Page 97 of The Island

And each woman knew she wouldn’t see the other alive again.

27

Petra ran down the gully fast. Certainly faster than she’d been going with the Americans. She’d always been fast. Even in Holland, where everyone biked, everyone was skinny, everyone ran. She’d been a sprinter and she was good—although not quite good enough to make a career of it.

She finished high school with no real ambitions in either athletics or academics. It was 1977 and she was the perfect age. She moved to London. She signed on the dole. She found a squat in Hackney. She listened to the Damned. She listened to the Clash. She listened to the Pistols. John Lydon was talking directly to her. She wanted to hear more about England’s Dreaming.

She followed the Pistols all over England and back to Europe. She met a Dutch boy at a Pistols gig at Club Zebra in Kristinehamn, Sweden.

“This is the worst music I have ever heard,” he said to her in his peasant accent.

“That’s the stupidest thing I have ever heard,” she replied.

And thus their lifelong relationship had begun.

Hans had encouraged her to enroll in college. She hadn’t been interested in further study before, but now she read everything. Hans was a competitive bicycle racer, and at first she’d gone to watch him and then she too became a racer.

She was better than him. She won trophies.

She was fast.

And more important than being fast, she was determined.

She read Tim Krabbé’s The Rider. She read it and, for a while, it became her bible. She was one of Krabbé’s “true alpinists.” The true alpinist does not climb mountains because “they are there”; the true alpinist’s will is not so weak that it is bent by a mere mountain.

It was all about will.

The ravine was only a meter wide and a meter deep.

She ran on.

Stones, red dirt, red clay under her feet—definitely a riverbed. A winter phenomenon, and not every winter.

She could hear Hans’s voice in her head, see his face. They are going to catch you. They are coming in a pincer movement. Go faster and keep your head down and then when they are behind you, you can slip out of the hollow and double back to the beach.

“I’m not going anywhere near the beach. I will go this way as far as I can. I will make noise and keep going and going,” she said.

You alone on the flat land? They will get you.

“Yes. Eventually,” Petra said with a smile.

Why are you doing this?

“Because of the children, Hans.”

You and the children. You won’t forgive me for that, will you?

“Of course I will, my darling Hans. It was our decision.”

Petra, is there any other way? The dogs…

“I will contrive to get myself shot before the dogs get me.”

Hans said nothing and then he too smiled.

The sun was almost directly overhead and the T-shirt was drenched with sweat. Hans had been correct about black. Heather’s black T-shirt absorbed the heat. Her gray one was a few degrees cooler. A long-sleeved cotton shirt would have worked even better.

She kept running as the gully narrowed.

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