Dr. Franklin's Island

by Ann Halam

  “Semi says there was a hijack,” said Arnie. “I think she’s right. There was a hijack, and the plane blew up before the rafts could get away. I don’t know how much fuel a charter jet that size carries. I don’t know how far off course we could be. But if we’re not where we should be, and nobody had a chance to send a radio message before we ditched, chances are that’s all she wrote. We’re finished if we can’t save ourselves. How are your Search and Rescue people going to find us, if they don’t know where to start looking?”

  It was the same argument as before, but they weren’t quarreling now. They were simply telling each other the bad news.

  “Let’s go to sleep,” I suggested. “Things’ll look better in the morning, when we’re rested.”

  We were cold, we tried to sleep. The night passed.

  chapter three

  On the second morning, we thought we heard a plane. We scrambled out from under the overhang and ran about looking at the sky. There wasn’t a sign of anything moving, except for a few seabirds over the outer reef, but we were full of hope. We tipped out the rucksacks, and found a magnifying glass; we rushed about collecting dry leaves. Miranda used the magnifying glass as a burning glass, and got a twist of dry tinder alight. I hopped and limped along the shore picking up sticks; Arnie went crashing around under the trees. In an hour or so we had a fire going, and we were throwing green stuff on to make it smoke. Miranda waved a white nylon Planet Savers jacket that had been in Sophie Merrit’s rucksack. Arnie ran up and down screaming “Help! Help!” and waving his arms. The plane (if it had been a plane, and not our imagination) didn’t come back. The empty sea and sky looked at us blankly, as if we were mad.

  Miranda said, “Maybe they’ve seen us, and they can’t let us know yet.”

  “If there was a plane, you’d think the people in the life rafts would have sent up a flare,” said Arnie.

  “Maybe they’re saving their flares,” I said. “For when it’s dark.”

  We kept the fire going all day, but it was incredibly hard work. My knee had swollen up and I couldn’t walk much. Arnie and Miranda had to do most of the fuel gathering, I did the tending. I felt guilty, but if there’d been three of us bringing in fuel, we couldn’t have gathered enough to last through the night. We had to let it go out.

  We didn’t hear any more plane noises, not even imaginary ones.

  On the third day we found the machete. We were patrolling the high-tide line, me limping along with a charred branch for a crutch, looking for more driftwood but not finding any. Miranda and I were collecting scraps of brightly colored nylon fishing net. Arnie was kicking along a very rusty soft drink can, and saying that these man-made things meant there must be people nearby. Miranda told him the sea carries things for thousands of miles. Human rubbish gets everywhere, it doesn’t mean a thing.

  Then Arnie’s can hit something that rang like metal. He gave a yell of delight, pounced on something half buried in the sand, and suddenly he was waving what looked like a pirate’s cutlass in the air.

  “You see!” he shouted. “You see! Don’t tell me this floated over from Australia!”

  Miranda, forgetting to be Very Cool for a moment, gave a whoop of joy herself, and grabbed the big knife from him. The blade was hardly speckled with rust. The handgrip, bound in brass wire, was shiny. She turned it over, gloatingly. Then we all saw the remains of an airline sticker, plastered to the metal. You could read the Planet Savers logo, and some of the print . . . saying, “not cabin baggage.” “Oh God,” she said. “The rain-forest scientist from Ecuador gave a machete to Georgie, do you remember? On the program when they announced the competition. I remember, at Miami airport, she told us she was bringing it with her.”

  We looked at each other, the shock hitting us again.

  Where was Georgie McCarthy now?

  Arnie took the machete back and stuck it in his belt. “I’m going to build a raft,” he said, defiantly. “With my machete. If you’re very good, Wonder Girl, I might let you help me.”

  That night we cut our first three notches on the coconut palm tree.

  On day four, a snake got into the shelter. Arnie had been hell-bent on starting to build his raft straightaway, but Miranda had insisted the first thing we did with his brilliant find was to cut poles and palm fronds, until we had enough material to build a basic A-frame hut. We put it up by the trees. It looked rather ramshackle and pathetic, but we thought it wasn’t bad for a first attempt. After the machete find, the hut had taken the whole of the rest of the third day. By the time we’d finished it, stacked our salvaged belongings in there and cut a load of long grass (there was some soft grass, as well as the razor-sharp kind) for bedding, it had been dark, and we’d been too tired to do anything but crawl inside and sleep.

