Baz looked down at the spool and shook his head. "I wouldn't wanna try it. There's only about half a tank of petrol. And you can't see a thing out there."
Another spell of silence as everybody thought about that.
"Tough, man." Jubo wasn't sympathetic. "Better they don't make it. People know the preacher gone an' they all be comin' over. We don't be here on our own too long then."
"Here on our own..."
"Wow."
"My God." Amit looked around in wonder. "We've done it! We've really actually done it..."
And at last it began to sink in. No Preacher John, no Isaac, no divers, no capos... the island was theirs. Amit drew back his arm and hurled the final stone far out into the sea. Bright droplets rose from the surface, sparkled briefly against the light and disappeared into a spreading ring of white foam. Clear water. Clear, clean water...
"Wow. Look at that."
"But what are we gonna do?"
"Yeah, where do we start? Come on. No good just standing around here."
"We gotta celebrate. Gotta celebrate..."
A wild energy was starting to build, a head of pressure that had to be released.
"First t'ing I gonna do is eat," said Jubo. "Me got the rumbles, man."
"Yeah a a feast!"
"Feast! Feast!"
"Feast... feast... feast..."
The chant was taken up, and the boys exploded into life, leaping, jumping, punching the air, kicking at the gravel with their feet as they danced down the jetty.
"Hot chicken curry!"
"Tuna fish and rice!"
"Spaghetti and meatballs!"
"Yay! Come on, Baz! Come on, girls a feast! Woo-hooo!"
Away they went, a twirling, skipping crowd, leaving Baz to follow at his own pace. Maybe he'd seen too much today, knew too much of what it was like out there on that empty sea. He'd witnessed death and devastation, and had come horribly close to being lost for good. There would be nightmares, he knew, and they would surely haunt him forever. He didn't feel up to joining in with the mad celebrations.
"Baz?" Nadine caught up with him, touching his arm, gently holding him back. And then Steffie and Ray were there as well. None of them were looking particularly jubilant, considering their brilliant success in dealing with the capos. In fact Ray looked scared if anything.
"What?" said Baz. He knew something was coming, and he had the sinking feeling that he wasn't going to like it.
"Listen..." Nadine's beautiful eyes were troubled, serious. "You need to talk to Ray. I mean, the two of you are friends... you have to..."
"Yeah, look, Baz," said Steffie. "Me and Nadine are gonna go on ahead. But you just stay here for a minute and talk to Ray, yeah?"
"OK." Baz shrugged. He didn't know what it was he was supposed to talk about.
"And you..." Steffie turned towards Ray. "Don't bottle it, OK? How do you think he's gonna feel if he hears it from someone else? Yeah? All right?"
Ray nodded. "Yeah."
"Right, then." Steffie pushed her hair back behind one ear and smiled. "Come on, Nad."
The two of them walked away. They were scruffier now than when they'd first arrived, clothes a little grubbier, hair not quite so neat. But they still had an elegance about them, a way of moving that was quite different to the gaggle of boys now disappearing up the pathway to the school.
"So... what?" Baz turned to face Ray. "What is it? You were great today, by the way. I didn't... I didn't get to say that yet. But you were just amazing, all three of you."
All three of you...
"You know them, don't you?" he said. "I mean, Nadine. And... and Steffie. You know them from before somewhere."
Ray looked at him, big dark eyes so solemn and worried looking. He lifted a slim hand and tucked his hair behind one ear, shook it back. A graceful movement.
"Yeah," he said. "We were at school together. Here. At Tab Hill."
"Here? You can't have been. This was a-"
And then Baz saw it. At last he realized. At last he understood. And it was a thing so shocking that the whole world seemed to tilt around him. The stones beneath his feet were soft as marshmallows, sinking at his heels so that he had to tip forward to keep his balance.
"Jesus... Jesus. I can't... can't believe it." He stared back at Ray, and saw every feature as if for the first time. So plain and so obvious now. "You're a bloody girl, aren't you? You're a bloody girl!"
Ray blinked, taken by surprise perhaps at not having to spell it out after all. "That's right, Baz. I'm a bloody girl." The tiniest trace of a smile, there and gone. "I'm a bloody girl."
"Oh my God..." Baz put a hand to his forehead, feeling as though his brain were about to leap out. "Oh my God... you were... all along, you were..."
It began to make sense. The way Ray was always up first every morning, the first to use the jakes, the shower... always so private. How it was Ray who had instinctively understood the needs of the other girls when they arrived, sorted out their washroom stuff. The other girls...
"They didn't know I was here, though. Nad and Steffie. And I didn't expect them to be turning up. I told them not to say anything. Not to tell."
Baz remembered the look of shock on Steffie's face when she'd first seen Ray. Helping with the bags in the corridor.
