That was probably the most diplomatic way to put it. So far I had no reason to dislike him, but there was something about him that made me feel like he wasn’t really listening when anyone else talked. I told myself that I was probably being unfair. He was just more comfortable with people than me. More self-assured.
I should have trusted my instincts.
‘I imagine we’ll have that hut up in no time,’ Gill puffed as we climbed the slope back to the chosen site. ‘I certainly hope so anyway. That and the kitchen garden will be the most important things to get the groundwork done on.’
‘Once we all pitch in, we’ll get it done,’ I said.
*
When we got back Duncan was standing on his own, talking away, apparently for the benefit of the camera on his chest. Meanwhile Andrew, with the help of a little notebook and a tiny pencil, had sketched up a rough plan. When Duncan was done explaining things for our audience, Andrew talked us through his sketch, pointing as if he could see the hut taking shape in the air in front of him.
‘I’ve patterned it on an Iron Age roundhouse. It’s our best bet for something we can build quickly, but large enough and sturdy enough to keep us comfortable.’ He stabbed a finger at the sketch. ‘We’ll put thick wooden poles all around, with panels of wattle and daub in between. The roof is going to come up to a point, all thatched with pine branches.’
‘What about a fireplace?’ Shaun asked. ‘Are we cooking outside or what?’
‘We’ll dig a pit in the middle of the floor for a fire,’ Andrew explained. ‘The smoke from it will gather above us, in the conical roof, and slowly escape through a smoke hole in the very top.’
‘So what are the walls actually going to be made of?’ Zoe asked.
‘Basically, picture a wicker basket – only made of thick sticks. Onto that we’ll put a load of mud and clay mixed with thatching like grass and moss to plug up all the holes and leave a weatherproof wall.’
I glanced at Duncan, who was sitting on a rock, axe balanced head-down between his legs. He was, after all, the carpenter.
Andrew came to the end of his pitch. ‘So … do we need to vote or are we all happy?’ We glanced around at each other. No one seemed to have any more questions.
‘My worry,’ began Duncan, testing the axe’s weight, ‘is that we’re building for convenience rather than suitability. It’s easy to say, “Oh well, chopping down trees is too much work”, but in the end that’s what’s going to give us a better, warmer home.’
Zoe accepted a rollup from Shaun. ‘I don’t think anyone’s saying that. It’s just that we don’t have the tools to cut down a lot of trees quickly, and I for one am looking forward to having an inside space for sleeping. So, if this hut thing of Andrew’s is quick to build, and it’s going to be warm, that seems like the best option.’
Shaun was nodding. I got the sense that he was going to be a swing vote in most of our decisions. So far he hadn’t had a lot of ideas. Still, with Duncan, Maxine and Andrew in the group, the last thing we needed was another prospective ‘leader’.
Duncan pounded the axe head on the ground absently. ‘Well, if only two of us thought to bring proper axes I suppose that is the best option.’
I saw Zoe roll her eyes and I could understand her frustration. It didn’t seem that fair of Duncan to say something like that. We hadn’t been told to bring full-on axes with us, and we’d all had other things we needed to bring. Maxine had brought along supplies for sterilising jars, pickling and preserving food. I had my foraging book and Frank had brought his fishing equipment. Duncan’s comment was allowed to slide though. I supposed as it was our first full day no one wanted to get into an argument.
Following our agreement on the hut we split into work groups. Andrew and Duncan, along with Shaun and Zoe, would be cutting down trees for the hut frame and stripping their branches with saws. The rest of us would dig holes for the poles to go into and then gather the cut branches and sticks to start work on the panels.
Duncan, who’d been irritating me a little with his bossy attitude, was at least a hard worker. By the time the sun began to slip away, we had half the trunks in the ground and two more on the grass waiting to be lifted in. Andrew was right. At that rate it would have taken months to build walls of solid logs.
We were all tired and aching, hands sticky with sap and grazed from the bark. As we walked down the hill to the beach camp we chatted in pairs and I saw only smiles.
