No sleep last night. I’m hungry.
The sea is red this morning. It moves sluggishly, falling in long folds like treacle. The sun has not yet risen, and the sky is a ceiling of heavy violet clouds. Rain will come again today, and we will have no fire to comfort us and be our beacon, nor wind to launch a kite. I sit thinking of my grandparents’ house in Sutherland. I think of sweet chestnuts and potatoes roasting in the ashes of the fire. I can hear the blackened shells exploding, smell the comforting aroma of butter and black-peppered fluffy baked potato. My throat feels as if a stone is lodged there and I can’t shift it.
A transparent crab appears from its small hole and starts shoveling sand. I wait. It moves away from the safety of its burrow and I grab it and put it straight into my mouth and crunch and swallow. I sit still, the wind stretching my hair behind me.
The sea is now purple.
I wait. Another crab comes within my reach and I eat it. I spit out the shell of this one; it’s too crunchy to swallow. I eat six crabs in an hour. About the same amount of flesh as a small handful of peas, but they’ll have vitamins and minerals.
The two juniors are hanging upside down from a banyan branch, getting in the way of Jas, who is trying to tidy our belongings in the enclosure. She is the only one who cares about our comfort, if you can call it that. She shakes the sand from our sleeping bags and sweeps the floor clean of leaves and bits of fruit skin.
Lately we’ve seen evidence of rats in our camp. In the night they steal bits of coconut flesh and leave droppings under our sleeping bags. I expect they are nibbling away at Natalie’s body, and at the boatman’s remains, too. We don’t investigate; we don’t want to know.
Jody asks me to make a bow and arrow for her.
“We should have thought of it before—weapons, we need more weapons, in case… in case we need them,” I say to Jas.
“The juniors have lost their spears already.”
We gather several different sorts of thin bendy branches, and Jas and I experiment. After a day of cut fingers and blistered thumbs I’ve made a bow. I don’t know the name of the tree, but its damp twigs are springy and supple and bend beautifully. I secure string to the bow with a round turn and two half hitches at each end. Arrows are easier: I have whittled sticks to a sharp point, and at the other end I have cut a notch to fit into the line. I did try to make a feathered arrow from a piece of seabird feather, but it didn’t work. I fasten guitar string around the ends of the bow. It makes a flexible bowstring, but when I try to fire the arrow it simply flops to the ground. There must be a better way. I draw pictures of arrows I’ve seen in movies. The correct flight has to be the answer. After walking up and down the beach several times looking for feathers, I attempt to cut and fix them to the arrow. I think I’ve got it now. I split a feather from the top down the center of the quill, leaving a little quill at each end to tie to the arrow. I tie three flights, equally spaced, around the shaft.
I draw a diagram of the bow and arrow in my journal.
“Here you are, Jody. Catch us some supper.” I give her the weapon and watch her whoop and yell, leaping around the beach, Carly running after her.
Encouraged by my success, I put my mind to more ways of making weapons. A catapult should be easy. Having gathered several forked pliable twigs, I choose the most sturdy specimen and cut it to size. Elastic is what is needed, but we don’t have any. Oh—yes, we do!
“Who’s going to sacrifice their underwear for the sake of our survival?” I ask the others.
Jas looks alarmed.
“Don’t worry, I’ll do it,” I say. I have shorts I can wear without my underwear, so I remove the elastic and tie it onto the tops of the V. No, that won’t do. It needs a pouch to fit pebbles in. I untie one end and slide a piece of doubled-up T-shirt sleeve on. I gather some pebbles to use as missiles, and then I practice my shooting skills.
Jas is looking even thinner—she says she’s gone off coconuts. Hunger torments us. It doesn’t matter how much fruit we eat; we are always hungry. We’re not getting enough protein or carbohydrates or vitamins. No wonder we are listless and lacking in energy.
I find myself wandering into the forest. I’d love to tell Jas about the monk. I’m tempted to look for him despite my promise of silence. After all, he has pawpaw and breadfruit. He has chickens, a fire, delicious eggs. He would help us, I’m sure. Perhaps I could bring some of his fire back to the beach? Perhaps I should. Our survival is as important as his—more.
I keep to the paths we have made before, but don’t go too deep into the forest. I see wild boars behind every tree, snakes hanging from every branch. There’s no tiger to protect me here. The figs I find are small and puny. Jas explained once that they grow on climbers, beginning life as epiphytes (plants that live off other plants), putting down roots, eventually strangling the host tree. I’ve learned so much since we were stranded here. I keep walking.
I go back to where I remember finding the bananas and cut a large bunch, which I throw over my shoulder. I head back toward the beach again. I think it was around here that I saw the tiger and fell down into the monk’s ravine, but I can’t be sure. I whistle loudly, not because I’m happy but to warn wild boars and snakes that I am coming. I’m trying to be positive, but thoughts of Sandy’s empty sleeping bag, of the black fin in the lagoon, of the crab crawling out of the boatman’s eye socket, of the billowing clouds of explosions, and of Hope’s flailing arm make a nightmarish patchwork in my head. In spite of the humidity and heat I am shivering.
I don’t go looking for the monk. I cannot put him in danger.
I promised.
“Look what I’ve got, look what I’ve got.” Jody is carrying a flapping blue fish on the end of an arrow. “I caught it from the rocks. Aren’t I clever? And Carly helped.”
“Good girls, well done!” Jas is always so upbeat, so positive. I don’t know where we would be if it weren’t for her. She’s our surrogate mother. She shows Mrs. Campbell up for the disaster that she is. I hate to think of her being hurt. I haven’t said anything about her father and Loopy Layla, and I never will. What if it was my dad? Would I want to know?
I kill the fish, hitting its head on a rock. We watch the thin blood, pink, slipping into the water. We cut off the head, then skin and fillet the fish, slicing it thinly and squeezing lime juice over it before hanging it in strips over a branch, where red flies gather around it.
We’ve run out of salt.
But nothing is wasted. The juniors are using the empty cylindrical salt container as a pretend telescope.