Once warmer weather started to creep in I knew it was time to go back to the clearing. Summer was coming. The shellfish wouldn’t be safe to eat again until after the colder weather. For now, though, they’d done me a lot of good. I was stronger, able to walk for longer periods without getting winded. Most importantly, my mind felt sharper. I could focus more easily and think without zoning out.
Clean and with my gnawing hunger sated, I felt calm. I found myself looking at the future head-on for the first time I could remember. I couldn’t pretend anymore that rescue was coming any time soon. Another boat might chance on me but how long would that take? Four months? Six? A year? I had to plan or I wouldn’t survive that long. I had to keep myself alive.
When I returned to the clearing I stood at its centre. Only a week or so before I’d crawled into it, half-crazed and starved to the edge of death. Now I looked around me and steeled myself for work. Everything we’d built was in disrepair, falling back to the forest. Already counting down the days to winter, I got to work.
Chapter 36
‘Let’s talk about the end of the world,’ Sasha had said blithely. ‘Pretend it happened tomorrow. How would you cope, who would you want to be with?’
I imagined that very little would change. My days were fairly uniform. Monday to Friday I got up early, headed in to the office and avoided people until I went home. Weekends I spent alone, either foraging or cleaning my flat. Mostly I just waited for Monday. If I ever got too lonely I’d walk into town and window-shop just to be around other people. If the world ended it’d be a permanent Saturday afternoon, only without the possibility of shopping or going for a walk. I’d just be stuck in my flat, distracting myself in any way I could.
As for who I’d want with me, I knew the answer well enough. Mum and Dad. Only that was now impossible. Because of me.
I remembered with painful clarity the night I’d called them. I’d had a shit day at work, been chewed out by someone higher up. I hadn’t been able to keep from crying on the way home, pushing my way through crowds of shoppers. Desperate to get some privacy I’d taken a short cut and been cornered in an alley by a drunk guy. Nothing had happened, not really. He’d followed me, calling names that I desperately ignored. Then he’d grabbed my ponytail, shocking me. I’d screamed and from somewhere a kind of furious confidence had boiled up. I’d shrieked every swearword I could think of at him until he fled. Then I’d broken, sobbing as I practically ran home and locked myself in my flat.
That was when I flicked on the lights and realised that the meter had run down. Unable to face going to the corner shop in the dark, where that man might be lurking, I’d sat on the sofa for hours. No heating, no light, nothing to eat or watch. All the loneliness and fear and humiliation turning my insides to ice.
In that moment of weakness I’d cracked. As soon as Mum’s voice came over the phone I started to cry, and when she asked if I wanted them to come and get me, I couldn’t help it. I said yes. More than anything I wanted to be far from the loud, dirty city full of strangers, in a warm, well-lit home with two people that loved me.
They promised they’d be there in a matter of hours. I packed, still crying, feeling the lowest I’d ever been. The lowest I thought I could feel. Then I’d fallen asleep on the sofa, under my coat. Waiting.
They never came.
That was the night they had the accident. The last night I spoke to them. When I woke up it was to the police telling me I’d never see my parents again.
*
I didn’t find the graves until I started on the allotment.
With the hut mostly patched up and a new latrine dug under the relocated shelter, it was my most pressing concern. I couldn’t survive on forage alone. Although the overflowing compost pile was in a state, the lack of proper care had preserved a lot of the discarded vegetable matter, which had dried out. From these I was able to recover seeds, which I planted in rusted tins full of soil. Each one was a precious thing. I carried them into the hut to keep warm at night and took them outside to sit in the sun every day. Soon they got big enough to plant out.
The allotment was almost completely overgrown. It was as if we’d never cleared it to begin with. Only the ramshackle fence showed where it had been in an ocean of weeds, many of which I’d been eating. With a collection of blunt shovels and limited strength I was working on clearing it when I noticed the heaped earth at the back. Two heaps to be exact, each one about a foot wide and six feet long. They were covered in ferns and grass.