‘Isn’t this great?’ Zoe said, twirling under the darkening trees. ‘It’s like being handed the world.’
Chapter 5
Work on the hut went quickly. We were all eager to see it complete, to move in and really start our island lives. From the moment we woke up we worked on nothing else.
Slowly the roof went on. A few days from the end of our first month on the island, those of us on the ground turned to other projects. We’d taken the mud for the walls from a spot across the clearing and now turned that ragged patch into an allotment, ready for spring planting. Maxine was the first to notice the rabbits.
‘There’s another one!’ She pointed excitedly into the forest. ‘How on earth did they get here?’
‘Well, it only takes two,’ I pointed out.
‘I suppose that’s why they’re considered pests,’ she said. ‘Very sweet pests though.’
‘I wonder if anyone knows how to catch them.’
‘Andrew probably. He seems like the type to know about that sort of thing … I used to keep them as pets,’ Maxine said. ‘When the girls were little. They loved them, until they got bored and moved on to wanting a dog. So, they ended up being my rabbits by default.’ She laughed softly. ‘I think I had more pets as a grown woman than I ever did as a child. They were forever wanting guinea pigs, hamsters – I drew the line at rats’ – she shuddered – ‘horrible things. They smell.’
‘My mum used to say the same thing. She hated their tails.’
Maxine nodded her agreement. ‘Awful little snake things. It’s funny – they’re both grown now, with their own families. Neither of them has pets. Maybe because now they’d actually have to take care of them.’ She laughed.
I smiled but I was thinking of Mum and her aversion to all things furred or feathered. Animals carried disease and dirt, neither of which she wanted in the house. The one exception had been a goldfish, won for me by Auntie Ruth at a fairground. She’d argued that anything that lived in water had to be clean, and Mum hadn’t been able to say no.
We told the others about the rabbits that evening. As it turned out, no one knew how to make a snare.
‘If we could catch a few, we could keep them and breed them – like chickens in a coop,’ Andrew said. ‘Then we won’t have to catch them all the time and we can just kill them when we need to.’
We went around and around debating how to catch rabbits. The upshot of this was that while Duncan and Andrew finished the roof, the rest of us went off to explore the island. The idea was to find evidence of warrens. Once we knew where the rabbits were, we would make a trap there and try to catch some.
I decided to go on my own. We’d all been together for days and I needed a bit of space. I was also glad to get away from everyone’s cameras. It was hard to forget that we were being filmed. At least when it was just me, I wasn’t actually in shot. Well, aside from on the cameras hidden in the trees, but those were easier to ignore than the bulky body cams.
I headed off into the woods and quickly lost sight and sound of everyone else. I’d thought of the island as being small when we approached by boat, but it seemed to go on and on. It was raining softly and the tall pines creaked in the wind, letting through a fine mist. Underfoot was mostly moss and fern shoots, slick and wet, greener than any grass. It was peaceful.
In the months leading up to my application, the months following the loss of my parents, I’d been angry, constantly. I snapped at co-workers and strangers alike. At home I threw and broke things. The stress of just being around other p
eople had felt crushing. I hadn’t wanted to examine why; maybe that was part of why I hadn’t told Becca about the car accident when it happened. She’d called my mum controlling and I hadn’t wanted to hear it, but deep down I knew she was right. I was their only child, a child they thought they’d never be able to have. Being overprotective and old-fashioned was expected for parents a decade older than everyone else’s.
I missed my parents more than anything, especially Mum. She’d been more than my mother, she was my favourite teacher, my only friend for most of my childhood. She was the one I confided everything to as soon as it happened. The one I cried to and laughed with and got support from. While other people had partners, best friends and siblings, I had Mum. In the years since leaving for university though, I’d become more and more aware of just how many limits and restrictions she’d put on me as I was growing up. Keeping me out of school, wary of children my own age, shutting out ‘inappropriate’ influences like most TV, pop music and teen fiction. All things that had left me incredibly ill-prepared for the real world, for socialising and making friends.
