Dr. Franklin's Island

by Ann Halam

  I couldn’t see the plane. But I didn’t say so. “Do you two remember an explosion?” I asked, after a silence that seemed too long. “When we were in the sea?”

  “Yeah,” said Arnie, looking at me sourly. “The plane blew up.”

  “I wonder what happened to all the other people?”

  As soon as I’d spoken, I wished I hadn’t said that. I decided shy people shouldn’t try to make conversation, not even in an emergency. If I manage to talk to strangers at all, nervousness always makes me say the wrong things.

  “The life rafts must be beyond the reef,” said Miranda firmly. “We were thrown onto this side of the rocks by the explosion, but the life rafts were on the other side, I’m sure of it.”

  Arnie gave a short laugh.

  “We’ll have to think of some way to attract their attention,” I said.

  The pale boy gave me the same unfriendly stare he’d given me in the departure lounge, only worse, shrugged and looked away. We were castaways together on a desert island, but he was still determined not to be nice. I didn’t know whether to admire him for being so unaffected by the situation, or dislike him right back. I felt so strange. Yesterday I had been Semirah Garson, a person with a normal life and normal problems. Now I was lost. I might never see my friends, my family, my home again.

  I felt a cold shock in the pit of my stomach. This is real.

  “Okay,” said Miranda. “Let’s start again, now that Semi’s with us. Semi, we’re trying to work out what happened on the plane, before we ditched.”

  “Does it matter?” said Arnie.

  “I don’t know,” said Miranda. “But I do know that when you’re in an emergency situation, the first thing you should do is put together all the information you have. Anything we remember might help us. Let’s each tell the story, see how it fits together.”

  So we took turns. I told my story, Miranda told hers. When it was his turn, Arnie said, in a fake little-boy voice: “I’m Arnie Pullman, this is my story. I live in Surrey. I like computer games and when I grow up I want to be very, very rich. I was on a plane and it crashed. That’s it, folks. That’s all I know.” Then he grinned sarcastically.

  I hated to have to admit it, but he had a point. Miranda, who had been sitting next to me, did not remember what I remembered. It seemed as if we’d been in two different plane crashes. Miranda thought the plane had been lurching around already when we both woke up. She believed we’d been caught in a tropical storm. She hadn’t seen my “strange man.” She thought the man with the stewardess had been one of the Planet Savers organizers, helping to calm people down. I said there’d been panic and a fight in the aisle. She said a girl had been taken ill, and the crew had been rushing about dealing with that, as well as with the storm.

  I was sure we’d been overdue for our landing in Quito when I woke up. Miranda said she’d looked at her watch too: but she thought we’d been halfway through the flight time. My watch had been ripped from my wrist somehow when we were in the sea. Miranda was wearing hers. It looked undamaged but it had stopped at 7:35 P.M. . . . But that was very confusing, because at 7:35 P.M. Miami time last night, our delayed flight had hardly left the tarmac. Miranda’s watch was not a reliable witness, but that didn’t prove I was right. This obviously wasn’t Quito, or anywhere in the mountains of Ecuador, but where would halfway from Florida to Ecuador put us on the map? We talked back and forth about time zones, and whether we’d remembered to change our watches, trying to work it out and getting nowhere.

  Arnie said he didn’t wear a watch. He sat there grinning, listening to us tie ourselves in knots. We were on a beach, probably in the Pacific Ocean. Other than that, we didn’t really know anything. We had no radio, no emergency flares, no first aid, no food or water, and no way of getting in contact with the other survivors . . . if there were any.

  Finally Miranda and I gave up. Lots of different discomforts started to ooze through the protective cloud of dazed confusion that still filled my head. Miraculously, both of my reef sandals had stayed on my feet, but the straps had rubbed my heels completely raw. My clothes weren’t dry, they were damp, sticky, and stiff with salt. One leg of my jeans was ripped in half, and through the rip you could see my knee, swollen and bruised, with a big raw scrape. I could feel other bruises too, and my whole body ached from all that swimming. My mouth felt as if it was lined with salted sandpaper, my face felt twice its size, and my hair must have looked disgusting.

