Stranded

by Sarah Goodwin

Andrew had thick brown dreadlocks coiled into a bun. They were startlingly long and would probably have reached his waist otherwise. Tattoos encircled one bicep and he had on a pair of ratty dungarees. His accent gave nothing away but, much like Zoe, he could have been from any suitably cool university town in England.

Frank on the other hand belonged in a pub, propping up the bar with a whippet at his feet and a red-top paper in front of his nose. His canvas fishing vest sported an alarming number of St. George flag patches and the frown he sent Zoe’s way felt very much like disapproval. In short, he appeared to be the kind of middle-class bigot my home village was populated with. I wondered if the producers had picked him for just that reason, putting a racist on an island with a black guy and an Indian girl to create drama.

She hummed doubtfully. ‘Everyone’s definitely said the right things, but I’m going to wait for the follow-through.’ She had a point. I’d seen enough of it at work. Everyone shows up to the meeting, everyone agrees, or, at least, doesn’t dissent. Then everyone just does what they planned on anyway and six months later we have another meeting about why nothing’s changed.

With a wet spring at our backs, the weather began to improve. The wind had lost its teeth and the formerly grey and brown landscape appeared suddenly green and vibrant.

‘Forgive, but don’t forget,’ I said, one of Auntie Ruth’s other aphorisms. ‘I always try to remember that. Because if someone can hurt you once, they can do it again.’

‘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?’

I’d heard someone say once that ‘suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem’.