Stranded (14 page)

No one had planned for this (apart from everybody in the entire outside world). None of us quite knew what to say.

And as we waited, fidgeting and shifting and watching the drizzle stop and the clouds disperse outside the window, I admitted to myself that it had all been a lie.

I had made a fool of myself at school. I had allowed myself to be caught up in the idea of the Rapture because I wanted it to be true. I wanted to be taken up to eternal bliss. I had let Father Moses – my real father, I believe – manipulate me. All those emotions, that exhilaration, had been real. Real, but founded on nothing. Father Moses had pulled it from thin air, unless he was suffering the biggest delusion of all. He had hypnotised us.

As the day unequivocally started, and it was completely light, I knew that I did not believe in his God. I was not sure I believed in any God at all. I was glad that I had finished my exams in spite of everything, because it would have been so easy not to bother, but now at least I will have my GCSEs.

I wanted to be sitting in heaven with Jesus. Instead, I am going to have to marry Philip. My destiny, from the moment it got light this morning, is to become a compound wife, sweeping floors and cooking stews and growing flowers and vegetables to sell at the market stall that has done so well in recent weeks as news of our impending Apocalypse had spread and people came from all around to buy our tomatoes and sweet peas and to laugh at us and take our photos and ask us giggling questions.

Now I desperately want to be one of the people on the outside, laughing. I do not want to be on the inside, fooled and tricked, contained and constrained. I stayed still because no one had told us to get up, but the tears poured down my cheeks.

In the end, Father Moses himself got up from his position on the platform, stretched, and said he was off to talk to Jesus for a minute. As soon as he left the room, we all stood up and the women started breastfeeding the little children, and some people lay down and went to sleep because no one had been able to doze during the long night of waiting. I assumed that when you were taken up to heaven, things like being a bit tired would not matter any more.

I lay down and slept on the hard floor, with Sarah next to me. Some time later Cassandra woke us, shaking my shoulder, and saying that God was not ready for us yet because there are more to be Saved than He was anticipating. I looked at her, and although I said nothing, she said, ‘Catherine,’ in her warning voice.

We went to bed and dozed all day. Sarah slept in my bed next to me for a bit, and then she went home.

She was not surprised that nothing had worked out the way it was supposed to.

‘I thought it probably wasn’t going to,’ she said, ‘but hey, it was worth a try. Are you OK, Cathy?’

‘Yeah,’ I told her. ‘Well. Sort of OK.’

I watched her go. I longed to go with her. I wanted to run after her and grab hold of her and implore her to help me. I cannot marry Philip! I do not remotely fancy him. I cannot subsume everything. I can’t stay here in this place, which, even though it is all I have ever known, I can see is not normal. I cannot just be a wife.

I am done with trying to convince myself. I want to get out of here.

This place is founded on lies, and I want to be normal.

It is the thirst. At least I think it is. I do not know anything.

I can feel my body giving up. When I look around this dry prison, I see other people with wide eyes and cracked mouths and sometimes I think they are feeling the same as me, and sometimes I hardly believe they are there.

We lie about, in the middle of this panorama that looks like paradise, and we wait to die. Paradise is an imaginary blissful destination that comes after death, so perhaps that is, in fact, where we are and what we are going through. Maybe it will all end in a minute.

Often I think we are dead. Everything I see, I see through a weird distorting filter. Sometimes I think it is a filter of thirst and hunger. Other times I wonder if something bigger than that has happened.

Maybe when I swam off by myself, following an ugly fish, I drowned as I tried to swim to shore. I contemplate that for a whole day, I think. At least, I start thinking it when the sun comes up and turns the sea a burning apocalyptic red, and by the time I stop it is dark. I may have eaten a few bananas in between. It is hard not to gag on them.

I followed the fish. I lost the boat. I would have been miles from that land I could see. There is no way I could have reached it. I died. That is what happened. I ran out of strength and I stopped swimming and every part of me filled with water. The fish are feeding on my body right now, sucking sustenance from me with their little gulping mouths. And as that happened, my conscious mind protected me by constructing this scenario. It imagined me being picked up, taken to the island and left here with the people I happened to be with at the end.

