Stranded (19 page)

‘Fine,’ says her husband.

The rain clouds suddenly cover the moon and we are plunged into absolute darkness. It is only when that happens that I realise it has not been properly dark in all the time we have been here. The sky has always been clear and at night the moon and the stars have shone down on us without stopping.

‘Oh,’ says Katy.

‘Who turned out the lights?’ says Gene. He says it in a jokey voice, but no one laughs.

I reach for Ed’s hand, and squeeze it when I find it. He squeezes back, so I assume I have got the right person. The rain is pounding more heavily than ever. The mosquitoes are around us in a cloud, and when I put my other hand in front of my face I cannot see it, not even when it is before my eyes.

‘I don’t like this.’ Cherry sounds as scared as I feel.

‘Neither do I,’ Ed admits.

‘Well.’ Katy draws a deep breath. ‘There’s absolutely nothing we can do. Nowhere we can go. We just have to sit here and wait for as long as it takes. At least we’re together. The mozzies are going to feast on us all they want. I don’t fancy actually sleeping here because of all the . . . wildlife. So we might have to sit here all night.’

‘At least it’ll get light in the morning.’ I am trying to be positive, but it just sounds stupid. I wanted to spend tonight with Ed. I wanted to slip away with him.

‘As far as we know.’

‘What does that mean, Mark?’ Cherry demands. ‘I mean, what the hell? Why wouldn’t it get light in the morning?’ Her voice is rising.

‘I just mean . . . Maybe it’s not that Samad didn’t come back for us. Perhaps something bigger has happened. I’ve been thinking this for a while.’

‘Something bigger, such as?’ Jean’s voice is sharp.

‘Such as? OK. Here are some options. Don’t tell me none of you have thought of any of this, because I won’t believe you. There are rogue Russians out there with nukes pointed all over the place. It’s always been poised on a hair trigger. Maybe that’s happened. Maybe they accidentally nuked Alaska or something. Perhaps there’s been a nuclear war. It wouldn’t take much for that to engulf the world. That could be the sun going out for ever. This could be radioactive rain.’

‘Oh Mark, shut up.’ I hear myself saying it, though I hadn’t planned to. ‘You’re being stupid. I don’t think the sun goes out from a nuclear exchange between America and Russia, does it? Not in Malaysia?’

‘No,’ he says. ‘I know we all like to think that Samad fell over and banged his head, because that’s a lovely benign, local explanation. But if they started throwing nukes around, India and Pakistan would have joined in. We’re not so far from that. Also, Japan’s just over there. Anything could have happened.’

The rain is still falling. I cannot believe we longed for this. I force myself to swallow pieces of half-cooked fish even though they are cold and wet, and pick bones out from between my teeth whenever I find them. This is not the moment to choke. I shuffle right up close to Ed and wonder if Mark and Cherry and Gene and Jean are doing the same with one another.

‘You can shut up, Mark,’ Gene says suddenly. ‘There is no point scaremongering like that and it’s a stupid way to talk. Whatever has happened, we’re stuck here and there’s not a thing we can do about any of it. If anyone wants distracting . . . well, I’m prepared to follow Cherry’s lead from last night and let you all know why it is that you’ll have noticed Jean and me not getting on harmoniously much of the time. Katy’s already heard the whole tale while we’ve been fishing, so I hope she’ll put up with hearing it all over again.’

‘You know I will, Gene,’ she says in the most gentle voice I have ever heard her use. ‘Of course I will.’

‘Jeannie, you don’t mind?’

‘If you must. But I’ll be correcting you if need be.’

‘Don’t I know it.’

Everyone is silent for what feels like a long time. Ed’s body is warm and comforting next to mine, and in spite of everything I want to lead him away quietly into the rainforest, away from everyone. But I don’t.

Things fly and creep, cheep and crack twigs all around us. The rain intensifies. Drops are coming through the forest canopy and splashing on to us.

‘Well,’ says Gene. ‘We’ve both kept a lid on it because we agreed not to talk about it while we were here. But I can tell you this: none of you besides Katy here knows either of us at all, because you cannot know us without knowing about what has gone on in the last two years.’

‘You know we have three children?’ Jean says. ‘A girl and two boys. Two little granddaughters too.’

We all murmur our assent. We do indeed know this.

