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“I’m going up to the cabana,” Santana said. “Start the fire for supper.”
“I’ll meet you there in a sec,” I said. “I need to use the bathroom.”
The toilets were the one part of the island infrastructure that was still working—possibly temporarily, we weren’t sure, but as long as they were operational, I was going to make the most of a proper loo. There was no water to flush, but pouring a bucket of seawater into the pan did the job fine, and seawater was the one thing we had in abundance. Presumably somewhere on the island was a septic tank that would eventually fill up—but I suspected if we weren’t rescued before then, we’d have bigger problems to worry about. Water, for a start. And Santana’s insulin.
When I entered the villa something seemed odd, and it took me a minute to realize what it was—the door, which we usually kept carefully shut to help keep out snakes and mosquitoes, was standing open. I frowned. Had Dan come back?
“Dan?” I called as I entered the villa, but there was no one there, just the flick of a gecko’s tail as it disappeared into the rafters.
Feeling a little puzzled, I peed, washed my hands in the bucket of seawater standing in the shower tray, and then made my way back to the cabana.
Santana was there alone, crouching over a little fire of driftwood, blowing on the embers. She looked up when she saw me.
“Hey. Angel’s lighter’s getting really low, you know. Do you think we should reserve it, in case a ship comes?”
“To light the beacon, you mean?” I thought about it. “I guess so… but I suppose the lighter fluid won’t last forever so there’s probably no point in hoarding it indefinitely. I take your point though—it’s going to run out either way. What can we use instead?”
“Joel’s glasses?” Santana said, and then laughed. “Bit Lord of the Flies, I know. Or does anyone know how to do that stick-rubbing thing?”
Down on the beach I could see Angel had crossed to the water villa and was crouching down, talking to Zana.
“Do you think she’s being abused?” I said to Santana, who sighed and stood up.
“I don’t know. I only know…” She stopped, and I looked at her, puzzled.
“What?”
“Well, look, I didn’t say anything because it seemed weird but… I knew his ex.”
“Whose? Conor’s?” I was puzzled. Santana nodded.
“I was at school with her—she was in the year below me. She was seventeen when they got together. He was twenty-four, which at the time sounded quite glamorous, but looking back… I mean, it’s borderline creepy if you ask me. Seven years is a lot when you’re seventeen.”
I nodded. I could see that. Seventeen-year-olds aren’t even adults—they can’t legally drink, they can’t vote, they can’t buy cigarettes. Twenty-four-year-olds are in a different world.
“What was he like back then?” I asked. Santana shrugged.
“That’s the thing—I never met him. I just heard about him from Cally. It was Conor says this, Conor says that. You’d have thought he could walk on water.”
“So how did you join the dots?” I asked, wondering where this was going. There was something about Santana’s tone I didn’t like. “I mean, there’s a lot of Conors. Are you sure it’s the same guy?”
“When we got the information for the show, I realized I knew his name. I asked around, and one of Cally’s sisters confirmed it was him. And she also told me what had happened to Cally.”
“Which was?” I asked, a little puzzled by her reluctance to get to the point.
“She’s dead,” Santana said flatly. She paused and swallowed, but I didn’t get the impression she was holding out on me, more that she was trying to gear herself up for how to say something upsetting. “She—she committed suicide. Two days after her nineteenth birthday. Two days after he left her.”
“Oh my God, Santana, that’s awful.”
“I know. Nineteen, Lyla. Nineteen.”
“Fuck.” I tried to process what that meant. “Why didn’t you say something?”
“Say what?” Santana said unhappily. She turned back to the fire, poking at it with a little stick, though it didn’t really need tending. She seemed more to be avoiding my gaze. “Oh, you don’t know me, but I went to school with your ex who killed herself? It’s not really something to bring up over dinner, is it.”
“No.” I ran my hands through my salt-stiffened hair. “No, God, no I can see that. But do you think—” I stopped, unsure where I was going with my train of thought. Santana waited for me to continue, and then when I didn’t, she finished the question for me.
“Do I think she killed herself because he was an abusive piece of shit? I have no idea. I honestly haven’t got a clue. He could have been a model boyfriend whose girlfriend tragically couldn’t deal with their breakup. But at the very least it shows a pattern, doesn’t it? A pattern of picking emotionally fragile younger women and making them very, very dependent on him.”
