We sat up and watched as Peter’s body became still. He crouched in the water with his head bowed. Mamoru stood up and went to help him; then Peter let out a strange squeal, standing up and running towards us as he did so. He was holding something in his hands. “The bugger’s nipped me!” he cried. It was only then that we saw he was holding a large green-black crab.
We cooked it over a slow, glowing fire that Mamoru made from coconut husks and sand. He gathered some glossy leaves from the edge of the scrubby forest behind us and placed the now reddened crab on this plate of foliage. I had not felt hungry before — the sun had dried all thoughts of food from my head — but as Mamoru divided the crab with his knife I felt my insides boil with hunger. He pulled a claw from the carapace and smashed it with the handle of his knife. With his fingertips he pulled away the broken bits of shell and handed me the glistening piece of brown-veined flesh. “Be careful,” he said as he gave it to me, “it is still very hot.”
Even though it was a large crab, there was not much meat to go round. When we tasted those little jellies of sweet white meat, we all realised we were hungrier than we thought. We took to sucking at the broken pieces of shell, which tasted of firewood and sea salt. Peter declared that he had never eaten anything as delicate and delectable.
“Ortolan pales in comparison,” he said. I was about to ask him what this was when he turned to Johnny and explained that it was a small French bird. “Like a sparrow,” he said patiently.
Only Johnny did not eat. He seemed too weak to do so. When I offered him a chunk of meat that Mamoru had prepared for me, he declined. I tried to insist that he eat, but Peter touched my arm and shook his head. He was right: Johnny seemed happier left on his own, resting against the base of the tree, set slightly apart from the rest of us.
When we finished, Honey suggested opening some tins from our rations, which are still plentiful. I looked at Peter. My hunger remained, it was true, but curiously, I did not yearn for preserved food. Now that I had eaten that crab, I wanted something similar.
“How could you even think of doing that, Honey?” Peter said. “It would be akin to raiding your larder for half a cold Scotch egg after dining on omelette au crabe at Boulestin. What savagery. I’d sooner starve.”
In the end we did nothing. We simply sat cross-legged around the fire, watching it die down until it was smouldering and hardly smoky. In the blue light I could see Mamoru looking at me. His face was slim and calm.
We retired to the makeshift camp beds Mamoru had prepared. Mine had been specially draped with cotton sheets, whilst the men made do with rough canvas. Mamoru came to me and said, “Don’t worry about Johnny, I will keep an eye on him.”
“Thank you,” I said, reaching to touch his shoulder in the dark.
As I fell asleep I could still taste the sweetness of the crab on my tongue. “Peter,” I called out. “I nearly forgot: thank you for our dinner.” There was no answer. He must already have fallen asleep.
THIS MORNING IT FELT as though all the things on the boat had happened a very long time ago. We breakfasted on rice (cooked, by Mamoru, in a pot over hot embers) with ikan bilis (which Honey declared “intolerable” before opening himself a tin of beef), jackfruit, and coarse coffee. There was much talk about whether this island was one of the Seven Maidens. In the distance, from this isolated beach, we can see two small islands, but there is no way of telling if these too are Maidens without surveying the area around these islands.
“If local on dit is true,” said Peter, “all we’d have to do is wait until sunset to see if they disappear.”
Mamoru and Honey went out to the boat to organise our supplies and consult their maps. They were gone for a considerable length of time, during which I remained here, writing, and Peter coaxed Johnny out onto the beach. They walked along the water’s edge, stopping now and then to dig shells and other mysterious things from the sand. They stood next to each other like two toddlers inspecting a toy. Sometimes Peter would run into the sea, throwing himself into the water when it was deep enough to swim; he exhorted Johnny to join him, but Johnny never ventured far, stopping as soon as the water reached his calves. He stood in the shallows, arms folded. Peter frequently broke into song, and every time he did so I found myself perplexed at how his voice transformed itself, suddenly acquiring a rich, silky texture. The sound it made filled the huge silence around us (there are no birds or insects here to make any noise). I began to recognise a few of the tunes he sang; one of them in particular was repeated many times. I am not sure what language it was in, but I found it surprisingly engaging. It was often accompanied by silly theatrical gestures — Peter beckoning to Johnny, who, I am sure, did not know what the song meant.
