Shipwreck

Kat collapsed across her face, dragged herself off to let Bel breathe. Mouth on mouth, deep and desperate dancing of tongues together.

Oblivion.

Kat met the dawn squatting on her haunches just short of the surf. She wore her waterproof jacket bundled round her despite the heat. When Bel walked across to see her there were already three charred filters on the sand to match the cigarette in her hand.

"I thought they were one-at-a-time emergencies only?"

"They're mine. My choice to make."

"Mind if I share?"

Kat looked reluctant but handed it over anyway. Bel had one puff to make the point, she hadn't actually wanted to smoke.

"Would you sit down for me please, Kat?"

"What?"

"Just plonk your bum on the sand and don't be grumpy for once, can't you!"

Kat looked astounded, but nonetheless she sat back with her feet now in front of her rather than underneath. Bel knelt down, took the plimsolls slowly off and kissed each foot once. She looked up and met Kat's eyes, waiting to see the acknowledgement in them that Kat had noticed the cord she had looped round her neck.

"Good morning Kat. My name is Bel, but I will answer to 'slut' if you'd prefer to call me that. I'll do almost anything you say, but I will not kill you, and I won't let you kill me. So we're just going to have to find a way to survive here with our decency intact, aren't ..."

"Stop it, Bel. You do not understand ..."

"The horrible things you've seen or suffered? No, I can't. I can understand that the worst possible thing that can happen doesn't have to be the thing that does happen every time ..."

She carefully replaced Kat's shoes before she stood up.

"... I'm not stupid, Kat, I understand that I owe you my life and I think a very great deal of you. I'll play along with you because I'm grateful, and because in ways that make no sense to me I do like you. I won't enjoy all the things we do for themselves, Kat. I want you to know that, because I think that it would spoil your enjoyment of them if I did. Now, unless you want to use me again, I think we have more than enough to do today."

Bel walked easily round the head of the island on the morning of the fifty-eighth day, two fish caught overnight by the hooks in the lagoon swinging in her hand. It was a quicker journey over the hill, but more dangerous and less comfortable in her coconut sandals, so she usually walked around the beach instead. Somewhere in the back of her mind she knew she was malnourished and sunburnt and slowly fading away, but on the surface she felt better than she could ever remember. She felt surprisingly at ease and comfortable with the jacket hanging loose on her shoulders; walked so naturally that she was unaware of the weight of the knife on her ankle.

Her mood darkened a little as she approached the camp. Kat wasn't dying, at least not yet, but she wasn't so well this week and there was nothing Bel could do except keep her as well fed as possible. That, of course, and amuse her funny little ways when called upon. Neither of those tasks were hardships. No task is truly a hardship if you do it for someone you love, and she was coming to wonder if that was a better word for it than admiration. How protective she felt towards poor tired Kat now, as both their bodies became weaker whilst everything else about Bel grew daily stronger.

"Morning, Kat."

"Bel."

"I've got these for you."

She flourished the fish for Kat's approval before dropping them beside the fire. She went to where Kat was leaning against her tree and stood astride her, bare cunt flourished in her face just as the fish had been: this is yours too, lady, if you want it. She felt the stroke of Kat's fingers on her thigh. She shrugged the jacket off before squatting down and taking that hand in hers, pushing it inside herself with a deep animal grunt.

"Want to fuck me for breakfast instead?"

Deep and hungry look in Kat's eyes as they met hers.

"You can be so dirty, Bel."

"Who taught me that? Who likes that? Fuck, Kat, you feel good in me."

Her hand went up inside Kat's shirt; neither gentle nor cruel, the rough stimulation that Kat liked. Stimulation as rough as Kat was inside her, and that felt so right that Bel moaned loudly enough to drown out the first faint buzzing overhead.

"What do you want for breakfast Bel?"

"You know I want to ki- ..."

"Bloody hell!"

Kat knocked Bel aside as she scrambled out from under. Bel jumped up at once, noise of aeroplane engines suddenly loud in her ears. She saw Kat snatching up two flares as she darted out onto the sand. Blind panic seized Bel, she charged after Kat.

"No. No, Kat, no!"

Mad, desperate flying rugby tackle; flailing hands grabbing at Kat's ankles and pulling her down. Kat rolled on her back and looked at Bel in utter horror; and then she was up on her knees with her hands busy.

The first flare popped and climbed into the air. Kat fired the one in her other hand. Bel came to her senses, stumbled back to the discarded jacket, grabbed the two from the pockets and sent them skyward as well. The pitch of the engines changed slightly as the plane banked and flew back over them. Bel was on her knees in the sand, tears coursing down her face. She could see Kat standing on the beach, arms waving over her head in the distress signal. She looked up and saw the plane's wing dip to them before it flew off.

