People in general set my teeth on edge, strangers in particular. It was always a relief to shut the door of my flat, slough off my work clothes and be myself again away from prying eyes.
‘Bullies, I suppose,’ I said. ‘Sometimes I’ve worked places where there are just … bullies. You grow up thinking that’s just playground stuff, but some people never grow out of it. They like throwing their weight around, having control over people. Especially in offices. You know, the CEO’s secretary who can get you in trouble for eating at your desk, when she does it every day. The HR manager who can get away with being a complete pig. That kind of thing.’
Sasha nodded. I wondered if she’d ever been bullied. I couldn’t picture it. You could tell with most people. Either they’d been bullied, or they’d been the one preying on someone else. There was a third kind, those that liked to watch, to laugh. Most people fell into that category in my experience. They liked to watch, as long as the bad things were happening to someone else. Wasn’t that why I was there? Wasn’t that what reality TV was all about? Throwing a group of bullies and victims together for the viewing public to bet on, like horses in a race.
‘How do you deal with people like that? Generally?’
That was a tricky one. Generally, I’d always followed my mum’s advice. Ignore them, and they’ll go away. Eventually they’d come to the end of their game, move on. Then I’d become the unreasonable one. ‘Why don’t you talk to Kirsty, she’s so nice’ – never mind that she made my first year in halls a nightmare, stealing my food, banging on my door in the night and running away with her friends, laughing. Condoms on my door handle, hiding my post, reading my letters from Mum aloud in the kitchen. No, once the game was over it was like none of that ever happened. I was just an antisocial freak.
Auntie Ruth’s advice had been very different. ‘You’ve got to fight back, Mads. The only way you can get that cow to leave you alone is to get back at her, better and smarter than she got at you.’
I’d never had the guts to retaliate. Too afraid of what might happen to me if I did. Kirsty and the others were loud, vicious. I’d seen her get in a fight once in the student union. I wasn’t looking to have my hair pulled out at the roots. But I thought about all the things I could do, from the big to the small. All the ways I could get revenge. If I was ever brave enough.
‘Forgive, but don’t forget,’ I said, one of Auntie Ruth’s other aphorisms. ‘I always try to remember that. Because if someone can hurt you once, they can do it again.’
*
Getting down to the fishing hut in the dark wasn’t easy. I nearly turned my ankle a few times on the exposed roots of pines. The bags I was carrying were heavy; I’d not had to carry it all up to the camp in one go and had forgotten how unwieldy they were. I was also weak from hunger.
When I arrived at the fishing hut I shone my torch inside. It had been largely abandoned since Frank had his accident and the seasonal embargo on mussels had kicked in. Inside there was a lot of sand blown in through the tattered plastic curtain that made the door. It smelled of damp and there was rainwater trapped in the plastic, turning yellowish-brown. I was too exhausted to care.
I crawled in and dragged my bag in after me. There was no cloud cover and the heat of the day’s sunshine had evaporated. I didn’t even bother to take my coat off, just toed off my boots from a prone position and shuffled onto my bedroll. I was too weary to dwell for long, and quickly fell asleep.
The following morning I had to face my new reality. I’d been numb with shock, exhaustion and cold when I left the camp, but in the blistering light of morning there was no hiding from the challenge I had to face. Everything we’d built in the eight months we’d been a community was now essentially off-limits to me. The food stocks, the water filter, the shelter and allotment crops, all out of reach. I was back where we’d been on arrival.
Panic rose in me like bile. There was so much I needed to do that I didn’t know where to begin. How was I going to manage? I was going to be alone for the next four months. Unwanted, shunned, hated, without even the most casual contact with a neutral outsider. On top of all of that, how would I look now, when all this went on television? A stubborn bitch no one could stand to be around? A weirdo who couldn’t get on with anyone and who created disaster wherever she went?
