Survive

by Tom Bale

  She crouches beside him. He’s shivering, breathing far too quickly. His eyes are tightly shut, and the expression on his face alarms her. He’s having the same reaction she did: in his mind he’s still down there, amongst the snakes.

  ‘Sam, it’s all right. You did it.’

  Finally he opens his eyes and straightens up. Jody urges him to move further away from the pit: she doesn’t want the children coming too close. Then she beckons to Grace and Dylan, and as a family they embrace, and share their relief.

  There’s the feel of a religious ceremony, almost, when Jody holds the bottle up for everyone to see. Foreign writing on the label, and a plastic seal still intact around the lid. Two litres of pure water. After God knows how many hours without proper fluid, it’s an unthinkable luxury.

  Except that Sam goes on fretting. ‘What about the other one?’

  ‘Leave it for now.’ Get it tomorrow, she thinks. Then: Oh God, please don’t say we’ll still be here tomorrow.

  Jody breaks the plastic seal and carefully removes the lid. Dylan is almost wilting as he stares at the water, but Jody wants to test it first, to make sure it’s drinkable. She has a single mouthful and savours the feel of it on her tongue, swilling it round as though it’s a fine wine. She moistens her lips and gums, only now appreciating how dry and sore they’ve become.

  Then she kneels to supervise while Dylan has a few sips, warning him to take it slowly so he doesn’t choke. Grace is next. She sips once, twice, stopping sooner than she needs to.

  After her, Sam takes an even smaller amount and insists that’s enough for him. They debate whether to continue along the path, and decide it’s too dangerous. But Jody points to the carrier bag. ‘That could be useful.’

  Sam wants to fetch it but Jody insists on going. She plots a cautious route around the pit, testing each step before she sets her weight down, scanning the trees for other lurking hazards. The bag looks so innocuous, snagged on a branch as if blown there, and yet it was the bag that had lured her forward, into the trap.

  Just as they planned it? she wonders.

  She unhooks the bag, checks there’s nothing inside, then makes her way back. Staring at the pit prompts another thought.

  ‘Should we take the net?’

  Sam has had the same idea. He’s studying the ground, trying to work out what’s keeping it in place. It turns out there are half a dozen cables – bungee cords, Sam calls them – buried in soil and leaves and looped around the trees on each side of the path. As Sam unhooks each one, and the net begins to sag, Jody grows uneasy.

  ‘What about the snakes?’

  ‘It’s not the net keeping them there. If they could climb up the sides they’d easily get through the net.’

  ‘Yeah, of course.’ She tries to focus on the net. ‘Could we catch some fish with this?’

  ‘I doubt it. Look at the size of the holes.’

  He’s right. And even if they caught one, how would they clean and prepare it? They’ve no tools, no utensils, and precious little expertise.

  Sam gathers up the net and slings it over his shoulder. He’s taking the bungee cords as well. A remark about building a shelter makes Jody’s legs go weak at the prospect of being here at night. In the dark. Alone.

  She lets out a sob – just the one – then crams all the negative feelings back inside. It’s a brief moment of utter hopelessness, something to indulge and then regret, like a bitter chocolate.

  Walking back, Sam takes the lead, frequently turning to make sure they stay close. He’s wary of the possibility that there could be more reptiles loose in the woods.

  There’s a moment when Grace yelps, and Sam, imagining the worst, turns and raises the stake as if he’s about to hurl it through the air. Grace is rubbing the bottom of her leg.

  ‘Something stung me.’

  Jody takes a look. ‘There’s a red mark. A bite, I think.’

  Another problem to face in the coming hours. Jody was careful to bring all kinds of sprays and lotions, but out here they have no protection other than the sun cream, nothing to ease the pain of insect bites or stings.

  Up ahead, the trees are thinning out before the wide sweep of the beach. Beyond it, the sea is as flat as a pool table, a million sparkles of sunlight dancing across the surface. Sam steps into the white hot glare and flinches, narrowing his eyes and turning away.

  But not before he spots the boat.

  Doubting his own eyes, he looks back. A sleek white yacht is gliding swiftly from left to right. Much closer than the ship they saw earlier, though still a fair way out.

