Stranded

by Sarah Goodwin

  Still, as I dozed and listened to my fellow campers entering the hut and going to bed, I felt suspicion gnaw at me. Since arriving there had been trust. We had shared our rations, we had stored our supplies in the open and side by side. Now I was worried about my belongings and found myself thinking of hiding places within the small hut we all called home.

  I did not sleep well that night. Though, if I had known then what would follow, the escalation that was to come, I might not have slept at all.

  Chapter 8

  ‘How do you think your friends or your family would describe you?’ Sasha had asked, not looking at me. Someone had brought her an iced coffee and she was smiling at them, probably as keen for this to be over as I was. I supposed she didn’t have to seem enthusiastic; they were going to re-record her parts with an actual presenter. I only got the one chance.

  To be honest I had no idea how Becca would describe me. Probably in the same bland terms you would an appliance you wanted to give away: reliable, hardworking, just slightly old-fashioned. Not exactly the thrill-seeker these people were looking for.

  I knew how Mum would have termed me; sensitive, a wallflower, reserved. Her catchphrase during my childhood had been ‘you’re a good girl’; simultaneously praise and an admonishment. Good girls did not argue or ‘strop’. Good girls didn’t beg their parents for nail polish or ‘tawdry’ teen magazines. Mum had moulded me in her image – pinafores, plaits and none of those ‘vulgar Barbie dolls’.

  I thought suddenly of Auntie Ruth, Mum’s little sister who visited sporadically through my childhood, sometimes staying for weeks at a time. Back then I’d not realised this was because she’d lost her job, her flat, her boyfriend or all three at once. Or because she’d gone travelling again and returned, full of amazing stories but flat broke, again. I’d assumed that staying with us was a treat for her. A kind of holiday, or that she’d missed us while she was abroad. Looking back, she must have hated it, having to rely on Mum’s pursed-mouth charity.

  I had a clear memory of Auntie Ruth taking me down to the stream behind the local church. She had bright red hair with sunglasses on top, nails to match. A long swishy peasant skirt with bells on the hem. I thought she looked like someone from a storybook, all colours and patterns. We went looking for fairies in the weeds and wildflowers. She showed me how to suck nectar out of white nettle buds. Once, she gave me a ‘magic stone’ – one of those little tumble stones they sell in gift shops for a pound a scoop. It was blue and partly clear. I liked to hold it up to the sun and look through it.

  ‘You’re filling her head with nonsense,’ I heard Mum say to her, after I showed off my ‘fairy gem’ and went to wash my hands, stopping just on the other side of the door. I did this a lot, listening. I wasn’t sure for what exactly, maybe just to see what they said about me when I wasn’t there.

  ‘She’s being creative, it’s good for her. Her mind needs opening up, some imagination.’

  ‘Rubbish. And what would you know about it?’

  A long, frosty silence. I remembered feeling like I should move away, not listen anymore. But I stayed.

  ‘She’s enjoying herself with a little make-believe. There’s no harm in that, is there? Let her be a kid. She’s got the heart of a dreamer and the head of an old maid. Why don’t you let her out to play with all the other kids that’re home for the holidays? Summer’s when they should run wild.’

  Mum sniffed. ‘They’re too rough. She’s only little. Just watch what you say around her. She’s very sensitive.’

  Where was that stone now? I wondered. Probably somewhere in my old room. Surrounded by the prim china dolls Mum had given me over the years. Unless she’d thrown it away. She did that a lot, making decisions about what I needed and what was just ‘collecting dust’. When Auntie Ruth died, far away in a foreign hospital, Mum didn’t tell me for months. Claimed it didn’t occur to her that I ‘needed to know’. It would only upset me while I was meant to be studying. After all, I was so very sensitive.

  I smiled at Sasha and the camera, the smell of hairspray reminding me of hennaed hair and giggling as Ruth painted my toenails.

  ‘I think anyone that knows me would say I was a dreamer … ready to run wild.’

  *

  From then on, Zoe, Shaun and I worked under Andrew in one group and the others worked with Duncan. Fortunately, we got to organise ourselves. I did not relish the thought of working under Duncan. There was an edge to our interactions now that had not been there before.

