‘They?’ I still don’t face him because I’m afraid of nothingness.
‘The other Guests. They said you must have done something terrible, to bring this destruction. I defended you. Please, tell me what you’ve done.’
The brain is dangerous territory.
Unpredictable things happen there. So I can think of nothing more unnatural than trying to pry into its secrets or analyse how someone else interprets the
world.
It is true that sometimes even I long for understanding, for one good person to see me for the person I really am and, better still, to accept me
completely.
But I realised after what happened to Meggie that few people can forgive, and almost no one can forget. Offeríng someone the truth about your innermost thoughts
and desires is too big a gamble. You risk judgement, condemnation.
Let me rescue you, Alice, before it’s too late . . .
Still I’m afraid to turn round and look at Danny. Everything feels misshapen and wrong.
Half of me is here on the wrecked Beach with my back to Danny, longing to touch him and be touched by him.
But the other half knows I’m being monitored in a scanner, that what I’m experiencing can’t possibly be real.
Is this what schizophrenia feels like? Perhaps Olav has hit the jackpot; I really am in need of psychiatric help.
‘Alice? You can’t wait forever.’
Slowly, I turn towards the voice.
Danny. A different Danny from the one I know so well. His sandy hair is matted, his arms and legs are covered in scratches and he has a blackened eye that makes the green of his iris look even
more intense.
‘
Danny.
Oh God. What happened to you?’
When I reach out for him, he backs away. On any other day, we’d already be in each other’s arms, kissing, but no wonder he’s keeping his distance. I might have caused the
destruction of paradise.
If it even exists.
My head throbs in time with the thunderous machine.
‘I’ll live,’ he says, then lets out a single laugh. ‘Or survive. Or whatever. But I need to know what happened. One moment we were talking, the next all hell broke
loose.’
I nod. ‘Someone saw the Beach. Someone who shouldn’t have.’
Disbelief clouds Danny’s face. ‘You
showed
it to a stranger? What the hell were you thinking? Didn’t you realise that would make the Management angry?’
The scene of devastation behind him shows just
how
angry. ‘It wasn’t deliberate. The person . . . he walked in on me when he shouldn’t have.’
‘He?’
That one-word question has so much behind it: suspicion, jealousy,
fear.
‘My parents have banned me from going online and the only place I could go to try was a friend’s flat.’
A friend who must be able to hear every word I say.
‘You were in his place, then, were you? Just the two of you?’
‘Danny.
Please.
He doesn’t matter.’
I look away, hoping Lewis hasn’t heard that part, or doesn’t realise I’m talking about him. It doesn’t seem fair. Or true.
Danny stares back.
‘What I need to know is what’s happened here. And where Meggie is. Please?’
Danny’s face changes suddenly, from hostility to fear. He’s cowering as though someone is about to hit him.
And I realise it’s not only the scanner machinery that’s rumbling.
‘It’s starting again, Alice,’ he shouts. ‘We need to move. I don’t know what will happen this time—’
Before he can finish, the first bolts of lightning break up the sky and a wild wind comes from nowhere. He grabs my hand and pulls me backwards, towards the sharp rocks that enclose the Beach,
where Sam’s bar used to be.
The force of the storm is intensifying so rapidly that we’re struggling not to be pushed over into the sand as we run. I can feel my skin being warped by the wind like Plasticine.
‘Here!’
There’s a tiny overhanging section of rock which forms a shelter. Danny lets me crouch down, then squeezes in beside me. Finally, we kiss. But it’s different. Not the
all-the-time-in-the-world embrace we’ve lingered over before, but the briefest touch to prove we are still in this together.
It makes me shake a little less.
I watch the storm in awe. So much rain is pouring, like a whole ocean is being tipped down from the heavens. Thunder makes my teeth vibrate, and flashes of lightning turn the Beach from night to
day and back again a hundred times a minute.
The rawness is almost exciting. I wonder how the Guests felt when confronted with this after months or years of nothing but endless sunshine and bland blue skies.