‘Well, there is something we haven’t told you about one of our boys.’

‘Jeannie!’ Gene is annoyed. ‘I’m telling it. Butt out.’

‘Well don’t expect me to let you present it all your way.’

‘
I know
. Let me start at least.’

‘Go on then. We’ll let them judge, shall we?’

He sighs.

‘I’ll tell you the tale. Jeannie will tell you I’m wrong. You can do your best to work it out. But my way’s the right way. Here goes.’

And, in the absolute darkness, he begins to speak.

We listen to Gene’s story in total blackness, to a background of unsettling jungle creatures and pounding rain. I am gripped from the very beginning. Ed’s arm around me is my anchor to safety, and I wish we had got together earlier. It suddenly feels as if we have wasted too much time.

‘We both agreed to come to Malaysia, and not a second has gone by that I haven’t regretted it. Of course, there’s being stuck here, but even before then it wasn’t working out as it should have done. Not the healing and refreshing break. Turns out – and I don’t think Jeannie’ll disagree with me on this one – that if you go away from the thing that is central to your life, you see what’s become of your relationship and it isn’t necessarily going to be pretty, hey?

‘We would never in a million years have come to Malaysia. When we went on holiday, we stayed in Australia. It’s a country you don’t need to leave. You’ve got the beaches, the mountains, the interior, you’ve got cosmopolitan cities and—’

‘Gene,’ says his wife, her tone withering. ‘You’re not the fucking tourist information centre. Get on with it.’

‘Yeah. I’ve not always lived in Australia, you know. That’s why I like it so much. Anyway, we weren’t meant to be here. It should have been Ben. Our youngest. Little Ben. He was the one coming here, and he was coming on a trip of a lifetime with Samira, his fiancée. I’m going to say what happened quickly, to get it over with, because even though we’re his parents, which means we’re meant to be the strong ones, the ones in charge, neither Jeannie nor me is very good at dealing with the reality of this. As we have discovered since we’ve been away from home.

‘Ben had been in hospital for two years and fifteen days when we came on this little jaunt. I hate the fact that I’ve lost track of the days. I want to know what day it is, because I want to think about it being the same day where he is, in Brizzie. I know this, though: he has had two birthdays and two Christmases in there, and by now it’s probably been his third Easter. I always had the highest level of health insurance, because I worked on the basis that you had to be ready for the unimaginable to strike.

‘And the unimaginable did strike.

‘Ben was thirty-one. Now he’s thirty-three. So there he is: a thirty-one-year-old man, engaged to be married to Samira, who is a lovely girl, and we’re looking forward to some more grandchildren coming along. Jeannie and Samira and Samira’s family are planning the wedding, which is going to be part Hindu, part secular Western style, which all seems to be an excuse for a mammoth party that lasts weeks. All of which is fine by me. More than fine. Perfect. Ben lives in Brisbane, in West End, which, believe me, is a cooler place to be than Chapel Hill, where his old parents live, but not so far away. He comes over to see us every week or two. He’s a good boy, the best: handsome and clever and great at everything he does. A hell of a rugby player. We used to worry about Ben and his rugby, didn’t we, Jeannie? All those injuries you hear about. Broken necks. But he seemed untouchable. No broken bones, never been X-rayed before. He never caught the flu, never got the vomiting bugs that went around. He used to get awards at school for perfect attendance because he was never sick.

‘And then it all caught up with him at once.’

‘Oh Gene,’ says his wife, and now her tone is completely different. ‘Do you have to say it? I don’t want to hear it, not here.’

‘It’s a bit late now, darling.’ His attitude to her is different too. He is much gentler. ‘Come on. Me saying it isn’t going to make it real. It’s already real.’

‘Don’t tell us if you don’t want to,’ Ed says.

‘No, I’ve said I’ll tell you, and I will. I want you to know. It was the quickest thing to happen. When you realise that however much you try, no matter what you do, you can’t go back and undo something, that destroys you. It should be the easiest little thing: you should be able to go, “no, that wasn’t right – we’ll go back and do it differently”. If there was any way in which I could turn back time and put myself there in his place, then I would. I would do it a million times over. But I can’t, and that is the bleak truth of the universe. When we washed up here, I felt the cosmos had skewed itself and I hoped that might give me a chance to hop over into Ben’s life, but no such luck.

