by Ann Halam
Miranda was wearing the reef sandals. (The three of us took turns using them, even though Arnie’s feet were too big. It was only fair.) I was wearing some elegant beach shoes, made of coconut husk and string, that didn’t really work, but they were better than bare feet. We headed north, along the edge of the trees. We were scouting for the trek to the next bay, which was still our big plan, though even Arnie no longer believed we’d find a tourist village. We were hoping to find another source of fresh water, and also hoping to find more jungle fruit. We hadn’t had any further success this way since Miranda’s wild banana tree, but we were hopeful.
Our method was to walk along the beach until we came to a natural opening in the trees, then head in toward the foot of the cliff, turn north there and explore until we got stopped by a thorn thicket. Then we’d fight our way out to the beach again and repeat the process. By midday we were farther toward the headland than ever before, and we’d found a grove of wild guava trees; but the fruit we’d knocked down with our multipurpose sharpened sticks was too woody to eat. Otherwise, there was nothing to report. It was thirsty work. Even half a day trekking showed us how hopeless it would be to set out on a longer expedition without carrying lots of water.
We rested, chewing our coconut strips, on the cool sand in the shade, and then went on. The forest got nastier; darker and thornier, and soggy underfoot, but never any water fit to drink. After about an hour we hit a gloomy clearing, near the cliff, where Miranda spotted something exciting.
“Look!” she said. “Something’s been digging up the ground!”
We’d seen plenty of birds, butterflies and insects, and one snake. We’d had a few glimpses of monkeys. But all the wildlife on this desert island was very shy. We’d never seen any animals bigger than beetles on the ground. I peered at the marks she’d found, struggling with my poor eyesight.
“And look here! Bark chewed off a tree trunk, and scratches. I wonder what did that? Maybe a small deer? Or maybe it’s wild pigs! Ooh, Semi! Imagine roast suckling pig!”
She lifted her head, sharply. I’d heard it too. There was something rustling in the undergrowth, really close to us.
“You stay here,” she whispered, quietly taking out the net bag. “I’m going hunting!”
I’d seen Miranda do such amazing things I almost believed she’d reappear in a few minutes with a wild pig slung over her shoulder. I was so hungry for a change from fish and coconut that my mouth was watering at the very thought. I’d been standing there for a few minutes, trying not to breathe aloud, when I heard a snuffling noise behind me. I turned, cautiously, and my heart leaped! In the middle of the clearing there was a pool of stagnant water. There by the pool stood an animal about the size of a large cat. It seemed to be drinking. It had a stripy back, and I was sure I saw a snout. A wild piglet!
I crept forward, holding my breath and leveling my fruit-picking stick like Stone Age Girl the Hunter, feeling incredibly silly, but excited too. The piglet went on snuffling up the dark water. It didn’t seem to know I was there. I was almost on top of it when it gave a start, and looked up. I saw its eyes. I saw it lift its front legs, as if to ward off a blow. Oh, what? The piglet had little human hands!
I screamed.
Miranda came leaping back into the clearing. The piglet squealed. Miranda flung the net bag. The piglet ran through my legs, overturning me. I fell forward, grabbing Miranda. All the birds in the trees around shot up into the air screeching, and a few monkeys hooted for good measure; we both ended up in the pool, splashed to the eyes in stinking swamp water.
The smell was so bad, we couldn’t stand it. We had to give up on the forest, head back out to the beach and wash ourselves down in seawater.
We decided that was the end of the expedition.
I was shaken by the fact that I’d thought the piglet had little hands. But I managed to put it out of my head quite quickly. We were all used to the horrible obsessions we had about the dead bodies, and I think we’d all decided, separately, not to talk about any other strange ideas that came into our heads. It was easier to stay normal, that way.
So I didn’t say anything about it to Miranda.
The sky was still blue, but the sun was slipping down behind the far headland by the time we set off for “home.” The beach was cool. The bay, soft and blurred by my poor vision, guarded by its two sleeping dragons, looked very beautiful as we walked along beside the water.