  ‘Hey!’ he cries, as Jody eases past the children to see what’s wrong.

  ‘Is that...?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Sam drops everything and goes racing down the beach, yelling and waving his arms. Jody does the same, and at the water they splash into the shallows and jump up and down and scream.

  ‘HERE! LOOK OVER HERE! HELP US! HELP!’

  It does no good. The yacht doesn’t alter its course. A couple of minutes and it’s no more than a white speck on the horizon, but still Sam and Jody go on shouting, waving, hoping…

  Until they don’t, anymore.

  And now they have to face the kids. After making so much effort to downplay the trouble they’re in, they’ve just gone and shown how serious it is.

  Sam takes Jody’s hand and they walk back up the beach. Grace and Dylan are sitting by the rowing boat, knees drawn up, arms wrapped round their legs. Sad eyed and solemn, like a couple of grubby urchins from the olden days.

  Jody sniffs. ‘This is starting to remind me of that film with Tom Hanks.’

  ‘Where he’s stranded after a plane crash?’ Sam tuts at the memory. ‘Stuck on his own for years, with only a football or something for company.’

  ‘Yeah.’ She squeezes his hand. ‘But he manages to get home at the end, though.’

  ‘Only ’cause it’s Hollywood. They wouldn’t make a big movie where he’s alone all the way through, and then dies. Who’d want to see that?’

  Wrong thing to say, he realises too late.

  But Jody, in a matter-of-fact tone, says, ‘In our case, someone must want to see it. Because they might have left us some water, but we shouldn’t kid ourselves that they care whether we live or die out here. They don’t.’

  And on that happy note...

  Rejoining the children, Jody says brightly, ‘Who wants some more coconut?’

  Grace is absently rubbing her leg and won’t meet Jody’s gaze. She knows exactly why they tried so hard to signal to the yacht. Dylan, looking tearful, shakes his head.

  ‘Sure, Dylan? Aren’t you hungry?’

  ‘Want something else.’

  ‘There isn’t anything. Later we might try to catch a fish.’

  ‘I wanna go home.’

  ‘I know. And we will. But not yet.’

  ‘I want to. I wanna go home. I wanna go home now.’

  ‘Don’t get whiny on us, mate,’ Sam says. ‘It won’t be long.’

  ‘Yes, it will,’ says Grace, scratching at her leg.

  ‘Ssh.’ Jody frowns. ‘Try to leave it alone. You’ll only make it itch more.’

  ‘It already itches, Mum. That’s why I’m scratching.’

  Jody takes a breath. Be calm. She’d love to suggest they have another drink, but she has no idea how long it’s got to last.

  Taking refuge beneath the trees at the top of the beach, they discover that a slight breeze has sprung up; it’s cool and refreshing. With Sam’s help, she cracks open the coconut she drained earlier and distributes more chunks of the white flesh. But Dylan shoves her hand away.

  ‘Don’t want it.’

  Before he can get fractious again, Sam grabs him into an embrace that turns into a tickling competition. After a bout of near hysterical giggling, Dylan sits back in a better mood – for now.

  Nibbling on a lump of coconut, he says, ‘When are we going home?’

  ‘Soon,’ Sam tells him.

  ‘Tonig
ht?’ Grace asks, her voice loaded with disbelief.

  ‘No, probably not tonight,’ Jody says. ‘Tomorrow, hopefully.’

  ‘Hopefully,’ Grace echoes sarcastically, but Dylan is nodding as if a solemn promise has been made. His trusting nature is much harder to bear than his tantrum. At his age, Mum and Dad are still like gods: all knowing, all powerful. It breaks Jody’s heart that his faith is so cruelly misplaced.

  When their jaws ache from the effort of chewing, Jody passes the water round: two big mouthfuls each. Sam only wants one but she insists he has the same as them, to keep his strength up.

  Then the children lie down on the sand. Jody helps them get comfortable, rubbing Dylan’s back until he falls asleep. Once they’re both off, she and Sam can rest. Jody shuts her eyes but sleep won’t come. She settles for counting the seconds until she can feel the day slipping past, as indifferent to their fate as that big white yacht.

