Stranded (10 page)

‘Hey,’ says Cherry. ‘That’s good enough for me. Was it a funny-looking one?’

I nod, staring at my feet with their chipped pink varnish.

Edward puts a warm hand on my still-wet shoulder. I lean into him, grateful.

‘Where was it going?’

‘I think it noticed me in the end and it swam away. Probably just as well.’

‘Indeed,’ says Gene. ‘It would have taken you to the Philippines if you’d carried on that way.’ Although I still feel remarkably silly, the atmosphere between us all seems to have lightened. We feel less like a random collection of people and more like a group.

‘Sorry,’ I tell them, but I am smiling now. ‘I’m the stupidest person in the world. You were always going to find that out at some point.’

At the next snorkelling stop, I am careful to keep close to the boat. Katy stays with me, though we do not talk much. I keep bobbing up to the surface and checking where everyone else is. Mark and Cherry swim a little way away and giggle together. Jean and Gene head in opposite directions and ignore each other so pointedly that I know they must be thinking, obsessively, of one another. Edward goes furthest, but comes back before he goes out of sight, and Samad stays on the boat, lying back with his eyes closed and the sun on his face. I watch some fish, look for the elusive turtles, and when I get bored of it, I climb back on to the boat and sit back, with Samad, who is dozing.

‘I am forty,’ I whisper to myself. It doesn’t feel that way. Has it always been like this? I wonder. Has forty always looked old when you’re younger, and felt young when you get there? Some days I feel a hundred years old, but mostly, I am exactly the same as I was when I was seventeen. Forty is, after all, going to be fine.

It must be about midday. Daisy will be waking up soon. I look at my phone, hoping for a message from her. It has a tiny amount of reception, but nothing has arrived.

Samad’s eyes open suddenly, and he sits up, perfectly alert.

‘OK!’ he says, grinning at me. ‘Lunch?’

I am starving.

‘Lunch!’ I agree. My birthday lunch. He starts the engine, which is the signal for everyone else to swim back, and we set off towards an island on the horizon. It is the only piece of land we can see at all: this is the most remote place I can possibly imagine.

‘How old’s your baby, Samad?’ I ask, as I am sitting next to him.

‘She is five weeks old.’ He is proud. ‘Very good baby.’

‘Five weeks!’ I coo. ‘Tiny! How gorgeous.’ And it is gorgeous, I think. Having a new baby is like nothing on earth. It forces you to live in a strange hyper-reality in which everything revolves around the newcomer’s needs.

‘Do you have other children?’

‘Yes. Two others. All girls. Four and two years old.’

‘Wow,’ I say. I sound impressed and jealous even though I am profoundly glad that I only did it once.

Around the other side of the island, he approaches the beach carefully, slowing the engine so we appreciate our first sight of our destination. This is a perfect place, a genuine desert island. With no landmarks at all, I am completely disorientated. There is no sign of the long Malaysian peninsula that is the mainland, and no trace of Perhentian Kecil. I wonder if this means we are facing due east, towards (according to Gene) the Philippines, but in fact we could be facing anything, and we are definitely facing nothing. Nothing is close enough to be seen. The island is small, and as far as I have seen, covered in dense jungle apart from this beach. It is an inspired place to stop for lunch.

On my fortieth birthday, I say in my head, I had lunch on a remote paradise island in the South China Sea.

We pile off the boat and on to the white beach. Everything is silent. This feels like a place that is not used to people. For a moment I wonder whether we should be here. This beach would have looked exactly as it does now, hundreds of thousands of years ago. There has never been electricity here, or a house or a shop or the internet. It is nature in its purest form.

The sand is white and hot, so that you cannot walk on it with bare feet. The water is clear, clearer even than it is back at the resort. The air feels different in my lungs, far from all sources of pollution apart from us, though I am quite sure I am imagining that.

Nothing feels quite real. The jungle is making the same chirping, rustling sounds as the one on Perhentian Kecil, and I decide to keep well away from it. I picture the dinosaur lizard I spoke to this morning, and imagine its bigger, more savage cousins living in the interior of this island. There could be actual dinosaurs. Anything could be there.