“How long do you think it’ll be before we really get that roast suckling pig?”
Miranda laughed. “About a year! That net bag was about as useful as a tea cozy!”
“Me and my pathetic fruit-picking stick. I must have looked such an idiot!”
“But maybe we have to learn. We need to expand our food resources somehow.”
We walked in silence for a bit.
“You don’t think anyone’s ever going to rescue us, do you?”
She looked at me seriously. “It’s getting to be a long time. But we’re alive and in good shape, and they’ll find us. We are going to be rescued, Semi. Don’t ever give up hope.”
I knew what she meant. We had to believe. It was the only way to keep sane. I was glad I’d decided not to tell her about the piglet with hands. I didn’t want to worry her.
“Tomorrow,” I said, “the film crew for the next James Bond movie will arrive. This island has been picked out to play the role of the villain’s secret hideout.”
“It’s good to have something to look forward to.”
“If not tomorrow, then the next day.”
“I certainly hope so. I don’t fancy playing Adam and Eve with Arnie.”
We were still snorting and giggling over this idea as we arrived back in camp.
Arnie was nowhere in sight.
“Typical,” muttered Miranda.
He’d probably gone off into the woods, looking for more trees to chop down. Arnie loved to do nothing. If he wasn’t working on his raft, he’d sit daydreaming all day if we let him. Since he’d been supposed to sit on the beach keeping watch, naturally he would have decided to do something else. But he should have been back by now. I wandered about, picking up oddments of our salvaged possessions that had somehow strayed out of place.
Miranda looked up and down the beach.
“Semi,” she said, worriedly, “the raft’s gone.”
The sun left our beach early, because of the curve of the bay; but by this time it was dusk. The moon, which was nearly full, was well up in the sky. We went up to the trees, and searched around and called his name. Because it was Arnie, and we were used to his idea of fun, we weren’t totally, seriously frightened. We were sure he was hiding and he’d taken the raft with him to make us really scared. But he didn’t come back. When it was getting really dark we started looking for his footprints, or traces of the raft having been dragged off. But it was too late. The moonlight was terribly confusing, and of course there were footprints everywhere. We looked for him at the coconut palms, we even groped our way up to the waterfall pool. But under the trees it was too dark to search; and the beach was empty.
We called his name, over and over, but he didn’t answer.
We came back to the camp, shocked and horrified.
We couldn’t sleep. We walked up and down by the lagoon, which lay flat and bright and empty under the silver-penny moon. There was no sign of Arnie’s raft.
In the morning we discovered that the machete was gone, and our stored food.
“He wouldn’t have gone out on the raft on his own,” I said. “He’s not that stupid.”
“Then where is it?” whispered Miranda.
Out in the middle of the bay, the Girl Who Waved flapped her ragged arms, as if she was signaling to us that she knew where Arnie was.
She knew.
chapter four
On Day Thirteen, at low tide, I went out along the coral causeway alone, wearing the reef sandals, watching carefully where I put my feet. There are some very nasty creatures that live in
the holes in coral rock. It was something we did regularly, this trip, to see if more stuff had drifted in. Strange oddments kept on turning up: shoes, bits of clothing.
Neil Cannon’s body had gone. I reached the place where it had been, and stood looking down. The water was deep beside the causeway there. You could see through the sunlit layer that was like liquid air, into depth on depth of clear blue darkness. I shivered in the hot sunlight. Since the night of the crash the sea had seemed like an enemy to me, a monster lying in wait, going to kill me if ever I gave it a chance.
A few meters ahead there was a dark blob, bumping against the rock. I felt sick. I thought it was a human head.
Oh God, I prayed. Oh please, don’t let it be. . . . Don’t let me have to see that.
