Chapter Text
A solitary pair of teardrops stole down Jack’s dirty cheeks with force, tracing forbidden paths across the faint smears of blood and soil that were loyal to his skin, until they finally reached the young curve of his round little chin. Something warm had been flowing as well from beneath his belly like twin faucets.
The urine struck the grass with a distinctive sound. Something very like the angry hiss of hot oil when a handful of chicken meat is plunged into its depths, and that was some unnecessary vivid comparison there, but Jack was in no state to argue. He blinked so the other droplets would not cloud his sight any longer.
How long had he been holding it in? Three hours? Four? Jack carried no answer in his pocket at all. The relief felt so profound, so sweet, so utterly satisfying that the boy’s lacrimal glands reacted as though a rescue ship had finally arrived to carry him home.
There was a great deal of it. When there was a great deal it meant it had not yet stopped. When it had not yet stopped the trickling sound cotinued to ring out clearly.
Jack’s empty stomach gave a low growl at the memory of fried chicken.
Or maybe roasted chicken would taste even finer.
He blinked again.
I just brought down a boar, he thought once the last warm trickle had spent itself and tugged his trousers back into place. Jack had only just speared a mother pig the size of a small mountain with the sharpened stone-tipped weapon he had honed himself at an age not yet thirteen. The liquid of evidence undeniably engraved on his features.
Just kidding!
In truth the boar was not quite the size of a small mountain. It was merely a respectably large wild pig, nothing monstrous, nothing outside the ordinary. Jack simply wished it had been enormous. That was only natural when measured against his own scrawny frame, thin and brittle as a malnourished child’s.
Still, what words could possibly leave his father’s lips except ‘my son is truly a boy to be proud of’?
None, of course. His father was not there.
And strangely it was not his father’s reaction that Jack now craved. What he hungered to witness was the stunned, bewildered expression that would surely overtake Ralph the little dictator’s face when he and the choir boys — no, the hunters, you know — presented the pig as big as a meteor and as heavy as the Austrian painter’s sins. Behold, this is your feast tonight. This is proper nourishment for the littluns who still desperately need decent food if they are ever to grow tall and strong. Through Jack and the cho — the hunters, God has brought sustenance to us all.
Jack wiped the last traces of tears away with the back of his hand and gave a single, sharp sniff to clear his nose. Then he turned and made his way toward the pool beneath the waterfall, where the hunters were already engaged in their ritual of cleansing, which was really nothing more than a boisterous bath.
Who could ever dislike swimming?
Quite a few people, as it turned out, though Jack was not among them.
His father had once, two or three times perhaps, taken him swimming during holidays at the hotel. Back when his father still bothered to send letters regularly, back when he would come to collect Jack for Christmas instead of abandoning him to shiver with a cold in the empty dormitory, left alone with no one but batty Simon for company.
Batty Simon.
It all felt like another lifetime.
When Jack reached the rocks beside the stream, he saw several suitcases lying scattered about like forgotten relics.
“Whose are these?” Roger was there, already rummaging carelessly through one of the bags filled with clean clothes. “Is this yours, Jack?”
“No.”
Bowing across from him was Bill, and he answered without looking up: “Just take them,” while he continued to rifle through his own find like a burglar.
Jack bent down in front of one of the still-closed suitcases. It was not his, of course, yet heaven’s bounty was heaven’s bounty all the same. He had thought every scrap of his clothing had been devoured by the flames. His own suitcase was probably lying somewhere on the far side of the island.
“Who wants a piece of eel pie?”
Silence.
No one wants a piece of eel pie.
Half gently, half roughly, Jack pried open the suitcase until the dry, gleaming clothes inside revealed themselves like treasures. He gave a little snort and let a crooked smile tilt across his face, a habit that surfaced whenever something folded itself neatly to his will. The way Mr. Merridew raised an arrogant little brat.
He stroked his dirty palm against the soft fabric before lifting the top layers of garments aside and there, nestled beneath them, lay a tube of toothpaste and a toothbrush. Praise the Lord, Jack thought fervently, which might have been a bit excessive for a toothbrush, but he was sick to death of the foul breath that stretched from every boy around him, including his own, though admitting it aloud equals jumping himself off the rock cliff. How fiercely he had missed the sharp fiery sting of a toothpaste.
Under the toothpaste and toothbrush lay one more object that did not escape Jack’s sudden inspection.
There was, unfortunately, a book.
Almost immediately Jack’s face curled into a frown.
With a touch of haste he flipped open the first page, searching for any scrap of clue while secretly hoping that fate would once again align itself obediently with his wishes. Which was against his usual luck.
He swallowed not hard.
The familiar strokes of a pen carved out a neat line of letters etching the owner’s name with quiet certainty.
All of this treasure, every last piece of Jack’s sudden fortune, entirely belonged to batty Simon.
They called me ‘batty’.
I never understand why. I don’t feel insane or stupid or mentally slow. I consider myself perfectly normal, functioning like any ordinary human being. I may not speak much… but it feels very unfair that they labeled me batty simply because I like saying nothing.
It is easier, I think, to write things here than to say them aloud. Some people make it particularly difficult.
Today, there was a dispute over the marmalade again.
I fail to understand why it must become a daily event. Jack Merridew claimed it was “a matter of principle,” which I suspect is his way of saying he wanted more.
“I never knew you could read Arabic,” Maurice remarked in an impressed manner.
