I was sort of dreading getting back to the hotel, wondering about N&S. No surprises there. He was still out on his sun lounger and Sara was sitting next to him, reminding him to turn over every half hour . . . like a chicken on a spit. She told me that he had decided he would be all right with Factor 9 again but I wouldn’t have agreed. His shoulders were badly burned and there were two more blisters on his nose.
She rubbed in some more oil for him. I was surprised at how horrible it smelled. It’s yellow and it oozes out of the bottle, rippling between her fingers as she rubs it in. Disgusting.
I’ve been out in the sun a lot myself but I’m being careful. I wear a T-shirt with wide sleeves and a Bart Simpson baseball cap. I’ve got my own suntan lotion too. If you ask me, Uncle Nigel is out of his mind. Hasn’t he heard of skin cancer?
August 19
He’s got a tan! It’s not exactly a Mr. Universe shade of bronze but he’s definitely brown from head to toe. There are one or two areas where the skin is still a bit red, under his arms and on the very top of his head, but he says they’ll soon blend in with the rest of him. He was in a really good mood this afternoon and even said that perhaps I can go on a Jet Ski after all.
It rained for the first time this afternoon. The rain out here is strange. One moment it’s blazing sunlight and the next it’s just bucketing down and everyone has to run for cover. But it’s not like English rain. The water is softer. It’s like standing in a warm shower. And it’s over as quickly as it started, as if someone threw a switch.
Sara took me on the bus to Bridgetown, leaving Nigel on the beach (Factor 4). We walked around the port, which was a jumble of sailing boats and huge, fat cruisers. She looked into chartering a boat for the day but when she found out the price she soon forgot that idea. Nigel would never agree to pay, she said, and at the same time she sort of sighed. So I asked her something I’d always wondered. “Why did you marry Uncle Nigel?” I asked. “Oh,” she said. “He was very different when he was young. And so was I. I thought we’d be happy together.”
We went to a bar down on the dock. Sara bought me an ice cream. For herself she ordered a large rum punch even though it was only half past three in the afternoon. She made me promise not to tell Uncle Nigel.
August 21
Bad news. Uncle Nigel has completely peeled. So now he’s back to square one.
August 22
Uncle Nigel spent the entire day (eight hours) on the beach but it looks as if his new skin is refusing to tan. He has moved down to sun protection Factor 2.
He and Sara had an unpleasant argument yesterday . . . the day he lost his tan. Apparently, when they woke up, the sheets were covered with bits of brown. At first Sara thought it was mold or something that had flaked off the ceiling. But it was actually dead skin. She said it made her feel sick and Nigel just blew up at her. You could hear their voices down the corridor.
I saw Nigel stripping down on the beach. There was a bright pink strip going from his neck to his belly as if someone had been trying to unwrap him in a hurry. This was where the old skin had fallen away. But new skin had already grown to take its place. As for the rest of his tanned skin, it was obvious that he was going to lose that too. It was already muddy and unhealthy. He couldn’t move without a bit flaking off. He was doing what he could to save it. I noticed that he’d brought down a big bottle of After Sun and he was rubbing that in as if he thought it would somehow stick him back together again. I didn’t think it would work.
I went out again with Cassian and also with his older brother, Nick. I told them about Uncle Nigel and they both thought it was very funny. Nick told me that in Victorian times nobody wanted to have a suntan. It was considered socially inferior. This is something he learned at school.
When I got back to the hotel, Uncle Nigel was still lying there with Aunt Sara just a few yards away, sitting with her Stephen King under an umbrella. The book must have been amusing her because there was a definite smile on her face.
As for my uncle, I think the whole situation is getting out of control. His new skin isn’t tanning. But it is burning. It’s already turned a virulent shade of crimson. Unlike me, he hasn’t been wearing a hat and a large heat bubble has formed in the middle of his head. It’s like one of those white blobs you see in cartoons when Jerry hits Tom with a hammer. All the other hotel guests have begun to avoid him. You can see, when they walk down to the sea. They make a circle so they don’t have to get too close.
