Free White Light by Mark O'Flynn

squeezes.
    â€˜Buck up, old duck.’
    â€˜Don’t call me old duck.’
    â€˜Do you know these limestone stacks were formed during the Neogene period between five and twenty-three million years ago?’
    â€˜How do you know that?’
    â€˜I read a brochure last night.’
    â€˜Well, that’s not going to help us get off it.’
    â€˜The cliffs and stone stacks erode two centimetres a year. That figure must be an average because that bit,’ he waves his arm, ‘just eroded about two hundred metres in one go.’
    â€˜That’s not reassuring.’
    â€˜No.’
    He glances around to make sure we are quite in the middle.
    â€˜Hector?’
    â€˜Yes, Caroline.’
    â€˜I need to go to the loo.’
    â€˜You should have gone before we came across.’
    â€˜You saw that queue. You were the one who said we’d just nip over and back.’
    â€˜Don’t get snappy with me. I didn’t know the blasted bridge was going to collapse.’
    â€˜Neither did I.’
    Silence for a while. He looks east. I look west. A seagull lands on our island and glares at us as if to say,
Where are your sandwiches?
A part of me wonders, in the manner of the marooned, if only I were a seagull, but I am aware there is no profit to be had from this train of thought.
    I shift uncomfortably on my bottom.
    â€˜Try to take your mind off it,’ says Hector.
    â€˜All right for you to say.’
    â€˜Do you realise we are the first people ever to set foot on this island.’
    â€˜And the last. No one in their right mind would shimmy up forty-metre cliffs to say,
Ooh, look, there’s nothing here
.’
    â€˜I’m trying to be helpful, Caroline.’
    â€˜Well, you’re not.’
    Pause.
    â€˜Shall we play
I Spy
?’
    â€˜Shut up.’
    â€˜Don’t you have a postcard? We could fill that in.’
    â€˜I don’t have a pen.’
    â€˜Just like Pincher Martin, ha ha.’
    We watch the clouds for a while. One could get too used to that.
    â€˜Do you know that the Twelve Apostles used to be called the Sow and the Piglets?’
    â€˜Why did they change it?’
    â€˜Not grand enough. I don’t know. Why do they change anything?’
    I am beginning to wonder what might happen if we have to spend the night here. That thought is too awful to contemplate. Surely someone on the mainland is telephoning for assistance.
    â€˜I guess we have naming rights,’ I say. ‘What shall we call it, our island?’
    â€˜That’s the girl. Let’s put on our thinking caps.’
    The sweet, chardonnay breeze at our backs has turned into an Antarctic gale. It’s freezing, all the way from the South Pole. Perhaps the Twelve (nine) Apostles are icebergs that looked back at Lot’s wife.
    â€˜Thinking caps will blow off in this hurricane,’ I say.
    â€˜What about—The Windy Isle?’
    â€˜The Island of Hector Moreau.’
    â€˜Nice,’ says Hector. ‘The Sandwichless Island.’
    â€˜Island With No Trees. Or toilets.’
    â€˜Or banks. Or anything. We can create civilisation anew.’
    â€˜I was perfectly happy with civilisation the way it was, and then you had to drag me off in a silly campervan.’
    Hector is not listening. He is getting into the swing of things. He waves his arm grandly about the new, treeless island.
    â€˜King and Queen of all they survey.’
    â€˜Shut up, Hector… I don’t think I can hold on much longer.’
    â€˜Steady on, old girl. I think some of those people over there have telephoto lenses. We’ll be on the front page of the local rag for sure.’
    Hector is laughing at me. His shoulders are quietly shaking. We could not be more estranged if we were on a desert isle in the middle of the Pacific with a lone palm tree between us. I wonder if I could push him off the edge and blame it on the wind, but there appear to be too many