Authors: Emily Barr
Stranded
Emily Barr
Copyright © 2012, Emily Barr
The right of Emily Barr to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
For James, Gabe, Seb and Lottie, as always,
with lots of love.
Acknowledgements
Thanks first of all to my friend Vanessa Farnell for accompanying me on the research trip to Malaysia. Someone had to help check out those paradise beaches and you threw yourself into the assignment with admirable dedication.
Melissa and Cory Anderson won a competition to have a character in this book given a name of their choice, and named him after their son Jonah. He is the handsome one on the beach, as I’m sure he will be, in the real world, in years to come.
Thanks to the friends who keep me going on a day to day basis, and particularly to Kerys Deavin, Jayne Kirkham, Helen Allies and everyone I chat to in the school playground. Often you’re the only people I speak to all day.
Thanks to Sarah Duncan, Liz Kessler, Sarah Moss and Craig Green for writerly solidarity. And to the children in the school writing club: you have no idea how much your enthusiasm and brilliantly lateral approach makes me laugh and inspires me.
Thank you to my local independent bookshop, the Falmouth Bookseller, and particularly to Ron Johns and Katy Lazenby for support, and also wine.
My family, as ever, have put up with my erratic hours and distraction as I was writing Stranded: James, Gabe, Seb and Lottie, thank you, as ever, for taking it all in your collective stride, as you always do.
Enormous thanks to Sherise Hobbs, Leah Woodburn, Emily Furniss, Veronique Norton and everyone else at Headline for the invaluable support and the spot-on editing and encouragment. Huge thanks to everyone at Curtis Brown, and particularly to Jonny Geller. There’s no one in the world I’d rather have fighting my corner.
I roll over on to my back and open my eyes. The world has not ended overnight: the cloudless sky is pink where the sun is rising over the sea. I squeeze my eyes tight shut and try again. If I concentrate hard enough, perhaps I will be able to wake up at home.
I try with all my might to create my own bedroom in Brighton around me. The sand under my back becomes a mattress, the tatty sarong a duvet. The shifting, snoring people around me are transformed into my beautiful Daisy, sleeping just across the landing.
Much of the time I do not believe life on this island is real. I am strangely certain that I could pull myself home if I tried hard enough. I give it everything I have, this morning. If I wake up at home, I will appreciate everything I have like never before.
It doesn’t work, of course. It never does. The beach is still there. The water that imprisons us here is still lapping on the shore like something from a travel agent’s twisted brochure. I pull myself into a sitting position and look around. The sea is glimmering in the breaking dawn, and it is flat. This morning’s air is perfectly still. The sand is exactly the way it always is. No boat is visible on the horizon. No one has come in the night to rescue us. Nothing has changed. We have been stuck here for many days. Nobody has counted; the time has drifted by. We are still alive, all seven of us, though one is ill and at least one other is mad. The rest of them are still sleeping, so I stand up and pad away, savouring time on my own. I walk to the edge of the jungle, listening to its sounds. Everything in there is waking up. The rainforest teems with life. From the smallest insect to the giant lumbering dinosaur lizards, the inhabitants of the island’s interior are harmless, to us if not each other. There are no tigers in there, no rabid monkeys. What peril there is probably comes from the mosquitoes.
My hair is straw. I dread to think how leathery my face has become: it is peeling in places, though we still have a little sunscreen left. I am wearing the bikini and sarong I happened to have on when this started. If I had known what I was heading towards, I would have worn something sturdier and brought supplies. The sarong used to be pink with gold lamé at the edge. I was pleased when I bought it in Accessorize at Gatwick. Now it is greyish and the gold thread is broken and sticking out everywhere. There are three holes in it. This is a rubbish sarong. I never expected, when I bought it, that it would become the sole thing I owned.
If it weren’t for Daisy, back at home wondering what has become of me, I would set out into the sea and swim until my body gave up. As it is, I just have to wait.
The day stretches ahead. All we do is find food and fetch water. We have no energy for anything but the struggle to stay alive. This is no life at all. I lean against a tree and sob. This is where I will die. We will all die here, and we know it. I hope it happens soon.
Four weeks earlier
When the hotel spa opens at seven, I am there, my bikini under my clothes, ready to swim. I see no one but the man behind the desk, who smiles warmly and hands me a fluffy white towel before going back to his newspaper.
The floor is dark marble with a decking pathway leading to the pool to stop you slipping. I pass showers with heads the size of dinner plates. The areas are separated from one another by bamboo screens. It all feels hugely luxurious, a million splendid miles from my messy little terraced house at home. The warm air cossets me like a duvet. Everything is perfect. I have never been to a spa before; now I never want to leave.
