Stranded

by Sarah Goodwin

  Gill continued to stare. I turned my attention to the others, telling myself she was just in shock and not thinking clearly. ‘We don’t know what happened to them, or why the boat didn’t come today. But, perhaps there was a good reason for the boat to be delayed and it may well be here tomorrow. In the meantime we need to stay calm.’

  Only Zoe’s sobs broke the silence that followed.

  Chapter 21

  ‘I think it was the thing that hit us the hardest, their deaths. Not the boat not being there. At the start we had so many theories and ideas about why it was late. So many hopes, that it would just turn up. But the bodies … We couldn’t explain that,’ I say, twisting my hands together, callouses grating over each other, rough as rock.

  ‘Being confronted with their deaths must have brought home how serious your situation was,’ Rosie, the interviewer, says.

  ‘Strangely, it didn’t,’ I reply, ignoring her as she snaps her mouth closed, annoyed at my correction. ‘After so long there, living as we were … it was almost like they were a separate species, certainly a separate community. Their deaths were worrying, but only insofar as they related to us. To our situation. I don’t think we spared much thought for them as people, terrible as that is to say. It was a luxury we didn’t have room for, mourning people we didn’t know. No … I think the worst part of it all, for us, was not having that influence anymore – those representatives of the outside world.’ I force myself to put my hands in my lap, to stop fidgeting. ‘Without them there we didn’t have anyone to go to, no arbiter holding us accountable … It was just us, or rather, just them … and me.’

  Chapter 22

  The next morning we rose and breakfasted on the meagre rations available. I’d spent the night on the hut floor. No one had said anything about me going back to my own shelter. I think we all had bigger concerns and I wasn’t going to volunteer to spend the night alone.

  I guessed that, much as I had done, they’d used up most of their food in a final farewell meal. The stores of shop-bought goods were basically gone, aside from a few tablespoons of rice. Similarly, from what I could see of the food box, preserved food was getting low as well. They must have had significant spoilage or had been eating a lot more than when I’d been in the community. I told myself not to worry. The boat would come that day.

  I wished I was better at lying to myself.

  The truth of it was that, from the moment we all trudged down to the beach, I knew no boat would come. Perhaps some of the others did too as, although we all brought our bags, the cooking pots and things were left behind. None of us wore cameras; mine was completely out of charge anyway. My charger, like the rest of my stuff, was still piled where I’d left it on the beach.

  Cold dread sat like clay in my stomach as we gathered sticks to make a large fire. We sat around it like crows, hunched against the cold, scanning the flat horizon. Freezing rain had started overnight and now continued to fall, pitting and melting the snow, turning it to ice.

  As morning turned to afternoon we all grew restless. Duncan paced up and down the gravelly beach and I noticed Shaun and Frank passing a bottle of murky water back and forth – likely mushroom brew.

  ‘I think,’ I said, the silence shattering like so much glass, ‘that maybe we should leave a lookout and then … get on with finding some supplies.’

  Everyone turned to look at Duncan. He’d been thrusting himself into the leadership role since we arrived, but it was still weird to see how they all looked to him for answers. Perhaps the last democratic vote had been the one that turned me out of the community.

  Duncan gave a sharp nod. ‘You’re the one that lives down here so it’s a good idea if you keep a lookout.’

  I wasn’t too shocked by the implication that I was still not welcome in camp. The immediate shock was over. Now we were back to normal, whatever that meant.

  ‘I need to be able to forage and cut firewood too,’ I pointed out. ‘Unless we’re going to pool our resources.’

  ‘You can do the mornings. Then one of us will come down and relieve you,’ Duncan said, already turning away and picking up his bags.

  I didn’t bother pointing out that it was currently afternoon and therefore not my ‘shift’. It didn’t seem worth it and I could forage along the shoreline well enough. What worried me more was his deflection over the supplies. Even now, in this grave situation, I was on my own.

  ‘Should we maybe think about building, like … a boat?’ Shaun suggested, turning red when Andrew barely suppressed a bitter laugh.

