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“I am not a nurse,” she had said privately to me, taking one look at Santana’s flushed face and glazed eyes. “But this I can do.”
She came back after dark had fallen, her clothes smelling of chemicals, and her shoulders bowed in a way that told me that she hadn’t achieved what she set out to do. When I saw her fumble with the door handle, I got up and opened it for her, putting my finger to my lips to signal that Santana was asleep. But it was me who broke the silence when I saw the burns on Angel’s hands.
“Fuck, Angel, what happened?”
Angel shrugged.
“The acid was still reactive.”
“You opened up the battery?”
“I tried. It is difficult without tools. I will need to try again in daylight.”
From across the room Santana called out, stirring restlessly in her sleep, and we both stilled. When she was calm again, Angel whispered, “She is no better?”
Zana shook her head.
“We’ve been trying to get ibuprofen into her, but she threw up the pills. She’s very hot.”
Angel swore in French, words I didn’t understand but which sounded filthy even in another language, and then sank to her mattress, her head in her hands.
“Fuck, will it never end? Will we never get a break?”
I swallowed against the pain in my throat. I wanted to tell her everything would be okay. But we both knew that was a lie.
Instead, I watched as she lowered her head wearily to the pillow and closed her eyes. She looked exhausted, and the faint snores a few minutes later backed that up.
I should have been equally tired, if not more so. Out of all of us, Angel was the only one who’d had any sleep last night, while I’d spent the intervening hours fighting for my life, first half-strangled, then half-drowned. But I couldn’t seem to let go. I lay there, listening to Angel’s gentle snores and Santana’s shallow, feverish breaths, and then I realized something—only Zana was as quiet and watchful as me. When I raised myself on my elbow to look across at her, I could see her lying there, curled on one side, staring into the darkness. And as I watched, I saw a single tear roll down her cheek, to soak into the mattress.
I opened my mouth to say something—Are you okay? Is there anything I can do?—and then I closed it again. There was nothing I could do. Nothing I could say.
As quietly as I could, I let myself down onto the mattress, and then turned, trying to make it seem as if I was simply tossing in my sleep. Then I closed my eyes and waited for the real thing to come.
WHEN I WOKE the next morning, there was dawn light streaming through the windows and I saw that Santana and Zana were still out cold, but Angel was awake and up. She had wound a sarong around her hips, twisted her hair into a top knot, and was hunting for her shoes.
I stood up, pulled on the shirt I’d been wearing last night, and whispered, “Can I help?”
Angel looked across at Santana and Zana and shrugged, raising both eyebrows. I knew what she was asking. Was I needed here?
As silently as I could, I tiptoed to the side of the big double bed and touched Santana’s cheek with the backs of my knuckles. Her skin felt cool, after the damp heat of last night, and the hectic flush had gone from her cheekbones.
“I think she’s okay,” I mouthed to Angel, who shrugged again, but this time in an indefinably different way that clearly meant, okay, you do you. She rubbed the last dregs of sun cream into her shoulders, and we set out into the forest.
Somehow, I don’t know why, the staff area always felt like the hottest part of the island, maybe because the trees were fewer and more widely spaced, or maybe because the concrete soaked up the heat of the day in a way that the forest floor didn’t. By the time we broke out of the trees into the staff clearing, both Angel and I were sweating, in spite of the breeze coming off the sea.
I could smell the battery acid even before we had crossed the clearing, and when we got to the shade of the radio hut, I could see what Angel had spent all day yesterday doing—hacking through the thick outer skin of the cell with a mixture of nails, screwdrivers, and a broken kitchen knife. She had managed to get a corner of the top cover almost free, like a partly open sardine tin, and you could just make out the liquid gleam of the acid inside. You could also see where quite a lot of it had spilled out onto the concrete—and presumably onto Angel herself.
“It was not easy,” Angel said unnecessarily, and I nodded. The fumes were overpowering, and every time I breathed in, they caught in my bruised throat, making me want to cough.
“Should we take it outside?” I asked. “I can’t imagine it’s very safe to breathe.”
Angel nodded, and together, carefully, we dragged the battery out of the hut and into the shade of a tree, where Angel began attacking it again with a nail and a makeshift hammer, trying to widen the aperture she’d already made. But her burned hands made her clumsy, and after a few minutes she missed her mark and hit the battery casing, making the acid inside slosh. A few drops sprayed up and landed on her fingers and she winced, sucking in her breath as it stung her raw skin.
“Christ, Angel, stop,” I said, realizing what was happening. “Let me.”
“I am fine,” Angel said through gritted teeth.
“Clearly you’re not. Your hands are already in shreds. Seriously, let me do this part. What are you trying to do?”
