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Can you read this? I’m writing with a piece of charcoal cut from one of the charred beams in the church. The pen finally ran out, and when it did I felt most alone since the crash.

Even if I ran out of charcoal I’d cut my finger and write in blood.

I’ve built a fire in the ruin. Not cold, but the flames warm the desolate landscape, the distant stars and a dead moon rising.

Beyond my vision there’s a city rush hour of movement, an insect metropolis scourged by the tongues of lizards and the teeth of rodents. And these predators are the hunted too, the smaller reptiles and mammals running from their own demons, each death a transfer of energy and verve, the heat of the sun passed from plant to blood and back to earth.

But the cycle of living is absent from this starlit scene. The whole universe has frozen. I’m no more than a figure in a painting, a brushstroke fixed in time.

So when I see motion, the bright white dot of a satellite tracing an orbit above the stratosphere, the solar panels angling the light of the moon to my lonely fire, it’s as beautiful as an angel gliding through heaven.

Before I’m rescued, and just in case I’m not, I want to tell you something. And it’s with this need I’m suddenly energised, maybe a final burst of living for this one last entry. Because suddenly the fear of being unfinished, incomplete before you, makes me realise if I do anything right now, it’s to tell you the reason I didn’t want to speak about my parents is because I’ve never known them. Until last year they were as good as dead. I knew only they gave me up the day I was born, passing me on to a home, then an old woman called Nana May who potted jam and ironed my socks and read fairy tales till I slept and dreamed of those castles in the sky. Two days after my tenth birthday she died. I’ve always thought of her wandering the woods of Sleeping Beauty, or the garden of the Selfish Giant, picking apples and filling her apron pocket.

She left me well mannered, attentive and polite. A boy who made his own bed and washed the dishes, a good son. But ten’s too old for a new start, a new family. I bounced from home to home, foster parents and dormitories, stark rooms where we ran wild, rooms that were locked at night so we’d still be there in the morning. And those clattering canteens the mornings of my childhood, everything I owned labelled with my name. Until sixth form, when I realised that university was my escape, filling in a grant form with the words ‘Not applicable’ in the box for family.

For three years I belonged. The other students, the rugby club, lecturers and friends, knew nothing of who I was, or was not. No false pity or tears. I thought I’d been born again, free of the past.

But then my parents returned, wanted in on my life now I was a graduate with a degree, a success. They tracked me down through the adoption agency. I arranged a meeting in a shopping centre, outside a fast-food restaurant, anonymous and sterile. From the mezzanine level I watched them wait and check their watches, unfold a piece of paper with directions. Like two lost tourists, these strangers that shared flesh and blood. I watched until my mother looked up to the balcony. We caught eyes. Did she recognise the boy she bore? But I left them standing there, apart from the world and, I hoped, feeling abandoned. By the end of that day I had a flight booked to Darwin.

So I flew to the other side of the planet, escaped. Or at least thought I had. Until you asked me to talk about my family. You wanted a history, and I gave you a blank page, not the story of failed adoption, foster care and neglect.

That first time we stood naked in the desert, the cloudless dusk blinking with stars, when we were silent, almost afraid of speaking, I was free again. Because I had a future, with you.

Now that’s in doubt. And only a dying man should have visions of murdered priests and burning chapels. So, if my rescue is late, can you do me a little favour and tell them I’m