‘Do you need a hand?’ Zoe said, yawning widely as she spoke.
‘Get yourself some sleep; I’ll wake you up if anything changes,’ I said. The image of her stricken, tear-stained face still very much at the forefront of my mind. She’d been through enough.
‘All right … if you’re sure … and thanks, Maddy. For everything.’
I shrugged, uncomfortable. This was sort of my fault after all. Duncan might have been underhanded, but I had been irresponsible. I should have known better.
Once Zoe went off to bed I rinsed out buckets of shit with boiling soapy water and sluiced down the latrine and shower stall as best I could. I gathered up all the discarded clothing I could find and went a fair distance from camp, lit a small fire and boiled up the dirty clothes in the one metal bucket. Lastly I refilled the filter so that there’d be plenty of clean water to drink when everyone woke up.
By the time I was done exorcising my guilt a pale dawn had found its way through the trees. The camp was revealed as a confusion of footprints, buckets and puddles of spilled water. Everything at least smelled cleaner, aside from me. I did a last check of the sleeping patients. They all looked all right, with colour in their faces. By my rudimentary calculations they were past the worst of it.
I woke Zoe to tell her I was going to the beach for a wash and to come and get me if anyone deteriorated, or to go for the emergency phone if it was serious. She grabbed my arm as I went to leave.
‘Will you come back? Please? I don’t want to be here on my own.’
Guilt flared again. I couldn’t leave her to deal with my mess. I hadn’t planned on returning; this wasn’t my home anymore. It was humiliating really, how quickly I caved to the slightest hint of Zoe’s need to have me there. To the idea that I was wanted. I’d been on my own for too long if that was all it took to change my mind.
I nodded. ‘I’ll grab a few things and come right back.’
I hurried down to the beach, stripped and took a hasty dip in the freezing sea. Dripping and shivering I ran to the hut, towelled off and put on a clean pair of leggings, T-shirt and oversized jumper. With my hat pulled on over my wet hair I packed a change of clothes, my camera charger and my sleeping bag into my rucksack and headed back up the hill.
For the next few days I was back in the communal hut, but I could never mistake things for being as they were. For a start everyone was still weakened from their tussle with amanita muscaria. Most of them showed symptoms like getting over a bad flu: exhaustion, aches and grogginess. Frank and Shaun were mostly back to normal the day after the event itself, aside from Frank’s hangover. The four of us shared the necessary work, chopping wood, fetching, filtering and boiling water, preparing meals, feeding the rabbits and digging a new latrine. Still, I felt like an outsider and more often than not I found myself working alone.
Despite Zoe’s initial gratitude for my presence, she started to avoid me as soon as Shaun was awake and sensible. I wasn’t surprised, but it did still hurt. I’d foolishly let myself hope that she’d forgiven me for not helping her that day on the beach. Clearly, she had not. The crisis had forced her to depend on me but now that it was over, we were back where we had been before.
I steered clear of ministering to the others directly. I had no desire to spend more time with them than was absolutely necessary. Instead I busied myself with the water and the wood. I foraged what I could and cooked solo, unwilling to ask for rations and knowing they would probably not be forthcoming. At night when I bedded down in my old spot in the hut, the air felt strained. I knew I wasn’t wanted. After all, every one of them had voted to kick me out. They weren’t looking for me to come back.
After two days of this I knew I had to leave. Their hostility helped to ease any residual feelings of responsibility I had over the incident. I’d more than paid for my moment of carelessness. I packed my things and left just after breakfast. I’d been planning on saying goodbye to Zoe at least, but she was nowhere to be found. Shaun and Frank had also disappeared from camp. I told myself that they weren’t avoiding me and that I didn’t care if they were.
It was almost a relief to return to my little tipi. The silence there was natural, calm, not pointed and weighty with disapproval. I stowed my things inside and went to look at the smokehouse. Without me there to tend the fire it had gone out and the mushrooms I’d been drying had gone soft and dark. I buried the spoiled food in the woods with regret. I’d lost three days of foraging for food that I sorely needed.
