Perfect Strangers

by Dani Atkins

  ‘People do,’ I said grimly. ‘It’s a human thing. I read it . . . somewhere,’ I added with a small shrug.

  I felt his hand briefly reach over and pat my back. ‘You’re a useful person to have around,’ Logan commented.

  I turned and looked down at him where he lay in the shelter behind me, propped up on one elbow. ‘Not so much,’ I said with a rueful smile. ‘Because I have absolutely no idea how to navigate with a compass.’

  Logan gave a fleeting wink and a flash of a small crooked smile. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I do. I must have read it somewhere.’

  Day Four

  The first thing I noticed on waking was the cold. Logan was no longer beside me, his body having effectively provided a wind break for me to shield behind. But that wasn’t the only reason for the chill, because as I struggled up into a sitting position I noticed that our fire was well overdue for being built up. Where was Logan? Alarm, never far from the forefront of my mind, began to scamper through it like rats in an attic.

  It was hardly surprising how quickly the gears slipped from calm to alarm. As if waiting to be found wasn’t terrifying enough, we now had to cope with the knowledge that we appeared to be surrounded by predators whichever way we turned.

  I crawled out of the shelter, my eyes already scanning the snowy ground for signs of attack. The snow was unmarked by tracks of any kind, even human ones. I guessed it must have snowed again while I slept. A 360-degree rotation didn’t find him, and it was only after I cupped my hands to my mouth like a yodeller and cried out his name, that I noticed a dark shape on the other side of the lake. He was walking, head down against the chilling wind, in the place where we had been lobbing stones. He heard my call and responded with a broad wave of his arm, replicating the exact same gesture he’d performed in the airport terminal when he’d emerged from the coffee shop and seen me. It seemed as though that had happened to two entirely different people.

  I was unhappy to have the distance of the lake separating us, so I snagged up a thick quilted fleece that I’d liberated from Vincent – who fortunately appeared to be much closer to my size than Bob – and prepared to join him. I threw an armful of sticks on the fire and reached automatically for my spear before stepping away from our camp. It was strange how quickly the trappings of modern day civilisation just slip away, I thought as I crunched through the snow and began to circle the lake. Back home I would automatically set the burglar alarm, and check I had my mobile phone and door keys with me before leaving the flat. Now I stoked the fire and reached for a spear. You think man has come such a very long way, but it only takes a single freak accident for you to realise the distance we’ve travelled isn’t that far after all.

  Logan was standing beside a small grove of trees, a little distance from the edge of the water. He was deeply engrossed with something on the snowy ground, and as I got closer I felt my steps falter when I saw what it was that had attracted his attention. Here, beneath the boughs of the trees, the fresh fall of snow hadn’t obliterated the signs that our late-night visitors had left behind. There were footprints. A lot of them.

  They looked like dog prints, so the good news was that the animal intruders hadn’t been bears. The bad news was that, of course, they weren’t left by dogs – they were far too large for that. Very slowly I crouched down and laid my palm flat on the ground alongside one of the clearest impressions. My hand was only marginally larger than the imprint in the snow. I looked up at Logan, the expression on my face clearly worried. ‘I’d always imagined they were more or less dog-sized.’

  ‘Only if the dog is on steroids,’ Logan retorted, which should have been funny, but somehow wasn’t. He held out a hand and pulled me upright.

  ‘I thought there’d been just one of them,’ I said a little shakily, as I surveyed the twisting network of tracks that circled in and around the trees. ‘But it looks like there was a whole load of them.’ The idea that they had been silently gathering, stealthily watching us from such close-quarters, was frankly terrifying.

  ‘They’re social animals. They live in packs,’ Logan replied.

  I looked down at the tracks that disappeared into the thick dense woodland. ‘I guess so. But somehow I don’t think this was a social call.’

  We walked back in silence around the edge of the lake. Logan had kept hold of my hand in his, and while there was no real risk of me slipping or falling, I still didn’t pull it away from him. The feel of his fingers firmly curled around mine gave me an illusion of safety, in a place where danger was suddenly all around us.