I notice, incidentally, that he’s still reading A Tale of Two Cities. But we’ve been here now for almost two weeks and he’s still only on page twelve.
August 25
Cassian and Nick left today and the hotel feels empty without them. Another family arrived . . . three girls! To be honest, I’m beginning to look forward to going home. No news from Mom. She still hasn’t had the baby. I miss her. And I’m really worried about Uncle Nigel.
All his old skin has gone now. It’s either fallen off or it’s been taken over by the new skin, which is a sort of mottled mauve and has a life of its own. His whole body is covered in boils like tiny volcanoes. These actually burst in the hot sun . . . I swear I’m not making it up. They burst and yellow pus oozes out. You can actually see it. Every ten minutes he seems to have another boil somewhere on his skin. There are also lots more sores on his face. They run down the side of his cheeks and onto his neck. If he had a chin I’m sure that would be covered in sores too.
And he’s still trying to get a tan! This afternoon I’d had enough. I don’t often talk to Uncle Nigel. For some reason I always seem to irritate him. But I did try telling him that he looked, frankly, horrible, and that I was really worried about him. I should have saved my breath! He almost chewed my head off, using the sort of language you wouldn’t expect to hear coming from a headmaster. So then I tried to tell Aunt Sara what I thought.
ME: Aunt Sara, aren’t you going to do something?
SARA: What do you mean?
ME: Uncle Nigel! He looks awful . . .
SARA: (with a sigh) What can I do, Tim? I’m afraid your uncle has never listened to me. Not ever. And he’s determined to get this tan.
ME: But he’s killing himself.
SARA: I think you’re exaggerating, dear. He’ll be fine.
But he isn’t fine. Dinner tonight was the most embarrassing night of my life.
We went to a fancy restaurant. It should have been beautiful. The tables were outdoors, spread over two terraces. We sat with paper lanterns hanging over us and the silver waves almost lapping at our feet. Nigel walked very stiffly, like a robot. You could tell that his clothes were rubbing against his damaged skin and to him they must have felt like sandpaper.
He didn’t make much sense over dinner. He ranted on about a boy called Charlie Meyer who obviously went to his school and who, equally obviously, was no favorite of his. He was still using a lot of four-letter words and I could see the other diners glancing around. One of the waiters came to see what the matter was and suddenly Uncle Nigel was violently sick! All over himself!
We left at once. Uncle Nigel groaned as we bundled him into a taxi. I could feel his skin under his shirt. It was damp and slimy. Aunt Sara didn’t say anything until we got back to the hotel. Then . . . “You can order from room service, Tim. And you’ll have to put yourself to bed.”
“What about Uncle Nigel?”
“I’ll look after him!”
August 27
Uncle Nigel is no longer able to talk. Even if he could construct a sentence anyone could understand, he would be unable to say it, since he has now managed to burn his lips so badly that they’ve turned black and shriveled up. What was left of his hair has fallen out and his new skin has shrunk and torn so that you can actually see areas of his skull. I think he has also gone blind in one eye.
The hotel manager, Mr. Jenson, has banned him from the beach as the other guests had finally complained. Mr. Jenson had a meeting with my aunt and me. He said that in his opinion my un
cle shouldn’t be sunbathing anymore.
JENSON: Forgive me, Mrs. Howard. But I think this is a very unhealthy situation . . .
SARA: I have tried to stop him, Mr. Jenson. This morning I even locked him in the bathroom. But he managed to force open the window and climb down the drainpipe.
JENSON: Perhaps we should call for a doctor?
SARA: I’m sure that’s not necessary . . .
She said she’d been trying to stop him but I’m not sure that’s true. She was still rubbing oil into him every morning and evening. I’d seen her. But I didn’t say anything.
I am beginning to feel very uneasy about all this.
August 28
Yesterday evening, Ungle Nigel ran away.
