Read by Zoë Gardner
It was when our cruise ship upended, burst into oily black flames, and finally sank that I really started to worry. Duncan, my companion in the lifeboat, who’d been filming everything on his iPhone, muttering about YouTube gold, sucked his teeth like a larcenous plumber and stared across at me with a hint of satisfaction.
“Looks like it’s just you and me now.”
We’d clambered into the dinghy, soaked, terrified and shivering, four hours before. I’ve never been a good sailor, and I’d been hunched against the stern, puking, since. But his words made me feel even sicker, and if you’d met Duncan, you’d know why.
“Awesome,” I said weakly, retched, and fainted.
*
Duncan worked in media. That’s why, instead of grabbing food, water and passport from his cabin when we hit the storm, he took his iPad, iPhone, and coke. That’s also why, given that this island doesn’t have wifi, and Duncan ran down his iPhone battery updating his status to “Duncan is shipwrecked, OMG it’s just like Lost!” we were fucked.
“Now Helen,” he said in that patronising account-manager tone I learned to hate when I worked on reception for an ad-agency, “we’re not necessarily fucked. Let’s take a positive mental attitude and try to think outside the box.”
“What box?” I spat. “You wasted your battery on stupid tweets everyone will think are a joke, instead of calling for help. We are fucked, and you fucked us.”
Duncan steepled his fingers.
“I’ve been in situations like this before,” he began. I sat bolt upright.
“Have you?” I said, dripping sarcasm like fat from a George Foreman grill. “Have you really?” Then it occurred to me that it was just possible his agency had sent him on some Iron Man training weekend to bond the sales-team, and that maybe he had had to survive on a desert island before. Perhaps there was some Ray Mears in Duncan Nisley after all.
“Did you ever have a job interview where they give you ten items for a trek through the desert, and you have to arrange them in order of importance?” he asked me, head tilted earnestly.
“No …” My job interviews usually consist of questions about whether I can do the job; but of course, media’s different. “What can we do with what we’ve got, then?”
“The take-home from the exercise,” said Duncan, “was that when you’re stranded, the most important thing is … fresh water.” He nodded smugly as if to say “didn’t expect that, did you?”
Could I beat him to death? Perhaps the iPad would come in handy after all.
“How long did this exercise take?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Four hours? Was really fun actually. We all went to Soho House after.”
Could I beat him to death with the iPad, then eat him? Best not, for the moment. I was pretty tired, and we might get rescued in the morning.
“Night Duncan,” I said, “I’m going to sleep. Don’t let the fire go out.”
*
He let the fire go out.
“DUNCAN!” I yelled, when I woke to its grey, cold ashes next morning. “WHAT THE FUCK?!”
Leaves stirred and birds whirred in the foliage as Duncan lolloped out of the jungle looking aggrieved.
“What’s the problemo?”
It emerged that after last night’s conversation he’d got up early to look for water. He hadn’t woken me for fire-watch because, I quote, “ladies need their beauty-sleep!” When I reminded him that we’d need fire to keep warm and cook on, he pouted and said I should make my mind up which I wanted, fire or water, because he wasn’t a mind-reader.
“Duncan,” I said gently, “it’s not either-or. This isn’t a priority list for a job interview, it’s a survival situation. We need fire and water, otherwise we’ll die. Do you understand?”
He narrowed his eyes haughtily.
“I,” he told me, “have an honours degree in Media Studies from Lancaster University. I am not stupid. Look.”
Though his search for water hadn’t succeeded, he had found some interesting-looking mushrooms. “They’re like the chua min I tried in Mongolia,” he said excitedly. I thought they looked like mushrooms a girl at my primary-school died from eating, but I didn’t mention this. If he survived, we had a food-source, and possibly headtrips, and if he didn’t; well, it was win-win for me.
“OK,” I said cheerily, “you test them and I’ll look for water.”
I set off into the bushes, picking a few likely-looking fruit, scaring many lizards and birds, and finally, after several sweaty hours in the tropical sun, finding a freshwater pool fed by a tiny burbling stream.
Unfortunately, when I returned to share the good news, Duncan was completely off his tits. The mushrooms were indeed magic: he’d stripped naked and was performing a strange kata facing a palm-tree. Surprised by my approach, he fell backwards into the sand, grinning. His pupils were black gobstoppers, his skin a weird shade of pink.
“Hi Helen,” he said dreamily, “the Island has elected me its King. I agreed to a six-month probationary period, stock options and an index-linked bonus. It’s paying me in coconuts. Look, coconuts.”
He gestured to a couple lying beside him. I shrugged, sat down and tried to restart the fire with his half-empty lighter and some dry grass. As the huge yellow moon bloomed over the island like a tropical flower and Duncan wittered gently beside me, I wondered whether we’d ever get off this island, and what we’d do in the meantime.
*
The answer turned out to be: get wrecked.
That first shroom-trip changed something in Duncan. He’d always been a git, but in an ineffectual, middle-managerish way: now he was a grandiose git. He banged on about being King of the island, and his insinuations that I should be his Queen became less subtle as time passed. He obviously reckoned that eventually I was bound to give in; it was only a matter of time, patience, and finding the right drugs.
Ah, the drugs. For Duncan, that island was paradise. Food-wise, the birds were tough and bland, the frogs tasted like crap and most of the vegetation was either horrible or mildly toxic, but on the plus side, almost everything seemed to have some sort of upper, downer or hallucinogenic property. The frogs, for example, sent you on a psychedelic holiday if you licked them; no wonder they looked smug. Even the squirrelly rat-things had an anal gland that kept you up all night like a massive dose of speed. Duncan spent months searching for an aphrodisiac that was also a sedative, in the hope that Nature’s Rohypnol would persuade me to sleep with him. I crossed my legs and prayed for rescue.
