Inching closer so as not to slip and fall, I made out that it was a large length of metal, painted white on one side. Its shape was undefined; its edges ragged. But in my heart, I knew what I was looking at. Another piece of debris from the plane, another vital part that had been torn free from the whole. Another relic left behind that helped explain what had happened to the rest of the aircraft I’d been on. Though I wasn’t sure where the front half of the plane was, I knew where it wasn’t. It was nowhere near safe ground with us or we’d have found it by now.
This last piece of evidence only served to confirm my gnawing suspicions that there was only one place where the rest of the plane could be: out in the drink below me.
As if to confirm my theory, I turned to my right, my gaze losing itself in the hues of blue before me. There was no white wing rising from the water like a shark’s tail. No slew of debris floating in the distance. The flat surface of the sea lay empty and undisturbed as the trees behind me, except for the waves building up near the shore. Either Flight SWA 1528 had crashed further than the eye could see or it had sunken into the depths entirely. There were no other explanations.
My legs gave way beneath me, making me sit on that uneven boulder. Everyone else on that flight was dead. The Captain and first mate. The freckled stewardess who’d brought me my meal. All the passengers I’d stepped in front of in the queue. The ones that were already seated when I got on board. The annoying child that’d been crying the whole flight. The air was sucked out of my lungs at that last thought. It refused to come back.
Pangs of guilt passed through me as I remembered the disdain and smugness in my thoughts. That poor child… he was only doing what all children do on airplanes. He didn’t deserve to die for it, not a death as grisly as…
The tears came out in silent streams. Deep inside, I wanted to wail but couldn’t find the breath to do it. I’d long been a practical person at heart. I didn’t believe in gods or higher purpose or whatever bollocks people use to explain the unexplainable. “No fate but what we make” had always been my motto. But in that moment, fate—and the world it had built—felt far crueller to me than ever.
It was a long time getting back. I kept losing myself in busy thoughts. For all anyone knew, my fellow passenger and I had gone down in the drink with the rest. No help was coming anytime soon. So our next decision would be crucial to our continuing survival. That meant a plan had to be made, organisation put into place, priorities given a hierarchy, tasks scaled proper.
The fear, shame and dread I’d felt earlier had ebbed away while I sank back into a familiar mindset. It was almost a relief, really, the prospect of easing back into a routine of tasks that I was good at.
The curving horizon finally revealed the only other survivor of Flight SWA 1528. She was standing up now, that solid piece of wood in her hand. Since she’d regained her second wind, she was busy doodling something in the sand with the tip of her makeshift cane. As I drew closer, I saw her putting the finishing touch on a very large capital ‘s’ that she’d drawn.
She looked up as she saw me approaching, a tentative smile blooming at the corner of her lips. What was left of my contempt for her vanished. She didn’t belong here any more than I did. I was struck again by how young she was. In another life, I could have had a daughter her age.
In my career, I’d been the bearer of bad news more than once. In fact, it’d become something of a speciality of mine. But this time, words failed me. It must have shown on my face, by the way her smile faltered. She took a step closer to try and catch my gaze. After a second, I couldn’t meet it, so I looked down.
That made my eyes settle on the thing she’d traced in the sand. In large capital letters was SOS—the universal code for “we’re all alone and desperately need some help”. If only she knew how true that was, I thought ruefully. Then again… given how she’d tried to warn me, maybe she did. And maybe that was why she was writing this in the first place.
I held out a hand toward her staff. Taking it the right way for once, she placed it in my waiting fingers. Next to her final ‘s’, I drew out what I knew in my heart to be true of where we were. A body of land, surrounded by water on all sides.
An island.
9. MORNING SWIM
An island. Of all the places to be stuck in, it had to be an island. And by the look and feel of things, a deserted one.
This place didn’t feel familiar in any sense of the word. It felt isolated and dead, but yet fruitful and part of something greater at the same time. No animal life and sparse vegetation on land. And yet there was an animated sea within easy walking distance of the crash site and wasn’t that life all the same? And could that be a chance to survive for us?
This was not how I’d envisioned this trip going. I should have been in Stockholm by now, installed in what was going to be my home for the next seven months. I was going to stay with Mr and Mrs Birgerson, to take care of their adorable little three-year-old boy, Noah. I’d always had a great connection with children, especially babies and toddlers. And they seemed to gravitate towards me. So, whenever possible, I did my best to leave them happier than I’d found them.
The Birgersons’ file at the Au pair agency had said that they owned a little house on Djurgården, one of Stockholm’s many islands. When I looked it up on the internet, I discovered there was a theme park not that far away, and a zoo. For months, as I worked the vineyards back home, I daydreamed of taking Noah there. Oh, we would have had so much fun! I’d put him in his little stroller, wrap him up in warm clothes, add a little blanket if there was a need for one. Then we’d stroll down along the shore, mingle with the tourists visiting the capital who were putting on their best faces to make him laugh, smile, and beam. That’s where I should be right now, I thought with an ache in my heart.
Instead, I was looking around at the empty pebble beach, sparse trees and the blue waters that seemed to stretch out far beyond the horizon. Not the kind of island I’d been dreaming of at all.
As I looked down at my SOS, my throat tightened. I’d made it almost as a joke; that’s the acronym they always scratch out somewhere in the movies. Now I realised getting one of those seen may be our only hope of ever getting off this island. Yet when I glanced up at the ever-empty skies, I had to accept there was no one to see it.
Now that the morning had passed, most of the clouds were gone. Aside from the odd light grey patch here and there, the sky was stretching out bright and blue. It was the kind of blue that seemed to electrify the whole sky. An ironic contradiction… a sky vibrant with life, hovering over lonely barren ground. And there wasn’t the faintest trace of human disturbance in all that blue, not a vapor trail left by a faraway plane, nothing.
I glanced back down at my lousy SOS. We could set this bloody island on fire and it wouldn’t do us any good if there was nobody to see it. I wondered if maybe I should have used sticks and stones to create my SOS. That’s also something they did in the movies, probably because it was more visible for the camera. It likely would have been for any passing aircraft. I was getting up to go into the forest and grab various branches when something caught my eye in the water… a glint. I looked up at the waves, trying to narrow my gaze to make out its source. Try though I did, I couldn’t find it again.