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“Yes, I saw the sea. I was out in it, in that water villa, remember?”
“He’s not wrong,” Joel said. His voice was flat, and we all fell silent at the sound of it. “And we’ve got no idea if we had the worst of it, or if it was even worse over on the other islands.”
There was a long pause. I could see everyone looking at each other wondering… A real tropical hurricane, one that devastated miles of coastline… how long would it take help to arrive?
“They’d have forecasted it, wouldn’t they?” Dan said uncertainly. He pushed his bleached fringe out of his eyes, frowning. “I mean… they’ve got hurricane forecasts down to a pretty fine art.”
“There was a storm forecast,” I said a little reluctantly. “I heard some of the crew members talking about it. They asked if they could speak to Baz. But they said it wasn’t due for another couple of days.”
“Look, can we just quit jabbering,” Bayer said impatiently. “The point is, we don’t know. We don’t know if the boat’s coming back, we don’t know when we’ll be able to get to a hospital, and I’m fucked if I’m walking around with my arm like a dead fucking fish nailed to my side, not to mention it hurts like a bastard.” He was telling the truth about that. There were beads of sweat on his forehead, in spite of the stiff poststorm breeze still whipping through the cabana.
“Okay,” Conor said, flexing his fingers. “If you’re sure, then let’s get on with it. You’d better take off your shirt and lie down.”
We all watched as Bayer maneuvered awkwardly out of his T-shirt, showing an expanse of olive-tanned skin covered in black-ink tribal tattoos. They reminded me of the fake tattoos we had given each other with Sharpies in maths, when I was a teenager—meaningless interlocking swirls that covered his chest and arms, and seemed designed mainly to show how hard he was to endure so many needles. Once he was out of the shirt, he lowered himself gingerly to the ground, with Angel’s wrap under his head.
“Don’t sue me if I fuck up your shoulder, bro,” Conor said.
“I won’t,” Bayer said. He gave a sickly grin. “What do I do now?”
“Just try to relax. I’m going to take your arm…” He picked up Bayer’s limp, swollen arm. “… and I’m just going to pull very slowly and steadily, and I’ll be as gentle as I can, but it’s going to hurt.”
“I can take it,” Bayer said, but there was something slightly unconvincing about his voice, and I saw that he’d shut his eyes. “Do it, man.”
Conor sat down beside him and braced one foot against Bayer’s rib cage. Then he began to pull.
For a second nothing happened. Then Bayer began to cry out, a long groan of pain that rose with a few seconds to an uncontrolled shriek of agony. For a second he writhed, clearly trying to wrench his arm out of Conor’s iron grasp. Then, just when I was on the point of jumping up to intervene and shout at Conor to stop, there was a horrible, squelching thunk, not a pop, something duller and deeper, and Conor let go of Bayer’s arm and stood up from the ground, dusting down his shorts.
“There you go. Good work, man.”
I looked up at him, unable to be anything but slightly impressed. In his shoes I would have been as rattled and sweating as Bayer, who was lying on the ground writhing and panting with pain, his right hand clutched to his left shoulder. But Conor looked entirely self-possessed.
“I’m sorry,” he said sympathetically, “that probably hurt like a bitch. Apparently, it’s worse on people with a lot of muscle. You should splint it up or something, make sure it doesn’t slip out again.”
“Christ, man,” Bayer was groaning, “you nearly ripped my bloody arm off.” He was still rolling on the floor, holding his arm. Angel knelt beside him in the dust and helped him sit up. Bayer was pale and covered in sweat, but his shoulder was back in place, and as he groped his way upright, supporting himself on the table with his right hand, I saw his left arm was moving more easily.
“I have some painkillers in the villa,” Angel said. “If they have not blown away.”
“I’ll go,” I said. “Our villa—” I stopped, mentally correcting myself. My villa. “It’s fine, anyway. No storm damage, I mean, and I’ve definitely got some paracetamol. Or maybe ibuprofen, but if you’ve got internal bleeding, you don’t want anything that thins the blood. How’s the bruising?”
“It hurts like a motherfucker, if that’s what you mean,” he said a little sulkily, and I nodded.
“Yeah, I mean, it will. And Conor’s right about the sling. I’ll see if I can find a scarf or something.”
“So your villa’s okay?” Conor said now, and I nodded. Conor was looking thoughtful.
“The ones that are still standing… that’s Dan and Santana’s and yours, right?”
“And the water villa,” I said. “But the jetty’s gone, so you have to swim out. What about the others?”
“Well, Joel and Romi’s is gone,” Conor said, ticking them off his fingers. “Bayer and Angel’s has lost the roof. And mine, all the windows got smashed in the storm. None of them are really habitable, at least in the short-term. We need to make sure everyone has somewhere to sleep tonight—and that probably means moving the mattresses around the huts. And then—”
He stopped.
“And then?” I prompted.
“And then… then we need to dig the graves.”
There was a sudden, bleak silence. It was as if, for a moment, we had almost forgotten the reality of what had happened last night—caught up in the practicalities of Bayer’s arm, and where to sleep. For a moment it had felt almost as if the night had been a bad dream—just another reality TV scenario, a team game we had to work together to overcome, using all our skills to add to the prize pot.