The other thing we did was play Either/Or, a simple game which led to long hypothetical discussions.
“Food or drugs?” he asked me one night as we sat on the beach gazing glumly out to sea.
“Rescue.” I replied.
He frowned and toyed with a nearby frog. He let them swim in coconut milk so they were nicer to lick. They didn’t seem to mind. “Apart from that,” he said.
I couldn’t think of anything I wanted more than rescue, except for a break from sodding Duncan.
“Food, then. I know what you’d say.”
He beamed. “I knew it! Now, hypothetically of course, would you sleep with me if I made you a really good dinner?” I shrugged noncommittally. That wasn’t going to happen unless he cut off a limb and cooked it. And after months of fish, frogs and mushrooms, I wouldn’t’ve said no.
“Maybe.”
His face fell. “Only maybe? But don’t you miss it? Sex, I mean. Don’t you get, you know, itchy and horny and just, fucking insane, a little bit, if you don’t get any?”
He had a crazed look in his eye, but that might have been the amphibian high.
“Duncan,” I said, “women are like camels: we can go a long way on a single hump.”
He scowled, tossing the frog back into its milk-bath. “But we’ve not even had one!”
I thought of Lorenzo the wine waiter, going down the night before the ship did, and grinned. This seemed to infuriate Duncan even more.
“I’ll show you!” he yelled. “I’m King of this island and I’m going to make you a dinner fit for a Queen.”
I rolled my eyes. “Ha! Find me a turkey in this bloody place and I’ll give you a handjob.”
OK, I’d licked a bit too much frog. OK, I was only joking. But given what happened next, I probably shouldn’t have said that.
*
When Duncan disappeared for a week, I didn’t worry. He often went on so-called “shaman journeys” through the interior in a search for more and better drug-frogs and speed-squirrels, returning filthy, exhausted and incredibly high. But after a fortnight of sweet solitude, I grudgingly accepted that I ought to look for him. Knowing King Duncs he was lying at the bottom of a ravine with a broken leg, chatting to hummingbirds or handing out knighthoods to shrubs.
Just as I was leaving, the man himself came crashing through the brush, grinning loonishly and staggering under the weight of what looked like a huge turkey. He pointed at me imperiously. “The Queen will be seated,” he said, “while the King prepares her dinner!”
“Oh my God,” I said. He’d done it. He’d actually found me, if not a turkey, something similar enough that manual relief was definitely a fair price to pay. Luckily though, I had something better up my sleeve.
Over at the kitchen-stone, he hacked the thing into manageable bits, plucked a leg the size of a T-bone, and speared it to roast over the fire. It smelled amazing: I couldn’t wait to have my first delicious meal on this godforsaken sand-dune. As he served the steaming bird onto makeshift palm-leaf plates, I almost warmed to him. Good old Duncs; high as a kite most of the time, but a surprisingly effective hunter-gatherer. The turkey-thing tasted incredible, and I decided he thoroughly deserved his return gift of a rare blue gecko which spat an Ecstasy-like substance when threatened
“Oh Helen,” he said, visibly moved, “that’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever got for me.”
“Nicer than a handjob?”
He considered. “Yeah …” I grinned, and we high-fived. And then I saw the offcuts lying beside the kitchen-stone, and felt a vague, foreboding sense of recognition. I walked over, picking up the head from where Duncan had tossed it. A downcurved, gentle beak; big, stupid eyes, a large roundish head covered with dull-brown feathers. It looked like something I’d seen in a history book once. It looked like:
“Duncan,” I said calmly, “is this ... a dodo?”
Three things happened then. Firstly, a horn blared as a rescue-ship rounded the bay; secondly, we both started waving madly, and thirdly, there was a crunch as Duncan trod on the gecko’s cage, setting it free. For a moment it sat motionless; then it skittered across the sand like a skimmed sapphire, and Duncan, seeing his beautiful high pegging it for the undergrowth, galloped after it.
“Nooooo!” he yowled, and chased the little creature into the shadows of the jungle, the unasked Either/Or question, rescue or drugs, finally, definitively answered.
*
The ship’s crew searched the island for three days, finding drug-frogs, coke-fruit, weed-veg and magic-mushrooms aplenty, but no Duncan, and no dodos. I know Duncan’ll manage: frankly, it’s the dodos I worry about.
I comfort myself that Duncan was always more into frogs than food anyway; that he only killed one because he knew I was craving turkey. I remember that, friendly and stupid though they are, there’s more of them than there are of him, probably.
And when all else fails, I remind myself that Duncan is a tripped-out sales executive with a degree in Media Studies from Lancaster University: and that if it comes to a battle of wits, the dodos’ll probably be fine.
© Richard Meredith, 2013
Richard Meredith is readjusting slowly to life in the UK, having recently returned from a stint in New York, He studied English at York University and has spent the last ten years working in television. His story The Museum of the Future will appear in the Arachne Press/Liars' League anthology Weird Lies in late 2013.
As one of The Congress of Oddities, Zoë Gardner wrote and performed in Edinburgh and made The Odditorium (ITV2). Acting includes: Katy Brand’s Big Ass Show, Cowards, Ideal, We Are Mongrels. In July she can be heard on Radio 4 playing all the female roles in Colin Hoult’s Carnival of Monsters.
Comments