  In the morning Arnie and Miranda went fuel gathering. When they came back I was sitting in the shelter, out of the sun. Miranda crawled in, and put her hand down on something I’d taken for a curved shadow on the bedding, but it was a snake! She jerked back; it lashed out at her. Miranda screamed, I screamed. We both shot out of the shelter, destroying half a palm-frond wall. The snake came zipping after us. I suppose it was trying to get away, but it didn’t seem like it. It looked big, about two meters long, and seemed as if it was out for our blood. Miranda screamed and screamed. I was stunned to see her so out of control. I grabbed the machete from the heap of newly gathered fuel, and I don’t know how I managed it, but I whacked away at the beast. I actually chopped it in half.

  The two halves of the snake wriggled in the sand. It wasn’t really very big, no more than a meter. It was slim and bright green, which scared me. I knew that at least one kind of bright green tropical snake was deadly poisonous (though I didn’t know if you got them in Ecuador). Miranda stared at the wriggling pieces, her face drained and gray.

  “I hate snakes,” she whispered. She turned to me. “My God, Semi! It was right by you! Didn’t you see it?”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “She can’t see anything much,” said Arnie, who was standing there laughing like an idiot. “She’s blind as a dozy bat, haven’t you noticed? Semi the semisighted!”

  “Cut that out, Arnie,” snapped Miranda. “Don’t be such a creep.”

  I felt totally humiliated and ashamed. I don’t know how many times I’d pretended to see something I couldn’t, since the plane crash, and of course they’d known all along. Arnie picked up the front half of the twisting body with a stick. He waved it at Miranda, poking it toward her, obviously hoping she’d scream and run.

  “Miranda the scaredy cat!”

  “I hate snakes,” said Miranda, staring at him coldly, without moving.

  He laughed again, and started to chant: “Semi the semisighted! Semi the semisighted!” He’d realized he could get at Miranda best by taunting me.

  Suddenly, I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stand the whole thing, not for a minute longer. I ran away. I don’t know where I thought I was running to. I ran and hobbled and limped along the beach, until my knee gave way, and then I sat there, staring out to sea, crying.

  Miranda and Arnie came up after a few minutes, Arnie twirling his snake-stick, Miranda with her shoulders slumped, looking depressed. They sat down near me. “We shouldn’t have built the shelter near the trees,” said Miranda. “That was my idea and it was asking for trouble. We won’t do that again.”

  “No,” I croaked, wiping my eyes.

  Arnie poked the sand with his stick. “A grass-colored snake on grass bedding,” he growled, not looking at me. “I don’t s’pose I’d have spotted it either.”

  “I hope there is a tourist village in the next bay,” said Miranda. “Because I’ve been thinking about it, and I think the initial search operation must have missed us. We might have to wait quite a while now before they track us down.”

  Arnie and I nodded. We’d all been thinking about it.

  She leaned back to look at the green wall behind us. “Plus, I don’t think we’r
e going to get up that cliff behind the waterfall very easily. Not without climbing gear. And it seems to stretch all the way along the bay.”

  This was as near to being not-positive as Miranda could possibly allow herself to be.

  “You mean we’re trapped?” I said. “On a tropical island, without anything to eat except coconuts, between the sharks in the lagoon and an unclimbable mountain?”

  “Yeah,” said Arnie gloomily. “Prisoners in paradise.”

  For some reason this made us all laugh. It dawned on me that I hadn’t thought once about being shy, since the morning after the crash. That made me laugh again, but I wouldn’t tell them why. It was a high price to pay, and Arnie wasn’t exactly ideal material, but maybe I had actually managed to make two new friends.

  In a really, really bad situation, most people will try not to break down. It’s instinct, and if you have any sense, you’ll let it guide you. But it’s also good, occasionally, to scream and burst into tears and get nasty, for a minute or two. It relieves the pressure. We picked ourselves up, and got to work on moving the shelter. We rebuilt it next to our boulder with the overhang, and it felt more like home there. No more snakes invaded it.