  ‘With what? Given the tools we have, the best we could hope for is a raft. And a raft is not getting us back to the mainland. No rudder to steer. We can’t even make proper oars to row with, not with just axes. It’s miles and we’d be at the mercy of the current.’

  ‘I was just saying,’ Shaun muttered.

  ‘Well, if all you’ve got is idiot ideas, keep them to yourself. There’s a good boy,’ Andrew snapped. Duncan laughed. They formed a miserable little line and headed back to the clearing without a backward glance at me.

  I went and stashed my things in the tipi. It was strange but somehow the inside of it felt smaller, more ramshackle. I suppose it was the difference between it being a temporary camping shelter and a more permanent dwelling. It was a sobering thought and I hoped against hope that it would not be permanent – only a short extension of my time on the island.

  Only a few days before I’d been depressed at the idea of leaving Buidseach behind, now I was angry at my own stupid whimsy. It was true, I had enjoyed being on the island, at first. Since being ousted from the community, life had been harder but I’d been able to find some comfort in my tipi, knowing that my time there would soon be over. In fact if I had a boatload of supplies at my disposal, the prospect of being stuck on the island would be quite different; I could see myself being able to build a life. But I didn’t have a boatload of things to help me. I barely had a bagful. My food was down to a few handfuls of dried mushrooms and nuts. The firewood enough for one or two campfires. For the first time it occurred to me that we might starve before help came. Panic snatched at me, making my heart beat rabbit-fast. I squeezed my eyes shut and forced the sharp whirl of emotions down. Panic wouldn’t feed me or keep me warm.

  With my bucket in hand, I went down to the shoreline and picked it over. As I turned rocks and lifted clumps of winter-leathered seaweed, I occasionally looked out to sea. There was no boat, no sign of one at all. Just water, stretching on and on. I couldn’t see even a shadow of the opposite coastline. Somewhere out there, millions of people were going about their lives; working, shopping, watching TV. Millions of people completely oblivious that on this little island, we sat hungry and afraid.

  Before dark I’d found a gratifying number of mussels and a reasonably sized crab. At least we had seafood going for us. I took my bucket up the beach and found a sharp-sided boulder to crack the crab against, killing it. In my hut I boiled water in the billycan and dropped my finds into it. The shellfish weren’t enough to replace the calories I’d lost to exercise and cold, but they filled me up a bit and pushed back the edge of panic even further. For today at least, I was fed and warm.

  It was only as night closed in that I realised I’d still not charged my camera. None of us had. The little solar chargers we had been given worked with one of two batteries so we charged one by day while using another. I’d not thought to charge mine the previous day – thinking it was the last day on the island. I’d also not done it today when I got back to the beach. I thought back and couldn’t remember any of the others putting their batteries out to charge before we left camp. None of us had even been wearing our cameras.

  The crab in my stomach suddenly felt alive again, crawling and snapping at my insides. Was that why Duncan had been so quick to bar me from their supplies and turn me out back to my tipi? After all, it had only been my threat of our constant recordings that had made him give me rations the last time I was pushed out. Perhaps he was ba
nking on no one seeing the footage, ever.

  That thought scared me more than the food shortage or the missing boat. It was the first time I’d felt truly separate from the world on the other side of the sea. The first time I’d felt like its rules and laws wouldn’t be there to protect me. I thought of the times I’d returned to my tipi to find it searched, looted. It was clear that was going to happen again, maybe worse now.

  I made a quick decision. My one recourse was to go back to hiding my things and to wear my camera continuously. If I wanted to survive, I had to keep my rations safe from theft. It didn’t take long to round up what I had; there wasn’t much. The rain had started to worsen and I was grateful for it as it meant there was less snow to betray my tracks.

  I found the cave and crawled inside. Everything was much as it had been before, only colder and slightly damper in the outermost section. The inner chamber was as dry as ever and I carefully replaced my few things on the outcrops in the stone. Seeing how little I had, all lined up like that, only worsened my dread. Still, at least my supplies would be safe there. I hoped.

