Mary came back with water and bandages from a first-aid kit. The sight of her galvanized Avery into action. He ripped Tom’s shirt back and exposed the area all round the wound. The hole was smaller than he would have thought. He began to bathe the blood away. It was coming out slower.
‘Richard, how is he?’ Her voice was flat, carefully drained of emotion. It sounded like a child making the supreme effort of not crying.
Avery took a gamble. ‘Lucky, I think.’ He smiled at her. ‘Nothing vital seems to be hit. He’s a tough customer, is your Tom. But I don’t imagine he’ll be doing handsprings for a few days.’
She seemed relieved, but not much. ‘I wish I could A have helped. I feel so….’ Her voice tailed away.
‘We’ve got to stop this damn bleeding,’ said Avery. ‘I’m going to squeeze a wad of cotton wool through in the Dettol, then pack it over the wound and bind it as tight as I can Unless you can think of anything better?’
She shook her head.
They cleaned the wound thoroughly and pressed a small mountain of cotton wool over it. Then, while Mary held the cotton wool in position, Avery turned Tom over and got him up into a half-sitting position.
By the time Mary had cut the rest of his shirt away, the cotton wool was soaked through. They got a bigger wad—in fact the rest of the supply—and pressed that on. Then Avery began to put on the bandage, winding tightly under the armpits and then across the chest and back, as high as possible. The first bandage lasted about six full turns. They put four on altogether.
While Avery was struggling to pin the last one, Tom —surprisingly, even miraculously—returned to consciousness.
‘My back’s burning,’ he mumbled. ‘What’s happening to my back? Who the hell ’ He opened his eyes wide, and gripped Avery’s arm weakly. ‘Richard, did you ?’
‘Yes, it’s out. Take it easy The operation was hardly a text-book example, but the patient is still alive.’
‘Darling,’ said Mary. ‘How do you feel?’
More miracles. Tom managed a sound that might charitably be interpreted as a laugh. ‘How do I feel? That’s a good one! I need some whisky…. Oh, my God! They got Barbara! ’ The remembering of it seemed to hit him physically.
‘You said that before.’ Avery tried to keep his voice normal. ‘Don’t play it for suspense a second time.’
Mary found a bottle of whisky and held it to Tom’s lips. She tilted it too much. He coughed and spluttered, and the whisky ran down his chest. The cough made him contort with pain.
He controlled both the pain and the cough with an effort. ‘We must have gone too near their bloody camp, I suppose…. No, I’ll be honest, I wanted to see their territory…. Don’t even know whether we got anywhere near it. We were following a stream. Barbara thought it might be the one they used…. Next thing you know, we practically walked into one of the big boys. He had javelins, we had tomahawks…. We stood staring at each other for a couple of seconds—mutual shock. Then he began to play with a javelin, and I yelled to Barbara to run for it…. The first one missed us both. I stopped to throw a tomahawk then started after her Next thing, I collected it in the back. I must have made a hell of a noise. Barbara turned round and came towards me. Then I passed out.’
He glanced longingly at the whisky bottle, and Mary gave him another drink. He took care not to cough this time. ‘When I came round, there was nothing. Except that Barbara’s tomahawks were lying in the grass.’ He hesitated, and avoided Avery’s gaze. ‘It—it looked as if there had been a bit of a struggle.’ Again he hesitated. ‘The only blood there was seemed to be mine…. God, it was hurting me. It was hurting bad I thought… I
thought the next best thing to dying was to ’ He stopped, and suddenly began to cry ‘Don’t know how the hell I got back,’ he blubbered. ‘I just had to…. Say something, Richard, for Christ’s sake, say something…. You ought to ram that goddamned javelin down my throat! ’
The telling of it, the shame, the unhappiness were all too much for Tom. He was still conscious, but his head slumped forwards on to his chest. The tears ran down his face, dripped off the end of his chin and mingled with blood and whisky. The sobbing hurt him, but he couldn’t stop. Avery laid him carefully back on the bed.
‘Not your fault, Tom,’ he said with difficulty. ‘Something was bound to happen sooner or later…. It seems that people like them don’t think or feel like people like us…. Whatever happens now, I suppose in the end it’s going to have to be a fight to a finish.’
But Tom wasn’t listening any more. Too much pain, too much sheer endurance and too much exhaustion had pushed him mercifully down into a pit of darkness.
Mary took Avery’s hand and held it. It was cold and clammy. ‘What can we do?’ she asked helplessly. ‘Oh, Richard, what can we do?’
Suddenly, he seemed to come out of a trance. ‘I’ve got to find out about Barbara, if she’s…’ He left it unsaid.
TWENTY-THREE
Avery had perched himself on a thick branch just above the main fork in a fairly tall tree. He sat there, almost motionless, watching. He had been there for about half an hour. He was some fifty yards away from the camp of the golden people, which he could see through a convenient and roughly triangular gap in the tree’s thick foliage. Soon it would be sunset. Soon he would have to act.
He was not the type of person for whom violence had any attraction. The thought of it normally made him sick with fear. But his sudden hatred for these people, who had so abruptly brought his small world of happiness tumbling, was strong enough to dominate his fear; and was strong enough also to transmute part of it into a lust for vengeance.
The day, having started so happily, had turned into a traumatic nightmare. The shock that had been injected into his nervous system was still acting as a stimulant. Later, no doubt, there would be depression and reaction; but for the time being, it had made him into a computer with muscles and purpose, a machine running on borrowed energy.
He had eaten nothing since breakfast, but he did not feel either hungry or tired. Anxiety and hatred were food enough.
However, the compulsion to find out about Barbara had not impaired the mechanical logic that began to drive him almost like an automaton. Before he left Camp Two he had made sure that Tom was as comfortable as possible. He had also gone to the stream for a fresh supply of water—he had an idea that Mary was going to need a lot of water for her patient—and had collected as much fruit as he could carry on the way back. That at least ensured that she would not have to leave Tom unattended for quite a while. When he had satisfied himself that nothing more could be done at the camp, he had armed himself with two knives and two tomahawks and set off. He would have liked to take the gun, but then Mary would not have been able to defend the camp effectively.
The journey had taken much longer than he anticipated—nearly four hours. At first he tried to follow Tom’s trail; but that proved a hopeless task. He was not trained to follow a blood spoor—or, indeed, a spoor of any kind—and soon abandoned the idea. It would be faster to travel in the general direction of the camp of the golden people and hope that he would strike the stream that supplied their water. Eventually, he came to a stream that seemed as if it might be the right one; but after he had followed it for a couple of hours, he saw that it joined the sea on an uninhabited piece of the coast. Fortunately, he recognized the strip of shore. There was and odd little rock formation that had attracted his attention when he and Barbara had walked round the island.