  My knee got better, helped by antiseptic cream and a dressing from our first-aid kit (one good thing about having crashed with a planeload of Young Conservationists, those two rucksacks were full of useful survival items). We improved the shelter. We gathered fuel. We made a shadow clock, with a pole stuck in the sand and shorter pieces of wood in a circle around it, like a sundial, and used it to keep track of the tides. We tried various ways of making beach sandals. None of them worked very well. Miranda lashed her pocketknife onto the end of a split stick, using some of the twine we’d collected, and went spearfishing in the shallows. Arnie and I didn’t believe this could possibly work. I was so terrified that a shark would come sneaking up and bite her leg off that I couldn’t watch. But Miranda came back up the beach with four fat fish, three about the length of my hand, one twice that size. We gutted them and cooked them wrapped in leaves, and they were full of bones, but they were delicious.

  Apart from the occasional flare-up like the snake incident, the three of us got on quite well. But there was always friction between Arnie and Miranda. The trouble was, he kept having to do what she told him, because although he was annoying, Arnie wasn’t stupid, and he knew she was right. Maybe even worse, from Arnie’s point of view, she practically always kept control of herself and insisted on being positive. It was Miranda who made us keep the signal fire always ready. She was the one who started storing food and making coconut water-carriers, so we’d have supplies to take with us when we set off to explore the island. She had endless plans and schemes for making sure we had plenty to do and think about, and no time to sit around getting depressed. At times I couldn’t help sympathizing with Arnie. Sometimes it was a relief to have him there, making sarcastic remarks and moaning. But then he’d make one of his nasty cracks about “semisighted Semi,” or he’d eat some of our stored rations and lie about it, and I’d hate him.

  And the days passed.

  The worst thing was the dead bodies. It was bad enough seeing them, but thinking about them was worse. Each of us had our own particular horror. For me it was Neil Cannon, bumping against the coral causeway. Arnie and Miranda helped me try to get him out, to humor me; but it was hopeless. We couldn’t get a grip on him, the waves kept carrying him away; and none of us had the courage to get into that water, not even Miranda. So I’d lie at night in our rustling shelter, and every time I closed my eyes I’d see his dead face. I’d see that bloodless, ragged wound, as if someone had nearly sawed him in two; I’d see his hair floating like seaweed.

  For Arnie it was the Woman in Stewardess Uniform. There was only the top half of her left when we found her on the beach; and something had eaten out her eyes. Of course we buried her, above the high-tide line, but we couldn’t make the hole very deep, and Arnie couldn’t leave the grave alone. He kept having to go back and check . . . to make sure that nothing had dug her up, I suppose. He didn’t talk about it, he just had to keep going back there. We’d find him sitting staring at the bump in the sand, looking sick.

  For Miranda it was the Girl Who Waved. We’d thought she was alive when we first noticed her, then we realized that she couldn’t be. She was wedged in a reef of rocks that broke the high-tide surface, a little way out in the lagoon. I couldn’t make out the details, but Miranda and Arnie could, and Miranda had to keep talking about it. When the tide was high the girl seemed to sit up out of the water as if she was sitting up in bed, and the waves tossed her arms above her head, as if she was beckoning to us. But apparently (I couldn’t see this, I’m thankful to say) she had no hands. The ends of her arms were reddish fronded stumps, like sea anemones. At night, Miranda often thought she could hear the girl calling for help. She knew it was her imagination, but she could hear it—

  And there was the leg, a dreary gruesome sight, a man’s leg floating by itself. We didn’t think it was Neil Cannon’s, it was too fat and white and hairy. It kept reappearing, in deteriorating condition, brought in by the waves every tide, but never ending up on the beach.

  We all hated that leg.

