Dr. Franklin's Island (2 page)

“Who are you?” I said to the person next to me, on the other side from Miranda. I didn’t have the strength to sit up and look.

“I’m Arnie.”

“Semi.”

“Miranda.”

All three of us crawled up the sloping beach, until the sand under us was dry. We collapsed again for a while, and then we crawled farther, until we came to a big boulder with an overhang; a shelter that seemed, by our present standards, as good as a five-star hotel. There we lay, drenched, battered, too exhausted to talk, too exhausted to sleep, waiting for the light.

chapter two

In the end I must have slept, or passed out. I think we all did. When I woke up it was broad daylight. For a moment the sand was like a soft bed, and I was cozy. Then I moved, and I knew I was terribly uncomfortable. I crawled out from under the rock ledge, wincing when I put my weight on my bashed knee. Miranda Fallow and the boy called Arnie were awake, sitting talking to each other.

Arnie was the big pale chunky boy who had been sitting by himself in the departure lounge.

I went and joined them. I had nowhere else to go.

“Good morning,” I said, awkwardly.

Being shipwrecked doesn’t make shyness any easier.

“Hi,” said Miranda, smiling.

Arnie nodded at me, and the three of us sat in silence. I had the impression Arnie and Miranda had been arguing about something.

The beach was a wide curve of glittering white sand, so bright it hurt your eyes to look at it. I couldn’t make out any details because I’d lost my contact lenses, but I could see green rugged headlands in the distance, at either end of the curve—like sleeping dragons with their noses buried in the sea. Behind us, all along the bay (which looked to be several miles long), there was a wall of thick, tropical green that seemed to go straight up into the sky. In front of us, on the blue and shining horizon, there was a line of moving white, with some dark blotches that I guessed must be the rocks of an outer reef.

Great,
I thought.
My worst nightmare. A beach holiday
without even any books to read, with two complete
strangers, and at least one of them already doesn’t like
me.

I pointed at the rocks. “Is that where we swam from last night? Wow.”

“Yeah,” said Miranda, and she pointed too. “We did good, didn’t we? Look, you can see the plane wreck. The pilot must have tried to ditch in open water, but he came down on the reef instead. Lucky for us we swam in the right direction.”

I couldn’t see the plane. But I didn’t say so. “Do you two remember an explosion?” I asked, after a silence that seemed too long. “When we were in the sea?”

“Yeah,” said Arnie, looking at me sourly. “The plane blew up.”

“I wonder what happened to all the other people?”

As soon as I’d spoken, I wished I hadn’t said that. I decided shy people shouldn’t try to make conversation, not even in an emergency. If I manage to talk to strangers at all, nervousness always makes me say the wrong things.

“The life rafts must be beyond the reef,” said Miranda firmly. “We were thrown onto this side of the rocks by the explosion, but the life rafts were on the other side, I’m sure of it.”

Arnie gave a short laugh.

“We’ll have to think of some way to attract their attention,” I said.

The pale boy gave me the same unfriendly stare he’d given me in the departure lounge, only worse, shrugged and looked away. We were castaways together on a desert island, but he was
still
determined not to be nice. I didn’t know whether to admire him for being so unaffected by the situation, or dislike him right back. I felt so strange. Yesterday I had been Semirah Garson, a person with a normal life and normal problems. Now I was lost. I might never see my friends, my family, my home again.

I felt a cold shock in the pit of my stomach.
This is real.

“Okay,” said Miranda. “Let’s start again, now that Semi’s with us. Semi, we’re trying to work out what happened on the plane, before we ditched.”

“Does it matter?” said Arnie.

“I don’t know,” said Miranda. “But I do know that when you’re in an emergency situation, the first thing you should do is put together all the information you have. Anything we remember might help us. Let’s each tell the story, see how it fits together.”

So we took turns. I told my story, Miranda told hers. When it was his turn, Arnie said, in a fake little-boy voice: “I’m Arnie Pullman, this is my story. I live in Surrey. I like computer games and when I grow up I want to be very, very rich. I was on a plane and it crashed. That’s it, folks. That’s all I know.” Then he grinned sarcastically.