For a moment, sitting there in the musty shelter, I considered giving up. I had in my head an image of me walking up to the portacabin and asking for the emergency radio. The producers would have to send someone to get me if I wanted off the island. There was no prize at the end of this, nothing worth soldiering on for. They couldn’t keep me there a prisoner against my will. I could be on the mainland by nightfall. Perhaps they’d put me up in a hotel. I could take a long, hot shower, lie on a real mattress, watch television, crank the thermostat up and order in a pizza to eat all alone. Even the thought of that brought tears to my eyes. It was humiliating. Worse, though, was the idea of returning to my previous life, to the inheritance I couldn’t stand to think of, to the loss that threatened to break me.
I felt for the straps to my camera and undid them. Turning the little black box around I looked at my tiny reflection in its dead-eyed lens. I wasn’t alone, not really. Everything I did, everything any of us did, was being recorded. One day people would see what I’d gone through. I refused to give Duncan or the others the satisfaction of being rid of me. I wanted every moment of their mean-spiritedness, their bullying, to be on show, for anyone to see. If I left now they could forget me. If I left, I would be the one losing out on the island and its beauty.
‘I’m not giving up,’ I said, aloud to the camera, to jolt myself away from thoughts of hotels and hot food. ‘I’m not letting them win. I refuse to be forced off this island.’
Those three phrases formed a mantra for the rest of my day.
I got up, reattached my camera and forced myself to find twigs and dry seaweed for a fire. With that done I went down to the rocks and picked an obscene number of mussels. September loomed and there were only a few weeks left of the mussel-ban. I would take my chances. I gathered enough for two people, two greedy people. I had a full day’s work ahead of me and I would not be much good on an empty stomach.
I steamed my mussels in a small amount of water, added ghee from a tin Andrew had definitely not meant to give to me, and ate the mussels using a shell half as a spoon. It wasn’t pizza in a warm hotel, but it was almost as blissful.
With a blank page from my novel and a pen I wrote myself a list of everything I needed to get done. If I had a moment to think of the others, of the way things had been last night, I knew I’d freeze up and sink into despair. I needed focus, goals and, above all, something for dinner.
*
I spent that first day alone foraging, for food and supplies. I swept out the fishing hut with a pine branch and turned a plastic bottle and a handkerchief into a primitive water filter.
My main worry was the food. Mushrooms would be plentiful right through until the end of November, but everything else would be unpleasant to eat or just absent altogether within a month or so. I had to preserve as much as possible. I had no jars and no vinegar, no sugar or salt, so pickling or brining was out of the question. Drying and smoking would have to do.
I would not go crawling for assistance that would not be forthcoming from my fellow islanders. I would not beg the production team to send pasta over by boat. I would not leave now that I had started to discover myself again.
For the next few days I kept busy, talking as I did so to the people who would one day watch my endeavours. It helped me to feel less alone. It was ridiculous; I’d spent so much time longing for a bit of peace from all of them and now I had it and it was driving me crazy. Even when I’d thought myself lonely before I’d still spoken to people; at work, in shops, waiting for the bus. On the island all that incidental contact was stripped away. I spoke to the camera because, otherwise, I wouldn’t have spoken at all.
There were plenty of mussels
about and I was eating well for the first time in months. The strength I got from that was incredible. I’d forgotten what it was to not feel tired and annoyed all the time. I quickly put together a small wattle and daub structure out of the sea wind, large enough to surround a fire pit. Inside this approximation of a smoke shack I hung clumps of seaweed and mushrooms to dry.
I stored the dry food in washed-out tins, lidded with squares of torn-up T-shirt tied on with string. Dried berries and nuts I hung from the ceiling in pouches made of the lining of my holdall. None of it was ideal, but it was better than nothing.
Hunting for food took most of my time and led me all over the island. It was a hard task to find places I’d not previously harvested. I crawled around, overturning leaves and dead plants looking for precious mushrooms, often going out at dawn and not returning until late afternoon.
