Stranded (18 page)

‘Catherine,’ Cassandra said. ‘Listen to me. You will marry Philip and have his children, because that is what God wants for you.’

‘You just said,’ I was unable to stop myself pointing out, ‘that you had to work hard to get me chosen for him. So it’s more what
you
want than what God wants.’

‘Enough! You will not complain. Is that understood? I do not want to hear one more word.’

I sighed. I know when it is time to stop. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Sorry, Cassandra.’

She hugged me awkwardly. ‘That’s better,’ she said. She pulled back and looked at me with those all-seeing eyes of hers. ‘Good girl.’

I am acting from now on. I am not going to marry Philip. I do not believe in Moses, or his version of God, any more. I do not want to live here. I am ready to throw it all away and find something else. Anything will do.

Gene and Katy spend the day sitting on the rock together, fishing. They make an odd pair there, side by side above the edge of the beach. Gene is wearing the faded sunhat he was sporting on the fishing trip, and Katy has improvised a head covering by wrapping her sarong around her head like a turban. It leaves her arms and legs and back exposed, but we still have supplies of sunscreen, and she says if she can stave off the headache, she can live with everything else.

I stare at them for much of the day. They talk to each other almost constantly, but I have no idea what they can be saying. I find it difficult to talk to Katy now, because I defer to her in everything. She is so much more together than I am. Gene, on the other hand, talks intensely, normally looking very serious, and they are forever passing their water bottle back and forth, and sharing fruit.

From time to time they land a fish. That is the greatest sight in the world. Protein is, indeed, the thing that allows you to function. If I ever got away from here, I would revere protein for its quasi-magical restorative powers. I would also never eat another banana again for the rest of my life.

Getting away from here is not going to happen. This is where I live. This is where I will die. These are the people with whom I will spend the rest of my life. This stretch of sand, and the rainforest behind it, is the universe.

At least I am with tolerable people. I can live with all of them, and I admire Katy, and Ed has, somehow, become my best friend.

I wander into the warm sea and float on my back for a while. Doing that used to be relaxing when it felt like a treat, when I was on holiday. Now it is just another way of passing the time. I save it up. The sea keeps us clean, but it also keeps our skin salty and scaly, and my hair is so dry it seems about to crack. I look at the sky. I spend a lot of time looking at the sky. It changes: sometimes it is light blue, and other times it is dark blue. Sometimes there are clouds, but they are always white and fluffy, and they blow away. It has not rained. I would like it to rain, very much.

‘You look almost happy.’

I spin around, putting my feet down on white coral. Ed is standing next to me.

‘I didn’t notice you arriving,’ I say. ‘You positively startled me.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Don’t be. I thought nothing surprising was ever going to happen again. It’s good to be startled.’

He smiles. ‘Right.’

I look at him. Ed’s face is burned and his nose has peeled. I’m sure mine has too. Everyone looks ravaged by the sun. He has lost weight and his ribs are sticking out. And, like all the men, he has a beard that is growing wilder and more Robinson Crusoe by the day. All the same, I love to look at him.

It comes on me suddenly, the realisation. I have not felt any form of attraction to a man for a long time. Now my legs actually weaken beneath me, as I realise. I look at him and feel breathless with sudden desire, and I try hard to arrange my features in a way that will hide it. Get through this conversation, I tell myself, and think about this later.

Ed is the person here I want to have beside me, all the time.

‘Are you OK, Esther?’

I force a smile. ‘How old are you, Ed?’

‘Guess.’

‘Oh, don’t. I’ll only have to say something younger than I think. Younger than me. Maybe ten years younger than me? Maybe you’re thirty? So let’s log my official guess at twenty-eight.’

He laughs. ‘Thirty-one. Close. But it’s just a number here, isn’t it? We’re all in the same boat and it makes no difference whether we’re eighteen or eighty-eight.’

‘In the same boat? Unfortunate turn of phrase, that.’

‘It is, isn’t it? Oh, to be in the same boat. Apologies.’

‘I realised this morning that I have spent every single night of my forties on this island. It’s another “be careful what you wish for”, isn’t it? I would have casually said that such a thing would be heaven, before it happened. You know: “Stranded on a desert island as a birthday treat? Yes please!”’

