by Dani Atkins
I gasped as it swirled and splashed against me with each step. ‘Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit!’ I exclaimed as I jerkily continued until it was at my waist. I was hoping that as I got closer to Logan’s point of entry I might have been able to see beneath the surface, but the water was as inky black and impenetrable from here as it had been from the shore. It hid its secrets well.
‘Okay, I’m going to do this,’ I said, forcing myself to hyperventilate for a few seconds to increase my lung capacity. I was literally about to launch myself forward when the surface of the water in front of me erupted in a frothy disturbance from which Logan’s head emerged.
‘Logan, thank God,’ I said, stepping jerkily towards him through the water with my arm outstretched. He took hold of my hand and I tried not to flinch as his ice-cold fingers gripped mine. He shook the water from his hair and each droplet which landed on me felt like a sharp stabbing needle. The soft gold of his tan was temporarily gone, bleached from his body by the temperature of the water. Together we strode out of the lake, and it was only when the water level was at our knees that I noticed he’d been successful in his mission and was carrying my dripping tote bag in his free hand.
‘My bag! You found it.’
His lips formed a wry smile as he passed me my waterlogged luggage, which looked considerably the worse for wear after its night in the lake. And it was a good deal heavier than the last time I had carried it; Logan saw me wince when the bag’s strap bit into my shoulder.
‘Either you’re smuggling gold bullion, or you’ve taken on a whole load of water.’
I went to spring the bag’s catch, when he added, ‘Or maybe an eel or two.’ I threw the bag off my shoulder with a brief ‘Ugh!’ and it fell back into the water with a noisy splash. Logan bent to pick it up, chuckling softly, but he didn’t pass it back to me to carry. As we sploshed clumsily up the bank, still holding hands for balance, I eyed the bag warily, as though it did indeed contain an unwanted stowaway from the lake.
‘That would be a good thing,’ Logan proclaimed, as I stooped to collect our discarded clothes. ‘Breakfast,’ he completed, and got an even more heartfelt ‘ugh’ than the last one.
We hurriedly pulled our clothes back on beside the fire’s meagre heat, trying to repair the damage from our cold-water dip. I had ended up only marginally less wet than Logan, even though all I’d done was wade into the lake after him. As soon as I was dressed I dropped to my knees and opened and upended my bag. Thankfully nothing swam or slithered out on the gush of water that flowed from the tote. As I lifted each dripping item from the ground I scarcely noticed that Logan had returned to the lake, retrieved the makeshift water container, and had placed it on the stand above the flames.
I sorrowfully examined each sodden item from my bag one at a time, and Logan thoughtfully said nothing as he sat down on a rock and watched me. I reached first for my mobile phone, from which trickled a continual stream of water as I held it in my hands. I didn’t really expect anything to happen when I pressed the on button, but I pressed it anyway. No logo lit the screen, no welcoming trilling sound greeted me. It had sent its last text and made its last call. It was nothing more now than an extremely expensive piece of technological junk. I bit my lip, which had started to quiver. It would have been a miracle if the phone had actually still been working, and I think we’d already used up our quota of those by surviving the crash. I threw the useless handset down onto the stony ground and heard a sharp crack as the screen connected with a small rock.
‘Oh no. I think you broke it,’ Logan deadpanned.
‘Very funny,’ I said, with a responding sad smile. Logan left his rock and came to my side to place a consoling arm around my shoulder.
‘We’re not going to need a phone to get through this or any other twenty-first century device. We’re going to do this the good old-fashioned way.’ I looked at him questioningly. ‘We’ll use our wits, ingenuity and sheer determination to survive the elements, until help arrives,’ he answered solemnly. ‘We’ll do this, Hannah, we will.’ He squeezed my shoulder in added emphasis before allowing his arm to drop away. ‘So what else do you have in here?’ he asked, eyeing the sodden contents of my hand luggage.
‘My ruined passport,’ I said, picking up the maroon-covered document. It was a floppy saturated mess, whose pages were stuck together.