‘What about the others?’ I ask Danny, though of course there’s only one other I care about:
Meggie.
He kisses the top of my head and I feel comforted, till I realise that he’s doing it so I don’t have to see his face as he tells me what happened. ‘I don’t know for sure.
When the storm really got going, it was hellish.’
‘But Guests can’t be hurt, can they?’ A memory of poor Triti comes into my head. She wanted to escape from the Beach more than anything, but couldn’t injure herself or
end it, however hard she tried.
‘All bets are off now, Alice. You haven’t noticed how bad I look?’
I touch the bruised skin under his eye. ‘Still gorgeous. But maybe a little rougher around the edges.’
Danny smiles briefly, then goes back to the story. ‘Perhaps no one would have been hurt, who knows? But it’s instinct to flee from a storm. You see what it did to the bar, to the
huts?’
‘But where did they flee to? I thought there was no way out of the Beach. People have tried hard enough.’ A horrible dread is rising inside me.
Meggie?
‘Not as hard as they did when the storm struck.’ He closes his eyes as he remembers. ‘The Guests started to clamber up the rocks. At first, it was every guy or girl for him- or
herself, but pretty soon they realised it could only work if everyone helped each other, so they kinda got a human chain going. People fell, were pulled up again.’
‘Including my sister?’
‘She was one of the last, Alice. She hung on for hours in case you came back, even though Tim was the one who organised the whole escape chain.’
‘Tim?’
‘Weird, right? I never thought he’d lead anyone, but the Guests just seemed to trust him. We’re talking total panic when the storm first hit. But there was this quiet English
guy thing about him, like nothing could be bad while he was giving orders, you know, like in a war movie.’
‘But Meggie didn’t stay with you.’ My voice is small and scared.
‘Alice, Tim left her no choice. They both tried to make me go but I refused. I couldn’t leave without saying goodbye to you. They said they’d come back for me.’
Goodbye?
Who mentioned goodbye? I ignore that part, focus on the practical. If I created this mess, then surely I can find a way to put it right, bring Meggie back.
The alternative is too awful to contemplate.
The rain is even heavier now. ‘Have they come back?’
Danny shakes his head. ‘No. A few times I tried to climb up on my own, far enough to see over the cliffs, but it takes two to get any grip.’
I look above us. The rocks are unforgivingly smooth and sharp.
‘Where could they have gone?’ I think back to the last time I saw my sister. She was walking away with Tim, to give me some time alone with Danny.
He doesn’t answer. There
is
no answer, I suppose.
‘I might never see my sister again, Danny.’ It’s been my worst fear from my very first moments on the Beach, but I can’t believe it’s actually happened.
He squeezes me tighter. ‘We don’t know that. We don’t know anything.’
‘Sam might know,’ I say.
He points towards where the foundations of the bar form a low square in the sand. ‘We’ll go ask her, shall we? Maybe see if she can rustle up a couple of daiquiris while we’re
there.’
Danny doesn’t usually
do
sarcasm but I understand why he’s talking this way.
‘And you? How do you feel?’ I ask him.
He shrugs. ‘Not that excited about the prospect of eternity here without even a softball to keep me company.’
‘You’ve got me.’
‘No.’
‘Of course you have. Forever and always! We could try to clamber up now, together.’
‘And then what? Alice, there might be no going back once you’ve seen what’s at the top.’
That silences me.
‘We have to be realistic, Alice. And you must promise not to be sad. Not about me, not about your sister. I’ve had plenty of time to think while I’ve been alone, and I have to
tell you I wish you’d never come to the Beach at all.’
‘
I
don’t.’
‘Only because you can’t imagine what your life woulda been like without it, but I
can
imagine it. You’d have been sad for a long while, but slowly you’d have
accepted that the police had solved Meggie’s murder. It would have been easier to move on.’
‘But then I wouldn’t have met you, Danny. I wouldn’t have known how it feels to be in love.’