  ‘I suppose this makes it a fairly easy decision, after all,’ he said with a sigh. ‘We can’t stay here another night.’ He crouched before the fire and held out his hands to the warming flames.

  ‘Do you think they’ll come back then?’ I asked, illogically whispering, as though the wolves were eavesdropping on our conversation from just beyond the trees.

  ‘No, I don’t think they’ll come back—’ I opened my mouth to speak, but my words were never voiced, as he completed grimly, ‘I know they will.’

  Fear should have robbed us of our appetites, but we were far too hungry for that, although we munched our way through the rationed portions of confectionery and biscuits with noticeably less gusto than the night before. Like an enthusiastic barista, I’d swirled thick dollops of maple syrup into our hot water drinks, and stirred them vigorously with a swizzle stick snapped from a nearby tree. We needed the overly sweet drink for energy for the walk ahead, although I suspected we might one day have to pay for our present diet in the dentist’s chair. A sudden image came to mind of William’s side of the Italian glass-door cabinet in our bathroom. A sonic toothbrush, mouthwash, and all manner of flossing paraphernalia were behind the killer whiteness of his perfect smile. I couldn’t imagine how he’d cope with having to contend with our regime of just rubbing snow across his teeth with his fingers. But then, William was clearly capable of all sorts of things I had never imagined him doing.

  As much as I wanted to leave, I was strangely reluctant when it came to dismantling our camp, finding it almost impossible to decide what we needed to take with us, and what we should just leave behind for the bears and the wolves to squabble over. With Logan’s help we eventually had a pile of clothing and equipment that we divided between Vincent’s backpack and my own bag.

  We stood by the fire for a long moment, trying to absorb the last of its heat before walking off into the snowy wasteland, all the while knowing that in less than five minutes its warmth would be just a distant memory. When I stepped forward to kick snow onto the flames to extinguish them, Logan had gently pulled me back. ‘Let it burn. That way if a plane flies overhead, they’ll at least know we were here,’ he said wisely. ‘Although your sign works pretty well too.’

  I glanced across at the collection of debris and wood that I’d painstakingly rearranged from its original ‘SOS’ message to a large arrowhead shape, pointing in the direction we were heading.

  ‘They’re only useful if they’re still looking for us from the air,’ I said glumly. ‘We haven’t seen a single plane or even heard one yet,’ I told him, as though that vital piece of information might somehow have managed to escape him.

  ‘It’s still early days, Hannah. They’re not going to call off the search for a long time yet. For a start, I doubt your sister would allow it.’

  I smiled, liking the way he made it sound as though he already knew and understood my fiercely protective older sibling. ‘I’m really looking forward to meeting her,’ Logan added. ‘I’m sure Kate and I will get along famously.’

  There was a wry note in my voice, as I tried to throw off the cloak of depression I seemed to have inadvertently put on that morning. ‘You, she would like,’ I confirmed.

  Logan’s bright emerald eyes lifted from the snowy terrain and went to my face. ‘Not such a big fan of William then, I’m guessing?’

  ‘Oh, she liked him well enough for a while,’ I conceded. ‘Just not so muc
h now. Understandably.’

  Logan stopped abruptly, so unexpectedly that I almost walked straight into him. ‘I know you said you didn’t want to talk about it, but I have to ask. Just what the hell did he do to you?’ There was an unexpected trace of something like anger tightening his voice.

  ‘Does it matter?’ I asked, with tired resignation.

  ‘Of course it does. Because when I knock some jerk to the ground, I always like to know exactly why I’m doing it.’

  The giggle came unexpectedly to my lips, all the more strange when I finally revealed what he’d probably guessed quite a while ago. ‘The usual. He promised me the world, told me I meant everything to him – which, who knows, maybe I did – but not enough to stop him from screwing around with someone he works with behind my back. And then being dumb enough not to even cover his tracks that well.’

  ‘He is dumb. Colossally, stupidly and unbelievably dumb,’ Logan confirmed. ‘But not for that reason.’ I was surprised to feel the heat of a blush come to my cheeks at his words. Once again Logan had managed to make me feel good, about myself, who I was, and my ability to cope with just about anything life threw at me. He put an arm around my shoulders, and drew me closer against him. My injured side should have protested about that. But as we walked into the unknown snowy territory ahead, I felt no pain, not even a twinge. I should have known that nothing about him would ever hurt me.