  Most of our group work involved stripping branches from felled trees and carrying logs back to camp. Andrew and Duncan took care of the finer details like chiselling holes and joints. Every morning the clearing rang with the sound of hammer on steel and the scrape of saws on wood. Together we finished the shelter for our latrine, a shower ‘cubicle’ and a log store.

  In the afternoons we were ‘allowed’ to pursue our own projects. For me this meant foraging. I spent a very sticky few days milking sea buckthorn berries into a series of empty jars. The berries were too fragile and thin-skinned to actually pick. Maxine was pleased with the results though.

  We still hadn’t caught any rabbits for our enclosure. This was set on a large, half-buried rock. Anything else and the rabbits would tunnel to freedom. Since the work party on building seemed to be winding down, we had a meeting to work out what to do about the rabbits.

  ‘I’m not going out hunting for rabbits,’ Zoe said, right off the bat. ‘I’ll help feed them, I’ll build whatever we need – but I’m not OK with hunting them down.’

  ‘Andrew’s veggie and he’s not fussed,’ Duncan pointed out.

  Zoe didn’t look at either of them, but shrugged. ‘What Andrew’s OK with is his business.’

  ‘I am here,’ Andrew said. ‘Look, just because I feel differently about eating meat while we’re here doesn’t make me a fake vegetarian, OK? I’m against the meat industry, not hunting my own.’

  ‘Let’s split the work detail,’ Shaun said quickly. ‘Two out of the four can go hunting. And maybe we have one person go when Zoe’s meant to go.’

  ‘I’m fine on my own,’ I said.

  ‘That’s settled then,’ Shaun said, giving me a grateful smile. He was clearly trying to get on Zoe’s good side. It was kind of sweet.

  Our trap was simple: an empty bucket balanced on a scrap of wood. Frank had punched a hole in the edge of the bucket’s lid and made a hinge of fishing line. The idea was that the lid could be propped up on a stick and when a rabbit entered the bucket after the bait, it tipped, dropping the lid in place. The whole contraption had to be propped up with sticks so it wouldn’t fall over when, and if, we caught a rabbit.

  For over a week we stalked Frank’s warren. We caught nothing. So we had another meeting. They were fast becoming our speciality.

  As we sat around the fire after dinner, Duncan cleared his throat. I looked up from my foraging guide. If given the choice I preferred not to be around Duncan unless we were in a group, the same with Andrew and Shaun. I hadn’t forgotten about Shaun spying on me and Zoe, even though she seemed to be quite keen on him. I wasn’t holding anything against them per se, but I wasn’t as open with them anymore.

  ‘I think we need to discuss the rabbit situation,’ Duncan said. ‘It feels like we’re not getting anywhere, and we’ve wasted a lot of time on it already.’

  ‘I think it’s pretty important to have a source of meat for the winter,’ Shaun said. ‘And I’m not just sayin’ that because it’s sort of my job to do the butchering. I’m also getting bloody sick of rabbit food.’

  There were murmurings from around the fire. The hardest part of the experience so far had been the food. Although the wild greens and shellfish were quite plentiful, they were also not as filling or calorific as we needed them to be given our hard work. Frank seldom caught anything big enough to be worth gutting. If he caught anything at all. Even Zoe, already used to a vegetarian diet and quite healthy, was losing weight rapidly.

&n
bsp; ‘I would full-on murder someone for some halloumi,’ she muttered to Shaun.

  ‘Or a Big Mac,’ he snorted.

  ‘Uh … fries,’ Zoe sighed wistfully.

  I noticed Maxine glaring at them in a sort of headmistress way. It was the same glare she had at mealtimes when food was most often discussed. We all missed things and it felt like we talked about nothing else sometimes. Maxine seemed to take it personally, as if wistful longing and imagination were a slight against her cooking. I supposed she’d rather not think about what she was missing, and found it annoying when other people harped on.

  ‘Maybe we need a new way to catch them?’ Andrew said.

  ‘Like what?’ Duncan asked.

  ‘Like a snare or something. Maybe I can work it out.’

  ‘We don’t have any wire though,’ Zoe pointed out. ‘Don’t you need wire to make something like that? Besides which, it seems super cruel to like, leave them tied up for ages.’

