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Excerpt from the Book
Prologue: Nikumaroro – 13th October, 1937
The face of death was purple.
With beady red eyes on stalks, a dark, shiny lump between them that resembled a nose but wasn’t, wiggling feelers on top, a bulbous body trailing along behind.
“Bigger than my head,” she thought mildly, and shifted her eyes – aware of the effort – to examine the creature’s huge, battered pincers.
The giant crab – purplish-black, she decided – sidled out of her field of vision, clattering over the rubbly ground. She tried to keep it in sight, but found she couldn’t lift or turn her head.
Decided she didn’t need to.
“Going for my gut,” she thought, with relentless practicality.
Smaller crabs, clattering in a different key, dragging the pilfered sea shells in which they lived, were already nibbling at her legs and arms. Tiny ones too, hardly bigger than insects, but so many of them, so very many. She no longer felt them as more than an itch.
Hermit crabs, she thought fleetingly, eating a hermit. Alive.
Was she alive?
The ground seemed to be. Everything around where she lay, by the cold remains of her fire, seemed to pulsate with crabs.
So intent on their business. Eating her.
Alive, she thought, turning the word over in her mind. What was it to be alive, and how did it differ to be dead?
And which was she, now, under this tree, on this island, covered in crabs?
Alive, she decided, if barely so. And certainly – her brain began replaying it – she had been alive.
The memories, fragments, glimpses, fluttered across her dimming consciousness. Banking through canyons of cloud, skirting rain squalls and thunderstorms, watching the farms and roads and oceans, jungles and deserts pass under her wings. Seeing the great cities rising up on the horizon – San Francisco, New York, Mexico City.
The freedom she had felt, the sheer fierce joy of it, would have brought tears to her eyes, but she was far too dehydrated to produce them.
With an almost academic curiosity, she wondered what was killing her – besides the crabs.
Dehydration, of course, but something had made her too sick to move around and find water, and had brought on the explosive diarrhea that had left her so drained, weak, delirious. It was good the delirium had passed.
Or had it? It didn’t matter.
Had it been the fish? The pretty little fish, caught on the retreating tide in the pools she had blocked off with the window screen from the shipwreck? Cooked on the coals, torn apart by hand? They had tasted all right. Or the bird, caught by hand, plucked and cooked? It had been a fishy tasting thing, but why would it have made her sick? The baby turtles? The canned food from the pile near the shipwreck?
Or was it her infected foot? She couldn’t feel it now, but it had been swollen and horribly painful at times, ever since she had cut it on the way down here from the other end of the island. Thank goodness for Fred’s shoe when the foot got too big to fit in her own.
Her mind flickered. What would dying bring? For a moment she felt fear, but with a familiar act of will she put it away. She found it replaced by regret, especially for Mommie. Wished she could speak with her one last time, reassure her.
George would see to it, though; George had a way, and he was kind....
And he cared so for her life’s work, her story. She wondered vaguely who, if anyone, would find its last chapter, the scribbled pages stuffed in Fred’s sextant box. The last words marked in big block letters with pieces of dried-up rouge from her compact, after her pencil had gone missing.
Fred’s sextant box. For what he called his “preventer” – the nautical sextant tricked out with a bubble level to use in the air. She could almost see his face, his wry smile. Wondered if he would stay buried in the grave she had scraped out with her hands and a piece of wood. Or would the crabs get him, too?
With a sigh – had she sighed? Was she breathing? — she put it all aside, let herself sink away into her surroundings. The coolness of the coral gravel after the heat of the day. The darkening sky beyond the glowing green-gold leaves. The boom of the surf, unseen but so near. The squabbling cries of birds settling for the night, the vaguely felt nibbling of the crabs. A light misting of rain as a small shower passed over.
Another adventure.
The clouds were parting, and the sky was endless and glowing.
Her body’s last act was to smile.
“Wheels up,” she whispered.
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