They hadn’t meant to hurt me, I was sure. Yet in all the grief and despair of losing my parents, there was also a kind of frustrated rage. Intentional or not, they’d shaped and pruned me into something not quite right. Now they were gone, I’d never be able to talk to them about it. I’d missed my chance. All the things I could never say to them, could never ask, just bubbled away inside me, making me angrier and angrier.
Part of wanting to leave the outside world behind was me wanting to let go of that anger. I wanted to be kinder, to myself as much as to everyone else. I wanted to push myself past my boundaries, so I could stop blaming my parents and let go of all that wasted time. So far I at least felt freer, if not yet happier.
In the spirit of that, I’d forced myself to stop pigeonholing my fellow islanders. I decided to try to be more accepting. I’d dropped my assumptions and made an effort to get along. Even Duncan, who had irritated me at the beginning, was growing on me now. His forthright attempts at leadership pushed us forward as a group and motivated discussion.
I thought on this as I made my way up slopes and down into deep gullies. On my way I noticed the shoots of the plants my research had informed me would be on the menu in a month or so: orache, gorse and hawthorn.
At last I reached a higher point on the northern side of the island that was slightly more exposed. From there I looked down on a large swath of grassland. In the distance, nestled in another smattering of pines, was a portacabin. I wondered what our camera crew were up to. Probably enjoying electricity and a flush toilet.
After descending the steep rise I made my way west, parallel to the cabin, not wanting to get closer to the ‘out of bounds’ area. I’d just re-entered the treeline at the lower level when I saw it: a flash of blue in all that green.
As I got closer I saw that the blue thing was a thick piece of fabric tied in a knot around a branch of sea buckthorn. Remembering the blue folder we’d found taped to our building supplies, I was certain I’d found a cache. A quick check of the surrounding area led me to loose soil under the thorn bush and I dug with my hands.
Buried six inches underground was a large plastic storage box. Pulling it out of the hole was tricky as it was quite heavy and slick with wet mud. When I unclasped the lid I almost squealed with glee. As much as Andrew had been put out by the supplies we’d been given, I was already starting to miss some of my creature comforts, mostly milk as we’d been having our tea black.
The box was stuffed with packets and cartons, as well as some large Kilner jars full of rice, beans and other staples. The jars in particular were exciting, as we’d be able to reuse them for our own preserves once empty.
I decided to split the weight and fill my rucksack with as much as possible. The result was a box that was awkward but not impossible to carry and a backpack that was heavy but manageable. Thankfully I’d come mostly uphill from camp and so the return trip would be mostly downhill. I was looking forward to surprising everyone with my find, particularly the real coffee and biscuits I’d spotted in my haul.
What I’d not banked on was the rain. As I made my way downhill the weather got worse and soon the misty fallout from the pines became a heavy, consistent downpour. I realised with dismay that I’d started going east by accident as I fought the slippery, steep ground. I still wasn’t even halfway back and was now, by my reckoning, almost on the wrong side of the island.
It was then that I made my second discovery of the day.
I came across a sort of rock cluster; two large boulders nestled against a hill, with another large, flat rock on top. The perfect shelter for a short rest. The whole thing was caked in moss and lichen, surrounded by thick ferns and brush. I hadn’t realised how tiring the walk had been until I got the chance to sit down. I was in fact so tired that I didn’t notice the gap between the rocks right away. Once I glanced inside, however, I realised that I was actually sitting at the mouth of a sort of cave.
There was a dynamo torch in my bag and I took it out to shine it into the gap. By lying down on my stomach in the wet greenery, I was able to slither into the hole a little way and see further in. I was fairly certain it wasn’t an animal den. There was no evidence of rabbit droppings or anything like that and nothing moving inside. The place seemed a quirk of geology and erosion, formed by chance.
