Stranded

by Sarah Goodwin

  I ended up with a fairly mangled pile of meat. It was piled up in my billycan, glistening in the flames. Some of it was still on the bones; jointing the animals hadn’t been easy. In the end I’d settled for cutting pieces of meat free. The guts, organs and skins I’d piled into my latrine hole and covered over with dirt. I wiped the blood from my hands with the damp sock and discarded it into the hole.

  Deciding how to cook the meat was the next step. Dimly I was remembering a book I’d read once. Not a guide or anything, just a novel. There had been starving people and they’d poached a deer from somewhere. The rich meat made them sick after so long without proper food. They had to make soup instead and eat slowly. So I made soup, poaching the meat in a little water with salt and juice from the tinned tomatoes. I ate slowly. I barely tasted it.

  I ate that soup for the next few days. On one of those days it rained heavily. I could tell because drips started to come through the roof of the cave. Using the torch I found the place where the water was coming through and scraped at it with my shovel. Soon a thin stream of muddy water was pitting the dirt floor. I put my water bucket underneath and draped a cloth over the top to filter out the worst of the soil. As long as there was rain, I would have water.

  In between making these little adjustments to my new existence I sat by the blocked entrance and listened. I wanted to know what was going on outside. Not just the other islanders, but anything at all that wasn’t my own thoughts, my own breathing. I could only hear the heaviest rain and no birdsong or creaking of the pines could penetrate the dense earth.

  After a few days I thought I’d worked out the pattern of my guards. The people on watch seemed to change regularly, I assumed by day and by night. It always seemed to be a pair by day. I could hear them talking. I guessed when day was as that was the period in which someone else visited regularly, presumably to bring food. The voices changed; Andrew and Duncan, Andrew and Frank. Maxine. I couldn’t see them delivering meals, so assumed they were the guards and Maxine brought them food.

  Night was the quieter time. Although there was talking several times a day when food came, there were no voices at night. I only knew someone was there by the occasional sneeze or the crack of a hatchet as wood was cut for the fire. I had no idea who watched the cave at night. It seemed like only one person from the lack of talking, but it could easily have been two people taking turns to sleep.

  I judged the days and nights by this cycle of voices. As each cycle completed, I marked off another day in my old diary, re-crossing our days on the island.

  Listening to them was my main occupation. I had to keep track of how closely they were watching me. Eventually I hoped to hear nothing at all. Once that happened, I could start digging my way out of the cave.

  After the first night, when Andrew had threatened me through the blockade, no one spoke to me directly. They spoke about me sometimes, but as if I was an animal that couldn’t understand them. Mostly they speculated on what supplies I had and how long they’d last. Other times they whispered and I supposed they were talking about the camp and their own troubles. Or planning on how to get into the cave. Stuff they didn’t want me to hear. Sometimes they forgot to whisper, or were too intoxicated to bother. I had no idea how much fly agaric they’d managed to find and dry, but it seemed from the periods of raised voices and merriment they were using it regularly, even when on watch.

  One night, five days after I was shut in, I heard Duncan say, ‘What are we going to do about Zoe? She’s driving me up the fucking wall.’

  I’d been filling in the latrine, but I stopped to listen. Talking at night was unusual. The guard had changed only a short while before. I guessed it was dark but not late enough for sleep.

  ‘I know. Christ, she wants to get herself together.’ That was Andrew. ‘I mean, yeah, it’s sad Shaun’s dead but we’ve got bigger shit to be worried about at the moment. Where the fuck is that boat?’

  ‘No fucking clue. But she’s not doing herself any favours carrying on like she is. I mean, we’re the ones trying to keep everything together. We’re the ones making sure there’s food and wood and water. What’s she doing? Nothing. She just sleeps and cries. She’s like a fucking baby.’

  ‘And what about that baby? She doesn’t look like she’s getting any bigger.’

