Stranded (13 page)

We are almost silent. When I look at Ed he smiles warmly, and that makes me feel better. I edge closer to him.

‘It’ll be OK,’ he says. ‘It’s still an adventure. Tomorrow, if we’re still here, we can explore, see what it’s like on the other side, light fires all over the place. I was thinking, we could get the whole bloody forest on fire, perhaps – draw some attention to ourselves. Someone, somewhere would notice an island going up in flames. Someone would come closer to have a look. Don’t worry too much, hey, Esther?’

‘But what about water—’ I am saying, when we are both distracted by a scream from the jungle.

At first my heart leaps: something is happening! In a fraction of a second I process the fact that it was Cherry’s scream, that she might be hurt, that nothing good is going on and that rescue, if it comes, will certainly not arrive from within the island. Anything that came from within the island would be a horrible thing.

Ed is already starting towards her, when the scream becomes a shout.

‘I know!’ she yells. ‘I am very
very
well aware of that fact, thank you!’

‘Which does not help matters,’ Mark is yelling back at her. ‘Not one fucking bit.’

‘This was not my idea, for your information.’

‘Oh, wasn’t it? It wasn’t mine.’

Their voices are lowered after that so that, although we can still hear that they are arguing, we can no longer hear the words. Ed and I look at each other.

‘Another warring couple,’ he says quietly. ‘This place is not a great advertisement for marriage, you know. There’s Gene and Jean who loathe one another’s guts in a way that I find startling and scary. You’re divorced. Katy’s recently separated from someone, hasn’t she? And now even the honeymooning lovebirds are at it. I thought I could depend on them, at least, to keep the romantic dream alive.’

‘What about you?’ I ask, as Ed puts a handful of dry fronds on the fire. ‘Is there a girlfriend wondering where you’ve got to?’ I find myself slightly, ridiculously hoping that there isn’t.

He shakes his head and laughs.

‘There is not. Nobody has any idea that I’m here. There was a girlfriend for a while, of course. There’ve been a few. But there’s not any more. And if she, Ellie, the most recent one, could see me here, about to admit defeat by bedding down for the night as soon as the sun sets and wondering how far our chances are diminished by the third day, she’d vaguely think she might call the coastguard but then something she liked would come on the telly and she probably wouldn’t get round to it. We’re not exactly a big presence in each other’s lives. We never were really.’

‘At least you don’t positively detest each other. Which proves you weren’t married.’

‘There was never enough passion for that even to be a consideration,’ he says. ‘There was no passion at all, in fact. Do you think good passion turns to destructive passion? The evidence around us would suggest it does.’

‘Not in my case. Chris and I just stumbled into one another. It was never going to work.’

Soon all of us are around the fire, back in our places from yesterday. Gene comes out of the dark, stumbling, but when he gets close to the fire we see that his arms are full of bananas. He hands them around.

‘Several fruit trees in the vicinity,’ he says. ‘Come on, eat up.’

We pass them around. I eat a couple because I know I should. The strange thing is that I am not hungry at all. My head is pulsating from within, and I am trying not to think about water.

I put my head down on the sarong, and without saying a word to anyone, I let myself drift off to sleep. I dream so vividly that a boat lands on the beach and everyone goes away without me that I sit up abruptly in the middle of the night and look around, sobbing heaving great sobs. The moon is shining down from a starry sky, and the whole of the surface of the sea is gleaming silver. I cry harder as I realise that I cannot see the boat, that they really have all left without me.

When I notice that they are still here, sleeping around the glowing embers of the fire, I carry on crying because I cannot imagine being rescued now.

Katy is not where she should be, next to me. I scan the beach, but she is nowhere to be seen. After a while she climbs down from the rock at the edge of the beach, the place where I sat this morning. I watch her approach the fire.

‘Esther,’ she whispers, with a little smile. ‘Not sleeping either?’

She lies back down next to me.

‘I had a dream that everyone went away without me,’ I whisper. ‘I woke up and thought it was true.’

‘Oh, Esther,’ she says, and I can hear the smile in her voice even though I cannot see her face. ‘My dream was that there was a little boat moored just beyond those rocks. I was so certain. I had to go and check.’