It was an interesting find and my mind turned immediately to what kinds of mushrooms I might find there come autumn. The possibility of even farming some species in there was quite exciting, as until then I’d been resigned to the capricious and elusive nature of wild fungus.
Once the rain cleared a bit I hefted the box on my shoulder and slid my way back to camp. Everyone else was already back and gathered inside the hut. In my absence Andrew had finished the roof, not before time given the weather.
The floor was still unfinished dirt with no fire pit, but with everyone packed inside it was warmer than outside. I shrugged out of my wet coat and took a seat on the dry ground. The box immediately caused a stir of excitement. So much so that I forgot to mention my second discovery; the cave.
‘Just in time for our housewarming party,’ Zoe said, brandishing a bottle of whisky. ‘Irish coffees and cookies for dinner!’
‘More handouts,’ Andrew sniffed, looking into the box. ‘This is a fucking joke.’
‘Will you lighten up, please?’ Zoe said, half serious. ‘Look – you get tobacco! Can’t find that washed up on the beach.’
The pouches of rolling papers and tobacco seemed to mollify Andrew somewhat. He might not have any interest in sugar and processed food, but he did go through his skinny rollups like he was trying to beat a personal record.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ Duncan said, after we’d shared round the packet of biscuits as a mid-afternoon pick-me-up. ‘I know we all have our own rations and we’ve been sort of sharing between ourselves informally – but now we’ve got our first group supplies, maybe we ought to think about putting all our stuff together into one larder.’
‘Could be a good shout,’ Shaun said. There were other mutterings of agreement.
High on our first processed sugar in a week, we all agreed to create a shared food store in the new hut. Andrew started making plans with Duncan for some shelves across the back wall, pegged into the upright posts.
After he’d finished his biscuit Frank cleared his throat and quietly revealed to me that he’d found a large rabbit warren. He’d already told the others. Apparently to the east of us was a hillside riddled with burrows. This meant that we’d have to fence our garden before we planted anything. But we were also now in with a shot at trapping some rabbits for our ‘rabbit coop’.
With work almost finished on the hut Andrew was excitedly talking to anyone who’d listen about other building projects. He wanted to get the kitchen lean-to done right away. Then a shelter for our long-drop latrine and another for us to strip down and wash in.
That night w
e stayed so long at the hilltop camp that the sky was darkening from blue to black as we reached the beach. Maxine and Gill made our first ‘group meal’ over the fire, a kind of pilaf seasoned with curry powder from the cache box. Afterwards I volunteered with Shaun to wash up.
We sat around the fire and I thumbed through my foraging guide, turning down corners of things I’d found. Zoe was using her hand drill on a thin slice of log, Andrew had a book and Shaun was lying down, looking alternately at the stars and Zoe. It was the first time in a long time that I’d enjoyed the company of other people without feeling anxious or irritated.
That night we went to bed knowing that it would be our last night on the beach. Tomorrow we’d finish our hut and move in. Our first milestone, a testament to our skills and combined effort.
Looking back, it almost makes me sick. To think how naïve I was to consider the building of the hut, together, as a sign of things to come.
Chapter 6
I haven’t yet had a good night’s sleep. In the police station and hospital, it was to be expected, but in a quiet, comfortable bed I’m still jerking awake every few hours. Scrabbling upright, feeling my heart pounding away, slowly easing back to normal as I blink away the nightmare. I’m in bed. I’m home. I’m safe.
I get up and put the light on. The central heating has clicked over and the carpet is warm under my feet. Downstairs, in the kitchen, I fill a glass with milk and drink it down, slowly. I can do that now; flip a switch for daylight, walk around barefoot and cosy, lock a door against the world. I wonder when it will begin to feel normal again. When it will feel like my life and not a short reprieve from cold, hunger and danger.
I notice the answer machine blinking in the hall. Thirty-seven messages. The first time it had rung I’d dropped a cup of tea and had a small panic attack. Now it’s on silent but the calls are still coming in. I sit on the stairs and push play.
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