The Island Between Us

She had been on the island for a few days when she got the jeep stuck.

The track had looked worse in photographs and she had taken that as reassurance. The wrong kind of reassurance.

The morning had started grey but quiet enough. Gemma had taken the jeep, a squat, sun-faded thing that came along with the house, the kind of vehicle that communicated function without apology. She had followed the road north out of the village, past the turn-off for Old Settlement Beach, and onto the narrowing gravel that climbed into the island’s interior.

The sky behind her had been overcast but settled. Ahead, toward the hills, it had been doing something more ambiguous. She had noted this and continued anyway.

The first deterioration was almost imperceptible. The gravel thinned, then disappeared, leaving packed earth that was damp but navigable. The track narrowed to the width of a single vehicle and the vegetation pressed closer, palms and tree ferns forming a canopy that filtered the light into something greenish and dim. She found it beautiful. She also found it a reasonable justification for continuing.

The second deterioration was less ambiguous. The packed earth gave way to the island’s distinctive volcanic red, and the red, after two nights of rain, had achieved a consistency somewhere between soup and cement. The jeep began to slip. Gemma felt it in her hands first, a slight drift the steering wheel corrected for and then stopped correcting for, she downshifted, leaned forward slightly, and kept going.

This was not, she was aware, strictly rational. The lookout was a few more kilometres up, the conditions were worsening, and every instinct that had kept her professionally functional for years was noting that she had passed the point where a sensible person would turn around.

She was also aware that this was exactly why she was still moving forward. She had spent years doing what was sensible, so thoroughly and for so long that it had begun to feel like a kind of flinching.

The jeep made it another hundred metres before giving up.

It happened without drama.

The wheels found a patch where the red mud gave way entirely, and the back of the jeep slid sideways, not violently, but with the slow certainty of something that had already made up its mind. The vehicle came to rest at an angle, rear end tilted toward the slope’s lower edge, and settled there.

She tried forward. The wheels spun.

She tried reverse. The wheels spun.

The rear sank a centimetre further. She tried rocking it, forward, back, forward, back, watching in the side mirror as the tread splattered the red mud that had no intention of allowing grip.

The engine sound rose and fell with each attempt.

She turned the engine off.

The silence was absolute. Then, after a moment, birdsong.

Gemma got out and stood by the driver’s door, looking back at the rear wheel. The mud had come up halfway up the tyre. She crouched to get a better look, though looking at it changed nothing, and was still crouching when the rain started, not gradually, the way rain sometimes built, but all at once, as though a decision had been made.

The birdsong stopped.

The mud took her left sandal as she tried to take a step. Not dramatically, just a clean, efficient transfer from foot to mud with sound effects. She retrieved it and slipped it back on. The rain intensified, as though confirming something she already knew.

Squelching around the jeep, she found the other rear wheel almost as deep. She crouched and looked at the gap between the tyre and anything that could reasonably be described as solid ground.

She looked in the back of the jeep, wondering if there might be something for situations such as this. Two water bottles, her day bag with beach towel, sunscreen and a spare cover-all.

Not useful.

A first aid kit, three bungee cords, and a beach umbrella that had seen windy days.

Still not useful.

No tow rope. She hadn’t thought to worry about a tow rope and was briefly annoyed at why she should have.

She shut the door and the noise was sudden and loud.

She then checked her phone. She held it up at various angles. One bar, then none.

So. Vehicle, stuck, approximately two kilometres from the nearest proper road, on a track that had not seen another vehicle since she’d turned onto it, in rain that was still increasing, with no equipment and no communication.

She had been on the island nearly a week and knew approximately no one.

Gemma stood in the rain and let her composure settle. She was wet through and through. The red mud had splattered halfway up her calves. A slight sense of panic was stirring.

No. She was not going to panic.

She was going to need help. That was a fact.

These were two separate conclusions and she arrived at them one after the other as she stood in the rain. Either wait for something to happen, or have something happen.

She was not going to wait for something to happen.

She took her handbag from the passenger seat, tucked one of the water bottles in, and slung it crosswise over her shoulder. Her mind on the backtrack to the main road.

She turned.

She was not a woman who panicked. She also knew this was not the same thing as being unafraid.

Her eyes went to the distances available, the track ahead, the vegetation on either side, the steep angle of the slope. She catalogued them in under a second. In the way that women do when being alone has just become a fact rather than a circumstance.

She breathed once.

And then the island reasserted itself. Lord Howe. Eleven kilometres long and barely two across. A place where people left their bikes unlocked outside the café and knew their nearest neighbours by name.

By the third day she had been greeted at Thompson’s by a man she’d exchanged two sentences with. Whatever danger her body had briefly calculated felt, here, not merely unlikely but categorically wrong. The wrong fear. Applied to the wrong place.

The calculation didn’t disappear. It became manageable.

She looked at the track ahead, ready to set off.

A man was standing less than fifteen metres away, one hand resting on the strap of a backpack, wearing clothes that had clearly done time in actual weather, faded shirt, dark trousers, boots that had been through mud before.

Just as soaked as she. Unshaven. Tall, with the kind of build that declared itself without effort. He was not moving toward her. He was standing there, observing her predicament with an unhurried stillness that was either very calm or very practised and she couldn’t immediately tell the difference.

She had the odd, unwanted sensation of something like recognition, not recognition exactly, she had never seen this man before, but something that moved in the same direction. She registered it, did not know what to do with it, and set it aside.

He lifted a hand in greeting.

She watched as he moved closer.