I had a small calendar in my things and carefully crossed off the last three days. The remaining weeks stretched on as unfeeling black numbers. Although we had arrived in February, we would be rescued on the first of January – missing out the coldest month of the year. Before we’d set off I’d felt as if it was cheating to only live for eleven months on the island. After all, they were calling it a year, weren’t they? But now I could hardly wait for Christmas to pass and the boat to return for us. Already the wind coming off of the sea was like a knife through my clothes. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like in a few weeks’ time, when the snow started to fall.
Chapter 18
‘I think my biggest mistake was giving them too much credit,’ I say, pulling at a loose thread on the sleeve of the jumper. It grows longer and I imagine that somewhere a wardrobe assistant is wincing. As if a loose thread is important.
That’s the strangest part of being back; not the crowds, noise, hot showers and soft beds. It’s the thousand and one mundane concerns everyone seems so preoccupied with. Parking tickets, missing wheelie bins, long queues, bank holiday sales and loose threads. None of them seem to realise how little it all means. How much of it is window-dressing. Play-acting at being a superior species, somehow apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. I’ve seen what hides behind all that.
We are all animals when cornered.
‘I thought they didn’t realise what they were doing, or that they were just selfish, lazy. I tried to back away, not get involved. I thought, after they kicked me out, if I just got on with what I had to do it would be OK. But they wouldn’t let that happen. Hating me was the only thing they had holding them together. Without me I think they would have turned on each other much sooner. Not that it made any difference … No matter what we did, we were doomed as soon as that boat dropped us there.
‘The things that started happening to us, after Christmas … I thought it was all just random tragedy; accidents, mistakes. If I’d known then that there was some reason to it, some intent, I don’t know if I could have held on like I did.’
‘You might have given up hope?’
I almost smile. ‘I’d lost hope by then. No, I might have given up holding on to my delusion that somehow we were all still civilised people at heart. I might have tried to get them before they came for me.’
Chapter 19
Snow shrinks the world down. When I’d lived with my parents in their little village, it had kept us inside for days at a time. The roads outside slick as glass and unsalted, our cars useless in the driveway. There were always accidents, every winter.
On the island it was much the same, only now instead of being stuck in a three-bedroom house with wifi, TV, cupboards full of food, and central heating, I was confined to a small tipi with a fire, no toilet and a single novel. It was the first time I’d been jealous of hibernating creatures.
Inside the smoky darkness of my tipi I kept myself wrapped up in my sleeping bag. Reading was possible in the dim light and I was grateful I’d brought The Physician with me. I eagerly drank up the descriptions of scorching deserts and hot, dusty towns, imagining the same sun baking my face.
I left the tipi for only two things: to use the latrine and to bring in wood, which was stored in the now defunct smokehouse. Each time I braved the outside world the ferocity of the wind surprised me. It wasn’t just the strength of the sea wind but the hard, sandy pellets of snow it threw at me. After a few minutes outside I felt scoured down to the bone.
Wary of running out of wood I reluctantly went out every few days to dig through the snow for fallen branches and sticks to store in the smokehouse. It was while I was out shovelling half-frozen snow that I found the camera. The end of the spade bounced off the tough plastic and I pulled it up out of the snow. It was a game camera, one of the ones we’d been shown on arrival. Glancing up I saw a broken branch, probably snapped by the weight of the snowfall. The camera must have fallen.
I held on to it, wondering what to do. Clearly the camera guys hadn’t found the fallen camera. It had probably been buried in the snow for a while. I assumed they wouldn’t want to be trekking all over the island in the freezing cold, checking on them. I hung the smashed camera on a low branch to make it easier for them to find when the weather got better.
Every day I crossed another square off of my pocket calendar. It was the only thing I looked forward to, aside from hot meals. When I wasn’t reading, sleeping or making daring trips to the latrine, I daydreamed about what I would do when I was back on the mainland, back to reality. It was a game that could go on for hours and though it never bored me, it did often leave me feeling sad, even scared.