Jack’s whole body jerked as if he had been struck by lightning. As though he had been caught leafing through some adult magazine under the blazing midday sun.
While it’s true that the day was, in fact, still bright, what he held in his hands was neither a magazine nor anything remotely pornographic.
Or Arabic.
He lifted his head sharply and glared up at Maurice who now stood right beside him. “It’s Simon’s,” Jack muttered. Then he ducked his head again quickly, squinting against the sunlight.
“Bloody hell,” Maurice lowered himself onto the sand right beside Jack. The words meant to convey just how wildly curly Simon’s handwriting truly was, because he had genuinely believed for a second that he was looking at some Arabic manuscript. The loops and swirls reminded him oddly of Jack’s untamed hair. Strange that Jack seemed able to decipher it at all. “So the suitcase you just cracked open was his?”
“Yes.”
Maurice nodded slowly. His gaze drifting out toward the distant waves that never seemed to swell into anything truly grand before rolling ashore. “What did he write?”
“Dunno,” Jack lied while snapping the pages shut.
“Maybe I can try reading it,” Maurice said, stretching out his hand to receive the book. Jack immediately slapped the offered palm away with a sharp flick.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because it belongs to Simon,” scolded Jack.
Maurice grinned in utter baffle. “Then why are you reading it?”
“Because—” Jack’s tongue slipped just a fraction, barely noticeable, “because he wrote it with me.”
And that was another dishonesty.
Maurice’s eyes narrowed confusedly. “Did he? When?”
“During the long vacs,” Jack began raising his voice into a higher pitch as his patience started to fray at the edges.
“He talked to you then?”
“He talked to you too, didn’t he? To everyone, to the teachers?”
“Not really,” Maurice’s voice dropped lower, as though he were carefully correcting some memory inside his own head. “He was just… there in the choir group. That’s how I remember it. I don’t recall ever having a long conversation with him.” He made a pause, looking down at the sand between his toes. “I’m a little bit scared of him, y’know.”
Jack’s stomach gave an uneasy quiver. Then he snorted and turned his gaze away from Maurice’s face. “He really was a bit strange.”
Oh, come on, Jackie.
“He wasn’t too bad at rugger, though.”
Only the sound of the sea wind and the soft murmur of water answered, because Jack remained silent. Lips sealed, jaw tightly clenched. His bright blue eyes stared straight out toward the horizon of matching colour, so fixed and distant that if anyone had asked Maurice, he might have thought Jack had suddenly begun waiting for rescue ship to sail into view, which was offbeat because they kind of liked it here.
Hunting.
Singing.
Dancing.
Crickets had no bussiness in making loud noises in the middle of the day.
Maurice watched how Jack’s fingers unconsciously fiddled with the edge of the book’s cover, the way his thumb kept rubbing back and forth across the damp, already creased and crumpled layers of paper. Jack did not blink at all. He sat there zoning out at something only he could see.
“I’m curious just how strange he really was,” Maurice prodded once more. “Maybe the kid wrote something in there that explains why he was so weird in the fir—”
“Maurice,” Jack turned his head with a completely calm and rather bland expression, almost like he was genuinely trying to convince the other boy that, “there is nothing in there that you need to read. I promise.”
Spring break.
Only Jack and I remain here. All the other boys had gone home with their parents to spend the holiday together, the way proper families were supposed to do. As for me, I don't have a family, I don't have a father or a mother. I was born from a single seed.
That was the answer I gave when Jack asked whether I had a family or not, and he laughed.
Then he asked again, why didn’t my parents come to pick me up. I told him maybe they had made plans with his own parents in Bournemouth.
Why Bournemouth? I don’t know, I was just making it up.
Besides, I have no desire to explain to him that my father and mother were probably too busy throwing punches at each other again to remember they even had a son waiting in the dormitory. And I don’t want to ask why Jack’s own parents had failed to come and take him home either.
Maybe tomorrow he would tell me about it.
Jack did not tell Simon anything about it the next day.
Deep inside his mind, he remembered the real event that Simon had recorded on this very page.
Two or three years ago. That day had been the first time Jack had truly tried to talk to Simon. With absolute seriousness Jack had braced himself for the boy to answer with the same eerie, wide-eyed green stare that Simon so often fixed upon Maurice or Bill across the lunch table.
Jack had not known then that Simon was capable of sarcastic remark.
When he thought about it now, there hardly seemed to be anything particularly special about it. But when he turned the memory over once more, Jack had to admit it carried a certain quiet weight. After all, everyone had already decided Simon was strange, and strange boys were not meant to respond to idiotic, rhetorical questions as if they were worthy of proper answers.
At least, in Jack’s eyes, it proved that Simon was not quite as peculiar as people made him out to be.
“Since when did you become such a bookworm, Jack?” Roger had been pacing restlessly, balancing a couple of long branches on his shoulder like some lord of the sticks.
“Bookworm?” Jack was offended. He snapped Simon’s diary shut and shoved it deep into his trouser pocket before the thing could embarrass him any further. Bollocks, what the hell am I doing, the curly-haired lad muttered to himself, completely seduced by the pages and nearly forgetting that they had only just speared a pig with the size of small mou — alright, let’s not get carried away — so they could parade it like a trophy, and roast it right under the noses of Ralph and his loyal band of goody-two-shoes.
He stood up. Time to get to work.