I wish it had let me have Daisy. If I try hard – if I concentrate with all my might – I can produce her, once again, on the sand next to me. But then I screw my eyes up and send her away again, because now when she arrives she is burnt and peeling and her features are contorted with starvation and thirst, and I cannot bear to see my baby like that. I try to get the Daisy in jeans back, but she will not come.

I try to send her home, then, to Brighton, to Chris’s world with its baffling overabundance. She is in a world where, if you need something, you can go to the shops and buy it. Who cares if Chris is shambolic? Did I ever really care about that? Once I can peer down at her there, putting her hand up in the classroom, lying back on Chris’s sofa watching
Horrible Histories
, walking someone’s dog along the seafront, then I relax a bit further and know she is all right.

I have no idea how many days we have been here. I rack my brains for the way this post-reality dream world began. A man went to fetch matches. That was it.

He left some food and some drink to ease us into the next world. We finished the food. We drank the water. We realised we could not drink seawater and that he was not coming back. We counted what we had left. Four cans of Coke. Four of Diet Coke. Two of lemonade and two of Fanta. There was a banana tree in the part of the inland jungle we could reach. Someone went further in and discovered papayas. We emptied the cool boxes and washed them out in the sea and put them in the middle of the beach to catch rain.

It did not rain.

We lit a fire and it went out. Some people tried to catch fish but nothing happened. The American woman screamed and cried and said she was going to kill herself if he didn’t come back. I tried to say I thought that had already happened but I don’t think I actually spoke out loud. My mouth is too dry to talk.

Somebody walks around sometimes. Someone peels a banana and feeds it to me. I am sure that has happened quite often. They put a can to my lips and I swallow but it is just something sugary and warm. It is not water.

I have forgotten what these people are called, if I ever knew. I don’t think they are real.

She is shouting. People often shout. This time it carries on so long that in the end the words make their way into my consciousness.

‘Water!’ she is saying. Of course she is saying water. That was my mind. I made her say water because it is the only thing that matters. It is the element that surrounds us and keeps us apart from everything else, and it is the element that is killing us by its absence. Water is the enemy. Water is the only word there is.

‘Water!’ she keeps saying. I turn over to block her out. Yes, I try to say. I know about water.

Hours pass and she is still saying it.

Then hands are pulling me. I twist and push them off. They grab me and hold me down, and something is at my lips. I take a sip because that is what I do, but it is not warm Fanta.

I gulp it all down. The bottle is empty. It vanishes and then it comes back, and I drink it down again. Then I wrench my head away and throw up all over the sand.

‘That’s OK,’ says a voice, and it is a gentle voice. ‘It doesn’t matter. It’s a shock to the system. There’s plenty more.’

I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. I turn and look at the person who is speaking. It is a woman. I recognise her.

‘Esther, it’s all right,’ she says. Behind her I can see a man trying to light a fire. He does not have anything to light it with and is pointing a Fanta can at it, which is unsurprisingly not working.

‘What?’ I think I say.

‘Esther, it’s me. Katy. Look, here’s some more water. Keep this bottle. Keep it with you, and sip it slowly. Hold it, Esther. Hold it with your hands.’

‘Water?’

The woman smiles. I remember that she is nice and I like her. Katy.

‘We found a spring. I found it. If you follow the path all the way into the middle of the island, it’s there. A spring. I thought I was hallucinating. I drank loads of water and I was sick, like you. Then I drank more. I thought I was sick because the water was poisonous, but in fact it is fine, I’m sure it is. I feel better. Much better. Weirdly. So does Ed, look. Everyone’s coming round. I think we’re going to be all right, you know. I think that God has looked after us after all.’