‘You don’t need that,’ he confirmed.
‘My make-up bag,’ I said, holding up the brightly patterned bulging bag.
‘You definitely don’t need that. You look great just as you are.’
Crazily I could feel a flush of heat seep into my cheeks at the unexpected compliment, and tipped my head forward, letting the fall of blonde hair cover my heightened colour.
‘My new book,’ I said, reaching for and holding up the now unreadable thriller which I’d bought just the night before from the duty-free shop. ‘I guess I won’t be reading any more of this,’ I acknowledged dryly. The book was swollen to about three times its original thickness and the pages were now one heavy thick brick of paper.
‘I’ve read it. I’ll tell you how it ends,’ Logan volunteered.
I let my hand rifle among the fallen contents of my bag, pushing aside my diary, hairbrush and purse to pick up a slim green plastic zip-up wallet. ‘I do have a small first-aid kit,’ I said excitedly, lifting the pouch from the ground.
‘Now that could be useful,’ declared Logan. ‘Good packing,’ he commended.
I gave a small wistful smile. ‘That was actually Kate’s idea, not mine. She always makes sure I have one of these in my carry on. “Just in case,” she always says. She’s the practical one; the sensible big sister. I’m the airhead, the dizzy one who gets into crazy situations and keeps messing up my life.’
Logan’s eyes were suddenly serious. ‘I’m sure that’s not true.’
I thought of William back in London, waiting for me to forgive him and resume our life together, as though I could erase the memory of his treachery by pressing some mental reset button. Only I couldn’t.
‘You don’t know me,’ I said, and even I could hear the trace of bitterness in my voice.
‘No, I don’t,’ he conceded. ‘But by the time we get out of this, I hope to have rectified that.’ For some reason the warmth in my cheeks, which was just beginning to fade, suddenly reignited.
‘And what’s that?’ Logan asked, nudging a small bright pink plastic box with his finger. It had fallen to one side, a little away from the rest of my bag’s paraphernalia. For a second I frowned in confusion, not recognising the item, and then very slowly I began to smile.
‘Lily,’ I said, my smile widening as I suddenly remembered her last-minute addition to my luggage.
‘The flower?’
‘The niece.’
Logan shook his head in confusion and rather than explain further, I reached for the small plastic box and flipped up the catch. I was holding my breath in anticipation, and when the lid sprang back I wasn’t disappointed. The container had been watertight and its contents were still dry. I turned the box around to show it to Logan. He looked just the right amount of impressed and excited.
‘It was her going away present for me.’
‘I love that kid,’ Logan declared solemnly.
‘I do too,’ I echoed, and I swear I could actually feel my heart swelling inside the wall of my chest at just the thought of her beautiful smiling and trusting face. ‘I really do.’
Sensibly – much more sensibly than I would have been if left to my own devices – Logan suggested we ration out the chocolate, and after counting up the squares per bar, we decided that we would eat no more than two squares each at a time. It wasn’t much of a meal, but I swear that those two squares were the most delicious thing I had ever tasted – and I don’t even like foreign chocolate that much. Just the act of unwrapping the outer cover and peeling back the gold foil had started to make my mouth water, so by the time I began nibbling slowly on the two pieces, holding them in my h
ands and taking tiny delicate bites like an excited woodland creature, I was properly drooling. Not a good look. Logan, I noticed, just popped both pieces into his mouth and chewed, but I managed to extract much more pleasure from the treat by making it last.
When I had finally finished, I ran my tongue carefully around my lips just in case the smallest speck had escaped me. Then I looked up and saw Logan watching me with a curious expression on his face. An expression that made something quite unexpected happen in the region of my throat. I swallowed noisily, and when I looked up at him again, whatever I saw had vanished.
The water in the container over the fire was just beginning to boil and Logan carefully lifted it from the flames and placed it onto a small pile of stones he had in readiness beside it. I had visions of us lapping from the bowl like thirsty animals at a trough, but Logan had a better idea.