It was on one such day, almost a week into my isolation, that I noticed something amiss in my hut. It was the beginning of the season for sparassis crispa – cauliflower fungus. I’d had quite a successful day of it. On returning I went to find my mushroom brush, as cauliflower fungus has many, many holes for mud to get into, when I noticed a cep on my bed. The small mushroom was almost hidden under the fold of my sleeping bag. I picked it up and looked into my billycan, which was hanging on an exposed nail. It was where I kept the food I planned on eating for my meals, and it should have been full. It wasn’t.
When I’d left that morning it had contained a large handful of ceps, a few lobes of chicken-of-the-woods and the remainder of a small puffball I’d found the day before. Now only half of the chicken-of-the-woods and the puffball remained. The rest was gone. Still holding the lone cep, it took me a moment to realise what had happened. When I did, I felt my stomach clench in anger.
While I’d been out, searching and foraging for myself, after filling their larder for them, the others had been treating my hut like a supermarket. For a moment I was so blinded by rage that the thought of checking my smoke hut didn’t occur to me. As soon as it did I ran outside and untied the little door to peer in. It didn’t look like anything had been taken. Had they stolen stuff from there before? I couldn’t be sure.
I documented the theft for the camera, which assuaged some of my anger. They could say whatever they wanted about me. In the end they were the ones who were stealing. They were the ones who had thrown me out. Everyone who watched our footage would see that.
The next day, before I set off, I made sure to remember what was in the can for dinner: cauliflower fungus, seabeet and kelp. I climbed up into the hills and went hunting as usual, trying to put it out of my mind. By the time I returned to camp I’d almost forgotten about my suspicions.
It was clear immediately that someone had been in my hut again. There was nothing missing from the can, but my foraging book was out from under my bed. I flicked through it and noticed with great irritation that a page had been ripped out. I’d not needed to refer to it for a while and so couldn’t say if the page had been missing before I’d been ousted from the camp. But the fact remained that the book had been moved. Someone had been in my shelter.
My first thought was to go confront them, to demand the return of the page and some sort of compensation for the stolen mushrooms. My second thought was that this was probably what they were waiting for. It would have been easy to hide their intrusion if they’d wanted to. Clearly, they hadn’t been bothered that I would notice. They wanted me to. This was an act of petty aggression, something working in an office had taught me all about. In that environment taking someone’s stapler was an act of war and missing someone from a tea round a clear signal of contempt. They had probably turned their cameras off and if I started making accusations I’d only make myself look crazy and paranoid. If I went roaring up to camp to shout and stamp my feet, they would win. I would have succeeded only in making myself more of a pariah.
That didn’t mean I was going to take it lying down, of course.
That night I made a decision that was to prove essential to my survival. Though I didn’t know it at the time as I packed up all my tins and packets of food. It was dark by the time I picked my way out to the cave. Inside all was as I’d left it. No one seemed to have stumbled across my hiding place. Yet.
Once inside I came across a problem. I’d buried my packet food but the tins with their loose coverings and the permeable bags of dried food required hiding in a dry, airy space. Shining my torch around the roof of the little cave showed me only long, tangled roots and spider webs. If I hung anything there it would be seen by anyone coming in. Not to mention water might drip down those roots and rot my supplies.
The torch picked up the jagged line of the crack in the back wall. I went over and peered through. Back there I could see no roots; it looked mostly like stone and hard, dry clay that far under the hill. The two sides of the crack were not opposite one another; one was about ten inches back from the other. Maybe more. Experimentally I removed my bulky coat and camera, slid my shoulders into the space and wriggled. For a moment I was worried I was stuck and that worry jolted through my heart like a shard of ice. But I managed to push my way through and found myself in the full darkness of the cave interior.
It was indeed mostly stone and clay. No roots had found their way through and even fewer dry leaves had blown through the crack. The air was dry, stale, but suitable for my needs. I wriggled my way partially back through the crack and pulled my belongings in after me.