The fact was that the worst thing about my previous life was me. I didn’t like myself there, my depression or my outbursts of anger. I didn’t even know myself. For the first time since moving away from my parents I felt like a whole person, like I made sense without them. Although it hadn’t been easy and I’d had my doubts, overall I had found direction on the island. Away from it, back in the real world, I wasn’t sure I knew who I was.
There was a lot of time to think in the warm semidarkness of the tipi. I found myself dwelling more and more on memories of my real life. Thinking about things that had actually happened to me off the island made me feel like I was remembering a film or something. That version of me felt like someone else.
At last Christmas arrived. My time on the island was almost at an end. I planned to celebrate with a dinner of mussels and the last of my butter. Off the island Christmas hadn’t been a celebration for me for a while. While living alone it meant watching procedural crime reruns and drinking Irish cream. Now my parents were dead, it’d be even worse, without even a phone call to them to convince me I wasn’t completely alone. On Buidseach, though, it felt like a milestone, something to celebrate, even if I did so alone.
I was mending my hiking socks with a little sewing kit when I heard a tap on the frame of the tipi. For a moment I thought it might be the wind, then it came again. A knock. I moved the boots that were weighing down the plastic door curtain and flipped it aside. Zoe, swaddled in knitwear and with a coating of snow on her anorak, stuck her head inside.
‘Cosy in here, isn’t it?’ she said. Her nose was pink and dripping. ‘Merry Christmas!’
‘Merry Christmas,’ I echoed.
‘I was wondering if you wanted to come up to camp? We’re having a bit of a Christmas party – it’s only right that we spend it together, after all, it’s the only chance we’ll get before we go home.’
Zoe was fairly glowing with delight at the prospect of returning home. I imagined she had whole terabytes’ worth of Instagram posts to dream up in advance of the show coming out on TV. For the first time I considered having to go through the interviews again, answering questions I didn’t have answers to; about why I’d been kicked out, why I hadn’t fought harder or been more willing to compromise. Before it had felt almost like therapy, private, but now I would be on trial in front of hundreds of thousands of viewers. My character, my self, open to dissection.
‘I don’t really have anything to bring,’ I said.
‘Just bring yourself! Come on, Maddy, it’s Christmas! Good cheer! Forgiveness!’ Seeing my face, she sighed. ‘Look, we’ll all be leaving soon and … this is our last chance to make up. After everything, we all did this together. We should be together at the end. Just come and have a good time with us, please?’
I relented. ‘All right. Give me a second to get my boots on.’
I stuffed my feet into my darned socks and then into my wellies. My camera had been spending all its time propped up on a crossbar, filming me, giving me someone to talk to. I strapped it on. On impulse I grabbed the remaining half of a packet of chocolate fudge cake mix – the ‘add hot water and wait’ kind. It was better than nothing. Together we shuffled off through the thick snow and its icy crust.
‘How are you doing?’ I asked, as we made our way slowly up hill.
‘You mean—’ She gestured at her stomach. ‘Not sure. I was talking to Gill and she said her period had been late too – so maybe it’s just because, you know, the lack of food right now.’
‘How are you guys doing on that front?’ I asked.
Zoe sniffed but didn’t seem in a hurry to answer. I guessed it was getting pretty bad. I was down to my last bits here and there, making up dehydrated meals in quarter batches.
‘We’re all right. Some of the stuff went manky – not that Maxine’s taking responsibility for that. Nothing could possibly be her fault.’
I was starting to think Zoe had only invited me so she had someone to complain to about Maxine. It seemed things hadn’t been all togetherness and community since my eviction. Clearly Maxine was still making things difficult. I wondered if she was the new target of everyone’s frustrations.
‘Everyone else is getting through the rabbits before we leave so that means plenty of seaweed for me,’ Zoe said with a grimace. ‘It’s getting kind of disgusting up at the clearing – I’m glad we’re getting away soon. Some of the guys honestly suck at picking up after themselves. We made a bit of an effort today though.’ We tramped along in silence for a while, then Zoe clicked her tongue.