  “We ought to move out of the sun,” said Miranda at last. “It’s getting hot.”

  “We ought to start walking to one of those headlands,” said Arnie.

  “And then what?” sighed Miranda. “It’s farther than you think, it’s miles, Arnie, and we have no water. Two of us have no shoes. There’s no sign of human life here. If we managed to reach the headland, we don’t know if there’s a track across it. There might be snakes, there’ll certainly be ants, thorns, rocks. . . . Have you ever trekked in tropical forest? It’s no joke. We’d be lost and bushed in no time.”

  “What if there’s a tourist village in the next bay?”

  “What if there isn’t? I say we stay with the vehicle.”

  “What vehicle?”

  “That vehicle,” said Miranda firmly, pointing out to sea. “The plane. Search and Rescue will be searching for the plane. If we’re not right here when they come looking, we are sunk.”

  “What if that takes days? Are we going to sit here and starve?”

  I guessed this must be the continuation of the argument they’d been having before I joined them. It sounded as if it could go on forever.

  “I’m not hungry,” I said, trying to break it up. “But I’d love a cool shower.”

  I’d noticed, while we’d been talking, that Miranda had been looking up and down the beach, calmly examining the place. She pushed back her long black hair, which was clinging to her face and shoulders in sticky, salty locks.

  “I think that might be arranged,” she said, with a confident smile. She got up. “Or a bath, anyway. Come on.”

  We followed her, Arnie limping and complaining, although the sand wasn’t really hot yet. Miranda’s bare feet didn’t seem to bother her. Before long we reached a stream of water, spreading out into a fan of narrow channels. Arnie looked at Miranda in disgust, as if her having spotted this feature was a deliberate insult to him. He thumped down heavily on his knees, dipped up some water in his hand, tasted it and spat it out. “Gagh. It’s salt.” He smirked triumphantly. “Nice try, Wonder Girl. But no cigar.”

  “We follow it upstream,” explained Miranda, slowly, as if she was talking to a toddler.

  When we got to that wall of greenery, the water in the stream was still brackish. Arnie said, “I thought we weren’t supposed to leave the vehicle.” (You’d have thought he wanted to die of thirst.) But by then all of us could hear the sound of falling water, cool and clear, and irresistible even to Arnie. We ducked under the branches and picked our way along the bank of the stream, which soon became a clear, dark little river. I had my sandals, with the heel straps undone, so I wasn’t too badly off, except that my knee was hurting. Arnie and Miranda managed somehow, with Arnie complaining all the time. It was a relief to be out of the sun, but as tropical jungles go, this wasn’t a very attractive example. We didn’t see any flowers. A few tall trees with thick rusty-brown trunks loomed up into the sky, but mostly the vegetation was thorny bushes, thorny creepers and giant grass blades that cut our hands when we pushed them aside. We heard birds, and once something (probably a big monkey) went crashing through the branches over our heads. But we didn’t actually see any wildlife, except the big ants in the leaf litter (which we tried to avoid, but Arnie got bitten on his toe once).

  After about ten minutes we reached the waterfall. We’d been going uphill since we left the beach. We’d started clambering over rocks, then suddenly the slope ahead of us became a creeper-hung cliff, with water pouring down it in a thick silver-bright ribbon and churning into
a round clear pool big enough for swimming.

  We stared at it in delight.

  “There you are,” said Miranda. “Your shower, Semi.”

  “Watch out for piranhas,” said Arnie. But he almost sounded happy.

  I took off my sandals. The three of us clasped hands (this was a foolish risk, and we wouldn’t have done it later on) and jumped together into the water.

  The pool was nice and deep, and it had nothing nasty lurking in it. None of us managed to touch the bottom. We splashed and we swam, we dived in and out of the thundering spray. We swallowed gallons of pure, fresh water. Then we scrambled out onto the rocks and sat in a row, looking up. The cliff went up like the side of a house. We couldn’t see the top of it.

  “I don’t think we’re going any farther that way,” remarked Arnie.

  Miranda said, “I’m sure it would be possible. Anything’s possible, if you have to do it. But we’re not going to try, not yet anyway. We’re going to—”

  “I know, I know, stay by the vehicle. Give it a rest. Who put you in charge, anyway?”