‘Let’s just see what Bob has in his bag, shall we?’
I crouched in front of the open suitcase, pretty certain that if Bob had decided there was a need to carry a couple of drinking mugs in his suitcase, I would probably already have seen them. Logan just smiled when I voiced that opinion and shook his head. ‘You have to think outside of the box, Hannah. It’s all about improvising.’
He suddenly sounded far too much like someone in one of my company’s brainstorming marketing meetings. If he started talking about blue sky ideas or pushing the envelope or any of the other buzz words or phrases that were guaranteed to set my teeth on edge, I might have to revise my entire opinion of him. I really didn’t want him to be that guy, the corporate clone.
‘What I’m really hoping for,’ said Logan, reaching past me to delve into the open suitcase, ‘is that Bob is the type who doesn’t give a toss about the environment or the ozone layer.’
‘Huh?’
Logan had found what he was looking for and unzipped a zebra print striped sponge bag. He pulled out a can of shaving foam and an aerosol of deodorant and plucked off their plastic caps. ‘Good man,’ he pronounced, holding out the two miniature makeshift cups.
After a quick douse in the lake we had managed to eliminate almost all of the lingering taste of toiletries from the tiny vessels. ‘Another demitasse?’ joked Logan, and I nodded gratefully as I passed him my bright red plastic lid. I had already drunk five capfuls and was still thirstily craving more.
It was fully light by now, and I had already begun scanning the sky for signs of a rescue plane.
‘What time is it, do you think?’ Although Logan and I were both wearing watches, neither was working after being submerged in the lake.
‘Eight o’clock, maybe a little later.’
‘So they’ll be starting to search soon, won’t they?’
Logan’s face looked troubled. ‘Yes, probably.’ He too looked upward to the empty skies. But what it lacked in helicopters and planes was made up for with ominously grey storm clouds. ‘Weather permitting.’
‘That’s not going to stop them searching for survivors, is it?’
Logan shrugged. ‘I don’t know, Hannah. I’m no pilot, so I have no idea when it gets too dangerous for them to fly.’
So that was another profession that I could cross off my rapidly growing list of possibilities. ‘But we should do all we can to help them spot us, in any event.’
Surely that was a given? Wouldn’t we both do all we could to ensure they saw us from the air? I for one had every intention of jumping up and down like a lunatic and screaming my head off at the first sound of a plane’s engine. But that wasn’t what Logan had meant, and once again I felt grateful that he was thinking far more logically than I seemed capable of doing.
‘We’re going to need to keep the fire blazing 24/7 and then have some leafy wet branches or green sticks nearby to throw on it as soon as we hear or see anything.’
As this was the exact opposite to the type of wood he had had me searching for the night before, I was confused, which I guess must have been obvious from the look on my face. Patiently he explained. ‘From up above a fire won’t be seen as easily as smoke. So we need to be ready to smother the flames to send up a long plume of white smoke. That’s what will be noticed above the trees.’
I shook my head from side to side. I should have thought of that. It wasn’t rocket science, just basic common sense. It made me realise all over again (as if I had ever really forgotten) just how ill equipped I was to ensure my own survival and just how grateful I felt that the person I happened to be marooned with was so very capable. For a moment I found myself wondering how William would have fared in this situation. He was capable, in his own way. He could get the best table in a restaurant, the best discount on a deal, the most profit for his company. But could he light a fire, and send up a smoke signal? Could he have kept us both safe? There was a time I had felt nothing but safety and comfort when I was with him, but that was so long ago I could scarcely remember how that felt any more.
‘You okay?’ Logan asked perceptively, as memories of William lingered in the shadowy depths of my eyes.
‘Fine,’ I lied. And then, anxious that he didn’t delve any further I hastily added a suggestion of my own. ‘We should write out SOS on the ground too, out of sticks and stuff. I saw people do that in a movie once, after a plane had crashed.’