‘No little boat?’

‘’Fraid not.’

She covers me with her towel and I shift closer. I don’t think I can possibly be going to sleep because my head is pounding and I am trying to work out when I should have been leaving for my flight home. I lie and think and try not to cry because losing water through my eyes seems to make my headache worse and worse and worse.

Samad does not arrive in the night. He does not come in the morning. We share the last of the water, but it doesn’t work because Mark gulps down half of one bottle in one go.

He is sorry, but not sorry enough.

‘I couldn’t help myself,’ he says, uselessly.

I hate him. When I look around, I see that everybody hates him. We are all firing pure, shining arrows of loathing in his direction. He laughs a bit and puts his hands up. ‘Hey,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry, OK? I didn’t mean to.’

‘You didn’t mean to drink far more than your fair share of our last remaining lifeline, which is now gone?’ Jean speaks for us all. ‘Well. That’s certainly all right, then.’

So we are on a baking hot island with absolutely no water. We are surrounded by it, but there is nothing to drink. Nothing at all. My tongue is big in my mouth. My throat is dry. The hunger is nothing. The thirst is everything. I lie back and look at the sky for a while.

‘If it would rain . . .’ I say, but my head is throbbing so hard that I cannot finish the sentence. I don’t need to, because everyone knows what I mean.

‘It’s not fair,’ says someone. I think it was Jean, but everyone sounds the same to my ears now. I know what she means, too. She means that it rained regularly when we were at the resort, and now we have been here for a length of time that is fuzzy but that includes, I think, three nights, and it has not rained at all.

I am glad that I am not able to work out when I should be catching the plane home. I see Daisy all the time, but I cannot properly think about her. There are all sorts of consequences for her of my being trapped on an island without water. But I cannot actually address them and I know that this is for the best because there is nothing I can do.

All the same, one moment I am looking at the defiantly blue sky waiting for it to rain, and then the sun is in a different part of the sky and I am curled up on myself, rocking to and fro and rasping the words ‘my baby’, over and over again. I must have been doing that for hours. She is right there, and if I didn’t know better I would think she was with me on this island, because the image of her, in her baggy jeans and her yellow and red striped T-shirt, her long hair back in a messy ponytail, her face confused and concerned for me, is so vivid. She keeps reaching for me, and I stretch out a hand to touch her back, but of course there is nothing.

The sun is burning my shoulders and my face. I can feel it all becoming raw and cracking and peeling. I make an effort and sit up. My throat hurts so much, and my mouth is so dry. I heave myself to my knees and then wobble to my feet.

I sway as I stand, and when the black spots that cover everything shrink a little, I look around. Mark and Cherry are in the shade, lying in one another’s arms. Their marriage, I think, is going to end here, on their honey moon. They came to Malaysia for the paradise beaches, and it is the paradise beach that is going to claim them. At least they are together, I think, knowing how sentimental this is and not caring.

Jean is propped up against the boulder at the end of the sand. She sees me looking and lifts a hand, then lets it drop. Gene is lying beside her, his eyes closed. Ed is near me, asleep on the hot sand. He should come to the shade as well.

The fire has gone out. The last thing we need is a fire, unless we could somehow use it to take the salt out of the seawater. I have an untrustworthy memory of someone on TV doing that once, condensing it on to a piece of metal and letting it drip down.

Someone is moving around in the rainforest. I look for Katy, and when I see her, she is on her knees, licking a leaf. At least she is doing something.

I try to walk to the shade, but my knees wobble and buckle, and I end up crawling, dragging myself out of the burning light.

This place was going to be perfect. It was heaven. Look at the white sand, everyone said. Salty seawater. How perfect. How marvellous. This is paradise. The sun shines off the sand and I have to screw up my eyes.

‘Ed,’ I say. He should come too but I don’t have the strength to pull him. I change course and crawl towards him. The sand is so hot. I want to lie down but I know I mustn’t. I reach him and put a hand on his chest.

‘Ed,’ I say. ‘You need to . . .’