He laughs. ‘Any idea how many nights it’s been?’

‘I completely and utterly lost count right back at the start when we ran out of water. You?’

‘I’d guess ten, but I don’t know. We should have made a tally chart or something. Or Katy should. She’s the only one who would have kept count properly.’

‘She probably knows exactly how long we’ve been here.’

‘I expect she’s not telling us because it would be bad for morale. So what do you make of Mark and Cherry?’

I stifle a laugh. I cannot actually laugh at them because of their children, but I almost want to.

‘I would never have guessed. Never. I completely believed they were newly-weds on their paradise honeymoon.’

‘I did too. I suppose when someone tells you they’re married, you don’t go around thinking: “Hmm, but are you
really
, I wonder?”’

‘Or, “Yes, but are you married to
each other
?”’

‘I feel for them. I really do,’ Ed says.

‘Me too. That guilt is awful.’

‘In fact, I feel much worse for those of you with children than I do for me and Katy. She’s right, I can see it in all of your faces. If you have a child at home, this is infinitely worse than if you haven’t.’

‘No babies in your life then, Ed?’

‘Oh, Christ no. No youthful indiscretions that bore fruit, absolutely not.’

We are swimming out to sea together, without having discussed it. I am doing a slow breaststroke. Slow is the only speed we have.

‘What would happen if we carried on?’ I wonder. ‘How far would we get before we ran out of energy and just stopped trying?’

‘Not very,’ Ed says, and he stops and spins around towards me. ‘Look, Esther. Can I say something? This is going to sound weird, so I apologise in advance.’

My feet do not reach the ground. I am treading water, and becoming very tired very quickly.

‘I can take weird,’ I tell him, suddenly alert with adrenalin. I hope that it is going to be what I want it to be. I hope that it isn’t. ‘What isn’t weird?’ I add.

‘Well.’ He bites his lip and laughs. ‘OK. Here goes. I wasn’t going to say anything, but now I think, what the hell. When I first saw you, back on that bus in that other lifetime, I thought you were incredibly beautiful. I knew at once there was something special about you. That’s why we came to Paradise Bay. Jonah and Piet were laughing at me because I wanted to go to where you were. Even though I thought it was Jonah you liked the look of, not me. And I only came on this trip because Katy said you might be going. And even now, after all we’ve been through, I still think you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met. I’m not meaning to proposition you or anything. I just thought I should tell you. That’s all. I wanted to say it, just like Cherry wanted to tell her secrets. Sometimes you just have to.’

His sunburned face is even redder than it was before. He looks away from me, as shy as a child on his first day at school.

I have no idea what to say, but I know that I am smiling.

‘Really?’ I manage in the end. ‘Seriously, Ed? Because that is not how I see myself at all. In fact that’s as far as you could possibly get from the way I see myself. I’m amazed. Sorry, that’s why I’m not managing to be gracious. Seriously? You’re not joking? You’re not just saying this for a bet with Mark . . . ?’

He smiles. ‘Don’t be silly. I’m not joking. Honestly I’m not. But the last thing I want is for you to worry that you’ve been stranded on an island with an obsessed nutcase. As I said, I’m not saying this as a prelude to anything. I’m just saying it. Because I was tired of not saying it. And because you were there, in front of me. And so it just came out.’

I look at him. He looks back. Something inside me tightens up. We gaze into each other’s eyes for a long time. I am still treading water. I want to savour this moment, but I cannot.

‘Can we swim in a little way?’ I gasp. ‘I can’t keep this going any longer.’

‘Of course. Sorry. God, I’m really sorry. You should have said.’

We swim together until we can both touch the ground. When my feet find the coral, even though it is spiky, I am so relieved that I feel myself nearly buckling.

I am acutely conscious of Ed, of everything about him, and of the small but significant distance between us. Should I say it? I wonder. I know that I will. There is, after all, nothing else to do.

‘Well,’ I say. ‘Since we’re being honest. I’ve liked you all along. You know I have. And I was thinking, just now, that . . . Oh, fuck it.’