  ‘Reckon it was a put-on to get Shaun to stay interested in her?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  I bit my lip. If they were right and Zoe wasn’t showing signs of her advancing condition, it meant one of three things: she’d been mistaken, she’d miscarried – whether by design or by chance – or she was so malnourished things weren’t developing as they should. The first didn’t seem likely. She’d been so sure the last time we spoke. If she was still pregnant and not getting enough food she’d be in danger of not having enough nutrients for her and the baby. Leaching her strength until she had nothing left, and they both wasted away.

  There was silence for a while and I almost left them to it, thinking they were done. Then Duncan spoke again, quietly. ‘Do you think Gill’s right?’

  ‘About the camera guys, you mean?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  There was a short silence. ‘Maybe? Gill’s got some pretty funny ideas about stuff. Not exactly the brightest bulb, is she?’

  ‘She’s a dense fucking cow, but that’s not the point,’ Duncan said. ‘She reckons Maddy did something to those camera guys, poisoned them.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘… She said it was one of us.’

  ‘Maddy did?’

  ‘Yeah … Before you guys came, she was ranting about how it was one of us, that we gave those blokes poison mushrooms,’ Duncan said, slowly, like he was actually thinking about what I’d said. I held my breath, straining to hear what came next.

  ‘Why’d we do that?’ Andrew said. ‘Makes no sense.’

  ‘Dunno. Probably she was just making stuff up so we’d leave her alone, fight amongst ourselves. I mean, if one of us had given them mushrooms we’d have said so by now, right? I mean, we’ve all been sitting around trying to work out what’s going on. Someone would have said.’

  ‘Probably was her. And now there’s Shaun … When we do get out of here no one’s going to believe a word she says. They’ll probably arrest her.’

  ‘Yeah … supposing we get out of here.’

  I strained my ears in the silence that followed, almost thinking they’d let the conversation lapse. Then Andrew spoke again.

  ‘It has to be something more than just weather or cost delays. They’d have drummed up enough cash to get us by now, or got the authorities in. What if …’ Andrew continued, then stopped.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘What if … there’s no authorities? What if … something’s happened out there?’

  ‘Like what?’ Duncan said, contemplative. ‘A war?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘With who?’

  ‘Take your pick. We’ve been here over a year. We don’t know what might have happened back home. What if there’s been some kind of regime change or the government’s collapsed? The oil could’ve run out or some kind of superbug—’

  ‘Crackpot.’

  ‘Am I?’ Andrew said. ‘The world’s a fragile fucking place. When I was working at the city farm we did all these campaigns about factory farming. All those chemicals and antibiotics they pump into the animals to keep them from rotting alive in those cages. We eat that shit. Air’s polluted, water’s poisoned. Sea levels rising, flooding, storms. GMOs and mad cow. It’s a race to see what gets us first. What if something has?’

  There was a long silence. I had to agree with Andrew, at least in part. There were many things that could have happened in our absence. He did seem way off the mark with some of them though. I thought of biological weapons, nuclear fallout, chemical gas, and shivered. Was that better or worse than what I’d envisioned? Was any of it better than the rest?

  ‘And you reckon she knows what’s happened, do you?’ Duncan said
. ‘How?’

  ‘I’m not saying she for sure knows something we don’t but … she’s not stupid. Maybe she’s looking at the same things we are and she thinks, hey, something’s fucked up out there … She’s not tried to get out.’

  ‘We’re guarding her.’

  ‘All right,’ Andrew countered, ‘but even before that. She didn’t try getting away, swimming for it or …’

  ‘That’s basically suicide. Do you not remember how long it took us to get here on the boat? Even if we built a bloody raft we’d never reach the shore.’

  Andrew made a frustrated sound. ‘I know! My point is, she hasn’t tried to get away, or signal for help or do anything but sit in that hole.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So … maybe she thinks there’s no point. No one to come save her, nowhere to go because there’s nothing out there.’

  Duncan seemed to have nothing to say to that. There was no more talk and after a while I went to the inner cave to bank the fire and got into my nest of a bed. Sleep was even more elusive than usual.

