The Other Side of Nowhere (8 page)

Tomorrow the sun will be out and Nick’s dad will come get us.
He must have been freaking out about this crazy storm and how we hadn’t called him like Nick said we would.
Yeah, he’ll be out at first light tomorrow, probably with the boat police or something.
And then I thought about getting back to Shell Harbour. I smiled thinking of how Matt would demand to be the one to tell everyone what happened and would make it sound bigger than the sinking of the
Titanic
. Then we’ll go back to the farm and hang out, like I promised George we would.
And then, maybe, after a few days, Nick and I will laugh about how I’d shoved his nuisance body away under the water and how he kicked me in the head …

Yep, all we have to do is get to the other side of this night and everything will be fine.

There was something on my foot. When my eyes adjusted I saw it was a rat. Only it was the size of a cat. And it had my toe in its claws!

‘Get off!’ I jerked my legs up to my chest, frantically, and it shot off into a dark corner of the cave.

Wide awake now, I stood up and stretched against the stiffness from a night on the hard stone floor. Our campfire was dead and everyone else was still asleep. Leaving them huddled together, I slipped out of the cave and wandered through the trees to the beach, squinting at the sunlight.

The storm was long gone, leaving in its place a powder-blue sky and an even rolling swell. The only evidence of the previous night’s mayhem was a line of seaweed pushed high up the beach by the storm tide.

I dropped onto the sand and tuned into the sounds of the island. The gentle hiss of foam bubbling as each wave receded, the hum of cicadas and the chirping of a zillion waking birds.

Looking down at myself, I noticed for the first time that my legs and arms were covered in deep scrapes and blue-green bruises. Other than some stinging deep cuts on my hands from gripping the wire railing on
The Dolphin
, and a few aches, I didn’t feel too bad. But when I thought about what had happened the day before, I could hardly believe we’d survived.

The beach we’d crawled onto was crescent shaped, no more than a few hundred metres long. At the farthest point, the rocks we had narrowly avoided the night before jutted into the ocean. But they were no longer covered in an eerie mist. Instead, the sun sparkled off rock pools and highlighted the colourful patterns in the stone. Behind me, a dense jungle of trees and bushes stretched back to the base of an almost vertical rock wall. As high as a skyscraper, the wall spanned almost the full length of the beach. It was like being in the middle of a stadium and looking up at the grandstand.

At the near end of the beach, the trees were not so tightly packed together and I could see through to the boulders where the cave was. Then the beach closed out into another wall of rock, the beginning of what I recalled to be a long line of cliffs all the way down to the southern-most tip of the island. This tiny beach was the only landing spot for kilometres. I thought, not for the first time, about just how lucky we’d been.

‘Welcome to Survivor Island,’ said a voice behind me.

George sat down next to me, digging her brown summer feet into the sand. I noticed the bright red polish on her toenails and realised that we’d all lost our shoes or thongs at some point during the night.

‘Hey. Get much sleep?’

‘Oh yeah. Those rock beds, they’re gonna catch on big time,’ George said, extending her arms behind her in a long, luxurious stretch. She pulled her hair back from her face, tying it loosely in a bun on top of her head, and leant forward to rest her chin on her knees. A nasty scratch ran down the side of her neck, angry and red against the tan of her skin.

‘What?’ she asked squinting against the sun.

‘Nothing. Just looking.’

‘Weirdo,’ she teased, nudging me off balance with her elbow.

‘Bully,’ I replied, elbowing her back.

‘So how long do you think we’ll have to wait to be rescued?’

‘Not long,’ I said, surveying the water. ‘Nick’s dad must be worried out of his mind. I mean, we said we’d call and we never did. Bet he’s already on his way.’

George looked skyward, as if expecting to see a rescue plane appear at any moment. ‘I hope so. You think we have time for a swim?’

‘Sure,’ I said.

Without warning she pushed me so hard I rolled over onto the sand just as she sprang to her feet ‘Race you!’

George stripped down to her bikini and raced towards the water. Wrestling with my shirt as I ran, I only just managed to grab her as she was about to dive in. She squealed as the force of my tackle pushed us both under and as we surfaced a school of tiny baitfish darted out of our way.

We splashed and dived and bombed and laughed our way along the shoreline and then floated back with the current. I watched the way she glided through the water effortlessly, how the sun made her wet skin glisten. She stood up in the water to retie her hair and flashed me a wide smile. She really was stunningly pretty. I felt a familiar sensation, which always ended with me having to remind myself she was my cousin and if I was being truthful, I wished she wasn’t.

I could have happily hung out with her all day, just the two of us. So when Matt and Nick finally appeared on the beach I felt a little annoyed. As soon as he spotted us, Matt raced into the water, and Nick plonked himself down on the sand.

The three of us mucked around for a bit, splashing each other and bodysurfing waves. At one point, Matt swam up behind me and said, ‘Oh, yeah, I’ve found a warm spot.’

I splashed him in his goofy face, and happened to catch a glimpse of Nick, sitting alone on the beach as I did so. With a departing wave over my shoulder, I waded ashore and headed over to him.

Walking up the beach, I started to feel uneasy again. The vision of Nick drifting away was still fixed in my head. He was sitting, flicking sand with a stick. He didn’t look up as I sat down beside him. Nick was not super easy to talk to in the mornings at the best of times, but he seemed even more stand-offish than normal.

‘How’s the shoulder?’ I said, after a moment’s silence.

‘Not bad,’ he replied, with a non-committal shrug.

I picked up a stick and started to break it into smaller pieces. ‘Water’s nice. You should have a swim.’