  ‘You eat sushi, don’t you?’

  ‘This is not sushi.’

  Logan turned from his position on the low flat rock, spear in hand, and gave me an extremely telling look.

  ‘Is there rice, toasted seaweed, any wasabi?’ I questioned.

  ‘Picky, picky,’ grumbled Logan, turning his attention back to the fast-flowing stream after a darting silver shape caught his eye. He raised his spear and lunged it into the water, almost losing his balance in his eagerness. I sat up a little straighter on the fallen log I had claimed as a seat, and continued to rub my sore and aching feet. I had a horrid suspicion that Logan might have been right, and that I should never have removed my trainers, but after over three hours of trudging through the snow I don’t think I could have taken a single step further.

  It hadn’t been long before we realised that as useful as it might have been, Vincent’s compass was probably not the thing that would ultimately lead us out of the wilderness. Nature itself, or rather the landscape, was going to do that.

  The lake we had crash-landed into was considerably larger than either of us had realised, and it was only after walking down its length and scrabbling over a small pyramid of rocks, that we saw that it was actually fed by a rapidly running stream. We had stood shoulder to shoulder before the bubbling torrent, and I knew there was a great significance in this discovery, because Logan looked delighted, while I just looked confused.

  ‘This is great. This is really going to help us.’

  I nodded wisely as though I understood and concurred entirely, and then decided to drop the pretence. ‘Er, why is that, exactly?’

  ‘Because the lake wasn’t an isolated body of inland water. There’s a stream running into it.’

  I resisted the urge to say ‘Duh?’ or even ‘Well, I can see that’ and opted instead for, ‘And that means . . . ?’

  Logan turned to me, and the wind ruffled the dark burnt-ember strands of his hair as though invisible fingers were running through it. I shocked myself for a moment with the silent admission that I wished my own fingers were doing the same thing.

  ‘And where’s the stream flowing from?’ Logan looked at me encouragingly, like the very best of classroom teachers, trying to coax the answer out of a reluctant student.

  ‘Umm . . .’ A thousand memories of moments just like this flashed back to me from my schooldays. If I hadn’t read it somewhere, if it wasn’t accessed deep within the curious seemingly bottomless files in my photographic memory, I was usually stumped for an answer. ‘A river?’ I hazarded.

  Logan’s face split into an encouraging smile. He really had one of the most attractive smiles I had ever seen. I shook my head as though trying to shake out the errant thought that had crept in there when I wasn’t looking. What was wrong with me this morning? It had to be the lack of food, making me like this.

  ‘Exactly. A river. And where you find a river, you will eventually find . . . ?’

  I smiled vaguely and shrugged in a helpless kind of way. ‘I dunno. Boats? A McDonalds? I don’t know, you tell me.’

  ‘Well, possibly either of those – eventually. Basically, if we just follow the river downstream for long enough then eventually we’re going to come to some form of habitation, or settlement, or maybe eventually we’ll even get to a highway of some sort.’

  ‘Just so you know, there were three “eventuallys” in your last sentence.’

  His grin was rueful. ‘It might take some time. There’s no way of knowing how long this river is. Unless – of course – you’ve happened to ever read that somewhere?’

  ‘’Fraid not.’

  I’m not sure which one of us had spotted the fish first. Although the weather was cold, the sun was still glinting on the surface of the water, and at first I thought the mercurial flashes of movement were just reflections, but when I looked at Logan he was staring at exactly the same spot in the stream as I was.

  ‘Would madam like the fish for lunch?’ Logan had asked, in a passably good snooty British accent. He shrugged Vincent’s backpack from his shoulders and dropped it to the ground.

  ‘How on earth are you going to catch a fish without a proper fishing rod?’ I asked, lowering my own bag to the ground, more than happy to be finally stopping for a rest. I hadn’t wanted to be the one to complain, but my feet were throbbing and my legs were aching and trembling from the unaccustomed exercise.

