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Emily still can’t look at bodies of water without getting that itchy sense of dread creeping up her spine. She’s fine with the bathtub, but the rest? She makes her home in inner city London and tries not to think about the coast.
The first few months she’s kept busy with admin and police stuff and the media, but they’d warned her about that. It helps to keep busy, keep her mind focused on something other than the fact that she seems to have forgotten how to fit into the world. It’s the strangest thing, but she misses that damn island.
Hassan contacts her at the end of the third month. She hasn’t seen him since the rescue, they’d escorted him back to Egypt pretty quickly after the cruise company paid him off, and she’s been alone ever since. But he sends her a text, of all things, via a translator. How are you? Good, allah yubarik?
It’s weird, to have a conversation with him that isn’t peppered with expletives, that flows naturally, that doesn’t end in utter frustration. Some nights on the island, she’d have preferred the silence, but he spoke and spoke and swore at the sky, then prayed like a holy man whenever the sun moved along the little dial they constructed out of foraged twigs.
I’m doing okay, Emily types out, feeling strange. I hope you can put this through the translator. I miss you. I miss you a lot. I don’t miss that place, but I miss your company. It’s nice to be able to talk to you. She makes sure to spell every word correctly, the better to assist his translator. She sends the text out into the world and wonders if he’ll reply right away or if, unlike her, he has a life now that they’ve been thrust back into the world.
She isn’t ready to go back to work, and she’s still under the care of the hospital anyway, so she spends her days fighting off news reporters and assuring the cruise company that no, she doesn’t want to sue. She’d have a decent enough case, but she wants it to be over. She wants peace. She wants to forget the Pacific Ocean even exists.
Hassan doesn’t reply right away, and maybe that’s for the best. He probably has a wife out there, two-point-four confused children, a family of well-wishers praising Allah for his safe return. She thinks of that island, the wreckage of their ship, the dead bodies they’d wordlessly buried in shallow graves. They’d used hollowed tree trunks to dig the holes. Funny, the things that keep coming back.
She thinks, now, about how well they’d communicated, considering the only Arabic she knew was what she’d gleaned from Asif down the mini-mart in Hounslow, and the only English Hassan knew was what he’d learned from TV, American TV at that, and the occasional fastfood chain name. It had been tiresome, talking with him, but they’d made it work. He spoke to her like a child: pointing, frowning, rudimentary signing. She’d learned a few words, but she’d never been one for languages. She’d failed GCSE French and then that was it. But Arabic came slowly to her, over the months, over the two agonising years spent surrounded by jetsam and washed-up plastic.
His English was better than her Arabic, but still every aspect of their survival there was loaded with confusion. Before they’d found each other, back when she thought she was the only survivor, she’d screamed for days, just let the pain leave her like a sickness, and she’d wandered up and down that sorry coastline, searching for some sign of civilisation. The island wasn’t that big and so, by the close of the second week, they’d encountered each other at the same blessedly fresh water source. A little stream, thick with fallen leaves, but crystal clear. Untouched, she’d thought, by human hands.
She was tired, drained, acutely starving to death, and he was badly injured with a gash down one leg that snaked around his Achilles’ tendon. He’d never walk properly again, but she didn’t tell him that. She washed it out as much as she could and wrapped it in leaves plucked from as high as she could climb. Less bacteria, she’d rationed. It was a miracle he didn’t die of infection, and maybe that’s what it was—miraculous, that the two of them had survived the sinking, had limped exhausted onto the same shore, had found each other under the sun’s relentless glare.
They ate sporadically in the early days: roots dug up with bare hands, strange berries despite her misgivings, the sap gleaned from a fallen tree. It wasn’t enough by half to sate her hunger, and the two of them grew to be like a pair of skeletons, lying exhausted on a trash-filled beach, beside their pathetic attempt at a rock sign: HELP. It was a thin hope, that sign; they never saw a plane fly by in the entire two year stretch they’d spent there, except for the ecstatic moment when a low flying light aircraft had come jittering across the blue endless sky above them. A search plane, two years late. Emily’s stomach had soared at the very sight of it, of the little puffs of cloud emanating from its chattering engine, and she could never forget so long as she lived the sheer bliss when she realised it had seen them, and had maneuvered to come in to land. Rescue, at last, on a sunny day.
She’d cried on the ride back to civilisation, relief mostly, lingering panic, a dull sense of reality suddenly creeping in. It had happened, their adventure, and then it was over. She need never catch another tropical fish as long as she lived. She need never filter water through straw and sand, never watch the storms whip up out at sea and pray they didn’t come inland. She need never see Hassan again, not unless she wanted.
She wants. She misses him. She texts him again: shukran jazilan lak. shukran shukran shukran. A thousand thank-yous for the man who kept her sane. He does not respond. What time is it there, anyway? Three am? Four? It’s late for her; it must be later still for him. She doesn’t blame him.
She crawls into bed. Safe, warm, full health—these are the things she took for granted, once. They’d had to rip eight teeth out. Hassan lost his leg. Their brains, too, got left behind. Neither of them came back right.
She tries to sleep, but sleep does not want to come. There is only darkness, and the circular reasoning of her brain. Over and over, she thinks: the island, the sand, the stormy sea, the chaos of the sinking boat. The captain, his voice wavering as he gives the order to abandon ship. The detritus floating on by. The lifeboats, too few. The ship’s horn as it broke in two, the lightning bolt cutting it almost perfectly down the middle. A perfect storm, so they said. The fire along the water, burning passengers and crew alike, a nightmare in technicolour.
She screws her eyes shut. She’ll have therapy tomorrow and they’ll talk about it, she will lay her emotions out bare as if they are supplies to be utilised, but they will come no closer to absolution. She will always be dying on that island, always be waiting for rescue, and so, too, will Hassan.