  It was then that I thought of the portacabin. Duncan and I had only taken a cursory look around, but surely there had been food stored there, in the kitchenette? It was late now, fully dark, and the others had been out of my sight all day. Had they already taken the supplies? The thought made my heart jump with anxiety. I knew that if they had the food I could whistle for any rations. If they’d been reluctant before when we knew our time on the island was limited, they would surely not be any more generous now we had no idea when rescue would come.

  I snatched up my empty bag and quickly left the cave. There was no time to waste. I had to get to the cabin and see if there was anything there I could salvage for myself.

  The route was difficult in the dark, but I’d had some practice hiking over ice and snow in the pitch black. I found my way easily enough to the rise and descended it with trembling legs. All the while fear had me turning my head, looking for shadows in the trees. What if the others had already been and gone? Worse, what if they were still there?

  I steeled myself before entering the portacabin. I had my torch with me but only turned it on once the door was closed. I kept the beam low, under the windows. Everything seemed to be as I had left it. Still, I went quickly to the cupboards and opened them, one after another.

  All were empty.

  I could have cried in my disappointment and bitter anger. I shone my torch on the floor and saw the evidence of many footprints. They had been there. They had taken everything. A tiny part of me wanted to believe that tomorrow someone would come down with a share of the supplies. But I knew that part of me belonged to the normal world, not the situation I was currently in. What was fair and good did not apply here, not right now.

  Sure that there was something they had to have missed I went into the bathroom to search, as much as I didn’t want to go anywhere near the body that lay there. I moved around it carefully, opening cabinets, all of which were empty. I guessed that they had once contained soap, bleach, other cleaning supplies and maybe some first-aid things too. The only thing left was a pair of yellow rubber gloves beneath the sink, balled up behind a pipe.

  I opened each cupboard in the kitchenette and felt into every corner hoping to find even a stray stock cube. They were completely cleaned out. There were lockers under the computer consoles and when I opened these they did still have supplies inside. Mostly wires, cables, plastic ties and parts. I went through everything and ended up emptying out some of the plastic storage boxes to take with me, along with some cable ties. There was one useful thing in there, a bottle of seventy-percent isopropyl alcohol. Presumably it had some use in cleaning electrical equipment, but now it was mine.

  I sat back on my heels and pressed my hands against my eyes. This was it? How could I survive without extra food and supplies? In desperation I looked around and found myself staring at the bunkbeds. I’d forced myself not to look at them the entire time I’d been in the cabin, desperate not to spend another moment looking at the body there, but now I saw something aside from the horror. Under the bottom bunk, just visible under the fall of the filth-encrusted blanket, was the edge of a plastic crate.

  For a few moments I was frozen. There was something under that bed, I was sure. Something that the others had not found because who in their right mind would go under a bed with a decomposing body in it? No one. No one that is, unless they were truly desperate.

  I fetched the rubber gloves from the bathroom and removed my coat, tucking the sleeves of my shirt into the gloves. With my scarf wrapped around my mouth and nose, I edged towards the beds.

  The smell, though muted by the cold, was still present. Up close, it hung thickly in the air. The bedding on the bunk was crusted and frozen, stiff when I tried to push it aside. In the end I lifted it up, folding it over the body. Underneath, there were new horrors. Things had clearly dripped and pooled during the summer and now stalactites of liquefied fat and flesh hung from the slats of the bed. The floor was greasy under my gloved hands, thick with rancid gunge. My eyes stung with tears of revulsion. Still, I edged the sticky plastic crate out and pried off the lid.

  The box was the same kind of clear plastic as the cache boxes. A cheap, large-capacity storage crate. Inside, arranged neatly and as pristine as the day they were packed, sat rows of tins, packets and boxes. Food. Medicine. Soap and luxuries. I started to cry, the tears soaking my scarf. With trembling hands I pulled off the gloves, turning them inside out and throwing them under the bed.

  I didn’t even look at the labels, just packed everything into my bag as quickly as possible. I found myself glancing over my shoulder at the door as I did so. Once I was done I used my foot to push the box back under the bed out of sight.