  “Now I want my breakfast,” I broke in. I hoped Arnie wasn’t going to go on like this until we got rescued. Couldn’t we try to be nice to each other?

  “Ah, breakfast,” said Miranda, grinning. “For that we go back to the beach.”

  About two hours later we were sitting under our rock ledge again, drinking coconut milk, and eating the soft slippery flesh of young coconuts. Miranda had spotted the grove of coconut palms at the same time as she’d seen the stream in the sand. We’d found plenty of fat, green coconuts lying under them, both the big ones and the little young ones that are really tasty. We’d used her pocketknife (which was one of the things she’d moved into the pockets of her combats when the plane was in trouble), assisted by various stones and sticks, to break into them. It had not been easy. There had been a lot of trial-and-error bashing, dropping rocks on coconuts from a height, prizing and thumping and general frustrated hammering. But we had triumphed.

  We had water, we had food, we had shelter from the sun. We had washed ourselves and our clothes free of salt, which might not sound important, but feeling fresh and cool made a huge difference to my ability to cope. For the moment, we had the illusion that we were doing well, and this was a thrilling adventure that would soon be over.

  “Now we should start walking,” said Arnie, pointing to the northern headland with a piece of coconut shell. “That way looks nearer. It can’t be more than two or three miles.”

  Miranda shook her head stubbornly. “There are other priorities. We need shelter for tonight. We need to get a signal fire going. We should start work straightaway.”

  “Knock it off. If I was in a life raft, I’d take orders from the captain, or whoever. But why do I have to take orders from you?”

  “You don’t, Arnie. But I’m the one who found us fresh water and food, so maybe you should think about taking my advice. Look,” she added, in a peacemaking tone, “the tide’s gone out a long way. Let’s see if we can get to the wreckage. We might find some useful stuff. If we had a water container, that would be a good start.”

  Arnie groaned. “Okay. I’ll buy it. Find me my shoes, Wonder Girl. I left them under my seat.”

  It was afternoon. The sun was going to disappear quite soon, behind the headland at the end of our bay. There was a breeze and it was a beautiful, warm, comfortable temperature. As we walked down to the sea together, I had the illusion—again—that everything was going to be all right. None of us mentioned the idea, but I think we were all convinced that we’d get to the reef, and then we’d see the life rafts, and they’d see us. They’d pick us up. We’d be with everybody else. Soon we’d be safe. In a day or two we’d be settling into that rain-forest compound with the environmental scientists, and everything would be back to normal.

  When something terrifically terrible happens to you, I think your brain doesn’t get it, for quite a while. You go on trying to see the world the way it was, even when common sense should tell you that everything has changed forever.

  The tide had gone out a very long way, uncovering a strip of flat coral rock that stretched across the lagoon like a causeway. It was painfully rough underfoot, like walking on a giant petrified pan scrubber. I said we could take turns with my sandals, but Miranda said no, I was having enough trouble with my bad knee. She and Arnie managed barefoot. Quite soon we started seeing things from the plane. We came across a rucksack, wedged in among the coral. It was fastened up, but it seemed to have been invaded by some weird fluffy white sea creature that was trying to get out.

  “What’s that?” said Arnie, poking it.

  Miranda and I took a second look, and started to giggle. “It’s tampons,” I said. “Expanding widthways when wet—”

  “Yecch!” Arnie jumped up and kicked the bag away—

  “Don’t do that,” said Miranda. “Pull it out. Anything could be useful.”

  So we pulled it out, and threw away the tampons. There was a name on the inside of the top flap, scrolled and decorated in purple ink.

  Sophie Merrit. Which was Sophie Merrit? I wondered. Maybe it was my owl girl—

  Then it hit me. From the looks on their faces, Arnie and Miranda had felt the same shock. We stared at each other, no one wanting to say what we were thinking.

  “Leave it here,” said Miranda. “We’ll pick it up on the way back.”

  We went on, in dead silence.