I walk right up to him, so that our bodies are touching, and I put a hand behind his neck and pull his head forward so I can kiss him. He kisses me back. I had forgotten how it feels to explore someone new. For precious minutes I forget everything else and lose myself in the moment, in Ed.

We pull back and smile at each other. His hands are on my waist.

‘Promise it’s not just because I’m the only single straight woman here?’ I say, making an effort not to look back at the beach, where I know Jean is staring and Gene and Katy are pretending not to have noticed.

He takes my hand and holds it tightly. ‘And not because I’m the only eligible man?’

‘Promise.’

It starts to rain before the fish have finished cooking. Gene and Katy have caught six today, and we are sitting around the fire waiting for them when it happens. The sun has already disappeared behind the forest, but the sky is still light. I have been vaguely aware of clouds sweeping in, but have not paid the changing light and the static air much attention. I am too distracted.

‘Did anyone feel that?’ Cherry says. She puts a hand out flat. ‘A raindrop. I’m certain it was a raindrop.’

‘I felt one too,’ Ed says a moment later. I shuffle a little closer to him. This is not an environment for secrets, but I am pretending that no one has noticed. Nobody has said anything, and I have blanked out the little looks and the fact that his arm is around my waist, so we have, in fact, no secret at all. I am glad. I want to shout about it. I want Katy to ask me a leading question so I can talk about Ed. I am like a schoolgirl with a crush, desperate to steer the subject around to my beloved.

And now, at last, it is raining. The water we need so much is splattering down from the sky, in drops that are immediately fat and huge. The sensation of being rained upon is so novel that it makes me laugh aloud, and then I jump up and throw my head back and savour the drops falling on my face.

Water is falling from the sky. Even though it would have been so much more welcome a few days ago, it still feels like a miracle and it almost makes me believe in a supreme being. The same one who stranded us here is now showering us with fresh water.

The rain gathers momentum, and soon it is falling so fast that it becomes an attack. My hair is drenched, the salt washed right out of it. The bikini and sarong that are all I own are clinging to me. I notice people bustling around the fire, grabbing the fish out of it. Raindrops are bouncing off the sand like bullets.

There is only one thing to do. Ed grabs my hand and we turn and run for the shelter of the jungle, where we stand under the canopy and listen to the rain pounding on top of the forest’s leafy roof, and watch it blasting the sand in front of us, putting our fire out and destroying our dinner.

I look at him and he smiles down at me.

‘Quite a day,’ he says, and puts an arm around my shoulders.

I step closer and do the only thing I want to do in the world. I turn and kiss him again.

We sit in the forest, but as close to the edge of it as we can because of the noises the bugs and creatures are making in there. I still hate being on their terrain. I cannot stop imagining the massive lizards strolling all over me as I sleep, taking bites out of my face and pulling my hair out to put in their nests. More realistically, the place is full of mosquitoes, and even though the practice nurse back in the other world told me that this was not a malarial area, I do not trust the little chart she pulled up on her computer. This island was not on it, for one thing.

There is nothing we can do to keep them away, now we are in the rainforest. Nobody brought insect repellent with them when they came on the day trip; Jean says she did, but she left it in the boat and so it has gone to wherever Samad ended up. None of us bother to speculate about him any more.

We sit in a gap between the trees, closer to each other than usual. Without a fire, everything is more frightening. The high whine of mosquitoes is a counterpoint to the pounding rain. I recall myself in Kuala Lumpur, crashing into a bar to escape rain like this.

‘Here you go.’ Jean is passing out little parcels, wrapped in banana leaves. ‘It’s not going to be tasty, but it should keep you going.’

‘Tell us about dinner, Jeannie?’ asks Mark. She smiles at him. He flatters her, I think, and she has warmed to him now she knows his real story. She hated the idea of him being blissfully married to Cherry. She loves the extent of their fuck-up.

‘I present you: partly cooked sushi made from a fish whose name I don’t know. Drenched in a rainwater coulis.’

‘Yum,’ I say. ‘Thanks, Jean. Thanks for rescuing it when the rest of us were just feeling the rain in our hair.’

‘You’re welcome, darling.’ She hands mine to me. ‘But you, you grumpy old bastard, you can go last.’