‘Excellent idea,’ Logan said, and I felt momentarily inflated by a small puff of pride. Not totally useless and incompetent then. ‘Anything else you can remember from the film that might help us?’
My face screwed up in concentration as I sought to recall the plot, then as it came back to me I wrinkled my nose in distaste. ‘Not really. But I think they ended up eating each other to survive. It was actually pretty gross.’
Logan’s handsome face twisted in a small grimace. ‘Rest assured, I definitely won’t be eating you,’ he promised with teasing solemnity, and although I knew there had been absolutely nothing inappropriate in his remark, I felt suddenly awkward as a totally different interpretation came to mind.
I sprang to my feet. ‘I’m going to look through the bits of wreckage for stuff to spell out the message.’
‘We’ll do it together,’ he said, coming to join me.
It was actually a lot harder to do than I had first thought. Although there was no shortage of debris lying around, we needed to clear a large area in the first instance to make space for a message big enough to be seen from the skies. Perhaps it was lack of food or maybe the thin mountain air, but very soon I was panting noisily from the exertion of scurrying backwards and forwards across the clearing with armloads of wreckage. Logan, on the other hand, wasn’t even breathing hard and hadn’t broken into a sweat. Unfortunately I couldn’t say the same, and despite the outside temperature I pulled the heavy sweatshirt over my head, leaving me in just my thin vest top.
‘You should be careful, you don’t want to catch a chill.’
‘I’ll be fine,’ I assured, bending down to pick up a particularly heavy piece of twisted metal. I grunted in a very unattractive fashion, and Logan quickly dropped what he was carrying and grabbed hold of one end to help me.
We shuffled towards the line of trees where we had stacked most of the debris. I wondered if it would provide enough of a barrier to keep the bears away. Probably not. The memory of our night-time visitor made me shiver and I eyed the darkened spaces between the trees cautiously.
‘I don’t think they’re likely to make an appearance when we’re making this much noise,’ Logan assured.
‘If you say so,’ I replied doubtfully.
We worked well as a team I noticed, as we began to spell out the three letters that could be the difference between our survival and . . . well, that sentence was too frightening to complete. I leaned back and gently tried to rub away the ache at the base of my spine as I surveyed my letter S – which actually looked a lot more like a number five – then Logan looked up from his work on the next letter.
‘So, what’s his name?’
It was probably childish to pretend that I
didn’t know what he was talking about, but I tried anyway.
‘Whose name?’
He placed a long length of blackened twisted metal onto the ground and completed the circle, as though finishing an oversized jigsaw. ‘The guy you flew halfway across the world to get away from.’
‘What makes you think I was running from anyone?’ I challenged. ‘I was visiting my sister, I told you that.’
‘You did,’ agreed Logan equably, beginning the construction of the final two-metre tall letter. ‘But it was more what you didn’t say, than what you did. I’m pretty good at reading people, and there was a look on your face when I asked if you’d been on holiday that just made me think . . . ’ his voice petered away.
I said nothing, but I could feel the shutters falling over my eyes like they were physical barriers.
‘But hey, I could have been wrong.’ He smiled and shrugged as though he was prepared to drop the topic. ‘Two and two doesn’t always make four.’
Clearly not a maths teacher then. ‘Yes it does,’ I said quietly. ‘When you suspect something is true . . . well, it invariably is.’
Logan waited patiently for me to continue, not pushing or forcing me to give more than I was prepared to reveal.
‘His name is William. And I don’t think I want to talk about it, if it’s all the same to you.’
He came to my side and put his arm around me, and it didn’t seem odd at all to lay my head wearily onto his shoulder.
‘It’s okay, Hannah,’ he said gently. ‘Everything’s okay.’ Only it wasn’t really, and we both knew it. But just for a moment I chose to ignore that glaring reality.
‘Why don’t you put some more water on to boil and I’ll finish up here,’ he suggested. I nodded, grateful for the distraction, and had walked three or four metres away from him when Logan added one final comment.