“Hi.” She said. “I’m stuck.”

“I can see that,” he said.

He set his backpack down on some vegetation on the side of the road and looked at the rear of the jeep with the focused attention of someone looking at the problem rather than at her.

Except that for one fraction of a second, when he reached the vehicle and turned, his eyes moved across her, and in that fraction she registered what the rain had done.

Her clothes were wet through and through, sitting against her skin, her hair dark with it. She was standing in red mud in sandals, colour indistinguishable from the mud.

His gaze did not linger. It was brief enough that she would not have registered it as a look at all, except that something in his stillness altered, a fractional pause before he crouched to examine the situation, a slight adjustment of where he directed his gaze.

Then it resolved, and he was looking at the jeep and the mud with the attention of a man who had found the relevant problem.

He stayed crouched for a moment. He looked at the slope’s angle. He stood, looked at the track ahead, then behind, his expression throughout neither troubled nor dismissive. Just calibrating.

Then he looked at her directly.

“You have two options: we can either try to get it out,” he said, “or you walk back and call a tow truck for the jeep.”

She looked at him and then back at the jeep.

He’d laid out the options and waited. There was every chance she would have to walk back.

Something in her chest released by a small amount.

“Let’s try to get it out,” she said.

He nodded once.

“Get in and put it in first gear.” He moved to the rear of the vehicle and placed both hands in the middle of the tailgate. “When I say, you give it just enough, not a lot. Just enough to feel it move. If it catches, steer straight.”

Precise. Only as many instructions as necessary. He said nothing else and was already positioned, weight shifted forward, waiting.

Gemma got in. First gear. Hands on the wheel. She waited for him to say when.

He said when, and she gave it just enough, and the jeep moved.

Not immediately. There was a moment of suspension, the mud making its position clear, the tyres slowly churning through the useless rotation she’d been managing on her own.

Then something caught. A shift in the vibration under her hands, a change in the engine’s note, and the vehicle came free with a sideways lurch she corrected for automatically, steering straight as he’d told her.

She felt him at the rear, the weight and effort of him briefly part of the vehicle’s physics, and then she was about fifteen metres up the track on more solid ground and the jeep was pointing the right direction.

She pulled alongside a section where tree roots had armoured the ground enough to park without sinking and switched off the engine.

She got out and walked back. He had some mud splattered on him, shirt and forearms, trousers, less than she’d expected given what he’d just done. He brushed down his clothes and forearms as best he could and then wiped his hands on the back of his trousers with the practicality of a man who has gotten his hands muddy before and expects he will again.

She felt a small guilt about his clothes.

“Thank you,” she said. “I’ve put you through so much trouble...” She meant it. It came out the way her thank yous tended to, sincere but clipped, without the cushioning warmth that would have made it something it wasn’t. She didn’t apologise for this and he didn’t appear to require it.

“Your clothes...”

“Don’t worry.”

“Gemma,” she said. By way of introduction rather than explanation.

“Douglas,” he said.

“I must compensate you for your trouble...”

He looked at her then. Directly and without haste. It was not an appraising look. She had received those often enough to recognise them. This was different. No inventory in it. More like he was taking note of something, not what she looked like, but something about the situation that included her. She couldn’t name the distinction but she felt it.

“If we run into each other again, you can buy me a drink.” He looked up at the road ahead. “Track doesn’t improve from here,” he said. “Worse for another kilometre before it levels.”

“The lookout-”

“Will keep.” The logistical fact, said without apology. “Another day when the ground’s had time.”

Gemma looked up the track. The rain came down with no real urgency. She looked back at him through rain-soaked lashes.

“Is there another way up?”

“Not today,” he said.

She waited for the rest of the sentence and understood there wasn’t one.

Douglas picked up his pack, settled the strap on his shoulder, and turned toward the bush. He was continuing his trek.

Gemma realised that the noise must have drawn him out to see what was happening. She watched him go. He did not look back. He disappeared into the palms with the steadiness of a man comfortable in difficult terrain and with somewhere to be.

“Road back will be worse,” he called back, before he reached the palms. “Keep left at the next fork. Ground’s harder there.”

As he turned to continue walking, she caught a glimpse of him pulling what looked like a chunky phone from his belt, his thumb moving across it with the ease of habit.

She had no signal. She noted this without knowing what to do with the thought, and then the palm line took him.

She stood a moment longer than necessary. Then she got back in the jeep.

The fork came up as he had said, just before the track widened back to gravel. She kept left. The ground was harder, the volcanic soil gave way to something more consolidated, and the jeep tracked through without the pull she’d been managing on the way up.

She drove the rest of the way back with the windows halfway down because the glass was fogging, and because the air coming in was clean and smelled of rain and wet vegetation and something that belonged to this island and nowhere else.

She arrived back thinking about him.

Not about the jeep, or the mud, or the two kilometres she hadn’t had to walk. About the man who had appeared out of the trees as though summoned by nothing more than a stuck vehicle and a bit of bad luck, and who had asked what she wanted rather than assumed it.

She found herself hoping, with an intensity that unsettled her slightly, that she would run into him again. That she would, in fact, buy him that drink.

She was not a woman who hoped for things without examining why first. She examined this, briefly, and found no satisfying answer, only the fact of the hope itself, sitting there, uninvited and entirely unlike her.

She parked outside the house and turned off the engine and sat for a moment with her hands on the steering wheel before stepping out. The rain had eased to almost nothing.

She had not reached the lookout.

She left the muddy sandals on the doorstep and went inside.