  Sophie Merrit’s in one of the life rafts, I told myself. They’re all in the life rafts. But my mind kept showing me pictures of the bobbing heads in the dark water, the jagged rocks, me and Miranda and Arnie swimming the other way from everyone else, that huge explosion. The faces of the teenagers in the departure lounge in Miami started running through my head. I remembered how I’d wandered around, envying the lucky ones in their chattering groups. . . . A few meters farther on we found a fleet of airline meals, still wrapped in their foil, sealed in plastic bags that had blown up like balloons. We hooked out as many as we could reach and left them stacked on the rock. Then we found a life jacket, with the straps torn. A Planet Savers baseball cap. Two floating shoes, but not a pair. Neither of them was anything like big enough for Arnie, so we threw them back. Another rucksack (which we salvaged, like the first). A seat cover. A plastic drinking glass. By this time even I could see the silvery shape of the wrecked plane, crumpled on the rocks like a broken toy. It was still a long way off.

  The lagoon, which had looked flat as a boating lake from the shore, was heaving with slow, foamless billows that kept hiding the wreck and the outer reef from view. Arnie started to make a joke about the Swiss Family Robinson, the castaways in a classic desert island story. They manage to rescue a whole department store of supplies from their wreck; we were doing pathetically badly in comparison—

  Then he stopped dead—he was in front—and said quietly, “Oh God.”

  There was a body bumping against our causeway. No life jacket. The jacket must have been ripped away by whatever had made the hideous jagged wound that almost cut the torso in two. It was Neil Cannon, the Planet Savers TV presenter. His hair wasn’t spiky anymore, it drifted like seaweed. His healthy outdoors tan had turned pale and bloodless. He only had one leg.

  “I don’t think I’ll go swimming in this lagoon,” muttered Arnie.

  “Can we bury him?” I whispered. “Can we please, please get him out and bury him?”

  It seemed awful to leave him there.

  “Look!” breathed Miranda.

  Farther out, the billows had lifted into view something I saw as a big, bobbing yellow blur. It was a life raft! We ran toward it, yelling.

  When we were level with it, we saw that the raft was floating upside down. We shouted, in the faint hope that there were people alive, trapped underneath; but got no answer. Then as we watched, it was heaved up by the waves; and lazily turned over. As it rolled, we saw the long wide gash in the bottom, before it slowly sank. “It wasn’t a shark t
hat did that,” whispered Miranda.

  “No,” said Arnie. “It must have been the explosion. Remember, there was an explosion.”

  “I don’t think we’re going to reach the wreck,” said Miranda. “It’s too far.”

  We stood there, surrounded by the empty sea and the empty sky.

  “I think we’d better head back,” I said at last. “I’m sure the tide’s started to turn.”

  We returned to the beach in silence, collecting our salvaged goods on the way. I had to close my eyes while we were passing the body. The tide was coming in quickly. We were wading knee-deep before we reached the shore, which was very scary.

  As night fell, we sat under our rock ledge again, eating more coconut meat and sipping on thin, refreshing young coconut milk. None of us felt like tackling the airline food. In fact, none of us felt hungry. We ate because we knew we ought to. We talked about ways of getting out to the plane. We talked about needing a decent knife, and about making a signal fire. One of the things Miranda had moved from her bag into her pockets, on the plane, had been a box of matches wrapped in plastic; but they were lost. The pocket they had been in had been torn off in the water. We hoped there’d be something we could use to make a fire in one of the rucksacks. But we didn’t feel like looking now, and anyway, we had no light to see by. There’d been thirty-seven teenagers, ten Planet Savers adults to organize us, and the cabin crew, and the pilot—

  Were we the only ones left alive?

  “There could still be a tourist village,” said Arnie. “We don’t even know that this is an island. We could be five miles from a road, or something, on the coast of Ecuador.”

  Miranda sighed. “That waterfall was pretty spectacular, wasn’t it?”

  “So?”

  “I didn’t see any sign of people having been there. Did you? Not a scrap of litter. No path. There was nothing.There’s nothing on this beach, either. No footprints, no tire marks, no fishing nets, no huts. I don’t think there’s any tourist village, Arnie. I don’t think there’s a road. I think we’re alone, and our only hope is to stay near the wreck.”