were dead. But perhaps my idea of who she was is dead. She’s kooky, a hippie, unusual, not like my mom or the other USAF wives. She has—
had—
a glamour about her, a mystery. But she let us down.

Mom says everyone needs heroes. She says it’s good to have someone to look up to and admire. Like the boxer Cassius Clay—or Muhammad Ali, as he wants to be called now. Dad used to really like him until he refused to join the U.S. Army, a conscientious objector. Now he despises him. “Draft dodger,” he calls him. But Ali refused to join the army because war is against the teachings of the Holy Qur’an. So I admire him for it. It’s not draft-dodging; it’s against his Islamic principles to fight in a Christian war. He said, “I ain’t got no quarrel with the Vietcong…. No Vietcong ever called me nigger.”

It’s just one more thing that Dad and I disagree about. I have a poster of Muhammad Ali on my bedroom wall. I’ve also got one of Mahatma Gandhi. Dad never comes into my room, but if he ever did, and he saw them, he’d go mad. I don’t care. Mom agrees with me that it’s none of their business how I decorate my room. As long as I don’t paint it black.

I’d do anything to be back home with them. I’d even paint my room pink if that’s what Dad wanted.

FIRE MOUNTAIN KOH TABU, JUNE 1974

It turns out that Fire Peak is not far from the Cave of Hands, and we get there without mishap. I must have gone the long way around the first time. The other two are a bit slower than I am at climbing, but I showed them the best way up and we all carried tinder and firewood. It’s so much easier with three of us.

The fire was lit after only a few tries. Our spark stone works brilliantly. I wonder what the monk uses for fire? He probably
only has the under-earth oven, as he doesn’t want to advertise his presence with smoke. What a lonely, strange life he must have—but beautiful, too. I think of the tiger lying next to him. It was like that painting of a saint—maybe Saint Anthony, or Daniel, I can’t remember—surrounded by tigers and lions and their prey, lying in peace and harmony with one another. A part of me wants to talk to Jas and Layla about the monk, but I must be discreet.

If the world gets to know about him and his tiger he’ll be in mortal danger. I can’t ever mention him. He must be protected from the outside world. No one must ever read this journal.

We stay by the fire for two days and two nights and see only one ship, a long way off. Two small craft, local fishing boats, have come closer, but have gone on by. No planes.

Jas worries about Jody and Carly and, like me, doesn’t trust May and Arlene to cope if anything goes wrong—like an attack by wild boars. Layla’s pulling her weight. We have found bananas and coconuts, and although we
are bored to death with them, they keep us alive. We’ll have to go back down soon, anyway, as we are running out of water. My clothes are disgustingly smelly again but the wind at night is cooler up here and we need to wear everything we’ve got. Mostly we huddle in our sleeping bags on the flat rock close to the fire.

“I’m going to look for freshwater,” I say, taking one of the empty containers. Finding a water source would mean that we could stay and keep the fire going for longer. I hack my way through uncleared forest and nearly step on a fallen nest with a clutch of quite big eggs. A feast of scrambled eggs! Or it could be, if we had a frying pan. I try to pick the eggs up, but one of them is broken and I get the mess all over my hands. It’s so sticky I can’t wipe it off. Sticky! That’s it! Glue—we have glue! We can make a successful kite now, glue it together. Phaedrus would be proud of me, working it out, thinking things through. Carrying the eggs in my T-shirt, I get back to the others and tell them my plan. It’s a good one, they agree.

“Shall we make it here or wait until we get to the beach?” I ask.

“It has more chance of being seen if we fly it here. It will go higher than it could go from the beach,” Layla responds.

“Okay, but let’s eat some now.” Jas looks desperate.

“Not raw, please, I can’t stand it,” I answer.

“Watch this.” Layla uses the handle of the knife to chip gently away at the rounded top of an egg until she has broken off a dime-sized piece of shell. “Now the egg can cook in its own little pan, without exploding.” She places the egg, pointed side down, in the embers of the fire, and then repeats the process with two more eggs. We sit over the fire watching them cook. After about twenty minutes we use twigs like chopsticks to pick up the eggs and remove them from the fire. When the shells have cooled a little we peel the eggs and eat them. It’s the most delicious food I have ever tasted.

“Where did you learn that?” I ask. Perhaps she’s a survivor after all.

She shrugs. “My aunt Aggie, maybe. She was a Girl Guide.”

We search for the right sort of springy thin bamboo for the kite, split it, and then make twine from split palm leaves. We already have some twine with us from beach finds. What to use as the fabric? Nothing we have is light enough; I’m pretty sure that that was my mistake before. Paper would be better. I find a relatively sheltered spot at the foot of the rocks and begin to tear out more pages of
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
. I dip each page into a coconut shell filled with raw egg and paste them together, sticking them onto the diamond-shape
framework, reading the pages as I go. I get to the part where Phaedrus’s son has died, on page 422:

Now Chris’s body, which was part of that larger pattern, was gone. But the larger pattern remained…. If you take that part of the pattern that is not the flesh and bones of Chris and call it the “Spirit” of Chris or the “Ghost” of Chris, then you can say without further translation that the spirit or ghost of Chris is looking for a new body to enter.