  Standing there, near the shrunken bodies of the two men I barely knew, I felt a wave of gratitude. If they hadn’t shoved that box under the bed, I would have nothing. As unintentional as it might have been, they had saved me.

  ‘Thank you,’ I whispered, feeling instantly foolish.

  I turned and went out into the night.

  It wasn’t easy getting the bulging bag of supplies back to the cave. I didn’t mind one bit. The entrance into the second chamber was so narrow I had to unpack item by item and push them through. In the darkness I still didn’t get a good look at what there was but could feel the shapes of bags of pasta and rice, the slosh of tinned beans, solid little boxes of tablets. Inside I filled the plastic bins and pushed them into a recess in the wall. Hopefully, no one would look there, even if they found this cave within a cave.

  As I left the outer cave, I decided I would need to make something to camouflage the entrance. I would come back with a simple wattle and daub panel to wedge a little way into the opening. With plenty of ferns and leaves it could look as if the cave entrance was nothing more than an outcrop of rock.

  I would also keep charging and wearing my own camera, so there would be a record of the others’ actions, even if just on the internal memory card. Perhaps that would deter them from doing too much to threaten me.

  I picked my way back through the woods to my tipi and tried to settle myself for the night. It was hard; although I was exhausted I was also tense with fear and worry over our future, my future. Already the divide between myself and the others had widened. They had taken all they could and didn’t appear to have thought of me. I felt ill at ease that after only two days, shocking and frightening as those days had been, they were already closing ranks.

  I could only hope that the boat would come, sooner rather than later.

  *

  Rescue did not come on the third day of waiting, or the fourth, or the fifth. As the first week of our abandonment came to an end, I started to feel that something was deeply wrong.

  There was nothing else to think about. My days filled up with creating and discarding theories as to why we were still waiting for rescue. In the mornings I kept watch on the icy beach, gathering what I co
uld from the shoreline and sitting by a campfire, charging my power bank. I turned over the idea that the production company was pulling some kind of stunt. Or perhaps somehow we’d lost track of the date, Andrew’s watch was losing time, and we were to be collected in a few days’ time. Even that we’d misunderstood how long we were to be on the island in the first place. Maybe everything was running as it was expected to, and we’d just collectively convinced ourselves of incorrect facts.

  Brooding on the reasons behind our abandonment kept me awake at night, but it was not the only thing to do so. I found, as the first week came to an end, that I was living a kind of double life.

  By day I kept watch, changing places with Maxine at noon. She didn’t attempt to speak to me and when I asked how she was or how things were going, she gave one-word answers. In the afternoons I kept busy around the tipi, splitting firewood, foraging and beachcombing. I noticed that Maxine watched me as much as she watched the sea; she wasn’t wearing her camera. I didn’t want to fall into paranoia, but I had a feeling she was reporting back. For what purpose I had no idea, other than that it gave them something else to focus on – their dislike of me.

  At night I was at my most active. Once I was sure that the darkness was total and the others were likely in camp, I hurried to my cave. I’d spent some time securing the place and now had a camouflage panel which went across the entrance, making it look like a small hole choked with foliage. Mostly I went there to hang seaweed from the lines I’d strung, where it could air-dry and be preserved. I also stashed some of my beachcombing finds there: another bucket, ripped netting, a small fishing buoy. Every small thing I could squirrel away felt like so much ballast against an uncertain future.

  There was a whisper at the back of my mind, one that grew louder each day, that said I was right to be afraid. Not just that rescue would never come, but that I was trapped with seven people who hated me. Seven increasingly desperate people and limited resources. I was already hiding my supplies from them, but that part of me knew that wasn’t enough. The cave had stopped feeling like a storehouse and more like a bunker. A panic room. I was sleeping in my tipi but that was just a front, hiding this place from the others. I told myself that there was no reason to be afraid for myself. I put that anxiety at the back of my mind and worried about bigger things, like why we were still on the island.