He opens an eye. ‘What?’ he mutters. He is completely disorientated, and I see in his eyes that he does not recognise me.

I try out the words in my head. They sound right, so I say them.

‘Come to the shade.’

He frowns. ‘What?’

‘Shade.’

He props himself up and scowls around the beach. Then he tries to stand up. We end up crawling together to the edge of the rainforest.

When we get there, we look at one another. I cannot speak and he does not seem able to either. Everyone but Katy is collapsed, and she is nearly gone. We have no water. You cannot live without water. You die.

The sun shines off the sea and dazzles me. I turn my head away from that treacherous beach, the place that has taken us and beaten us, and lie down between two trees, on the edge of the sand. I want the dinosaurs to come out of the forest now, and eat me.

I should go and look for water. The creatures that live in the forest must drink something. But my head is pounding so loudly that I cannot hear anything else, and I am parched, and all I want is a drink and there is nothing.

I close my eyes. Perhaps I will just have a little sleep. The darkness descends rapidly.

Cathy

‘Doomsday’, 8 p.m.

Unless the Rapture has happened in an abstract and imperceptible way, with some kind of cosmic shifting that remains unnoticed by the people it happens to, then something has gone wrong.

We were ready, at dawn. We were so excited. We stayed up all night, praying and preparing ourselves. All of us were dressed in white, on Father Moses’ orders.

‘The Lord will appreciate you clothing yourselves that way,’ he said, his blue eyes shining out.

It would have been nice if the end of the material world was marked with a clear starry night. Cassandra told me that God had more important things to worry about tonight than the weather and that I should not even think of complaining about it. No matter: the sky was filled with clouds and a light drizzle fell for most of the night.

Two television news crews came along shortly before dawn, and a woman with lots of make-up on poked her head around the door and asked if she could come in and film us ‘being swept up to heaven’. Father Moses shut the door in her face. I could see that he recognised that she was beyond salvation. Sarah sat next to me, holding my hand, and my other hand was in Philip’s. Sarah was wearing blue varnish on her fingernails, but I knew that God would not mind that. He might even have liked it.

Martha sat on Philip’s other side. Cassandra kept looking over and smiling at me, probably because I am her only birth child. They say it makes no difference who your birth parents are, but it must do a bit.

Then we all started to sing. We sang a hymn that Father Moses wrote for the occasion: ‘The Apocalypse comes tonight/ When our saviour shines so bright/ And all of us do pray/ That the righteous are taken away/ To heaven to dwell with God/ Like peas in their proper pod.’

(I can dare to think this now: I slightly felt I could have come up with some better lyrics than those, if he’d asked me. In fact most people could, but we were not invited.)

Because of the clouds, there was no first ray of sunlight. The hand of God did not reach down as dawn broke. Dawn was a smudge of grey, and gradually lightening clouds.

We waited. Philip’s hand was sweaty in mine. Philip is, I think, nearly always sweaty. Sarah clasped me so tightly that I wanted to pull my hand away and rub it, but I bore it. I was tingling all over. Any second now . . .

And then, perhaps ten minutes after the light grey dawn began, I realised with a horrible sense of dread and betrayal that nothing was happening. If the righteous were being taken away, that meant we were not Saved. Not even Cassandra, not Father Moses. Not even the babies were Saved.

Father Moses jumped up and shouted: ‘Half past five,’ and we pretended to believe that Jesus had beamed that message directly into his head. I knew it, though. My old misery and cynicism were creeping back. Everything I had banished with the expectation of paradise was suddenly there again, lurking at the edges of my mind. It was all I could do to hold them at bay, but I managed it until half past five came and went. The people from the TV were filming us through the windows, once it was light, and no one bothered to chase them away.

Sarah let go of my hand. I pulled my other hand out of Philip’s and dried it on my white nightdress. People started to stretch and to look at one another in fear. Nobody wanted to be the first to point out that the Emperor was naked. We sat and waited. I was cramped and uncomfortable, desperate to stand up and walk around. I shuffled on my bottom. Everyone in the room, I suddenly knew, was waiting for someone to dare to point out the stark truth.