Stranded (6 page)

‘Esther.’ I wonder if we should shake hands, but it feels too formal. She goes back to her writing, and I wander over to the counter and order some lunch.

Ten minutes later, I am eating spicy vegetables and rice, drinking warm water that tastes of the plastic bottle. There are now three boys at the table on my other side, and they are talking to me whenever I look up at them. They are Piet from Holland, a gorgeous man who introduced himself as ‘Jonah Anderson from Canada’, and Edward, who, as we have been acquainted for several hours, now feels like my oldest friend. They are kindly conversing with me as though I were not a lot older than them, and I am enjoying trying to convince myself that they haven’t noticed the decade or so that separates us.

Katy is still on the other side, but she is lost in writing in a book now, a diary, probably, and is not joining in the conversation at all. This, I suppose, is why it’s nice to be older. You don’t have to try to get everyone to like you all the time.

In front of me, on my white plastic table, is my ticket to the Perhentian Islands. It has a picture of a beach on it. I pick it up and turn it over and over, marvelling at it.

‘How long are you travelling for?’ asks the Dutch boy, looking at me politely. He is tall and wholesome, and very courteous.

‘Just three weeks,’ I tell him, though I don’t want to think about the fact that I will have to make this journey in reverse in the near future.

They all smile regretfully in my direction. I am apologetic.

‘I know three weeks isn’t long enough for proper travelling.’ I am using my most humble voice, as if by coming here for so short a time I am breaking a rule or two. ‘But I have a job, and a daughter, so it’s quite something that I’m here at all.’

‘Wow,’ says Jonah. ‘It certainly is. Where’s your baby, if you don’t mind us asking?’

Jonah is a proper, clean-cut Canadian, the sort who ends up in Hollywood with everyone thinking he’s American. He has dark hair and chiselled cheekbones. I wonder if I am blushing when he speaks to me.

‘Of course I don’t mind,’ I tell him. ‘She’s not much of a baby these days. She’s ten, and she’s with her dad. We’re not together any more.’

‘Oh. Sorry to hear that.’

I giggle. I cannot help it: he is trying so hard to say the right thing.

‘It’s fine,’ I assure him, and right here, right now, it is. ‘Things are better this way, that’s for sure.’

‘Well,’ says Jonah, ‘good on you for getting yourself out here.’

I scoop the last of my rice on to my spoon. Just as I am admiring my perfectly clean plate, the woman from the ticket office strides past, shouting: ‘To the boat, everybody, please!’

I now feel that I endured a horrible night in Kuala Terengganu just so that I would appreciate this. It is a speedboat, and it goes fast. As soon as we are out of the harbour, wearing our life jackets, the driver (or whatever you call someone who drives a boat) cranks up the engine, and we start leaping over the surface of the water. At home I would hate this. I would grasp the side of the boat and close my eyes, expecting at any second to flip over and die. Now I keep my eyes open, fixed on the bulk of the island in front of us, and my smile is so wide that it hurts my mouth. I relish every leap the boat makes, love the fact that the engine is so loud that conversation is impossible. Spray peppers my face whenever we go over a particularly big wave. The boat holds about fifteen people, including the three boys I just met, and Katy, and we are all sitting like this, staring forward at our destination. There are a few Australians, including a small, weedy man who tried to manoeuvre himself to sit with me, though I managed to outmanoeuvre him by asking someone to swap places in case I was sick. Most of the passengers, I think, are German. They are friendly and trendy and a bit intimidating.

As we approach the island, I know that I have done it. From the moment I met Ally in the gallery, I have been working towards this: Paradise Bay resort on Pulau Perhentian Kecil. I have a hut reserved, and I am nearly there. The sky is a deep blue today, the sun shining relentlessly, glinting dazzlingly off the waves.

It almost seems too soon when the engine slows and we start crawling towards the shore. The first place we stop is Coral Bay, where several developments of huts are clustered around a long sandy beach. I catch my breath. This is one of the ‘built-up’ parts of the island, yet it is beautiful, and I would be happy to be getting out here. There is a jetty on which heaps of supplies are waiting in the sun. Many boxes of eggs are piled up, and I find myself hoping they will be taken somewhere cooler soon. Moored by the beach, there are much smaller speedboats, some of them with taxi signs on them. People are lying on the sand reading, and sitting in cafés. To the left there is a very smart-looking development of bungalows with a big building at its centre.