I lined up my tins on a ledge where two rocks met, so any damp from the dirt floor wouldn’t rust them. I wedged my foraging book beside them and put the cloth pouches on top. It was a semi-decent solution and would at least keep my food from being stolen. Sitting there, I thought for a moment of moving all my things into the cave, but logic stopped me. If I disappeared from the beach the others would notice and would go looking for my new camp. Then the stealing would begin all over again. Besides, the beach hut was close to the shore and suited me fine for foraging and beachcombing. The one drawback to it was not being able to have a fire indoors. Come winter that would be impossible to live without.
Building a new shelter seemed my only option. Yet more work to undertake alone. I sighed and eased my way out of the cave. Tomorrow I would make a start on my own hut.
*
Three weeks after being ousted from the community, life was almost back to normal. At least, as normal as life could be on an island populated by only ten people, two of whom I never saw and the rest of whom hated me. I’d seen the other islanders around and they mostly ignored me. A few times Zoe had come down to the beach to take a quick dunk in the ocean; she nodded hello, but that was about it.
I’d made myself a little hut on the edge of the beach, where it turned to earth. It was of tipi style, three reasonably thick branches sunk into the dirt and lashed together at the top with scraps of rope. Onto this frame I’d nailed crossbars of pallet from the demolished fishing hut and heaped on pine boughs, held in place with the plastic sheeting. The result was snug, smoky, but warm. I could also now cook inside when it rained, as it did often now that September had washed away the last of the warm weather and was edging into October.
My stock of food was still not enough to feel confident about, but with some rationing, it would keep me going until January. I kept a bit on hand in the tipi as a decoy and made sure to pick lots of woody, bitter vegetation as bait. Food still went missing, but at least it wasn’t food I wanted.
I was out among the tidal pools, looking for clams, whelks or anything else edible hiding in the wind-furrowed water, when I felt eyes on me. Looking up I saw Zoe standing on the beach, her dark hair whip-ping in the wind. She waved, then beckoned me back. Curious, I picked up my bucket (a child’s yellow castle one I’d found, handleless, on the beach) and made my way towards her.
Zoe had given up her summer uniform of sarongs, skirts and tank-tops for more cold-resistant leggings and wellies. I noticed that she was wearing Shaun’s bulky fisherman jumper under her
purple anorak.
‘Hi,’ she said, as I came within earshot. ‘Find much?’
‘Not especially,’ I said. ‘How about you?’
‘Oh, I’m not looking … not today.’ Zoe looked out at the sea, which roared and foamed behind me. ‘Can I talk to you about something?’
‘All right,’ I said, sensing that I was not going to like where this was going. ‘Can we walk and talk? It’s bloody cold out here.’
‘Um …’ Zoe glanced around. ‘Sure, but not to the beach hut.’
‘Worried about being seen with the island pariah?’ I said, only half joking.
Zoe lowered her eyes and didn’t laugh. I realised that was exactly what she was worried about.
‘What is it you wanted to talk about?’ I asked, swallowing the hurt I felt.
‘Well … You’re a herbal doctor or something, right?’
‘Or something.’
‘I need some medicine.’
‘Gill’s got the first-aid kit.’
‘Gill can’t help with this,’ Zoe said, looking pained.
‘If it’s serious you need to go to the camera guys and use the emergency radio,’ I said, feeling a stab of alarm. ‘What’s wrong?’
For the first time I noticed that Zoe wasn’t wearing her camera. I had got out of the habit of wearing mine all the time, mostly I left it in the tipi if I was gathering. I had a half-formed idea that maybe it might get footage of the food thieves even if they had left their cameras off, then when the show went out, people would know.
Zoe met my eyes for the first time. ‘I’m pregnant.’
‘Oh … wow … congratu—’
‘I don’t want to be. I can’t be, not right now,’ Zoe said, all in a rush. ‘I have plans, for my career, for my life. I don’t want to be a mum. I’ve never wanted to be and … I’m on the pill, but I don’t know if I missed one when that cow was hiding them, or if it’s not worked right but now … now I’m pregnant.’
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