"So they knew you as... like... somebody else. How did they get used to calling you Ray?"
"They've always called me that. It's spelled R-A-E, though. Rae. Short for Rachel."
A fresh wave of shock and bewilderment washed over Baz. He was never going to be able to get this into his head. R-A-E. Rae.
"Baz? Listen, it's still OK, isn't it? We're still OK?"
Ray... Rachel... put a hand out as if to touch him, but Baz couldn't let that happen. He backed away, his own hands raised in defense.
"Whoa. Whoa. This is too weird. I can't just... I mean, I feel..."
Stupid, was what he felt. And angry. Everything had been turned around, tipped upside down and inside out. A trick. A joke.
He began to walk away, furious that he'd been so exposed, so taken in.
"Baz, please! Please don't..."
Ray caught up with him a this new Ray, this stranger. Rachel. She grabbed at his arm. She...
"I had to do it! I had to!"
"What d'you mean, had to? Had to make me look an idiot?"
"Me and Mum a we were desperate. Mum was sick for nearly a month. She couldn't... couldn't work. No food. We didn't have any way to live. I knew Mum'd be better off without me around. So we tried this. I made her let me. But they would only take boys, and so this was the only way I could get here a if I was a boy. So I cut my hair short, scruffed myself up a bit. Mum reckoned I'd be found out straight away, but I said it had to be worth a go. The worst that could happen was I'd be sent back. We didn't know it'd be so dangerous here... Baz, please! Please stop a minute. I don't want to walk in there with the others around. You've got to let me try and say how it was."
"I don't care, OK?" Baz came to a halt. "I don't care why you had to come here, or pretend you were a boy... or whatever. But you could have told me. You didn't have to let me go on thinking' a Baz struggled with the words a *go on thinking that..."
Go on thinking what? He didn't know. "You should have told me, that's all."
"I wanted to. I really wanted to. But how could I? I didn't know what you'd do, or what you'd say. If anyone found out a and they would have found out a what would've happened to me then?"
She was holding onto his arm, eyes filling with tears. Her hand was shaking.
A horrible thought came into Baz's head. "Somebody did find out, didn't they? The capos. They knew, didn't they? What did you do last night, when Steiner caught you? What did you do?"
"Nothing! Nothing!" Rae was really crying now, tears streaming down her face. "I just told them, that's all. They were gonna put me down the hole. So I told them. Told them I was a girl, told them everything. And they believed me. But then, when they did believe me, they said OK, they wouldn't put me down the hole, but I had to make them a promise. They made me say that next weekend... next Sunday, I'd prove it to them. They said they'd keep it a secret, but that next Sunday I had to go and have a drink with them. Have some fun, they said. And so I promised..."
She looked so vulnerable, so unhappy, and Baz wanted to respond somehow. Wanted to reach out to her. Hold her hand. But he couldn't.
"Well... I'm sorry," he mumbled. "I'm really sorry. But this is just too weird for me. It's just too friggin' weird."
They stood there awkwardly, Baz digging at the stones with the heel of his trainer, Rae wiping her eyes with her fingers.
"What do you want me to do?" she said. "There's no point in keeping it a secret any longer. No need to. But maybe... maybe I shouldn't tell everyone right away. Maybe I'll say nothing for a bit. What do you think?"
Baz shrugged. What difference did it make? But then, perhaps she was right. He could just picture the looks on their faces a all the other boys a and the uproar it would cause. The digs, the teasing, the stupid remarks.
"Yeah," he said. "OK. Maybe say nothing. Look... Rae... just give me chance to get used to the idea, all right? I don't wanna walk in there now and foreveryone to know, and then have to deal with all that. Not right now. Not after today. Maybe we could just leave it till tomorrow, yeah?"
"All right. I don't think I could handle it either." Rae seemed relieved. "And tonight... well, I'll just sleep upstairs with Stef and Nad. Nobody'll notice."
"Yeah."
They began to walk along the jetty.
"You still mad at me?"
Baz sighed. "No, I'm not mad. I'm just wiped out. I've friggin' had it."
And this was still too weird, he thought. Ray was a girl. A girl. And her name was Rachel...
No, he couldn't cope with that at all.
"Hey a where've you two been? Come on!"
The celebrations were already under way. Bottles and cans littered the seating area of the slob room, and everyone was sprawled around, eating and drinking and talking all at the same time.
"It worked. I just can't believe it really worked. I never thought it would..." Robbie, staring down at the tin of tuna fish in his hand, shaking his head.
"Yeah. But the sort room a that was the best bit! Ray coming in like that, and Nadine and Steffie. Hey, Ray' a Amit looked up a *what happened? How did you plan that one?"