Silence.

"What was that Bel?"

"Sorry, wasn't thinking straight."

"Weren't thinking straight? We could have been ..."

"I didn't want to lose you!"

Stunned incomprehension on Kat's face, until she came over and gently kissed Bel's cheek. Then she set the billy made from an old freshwater can on the fire, went to her ditch bags and opened the most precious of the sealed plastic packets. She dropped one tea bag into the billy.

"Just the one, I won't believe it until we're on a good solid deck again."

"Kat, I'm so sorry. I don't know what I was thinking."

"Don't be obtuse, Bel, it doesn't suit. We know exactly what you were thinking, and I'm very flattered. I haven't treated you very well, and I'm about to treat you worse because you've honestly earned something I'm afraid I can't give you. Only end in tears later, child, I promise you it would."

"I'm prepared to ..."

"I'm not, and you shouldn't be either."

Bel poured tea into coconut shell cups and they sat drinking in silence.

"I'm not a child."

"No, you're not. I'm very grateful for that; might have been a little much even for me."

"Don't do that. Please, if you feel you need to insult someone, say it about me; don't make yourself sound so much uglier than you are."

"Bel ..."

"Yes Kat?"

"I ... I don't want to talk about it. I tried once, a long time ago, it didn't help in the least. I'd like you to know that there was never ... I've never had a knife put to me, Bel ..."

Some things are simply too weighty to be carried by words, that after all, is the reason that people make love with their bodies. There is simply no way to look someone in the eye and tell them how it feels to be helpless under them in trust. How fierce that is; how that secure terror opens places that nothing else can reach. The knowledge that it can only be felt hung there expectantly as Bel saw the swallow move down Kat's throat exactly as it had so long ago by the stream.

"... Nobody ever has. Not yet."

Bel put down her cup, reached down to her ankle and laid the blade very gently across Kat's throat.

"Ask me nicely."

"Please, Annabelle ..."

"My name's Bel, Kat, it always will be."

"Please, Bel, would you kindly allow me to kiss your cunt?"

"How, Kat? Want me to sit on your face?"

"Please don't, Bel. Please lay on your back and let me go down on you. Please allow me to do that for ..."

"You've asked, there's no need to beg. Please kiss me somewhere else first."

There is something that passes between lovers in that orgasmic moment of selfless fury, when your mouth and hers mix and melt together in the need to be one rather than two. We call it kissing, because we have no other word for it, but it's a fiercely different thing to the soft hesitant luxury of the kiss that comes before. And so, in Bel's mind, when she and Kat knelt together they kissed for the first and only time then, before she lay back and each in her own way acknowledged the debts they owed the other.

She shouldn't have been so selfish. She should have sat up a little so she could reach down and stroke that blade across Kat's neck and shoulders while she did what she did. It's what she would have wanted in Kat's place, but it felt so thoroughly good and indulgent she could do nothing but lie there and let the tongue carry her far away.

They were given separate bunks, of course, and then separate hospital rooms. Bel was younger and a little healthier, she was discharged before Kat and there was really no reason not to go straight back to UK and start some attempt at putting her life into order. To her surprise, that order came very easily. Small trials no longer intimidated her; everyday irritations were not worth her annoyance. She was famous for about a week and lingered in the local papers for another fortnight; and then the football season started and interest waned.

They never met again, but for two years Bel sent Christmas cards and on the second she received a complementary copy of the book. She tried to read it but the kindly-meant lies were too much for her and she never finished: how the young woman the book called 'Joyce' had carried Kat through everything with her constant good humour and done the real work; how Kat owed her life to her. She turned back to the title and imagined that her copy must be quite unique. Surely Kat had signed hundreds at least, and surely she had done what every other author does: signature and sentiment in some corner of white space on the page. Bel's copy simply said 'Thank you', and it was written across Kat's own name. She found her hand tracing over the impression and she knew that there would be no kindness to either of them in sending another card next year.

Kat and Joyce must have been entirely chaste on the island, of course, they were both normal women and the matter never came up. As for Bel, she was far from certain what she was. There was, briefly, a man; then a fleeting woman; another man. None of them moved her. Like so much else, their concerns and passions seemed trivial to her. They expected her to understand and share their interest in the trade union, or Manchester City, or French cinema – as if any of those things truly mattered. She could never explain those fifteen seconds of lunacy on the beach to herself. She and Kat had needed each other to keep themselves alive. She could never – would never wish to – deny that they had needed each other in an entirely different way; that somewhere between the mental spite and physical blows Kat gave her body a great deal of pleasure. The sex, strange as it was, had kept them both sane, just as Kat intended. But surely it was sex, and nothing more than that? Kat, it was quite obvious, did not love her. Surely the weird inexplicable mixture of fear and dependence and basic animal lust she felt towards Kate could not be called anything as simple and gentle as love? Whatever it was, it seemed that it spoilt other people for her.

