I boil water and add crushed seeds and grains to make gruel, which I eat with the remaining crab claw. Again I do not offer any to Andalus.

I leave him in the cave when I go down to the beach for my morning swim.

While I swim I continue to think about the trip. The grains and tubers I can harvest a little at a time. They keep well. The fish that I smoke lasts three weeks before becoming inedible. Little is truly inedible but rotten fish is something I would rather avoid. If I take two weeks to prepare, the first fish will last a week into the voyage by which time it will long since have been eaten. A fish caught two days before I leave will last until almost the end of the voyage.

When I tell Andalus of my plans it may motivate him to work and to speak. Whether this would be out of fear or excitement I do not know.

The two peoples are prohibited from entering the other’s territory but if he has a reasonable excuse, after years of peace, it is doubtful whether he would be imprisoned. Perhaps even the prohibition has been repealed during this time. But if things have got worse, if the end of the Programme has caused tensions to rise again and supplies to dwindle, Andalus’s presence here could very well be a pretext for a resumption of hostilities. And if he refuses to speak, he will be imprisoned for certain. I imagine him standing there silent in the face of the wrath of the settlement. It will not do. I will make him aware of this. I decide to refuse him food for a while longer. That too may loosen his tongue.

I return to the cave. Andalus stares at me, watching while I pick up my axe. I can feel his eyes on me but when I look at his face I see no hostility. The only emotion I have seen is fear. For the rest he is blank.

A man with no voice and a man with no face.

I decide to tell him now of my plan to return. I sit close to him. I tilt my head to one side at first. I am still not going to tell him I know him.

‘We are going away,’ I begin. ‘We are going to go on a trip in a raft I will build. I hope you will help.’ His eyes meet mine. I stare into his pupils.

‘We are going to a place called Bran. I used to be known there. I used to be known well. Bran will decide our fate. I hope it is to be a good one.’ He drops his eyes from mine. I take his chin in my hand and lift it up. ‘Will you help?’ I ask. His mouth drops open. I think he is going to talk. He doesn’t. Instead he gets to his feet and shuffles away from me, out the cave entrance. Where he was sitting I notice something, a piece of fish. Has he been secretly catching food while I’ve been out in the forest or at the peat beds? I feel anger. I shout after him, ‘You will not plunder my island. You will not steal from me.’ I get up and go over to the entrance. He is a long way down the hill and cannot hear me. He has moved surprisingly quickly.

I am not angry for long. My anger never lasts. I am too pleased to be going back to worry about Andalus overly much. But I will stick to my plan to try to make him talk. And I won’t let him get away. He is essential to me now.

If I am to receive no help from Andalus I will need to make the most of my days. I will get up slightly earlier and forego the swim. I will alternate days of raft building with days of food collection and peat gathering. With fewer tasks in a day I can devote more time to each and accomplish more. It will be hard though and I will have little time for my survey.

It is dark today. As I set out for the forest, the clouds are so thick they shut out most of the light. It could be dusk. Though it is still dry near the cave, across the grasslands I see the rain fall in swathes, blown by the wind. Though it rarely rains heavily, today it will. It is not a good start to my labours.

I am right. The forest is wet underfoot. The rain seems to muffle any noise made by the breeze.

The first thing to do is to build the raft. I will need at least two trees for the base. The mast and oars can be made out of a third. By mid-afternoon I have felled three trees and stripped them of most of their branches. Once these are dry they will make a large bonfire. Or they will mean I can sit in a warm and completely dry cave for a few nights.

But, unless I have miscalculated, they will not be sufficiently dry by the time I leave. They would give off too much smoke. I leave the trunks where they lie. Splitting them into planks can wait for the day after tomorrow.

In the cave I put some tubers in the fire. I am exhausted and do not go out again that day. I realise it might take me a little longer to adjust to a new, more vigorous routine. I spend the last hour of daylight making annotations. I write down the number of trees I have taken, the number remaining, the ages of the ones I have cut down. All the trees I have taken seem roughly the same age. As far as I can work out they’re within a decade of each other at around fifty years old. I have three theories for this. The island experienced a few years of warmer weather when the saplings took root and now the lack of sun has stunted their growth.

They are of a variety that only reaches sexual maturity at a great age, which would be why there are no saplings. They were sown by a previous castaway, a man armed only with seeds from some abandoned part of the world, seeds which gave birth to a barren progeny.

I have not given much thought to this – that the island was inhabited before me. Yet why not? It might rain constantly but enough light gets through for vegetation other than the trees to grow. There is peat. It is surrounded by ocean, which must once have been more bountiful than now. All in all it is not a bad place to live. I could have chosen a worse place to be a castaway. Perhaps there were people here first. The common age of the trees is a possible clue. There could be signs of previous humans all around, things that are there but that I cannot see.

I could be living in the middle of a ruined city surrounded by ghostly chatter. We see what we want to see after all. But I am not convinced.

I feel that I am the first one here, the first one to make his mark in this watery prison.

I do feel as if I am not alone though. The figures amidst the trees, heads peering over cliff tops, bodies merging into the black cliff walls.

A consequence of being alone I tell myself. And of the life I have lived.

The longer I have not been with others the more I imagine others, the more I feel I am being watched. Of course I am not alone now.

Andalus, or Andalus’s shadow, is with me. It is possible he follows me in such a way that I do not see him but I doubt it. He would not be able to hide from me, a man who has been living on this small island for a decade. He is too large to be stealthy and even if he weren’t the island is mostly flat with little tall vegetation. Unless he was creeping through the mud on his belly I would be able to see him easily.

I do not feed him in the morning. Still he says nothing. I cannot, in good conscience, starve the man. Besides, I would not be able to return without him. My plan now is to feed him once a day at irregular times.

I reason that if I can create uncertainty about whether he will or will not be fed he may be moved to question my actions. On a grander scale, this was why there was a war. Our uncertainty over whether there were enough resources for all led us to fight for our share. It led us to fight Andalus’s people and it led to the Programme, which was, after all, a way to ensure there were never wars over food, land and water ever again, a way to ensure we knew what the future held. The Programme was put in place to prevent itself ever being necessary again, a contradiction my people lived with for many years.

I will not kill him but I will provoke him. It will be for his own good for he is unlikely to get much sympathy in the settlement if he cannot explain himself. That I treat him like an animal is not lost on me. Until he communicates with me that is the way I must be with him, for he can deserve no better.