Samad bustles around setting up lunch, declining offers of help and shooing us away. He has unloaded four fishing rods, with the lines and hooks and everything that goes with them. We are, I think, supposed to attempt to fish for extra lunch, but I cannot be bothered with that, not least because he has clearly catered for the fact that we are unlikely to catch anything. I go to sit on the hot sand with Katy instead, and we kick back on our sarongs and talk, in a desultory and lazy fashion, about what it is that makes this scene – the desert island, the sand, the sun, the sea – the epitome of the idea of heaven in our culture.

‘I wonder,’ I say, ‘whether we see the place where land and sea meet as “paradise” because life started by crawling out of the sea, on to the sand.’

Katy laughs.

‘Um, probably not, Esther,’ she says. ‘And anyway, that’s just a theory. I think it’s probably because people go to beaches to laze around, and there’s nothing much to do when you’re on a beach, which really is many people’s idea of heaven. I bet that people who live here – not here, obviously, no one lives here, but back on the main island – don’t see it that way. I bet they don’t look at the beach and say, “ahhh, bliss”.’

‘They look at the beach and see fat white people who fancy a beer,’ I posit. ‘They would probably see a completely different landscape as heaven.’

‘What, though?’ Katy wonders. ‘It’s hardly going to be central London, is it? My old street in Hackney? No one would sigh at that.’

‘I think if you lived here, and if you actually had to work, you’d find yourself hankering after mountains. The Himalayas or something. Let’s ask Samad,’ I suggest.

At that moment, he calls us over.

‘Everybody!’ he says. ‘Um, I am sorry. I have a question.’

We all wander over, ready to help. When we are within conversing distance, Samad smiles an embarrassed smile, and says, ‘OK, I am sorry to say that I need to ask if anybody has with them a lighter, or perhaps some matches.’

He has set the lunch out on the beach, and I am impressed and surprised by the care he has taken over it. He is clearly serious about his new venture. He has brought an ice box filled with fish (on the correct assumption that we would not bother to try to catch anything) and pieces of meat, as well as a tupperware box of salad and a cardboard box of fruit. A second ice box contains bottles of water and cans of soft drinks.

He has brought a small barbecue, and coals and wood to burn in it. It is, however, useless in its current state.

‘I don’t understand,’ he explains. ‘I have a lighter this morning. I keep it in the packet. With my cigarettes. But it goes. I have the cigarettes. But no lighter. But it is always in the packet.’

‘You must have left it on the beach or something,’ says Cherry. ‘Or it fell out. Did you check the boat?’

‘Every inch of the boat. Every compartment. Every place possible. Anybody?’

‘
We
don’t smoke,’ announces Mark, looking expectantly at everyone else.

‘I tried to towards the end of my marriage,’ I tell them, for some reason, ‘but I couldn’t. Just didn’t like it. It was annoying. I wanted to be a smoker: it fitted in with my self-loathing. I had to drink instead.’

‘Good girl,’ Jean tells me. ‘Gene’s a smoker at heart but I didn’t allow him to bring his filthy habit on holiday with us. Doesn’t stop him sneaking off when he thinks I’m not looking, the underhand bastard.’

We all look at Gene, instantly elevated to being our best bet. He shakes his head, regretful.

‘Not today,’ he says. ‘Knew I’d never get away with it. Wish I’d given it a go.’

That only leaves Edward and Katy.

‘Sorry, guys,’ Edward says. ‘I may be a Scot, which of course means I have deep-fried Mars Bars for breakfast and brush my teeth with golden syrup, but I’m a relatively clean-living one. No smoking here.’

‘And not me. I’ve never smoked,’ says Katy. ‘Although now you’re all looking at me with those imploring eyes, I’m really,
really
wishing I did.’

The fish look fresh and tantalising in the ice box. Samad replaces the lid before the insects find them.

‘I am sorry,’ he says, and he looks mortified. ‘I go back and find a light? One hour? You can wait one hour? Or you just eat the small lunch?’

‘Let’s have the small lunch,’ I suggest, looking around. ‘Look, we’ve got salad and fruit. It all looks beautiful. We’re not going to die, are we, if we have salad for lunch? Don’t bother to go all the way back, just for a lighter. We could always make a barbecue on one of the empty beaches when we get back later, and cook all this then. We don’t need to waste it. And we could catch some fish of our own later, too.’

I look round the little group, waiting for back-up. Cherry agrees at once. Her skin is glistening, tanned and toned, and she is, I think, almost impossibly beautiful.