  ‘Maybe we can try trapping somewhere else, further from the warren?’ I said. ‘I mean they probably have all the food they need around there, but if we move further away we might get some stragglers that aren’t part of the main group.’

  ‘The weak sickly ones?’ Duncan said, unimpressed. ‘Oh, delicious.’

  ‘We only need them to breed. Then we’ll have lots of rabbits to choose from.’

  He sighed and sat back. ‘I don’t think it’s worth wasting more time on. The work parties should go back to building.’

  ‘But we’ve built everything we need for right now,’ I said. ‘We’re just making furniture, which is sort of more your thing – as the carpenter.’ I was aware I should just give it up, but I wasn’t ready to let Duncan just have his way.

  ‘So, you want us to all go out hunting rabbits? That seems like a massive waste of time.’

  I was fighting to stay calm. ‘No. I’m saying some of us should keep trying. We already have the hutch so it seems a waste to just give up without trying a new tactic. Maybe the rest of the work party should be helping with something else, like the allotment.’

  Duncan looked over at Gillian. ‘I’m sure she would say if she needed any help on the allotment. She’s got it all in hand, right, Gill?’

  ‘Right,’ Gill said, looking up from her hair-thin rollup. ‘It’s going along quite nicely. Fence is in, seeds planted, nothing to do now but watch it grow.’

  ‘See?’ Duncan said.

  No one was taking my side, so I shrugged and let the matter drop. It was too hard to push uphill against the tide of indifference. Everyone was tired from a day of work and an unsatisfying dinner – they didn’t want to get involved. If Gill said the allotment was fine, it was fine. There was no point trying to argue about weeding, monitoring for pests or any of the rest of it.

  ‘Right, so, tomorrow we’re back on building parties,’ Duncan said. ‘Sound good?’

  There were mutterings of assent around the fire. Duncan looked across the ruddy, crackling flames and smiled at me. ‘You can take the traps out in the afternoon, when you’re done with work.’

  I turned in early, as was becoming habit. Partly this was because I was quite tired. Foraging meant I was hiking all over the island on a daily basis. Every log and twig overturned, every hill crested and stream crossed, it all cost energy. Energy that was not being replaced by the food we were eating. Food that was going down steadily as the days went on.

  Another reason to turn in early was to check on my things. Since the incident with my book I was keeping my possessions close. While there was nowhere to hide anything, I had taken to leaving my stuff in a plastic carrier hung up underneath my thin raincoat. So far nothing else had been damaged. Maybe that was because the book had been an accident. I felt mildly ridiculous for my suspicion. Clearly, I wasn’t used to living with other people.

  *

  Next morning we all broke into our work parties as usual. We spent a good few hours cutting more trees and stripping branches. I didn’t dispute that furniture would be nice. Still, having all eight of us work on it instead of Duncan, whose only job was woodwork, seemed unfair. Was unfair.

  Lunch was leftovers from dinner: soup of vegetable stock cube, wild greens, mussels, razor clams and seaweed. After a thorough re-heating on the fire the shellfish was like rubber. I was craving soft white bread and butter so strongly that I was nearly hallucinating it. I could feel the butter melting in my mouth.

  I left the camp with grim determination to come back with a rabbit.

  No one volunteered to come with me, which suited me just fine. What annoyed me was that while we were all off working on our personal jobs, Duncan, Andrew and Shaun would bring the scrap wood to the log store and call that an afternoon’s work. When I’d left the camp they were sitting at the fire with Gill, smoking.

  I pushed thoughts of the fair and unfair from my mind. I was going to catch a rabbit. It didn’t matter what they were doing. I hiked away to the eastern side of the woods, where the rabbit holes honeycombed the hills. Further on there were fewer holes and less vegetation, the rainwater having been sucked up by the perpetually parched pines. I laid out the trap, tapped in some stakes, and retreated.

  Hiding a way off in the trees, behind a crumbling hillock, I kept my eyes on the bucket. There was nothing to break up the time except the stirring of the branches and the thoughts of meat that kept filling my mind. I sat as still as possible, hardly daring to breathe, willing myself invisible.

  Finally, after so long I wondered if moss was going to sprout on my jacket, a rabbit appeared. I watched as it hopped slowly from its hole and looked about, sensing for danger. Finding none, it started to graze.

