Читать книгу Castle of Water - Dane Huckelbridge, Dane Huckelbridge - Страница 16

9

“Ouch, hold up a second.”

“Merde, what is it now?”

“I stepped on a piece of shell.”

Barry executed a few hops on one foot to extract the sharp little shard of conch from his heel.

“Are you ready?” Sophie asked with more than a hint of annoyance.

Barry took a few limping steps. “I think it went pretty deep.”

Sophie did another one of her exasperated exhales through pursed lips. “Putain,” she muttered as, glazed in sweat (it was significantly warmer on this day), she undid a few buttons of the borrowed shirt. “By the way, why were you dressed like this? These are office clothes. You looked ridiculous back at the airport.”

Barry sat in the sand to take a closer look at his foot. “I know, I came straight from the office.”

“You left for Tahiti from your office and didn’t change your clothes?”

Barry shrugged. “It was my last day of work, and I didn’t feel like going back to my apartment.”

“So you went directly to the airport?”

“Yeah, pretty much. I’d bought the tickets the week before, but I jumped in a cab and went straight from work.”

Sophie mumbled something derogatory about Americans and bloused out the shirt with her fingers to let some of the heat escape. “Well, it’s absurd, wearing a shirt like this on vacation.”

“I’m not wearing it, you are. And you’re welcome to give it back anytime you like.”

Sophie snorted. “Of course not. You will stare at my breasts.”

“What?” Barry snorted as well, and punctuated it with a laugh. “You actually think your tits are on my mind at the moment?”

Sophie shrugged, the same forcedly indifferent shrug she had mastered back at the cafés of the tenth when one of her friends confessed to an affair, or being in love with her psychiatrist, or having eaten an entire Saint Honoré all by herself. “Why not? You’re a man, non? Unless women don’t interest you.”

“Yes, women interest me,” Barry replied, both his foot and his pride momentarily wounded.

“There, you see? I keep the shirt. Merci beaucoup.”

Sophie plodded off defiantly across the sand, and Barry, having the courtesy to at least wait until she was out of earshot, muttered something derogatory about the French and ill-tempered women both. He rose to his feet, though, and hobbled after her, having realized as soon as she escaped his view that it was better to be in the company of an “uppity French bitch” than to be shirtless and hopeless and utterly alone. Plus, there was a raft, possibly stocked with freeze-dried astronaut ice cream, waiting just past the sun-drenched palms.

When the bright orange rubber of the raft came into sight, Sophie was already crouched over it, undoing the fastenings on a waterproof satchel. Barry approached and knelt beside her.

“This is it?”

“Oui. This is the kit.”

“What’s inside it?”

“I’m in the process of finding out. And the raft still works. I checked. It deflated because the plug came loose, not because it had a hole.”

“Well, that’s good news,” Barry remarked, although he wasn’t sure it actually was. Even a cursory scan of the horizon revealed an obvious lack of nearby islands to row to (and yes, there were two small plastic oars bundled beside the survival kit as well—Sophie evidently had not used them). The odds of them making it on the open ocean, much like the statistical probability of his artistic success, appeared to be one in a million.

As for the survival kit, it did not contain quite the freeze-dried bounty Barry had dreamed of, but its contents proved to be far more useful in the long-term sense. One by one, Sophie removed the items from the satchel and laid them carefully out on a space of smoothed sand. Included in the lineup was:

1 white plastic first-aid kit, containing gauze, bandages, sterilized sewing needles and thread, a plethora of alcohol wipes, antibiotic cream, and, strangely enough, cold medicine.

1 flare gun with six flare cartridges—instructions to its use were stamped on the handle.

1 emergency foil blanket folded into a silver cube. (Barry recognized it instantly from the New York City Marathon; the runners always donned them like capes after the race for warmth.)

1 box-cutter-style utility knife with six fresh blades.

12 emergency energy bars, packed, according to the labels, with carbohydrates and essential vitamins and minerals.

4 bottles of distilled water, ready to drink.

6 heavy-duty resealable plastic bags, empty and rolled, to be used for potential water storage.

1 solar still. (This one took a moment to figure out, but Barry recognized its plastic dome from his old Boy Scout manual and explained that it could be used to get limited quantities of freshwater from the ocean.)

1 spool of medium-gauge filament fishing line.

15 fishhooks of varying sizes, complete with sinkers and lures.

1 Grundig FR-200 shortwave radio with a hand-crank generator.

1 Brunton magnetic field compass.

1 waterproof match safe containing (and yes, Sophie counted each one) forty-eight matches.

1 waterproof Maglite flashlight.

1 bundle of thin nylon rope (one hundred feet or so, by Barry’s rough estimation).

1 pack of Russian cigarettes. (Barry didn’t recognize the brand, but the warning label was in Cyrillic.)

2 stainless-steel drinking cups/cooking pots with folding handles.

3 lightweight blue plastic tarps.

0 packages of astronaut ice cream.

There it was. Their lot. Their chance at survival. Barry grinned and reached for one of the water bottles.

“Ow!” he exclaimed when Sophie smacked his hand.

“Put that down. Those are for an emergency.”

“What the hell do you call surviving a plane crash and being stranded on a goddamn island?”

“We have freshwater for the time being, so we must drink that. Actually, we should fill the extra water bags in case we need them later.”

“So I suppose no energy bars either?”

Sophie shook her head. “Non. We might need them later as well. The best thing now would be for you to catch us a fish.”

“Why should I catch the fish?”

“Because you are American, like Huckleberry Finn, no?”

“But you are French, like Jacques Cousteau, no?”

“Non. You can catch the fish.”

“Christ.” Barry plopped down on the sand. “Can I at least have a cigarette?” He asked this sarcastically.

Sophie did her shrug. “Sure, why not.”

Barry picked apart the foil of the Russian cigarettes and held open the honeycomb of exposed white butts in offering toward her.

“No, thank you, I don’t smoke.”

“You’re French, and you don’t smoke?”

“You’re American, and you don’t know how to fish?” She said this snarkily, with an exaggerated twang she had no doubt picked up from some cowboy movie, and that infuriated Barry.

“You want fish? Fine, I’ll get you some fish. See you back at camp, ma chérie.”

“Don’t ever call me that!” Sophie was suddenly enraged. “I’m not your chérie.” She hastily undid the buttons and whipped off the shirt, throwing it at his feet.

Barry didn’t reply. Detecting at last her hidden layer of heartache, he realized, as he picked up the shirt and stamped off across the sand, that as young and pretty and seemingly impervious to disaster as his island-mate might seem, the ink on her widowhood was still painfully fresh—a fact that was demonstrated quite clearly by the fading sound of her sobs as she dragged the raft alone back to camp.