  After a while she murmurs, ‘Why us?’

  ‘Uh?’ Sam jerks a little; perhaps he was dozing.

  ‘That’s the one thing I can’t make sense of. Why us?’

  ‘There’s no point, Jode. You’re just torturing yourself.’

  ‘No. They’re torturing us. Putting us here for no reason. Hiding water in a hole full of snakes.’ She can hear her voice getting emotional; the tone of his sigh signals that he doesn’t want to hear it.

  ‘You’re not gonna find answers by going round and round it in your head.’

  ‘I can’t help it. The idea that this might not be random, that we might have been chosen–’

  ‘Can you leave it, Jode? Please.’

  There’s a moment of bitter silence. Jody wants to scream – or slap him. But either reaction will wake the children and make things worse.

  Instead she looks away, stares at a patch of milky blue sky and asks, ‘What are you hiding from me?’

  She can almost feel the shockwave from this sudden change of direction. Sam has to swallow before he replies.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You are. For weeks now. Months.’

  ‘I’m not.’ A big heaving sigh, but it sounds theatrical. ‘Jesus, of all the times...’

  ‘Okay, so when? When are we going to talk about it?’

  33

  Sam can’t argue about this now – and he certainly can’t discuss it calmly. He jumps up and marches across the beach. Running away, he tells himself. But so what?

  To work out his frustration, he goes back to digging the rowing boat out of the sand, scraping away with his fingers until the sweat comes running through his hair and dripping from his nose like a leaky tap. His shirt is useless against the sun’s raw heat. His back feels like a hotplate. His throat could be a tube of sandpaper filled with sawdust.

  But the boat is virtually clear, and apart from that one crack along the side, it appears to be intact. Sam finds the long stakes and works them beneath the hull at a diagonal angle. Once they’re in place he beckons to Jody, hoping there won’t be a price for her co-operation.

  She trudges over and gets to work in silence. Grace and Dylan wake and come running when they see what Sam and Jody are doing, pushing on the stakes to lever the boat out. It takes several attempts before the sand – with a comical sounding sloop! – gives up its prize.

  After that, it’s still a battle to flip it over. There’s a lot of sand stuck inside the boat, hard-packed and slightly damp, sticking like cement in the voids behind the crossbars of timber seating.

  The kids are helping to clean it out, laughing when it quickly turns into a fight, flinging handfuls of sand at each other – but mainly at Dad. Amazingly, despite the godawful trouble they’re in, Sam is struck by the fact that there’s still some pleasure to be had from being together as a family; no one on their phone, no one sloping off to watch TV. If only they were doing something like this at home, where they would be safe.

  Jody can’t see the point of testing the boat in water, but Sam insists that it’s worth a try. If nothing else it’s an easier way of cleaning out the last of the sand.

  They drag the craft down the beach. Grace and Dylan are beside themselves with excitement, which Sam finds worrying. For all that he and Jody keep stressing that they’re not going anywhere, the kids might well have assumed they’re being deceived. It wouldn’t be the first time, after all.

  Sure enough, there’s a bad reaction when the boat sinks in less than a metre of water. Dylan flings himself down and has a full-on tantrum, screaming and kicking his feet. Sam can’t get cross: he feels like doing the same thing himself.

  ‘It’s still going to come in handy,’ Jody says. ‘We’ll use it for shelter, probably.’

  ‘Or firewood,’ Sam adds with a snort. He’s not serious, but it does prompt another thought. Just because it’s sweltering now doesn’t mean it’ll stay that way. He suggests they find some wood to make a fire.

  ‘For tonight?’ Jody says, as if she can’t believe what she’s hearing.

  ‘Yeah. Unless you have a better idea?’

  Jody doesn’t. And she’s bitterly regretting what she said earlier. However valid her suspicions, this wasn’t the time to raise them. Now she has turned Sam against her, at the one moment when it’s essential to be united.

  Dragging the boat out of the sea is an arduous task. After filling so rapidly, it seems to take an age for the water to drain, and in the meantime it’s all extra weight. But they do have to think about shelter, and the boat seems like their best option in that respect.