Five people get off the boat here, including Katy, who grins and shouts, ‘I like the sound of Paradise Bay – might see you there!’ to me as she jumps on to the steps.

We turn left and head next to what I calculate to be the north of the island. Away from the beaches, there are large rocks at the water’s edge, and behind them, jungle. The thick trees cover the island. We pass a couple of beaches that are deserted but for one or two people lying on the sand, or sprawled on rocks. I can barely tear my eyes away.

At a tiny resort called D’Lagoon, three more people get off: they are met by a boat that comes out from the beach, and their backpacks are thrown into it after them. Then we stop at Long Beach, another built-up area that does, indeed, have a long beach, which seems to be peppered with diving and snorkelling outfits. Edward, Jonah and Piet get off here, shouting a cheery farewell. I hope I will see them again. We cross to the other island, the bigger one with the smarter resorts on it, and drop several people off there. By now there are only two of us left on the boat: a Japanese girl, and me. She is left at the fishermen’s village, which looks like an actual place where people live, with administrative buildings, shops and a school.

Then it is just me and the boatman.

‘Paradise Bay?’ he says.

‘Paradise Bay,’ I agree.

‘You have boyfriend?’ he says, but I can tell his heart is not in it.

‘Yes,’ I say, automatically. He shrugs and laughs.

A man comes out from the beach in a smaller boat, and I climb in, as I have seen all the other people do, and wait for my bag to be thrown after me.

‘Thank you!’ I shout to the driver. He waves as he turns the boat around.

‘Esther?’ asks the man who has picked me up.

‘Yes,’ I agree, delighted that my reservation exists.

He drives the boat right up the sand, and gestures to me to step out first. I stare at the sight in front of me as I climb inelegantly over the front of the boat. This is a perfect white beach. It seems to me to be just the right size. There are wooden huts, nicely spaced out around it, with a bigger wooden building that is clearly the café at the centre. A bougainvillea with magenta flowers is flourishing in front of the café. Two people are lying in the shade. The air smells of seawater and flowers. I have found heaven.

I push my hair back from my face, trip over a rope and fall flat into the water.

When I stand up, I see the boatman, a man on the beach and a couple sunbathing all laughing at me. That is fine. I am laughing at myself. I would struggle to laugh at myself for falling over at home, but here it is fine.

‘Thank you,’ I say to the boatman.

‘Have a good trip!’ he says. We all laugh again at that. I notice that I have reflexively kept my canvas shoulder bag out of the water. That, I think, was clever of me. ‘Welcome to Paradise Bay,’ he adds.

I smile at him. ‘Thank you. Thank you so much.’

My instincts were right. This place will be exactly what I need it to be. My new home is a small wooden hut on stilts. It is not one of the ultra-desirable ones at the edge of the beach; it is a little way up the hill, between a large rock with the sea behind it, and the jungle. I am tucked into a crevice. All I can hear when I am in there is the high-pitched chirping of insects. Even the sea is silenced by the rock. I have my own little veranda with a hammock on it, and a small table and two white chairs, and when I stand there, I look down past the other huts to the edge of the sand. The air hangs hot around me.

Inside, there is just a table, a chair, and a bed, over which a large mosquito net is hanging. I dump my backpack next to the bed, change into my bikini and put a sarong on top. Within minutes I am coated in sunscreen, have my straw hat on my head and my flip-flops on my feet. My book is in my hand. I am ready.

It is three o’clock. I work out a schedule for the rest of the day. For the remaining daylight hours I will lie on the beach reading my book. Later, I will retreat to the café and sit by myself like a confident and carefree grown-up, and after that I will go to bed. Tomorrow I will repeat the procedure, and then I will do it again, and I will keep doing it until it becomes my everyday life.

On the beach, I am three quarters asleep, lying on my stomach with my head turned sideways, when a shriek jolts me back to consciousness.

