Ruth crouched on the ground, her hands protectively over her head, her knees drawn up into a tight ball. She cried freely as her so-called friends crowded around her on all sides, telling her how horrible she was and what a complete failure she knew herself to be.
"You know you can't sing," said one.
"You know we don't want you at parties," said another.
"Why would we want to talk to you?"
"And as for your acting..."
"And when you make suggestions- what do you know?"
"And you can't control your temper."
"You can't even do a simple job a sixteen-year-old could do."
She knew it was all true. It was how she felt about herself. Why should anyone like her? How could they, when they knew what she was really like- a selfish, pathetic, useless, whinging cry-baby? Sometimes she had come close to almost believing that this wasn't her, and then something would happen and her darker side would be brought before her again.
She was in a hard, dark world with no escape as they crowded round her, telling her things she was all too ready to believe. She closed her eyes. Out of all them throng she heard the voice of someone she had thought she could trust.
"We don't really like you at all. We're just too nice to say so. How could anyone care about someone as unlovable as you?"
Her heart screamed and she opened her eyes. Nothing could hurt as deeply as that betrayal, as being let down like that.
But they had gone, the shadowy figures of her nightmare. She was lying by the fire. The others were asleep. Everything
was quiet and normal.
She tried to calm herself down, to breathe deeply and regularly. But then she heard it. A call, a groan, a screech, a combination of all three. "The monkeys!" she thought, starting. "That's what must have woken me up. Well, I never thought I'd be glad to hear them." The cry again. She began to worry. Was it the monkeys? It was like them, but somehow different, more-
She sat up. Heavy footfalls were stomping towards the camp. The others were awake now, looking at one another in fear in the firelight. Then the dark shape appeared, silhouetted against the sky. Someone screamed.
"Run!"
Ruth was twisting and turning in her sleep. One by one the others had woken up, almost all complaining of nausea and headaches and strange dreams, very real and frightening dreams. Some had woken up some distance from where they had fallen asleep. Nick seemed to have knocked the woodpile on top of him. Ernest was muttering something about "impaled on a cello," as he awoke, and Sophie had immediately felt the ground and asked why it wasn't wet. Patrick had disappeared completely, but no one was surprised by that. But Ruth still slept. Slowly all the others lay down to sleep too.
Ruth woke up suddenly. She opened her eyes and sat up. The first light of dawn was peeping over the horizon, and the fire had sunk down low. She looked around at the others. There were David and Becky, lying close to one another, breathing gently and regularly. There was Nick on the other side of the fire, there were all the others, lying here and there around the fire. There was no blood to be seen, no wounds, and no giant monster with huge white teeth. All was calm and quiet. It had just been a dream.
Or had it?
She held her hand over the fire until it was scorched, just to check that this time she was really awake. The pain helped reassure her. She tried to settle herself down, but she didn't feel like sleep. Both her dreams had been so horrible, so real, playing on her deepest fear. The fear of loosing her friends, of being alone.
Restless, she walked down towards the beach. As she reached the sand she almost fell over Patrick, who was curled up
against a rock. He opened his eyes and looked up.
"Sorry," she said. "Did I wake you up?"
"No, I wasn't asleep," he said. "I had some kind of dream, and I must have walked in my sleep because I woke up here. I haven't been back to sleep."
"You sleepwalked? I didn't know you did that."
"I haven't before. I must have tripped over something, I can remember falling in my dream and I woke up lying here."
"Are you ok?" She sat down next to him, leaning against the rock.
"Just a bit shaken."
"I had a dream too," Ruth said. "Well, two dreams. The first one was- well, horrible. The second one seemed so real- I thought I'd woken up. It was about us- but it couldn't have been us. We were on this island, and we were attacked, by something, an animal...I don't know what. I suppose it was just because I was afraid- those monkeys. But it felt so real."
"Maybe it's something we've eaten," Patrick said. "Mushrooms or something."
"I suppose so. But it's not the first dream I've had since we got here- dreams about us, that seem so real, but can't be. Maybe it's just because of the crash, maybe it affected me more than I realised."
"I've had that," Patrick said quietly. Ruth didn't reply. She realised something that until now she hadn't noticed. Patrick hadn't been in her latest dream. She thought about who had been and realised that only those people who had survived the dream crash and the dream accident had been there, and not all of them. The thought worried her. Why wasn't he there? What had happened to him? She had remind herself that it wasn't real. Patrick was here, beside her. Perhaps she had just been conscious, somehow, that he had wandered away from the camp.
The sun rose and the sea before them turned from an uninviting grey to sparkling blue. Despite the beauty Ruth found that her mood didn't lift. Another day, and still no hope of rescue. Maybe they would still be here when Ernest and Patrick's wine was brewed after all.
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