  This, she finds, is the hardest part of the day: having to play the role of happy-go-lucky mum, smiling and joking, keeping their spirits high when inside she’s burning, seething, ravaged by frustration and fear. Sam knows this – and he feels it too – but somehow he’s allowed to be sullen. He’s forgiven for snapping at them, for swearing, because that’s just what men are like.

  If a dad does his bit it’s treated as something to be admired, worthy of applause, whereas with mums it’s simply expected. Until today Jody had no idea how angry this makes her.

  The sun is noticeably lower in the sky when Sam decides they’ve gone far enough, a few metres from the treeline. They prop the boat on its side to speed up the drying process. A swim to cool off, then back to the shade of the trees, where they’re each permitted a mouthful of precious water.

  It does little to quench their raging thirst, so Dylan and Grace are given another sip. The bottle is more than three quarters empty already. Jody finds it a struggle to replace the lid and set it down. Her tongue feels swollen, like some alien creature has taken up residence in her mouth. All she can think about is water. She obsesses over the second bottle, but every fantasy of sloshing it down her throat is countered by the horror show of a snake bite and a slow, excruciating death.

  These images parade before her eyes, but it must seem to Sam as though she’s merely gazing out to sea. He moves alongside her, a couple of metres from where the kids are nibbling, disinterestedly, on coconut.

  ‘They aren’t coming,’ he murmurs.

  ‘What?’

  ‘They aren’t coming for us. Not today, anyway.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘So why do you keep looking?’

  ‘I’m not.’ She isn’t sure if that’s true, but it feels too lame to admit that she can’t quite give up hope. Because he’s right, isn’t he?

  Sam shields his eyes with both hands and stares for long enough to give her heart a little jolt. What has he spotted?

  ‘Look,’ he says at last, and when she squints she sees it too: a thin line of cloud bubbling up on the horizon. ‘First cloud we’ve seen all week, isn’t it?’

  Yes, she thinks. But it’s not a boat. It’s not rescue.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ she asks, in a tone that she never intended to sound so dejected.

  He snorts. There’s about half a second when it threatens to go seriously sour, the mood between them, but as it turns out he doesn’t want that any more than Jody does
.

  ‘Stay alive,’ is all he says, slapping his hands against his sides.

  The long and the short of it. Stay alive.

  Sam returns to the task of removing the nails from a couple of the stakes. Soon he’s panting from the effort and swearing at the difficulty of doing this without tools. A claw-headed hammer and he’d have it out in seconds.

  To spare the kids from hearing words they must never repeat at school, Jody suggests they take the net and try to catch a fish. It’s an idea that meets with little enthusiasm, and she virtually has to drag them across the beach. Sam is glad of the chance to be alone; not having to wear a brave face for a while.

  He tries to empty his mind of thought while he works away at the nails, the way he likes to do when he’s painting with a roller. No stress or worry, just a sort of gentle la-la-la in his head while his hands do their thing. Meditation, of a kind, he supposes.

  It’s probably a good half hour before the first nail comes free. And what a sweet victory that is, even if he hasn’t yet decided how it will be of use. A brief rest, then he looks for something else to do. Jody is chest deep in the sea, trying to sweep the net through the water like a bullfighter swishing a giant cape. Grace is off to one side, helping in a bored way, and Dylan is lost in a world of his own, swirling one of the stakes back and forth in the shallows. Sam hopes they’ll get lucky, but it doesn’t seem very likely.

  After examining the point of the nail, an idea comes to mind. He’s been trying not to dwell on Jody’s little attack, but it still hurts.

  There’s a strip of metal fixed to the boat, some kind of ID tag with a number stamped on it. He studies it and finds that the tip of the nail will just about slot into the heads of the screws that hold the tag in place.

  It doesn’t take him long to get them out; then he uses the nail to prise the tag away from the hull, leaving a pale strip of timber, like a patch of skin after a plaster’s been removed. The tag is made of steel, but thin enough to bend with just the pressure of his fingers. He’s idly playing with it when Jody and the kids come trudging back, empty-handed.