He had another argument with Aunt Sara. I heard vague, muffled shouts and then the slamming of the door. When I looked out of the window—the sun was just beginning to set—I saw him race out of the hotel, staggering toward the beach. He could hardly stand up straight. He was wearing shorts and nothing else and he was completely unrecognizable. He had no skin at all. His eyes bulged out of his skull and his lips had shrunk back to reveal not just his teeth but his gums. Every step he took, he moaned. At one point he staggered and fell back against the hotel wall. One of the guests saw him and actually screamed.
This morning he was gone. But he had left a bloody imprint of himself on the wall.
August 30
I can’t help but feel that Aunt Sara is completely different. There has been no news of Ungle Nigel and he hasn’t been seen for two days but she hasn’t been worried. She has been drinking a lot of rum. Last night she got drunk and ended up dancing with one of the waiters.
I can’t wait to get home. I spoke to Mom this morning. It seems I have a baby sister. They’re going to call her Lucy.
Mom asked me about the trip. I told her about the island and about the family I met but I decided not to say anything about Ungle Nigel.
August 31
Ungle Nigel is dead!
Some fishermen found him yesterday, lying flat on the beach. At first they thought he must have been eaten up and spit out by sharks. His whole body was a mass of oozing sores, gashes, and poisoned flesh. He no longer had any eyes. What had happened was that he had fallen asleep again in the sun. And this time he hadn’t woken up.
The only way they were able to recognize him was by his Marks & Spencer shorts.
Aunt Sara didn’t even sound surprised when they told her. She just said, “Oh.”
And I thought I saw her smile.
September 2
Back in England. Thank goodness.
Mom and Dad were supposed to meet me at Heathrow Airport but as it turned out there was one last, nasty surprise waiting for me when we finally landed. It turned out that my new sister, Lucy, had caught some sort of virus. It wasn’t anything very serious—just one of the things that newborn babies often get—but she’d had to go back to the hospital for the night and Mom and Dad were with her. Sara’s name was called out over the intercom and we lugged our cases over to the information desk, where we were given the news. I was going to have to stay at her house—just for the night. Mom and Dad would come and pick me up in the morning.
So it was back to Fulham and the Victorian terrace. I have to say that I walked in with a certain feeling of dread. It was Sara’s house now, of course. But it had once been Nigel’s and I could still feel him in there. It wasn’t just his ghost. In a way it was worse than that. The drab wallpaper and the shelves stuffed with fat, serious books. The old-fashioned furniture, the heavy curtains blotting out the light, the damp smell. It was as if his spirit was everywhere. He was dead. But while we were in the house, his memory lived on.
Aunt Sara must have felt it too. Before she’d even unpacked, she called a real estate agent and told him that she wanted to put the house on the market immediately. She said she planned to emigrate to Florida.
We had supper together—Chinese takeout—but neither of us ate very much and we hardly talked at all. She wanted to be alone. I could tell. In a funny way, she seemed almost suspicious of me. I noticed her glancing at me once or twice as if she was worried about something. It was as if she was waiting for me to blame her for Nigel’s death. But it hadn’t been her fault. She hadn’t done anything wrong.
Had she?
I went to bed early that night. In the spare room. But I couldn’t sleep.
I found myself thinking about everything that had happened. Over and over again the pieces went through my mind until a picture began to form. I rolled over and tried to think of something else. But I couldn’t. Because what I was seeing now, what I should have seen all along, was so horribly obvious.
“I have plans . . .”
That’s what Sara had told my mom before we left for vacation. She hadn’t wanted me to come from the very start. It was almost as if she had known what was going to happen and hadn’t wanted me to be there, as a witness. She hadn’t made Uncle Nigel lie in the sun, but now that I thought about it, she had never actually discouraged him either. And his death hadn’t upset her at all. She’d been drinking rum and dancing with the waiters before they’d even discovered the corpse.
