Shelter. It occurred to me that the roof hadn’t blown off, as it had off everything else, except perhaps off the other hut. The tangled planks, and the concrete floor, were mostly dry. Outside it was still not raining, though the light was fading against a heavy sky.
No one would come now before night. No one could have seen little Trox earlier in blinding rain. Accept it, I thought with tiredness; in twelve hours, but not before, someone would come.
Believe it.
Someone will come.
In the remains of the light, I laid several planks side by side on the dank inhospitable concrete, and with the flotation collar for pillow I lay down on my back... and couldn’t sleep.
Thirst had passed, but hunger burrowed like a screw in my stomach. I’d eaten nothing since the barbecue dinner in the Ford house, and I hadn’t wanted breakfast in the run up to the Odin hunt. The uneaten Danish pastries at the Owen Roberts’ airfield tantalised my emptiness until I could almost smell them. In the morning I’d find food and drink, I told myself, but without shoes I wasn’t going foraging in the dark.
The island air, at least, was sweetly warm; and, if it rained again, I would be dry. Hurricanes, particularly those like Odin, that formed and gained their strength in the Caribbean, not the Atlantic, were notoriously unpredictable in their travel, but they seldom turned right round one hundred and eighty degrees and retraced their former path. If it had happened, the occurrences had been so rare that it wasn’t worth worrying about.
I closed my eyes, but after its sluggish day my brain accelerated and relentlessly reviewed, remembered and relived all the steps to my present troubles. There were still whole prairies of unanswered questions defeating the simplest speculations, like why grow mushrooms on a tiny island in the Caribbean Sea? Like why send two meteorologists to race a hurricane to see what state the mushrooms were in? But surely Robin Darcy wouldn’t have bought an aeroplane just for that... and he’d bought it for Nicky, not Odin.
I supposed that someone, somewhere, might make sense of it. Robin had to know, didn’t he?
I spent a long time imagining Kris in the orange dinghy, his face looking back at me in horror as the screaming elements seized his future. If he managed to stay in the dinghy he would whirl across the face of the waters faster than racing speedboats. According to the instructions I’d followed too carelessly about how to open the dinghy (I should have climbed in to start with) there was a rudder and two paddles to steer with, but the calm sea they needed lay long hours ahead.
I switched off at the possibility that the gales had sucked the dinghy airborne. I balked at the probability that the canvas inflated shell went somersaulting over and over across the seas until Kris fell out into the water and met no Trox cliffs to scoop him to land.
I shifted restlessly on my hard plank bed, and long before dawn went outside to sit with my back against the hut’s exterior wall, my sight filled unexpectedly with stars.
The hurricane had gone over. The night was cloudless and still. Only the waves, heavily hurrying along the ruined mooring stage with a distant slap and hiss, spoke of the terrible force unleashed a day earlier on the little wrecked hamlet.
Hunger set me moving as soon as I could see where I was treading, but I already knew all the cupboards were bare, even if any were still standing. When the people of Trox Island had left they’d packed their lives to go with them. I looked in vain for a container that would hold liquids, and ended by sucking up spoonfuls of rain water from any sort of hollow I came across.
There was nothing to eat except muddy grass.
I navigated carefully over to the second thick-walled hut, that had been empty anyway on our first visit, and stood inside looking in puzzlement at the change high winds had wrought.
For a start, the inner surface of two of the walls had been peeled away, leaving bare breeze-blocks in view. The two huts, though appearing the same from outside, were constructed differently within. The hut I’d passed the night in had been built of solid concrete with a plaster facing. The second hut’s thick walls had been lined with prefabricated panels of plaster-like walling, and it was several of these that had been torn off their fastenings and broken into pieces.
Because I was expecting to see nothing but destruction, it took me a while to notice that there were differences in these ripped-off walls, and that, in particular, one panel, dangling off its fixings, was half-hiding a door of sorts underneath.
I went over for a closer look and found that the inner door, behind the loose bit of walling, was fastened shut by a combination lock and was the front, in fact, of a safe.
If the thoroughness of the rest of the exodus was anything to go by, that safe too would be as bare as Mother Hubbard’s. I tried to pull it open, on the basis that the wind had weakened or destroyed everything it reached, but this one barrier stood obstinately fast and, giving it up, I returned to my hunt for food.
The big blue birds with brown legs looked tantalising, but without shoes I couldn’t catch one, and without fire I’d have to eat it raw, and I wasn’t yet desperate enough to try that. I could perhaps catch one of the larger iguanas who moved more slowly than the little ones, but again the lack of cooking deterred me.
But where were the cows?
Cows gave milk, and milk was food. There had been a large free-roaming herd of cattle on the island two days ago, and surely some of them had had calves, and calves needed milk...
As long as the whole herd hadn’t been blasted into the sea, as long as I could get a cow to stand still, as long as I could find any decent container such as an empty can to drink from, my worst and most immediate predicament would be solved.
Problem: I couldn’t see the herd.
Trox was a mile long, with the village at one end and the consolidated grass airstrip extending from it to the other. I carefully walked to the beginning of the strip, from where we’d raced to get off in the aeroplane, but search as I could for cows, I saw not so much as a tail swishing.
What I did find, though, to my delight, was my dropped camera. Second thoughts cooled the enthusiasm somewhat as although it was supposed to be waterproof and was still in its protective leather slip cover, it had been lying deep in mud as if I’d also stamped on it when I’d dropped it. I picked it up sadly and held it dangling with its strap entwined in the tapes of the life jacket.
With hunger still a priority I set off along one side of the runway, seeing a rocky fringe of land sloping down between the flat grass and the tossing sea. There was room for a herd there, but not a cow in sight. Depressed, I left that side of the runway and crossed over it to the other, and on the way thought that although that landing strip had been fabricated of earth and grass, it had been quite a feat of engineering, as its dimensions were wide and long enough to accommodate full-sized cargo and passenger aircraft, not just small twin-engined toys.
On the other side of the runway there was a much wider extent of rocky land, much of it scraped bare by abrasive winds. Palm trees lay on their sides, roots helpless in the air, palm crowns like sodden mop-heads on the ground. Palm trees... coconuts... I diverged from cows to coconut milk and lost a bit more skin from legs and feet in descending from runway height down nearer to sea level.
Before I found a coconut, I found the cows.
They were lying in a long dark group, their stomachs on the ground. A low cliff beyond them had given shelter of sorts against the gales, and I supposed their own weight and mass had done the rest.