‘So he was crossing a road. That was all it was. Crossing a road like everyone does every bloody day, except in a place like this, of course. It was a busy road in Brisbane at rush hour, and he was a bit closer to the corner than he would ideally have been, but the traffic was practically at a standstill and he was just walking between the stationary cars.

‘The motorbike was weaving its way between them, as they do, beating the traffic by fitting through the spaces between the cars. Now don’t get me started on that. If a biker wants to be treated as a driver when it comes to how much space you give when you overtake, then he should bloody act as a driver and wait in the traffic like anyone else.

‘It was the work of a second. Ben steps out, the bike is right there, it smashes into him and he and the rider are flung into the cars. The rider had all his gear on, of course, so he just gets up and brushes himself down. Ben doesn’t. It takes far too long for the ambulance to reach him through the traffic, but he hangs on.

‘They call us. I pick up the phone, expecting anything but this. Some people say you know when something’s happened to your child, but you don’t. It hit us like a bolt from the blue. He’s in a coma, they say. But it’s Ben. I hang on to that. It’s Ben, so I know he’ll be OK. Jeannie’s in a terrible state as we go to the hospital, but I keep saying to her, it’s fine, he’ll be fine. I think I have a parent’s instinct. I bloody promise her we’ll get there and he’ll be sitting up in bed asking to go home. I believed in God, up until we got to the hospital and found that I was wrong. I had a very God-fearing past. I lost it all, in that instant. Gone.’

‘Whereas I almost began to believe again,’ Jean’s voice says quietly, from the dark. ‘It’s tempting.’

‘Yeah. We get there and they take us into a quiet little room and Jeannie’s just saying over and over that she wants to see him, and I suddenly think: they’ve brought us in here to say he’s dead. That’s what happens on the TV. You get there and it’s too late and they take you into a little room.

‘But he’s not dead, they say. He’s in a coma. He might wake up, or then again . . .’ His voice tails off, and Jean takes up the story while we all pretend not to be able to hear Gene struggling to compose himself, or Katy whispering words of comfort to him.

‘Samira,’ says Jean, her voice sharp. ‘We knew she was a lovely girl, but now she showed us what she was made of. She’s sat by his bed almost as much as we have, over the past two years. We said to her, look, Sammy. Go out there and have some fun. You don’t have to be in here all the time. We wouldn’t blame her, would we, Gene? If she went out and met someone else. She’s the same age as Ben, and that means she wants to get on with the babies. He’d want her to do that. He’d understand. She’s not there every day but she still goes in three times a week and sits with him and holds his hand and talks to him. Your heart just breaks for her, it really does. That’s the father of the children she should have started having by now, hooked up on all of that. He’s in a private hospital, thanks to Gene’s insurance, and he has the best care you could ask for. He just doesn’t wake up. We sit and stare and wait, but nothing happens.’

‘I’m sure he can hear us,’ Gene interrupts, composed again. ‘Jeannie says he can’t. I know, Jean. I know you say you’re being realistic. But I am certain he’s listening. I’ve sat by his bed every single day for two years and fifteen days. I’ve told him everything. He knows it all.

‘Now before the accident, he and Sammy were planning their honeymoon. They were going to come here. Not actual here, not to the fucking jungle in a mozzie cloud in the rain. But to where we were, the island with the guest houses and the cafés. We had just bought their tickets as a wedding present when the accident happened.

‘And then, when the two-year anniversary was coming up, we started to think that we should do something with the tickets, because the airline had said that under the circumstances they’d let us rebook whenever we wanted. We offered them to Sammy, of course, but she said no. I think we’re starting to irritate her a little, to be honest. And then Jean decided we should come away together. I thought about it for a while, and I decided she was right. We did this for Ben, came here so we could go home and tell him all about it. That was the plan. As we’ve discovered, the gods like to laugh at plans.

‘It was Jeannie who thought of it, as I say, but I could see where she was coming from. We could not possibly have contemplated a holiday in the normal run of things – how could we leave our child like that and go off camping like we used to do? – but this was different. This was Ben’s trip. I asked him about it, when it was just him and me.

‘“What if your mother and I went on the holiday for you, eh, Ben?” I said, staring at him, waiting for a reaction. “To that island.”