It wasn’t Arnie’s head. It was a Planet Savers jungle-kit water canteen, the strap waving vaguely to and fro, the cap fastened tight. I knelt down. The foamless billows lifted the canteen, and gently carried it out of reach. I knew the sea was trying to lure me, trying to make me lean out too far and fall in. But I wasn’t going to be caught like that. I waited, patiently; and the canteen came bobbing back. As I reached to grab it, a great, long torpedo shape came gliding upward, out of the blue. The shark turned over. It was very close. I saw its pale underbelly. The U-shaped, serrated, gummy gape of its mouth opened, lazily, and shut again: and then I was hugging the canteen in my arms, so terrified I didn’t know how I had managed to get hold of it.
I knelt there feeling sick for a minute or two. Then I walked on. I knew if I lost my nerve for this reef-walk once, I’d never get it back. The point which we’d established as the farthest we could go, without getting trapped by the tide, was marked with a long pole. As I reached it, I found a clean blue plastic barrel, floating half full of seawater.
Miranda was sitting outside the shelter, splitting up some palm leaf. The three of us had been weaving ourselves sleeping mats. Miranda had taught us how.
“Hi,” she said quietly. “Any sign of the raft?”
I shook my head. I put the canteen and the barrel down in front of her.
“I saw a shark,” I said. “Big one.”
My mouth began to tremble. I sat down beside her, and both of us started to cry. We sat there hugging each other, and crying, until it was time to go and cut the sunset notch.
Three days later we gave up searching and waiting for him, and set out on the trek to the next bay. We took our sleeping mats, the extra clothes, all the food we had and all the water we could carry. In case the Search and Rescue people arrived while we were away we left a message, written in pebbles on the sand above high tide, and a big arrow of sticks and stones, showing which way we had gone.
It took us a day to get to the headland and (I think) four days to climb it. We did a kind of imaginary version of the notch ceremony every night. We’d say we were going up to the notch tree, say who was cutting the notch, and play the tomorrow game. But we might have got muddled. We weren’t writing anything down. There’d been a pencil case in one of the rucksacks, a ballpoint and the remains of a notebook in the other; and a couple of sodden paperbacks. But none of the pens would write, so we’d used all the paper for tinder once it dried out. The signal fire had seemed more important.
Of course there were no tracks. We reckoned the headland was about a hundred meters—or three hundred feet—high, which doesn’t sound like much, but it was very hard going. We ran into thickets we couldn’t get through, cliffs we couldn’t scale and gullies we couldn’t cross, and worst of all we lost the compass almost straightaway when I fell into a ravine. Every time we had to backtrack, we’d end up getting lost and going around in circles, because we couldn’t see the sun for the trees. When we reached what seemed to be the top, there was no viewpoint. We had to struggle on, through ant-ridden thorny thickets, for another day, and sleep sitting up under a tree because there wasn’t a piece of ground clear enough for us to lie down. The next morning we managed to get a clear view into the northern bay. It was as empty as our own, but there was no beach. Swampy forest went right into the sea. We discussed trying to find a way down, but there didn’t seem to be much point, and really we had no choice but to turn back. We’d run out of food and water.
The night we arrived back in camp (which we counted as the night of Day Twenty), there was a storm. Our shelter was wrecked, and we lost some of our most important possessions. At least the Girl Who Waved was gone in the morning.
Miranda told me the last bits of wrecked plane fuselage had gone too.
Later on we tried the southern trek. The southern headland was farther off, bigger, incredibly rugged and totally covered in thickets with thorns like razor wire. We didn’t make it to the top. We both lost our footgear. By the time we got back to camp we both had deep, bleeding blisters, and Miranda had a huge thorn buried in the ball of her left foot. My sore knee, which had never got completely better, had swollen up again and started to ooze yellow stuff. We got the thorn out, but the wound on Miranda’s foot festered until it looked nearly as bad as my knee, and our blisters wouldn’t heal. We’d lost all the first aid in the storm, so the only medicine we had was rest.
For days after that, we did nothing but what we absolutely had to do to stay alive.