‘Yeah, maybe later,’ he said without enthusiasm. ‘How’s George?’

‘She’s good. I guess we were pretty lucky, huh?’

Nick nodded absently. Even though part of me felt like this was a pretty typical ‘new day’ type conversation with Nick, something was different. He was avoiding talking to me, I was sure of it. All of a sudden I felt all tongue-tied, like I was trying to start a conversation with a stranger. It was a welcome distraction when Matt came bounding over and sprayed us both with a shower of water, like a dog after a bath.

‘This is unreal,’ he said slashing the air with a piece of driftwood. ‘I’m Robinson Caruso!’

‘Crusoe, idiot.
Robinson Crusoe
,’ I said, smearing water off my face.

Matt ignored me and speared his stick into a fat clump of seaweed. ‘What’s for breakfast?’ he asked. ‘I’m starving.’

‘Why don’t you catch us a fish, Caruso?’

‘Yeah, that’d be cool! Bet I could, too,’ he replied, lifting the seaweed into the air on the end of the stick. ‘Or maybe a wild pig? D’you reckon there are pigs on the island?’

‘Ah …’ I began.

‘Hey!’ Matt said, suddenly with manic enthusiasm. ‘I saw this show once, where this plane crashes into a mountain and they have, like, no food at all. So they’re hungry, right? Like starving hungry actually. You know, after a few days of eating just bugs and stuff … So, guess what? Guess what they did?’ he looked at both Nick and me, excitedly. ‘They ate each other.’

‘Who’s eating each other?’ asked George, sitting down beside me.

I threw a piece of broken stick at Matt, which he ducked easily. ‘Caruso boy, there’s not enough hunger in the universe for me to ever eat your stinking feet.’

‘As if,’ Matt said, waving his seaweed stick into my face. ‘You so would if you were starving.’

George put her finger down her throat, pretending to gag. Matt saw me looking at her and he smirked and then his whole face lit up. ‘What about George? Bet you wouldn’t mind a little nibble on her –’

‘Shut up, moron!’ I said, pushing his stupid seaweed stick out of my face. I dug my foot into the sand and flicked up a spray at him. But he ducked behind George.

‘Get off me … you little cannibal!’ she shrieked, fending him off with a playful slap.

‘Anyway, cannibal Caruso, we’ll be home before you need to eat anybody,’ I said, trying to change the subject. ‘So why don’t you just man up and shut up about breakfast.’

We all sat in silence for a few moments.

‘I guess we better get moving,’ said Nick, almost too quietly to hear. He was sitting next to me, doodling patterns in the sand.

‘What’s that?’ I asked half-heartedly, my eye on Matt, hoping I’d get a chance to whack him.

‘Well, it’s a fair walk,’ Nick said. ‘Sooner we get going, sooner we get there.’

Something in the tone of his voice made me forget about Matt and pay attention. ‘Walk?’ I asked. ‘Walk where?’

Nick tossed the stick away and, for the first time that morning, looked straight at me. His eyes were like slits against the glare of the sun. ‘To get to the other side of the island is probably a good half-day walk. Getting past this escarpment might be a bit tricky, but after that it’s mostly downhill all the way to the beach.’

George and I glanced at each other questioningly. What was Nick talking about? I looked up at the sheer face of the rock wall, the escarpment as Nick called it. It was at least ten storeys high, an almost-vertical wall of solid rock.
Trick
y,
he reckons? We’d be out of our minds to even try to climb that.

‘Nick, I don’t get it. How come we can’t just stay here?’ asked George.

‘Because it will be easier for someone to find us on the other side. We can light a fire on the beach there that’ll be able to be seen from the Harbour.’ I could hear irritation in his voice. I knew he didn’t like being questioned, but I felt torn. After everything that had happened, it seemed more important than ever to rebuild the bridge between Nick and me, like I’d done so many times before. But what he was suggesting made no sense. How could we not question him?

‘Sorry, Nick,’ I started, ‘but I don’t really get it. I mean your old man’s probably halfway here by now. And in any case it’s not like we’re a million miles from home. Someone’s gonna come by this beach, won’t they?’

‘And besides,’ added George. ‘Everyone knows the thing to do in situations like this is to stay put and wait for help to arrive.’

Nick shrugged and he got to his feet. ‘Well, you stay then if you really want to. I can go.’

‘No way, that’s just dumb,’ I said more sharply than I meant to.

Nick shrugged as he walked away. The three of us looked at each other, not sure what to do.

‘Your dad is coming, right, Nick?’ asked George suddenly.

Where did that come from?
I wondered, turning to her. ‘Of course he’s coming,’ I said, looking at Nick’s back. ‘We didn’t call. He’ll know something’s up.’

Nick didn’t answer. He just poked a broken piece of shell half-buried in the sand with his toe, his eyes downcast.

‘Nick?’ George prompted.

Nick shrugged, still looking down. ‘Of course he is. Maybe just not right away …’ His voice trailed off and was almost lost in the sound of a wave breaking on the sand.

‘What do you mean maybe not right away?’ asked George, leaning forward trying to catch his eye. ‘I mean, he’s got to be worried sick, right?’

‘I said he’ll come, didn’t I?’ Nick said abruptly.

‘Nick, you’re –’

‘Look, I don’t want to talk about my dad. All right?’ he snapped, his head lifting at last.

George stepped away, taken aback by the anger in his voice. Seeing her response, Nick softened his tone.

‘I’m just saying I can’t … we can’t rely on him to come straightaway, that’s all.’

George sighed and squatted down on her haunches. She looked up at me with raised eyebrows as if to say,
He’s your friend. Do something.