"Wasn't really me." Ray a Rachel a sat down and grabbed a can of Coke from one of several multi-packs that lay around the floor. "Christ," she said. "Where did you get this lot from? What did you do? Break into the store?"
She'd instantly assumed her disguise, become one of the lads again, her husky voice calm and steady, no more tears. Baz just stared at her in wonder. Were all girls such good actors?
"Yeah. We used Steiner's keys," said Amit. "Come on, though a tell us where you've been all day, and all about the jam-jar thing, and the petrol."
"I'd got up to go to the jakes' a Rachel rubbed the back of her hand across her nose and sniffed a *really early this morning. And then Baz came in and we heard the divers talking outside the back window. They said they were going to take the little one with them. Tie her up. Tie her to the whatsit... the transom. So I... we... thought that meant Steffie. We thought they were taking Steffie out on the boat. She was gonna be on the boat! I couldn't believe it. So I ran upstairs to the art room, and got Steff and Nad, and then we all snuck down through the kitchen, up the back stairs and hid in the library."
"They didn't mean what we thought they meant, though," said Baz. "Turns out they were talking about the dinghy. They were gonna tie the dinghy to the transom."
"Yeah? Oh. Well, I didn't know that. The dinghy... right." There was a pause as Rachel popped open the can a pshtt a and took a quick swig.
"Anyway, so then we tried to think about what to do if we were caught. Stef had this idea. She said there was a big bottle of stuff in the art room for cleaning the brushes. Stuff that'd burn. It wasn't petrol, though. Something else."
"Turps," said Steffie. "White spirit. Dunno what made me think about it. I'd seen Preacher John that time, throwing stuff onto the altar to make the fire burn, and I dunno... I suppose that's where the idea came from. I said, OK, if they found us we could throw turps over them, and stand there with a box of matches or a lighter, then they wouldn't be able to touch us. Might give us another chance to run for it. We talked about it in the library. But it was only, like, an idea to protect ourselves. Then later, Ray said sh-he'd go down and have a look and see what was going on. He came running back and said that Baz'd made it, but we'd got to do something quick. Like now. And the turps was all we could think of, so we ran back down to the art room to get it. Then Ray had this better idea, with the torch thing and the jam jars. And we had a go."
"We reckoned if we could get close enough it'd work," said Nadine. "They wouldn't know what was in the jars, and they wouldn't be expecting much trouble from a bunch of girls." She glanced across at Rachel. "I mean, you know... us and Ray."
"Well, it was friggin' brilliant." Robbie rocked back in his seat, hugging himself with glee. "It was all just brilliant. The bomb and everything. Thinking it up in the first place, and then Fart Club, and building the thing... finding that pressure cooker... and then BOOF a up they all went..."
Yeah, you weren't there, thought Baz. It wasn't brilliant, it was horrible. And scary as hell. And trying to get back to the island, lost and all alone in that dinghy, that was horrible too...
Somebody passed him an open can of drink, and Baz took a sip. Beer. He pulled a face and passed it on. Didn't like it.
The chattering voices grew louder, more excited, just a hum of noise now. Baz caught little snippets here and there, but he wasn't really listening. He heard Robbie say something about seeds a planting seeds a and that caught his attention for a moment. Then Gene was going on about his ideas for rafts, and how they might be able to build a diving platform out in the sea. And Dyson was explaining to Ray how to catch a rabbit.
It was a warm atmosphere, full of hope and companion ship. Baz knew that he was amongst friends, people who truly cared about him, and that was a good feeling. But the others were already beginning to make plans, beginning to think about what would happen next. And he wasn't ready for that. Tomorrow they might build boats and catch rabbits and grow cabbages and play football a but that was tomorrow. He was still thinking about today.
He looked across at Rachel, her head close to Dyson's, chin in her hand as she listened to his talk. Dyson was holding a can of beer, and was consequently very talkative indeed. Rachel must have noticed that Baz was looking at her, or maybe she was thinking about him in that same moment. At any rate, she glanced over and gave him a slightly wobbly smile, rolled her eyes briefly, an indication that Dyson was being a bore.
Such beautiful eyes. He'd always thought so. How could he not have seen? How could Dyson or any of the others not see, even now? All the feelings of friendship that he'd had for Ray, the other Ray, were still there. He couldn't change them. He couldn't just transfer them across to this new person. Ray he'd been used to, but not Rachel. No, he wasn't ready for Rachel. Not yet.
The nightmares that he'd been dreading never came. Baz slept with his fishing spool beneath his pillow a such luxury to have a pillow a and he dreamed of the mackerel. He was swimming with the fishes, flying with the fishes, across a bright blue sea. They were his friends. They talked to him as they guided him on, and he recognized all their voices. Taps was there. And Enoch. Even Cookie.
CHAPTER THIRTY.