I cannot reply to her, so I follow her pointing finger. A young man –
that
, I tell myself, is
Ed
. He is nice – is handing a bottle of water to an old man. The old man looks baffled, but he is sipping from it. An older woman is walking down to the sea on wobbly legs. A tall man with black hair is sitting up with his eyes closed.

When I look in the other direction, there is a blonde woman, who is sitting on her own on the other side of the beach, crying.

‘Cherry’s had water,’ says Katy. ‘But she won’t stop crying. Maybe when she eats something.’

I make an effort and nod my head, because that feels like the right thing to do.

‘It’s OK now,’ she says in her gentle voice. She sounds like somebody on the radio, someone who reads the news. Somebody you can trust. ‘You’re going to be all right now. We’ll find food and someone will rescue us. They will. I am absolutely sure of it.’

My turn to fetch the water. It is my turn to fetch the water.

That means I need to fetch the water. Katy told me I had to.

The sun has risen over the sea, and all the water is burning pink, and that means it is morning. Another day has come and we are still here.

I prop myself up on my elbows and decide to go right now, because then it will be done. Katy has organised a rota for water and food and fishing, and she tells us all what we have to do and when we have to do it, and as long as we do as she says we are just about surviving. This means I have to go and fill an ice box with water, even though I am not sure I will be able to stand up. Being marooned on a desert island is not the way it is in films. It turns out that rather than learning deep lessons about life and love and what really matters, all you actually think about is food and water. Katy organised what she calls ‘latrines’, a row of holes dug in a jungle clearing. It is all about the basic bodily functions.

Sometimes I try to remember what life was like before this. All I can think of is Daisy. Nothing else I have ever done has any significance whatsoever, it turns out. I had a baby. I did all sorts of other things but they are nothing. I spent too much time with a man I didn’t like and with whom I had nothing in common. We got away from each other in the end. The only thing that matters from that now – the only part of it I can remember – is the look in Daisy’s eyes when I did something that hurt her. Daisy is practical and funny, and she deserves the best of everything.

As castaways, we are not bonding and becoming lifelong friends. We barely have the energy to acknowledge one another’s existence. No one is confiding in anyone. I don’t want to talk, not even to Katy, even though I told her my secrets before we came here. To carry on baring my soul here, aloud, would be unbearably claustrophobic; and anyway, Katy keeps talking about God and trying to get people to pray with her. I don’t want to pray. I just want a boat to come around the headland.

I stand up and stretch. My legs are wobbly. I take unsteady steps to the sea and walk straight into it. It is warm and cleansing and treacherous. I wish it would evaporate so we could walk back to life. All the same, I swim around in it, in the bikini I never take off, rinse my straw-like hair, and step back on to the beach. I wrap my sarong around myself – the sarong I bought at the airport that was so lovely and new and is now fading and ripped – and concentrate on finding and putting on my sunscreen.

There is nearly a whole bottle of it left. If it was just me, it would last me for longer than I want to be here, but since we have to share everything, there are several people using it, which means it will run out and we will get burnt and peel. Still, I put lots of it on, because doing that means that I am expecting to be rescued soon.

The ice box is in its place on the beach. We have to leave it out in the middle of the sand, Katy says, and Mark says too, and so does Jean. Because otherwise little bits of jungly things fall into the water and that is not nice. I pick it up. There is a tiny bit of yesterday’s water left, so I tip it out and watch it vanish, leaving just a patch of clumpy sand behind.

It is easy to find the spring. You follow the path and it takes you there. In two places you need to remember which fork to take, but Katy and Mark have made it easier by blocking off the path you don’t take with big branches. That means you just go without having to think about it. Katy showed me yesterday.

I stumble along. The jungle is much too noisy. It is filled with insects and things that screech and chirp and cry out. I do not like it. I hate being on their territory, but I do not have the energy I used to have to be properly afraid of them. I happily risk the jungle-dwellers ganging up on me and eating me alive. They cannot have any idea of how easy that would be for them, or they would have done it by now.

A lizard runs up the trunk of a tree beside me. Its tongue flickers out. I stick my tongue out back at it.