Cristelle Comby - Alone Together

I found my fellow passenger seated on a broken trunk, a half-eaten KitKat in his hand. If he’d been worried by my long absence, he didn’t let it show. Instead, his attention was focused on my three little friends. For just a moment, I swore he almost smiled.

While I cleaned the fish, he got a fire going. I wasn’t sure what these were, but they weren’t big. Some kind of mackerel, maybe? I’d done my fair share of trout fishing back home, but when it came to saltwater fish, I was out of my depth, so to speak. Well, fish was fish, and my method of preparing and cooking them seemed to work just as well on them. Once I’d emptied out the innards, I cooked them over the fire with my spear, the skin still on them.

Turns out, Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner were quite tasty. Their flavour was reminiscent of tuna, which worked wonders in terms of gelling with the taste of the blueberries. We’d have to check the pool again tomorrow, maybe look along the coast for other fish-traps if that one was empty. Who knows? There may also be other berry bushes somewhere else on the island.

The entire time I was eating, I couldn’t keep the smile off my face. On second thought, maybe this island wasn’t as barren and deserted as I’d first thought. There was life here too, which meant there was hope for us after all. That night, I fell into a deep sleep, filled with dreams of hope and prosperity for our future.

The next morning, we awoke to low-hanging clouds and thick humidity in the air. As this wasn’t a day for spaghetti tops, I kept my sweatshirt on, even as I caressed the hope that the sun would come out later.

Before we left for the beach, I fashioned two sturdier spears out of thick branches. When I gave one to Killian, I was rewarded with a dubious raise of his bushy eyebrows. Going down to the beach meant walking through the trees and scrubs on what was slowly turning to be a comfortable footpath. We’d been going back and forth so much in the past couple of days that the terrain was beaten and easy to follow. The humidity clung to us as we walked through it, even as the mist remained, clinging to everything below knee-height.

The sound of the waves grew louder as the trees parted. There was no ship in sight on that vast ocean of blue, but at this point, I no longer expected one. Glancing down at my wooden SOS sign, I feared my efforts had been as in vain as the one I’d etched onto the sand.

My gaze returned to the ocean and I lost myself to its vastness and power for a few moments. It was agitated today, pulsing louder than usual as it sent its waves to crash at our feet. As I looked on, something colourful caught my eye. Was it… yes, another suitcase! Not wasting time, I ran to the shore even as I started removing my clothes. We couldn’t risk the current sending it away again.

I was in the freezing surf less than a minute later. While the cold had been expected, I was surprised by the strong undercurrents pulling at me as I left the shore. The further out I went, the stronger and more treacherous they grew. It became a struggle just to maintain my course. Still, I was able to force myself to keep my head out of the water so as not to lose sight of the suitcase. Thank God it was bright red with white polka dots. Had it been darker like the first one, I may have lost it in the waves. My arms started to cramp when I reached it, making me glad for the strong waves that carried me and my cargo back to the shore.

The currents kept trying to push me towards the rocks and boulders on the right, but I fought them off while zeroing in on Killian, who was waiting in the sand with spears in hand. He took the suitcase from me when I reached the shore, working to get it open while I hastened to put on warm clothes. Despite my exertions, I felt my teeth rattling hard while my arms shook. Now more than ever, I wished that the prison of clouds would release the sun.

In comparison to the last suitcase, this one opened quite easily. Inside, we found a collection of women’s clothes as well as other female essentials. While I would have little use of the frivolous underwear, I knew I could put the assortment of socks, jeans and T-shirts to good use. The week’s supply of tampons and pads would also come in handy.

When Killian moved some of the stuff around, my heart clenched at the sight of what was underneath the clothes. Two more T-shirts and another pair of jeans—all of them children’s size. Reality caught back up with me at that moment, reminding me once more of all the passengers who hadn’t been as lucky as us. I couldn’t remember most of them, save for the fellows who’d been sitting closer to me. But I knew there’d been several small children onboard, a wailing baby somewhere near the middle of the plane.

Killian placed the children’s clothes back where he’d found them before closing the suitcase completely. A look at his pale face told me that his thoughts had taken a similar path to mine. I inched closer to him. I could have done with a hug right now, but since he didn’t seem the hugging type, I forced myself to get a grip.

A cramp ran up and down my bad leg, making me rub it with my hand. With a perturbed look, Killian pointed at the case, then at his chest, then back at the forest. I got the message. He wanted to take the new case back to the crash site. I nodded to let him know that I understood before he turned on his heel and disappeared down the trail. I watched him go, back ramrod straight, white hair standing out in the sea of green. Such a strange man , I thought, not for the first time.

After he’d gone, I reflected on how, without some serious effort on both our parts, we wouldn’t be able to understand or comprehend one another. That would require ingenuity and patience to get our respective meanings across, something I doubted Killian had much of. I couldn’t shake the feeling that my young feminine vigour, coupled with the fact that I was carrying both our weights, threatened his masculine superiority complex. If that was the case, I couldn’t have cared less. He was my ally in this battle for survival, so he ought to do his part. There was no other way if we both wanted to live.

Once the cramp was worked out of my leg, I trekked along the shoreline to the pool I found the day before. I prayed the tide would be similar to yesterday’s. Spear in hand, I felt like Tarzan hunting Sabor the leopard as I hopped from boulder to boulder. A song in the old tongue drifted through my head as I searched for the tide pool. Along with the song came memories, flowing close as if carried by the waves on my left.

My father’s mother used to look after me when I was a kid whenever both my parents were busy in the vineyards. That song was the one she used to sing to lull me to sleep. If I closed my eyes, I could picture her with her knitted purple shawl around her shoulders, her neatly combed grey hair. She had deep lines in her face, drawn more by grief than age. She’d lost her husband in WWII, her youngest daughter to a childhood illness, her eldest daughter to breast cancer at the age of thirty-five. Grandma was the one who’d insisted I learned some local patois, because, as she liked to say, “Some things were not to be forgotten”.

Though I hadn’t heard the song in years, the words drifted back to me. Tzantin Tzamozard was an old ballad about our village’s pride: its white wine. While some people may think it a strange topic for a child’s lullaby, winemaking ran deep in our community. It was practically etched into our DNA, to the point where many would have said it was Pinot rather than blood that ran through our veins.

In this strange place, lost outside time, it felt good to sing that old song again. If I closed my eyes, I could see the old vineyards on the hills, with their red and yellow grapes soaking in the sun as the green leaves swayed in the wind. I wondered if I’d ever see such things again.