I hated to have to admit it, but he had a point. Miranda, who had been sitting next to me, did not remember what I remembered. It seemed as if we’d been in two different plane crashes. Miranda thought the plane had been lurching around already when we both woke up. She believed we’d been caught in a tropical storm. She hadn’t seen my “strange man.” She thought the man with the stewardess had been one of the
Planet Savers
organizers, helping to calm people down. I said there’d been panic and a fight in the aisle. She said a girl had been taken ill, and the crew had been rushing about dealing with that, as well as with the storm.

I was sure we’d been overdue for our landing in Quito when I woke up. Miranda said she’d looked at her watch too: but she thought we’d been halfway through the flight time. My watch had been ripped from my wrist somehow when we were in the sea. Miranda was wearing hers. It looked undamaged but it had stopped at 7:35 P.M. . . . But that was very confusing, because at 7:35 P.M. Miami time last night, our delayed flight had hardly left the tarmac. Miranda’s watch was not a reliable witness, but that didn’t prove I was right. This obviously wasn’t Quito, or anywhere in the mountains of Ecuador, but where would halfway from Florida to Ecuador put us on the map? We talked back and forth about time zones, and whether we’d remembered to change our watches, trying to work it out and getting nowhere.

Arnie said he didn’t wear a watch. He sat there grinning, listening to us tie ourselves in knots. We were on a beach, probably in the Pacific Ocean. Other than that, we didn’t really know anything. We had no radio, no emergency flares, no first aid, no food or water, and no way of getting in contact with the other survivors . . . if there were any.

Finally Miranda and I gave up. Lots of different discomforts started to ooze through the protective cloud of dazed confusion that still filled my head. Miraculously, both of my reef sandals had stayed on my feet, but the straps had rubbed my heels completely raw. My clothes weren’t dry, they were damp, sticky, and stiff with salt. One leg of my jeans was ripped in half, and through the rip you could see my knee, swollen and bruised, with a big raw scrape. I could feel other bruises too, and my whole body ached from all that swimming. My mouth felt as if it was lined with salted sandpaper, my face felt twice its size, and my hair must have looked
disgusting.

“We ought to move out of the sun,” said Miranda at last. “It’s getting hot.”

“We ought to start walking to one of those headlands,” said Arnie.

“And then what?” sighed Miranda. “It’s farther than you think, it’s
miles,
Arnie, and we have no water. Two of us have no shoes. There’s no sign of human life here. If we managed to reach the headland, we don’t know if there’s a track across it. There might be snakes, there’ll certainly be ants, thorns, rocks. . . . Have you ever trekked in tropical forest? It’s no joke. We’d be lost and bushed in no time.”

“What if there’s a tourist village in the next bay?”

“What if there isn’t? I say we stay with the vehicle.”

“
What
vehicle?”

“
That
vehicle,” said Miranda firmly, pointing out to sea. “The plane. Search and Rescue will be searching
for the plane
. If we’re not
right here
when they come looking, we are sunk.”

“What if that takes days? Are we going to sit here and starve?”

I guessed this must be the continuation of the argument they’d been having before I joined them. It sounded as if it could go on forever.

“I’m not hungry,” I said, trying to break it up. “But I’d love a cool shower.”

I’d noticed, while we’d been talking, that Miranda had been looking up and down the beach, calmly
examining
the place. She pushed back her long black hair, which was clinging to her face and shoulders in sticky, salty locks.

“I think that might be arranged,” she said, with a confident smile. She got up. “Or a bath, anyway. Come on.”

We followed her, Arnie limping and complaining, although the sand wasn’t really hot yet. Miranda’s bare feet didn’t seem to bother her. Before long we reached a stream of water, spreading out into a fan of narrow channels. Arnie looked at Miranda in disgust, as if her having spotted this feature was a deliberate insult to him. He thumped down heavily on his knees, dipped up some water in his hand, tasted it and spat it out. “Gagh. It’s salt.” He smirked triumphantly. “Nice try, Wonder Girl. But no cigar.”

“We follow it upstream,” explained Miranda, slowly, as if she was talking to a toddler.

