Stranded (39 page)

‘You never spoke about your childhood when we were on the island,’ Ed says. I look away.

‘I wish I had. I wonder how she’d have reacted. She never spoke about hers either, did she? I never did because I wanted to keep part of myself back. The stories that people did tell, particularly Cherry and poor old Gene, were very particular parts of their lives. There’s loads of all of you that was kept hidden. I was happy to talk about my divorce because it’s tangential and trivial, almost. Talking about that was fine.’

Ed is fiddling with his drink, looking down at the table.

‘I wish you’d told me, you know,’ he says. ‘Not that it matters. But I wish you had.’ He suddenly shakes his head and smiles. ‘Anyway, this has certainly made me see how dull I am. Everyone else has much more interesting lives than I do. I’ll be the boring one in the corner.’

‘You could never be boring,’ I tell him, and I mean it. ‘You were the strong one. Not Katy, and definitely not me. You were amazing. I never heard you being grumpy. You never cried, you never seemed to get irritated with anyone, not even Mark. That’s a huge thing, Ed. You have no idea.’

He smiles.

‘I had you with me,’ he says. ‘Cheesy, but true. Clichéd, but what the hell. I was stranded on a desert island with the woman of my dreams – and an assortment of oddballs, admittedly. So none of it really mattered.’

I laugh, assuming he is joking, but when I look into his face – strong, handsome, still deeply tanned – I see that he is not.

‘Really?’ I say, moving closer to him.

He puts his arms around me and draws me in.

‘Really.’

We make our way to the appointed diner. It is lunchtime, and the Manhattan pavements – the sidewalks – are a ballet of people knowing where they are going and not bumping into each other as they do it.

We are clearly tourists.

‘It should be right here,’ says Ed, map in hand. I follow his gaze.

‘There it is!’ says Daisy, pointing. She is right: it is on the next corner.

‘Daisy,’ says Ed. ‘You’re quite something with the maps. You’re better than your mum and me by a factor of at least a million.’

‘I know,’ she says with a grin.

The floor is checked with black and white tiles. This is an extremely upmarket burger restaurant, with booths and a high ceiling. Daisy loves it. She skips on the spot as she takes in the scene: the clanking of dishes, the clatter of cutlery, the echoing voices.

Ed and I are here with Daisy. We are a little unit. He is my boyfriend. I grin whenever I think of the word. Nine years my junior, handsome and apparently in love with me, stabbing former cult-member that I am. Having Ed is the thing that has got me back on my feet.

Mark and Cherry are there already, sitting in a booth. They shout and wave us across. I am grinning all over my face at the sight of them. When we were on the island, I thought I would never want to see my fellow castaways again, yet now I look on them as long-lost friends.

They are both dressed like New Yorkers: Cherry is back to being her polished gorgeous self, her eyebrows barely there, her hair honey-blonde and shorter than it used to be, cut in a gamine bob. She is wearing skinny jeans and a white shirt, and I immediately feel sweaty and unkempt. Mark is in a polo shirt and chinos.

They both jump to their feet, and we all embrace. I squeeze both of them tightly.

‘This is Daisy,’ I say afterwards, an arm around her shoulders. ‘Daisy, my actual daughter. I may have mentioned her once or twice.’

‘Well, hello, Daisy,’ Cherry says. ‘We heard all about you in Malaysia. Your mom missed you so very, very much. And look at you – such a beautiful big girl.’

Daisy grins. ‘Hello,’ she manages to say. She looks at me for reassurance, and I take her hand and squeeze it.

‘I have a little girl too,’ Cherry continues, ‘but she’s younger than you. She’s only five, and she’s with her daddy this weekend. I missed her so very, very much too. And her brother.’

‘What’s her name?’ Daisy asks shyly. Cherry beams, sits on the banquette and shuffles over, patting the spot next to her. Daisy obediently sits there, looking at me first to check. I nod and smile.