Beside one I found a cross of crudely nailed boards with ‘Frank’ written in faded marker pen on it. There was no cross on the other. Perhaps it had been lost in the greenery, perhaps it had never had a marker. Either way, I knew it was Shaun’s body under that mound.
It was a shock to know that Frank was dead. I wondered how it had happened. Perhaps the harsh conditions had been too much for him? Had he had an accident like Shaun, or something worse? I remembered his love of homebrew and agaric tea. It seemed like every time I’d seen him in my rare encounters with the others, he’d been drunk. Maybe a build-up of toxins had finally caught up with him. Perhaps if one of them had poisoned the camera guys, they had killed him as well. I would never know.
Clearing the graves was not a productive use of my limited energy, but I did it anyway. It felt like the right thing to do. Mostly I did it for myself; to reassure myself that I wasn’t beyond caring about them, despite what they’d done. I righted Frank’s cross and made one for Shaun. It seemed only right that he should have a marker as well.
I was piling up the pulled weeds and sorting out the edible ones when I noticed the third grave. It was easy to miss, being so small. There wasn’t much earth heaped on it but someone had outlined the edges with pebbles from the stream and without the surrounding weeds I could see a clear two-by-one-foot patch of bare soil. I stood there and looked down at the little spot. It was too small to be for anyone but Zoe’s baby. I knelt and moved the weeds from around a larger stone. If something had been written there it was long gone. I could just make out a ‘B’ in black marker, mostly washed away and sun-faded. I traced the letter with a fingertip.
Had Zoe’s baby drawn a breath or was this a memorial for a stillbirth? I didn’t know. Almost didn’t want to. From the size of the dirt patch I guessed that the baby had been full term, or close to it. There was no fourth grave. Whatever had happened, Zoe had survived. I was glad. Even if she’d gone along with the rest of them, she had saved my life once. Acid swam in my gut as I looked at Shaun’s grave. I was the reason he’d been taken from her. Not a fitting repayment for Zoe’s help. I bit the inside of my cheek and looked away.
I tidied B’s grave and left a sprig of buttercups on it. There was nothing else I could do. Guilt followed me for the rest of the day. I threw myself into clearing the allotment and didn’t stop digging until my muscles burned and I felt close to throwing up on the turned soil.
The sun went down while I was washing the dirt off myself in the stream. Inside the hut I dried myself off on a ragged towel and put on an old T-shirt of Andrew’s over a pair of someone’s boxer shorts.
I’d worked hard on the inside of the hut. After living in the cave for weeks I wanted to sleep in comfort, not filth. Without having to make space for eight people’s beds and belongings there was plenty of room. After washing the mouldering bedding in the stream I’d put together a nice soft bed on a pile of pine boughs and foam rolls. The dirt floor was covered in fresh ferns and I’d cleaned and replaced all the pots and utensils on pegs on the wall.
I’d nailed some pallet planks to a chunk of log and dragged a stump in to use as a stool. It felt downright luxurious to sit and eat meals at a table, instead of crouched in the dark. I’d also been reading the books left behind by the others and relishing each new story.
But that night I couldn’t take refuge in my creature comforts. I knew now that Zoe’s baby was buried just across the clearing, along with Shaun and Frank. It was a very real remind
er of what the island could do to people. I had to be prepared. Tables and books wouldn’t keep me fed. Nothing I did would make up for what had happened to Zoe because of my carelessness, but I could survive. That would have to be enough.
There was a lot of work to get done and I filled the days to bursting with gathering, weeding, hauling water, chopping wood and catching rabbits. I reinforced the allotment fence with sticks and branches from thorn bushes and watched my seedlings grow. It wasn’t easy. More than once I had to run out in the pelting rain to find plastic sheeting to shelter the young plants. When birds started eating the seedlings, I made hangers to scare them away by stringing together tin lids and rabbit bones. They hung in the trees and their eerie chiming at least cut through the silence, making me feel less alone. I started to think of them as charms or talismans, warding off the voices that whispered at night.
