Stranded

by Sarah Goodwin

I rise and glance down at my ripped and muddy clothing, hanging off my skeletal body. With effort I part my sticky, salt-crusted lips. ‘I need the police.’

Whenever I wanted to do something new, away from the house – Brownies, ballet, horse riding – Mum was quick to remind me what had happened ‘last time’. That incident gave her the last word in every argument.

‘So, what are you most looking forward to, should you get chosen to take part in The Last Refuge?’ This time my answer was genuine, unconsidered. ‘The escape.’ From my life, my grief, from myself. I just had to get away.

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.

We were all tired and aching, hands sticky with sap and grazed from the bark. As we walked down the hill to the beach camp we chatted in pairs and I saw only smiles. ‘Isn’t this great?’ Zoe said, twirling under the darkening trees. ‘It’s like being handed the world.’

That night we went to bed knowing that it would be our last night on the beach. Tomorrow we’d finish our hut and move in. Our first milestone, a testament to our skills and combined effort. Looking back, it almost makes me sick. To think how naïve I was to consider the building of the hut, together, as a sign of things to come.

Something about the way she looked at her reminded me of how Mum used to treat her little sister, my Aunt Ruth. That same kind of disapproving pinch to the mouth.

Maybe I’d been worried about nothing; I was starting to fit in after all. What a fool I was.

I’ve seen off every attempt to mask the lines around my mouth and eyes, the scars on my face and hands.

‘Good evening, I’m Rosie Donnelly and tonight I’m here with Madeline Holinstead, one of the Buidseach Island survivors. Maddy – now that the trial is over, we are all dying to hear your story. What can you tell us about what happened on Buidseach Isle and your miraculous rescue?’

I sit back and think for a moment that I see a familiar dark shape just beyond the halo of studio lights. I take a breath that smells of hairspray and pine needles. ‘I’m going to tell you what no one else can stomach … the truth.’

She can’t possibly understand that it wasn’t just one thing. I can’t pinpoint the beginning of that subtle shift, the slide towards full-out war between us. I know where it ended though. It ended with them coming for me in the night.

‘The thing is,’ Zoe said, ‘we get you’re sorry about it and, that’s fine – thank you for saying so. But … we’ve been talking about basically everything that’s gone down since we got here and we think that it might be best if, for the rest of the experiment … if you maybe moved out of the camp.’

‘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.’

‘Nah, I’m saving myself for Maddy,’ Duncan said, and I heard a nasty edge beneath his humorous tone. ‘Give her something to shut her up.’

‘I can’t,’ I whispered into the dust. The cave and all its shadows, the yellow flames and the roots twisting through the crumbling dirt, seemed to sigh. The night wind crept its cold fingers into my hovel to chill my wet cheeks. ‘You must,’ it seemed to say. ‘You must.’

More often than not I found myself coming out of a kind of trance, just staring into the fire. Sometimes I heard sounds that couldn’t possibly be there: a PC booting up, a phone ringing, a car driving past. I decided it was probably birds imitating other sounds. Though it happened even in the dead of night.

Sometimes, when I tried to sleep in the small hours, I found myself talking out loud as if the cave walls could hear me. I whispered my inner thoughts to the roots and the cobwebs and the sighing wind.

‘When I look back, I’m not sure Shaun knew himself what he was going to do. Maybe he needed my help, or he wanted to please Duncan. Maybe he didn’t know yet and it was just his instinct that told him to catch me, work the rest out later. When it comes down to it, we’ll never know, will we? I’m here, and he’s not.’

I pressed my hands over my eyes and told myself it wasn’t real. None of this was real. But of course the worst parts were.

I couldn’t direct my thoughts anymore, they scurried from me like spiders. Dimly I realised that I was dying. This idea came to me one day as I watched the lights spin on the ceiling. It should have scared me but instead I felt a kind of relief. The decision was out of my hands now. I didn’t have to try and fail at ending my life, nature was going to do it for me.

I screamed until I laughed and laughed until it turned to sobbing. When my vision turned to dancing pinpricks it was almost a relief. I felt myself blacking out and let it happen. Only the thought that I might not wake up consoled me.

I looked down at the skull with its skittering crab. This was Zoe’s skull, sun-bleached and tumbled by the sea. I was standing in the middle of her bones.