  I watched for a long time as it took maddening moves both towards and away from the trap. My teeth dug into my lip and my hands cramped into anxious claws, waiting for it to go into the trap. In my mind a litany had begun – pleasepleasepleaseplease, as if begging some unseen god of rabbits. I was so consumed with the need to catch it, that I almost didn’t see it hop into the bucket.

  It was as if I’d conjured it. One moment I was staring at the rabbit, willing it to enter the trap, the next the lid fell down and the bucket sat, filled. I sprang up so fast I felt dizzy. In seconds I had the trap in my arms and was looking down, through the half-opened lid, into the black, liquid eyes of the rabbit. I snapped the lid down as if it might slip through the crack. I could feel its weight shifting, the panicked scuffle of paws.

  I must have seemed mad when I burst into camp, waving the bucket over my head and shouting. It was Zoe who first realised what I’d done. She jumped up from her half-finished kiln, hands clotted with mud, and came running to see. Shaun followed suit and soon I was surrounded, showing them my prize. The joy of it was incredible. Even Zoe, who had no stake in the rabbits, was practically glowing at this success and cooing over the ‘cute little bunny’. Our first failure had been averted. We had won.

  I let the rabbit out in the enclosure and it bolted into the little wooden shelter as soon as it was down. Maxine, ever practical, had set aside an empty pilchard tin for a water bowl and it was already full from the rain. Zoe ran off with Shaun to get some grass and leaves for it. They were like a pair of kids who’d been given their first pet.

  ‘Now I just need to do it again, and again,’ I said to Andrew, who was leaning over the hutch.

  ‘Give me two secs and I’ll come with you. If you get another, I’ll bring it back in a box – get that trap turned around faster.’

  ‘Good thinking.’

  With renewed excitement we hurried back to the place I’d caught our first rabbit. This time the waiting was charged with anticipation. Now we knew it was possible, it was no longer a question of if, it was a question of when.

  A second rabbit tripped into our trap an hour or so later and Andrew leapt on it. With the captive in an empty box he ran for camp, while I reset the trap and went back to watching. When he returned, I had another rabbit waiting for him.

  By the time it grew
too dark to carry on we had caught five rabbits. At camp, Maxine sexed our catches and discovered we had three does and two bucks. They had also proven quite hard to handle. Maxine had a history with pet rabbits, but these bit and kicked with their clawed feet when picked up. Duncan, who had tried to record a diary segment about our first rabbits, had a nasty bite on one hand. I can’t say that didn’t amuse me.

  ‘How long until we get to eat them?’ Duncan asked, looking down on the hutch and the small shelter in which the rabbits were cowering.

  ‘After the does have a litter – which takes about a month, once they’re actually pregnant,’ Maxine said. ‘And we have to wait for those rabbits to mature slightly. I think six babies is about average.’

  Duncan groaned. ‘A month? We’ll be skin and bones by then.’

  ‘We can catch more, now we know where the best spot is,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Then we could eat one of these today,’ Duncan said, ‘and get more tomorrow.’

  I looked to Maxine, who had the only experience with rabbits out of all of us. She shrugged.

  ‘We don’t really need two males – one and the does would be fine for now.’

  ‘Aren’t the females going to be easier to catch though?’ Duncan said. ‘We can replace one of them easier.’

  Maxine raised an eyebrow. ‘You caught them. What do you think, Maddy?’

  ‘I mean, they belong to all of us, right?’ Duncan said. ‘Why not vote?’

  I didn’t have any strong feelings about killing one of the rabbits and said as much. After all, I was missing meat as much as the next person.

  ‘I do think it should be one of the bucks though. Three litters from three does is better than having an extra buck getting territorial,’ I pointed out.

  Duncan muttered something to Shaun, who snickered. I kept my face blank. It was a good day, a successful one, and I wasn’t going to be the one to ruin that.

  We voted in the end and the decision was almost unanimous. Zoe abstained and also left the fireside while we discussed how best to kill the rabbit. In the end we agreed that breaking its neck would be fastest. Andrew caught one of the bucks and quickly dispatched it. Shaun, finally getting a chance to show off his butchering skills, skinned and gutted the body.