Roddy remembered an occasion several years ago, when he had been more scared than at any time in his life. One of his friends had borrowed his father’s motorbike and offered to take Roddy for a ride. Once committed, there was no backing out. At each jerky change of gear, Roddy was sure he was going to be flung off backwards, smashing his head like a coconut on the road. The bike tilted this way and that as his friend negotiated blind corners, hardly slowing down. He had the blind confidence of the young.
It was not the speed that terrified Roddy, or even the thought of being spilled onto the road. It was the lack of control. The fact that his life was, for those few minutes, totally in the hands of someone else. He’d felt like pissing himself when he’d considered that they were not even particularly close friends. What a way to die.
The fear he felt now was more intense, more all encompassing. It made his terror at the youthful lark pale into insignificance. Now, he feared not only for his body — a body already ravaged by war and hunger and thirst — but also his mind. He was being stalked through the dark avenues of his thoughts, and he had yet to see the pursuer. All the while, the island sat smugly around them. How could logic and self-awareness continue to exist untouched in such a place? A place that seemed happy to kill them, and determined to do so.
Not for the first time, Roddy wished that he had more faith in God. He had seen what belief had done to Ernie, but perhaps his faith had been too blind, too passive. It was ironic that a war which had seemed to bring many people closer to their faith, by forcing them into challenges of mind and spirit, had driven him further away. While people dying on beach-heads prayed to God, Roddy could not understand how God could do that to them in the first place. If He did exist then He was cruel indeed.
They buried Butch away from the stream, so that any future floods would not wash away the soil covering him and expose his body to the elements. None of the men spoke because they could all feel danger watching them, sitting up in the high branches or raising beady eyes from the stream. It watched them where they toiled, and laughed, and counted off another victory on skeletal fingers.
3. NAMING THE NAMELESS
They headed inland. None of them felt like walking, but they were even less inclined to stay near Butch’s grave. The chuckling stream threatened to drive them mad.
They remained within the jungle. It seemed to stretch on forever, as if the grasslands had never existed, and the flora and fauna of the place began to reveal more of itself to them. Much of it was strange. Max seemed to find solace in trying to identify birds and plants, but his comfort was short lived. For every species he knew, there were a dozen he did not. A snake curled its way up a tree trunk, bright yellow, long and very thin. Max went to name it, but then several scrabbling legs came into view around the trunk, propelling the creature’s rear end, and Max turned away. Roddy recalled the story of the Garden of Eden; how the snake had been cast to the ground, legless, to slither forever on its belly, eating dust. This creature did not belong to that family. This thing, in this place, did not subscribe to the ancient commandment.
They saw another snake, with gills flaring along its flanks and green slime decorating its scales. Max stared at it, frowning, trying to dredge an impossible name from his memory. Impossible, because the creature had no name. “Slime snake,” Max said, and named it.
“You should name it after us, if you must,” Norris commented.
“Who’ll ever know?” The finality in Max’s voice turned Roddy cold, but the big man would not be drawn. He was too keen to continue with what he called his naming of parts, as if the entire island were one massive machine and the slithering, flying and scampering things were the well-oiled components.
In a place where the trees thinned out, they saw several giant tortoises picking regally at low foliage. They skirted around the clearing, and Roddy checked the shells to see whether there was any recent damage. Norris was all for attacking the creatures, but to Roddy it seemed pointless, and Max said something which persuaded them that they were best left alone. “Why annoy them more?”
The reptiles raised lazy heads as the men passed, watching them with hooded black eyes. One of them may have had bits of Ernie still digesting in its gut, but to the men they all looked the same. Roddy mused that the same probably went both ways; the idea chilled him to the core, and he did not dwell upon it.