  I kept thinking about what Duncan had said: that whoever was responsible for the poisoning would have said something. I didn’t agree, mostly because I knew what it was like to be scared that the whole group would turn on you. But surely if whoever it was had made some kind of trade, the others would have noticed that they suddenly had more food, or illicit booze. Most of them had been stealing from the stash together, sharing their ill-gotten gains. If it was Gill, she’d have gone to Duncan like a loyal dog with her prize in hand.

  Something else had been bothering me. Fly agaric was very distinctive, red with white scales, the classic fairy-tale toadstool. There wasn’t really anything similar enough to it, to be taken for fly agaric. Certainly not anything like the destroying angel, which was mostly white. To have mixed the two up wouldn’t just be a matter of stupidity – it was nearly impossible to do so by accident.

  Then there was the accidental poisoning that had hit everyone at camp. Whoever had the page would have known what fly agaric looked like and what it could do, but they had all eaten it anyway, aside from Frank and Zoe. Why allow that to happen unless whoever it was had something to hide, something that made it too dangerous to reveal they knew anything about mushrooms? Like the murder of two people. Had Zoe or Frank been responsible? Shaun had only eaten enough to get a bit high; had he known not to overindulge? Gill was the first to throw up; had she done it on purpose to purge the toxins before they metabolised? My mind swam with explanations and accusations. Was I being paranoid, or was something not adding up?

  What if it wasn’t some accident by someone too greedy or stupid to pick the right mushrooms? What if it had all been completely intentional? Pass off lethal mushrooms for hallucinogenic ones. They looked much the same when chopped and dried after all. Easy to use one side of the page to find destroying angel, the other side to convince the camera guys that it was fly agaric.

  Only there had to be a reason. The cameramen had been killed before we ever even knew the boat wasn’t coming. Why kill them? What did it achieve? What could make someone poison two strangers and leave them to die? More importantly, who had done it and what would they do now that they were trapped, fighting for survival? If they were willing to kill seemingly at random, what would they do for the last bit of food? The slim hope of survival?

  Andrew’s words kept going round and around in my head.

  Nowhere to go.

  Nothing out there.

  What gets us first.

  Suicide.

  I’d heard someone say once that ‘suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem’. I was willing to bet that person had not been trapped on an island with a murderer and no hope of escape. It was not the first time that killing myself had occurred to me. There had been moments, fractions of seconds where I’d looked at my penknife and thought about just letting go, throwing the fight for survival. But it was no sure thing. I couldn’t think of ending it without picturing myself, hurt but not dead, weakened, easy prey. I didn’t want to make myself more vulnerable than I already was.

  Whatever Andrew thought, whatever I had imagined, there was still a world out there. My only hope was that it would find us sooner rather than later.

  Chapter 34

  The time passed, as slowly as I’d ever known it to. My guards didn’t seem about to lose interest in me. I heard them come and go every day and at the end of each cycle of changes I crossed the day off in my diary.

  On some days it rained. On most it didn’t. When the water ran out I sucked a stone to keep my mouth from drying out. When rain came again I had a strange idea that the water was coming out of the dirt itself and not from the outside. I sat and watched it emerge as if it was a miracle.

  My stock of wood grew lower each day. I used my blunt shovel to gouge dirt away from the walls and hacked the thicker tree roots with my hatchet. There were only so many but I piled them up and hoped they’d dry out. There was nothing I could do about food except ration it tightly.

  I spent the unending hours lying by the entrance, listening. The air in that cave was foul with rotting meat and my own waste, but I had to hear them. I had to hear something. Sometimes I thought they had finally left me alone, but then someone would speak and I’d know they were still out there. The weather would be getting better, no reason not to sit outside and watch me. What else did they have to do?

