“My name’s Anne-Marie,” I said, pointing at myself and enunciating clearly. “Anne-Marie.”
He didn’t understand me at all, his eyes flashing in something that looked like anger.
I surmised that it must have been the accent. Might writing it down help? I wondered. Finding a stick on the ground next to me, I wrote out ‘Anne-Marie’ in a patch of dirt torn up from the crash. Then I pointed at myself and handed him the stick. Begrudgingly, he wrote out ‘Killian’ just under my name.
I tried his name out loud, making him despair at my poor pronunciation. He had to say it out loud, repeating himself several times before I got it right, whereas I didn’t mind that the way he kept saying my name sounded exotic to my ears.
Regardless, it was a step in the right direction. Some kind of connection, at least.
10. A LITTLE WALK
Waking up after what had to be my first proper night of sleep since the crash felt weird. At first, being caught up in that hazy not-asleep-yet-not-quite-awake state made me forget what was wrong. All felt right and cottony, even as a disturbing feeling at the back of my spine nagged at me, telling me something was off. As I became more and more awake, the pieces of the puzzle started to come together. For one, the mattress was way too hard. For another, the light streaming in through the drapes was far too bright for this hour. And the final piece of evidence: someone—a man, I believed—was snoring heavily not too far from me.
The memories finally coalesced into something tangible as I sat up. I didn’t need to run my fingers over the synthetic fabric under me to know it was the cabin’s carpeted floor. Nor did I need to open my eyes completely to see the light seeping in through the jagged opening of the plane. As much as I wanted to forget about this situation, I couldn’t. Reality jabbed me without pity, mercy or remorse.
“Good morning, Killian,” I mumbled to the sleeping man up in the galley. The only reply that came from the back of the tail was more snoring.
I rolled my sore shoulders a couple of times before getting up. When I tried to apply some pressure on my bad leg, it felt like it was handling the strain better. The medicine from the first-aid kit had certainly done its job in kick-starting the healing process. Now I just had to wait for it to close up. Maybe I could go by the beach later and dip it into the ocean. I seemed to remember that saltwater healed wounds. Or was that sugar? I wasn’t sure either way, but thought it wouldn’t hurt to try.
Ambling out of the plane’s decapitated corpse, I took a look at the sun-bathed forest around us. It was every bit as quiet as it had been the day before. If help was coming, it was still a long way away. Looks like patience is one thing we’re both going to have to keep, I thought. I tried not to think about how many days and nights out here that meant.
After a frugal breakfast consisting of yet another KitKat taken from our dwindling supplies, we moved to the beach. There was no need for one of our peculiar discussions to agree on a destination. I couldn’t think of a better place to stay for the day and I was betting Killian couldn’t either.
After all, we’d be exposed there. Any ship passing by the island would have a chance to see us. Ditto any small plane or helicopter flying overhead. Besides, being near a natural water source like this just appealed to me. It felt so cleansing and restorative, much like the walks I often took by the mountain rivers back home.
After silently following the trail of yesterday’s footsteps through the trees, we came upon the pebble shore and its flat sea of blue and grey. Though it was seven in the morning, the sun was higher in the sky than I expected. Last night, I’d waited for the longest time to see the sunset before going to bed. I gave up at midnight.
It seemed like the sun never wanted to set in this place. It bathed the world in gentle morning light, on through what should be the darkest hours of the evening. There was something rather beautiful about that, like God or Mother Nature reminding us that we must never lose our hope.
Now shining brighter than ever, the sun revealed a receding tide lapping at the feet of a creamy white beach. The frothy waves had swallowed my SOS whole during the night. Guess I was right about using tree branches and rocks instead.
Killian moved to the breaking waves, crouching down to pour water in his cupped hands before splashing his face with it. I left him to his morning ablution so I could search for broken branches and build another call for help, higher up on the beach that was out of reach of the waves.
When I came back out of the forest with an armload of sticks and branches, my fellow passenger seemed busy cataloguing the contents of our provisions bag, which he’d taken with him. Somewhere, he’d found a fountain pen and he was using it to take notes on a white napkin.
Had it been someone else, I’d have used that pen to scrawl my phone number on it like it was a chance encounter in a bar. But since Killian seemed to have the sense of humour of a log, I thought better of it.
Going by how he sat with his back to the ocean, he didn’t seem to be one to appreciate the view either. As I got closer, I realised he wasn’t even sitting directly on the sand, but rather on an empty bag that he’d folded in quarters. I smiled at the futile gesture; it wasn’t like his pricey trousers weren’t ruined already. After spending a night laying down on the mud, no amount of cleaning product would get rid of those stains. Not that there was any cleaning product in sight, but still…
While I dropped my bundle of sticks at my feet, I glanced down at my own attire. I wasn’t faring much better than my fellow passenger in that department. My once-blue jeans had seen better days and I didn’t mean because of the torn-up leg. It was caked with the mud, the leaves, the branches and whatever else had managed to stick to them. I was amazed that my t-shirt only had a few tears around the midriff. My nose wrinkled as the odour from my body hit my nostrils. Our clothes weren’t the only thing that needed a wash. We did too.
Sitting on a rock at the edge of the waves, I began to clean myself by digging at the dirt under my nails and then rubbing my ocean-wet palms on my face. My hair was a mess and I knew that nothing short of a good wash could ever untangle the growing bird’s nest of curls, dirt and dead leaves that was forming atop my head.
Behind me, Killian continued with his ration list.
While I was busy dabbing my wound with saltwater while trying not to wince, he came up to me with the napkin in his hand. He pushed the diagram he had drawn in front of my face, which I tried making sense of. Not speaking the language certainly didn’t help here.
The easiest part to understand was the numbers, all of them in single digits. I knew we didn’t have much. But if I read these numbers right, we didn’t have enough to get us through next week. Somehow, we’d have to learn to hunt and gather materials, to harvest what we needed from nature herself.
I knew some individuals were predisposed to survive and thriving in the wild. But that wasn’t us, was it? Since Killian looked like a businessman, I’d say being stranded on a deserted island did nothing to play to his strong suits. And while I spent quite a lot of time outside growing up and knew everything about caring for a vineyard, I was in uncharted territory here myself.