I hope no one will notice that I am an impostor. I am not the kind of woman who comes to a place like this, yet I am doing, I think, a reasonable job of pretending to be one. Simply being a Westerner seems to be good enough. I stand in front of a mirror in the changing area. It is dimly and flatteringly lit, and if I toss my hair back and pose in a certain way, I can make myself look like the person I want to be. I can pass for a confident traveller who is here on her own because she likes it that way. At least the divorce has made me lose weight. I had my hair coloured before I came away, and now I see that my disguise is adequate for the moment.
No one will look at me and guess that I am petrified of everything. It is, though, unusual for a woman in her later thirties to be wandering around Asia on her own, so perhaps an observer might briefly wonder what has brought me here.
I do not look like a middle-class drunk, a comically inadequate wife, a badly dressed mother who turns up at the school gates too late and who has to go and find her daughter sitting, mortified, in the office. No school office staff would wrinkle their noses at the smell of lunchtime wine coming off this woman. No husband would declare himself bored senseless by her stupid behaviour.
Rather than having a window, the pool is open to the outside world, high up where no one could possibly see in. I am on the second floor up here, and all that is visible is a few clouds and some treetops. The air is steamy and hot.
I test the pool’s water with a toe: predictably, it is gorgeously warm. Soon I am ploughing up and down, counting so that I can make sure I have done it twenty times before I allow myself to succumb to the massaging jets that ring the pool’s fringes. Then I try each of them in turn: the jacuzzi, the overhead shower with its magical water pressure that pummels my shoulders when I stand below it, the shelf to lie down on, just below the pool’s surface, where hundreds of little jets spring up below and pound the body with a surprising force.
I lounge in the steam room for ten minutes, and wonder whether I could forget the grand plan and the paradise beach and spend the full three weeks right here.
I sit down to breakfast calmer than I have been for years. I now understand why women rush to spas squealing about ‘pampering’, a word that has always been guaranteed to lead me directly into homicidal rage. I would still rather poke my eyes out with the serious-looking fruit knife in front of me than be “pampered”, but I can, now, see the appeal of the spa. It is a hugely indulgent misappropriation of the world’s water and energy resources, but I cannot help loving it (and that is why humanity is doomed, encapsulated in one idle thought).
It is easy, now, to convince myself that I am enjoying the freedom of being alone. With the guidebook propped open under the edge of my plate, I work to renew my motivation to leave the city and head, tomorrow morning, towards the island. On the island, the sea will be my spa. Lying on the sand will be my pampering. And I will be in touch with nature, not cloistered away from it with other paying customers.
Theoretically, you should not have to fly thousands of miles and then set off on an epic land journey on your own, just to prove a point to an ex-husband who has told you you would be ‘incapable of organising fucking Mass at the Vatican’.
‘You couldn’t organise Mass at the Vatican either,’ I retorted, when he said that. ‘Imagine the pressure. All those little things you’d have to get right. And you’re not a Catholic – you’d have no more idea how to go about it than I would. We are both entirely incapable of organising Mass at the Vatican.’
Chris rolled his eyes. ‘We are a match made in heaven,’ he said as he walked away. He used to do the eye-roll whenever I spoke. I am here to show him that I am capable and brave; but I could have done that by staying at home and living happily without him. God knows, it would not be hard to forge a better life than his.
Coming here is completely out of character for me. I have never done anything remotely like it.
The reason I am in Malaysia, of all places, is because of a chance conversation I had at a party I gatecrashed. I decided to follow my instincts, or what I thought were my instincts (because I have never really been able to separate a good instinct from a self-destructive urge), partly to surprise everyone and mostly to amaze myself. As soon as I closed the front door, heaved my backpack on to my shoulders and started towards the station, I wished I had set my sights on something more attainable, like, for instance, exploring Scotland.
Happily, the hotel has an impeccable dining room, where no one looks at a lone woman. There is a wall of cascading water behind me, which is distracting, and I keep looking round at it even when I know exactly what it is. On the next table, a couple are arguing in quiet, deadly tones. I cannot understand their words, but the dynamic is as reassuringly familiar as an old fleece. When the woman’s mobile rings they both half-smile in relief. She immediately starts shouting down the phone, taking it all out on whoever is on the other end, in what might or might not be Mandarin.
I know that, when breakfast is included in the room price, you have to eat everything you possibly can to see you through the day. With this in mind, I have a plate full of tropical fruit, followed by two pieces of toast, and a large helping of the Malaysian breakfast, which is curry and rice. I drink as much coffee as I can persuade the waitress to pour me, and then I remember that I have only spent half a day exploring this city, and that there are many more sights I need to tick off.
I write a text to Chris’s phone, saying: ‘FOR DAISY. Off out exploring the city again. Breakfast was great, the spa amazing, will bring you here next time. Hope you’re having fun – love you lots and miss you hugely. Mum xxxxx’ I imagine Chris picking up the phone and reading my message before handing it to her. Even read through his eyes it passes muster, so I click ‘send’. Then I pack the guidebook back into my bag and head out into Kuala Lumpur.
