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But it did feel good standing. He took a deep breath, straightening to his full height.
They could have passed for extras in bad makeup from a disaster movie: naked, puckered, bruised, bearded, hair encrusted, lips white and cracked, skin peeling. He didn’t think he’d ever seen anything as beautiful as when Ben cracked a rueful smile at him. Literally.
They hobbled slowly up the dunes and into the woods.
Each step made them unbalanced, as if the water were their natural element and not now the land. But by the time they reached the sunken garden, Ben was more himself and had an arm aroundhiswaist, helping him up the steps.
They went around to the door, which they had left only three days before. It seemed more like a lifetime, and they were both well aware that to those inside it might well have been just that.
They eased it open and went in.
The air smelt rotten.
They went down the hallway and stood looking at what they found in the kitchen.
In one corner, thoughtfully piled upon Ben’s leather jacket (which had apparently been dragged off the back of a chair expressly for this purpose), was the by-product of three days of gluttony for two large dogs. That accounted for the smell.
It certainly wasn’t the result of rotten food. There was none left.
Every single edible thing had been extracted from its packaging and eaten. Nothing remained: no cheese, no ham, no bread, no pasties, no chocolate biscuits, no gourmet sausages, no quiche…nothing. The water in the tin bath was almost gone, but there was still some in the bottom. The only things that had not been consumed in this frenzy of gluttony were the dog biscuits Ben had left in the bowls.
They scooped them out and ate them and then harvested the ones left in the box.
Their plan of staying on the island for a day or two to recover before one of them set out again was over. They would starve if they did.
They went back up to the main room.
The dogs were upside down in their nest of blankets, fast asleep and snoring.
The very tip of Radulf’s tail might have been twitching, and this could have been through either a memory of apple and pork organic sausages, or apretend we’re deadguilty conscience, neither Ben nor Aleksey could tell. Or care.
They climbed into the blankets alongside the warm bodies and passed into blessed unconsciousness.
Tomorrow was only a few hours away.
* * *
Chapter Fifty-Three
Awareness returned slowly the next day, and Aleksey immediately realised the first positive result of the swim for him: he hurt so much everywhere that, for once, his leg was a minor inconvenience.
He was face to face with Ben, so close that he could see every detail of his long, almost girlish eyelashes delicately fanned on his spectacularly sunburnt, wind-chaffed, water-wrinkled skin. Aleksey didn’t think he’d ever seen him look more wholly perfect, but then Ben opened his eyes and all the illumination of his world condensed to two pools of translucent green. With great difficulty, he slid one finger over the blankets and laid its tip to Ben’s cheek. Ben twitched a lip. Aleksey stroked his finger gently down and rested it on the newly formed split. Ben sighed and once more Aleksey sensed that intensely silent connection they now shared. They were separate men, like the islands above the ocean, but if you looked deeper beneath the surface, they were the same—joined.
Perhaps one day, he thought, when the waters of life recede entirely and all is known, that elemental connection will be revealed.
‘You did it.’
Aleksey’s finger thrummed a little resting on Ben’s lip as he spoke. He nodded but corrected, ‘We did it.’
‘I didn’t—’ Aleksey hushed him.
‘I would not have seen the buoy and in seeing that we found Oasis Rock.’
Ben nodded to the truth of this.
Soft dawn light was beginning to seep through the mullioned glass. It was time. All Aleksey wanted to do was sink back into sleep, but he could not. His worst pain was the hunger in his belly, and he could see agitation from starved hollowness in Ben’s gaze.
Stay or go.
