Day three. Jesus, but time drags. This mob couldn’t organise the proverbial in a brewery. Three days we’ve spent, arguing the toss over where to set up camp, how to set up camp, and of course the blisteringly long drawn-out discussions about our potential rescue or otherwise. It feels like a month of anyone’s calendar.
Day one… well, yes, I grant you there wasn’t much could be wilfully orchestrated after the events of the previous night. Or was that day one? One thousand tonnes of steel cracking, listing, crockery and cutlery sliding from the tables, darkness, screaming, the rush for lifeboats, the confusion, God, what a mess. No organisation, no control, no real procedures at all from what I saw. That’s what comes of the cheap package deal, I guess.
Thankfully, I – and this pitiful bunch of comrades – were on the one and only lifeboat to actually be launched and get away from the sinking mother ship. We’ve seen no-one else.
It wasn’t until we’d scrambled for that first lifeboat, that I saw a woman I know… well, I use the term loosely… I’d not noticed her earlier. But I recognized her then, same bossy smug bitch, had all the answers, trying to organizing everyone… she was quite oblivious to me, to who I was. Christ, I bet she doesn’t even remember.
So, yeah, day one/day two… we’re grounded here, quite by accident, and ironically I’m stranded with her. With nothing more than oars, we’d all but drifted on the darkened seas until dawn – grateful for the slim yet hopeful chance – and we reached this island. The hardiest of us leaped forth, scrambled to pull our sorry craft up the beach. I was one of those, of course. The hardy ones. Smug bitch merely gave opinion, criticism, more bossy direction… pretty much how it was last time. Change management. Bunch of tossers.
Anyway, we’re here. In a brochure, this place would be termed ‘idyllic’. Soft sand, palm trees, blue sky, orange sunset, heat, silence. The epitome of perfection were a person to conjure up their ideal restful scene. But in truth it’s hell. Three days we’ve been here - in hell. No food, no shelter, no real idea where on this sorry earth we’ve landed. We’ve seen no planes. No other boats. We’ve seen… and this disturbs us more than anything… no activity whatsoever out there, the now brightened horizon where the submerged mother ship still projects in angular fashion, sinking very slowing into that quiet calm sea.
Why haven’t they noticed us missing?
On day two, or three, depending how you count it – after that initial panic and the almost catatonic confusion of nighttime drift and arrival at dawn, exhausted, emotionally wrecked – once we’d slept, sort of, and assembled on the beach at dawn, we assumed in our western middle-class castaway egotism we’d be rescued pretty quickly. Smug bitch even said as much herself. We took shelter from the midday sun under palms, worried about fresh water but happily drank salted on account of how it’d not be for long, and didn’t really think too much about food. We were muted. Quietly elated, if truth be known. One of our number - retired teacher, Old Boy’s network kind of guy – spotted some sort of edible fruit, named it in Latin in fact, swore it was okay to eat. And we ate.
Life seemed good. We still existed. We would be rescued.
But then we noticed… well, our resident smart arse noticed… what remained of the ship’s hull outlined against the orange glow of that evening’s setting sun. And the silence. The lack of air activity, the lack of other ships. She changed her tune and said, “they should have found us by now, we must have been off route”, and we all felt a twinge of awareness… those last 24 hours on board, the annoying chap at dinner who claimed we’d left our official route - banged on for hours he did, we all tried to ignore him, move away from his wittering - he’s gone now, didn’t make our boat… but he knew. He knew we’d drifted.
So we sit here, on day three, under our temporary shelter, drinking salty water and eating a fruit that belies all prior knowledge (and has already begun to have adverse affects on some of our bowels) and we begin to understand this might not be over soon. We’ve debated that which can’t be known as though it were fact, and in the sort of convinced frenzy that alarms me, frankly – I’ve seen this before, it’s quiet panic, the same sort of panic that hit my last company when we realised we were going under and our mortgages weren’t going to be paid… we knew what was coming but still enthused with the brightest ideas, as though we’d find something obvious that had been missed and the embracing of it would save us…
We didn’t. I spent my redundancy on this trip. Thought it’d herald a new start.
And that smug woman. She was there, in my company’s death throes. She was there, called in to make changes, not really giving a flying fuck about my mortgage, my future, our futures. Lining her own CV with experience, that’s what it was really about. And here she is. She doesn’t see me any more than she did then – but I see her. Oh yes I see her.
The retired prof has been trying to work out our location. Came up with a plausible enough story about this island, where he thinks we are, went on at length about its role in the overthrow of some ancient government or other and I just said, “yeah, right, but where the hell’s the nearest civilised conurbation?”
Smart-arse then suggested we nominate a leader. Maybe there was a glimmer of recognition in her eyes at that point. Maybe she remembered. She said things might get difficult, that it’s only a matter of time before “character will be revealed” and if we don’t put in place some sort of leadership structure… blah, blah, utter psychobabble but it’s had a curious traction, several others are now agreeing – clearly some just want a boss and are heartily lost without one. A timid mouse, who’s barely said a word until now, pipes up and suggests smart-arse herself as the leader – how apathetic is that? My blood boils.
Just coming up with an idea doesn’t make you the right person to lead on it. This I know to my own cost. Redundancy was un-welcomed, the wrong folk were in charge, but ultimately it was my liberation. I’m not one to buckle under pressure and I did have new high hopes. I survived that bitch’s interference once, I’m not going to join the apathetic masses now and kow-tow to some random nomination that puts her in charge again. If I’d been more forceful back then, we’d not have gone under.
Latin fruit prof is now heartily agreeing the nomination. There’s a lot of nodding. Smiles. Happiness in fact. Jesus but this crowd is easily swayed.
So here we are, nearly into day four and I’m on the sidelines. Again. I won’t stand for it this time. I raise my hand – my voice too – and say “We need several candidates for voting, this has to be full democracy…” the vocal old boy interrupts with some diatribe about what democracy means blah blah, but I hold firm: three candidates, not one done deal. The smug bitch narrows her eyes. Yeah, she remembers me now.
She immediately nominates the prof, who pooh-poohs without conviction and readily takes on the mantle. Then there’s a quick coercion for another of their number to stand – some guy who’s refusing to even fish, how the hell’s he going to keep us alive? - and lo, it now seems the running board is smart-arse, teacher guy and this tree-hugging leftie who’s insisting there’s enough non-animal produce on the island to keep us alive for months, despite the fact that most of us could now shit through the eye of a needle from 3 days of eating it, and frankly if he gets a single vote it’ll be not only a miracle but a travesty of this so-called democracy, here, on this supposed haven of holiday bliss, as we watch our third sunset and, in the distance, silhouetted against orange sky, the remains of the hull of our former unseaworthy craft, “Hope” – can you believe it?! – sinking beneath the horizon line and removing all visible trace from air or land that a ship ever passed over this sorry patch of ocean, let alone sank into it.
Jesus, what a mess.
I turn from the self-congratulatory circle of apathetics, from the narrow-eyed gaze of smug bitch, the pontifications of prof and the fruit-loving leftie who, on finding himself cast away on an island where the only life-sustaining protein idles innocently in rock pools, won’t fish, and I continue to grind the edges of hard abalone shell to sharpness against rock… God but I should have done this first time round…
I harness my shell to this makeshift grindstone.
I stare out to the horizon.
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