‘I wanted to say, before we get there … I’m sorry, for what I asked you to do, and for, you know, saying that stuff about you, behind your back? That was really shitty of me and I don’t want you going home thinking that I was being fake or mean … I’m sorry.’
‘Thanks, Zoe,’ I said, trying to be gracious while at the same time wondering where this was coming from, if it was for my benefit or that of the camera. ‘I’m sorry too, if I was harsh that day … It’s just, it sort of hit me, reminded me of something else. I might have overreacted.’
Zoe frowned. ‘Reminded you of what?’
‘Mum used to tell me this story … she probably only made it up to scare me. Keep me in line. It was about this girl at the big school. Mum said she got pregnant and she didn’t want her parents to know, so she bought some dodgy pill or … concoction online and it didn’t go well for her. She died. It was Mum’s favourite cautionary tale even after I got pulled out of school. It’s what made me decide on my final dissertation – abortifacient plants. I found it sort of grimly fascinating, what plants can do.’
Zoe nodded and I realised her mind was somewhere else, perhaps thinking about getting back to the mainland, to a doctor. I patted her awkwardly on the shoulder.
‘You’ll be all right, don’t worry.’
‘Thanks, Maddy.’
We reached the camp and it looked so different to the last time I’d seen it, I was momentarily stunned. The snow had blanketed over the churned-up dirt and someone had made a crude wreath of pine branches and hung it over the hut’s doorway. A snowman leant drunkenly in the middle of the clearing, wearing a bucket as a hat. Smoke rose through the hole in the roof and the smell of roasting meat was evident. From inside the hut came the sounds of raucous singing and laughter.
‘Come on, let’s get in the warm,’ Zoe said.
She pushed in through the plastic curtain and shrugged off her snow-covered coat. I followed and awkwardly did the same, conscious that I’d been sleeping in the clothes underneath for more than a couple of days.
‘Look who I found!’ Zoe announced, replacing her woolly hat with a crown of pine fronds. Eyes found me and I felt myself blush. Everyone else was wearing similar pine or ivy crowns and Gill had red lipstick on. Zoe’s body glitter had clearly done the
rounds. Everyone had sparkling cheeks and Duncan had combed some into his beard. A pine branch had been stabbed into a bucket of dirt to approximate a Christmas tree. Someone had clearly tried to decorate it with pinecones, foil-wrapped shells and plaited string.
‘Merry Christmas,’ I said.
‘Merry Christmas,’ most of them echoed unenthusiastically. Only Shaun smiled. I wasn’t sure if he was happy to see me alive and well, or just supporting Zoe’s idea to bring me in from the cold on Christmas. I felt my tentative good cheer waver. Clearly this was a gesture not approved by the whole community. I was here on sufferance. Trapped by Zoe’s festive efforts, I decided to stay for a short while, then make my excuses and get back to my tipi.
I took a seat by the fire, noticing with a start that there were bones amongst the embers. Tiny rabbit bones littered the fire hole and flames licked out from the eyes of several charred skulls. There were rabbits cooking over the fire as well, two of them on a rudimentary spit. Juices hissed in the flames, dripping onto those bones already picked clean.
The others were gathered around, watching the rabbits as Shaun turned them over the fire. There were cups around and I saw Andrew passing a sticky bottle of buckthorn wine across to Frank, whose cheeks were red already. I noticed that on what had once been the bookshelf there were now several bottles of varying coloured liquid, ranging from dark purple to light brown. More experiments in brewing most likely.
I dug the crumpled foil packet out of my pocket. ‘I brought cake … sort of.’
Andrew took it from me with a frown. ‘I didn’t give that to you.’
‘She took it. I told you she’d had stuff out of the box,’ Duncan said.
I flushed. ‘Well, if I hadn’t it would’ve been eaten long before now so … call it a Christmas miracle.’
Shaun took the packet from Andrew. ‘Thanks, Maddy,’ he said, giving Andrew a ‘drop it now’ look.
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