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Jack does not sleep the whole of the night after they kill Simon, and exhaustion leaves him jittery and wired the rest of the day. There’s the vicious satisfaction of stealing the conch, of howling and dancing and corralling Ralph and Piggy and making the latter kneel as their chief, but it’s short-lived. When Roger - kill the boring Nick-pig - flings the rock down onto Piggy’s head, there’s an awful lurching as though he, too, was sent careening over the cliff. As though he’s still stuck in the plane as it goes down.
He distracts himself with badly-roasted and still-bloody pig, the raw parts of which make him vomit, and with Roger’s jokes and the evening hunt. The little’uns do him reverence and piss brazenly on the sand. Roger’s talking of burning it all down, while Maurice favours a comb formation. Jack chooses the latter but it’s so hard to focus. His head throbs no matter how much water he drinks, and when he envisions expanding out to the rocky little island in the ocean, his mind circles around who’s missing.
That night, feverish and shaking, he slips off at last. The dream is a good one; a memory preserved despite that diary being gone. He found the scorched and shredded remnants earlier that day, and thank God Maurice was there because it held his expression together.
The dream is of another sleep. Last St Stephen’s Day, curled in a one-person bed and crushed up against Simon, the feverish chill countered by the blankets and body heat. Quotes from Huck Finn and drowsy jokes and Simon’s funny voices had rung in his ears. In unconsciousness and solitude, they had drawn closer, and when Jack awoke at dawn to find Simon awake, inches away and gaze locked on his, it had been nothing to lean closer, closer -
The tree of Genesis. Was it worth losing Heaven for? Is this?
Simon drew sick, too, but healed faster.