  Without sunlight, fresh air or the sight of stars I felt myself start to close down. While I focused on trying to keep my body fed and warm, my mind began to wander where I could not follow. The noises that I’d heard before – car horns, supermarket tills, dogs barking – were all still there. And the voices. I heard singing, music like from a radio. People talking in the crack at the rear of the cave. A voice telling me to get some rest, that everything would look better in the morning. Sometimes it sounded like my mum. Sometimes it was someone else, the voice from before, telling me I must go on.

  I started to see things too. The roof of the cave sparkled with stars or swam with lights like fish in a pond. I saw things mostly when it was fully dark. I tried to keep the fire going as much as possible. Then one night, lying by the small cluster of flames, I saw Shaun’s face amongst them.

  I recoiled. With the wall of the cave at my back I sat frozen, eyes fixed on his. Shaun peered out at me between the glowing logs and scraps of root fibre. Then he coughed and smoke spiralled upwards.

  ‘Maddy …’

  ‘Shaun,’ I whispered, voice cracking from disuse. ‘What …’

  ‘I came to see you,’ Shaun said. ‘I wanted to ask you why you did this to me?’

  ‘I didn’t …’

  ‘You ran. If you’d stayed put, I wouldn’t have followed you, and I wouldn’t be dead.’

  ‘I was scared.’

  ‘You didn’t even know what I wanted. How could you be scared?’

  ‘But—’

  ‘I wanted your help, for Zoe. I needed help and you killed me.’

  I closed my eyes and shook my head until I felt dizzy. When I opened my eyes again Shaun’s nose was an inch from mine, his eyes glowing red as coals.

  ‘You killed me!’ he bellowed, making my ears ring.

  I screamed and threw myself away from him, crawling to the other side of the cave and curling into a ball. I lay there with my hands over my ears and my eyes squeezed tightly shut. It was a long, long time before the prickling feeling of being watched drove me to look behind me again. For a second, no more than that, I saw someone else by my fire. No more than a shadow, a trick of the flickering fire. It wasn’t Shaun, I saw that much. Then the firelight shifted and it was gone.

  It was ridiculous, but inside I knew what, or who, I’d seen. The witch from the story, my story. The witch of Buidseach. She was the one speaking to me that night, the one who said I must go on.

  I pressed my hands over my eyes and told myself it wasn’t real. None of this was real.

  But of course the worst parts we
re.

  It occurred to me that the voices outside might be no more real than those in the cave. Perhaps the others had stopped watching me days ago. I spent the next few days listening carefully to reassure myself. They were real. They had to be.

  I was in a kind of limbo. As long as I was in the cave they couldn’t get me, but eventually I would have to take my chances. To stay was to eventually starve to death. I had to wait. A chance would come, I was certain. What it would look like or when it would arrive, I had no idea. I could only hope that it would be soon and that I would be strong enough to take it.

  My food stores grew lower and lower. I was almost used to being tired and hungry all the time. It had been the norm for months. I slept as much as possible and even when awake my mind wandered off for long periods. I could almost ignore the gnawing of my belly, the parch in my throat when the water ran out.

  Eventually all I had left was sugar, salt and olive oil. Once I had known the exact amount of calories in white sugar, a product of sharing an office with diet obsessed co-workers. I fell into line with them, popping sweetener tablets into my coffee, eating non-fat yoghurt, cutting doughnuts in half and saying, ‘Oh, I really shouldn’t …’ Now the idea of that made me laugh aloud ’til the sound filled the tiny cave and tears rolled down my hollowed cheeks.

  When I stopped the walls laughed back, a low cackle. The hair on my neck stood up and I closed my eyes, afraid of what I’d see.

  The next day the bulb in my dynamo torch burned out. I shoved the useless bit of plastic in a corner and lost track of it. The walls of the cave were bare of roots and I’d started hacking pieces off of the stump that blocked the door. It was wood after all. I needed to keep the fire going. In the darkness eyes appeared and watched me. Shaun spoke to me. I didn’t like the dark. Bit by bit I burned my books as kindling. The forage guide too, not that it mattered anymore. Evidence of some possible crime was worthless. No one was ever going to find us.