Coming out of the cave and eating semi-well had banished most of the hallucinations, at least during the day. I knew that’s what they were. It didn’t make them any less frightening. Some remained, though thankfully I was no longer actually seeing things. I only heard voices, sighing and whispering with the wind. Sometimes the voice from the cave, the witch, came to me in the dark. She sang, or whispered nonsense words with the creaking of the pines. Nothing I did seemed to have any effect on hearing these things. All I could do was ignore them and try to be inside before dark, when they began in earnest.
Eventually working with the blunt and rusted tools that the others had left out over the winter started to frustrate me. On a less practical level I also wanted clothes that didn’t remind me of Duncan or the rest of them. It was the last place I wanted to go, but I had to go to the cave and get my stuff.
I followed the vague path I’d taken on my way to the clearing. When I came in sight of the cave I felt my skin start to crawl with remembered fear. A smell reached me clear across from the cave. Living in there I must have been mostly deadened to it, but now the reek made my eyes water. The hole I’d escaped through looked impossibly small. I’d not gained a noticeable amount of weight but I found I had to widen the hole to get in. Around it were the marks of my clawing fingers in the dirt. It looked and smelled like the den of an animal; a dead one.
I bundled my things together in the dark. Everything felt slightly damp and I wondered if it had always been damp there or if it had crept in without my fires to chase it away. With my tools and salvageable clothing I crawled back out and coughed the stink from my lungs.
It was tempting to fill in the hole but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. At the back of my mind was the fear that I might need to get back in there. I wondered if I’d ever feel secure enough to visit the clearing without getting shivers. Maybe one day. After all I had nothing but time in which to try.
On the way back I decided to take a shortcut through the trees. The bundle was awkward to carry and I wanted to get everything back and have a rest before chopping some wood. I was kicking my way through some ferns when I raised a hand to push a branch away. My fingers touched wet cloth and I snatched my hand back, surprised.
Tied to the offending branch was a strip of cloth, bleached grey by rain and sun. I dropped my bundle and untied the fabric strip with shaking fingers. Inside the knot, where the cloth was protected, was a seam of bright blue. A cache marker. I stood there stupidly for a moment, then grabbed my shovel and started to dig.
When the end of the spade hit plastic I whooped. Scrabbling on my knees I pulled out a box someone had sealed up with heavy duty tape. It was smaller than the other cache boxes. Those had been large storage crates, but this was barely bigger than a shoebox. I pried off the lid and found a piece of paper wedged underneath. On it was a printed picture of what had once been Father Christmas. Some damp must have got into the box because his red suit had bled out over the page. The message said simply ‘Merry Christmas Islanders!’ Under the note was a plastic-wrapped Christmas pudding, a bottle of brandy, some mini Christmas crackers and eight party poppers. One for each of us.
I sat and stared at those things long after my eyes blurred and they devolved into colours and shapes. I was thinking about Christmas, the last time we’d all been together properly. After that there’d been the long, fruitless wait for the boat that never came. All right, so that Christmas hadn’t been great. I’d left hurt and angry, but we’d all been together, safe and fed. We were still just people living on an island for a lark, for a TV show. The real struggle, the knowledge that it was real, hadn’t reached us yet.
With the box under one arm and my bundle in the other I returned to the clearing. Not knowing what to do with it I left the box on my table. It made me feel strange to look at it. I felt almost like it was something from another time entirely. A capsule of memories I didn’t want to look at. Instead of resting I went straight out to cut wood and pile it in the store.
It was getting dark by the time I could bring myself to face the box again. I opened it and screwed up the note. It would be useful as kindling at least. The pudding in its bright red cellophane I put on the shelf. It could be my emergency rations – high in fat, sugar and dried fruit. Perfect. I picked up the bottle of brandy. It wasn’t large, the kind of bottle my mum had kept on hand for lighting the pudding and making hot toddies. Not really enough to preserve anything. I weighed it in my hands, turning it over. Perhaps I could make tinctures from it, there was no telling when I might need some form of medicine.
‘Useful,’ I said, my voice cracking from disuse. For a moment the sound made me uneasy, as if someone else had spoken.