Our morale had never been so low. We’d never felt so utterly wretched and defeated. But it was in that time, after the expeditions, that I first really made friends with Miranda Fallow. While Arnie had been with us, he’d been like a weight in the middle of a balance bar. He’d kept us together, but in a way, he’d also kept us apart. We’d been friends and allies, but Miranda had still been Very Cool Girl to me, someone so distant and admirable she was not quite human. When we were climbing the north headland and the south, we’d been as down as two people could be, and had come through only by clinging to each other. There was no distance left between us by the time we got back. There was no fear.
Maybe you have to be naturally shy to know what I mean by that.
We spent most of the time talking when we were sick: we had nothing else to do. Miranda told me about her parents, who were both anthropologists. How she’d traveled with them in all sorts of wild places when she was a child, but now she was at boarding school, which was okay . . . but lonely. I told her about my great-grandmother’s farm in Jamaica, which is the place I most love on earth; and my aunts, really my great-aunts, who never got married and don’t like children underfoot—which means that when we go there on holiday my brother and I run absolutely wild.
I told her about being shy. She told me about having parents who are so high powered and so interested in each other that you can’t possibly compete.
We talked about ambition (we both wanted to be scientists), friends and enemies, TV and music. We talked about sex and romance, and life, and death.
We never talked about being stranded there permanently. We had to keep hoping.
Little bad things happened (the ants got into my patent ant-free food storage). Little good things happened (we found more wild banana trees; I speared my first fish). Neither of us got our period, which was a blessing. I think it was because we weren’t eating enough. I wasn’t chubby anymore, and Miranda was like a sunburned skeleton.
We kept on cutting the notches as best we could, with Miranda’s pocketknife. In a way I wished we could stop. I didn’t want to think about how much time had passed, how little hope there was left of rescue. But it would have been hard to give up the ritual.
Sometimes I’d look at her and I’d think: You?
You?
It’s very weird to meet someone, another girl, on a plane, and it turns out she might be your life’s only companion.
Forever.
On Day Forty, we were feeling better. Our feet had healed up, and we’d had good luck with our fishing, so we’d eaten well the night before. We’d been taking it in turns to hobble up and get water, but we hadn’t had a swim in the waterfall pool since before the expeditions. We decided that today we were strong enough. So we
set out, wearing coconut-husk clogs tied to our feet with rags, and taking with us our water canteen, and some fish–coconut–wild-banana lunch. Me in my cutoff denims and the white Planet Savers jacket that had belonged to Sophie Merrit, Miranda in her tough old combat shorts and her black T-shirt. These were our best clothes. Since Arnie had gone, we hadn’t worn anything much at all, on the beach. I think we’d dressed up to celebrate feeling stronger again. We weren’t exactly expecting to meet anyone.
We reached the pool, stripped off, had a swim and got dressed again. For something to do, Miranda started looking for ways to begin the climb that we’d long ago decided was impossible. I wandered around poking at the leaf litter, thinking I might try digging for edible roots. Miranda pulled herself up, under the falling water, into the cleft in the rock that was as high as we’d ever been able to reach.
“Hey, Semi,” she called, in a very strange, questioning sort of voice. “Come here?”
I went over, and she helped me haul myself up. She pointed.
“Do you see what I see? Or am I imagining it?”
We could both see a strand of bright orange fishing twine, caught on a projection in the rock wall, deep inside the cleft. I looked at her, and nodded. “I can see it.”
“My God. You see what that means? Arnie was here! Arnie was in there!”
“I don’t believe it,” I whispered.
Miranda groped in the pocket of her shorts, brought out a small shell, and tossed it into the dark. It vanished with a rattling sound. “I’m going to try and get farther in.”
“Be careful,” I begged. “Please be careful.”
She squeezed herself upward and inward. “It gets wider . . . oh, I’m through!”
I followed her. We were in a narrow, wet, black passage. The first few meters must have been a tight fit for Arnie, but then it got a little wider. The air was fresh. We could hardly see a thing. We groped along, me very scared that we’d get stuck, and then, when I was going to suggest turning back, there was light ahead.