‘Her name,’ Cherry says, ‘is Hannah. Her brother’s name is Aaron. He’s just three . . .’

Soon Daisy is discussing our trip out here, the aeroplane, the hotel. Cherry asks her if she had already seen Manhattan in the movies.

‘We call them films,’ Daisy tells her.

I turn to Mark. ‘How are things with you, then, Marky Mark?’ I say. I feel far more relaxed with him here, in this Manhattan restaurant, than I ever did in Malaysia.

He considers the question carefully and ushers me down to the end of the booth, where we are out of Cherry’s earshot. Ed slides in next to him.

‘Things are acceptable,’ he says quietly. ‘Cherry has a new lease of life, as you can see. She and Tom split the moment she got home, kids have shared residency, and she’s picked herself up and taken the view that she has been given another chance in life. She’s a different person, actually. She’s open about everything, and it’s only now I see her like this that I realise how much of a front she used to put on. Naturally our relationship, such as it was, is well and truly over, but she’s a dear, dear friend.

‘Me . . . not so good. Antonia decided we should “give it another go”, “work on us”, all of that. She’s honourable, you know? Not a quitter. I felt like the worst turd on earth. It lasted a month or so, and
then
we quit.’

‘The worst turd on earth? Blimey.’

‘I know! That’s something, isn’t it? Don’t even imagine what that would look like. But yeah, it’s been shit. My kids are that much older than Cherry’s, they actually went through Daddy being missing, the whole discovery that I was in Malaysia with Cherry-the-neighbour rather than being where I was meant to be, the assumption that we’d waltzed off to start again without a word. And then the return with the tail between the legs. I don’t think Antonia believed, for a long time, that we were genuinely stuck on that island. She can be pretty scathing. She was entirely convinced that we eloped together and had second thoughts, and nothing I could say convinced her otherwise. Until the whole business with you and Katy came out. So I should thank you for corroborating my story.

‘But I’m trying to get back on my feet. I rented an apartment in Queens. I’m a weekend dad, a McDonald’s-and-the-zoo type. As I said, Cherry’s become my best friend, though we try to keep that under the radar as far as our kids are concerned, particularly mine, because they don’t like it that she still lives across the street from them, as Tom was the one to leave the family home. I’m building it up, with them. The older two pretty much hate me and I’m not looking forward to their therapy bills. But that’s us. It’s been a million times worse for you. Daisy is bearing up, isn’t she? She’s adorable, and exactly like you. Your “mini-me”. I was expecting a timid little thing, considering.’

‘It hasn’t been easy,’ I say in a low voice. Daisy is still chatting to Cherry, very animatedly telling her everything we have seen in Manhattan so far. Cherry is acting as if it were all new to her, and I love her for that. ‘It’s taken all summer,’ I continue, ‘to get her confidence up. It’s been hellish for her. I go away for the holidays, promising to come back rested and less tetchy, and I don’t come back at all. Then her “grandma” shows up, and she goes to stay with this grandma, is whisked away to a little town hundreds of miles away and bombarded with “Mummy doesn’t love you” and talk of God. The stuff of horror films and nightmares, in fact. It culminated with the thing the world knows about. Where I had to fly at Katy with a knife. Watching her mother, who apparently doesn’t love her, and who’s been gone for weeks and weeks and weeks, suddenly showing up and doing that was incredibly hard. But that’s Daisy. She deals with things, she always has done. She’s the strongest person I know. She’s been so brave. She started getting back to her old self when we went to stay at Ed’s parents’ place in Scotland and just ate amazing food and watched telly and played Monopoly for a week. And now, I think she’s coming out of it. I’ll feel guilty for the rest of my life.’

‘How about you? Are you OK, apart from that?’