‘Another bonus, huh?’ His voice is bitter. ‘Loving you has been wonderful, Alice. But it won’t be like that now. What lies ahead of us is nothing but pain. And I
don’t want you to think that’s what love is about, this
twisted
version. Loving someone you can never really have is a poor imitation of the real thing, don’t you
see?’
‘This is the real-est thing I’ve ever known.’
He shakes his head. ‘No. Nothing here is real. Not even me.’
‘Not that again, Danny, please. I
know
the real you. The old one you told me about before, the rich brat, I’ve never met him. What he did, how spoiled he was, doesn’t
matter to me.’
‘Even if the brat caused his own death?’ He turns away from me. ‘Even if he caused someone else’s death too?’
I shake my head. ‘Don’t torture yourself. You died in a plane crash. There were inquiries. OK, so you took the controls for a moment, but the pilot shouldn’t have let you do
that if he wasn’t confident you’d be safe. It was his responsibility.’
Too late, I remember he never told me
any
of that. I found it in news reports online. Have I gone too far in talking about the past? Will I be banned?
But nothing changes: Danny’s still there and the rain is still falling and the thunder is still growling. Maybe the Management aren’t listening any more.
He laughs. ‘So that’s the story the world bought? How
cute.
But if it were really an accident, I wouldn’t be here, right? There’d be nothing to
resolve.’
It
is
the one part of his story that’s never made sense to me.
‘Well, try this on for size, Alice. Dumb rich kid decides to prove that there’s more to him than his daddy’s money. Dumb rich kid wants to play the big man in border country,
down Mexico way. But it’s not enough for super-dumb rich kid to fly down in the family jet and buy a few pills from your local
farmacia.
No. Danny decides to play with the big boys.
He—’
‘You don’t have to tell me this.’
‘
Someone
has to know what I did.’
I want to block my ears because I don’t want to hear bad things about the boy I love; yet I sense he needs to do this and I owe it to him to let him confess to me. I nod for him to carry
on.
‘Drugs are sexy, right? That’s what I thought back then. So I got myself a gang contact and began making deals
so
much riskier than the legal stuff Daddy did – though
it was all funded by Daddy’s allowance, obviously. I made the pilot take a detour on the way to a family party. We went right over the border, even though he didn’t think too much of
heading somewhere with more cactuses than people. But what Danny wants, Danny gets.’
‘And that’s when you took the controls?’
He shakes his head. ‘No. I never did that. The dealers must have brought us down, then played around with the wreckage to conceal what happened, before taking the cash I had for the deal.
I don’t remember much except losing height . . .’ Danny sighs. ‘Five thousand dollars. That was all. The pilot had two daughters – orphans now, for the sake of five thousand
dollars. All
my fault.
’
I remember the news footage I watched online. His funeral. The pilot’s widow and children. The image of the smashed plane on the floor of the plains.
I don’t know what to say to him.
‘I disgust you, right? I disgust myself, too.’
He’s hunched up against the rock, centimetres from me. His shirt is soaked through and his eyes are full of pain.
‘No! You don’t disgust me, I . . .’ I should reach out for him, but I need a few more seconds to process this. As soon as I touch him, I know I’ll glimpse his last
moments again. It’ll feel different now I understand what really happened and why.
I
am
shocked. What he did was stupid and irresponsible, the consequences pointless and tragic. No wonder he’s been telling me the same things since we fell in love: that he
doesn’t deserve me, that he is a terrible person. Living with that knowledge would be enough to drive anyone crazy.
And yet does it change the way I feel about him? No. He had no way of knowing it would end like that. It was childish rebellion, not premeditated killing. Danny has suffered every day since he
arrived on the Beach. More than I ever knew until now.
‘Alice, say what you think. It can’t possibly make me feel any worse than I already do.’
Instead of looking at him, I focus on the bleak landscape in front of us. What seemed like paradise has always been a kind of hell for Danny. He’s tried to make up for it here, by
supporting Triti and Javier and my sister, spending his time trying to solve the mystery of the Beach itself. I won’t turn my back on him because he made a single mistake.
‘You’re not a monster, Danny. You’re just a guy who got it wrong.’