No! It was crazy! After all, she had packed all those bottles, the different suntan lotions. She’d even rubbed them in for him. As I lay in the darkness, I remembered the yellow ooze spilling out of the bottle, rippling through her fingers as she massaged his back. Once again I smelled it—thick and greasy—and at the same time I remembered something Nigel had said just before we’d left. He’d been examining one of the bottles and he’d said:
“Have you opened this?”
Maybe that was what made me get up. I couldn’t sleep anyway, so I got up and went downstairs. I don’t know why I tiptoed but I did. And there was Aunt Sara, standing in the kitchen, humming to herself.
She was surrounded by bottles. I recognized them at once. Factor 15, Factor 9, and Factor 4. The water-resistant oil, the hypoallergenic oil, and all the other oil. The Before Sun and the After Sun protection. She was emptying them, one at a time, into a large green tin. And no matter what it said on the labels, it was the same gold-colored oil that poured into the tin and I guessed that this was where the oil had really come from in the first place.
QUIKCOOK VEGETABLE OIL—FOR FASTER FRYING
Big red letters on the side of the tin. My aunt continued emptying the bottles, getting rid of the evidence.
I crept back to bed and counted the hours until my parents finally came.
Flight 715
There are some nightmares so horrible that even when you wake up they won’t quite go away. You lie in bed with the gray light of the morning beating at the window and even though you’re in your own bed, in your own room, you still wonder. Because the creatures of your dreams, the ghosts and the monsters are still with you, hiding in the shadows, just out of sight. And maybe you lie there for five minutes, for ten minutes, thinking about it, wondering. But finally you convince yourself—you have to. It was only a dream.
Judith Fletcher had just such a dream on the last day of her vacation in Canada and even as her parents slept on in their room and her younger sister, Maggie, snored noisily in the bed next to her, she lay there and remembered.
This was her dream.
She was at a funeral. There was something wrong with the cemetery. It was far too big and the grass simply didn’t look like grass. It was as flat as cardboard and that strange color that you only see in dreams; a green-silver-gray that had no name. There was a church bell ringing and, in the distance, a clock showing three minutes past six. Judith didn’t walk into the cemetery. She was carried, lifted by unseen hands. It was only as she floated toward a single grave, a black rectangle that seemed to have been cut out rather than dug, that she felt the first wave of terror. This wasn’t any funeral. This was hers.
She tried to wake up but sleep had become a prison. She tried to scream but only the faintest whisper escaped her lips.
; And then she saw the mourners. There were about three hundred of them, standing around the grave, none of them speaking. Even though she was asleep, it struck her as curious that none of them had dressed for the funeral. They were wearing their everyday clothes, watching her with empty, blank faces. Most of them were carrying suitcases. Some had duty-free bags.
There was a fat woman with big eyes and a shock of curling hair. A little boy holding a teddy bear that was missing an arm. A sullen-faced husband and wife, holding hands, not talking to each other. A black man in a leather jacket, biting his fingernails. Later on, she would remember every one of them as if she had known them all her life, even though she was certain she had never seen them before.
And then there was the vicar. At least, Judith assumed he was the vicar as he seemed to be in charge. But at the same time she was aware that the man wasn’t wearing church clothes; indeed, he seemed to be dressed in some sort of uniform. He was a thin man with long, fair hair. His nose had been broken at some time and there was a thin scar running down his cheek. He was standing alone, nearest the grave, and as Judith arrived he said four words.
“Flight Seven One Five.”
The invisible hands lowered Judith into the grave. Darkness rushed in on her. And that was when the nightmare became unbearable, when she struggled with all her being to break free. She couldn’t breathe. She had never known such utter blackness. It seemed to be not just outside her but inside too, at the back of her eyes, in her throat, reaching to the pit of her stomach. She was falling into it, endlessly falling. The tiny rectangle of light that had been the entrance to the grave was now a mile away. At the same time she was aware of two distinct sounds; first a huge explosion, then the scream of ambulances that grew louder and louder until she couldn’t take any more.