‘Oh,’ I say. ‘I’m all right. I feel a bit stupid that I didn’t twig about Katy. I thought she was my friend. But looking back on it, she knew what was going on and when we were going to be picked up. Apparently she was scared the night we saw that other boat, because it wasn’t part of the plan. They’d chosen that island because nothing ever went that way, so when something did, and Cherry started swimming to it, she was afraid that she might actually reach it. That was why she plunged in.’

‘But the next morning, real rescue came. We thought the night boat had sent someone out in the day. Was that wrong?’

‘I think the night boat freaked Katy out, so she called in the rescue boat sooner than planned.’

‘Sooner!’

‘I know.’

‘Any idea how long she was planning to prolong our sojourn?’

‘Another week or so, I think.’

‘Jeez.’

‘She kept us alive because that was her job. Keeping me out of the way long enough for them to get their hands on Daisy. She could have killed me easily, any time, but the whole point was that I needed to suffer by losing my daughter, because that was what I had inflicted on Moses and Cassandra.’

‘That’s pretty insane,’ Mark says. He takes a bottle of wine from the cooler on the table and pours each of us a glass. I see that Cherry has already ordered Daisy a Coca-Cola, a drink she is not technically allowed. ‘Esther, you can’t actually blame yourself for not working it out. You can’t expect that sort of unhinged behaviour from complete strangers.’

‘I spent ages vowing never to go away again. Then I thought, that’s a bit ridiculous. It’s a freaky thing that happened because of my background. Normally, having children doesn’t preclude anyone from travelling. So I decided that I
can
go travelling, and I will. But I’m going to bring her with me, for the moment.’

‘And Katy? Did she recover?’

‘Completely, though I think she was in hospital for a while. I was glad she did, purely because it meant they let me go. If I’d actually killed her, I’d be in prison for manslaughter for a long time. I can’t bear to think about that, and I make a point of not thinking about it, because it didn’t happen. Cassandra managed to get away from the St Ives police then and there, because they were busy arresting me and looking after Katy. I have no idea where she went. She never showed up again, anywhere. Which is unnerving. Then Katy was being investigated for the abduction, and skipped bail and hasn’t been heard from since either. The two of them have melted away. Unfortunately.’

Mark exhales deeply. ‘Yeah. Not your ideal outcome.’

‘The Village, meanwhile, are under huge pressure from the police. At least things are going to change there. I hope.’

Soon we are talking about other subjects. Gene was dead before he got to the mainland and Jean went home and found that her other son, Steve, had switched off Ben’s life support when his parents never returned.

‘He thought we’d lost our minds and were sitting gibbering in Asia somewhere,’ Jean reported when I spoke to her. ‘And how far off the mark was he? Not much. It was almost a relief. If you can call losing two of your very dearest people in one go a relief. I’m old, you know. I can live out the rest of my days. I have no requirement to be happy. I might even go over to visit you all, in New York and England, one of these days.’

I look around the table. We are all thin, but less thin than we used to be. None of us look like the desperate castaways we once were. It is strange that we have slipped back into a life we thought had been taken from us for ever. Yet everything is different.

We are all raising our glasses, clinking them, saying ‘cheers’, when something catches my eye outside the window.

It is nothing, I tell myself. I did not see anything. There are people passing us, because we are in the centre of Manhattan. Millions of people walk these streets, every day. Some of them are bound to have short dark hair. Many of them will be thin: they will be thin because they are New Yorkers, not because they chose to spend weeks on a deserted island in Asia. Some of them will, by the law of averages, have a look of Katy about them, move in the way she moves, share her essence in some indefinable way. I just saw someone like that.

Perhaps I will always feel like this. I will probably see her in crowds, occasionally. I will always be nervous about Daisy when I do not have her right next to me. I look at her again, talking to Cherry about some band they both like, laughing. She is fine now. She is here, with me, and everything is all right.

I look out of the window again. There is no sign of the person I just saw, the face that looked in, right at us, for a fraction of a second. That is because it was the face of a passing New Yorker. There is nothing, I tell myself, to worry about. Nothing at all. It is all over.