I blink and yawn. It was a high-pitched female scream, coming from the direction of the sea. By the time I manage to turn around and look, it has been followed by male laughter, and it is quite clear that there is nothing wrong.

There are two people in the clear water, and they are obviously very much a couple. He is tall, dark and muscular. She is petite yet curvy, with slick blonde hair. They are toned and tanned, like film stars. They seem to be in the wrong place altogether. A couple like this ought to be cavorting in the Caribbean, somewhere where they might be picked up by the paparazzi. The rest of us look like kicked-back backpackers.

They are doing what swimming pool signs used to refer to, disapprovingly, as ‘petting’. Oblivious to the fact that everyone in the area is now observing them (or perhaps not as oblivious as they look), they are snogging like teenagers, giggling, disappearing underwater and resurfacing in gales of laughter. I try to work out whether they could actually be having sex in the water. I have never tested the logistics of whether such a thing is technically possible.

A German couple nearby are looking at them too, though with less surprise than me. I catch the eye of the woman, who is completely cool, with long straight hair and a bikini patterned with little pictures of lemons that manages, somehow, to look stylish rather than stupid. She grimaces, and I nod and widen my eyes. We both look back to the couple in the water.

‘Three days they have been here,’ she calls to me. ‘Three days! It’s exactly the same each day.’

‘They don’t get tired of it?’ I ask.

‘It seems not.’

One of the men who works here comes and stands between us.

‘They are just married,’ he explains, as the woman’s bikini top comes off. He seems torn between disapproving and approving very much indeed. ‘This is very unusual for Malaysia, to do this.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ says the German woman. ‘Topless in a Muslim country? How stupid is she?’

‘Very,’ I agree. I assume these people have not passed through Kuala Terengganu.

She turns to her partner, who is wearing board shorts and has long curly hair, and, as far as I can tell, admonishes him in German for looking at the topless woman.

‘Where are they from?’ I ask, hoping that they will not turn out to be British.

‘Amerrrrrica,’ announces the man from the café, who introduces himself as Samad. ‘They are Americans, from Hollywood.’ He waves to a woman who is walking across the beach towards him, carrying a tiny baby.

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘They look like it.’

The spectacle quickly becomes boring, and I turn back to my book. Samad is off, running across the sand towards his child.

Sitting in the restaurant alone is less painful than I feared. I have been travelling for five days now (and it seems incredible, now that I am here, that less than a week has passed since I left home, taking the train to the airport at five in the morning), so I ought to be used to it; and I am.

This place is, happily, so relaxed that I do not feel in the least bit out of place, as I sip a tall glass of watermelon juice and wait for the fish I have ordered to arrive. I read my book a bit, write a postcard to Daisy and try to relax in the here and now.

I am staying here for two weeks. That is, clearly, a long time. If I start to panic now because I am going to have to leave in fourteen days’ time, I might as well not have come.

For a second I allow myself to imagine going home. I will, undoubtedly, be tanned. I will possibly look a little better, because the lovely food and the fact that I plan mainly to lie on the beach doing nothing means that some of my horrible splitting-up gauntness will have been softened away. I will have attained some perspective and wisdom, here on this beach, that will stay with me for ever. That is what I am banking on.

My journey back will be quicker. I am flying from Kota Bharu, which is somewhere to the north of here, on the mainland, back to Kuala Lumpur. Then I will hang around the airport for a few hours, or dash into the city for some last-minute present-shopping, before starting the international flight home. At some point, many hours after that, I will walk in through my own front door. The house will be empty, unoccupied for twenty-two days. The plants will be dead, of course, because it never occurred to me to get someone to come in and water them, though I could have done because I do, I remind myself, have friends. Even after everything that has happened over the past year, everything I have done, I still have some friends. Zoe, for instance, knows exactly where I am and approves of it.

I will walk in, and drop my backpack. There will probably be sand in it, from this very beach. Some of the sand I see now, when I look up from my postcard and out at the beach, will be coming home with me. Daisy will not be there. I will have a shower, put on some clean clothes and go to Chris’s flat to collect her.

Meanwhile, however, I am here. I am here and, for the next two weeks, I have nothing to do but lie back and recuperate. I take deep breaths and remind myself to savour every moment.