Page 20 of Swept Away

I pause. After five hours alone on the deck, watching the dawn, my whole body is alight with panic. When I think of a survival scenario, I imagine it would be very physical—hiking across a barren rockscape, scaling a rainforest tree, sprinting away from a score of zombies.Thissurvival scenario is the opposite. It’s basically a long exercise in sitting still.

I am a pretty sedentary person, but I’m also someone who always has my phone out, or the telly on, or a four-year-old launching themselves at me from the other end of the sofa—I’m not somebodywho should be left alone with their own thoughts. And whoever said that ocean sounds were restful had clearly never been lost at sea before, because that endless, repetitive noise in the cold darkness was a total mindfuck last night. I started hearing thingsinit—a rhythm playing out,ta-ta-da, and then a voice, on repeat, making a sound like a wolf:a-whoo, a-whoo. I’d huddled under two blankets and cried, grateful for the knowledge that Zeke was asleep and wouldn’t ever know.

The result of all this is that I am pathetically grateful for human contact, even if the human is a twenty-three-year-old stranger who knows what I look like naked.

“A harpy is like a…wrinkly old woman? Maybe with wings? You know, I’m not actually sure. It’s Greek or Roman or something.”

“You’re not wrinkly or old.”

He’s making no move to get up. I notice that he’s slept without a top on—I can see the tan width of his shoulders. I stand, shuffling my way down the side of the bed toward the door, head bowed slightly to fit under the sloping sides of the ceiling.

“You think that now, but wait until we’ve been out here for a couple of days without my retinol cream.”

“No wings, either,” he says comfortably, sitting up in bed.

I turn in the doorway. “Are you not panicking? About all this?”

“Not right now. Right now I’m waking up.”

I shake my head. I have this cruel impulse to scare him—to say,We’re screwed, don’t you see? Not a single boat has passed us in more than twenty-four hours. But another impulse swallows the words back. I don’t want him to be afraid. Yesterday morning, it was him versus me, but something has shifted in the darkness, and now it’s hard to say exactly how I see him. Still a stranger, definitely. But not an enemy.

“Come on,” I say. “We need to eat something. And then we need to make a plan.”

I gasp when I step out onto the deck, and the sound brings Zeke right up behind me in a few quick steps.

“Sorry,” I breathe, feeling the heat of his body against my back as he moves past me into the sunshine. “Sorry, sorry, I’ve not seen a ship or anything, it’s just…”

“I think it’s injured.”

Zeke is down on his knees already. Right in front of us, at twelve o’clock to the door, is a seagull. A little one, a baby, maybe. It’s browner than I’d expect a seagull to be, as if it’s not got its final feathers yet. It’s floating on the back of something—a broken kayak, snapped clean, one yellow stripe still visible on its side despite the water’s erosion. It was such a shock to step out here and find something other than blue water and blue sky.

“See how it can’t stretch out its left wing?”

I lean on the railing, looking down at the bird. Does seeing a seagull mean we’re close to land? Or is that just one of those myths, like my mum’s absolute conviction that going out with wet hair would lead to me catching a deadly Dickensian-style cold?

The seagull lets out a small sound, half mew, half caw, and I’m shocked to feel my eyes fill with tears. There is a lot to cry about right now, and this seagull is extremely low down on the list, so I don’t know what this is about. I blink them away before Zeke sees.

“We came out to make a plan,” I remind him, waving a notebook in my hand. It’s his—he dug it out of his bag yesterday for our inventory. I find the idea of him carrying a notebook around almost as strange as him carrying around a bunch of knives—I don’t know any men who write things down by hand.

He doesn’t look away from the seagull.

“Zeke? Hello?”

“Hi,” he says, glancing over his shoulder, eyes narrowed against the sun. “You OK?”

“Yeah, I just…” I pause. “Are you thinking the kayak might be useful? Do you think we should try to get hold of it?”

He’s slow to answer. I respect that about Zeke: he’s not afraid of a bit of silence.

“No,” he says finally. “I’m thinking, how do you save a seagull without Google?”

“You’re not serious.”

He frowns. “We don’t have a lot to do, Lexi. I think we can spare half an hour to rescue a baby bird.”

“How would we even do that? It’s way out of reach.”

He turns, sitting down, one forearm resting across his knees. “We came out here to make a plan, didn’t we?” he says.

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