‘Getting out of practice,’ I muttered, putting the bottle on the table. ‘Maybe I should draw a face on something, give myself someone to talk to.’
I built up the fire to heat my stew and sat there, looking into it. The flames were hypnotic, like figures and animals fighting or waves on the sea.
‘If it’s not too much trouble, maybe you could bring a boat,’ I said, addressing the shadows beyond the fire. ‘That’s your thing, isn’t it? Shipwrecks, stranded sailors.’ I picked up a stick and started tracing lines and swirls in the ashes around the fire hole. ‘Or maybe you could just talk back. Though it makes sense that even my imaginary friend doesn’t want to talk to me. That’s fine. At least you’re a good listener.’
A laugh came, dry, like twigs popping in the flames.
‘Glad you think it’s funny.’
I ate my meal and by the time I’d finished, the cold was closing in, the fire dying down. I took myself off to bed. The scent of pine rose up from my mattress of boughs and I watched the embers of the fire wink out, one by one.
As I drifted off I heard that dry, creaking voice again, crooning a lullaby.
Chapter 37
Around midsummer, when the days were long and hot, I decamped to the beach.
The move was temporary. I needed salt for preserving. For salt I needed seawater, lots of it. Lugging it up to the clearing was a waste of time and effort. The work was time-consuming but not difficult. I strained buckets of salt water through rags to get the sand out. After that all that was left was the boiling.
After a week or so of harvesting I had a respectable jar of slightly discoloured salt crystals. I needed a lot more but it was a fair start. I’d also amassed a large collection of broken plant pots, plastic bottles, disposable cutlery and rope. What I was hoping for were more buckets and containers to store water.
My search took me to the northern side of the island. I’d been avoiding it as that was where the portacabin was. It was also where the bulk of the craggy rocks were and lots of flotsam got trapped by them. Getting down to the sea was a struggle because in most places the earth had been eaten away leaving a sheer drop. I took my time and used a knotted rope around a tree to help me climb up and down.
I became quite confident in getting down the short cliffs to the beaches. After a while I decided to tackle the steepest climb on the northernmost point of the island. Standing at the top and looking down, I had my doubts. It
was at least twenty metres down, maybe more. A fall from the clifftop would injure me badly, if it didn’t kill me outright. I almost turned back from it. I would have, had I not spotted something interesting being tossed by the waves below. It looked like a bin; quite large and made of plastic. The kind of flip-top bin I’d had in the kitchen of my tiny flat. Something that size would hold a lot of water.
I tied off my climbing rope. The bin was a useful item and leaving it to be smashed on the rocks would be foolish. I’d be careful. I’d become quite practised at climbing and it wasn’t that far. With a second rope trailing down to pull the bin up with, I started the climb.
Around halfway down I realised I’d made a mistake. The drop was further than it had looked from above. The cliff itself was also not as solid as the others I’d scaled. Mostly it was crumbling earth, not rocks and hard chalk. It was also honeycombed with small holes and burrows, maybe from some kind of bird. There was a stiff wind coming in and it made the rope sway. Chunks broke off when I put my feet on the wall. More than once I lost my footing and felt myself rock sickeningly in the air.
When I reached the ground my legs were shaking. After taking a few seconds to catch my breath I looked around for the bin. This was definitely going to be a one-off trip. It had better have been worth it.
Fortunately, the bin was in one piece. The plastic was bleached a little and the edges were a bit jagged, but it would hold water. After a little experimentation I managed to get my belt around it and tie the rope to that. It was tenuous but I thought it would hold until I got it up to ground level. Aware that this was the only time I’d be making the climb down, I looked around for anything else of worth.
There was disappointingly little. The bin was the only large item I could see. The usual collection of bottle caps and lolly sticks bobbed in the water but nothing I could see a use for. I was about to start the long climb back up when I saw a flash of colour almost buried in seaweed. After pulling a few clumps of bladder wrack away I found a piece of pink and purple cloth pinned under a round rock. Curious, I picked the rock up. It was lighter than I’d been expecting for its size. I was momentarily off balance, looked down and dropped it as if bitten.
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