Almost a decade after the island, amidst the drear world of strikes, power cuts and three day weeks, Bel befriended a woman at work. She was six years Bel's junior, her name was Natalie and there was something that made Bel enjoy her company. She was neither grim nor self-righteous, but there was a seriousness about her unlike those foolish passing fancies. They talked at lunchtimes, then went for drinks, and with the passage of time they began to cook for each other once a week. They were in a pub, laughing over some feeble joke, when Bel happened to look across the table and suddenly understand she had fallen into a love unlike any emotion she had known in her life. She felt hesitation, and fear; and a terrible emptiness at the hopeless inevitability that this was as unrequited as all the other needs for closeness in her life.

That week it was her turn to entertain. They had barely sat down together on a cold rain-sodden night when all the lights failed yet again. It was such a common thing that winter that Bel had candles laid out already waiting. Except this time, as she stood she felt the touch very light on her wrist and heard the voice soft in the darkness.

"Please don't."

She sat back down and asked, fearful of the answer, if that was what Natalie truly wanted. A moment of silence as her eyes adjusted until the shadowy figure beside her resolved into an offered fork in a raised hand. Bel dipped her head and took the piece of steak in her teeth; chewed it slowly with the sound of Natalie's quiet sigh fluttering in her ears. A single second of devastated rejection as the meat on her own fork met a closed mouth, then she felt Natalie's need in the air between them and pushed just a little. Her mind was filled with a clear image of the other lips parting to her hand with exactly the same tease of welcoming resistance.

Natalie's discarded fork rang on the plate; fingers covered in mashed potato came to Bel's mouth and she sucked the length of them with the contentment of a nursing infant. Eyes closed in dim light, her hand found one of those sweet small carrots and offered it to Natalie. Wordless communication between them: she had barely formed the mental picture of gravy thick on her own nipple when she felt the hand on her buttons. Hands cupping each others' faces as the food in their mouths mixed ...

They cuddled together for warmth in bed after making love, and Natalie rather uncomfortably said she had an admission to make. Would it be too much of a problem for Bel not to be quite so gentle every time?

"How not gentle?"

"I'd rather not be punched."

"I'm very glad to hear that."

"I was looking at your belt earlier: thinking how it might feel on my back, on my ..."

"Really mean so much to you if I could?"

"I'd do without if it upsets you. Honestly though, I'd like you to try."

"One condition, please?"

"Anything."

"Whatever we might do; we can play games if you want to, but ... If you ever want to kiss in any way, that's always there for you. Please don't ever beg me for that. Please just don't. For me?"

"Of course, Bel. Whatever you prefer."

Nothing is a hardship, not if you are doing it for someone you truly love.

Miss Burns went back into the kitchen to tip out the pot and make some fresh tea. As she retrieved the mug from the table, her eye fell on the open newspaper:

Sylvia Katherine Maitland-Warner MBE, 1920-2012; SOE agent, prisoner of war, freelance photographer, yachtswoman. Died on Tuesday in a nursing home in Cornwall after suffering from Alzheimer's for many years ...

"Do you hate me so much for keeping secrets from you?"

Miss Weston was standing in the doorway looking at her.

"Don't hate you at all Bel. Anyway, that all happened so long before we met, it's not exactly keeping secrets."

"That wasn't the secret, love, that was the explanation. Here is the secret .."

She sat at the table and gently closed the newspaper, and then she went on.

"... if you rip out that panel over the old fireplace in the spare bedroom and reach up the chimney, you'll find a ledge with a cigar box resting on top of it. Inside there is a .32 automatic and a box of cartridges. They're entirely illegal, if anyone stumbled on them I could go to prison; I suppose you could too and that's why I'm apologising. I have no intention of ending up in a place where well-meaning strangers change my nappy. I will never be helpless again. Do we have any sort of problem here?"

"No, Bel, none at all. You can trust me."

"I know I can, love. Would you mind ... I know it's the middle of the day and there's things to do; would you mind too much if we went to bed for a little while?"

"I think that is a very good idea. Let's take some tea up with us, we're not in any hurry are we?"

Natalie Burns listened to her friend's footsteps on the stairs as she made the tea. After laying out cups and saucers and milk jug, she retrieved an ancient rolled-up trouser belt from the dresser drawer and put it neatly on the spare corner of the tea tray. Just in case.