Yet when Kris and I didn’t reappear at Cayman airport, Robin Darcy would surely send out rescuers. Kris’s orange dinghy could be seen for miles, and my life jacket, though a smaller dot in the ocean, was purposely bright. I shut my mind to the driving rain and fearsome colossal waves that would keep a life-jacket-seeking helicopter safe on the ground at home.
Odin was a slow-moving hurricane, but even the slow ones eventually passed. I, to live, had first to out-last Odin, and then to be visible, and then to be preferably visible on a regular cross-Caribbean air route.
Thoughts came slowly, none of them joyful. For instance, a thought unwelcome: the Caribbean was a very big sea. For another instance, another thought; I might be a practised surf rider, but first, I didn’t have a surfboard handy, and second, no surfboard ever could realistically ride a thirty-foot storm surge.
With useless jumbled thought, then, and no constructive decisions, I struggled simply to stay afloat with my head up out of the water. The life jacket was at least one of those with the main flotation collar in front supporting one’s chin, so that even when overwhelmed by the curling crest of a towering wave, the life jacket slowly righted its wearer — like a saturated cork rising.
One could swallow salt water and gasp painfully for air. One could claw oneself constantly upright into surface-whipping winds and stay there for a while, just able to breathe, but after the late afternoon had passed miserably into darkness, one could begin, in the endless heavy battering of racing waves, to feel that nothing, now, could grant deliverance, or reprieve.
One could pass into delirium, and one could drown.
Chapter 5
A long time after coherent thought of any kind had stopped, when flashes of illusion still made me believe my grandmother in silver was swimming in the waves not far ahead, a long time after the apparitions of Robin and Kris, holding hands, had dissolved from beckoning me wetly towards them to be shot, in the roaring non-human severity of Odin, while the remains of instinct flickered still in heart valves and groped for life in brain stem, a monstrous wave picked me up and lifted me high and flung the rag doll I’d become against an impossibly towering peak.
The peak wasn’t water... it was rock.
Far from giving me joy, it knocked me out.
This gift of a spared life, I gleaned a fair time later, came from the rock wall forming one end of the deserted jetty where ships had once docked to unload the life-blood stores for Trox Island.
There were the remains of scrubby bushes and stick-like saplings still growing indomitably from cracks and ledges, and it was among them, and gripped by them against an uneven and abrasive rockface, that I had come to rest.
Held fast there, I slowly seeped back to consciousness, and it seemed at first natural, and then with woozy reflection, extremely unnatural, that I should know where I was.
The knowledge came without strength or desire to do anything about it. I turned myself slightly to look along to the end of the dock and found that more than half of the structure, though built of very heavy timber and rooted in concrete, had been torn away as if made of cardboard.
Consciousness drifted away again into a troubled bad-dream-filled utterly exhausted state that was as much daze as sleep.
Several centuries or so later I noticed it had been raining ever since I’d opened my salt-water swollen eyes. Rain washed the salt from my limbs but all my skin was crinkled from too long an immersion, and in spite of water water every where nor any drop to drink, I had like any ancient mariner a scorchingly painful salt-induced thirst.
Rain... I opened my mouth to it hungrily. It filled my throat; it filled my mind. I realised that my grandmother wasn’t really out there in silver, swimming. Robin Darcy’s gun was back in Sand Dollar Beach, scaring the shit out of intruders.
Weakness went on, however, encouraging me to lie still. On the other hand, I was half way up a low cliff, lying among roots that the constant rain was loosening: and as if on cue, some of the bushes slid out of their anchorage and sent me tumbling and slithering with a mass of scratches down and down until I reached the hard surface of the dock itself.
By good luck the dock, though now smashed, had originally been built for the mooring of merchant ships, which meant the surface of the dock itself was above the turgid water. Brown rough waves sped threateningly along its length now, but only a few slapped heavily over its surface, as if searching for things to suck back into their grasp. The height and vigour of the waves that had managed my arrival had died down by nearly half. Seas of the present weight couldn’t have ripped up something as heavy as the dock.
So I lay a bit longer in the rain and thought of Kris and the eye of Odin, and the whole day seemed unreal.
The whole day... the light was grey... but it wasn’t night, and it had been night when I’d been on the edge of drowning.
Yesterday, I thought with incredulity. Kris and I had come here yesterday... and I’d spent all night in the black water, and I’d seen the shape of the cliff I’d crashed onto because the tired old world was spinning slowly towards the return of grey morning.
Ticking over again on the shattered dock I realised that it hadn’t been so damaged the day before. There hadn’t been any damage at all. I simply hadn’t the energy to do more than conclude that the destructive winds of Odin had crossed the island since we’d left. Soon, I told myself, soon I would go back up the hill to the little village. Soon I would get on with living. I had actually never before felt so weak.
As if to prod my flagging spirits, the heavy rain abruptly stopped.
To make some sort of start, I fiddled with the clips fastening the life jacket and managed only to tie the tapes into more difficult knots. Undoing them took ages. It was stupid how much my arms ached.
I still had no impression of hours. Day was light, night was dark. When day began fading again I finally put some resolution into things and with more effort than normal struggled to my bare feet and very slowly trudged up from sea level to the village which sat on the cliff top at a height of roughly two hundred feet. Storm surge waves might not wash away whole communities at such a height, but hurricane winds came with no such inhibitions. The little village of the day gone by, the houses, the church and the mushroom sheds, all had been blown to destruction.
I stood stock still, the life jacket dangling from my hand.
The concrete rectangles where the houses had stood were still in place: the roofs had vanished and the timbers of their walls were heaped and scattered with broken window frames twisted, glass gone. The water-catching cisterns were full of debris and mud, with no buckets to be seen.
The church had no roof. The spire and two walls had collapsed. All the mushroom sheds had vanished, though on the ground in outline one could see where they had been.
The only structures still standing were the two ultra-thick-walled concrete huts, and even they showed marks of battery from other flying debris.
Without shoes — and with socks sea-lost also — I found the village area made for even more uncomfortable progress than the hill, but I trod my way gingerly to the nearest of the thick-walled huts, the one that had contained the bunk beds, and went inside.
The doorway — with no door — led through the four-foot thick wall into deepening gloom, where my eyes took time to adjust. The entrance, I reckoned at length, had been almost face-on to the wind, in view of the chaotic results. A good quantity of wood was still inside the hut, even though no longer neatly organised into bunks. Hefty planks seemed to have been hurtled across the interior space to crash like battering rams into the walls. The force needed for the holes they had dug in the plastered walls gave me the thankful shivers: Kris and I might have thought we would find safe shelter in there if the storm had caught us on land.