  Every night at dusk we’d go to our notch tree—the most beautiful of the coconut palms, the one that stooped down in a graceful curve close to the sand— and whoever’s turn it was (we took turns, night by night) would cut another notch with the machete. Then we’d sit there telling each other that tomorrow the rescue plane would come. Tomorrow a party of Arnie’s tourists would turn up in a glass-bottomed boat, tomorrow we’d wake up and see an ice cream van driving along the sand, tomorrow a helicopter would arrive, full of sexy models in slinky bikinis, for a tropical photo shoot. Tomorrow is another day. It was Miranda who invented the ritual, and started the tomorrow game; and it might sound corny, but it helped.

  On Day Five, we woke after a night of wind and rain to find that most of the wreck of the plane had disappeared from our horizon. There were only a few tattered pieces of dull metal left, hardly visible. That made us feel pretty bad, even me, though I’d never been able to see it. But we tried not to think about what it might mean.

  On Day Six, the ants got into our salvaged airline meals, and they had to be thrown away. They were beginning to taste very dodgy, anyway. But this was also an extremely good day, because it was the day we found the wild bananas—which gave us hope that we were going to find lots of luxurious tropical fruits. This didn’t work out, but the thrill of thinking about mangoes and papayas was great while it lasted.

  On Day Seven, Arnie made up the “Prisoners in Paradise” song, with the catchy chorus about Marvelous Miranda, thinks we can eat sand-a and Semisighted Semi, walks into a sharkey’s belly . . . and sang it until we seriously wanted to kill him.

  On Day Eight, Miranda accidentally speared an octopus, a biggish octopus with a body about the size of a baby’s head. It fought back, and made off with our precious, our only, pocketknife. We all chased it, splashing, screeching, forgetting about sharks. We caught and killed the octopus, and rescued the knife. Miranda cooked it, but none of us could eat it.

  Arnie says octopuses are very intelligent, and now we have committed murder.

  On Day Ten, Arnie reckoned he’d finished building his raft. Arnie’s raft had been the cause of a lot of arguments. He insisted he only wanted to use it to cross the lagoon and get to the wrecked plane (which we hoped was still there, hidden from us by the rocks), but we knew he secretly planned to set out on the open sea, which sounded like suicide in our opinion. For another thing, he kept stealing our supplies. He’d claimed the best of the salvaged fishing twine that we’d patiently knotted into rope. He’d removed the best palm branches from the improved shelter, and cut them up to make his decking. He’d been taking the stored expedition rations, on the grounds that he needed more food because he was doing the most important work. He took our coconut-shell water containers to use as floats, broke
most of them, and lied about it. He half wrecked my reef sandals when he borrowed them to go into the thorniest bits of the forest, going after suitable saplings to cut for poles.

  Arnie could be fun, but he could be really annoying.

  If you said yes, Arnie had to say no. If you said up, he had to say down. If you were trying to be cheerful, he’d burst your bubble; if you were miserable, he’d laugh. If Miranda wanted to stay by the vehicle, he wanted to trek. If we wanted to prepare for the trek, he wanted to build his raft. Sometimes I enjoyed his sarcastic sense of humor. Sometimes I didn’t trust him. All the days I lived on that beach with Arnie, he was definitely my friend, but I never knew if I actually liked him or not.

  Anyway, on Day Ten we helped him carry his raft down to the sea and we launched it, on a tether. For a moment, it looked good. We were almost impressed. Then a wave got under it, and it immediately tipped over.

  “It’s not quite balanced yet,” said Arnie, with dignity. “It needs some fine-tuning.”

  “Arnie,” said Miranda, “I know you’ve put a lot of work into it, but frankly I wouldn’t care to paddle that thing across a swimming pool. Not with a team of life-guards on duty. I wouldn’t take it anywhere near a lagoon full of sharks.”

  “Have you ever seen a shark in the lagoon, Wonder Girl?”

  Miranda looked at him. “I’ve seen the bodies.”

  Arnie dragged his raft out of the water and stomped away, pulling it after him.

  “What do you want me do?” he yelled. “Stay here for the rest of my life? I’d rather die!”

  The day after that, Miranda and I went on a foraging expedition, leaving Arnie in charge of the camp and the signal fire. We took with us a coconut shell of fresh water each, some coconut strips to chew, some fire-hardened sharpened sticks, one of the rucksacks, and a net bag made from the fishing twine that we’d managed to preserve from Arnie.