  ‘Man has spear,’ Logan announced in a deep guttural caveman voice.

  The sound of my laughter rang out clearly in the cold crisp air. ‘Man hasn’t a hope in hell,’ I predicted darkly.

  Logan walked across the slippery surfaced rocks until he found a position where the water looked shallow enough to suit his purposes. After twenty minutes I’d eventually broken the silence he’d said was vital in order not to scare the fish away. ‘Should I light us a fire, so that we can cook it . . . assuming, of course, that you ever catch anything,’ I asked.

  ‘Tut tut. The fish are going to sense all that negativity. That’s probably what’s keeping them away, you know.’

  ‘Yes, that’ll be it,’ I said, nodding.

  Despite the fact that he’d spent twenty fruitless minutes on the edge of the stream, had almost lost his balance and slipped in countless times, Logan remarkably still seemed to have retained his good humour. If it had been William, he’d have given up after five minutes and phoned for a takeaway. I sniggered, and Logan turned his attention back to me.

  ‘You wouldn’t be laughing at my feeble attempts to prove I’m a natural outdoorsman now, Miss Truman, would you?’

  ‘No. Not at all. That’s why I offered to make a fire, to cook your catch.’

  Logan paused with the spear raised and poised above the water to smile at me. The stream was sparkling like a multi-coloured moving carpet of gemstones behind him. His hair was ruffled by the wind and his eyes were alight and alive. I will always remember him like this, I thought. This one moment, right here, right now, is how the memory of him is going to be etched into my mind for the rest of my life.

  ‘We probably shouldn’t waste the kindling we’ve collected on building a fire here, because we’re going to need it when we set up camp later. We’ve still got quite a few hours of daylight left so we can get a fair bit further downstream yet. I really think, when we get a fish, we should eat it raw.’

  My nose wrinkled in disgust, but I said nothing. The chances of him even catching a fish seemed highly unlikely. I’d worry about how we were serving it up when we’d got one. Eventually I’d pulled the socks from my feet, rolled up my jeans and padded over t
he stony ground to join him. He glanced down at my red and blistered toes with a look of commiseration. I lifted my spear, which I’d been using as an impromptu walking stick to keep my balance, and stepped into the shallow water.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, gasping at the coolness of the stream. ‘Tell me what to do.’

  It was a joint effort that led to us catching the salmon. That and an awful lot of luck. Logan’s lunging stabs into the stream managed to frighten some of the hapless fish into heading into the much shallower waters, where I was standing. I saw the large silver shape heading straight towards me and screwed my eyes tightly shut as I thrust the head of my spear into the water. I knew I’d caught it by the splashing, and the flapping pressure on my stick.

  ‘Ugh. Ugh. Yuk. I think we got one!’ I exclaimed, opening my eyes a mere crack to see that I was right.

  Logan splodged through the water and reached down and plucked the dying fish from the shallows. ‘You got one,’ Logan corrected, the consummate gracious fellow angler.

  I couldn’t look at the poor fish in his hands. I’m not a vegetarian, I eat fish all the time, but I’d never killed anything before that I intended to eat, and there was no way I was going to be able to put the poor creature out of its misery. Fortunately Logan wasn’t anywhere near as squeamish as me, and within seconds the fish had breathed his last.

  With the salmon in one hand, Logan reached out with the other to help me onto dry land. I trotted quickly back to where I’d left my shoes and socks and after drying my numb feet on one of Bob’s pinstriped shirts, I put my footwear back on.

  When I looked up, Logan was standing in front of me, the fish in his outstretched hands, like Oliver with his bowl of gruel. ‘After you.’

  I shook my head so vigorously that the blonde ponytail I’d tied it in before we left camp slapped me in the face. ‘No way. At least not unless we cook it first.’

  ‘There’s no time,’ Logan said regretfully. He raised the fish – now I’d seen it up close it was definitely a salmon – to his mouth. ‘It’s going to taste just fine. We need the protein,’ he added cajolingly. Again I shook my head and then watched dumbstruck as he lifted the fish to his mouth and bit deeply into its thick fleshy side.