When we got to that wall of greenery, the water in the stream was still brackish. Arnie said, “I thought we weren’t supposed to leave the vehicle.” (You’d have thought he
wanted
to die of thirst.) But by then all of us could hear the sound of falling water, cool and clear, and irresistible even to Arnie. We ducked under the branches and picked our way along the bank of the stream, which soon became a clear, dark little river. I had my sandals, with the heel straps undone, so I wasn’t too badly off, except that my knee was hurting. Arnie and Miranda managed somehow, with Arnie complaining all the time. It was a relief to be out of the sun, but as tropical jungles go, this wasn’t a very attractive example. We didn’t see any flowers. A few tall trees with thick rusty-brown trunks loomed up into the sky, but mostly the vegetation was thorny bushes, thorny creepers and giant grass blades that cut our hands when we pushed them aside. We heard birds, and once something (probably a big monkey) went crashing through the branches over our heads. But we didn’t actually see any wildlife, except the big ants in the leaf litter (which we tried to avoid, but Arnie got bitten on his toe once).

After about ten minutes we reached the waterfall. We’d been going uphill since we left the beach. We’d started clambering over rocks, then suddenly the slope ahead of us became a creeper-hung cliff, with water pouring down it in a thick silver-bright ribbon and churning into a round clear pool big enough for swimming.

We stared at it in delight.

“There you are,” said Miranda. “Your shower, Semi.”

“Watch out for piranhas,” said Arnie. But he almost sounded happy.

I took off my sandals. The three of us clasped hands (this was a foolish risk, and we wouldn’t have done it later on) and jumped together into the water.

The pool was nice and deep, and it had nothing nasty lurking in it. None of us managed to touch the bottom. We splashed and we swam, we dived in and out of the thundering spray. We swallowed gallons of pure, fresh water. Then we scrambled out onto the rocks and sat in a row, looking up. The cliff went up like the side of a house. We couldn’t see the top of it.

“I don’t think we’re going any farther that way,” remarked Arnie.

Miranda said, “I’m sure it would be possible. Anything’s possible, if you
have to
do it. But we’re not going to try, not yet anyway. We’re going to—”

“I know, I know,
stay by the vehicle
. Give it a rest. Who put you in charge, anyway?”

“Now I want my breakfast,” I broke in. I hoped Arnie wasn’t going to go on like this until we got rescued. Couldn’t we try to be nice to each other?

“Ah, breakfast,” said Miranda, grinning. “For that we go back to the beach.”

About two hours later we were sitting under our rock ledge again, drinking coconut milk, and eating the soft slippery flesh of young coconuts. Miranda had spotted the grove of coconut palms at the same time as she’d seen the stream in the sand. We’d found plenty of fat, green coconuts lying under them, both the big ones and the little young ones that are really tasty. We’d used her pocketknife (which was one of the things she’d moved into the pockets of her combats when the plane was in trouble), assisted by various stones and sticks, to break into them. It had not been easy. There had been a lot of trial-and-error bashing, dropping rocks on coconuts from a height, prizing and thumping and general frustrated hammering. But we had triumphed.

We had water, we had food, we had shelter from the sun. We had washed ourselves and our clothes free of salt, which might not sound important, but feeling fresh and cool made a huge difference to my ability to cope. For the moment, we had the illusion that we were doing well, and this was a thrilling adventure that would soon be over.

“
Now
we should start walking,” said Arnie, pointing to the northern headland with a piece of coconut shell. “That way looks nearer. It can’t be more than two or three miles.”

Miranda shook her head stubbornly. “There are other priorities. We need shelter for tonight. We need to get a signal fire going. We should start work straightaway.”

“Knock it off. If I was in a life raft, I’d take orders from the captain, or whoever. But why do I have to take orders from you?”

“You don’t, Arnie. But I’m the one who found us fresh water and food, so maybe you should think about taking my advice. Look,” she added, in a peacemaking tone, “the tide’s gone out a long way. Let’s see if we can get to the wreckage. We might find some useful stuff. If we had a water container, that would be a good start.”

Arnie groaned. “Okay. I’ll buy it. Find me my shoes, Wonder Girl. I left them under my seat.”

It was afternoon. The sun was going to disappear quite soon, behind the headland at the end of our bay. There was a breeze and it was a beautiful, warm, comfortable temperature. As we walked down to the sea together, I had the illusion—again—that everything was going to be all right. None of us mentioned the idea, but I think we were all convinced that we’d get to the reef, and then we’d see the life rafts, and they’d see us. They’d pick us up. We’d be with everybody else. Soon we’d be safe. In a day or two we’d be settling into that rain-forest compound with the environmental scientists, and everything would be back to normal.

When something terrifically terrible happens to you, I think your brain
doesn’t get it,
for quite a while. You go on trying to see the world the way it was, even when common sense should tell you that everything has changed forever.