Phaedrus and his wife have another baby, called Nell, and Chris’s spirit lives on in her. I wonder if Hope’s spirit will live on if her parents have another child, or if Sandy’s wandering spirit will be at rest in another body. Buddhists believe in perpetual reincarnation, Lan Kua told me. I’m not sure what I believe.

I fit the strings onto the back of the kite, knotting bits of string and handmade bark twine together. Then I make the tail using the rest of the pages. Phaedrus would be proud if he could see me now.

Carrying my precious cargo on my back, I climb to the top of the rock. The fire is only just burning, and not a great deal of smoke rises high. It mostly gets blown away
across the island like a thin gray mist. Two small fishing boats head past the island, way out beyond the reef. Layla and Jas have been jumping up and down, waving their arms, but we all know it’s hopeless and that they won’t be seen.

Layla takes the kite and walks as far away as she can on the flat rock. I hold the flight string, tightly coiled around a stick. As she hurls the kite into the air I pull and lift, pull and lift, until our bird flies high. It wavers once but finally rises until the string is at its last foot or so. We stand gazing up at it, our signal kite. Our freed bird. No SOS on it this time, no lipstick or mascara, just the many wise words of Robert M. Pirsig. Will anyone see?

“Who wants the rest of the water?” Layla offers an almost empty canister.

“You have it,” I tell Jas.

“Ugh! It’s gasoline!” Jas spits. “We must have brought the wrong bottle!”

“Give it here.” As quick as a flash I exchange the kite for the can. “Get away, both of you. Run!”

“What are you doing?”

“Just get out of here!”

I hurl the gasoline onto the smoldering bonfire and throw myself as far away from it as I can, crawling along on all fours on the rock, following Jas and Layla. Blue flames leap into the sky. I do believe the boats are coming
closer. Yes, yes. Have they seen the flames, or the kite? Will native boats land on an island that is taboo? We lose sight of them behind the trees. They are still many hours away.

“Come on, let’s go back. It’ll take us at least a day, don’t forget,” Layla says.

“No, we can go faster downhill. I know the way. Come on!” I reply.

Abandoning our fire but taking the kite, sleeping bags, and backpack, we hurry back down. Layla gets winded very quickly.

“It’s all that smoking,” I can’t help saying.

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” she puffs. “It’s my new year’s resolution—to quit.”

“But it’s June already,” says Jas.

“Don’t waste breath, hurry!” I urge them.

At one point we come to a thirty-foot drop where there’s a waterfall. I have lost us. If we have to climb around, it will take hours; the forest is so thick, and we’ll have to hack our way through.

“The waterfall,” I say. “The only way to do this is to go straight down it.”

“How?”

I rip a vine from a tree near the top and hang on to it as I walk down backward through the water. The others follow. We’ve saved a lot of time coming this way, and if
we follow the stream we will get to the beach in an hour or so.

Gibbons
hoo-hoo
at us from branches and toucans peer at us over their large, bulbous beaks. At one point deer run from our path. Dhole bark. We pass the temple and the Cave of Hands, the mineral lick, the ferny clearing. Cicadas sing shrilly. All is a dream on this descent, a speeded-up movie of jungle life; we fall over trailing branches and the massive roots of fig trees. We are scratched, cut, bruised. My beautiful kite is ripped on thorns, but I carry its remains as if it were an injured bird. Layla is crying with exhaustion and has to stop to catch her breath. Jas waits for her while I continue alone, running now. A quick drink at the stream and on I go.

At last, covered in sweat, blood, and mud, thorns in my legs and arms, and covered in bites, I come to the beach.

Jody runs to me along the beach,
followed closely by the others. “A boat, a boat! Bonnie, a boat!”

I’m sobbing. I haven’t the breath to speak.

“It’s coming to take us home.” Carly is unrecognizable. They all are. Carly has clean hair, clean face, and clean clothes, even clean fingernails. Bitten to the quick, but clean. Her face is covered in carefully applied makeup, as is Jody’s. Arlene and May have obviously had a ball giving them “makeovers.” They have looked after them after all.

Miraculously, the campfire is still alight.

The first boat is negotiating the reef. It sweeps through and putters in on its outboard motor. The other boat appears, rising on a wave and sliding through the reef,
perched on the rolling waves. Jas and Layla come out of the trees. We all run together toward the first boat as it reaches the shore.

“Bonnie, Bonnie!”

“Mom, Dad!”

I can’t believe it. My parents climb and stumble over the side of the boat, followed by Jas’s mom and dad. I fall into my mother’s arms.

“We’ve found you, we’ve found you,” she cries.

I’m not dreaming. The other boat beaches and Jody’s and Carly’s parents and Hope’s mother jump over the sides onto the sand. Jas’s parents are holding Jas and crying. A short man with a crew-cut and a woman with tight black curls stagger ashore. Arlene and May run to them.