‘Absolutely,’ she says, and I am not sure her accent is Californian. I think I have been assuming she is from California purely because she is blonde and toned. ‘Do not even think about doing that, Samad. We’ll be just fine with what we have here.’

No one else agrees, least of all Samad.

‘But,’ he says, ‘this is practice run for my new work. We must do it right. Now I learn: always check for the lighter.’ He laughs, his face suddenly crinkled and bright, in spite of our predicament. ‘Good lesson.’

‘Maybe we should let Samad go,’ says Katy, pressing her hand on to his shoulder. ‘Let him have a proper run-through of his expedition. We don’t mind what we have for lunch – of course we don’t – but that’s not the point. The point is that Samad needs to do this properly, because that’s what we’re here for, and what’s an hour, after all?’

‘I’m with you, Katy,’ Jean agrees. ‘He wants to go back for it, don’t you, darl? So go back for it. Look around you! We can wait it out here, can’t we? It’s not exactly sitting on a shoddy plastic seat at Adelaide bus station at five in the morning – which incidentally we have done, and for longer than an hour, too, thanks to the way my husband organises his bloody trips. So we kick back on the sand for an hour? Lie back, bit of a siesta? Fine by me.’

‘Yeah,’ agrees Edward. ‘It won’t be an enormous hardship. Do what you want, Samad. But if you go, fetch, like, ten lighters or something. Leave them hidden all over the beach. Then this will never happen again.’

Samad laughs, a bit sheepishly.

‘One hour,’ he says. ‘You wait. I am sure I have lighters this morning. But I will be back – with much fire.’

He steps into the boat and starts the engine, and we watch him motoring off, out to sea and round to the left. I glance at the others. Jean and Katy have both got books out of their bags and have settled back on the sand. I wish I had brought a book with me. I check my phone, which, unsurprisingly, has no reception, then I lie back on the hot beach and look at the sky. It is the darkest blue, with not the wispiest hint of a cloud.

When I prop myself up on my elbows, I see that Edward is swimming methodically around the bay. He swims out as far as the jutting rocks, across to the other side, back in, and across the shallow part. He does it again and again.

Gene is walking about, exploring at the edge of the jungle, which makes him braver than I am. I have a nagging fear that since the creatures in that jungle have probably never seen humans, they might attack us on sight. There must be thousands of them, so they would definitely win.

Mark and Cherry have disappeared by themselves, for which I suppose we should be grateful.

My stomach rumbles so loudly that I am sure the other two sunbathers must hear it, so I laugh and say: ‘If he doesn’t come back soon, I’m going to start on the fruit.’

‘Go ahead,’ says Gene, sitting down next to us. ‘Grab a banana if you’re hungry.’

This is the most I have ever heard him say in a normal voice.

‘I might, actually,’ I agree. ‘It seems like ages since breakfast.’

The banana is black on the outside but just right on the inside. I try to make it last, but it is gone in seconds.

I lie back, close my eyes and wait. Samad will be here soon.

‘The liar,’ Jean says, and her voice wakes me up. I have no idea where I am. I wake up feeling hot, and aware that I am lying on my sarong, on sand. It takes me several befuddled seconds to make sense of anything. ‘He said he’d be an hour. Anyone notice what time he left? It’s certainly more than an hour ago.’

I remember. It is a beach, but not our normal beach. Even then, I don’t begin to worry, not at all.

‘It can’t be much more than an hour, you fucking fusspot,’ says Gene. ‘Give the poor man a bloody chance.’

I am more concerned about the way Gene is speaking to his wife than about when Samad is coming back. None of us are worried about that; not at all.

As the sun is starting to sink in the sky, and we are still waiting for him, the anxiety begins to niggle.

‘He’ll come,’ says Katy, her eyes wide. I can see from the set of her jaw that she is strained, but she is determinedly optimistic. ‘Of course he will. He’d hardly . . .’

I keep checking my phone, just in case, but it does not miraculously receive a signal. Ed and Cherry also have phones with them, and neither of them work either. No phone company would send a signal out here. There is nothing we can do but wait.

‘I should have brought
my
phone,’ Mark announces unhelpfully. ‘I bet that would have worked. My phone is the greatest.’

No one bothers to tell him to shut up, though I see even Cherry roll her eyes. Here, perhaps, is where harsh reality starts to intrude on newly-wed bliss.