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Let there be light! We are as gods, because if we are not gods, then how else will the world be made?
Jack stares at the sprawled body on the sand, the shell that’s empty of the person. The body is riddled with holes, bloody stab wounds, and the spear in Jack’s hands is reddened right up past the point. Up, down, up down, his hunters raise and plunge their spears into the pig, the beast, the-
He runs, he reaches the beach, he howls into the night. He stabbed Simon in the heart.
Sobs wrack his body and, furious, he turns them into dance, frenzied as the others join him and laugh. He cannot look as the water comes in, washing his bloodied feet. He cannot look at what the water carries away. Jack laughs with Roger and applauds the little’un who arches backwards to walk on his hands and his feet. The bloodlust still hasn’t left, the rush of pure unadulterated power. He ignores the flashes of that pinched, gutted expression on Maurice’s face.
Little by little, the little’uns drop off to sleep, and by dawn Roger and Maurice and the other choir lads have have joined them. If there’s any regret, they give no sign. There’s no point to a signal fire, he thinks, because the outside world doesn’t exist, not really. This is it. This is all there is.
Jack sits by himself against the tree, the one he read that damned diary against. His hands shake, and he breathes out adrenaline and blood lust. Memories come unbidden. Last winter, the last winter he’ll ever know. He remembers the feverish haze, and the presence of his mother which lacked her coolness and replaced it with an earnest care.
The hand which cradled his face had been soft, though the murmuring voice of the person who supplied sips of water and kept him warm through his shivering had been masculine in a high-pitched manner. It was discordant with his mother’s voice, which had been deeper though still recognisably female, and often clipped with impatience whenever he took sick.
He kicked the blankets and hacked out his misery in rough wet coughs, and shuddered at the hand on his brow. He knew who it was by the time his fever broke, and admitted then to himself that he liked it. The tree of destiny becomes theirs, their genesis, their shelter; beneath it sprung up their private little world apart from the war. It was the start of something, anyway, though these long vacs had been theirs for years. The return of the others has been its end, as always. No one could see him like this, no one could see Jack weak.
Simon is uncommonly kind, steady, funny, and his brown eyes make a river of Jack’s mouth. Out flows whatever springs to his lips without thinking.
That one afternoon, December 30th, sprawled in the shade under the tree in seclusion. The childish press of mouths, the winter cold chased away by closeness, the agitated, ticklish feeling in Jack’s belly, and the desire to flee from those brown eyes which strip him to the bone. Only once, (or twice, maybe) but it underpins everything. Simon never wrote about it, thank God.
“I’m bored of worrying about being cruel.” He had been right, he was, but what stands out clearest is the hurt in Simon’s eyes. Weak… Stupid…
The sun is up, and Jack can see clearly. He steps impatiently over and between the sprawled bodies, then drops to his knees to crawl hastily under the shelter. He scrambles under the rock for the diary, heedless of waking the others… It’s gone. His stomach lurches and a wordless soft groan escapes his mouth.
The last of Simon exists only in his memory.
Jack swallows the absurd desire to tell Simon about this in secrecy, and he howls to the moon.