Necessity Makes Even the Timid Brave

The nights were cold so we all slept together, loosely arranged in a pile beneath the half-shelter of overlapping leaves. I felt the ribbed fabric of my tank top, rough but warm, against the exposed skin of my neck as he shifted to my left and slung his arm around me. If he wasn’t asleep he was fooling me, his eyes closed, breathing low and regular, lips gone slack and gently parted. To my other side, Edwina had curled herself up into me, her slender arms and legs looped like tendrils around my body.

Back at the camp I’d washed his wound carefully with a precious amount of rainwater, the purest water we had available. I’d soaked and then wrung out my tank top— now, his bandage— in the same water over and over, lying it out to dry over the hot rocks in the sun. And in the meantime his wound, which had stopped bleeding, could be exposed to the healing benefits of fresh air.

“Back home you’d get stitches for this,” I said, bent down to where I was only inches away from his arm, examining the four-inch cut from his elbow to his forearm closely, my face screwed up in what had to be a very unattractive-looking squint.

“Back home you would have got stitches for that,” he replied, his voice gently pointed not in retort, but concern. He meant my forehead, the gash I’d all but forgotten about now since I couldn’t see it. The shirt dry, I re-wrapped his arm before the sun got too low.

I was thinking about the way he’d looked at me when I stripped off my sweater, and then my sweatshirt, and finally my tank top, knowing the thin cotton material would be the most effective bandage for his torn open skin. While my eyes were on his arm I could feel his eyes on me— on the one hand, he was likely dazed from his sudden slip and fall, not to mention in some sort of shock from the large amount of blood that had poured out of him, and lightheaded from hunger and thirst and too much sunshine like we all were— but on the other, there I was, kneeling in front of him without a shirt on.

“Shitting my brains out has done wonders for my figure,” I said, meaning to break the tension between us. It worked, too— I was a master at deflecting the feeling of having people perceive me, perceive my body, my looks. I’d grown up an ugly kid, which only served to help me develop my first defence mechanism— humour— but then I lost a bunch of weight and grew into my looks. I was what my mother and her friends all called a late bloomer. Anyway, self-deprecation and humour were my big guns, and I pulled them out often. He laughed, his eyes still fastened on the tiny ribbon bow between my breasts— like everything else, my bra had gone grey and dingy.

Nothing wrong with lightening the mood a little. We’d both gorged on under-ripe berries and fruit two days ago and both paid the price. Back at the camp, and now dressed again, I chewed on broken slabs of what Edwina called biscuit, a water and seed paste she’d wrapped around a wet stick and cooked over the fire.

Tim said that when it was made with flour, it was called hardtack. He said when they’d done a unit in grade five on the European settlers, his teacher had marched them all out into a back field, lit a fire, and cooked up a whole bunch of hardtack for all the kids to eat. “And then we had to line up in front of a barrel and drink water from a dipper,” he said.

“That sounds gross,” I’d said, but he just shrugged. He said it beat sitting at a desk taking notes.

Lying beside him now in our puddle-pile, I thought back to what I’d learned in grade five— The Voyage of the Mimi, specifically, the part in the movie where one of them caught hypothermia so they all had to strip naked and hop in a sleeping bag together. “It’s necessary for body warmth!” the teacher, Mr. Hollingsworth, had yelled out over the sound of the TV and the kids hollering. Some kids even covered their eyes. I was so sheltered back then that I couldn’t understand what the big deal was— so what, they were naked. Now, even though I was shivering with cold, I wished I had an excuse to strip down. A sleeping bag would have been nice, too.

I also didn’t think the hardtack was gross. Not anymore. Even now my stomach rumbled thinking about it, the firmness, the chewiness, the way it made you feel fuller (not full though) because it took so long to eat. The way its bland pastiness seemed to both coat and soothe my squalling digestive system, still painfully raw in the aftermath of all that fruit.

The thing was, I was so terrified of us all starving together out there, of never being rescued, of dying, that I truly felt my body was making one last primal push towards survival. It was hindbrain thinking. Biology. The reason people fucked one another at other people’s funerals— but we are still alive. That, and the lightheadedness brought on by chronic hunger, dehydration, and sun exposure were all making me feel slightly manic. I could feel it creeping up, a gentle, light euphoria. Endorphin city. Sure, your body is breaking down muscle for fuel but look— doesn’t it feel nice? Doesn’t it make you just want to go and fuck somebody?

I could go on rationalizing all I wanted. That was another of my well-used coping mechanisms. A smaller big gun, if you will. But as I lay there with Tim’s arm around my neck, his hard-on twitching through the front his jeans, Edwina’s arms looped tenderly around my waist, my thoughts kept going back to his eyes on my tits, his fingers brushing over what I could only imagine was by now a thick scar on my forehead. His gentle words, his touch, his soft, enduring gratitude.