Filed To Story: Wild Dark Shore Book PDF Free by Charlotte McConaghy
I meet his eyes. “Dom. How are we gonna get me off this island?”
I climb onto the quad bike behind him, making sure to keep a gap between our bodies. The second we take off over the rough terrain I have instant regret: it is so rough it feels as though my body might simply bounce into pieces. After a while I concede that I wouldn’t have made the climb on foot-the communications building is, understandably, at the top of a high peak. By the time we reach it, I am weak from the strain of keeping my seat and there are spots in my vision. Dom helps me inside and onto a chair, offering me water from his pack. “You barely ate for a week,” he points out. “It’ll take a bit for you to get your strength back.”
“So who do we call?”
Dom lifts the radio receiver and presses what I’m assuming is the power button. Nothing happens. He fiddles with a few other instruments,
but there are no lights, no sounds. It’s all dead. He looks at me and waits.
My blood starts to rise. “Just tell me.”
“The comms are all down.”
“Meaning what.”
“Every instrument we use on this island to contact the mainland is dead. The radio system. The satellite internet. It’s all broken.”
I stare at him. There is a prickling sensation on the back of my neck. “What the fuck are you talking about? How is that possible?”
He spells it out. “They’ve been broken.”
“By who?”
“I don’t know.”
The strangest sensation touches the back of my neck and I look behind me in the small space, almost, for a second, expecting someone else to be in here with us. But we are alone, and all the hairs on my arms are standing on end.
“I only noticed it after the last ship left,” Dom says, and I turn back to him, trying to slow my racing thoughts.
“Meaning it could have been anyone who left the island?”
He nods.
“What-they busted up all the equipment and then bailed? To do what-strand you here? Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“I know it doesn’t.”
“You must have some idea of why someone would do that to you.”
“No.”
We stare at each other. I don’t believe him. He knows more than he’s saying. But I am suddenly overwhelmed by what this means. The sea is beneath my feet again, a woozy sway.
“Won’t whoever you’re in contact with notice that you’re not answering and send help?”
“They won’t be expecting to hear from us, not until it’s time to be collected.”
“Well?… fuck. Can you fix it?” I ask feebly.
A shake of his head, then, “But you can see why it’s strange to me, your timing.”
“What timing?”
“You showing up here, on an unscheduled boat, right after all our comms are taken out.”
I work that one through in my head. “I don’t have anything to do with your radio, Dom. I wasn’t coming here.”
His head tilts a little. “Yeah, you said that.”
We peer at each other. Wind creeps through a window. My heart still won’t slow.
The thing that isn’t making sense to me is that he should treat me with so much suspicion. As though
he needs to be wary of
me. But what exactly is it that he thinks I’m a threat to? What is he trying to protect? It seems clear that shit has gone down here. If somebody’s busted up the comms, there’s been trouble. And he is hiding it from me.
I can’t get back on the quad bike so soon, opting instead to take a very slow walk down the hill to the lighthouse, assuming it will be easier to go downhill. It’s not. My knees and my thighs and my bum, all my muscles, all my joints, all my wounds. There is a place that pain takes you. I haven’t known this place before. That is a privilege, isn’t it? But I know it well now. It is both vast and minuscule. It is as far as my mind can travel and as contained as the blades of grass under my feet. It is my body. It is hard to make sense of the fragility of it.
It’s just a body, he said, and I try to make that true, but as I walk I can’t be anything else, I am all body, only body, at its mercy. It becomes everything and then it starts to fail. My steps grow wobbly, my knees weaken and then buckle.
He returns for me on the noisy rumbling bike with an expression that says he does not have time for this. For my frivolity. As he lifts me I am aware, more than anything, of the way he smells. It is?… I can’t name it, but it fills me. He pulls me onto the seat behind him and instead of space there is its opposite, my arms encircling his body. My face rests against his back. I don’t mean for it to but I am so tired. I despise needing him but I have no choice, for a few minutes I will have
to surrender to him, to the texture and scent of him, and as I do I feel a surprising gentleness and somehow these bodies, our two bodies, feel oddly the same, they feel like one body, and when we stop and get off we will be two and I am delirious, I think.
We reach the lighthouse and he kills the engine, but neither of us moves immediately, maybe gathering ourselves for the task of climbing off, attempting the stairs.
“Dom,” I say, and he tilts his face back toward mine. “My boat had a radio.”
He nods, has already thought of it. “I don’t know how to get to it.”
I’ve had a thought about that, too.
There is a girl, and her brother says she is born for the water.