Stranded (15 page)

This is a world away from the landscape of the beach. The rainforest world is enclosed with a ceiling of thick frondy leaves. It is hot and humid in here, where the beach is always dry. And here I am surrounded by life, by plants and creatures that thrive in this odd place. Spiky vines arrange themselves across the path at head height, just to trap me. I duck under them, feeling bad for being on their territory, even though they are just plants.

The spring is bubbling away. It is a miraculous thing. Katy says that when we were all half-dead on the beach, she went exploring.

‘I could do it,’ she says, ‘because I’d drunk so much water that morning that it took me a while to get dehydrated. At least I think that’s why. Maybe it was just my body reacting differntly to the crisis. Whatever it was, I walked and walked. I knew there had to be water in here somewhere, because there’s so much life. I couldn’t see where I was going, and I blacked out a few times, but I kept finding fruit. It was as if there was a cosmic force or something, putting banana trees exactly where I needed them. I kept stuffing my face with bananas and there was probably some form of water in them or something. Anyway, I kept going. I walked on the paths, wherever they took me. And then I ended up at the spring.’

She was telling us this soon after we all came back from the dead, when she fed us water.

‘Did you think it was a mirage?’ I remember someone asking. It was Ed, I think.

‘Of course I did,’ she agreed. ‘I was having every kind of crazy thought. But I sat down and drank it out of my hands. I threw up in the nearest plant. But then I kept going and it was all right. As soon as I had water in my system I felt wonderful. Alive again.’

‘Thanks, Katy,’ Ed said, and we all muttered similar things. She saved our lives. I am still not convinced that any of this is real, but I cannot deny that things were worse when we did not have water, even if that was just a worse nightmare than this one.

The spring is in a little clearing. It bubbles out of the ground and gathers in a pool. It does not go anywhere. I had vaguely thought that a spring made a stream which made a river which reached the sea; but this one does not. It feeds into a pool, and perhaps it has an underwater network nourishing the nearby plants. Certainly there is much wild and magnificently bizarre foliage nearby: huge flowers bigger than my head, and creepers with odd leaves, and tall, tall palms that reach so far into the sky that they can probably see land.

I tip the ice box up and fill it as far as I can from the spring itself. That makes it about a quarter full. Then I use the biggest water bottle Samad left us, which is a 1.5 litre one, to top it up. Again and again I fill it, and tip its contents into the box. It empties with agonising slowness, glugging away. Time does not exist here, so it does not really matter whether it takes an hour (which I feel it does) or half a minute (which, if I make myself think clearly, is probably closer to objective, previous-life truth).

After some time, anyway, the box is nearly full. I move it carefully to a level place and sit down with my legs in the pool. I close my eyes and enjoy the cool water on my sore feet. Then I dip my hands in and allow the water to cool the pulse points on my wrists. When that is done, I am in a state of bliss, and I throw some cool water over my face and hair and lie back on the boggy ground, my feet still in the pool.

‘Esther?’

I yawn and shake my head.

‘Esther, are you OK?’

With the greatest reluctance, I open my eyes. All I see is the rainforest canopy. I prop myself up on my elbows and look around.

‘Huh?’ I think I say. It is some noise like that, anyway.

‘Esther!’ It is the Scottish man. He is Ed. Such details are surprisingly hard to remember these days.

‘Ed,’ I say. ‘Yes. Just lying down.’

‘Oh, sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you. You look so chilled. It’s just, well, we wanted to check on you because Jean said she saw you leaving with the ice box just after sunrise but you didn’t come back.’

‘I just sat down.’

‘I know. It’s been a while. That’s all. Come on, I’ll help you with the water. We can carry it together. It should probably be a two-person job anyway.’

I stretch. I want to be grumpy and snap at him, but we are stuck on an island. I think of all the people on the beach waking up and having no water. I remind myself that I have to be nice, much as I would rather not be, because we all have to live together, to sleep together around the fire, to share water and whatever scraps of food we have. If I drift into vicious mode, people will stop sharing things with me and I will die.

‘Sorry,’ I force myself to say. ‘I suppose I fell asleep.’

Edward smiles warmly. I remember that he had a handsome friend. I wish he was here too.

‘Will your friends be looking for you?’ I ask, as we take the long handle of the box and start walking. It is awkward, because the path is too narrow for us to go side by side, and avoiding spillage of precious water is difficult when you are walking one behind the other. I walk behind Ed; we take tiny steps and make agonisingly slow progress. Unexpectedly, I remember his friends’ names. ‘Jonah, I mean, and Piet.’

‘I hope they will,’ he says. ‘It’s funny, but now that we’ve all got a little strength back – come back from the brink, you know? – I’m starting to try to put myself in their shoes. We must have been gone quite a lot of days by now. I don’t think any of us know how many. Katy may do, I suppose. She’s been the most on the ball. But say we’ve been here five days, perhaps. Even a week, maybe. What will they have done?’

‘Did they know you were going on Samad’s trip?’ I try to focus on this. ‘You’re the only one of us, aren’t you, travelling with people who aren’t on this island. You’re the only one who’s left friends behind who might raise some sort of alarm.’

‘Yes. I’m sure they’d try to find out what became of me.’

I seize on the idea. ‘Perhaps they’ve got boats out looking. If they hadn’t seen Samad, they’d think we all capsized, wouldn’t they?’

‘I’m pretty confident they’d have got some boats out looking, yes.’

‘And sooner or later they’ll find us.’

His voice is warm as he echoes me.

‘Sooner or later they’ll find us.’

He turns and gives me a reassuring smile. I hang on to the warmth and the certainty in his voice.

There is a small fire burning on the beach. I smile at the sight of it. Smoke is drifting directly upwards into the still air. The heat is stifling today.

‘Well done!’ Ed calls. ‘Look at that! Did you use a can again?’

‘It bloody took long enough,’ Jean grumbles, but she is smiling, pleased with herself. ‘Mainly because that piece of chocolate I polished it with first time round is long gone down my husband’s greedy gullet.’

Gene waves an irritated hand in her direction.

‘Shut up, woman,’ he mutters.

‘So I had to polish it up with leaves and bits of cloth and whatnot and it took for ever. But yeah, we got there.’

Katy is kneeling by the fire, feeding it with dry palm fronds and a collection of sticks and leaves she has piled on the beach. She looks up and pushes a dark lock back from her face. She has lost weight since we’ve been here and her cheekbones are protruding like knives.

‘Esther. You’re back. Anyone fancy fishing?’

I think about that.

‘I fancy
fish
,’ I say.

‘Well yes,’ Katy concedes. ‘I think we all fancy fish. But to get us to that point, someone needs to do some fishing.’

‘I’ll do some fishing,’ says Gene. ‘Maybe we can get the little fishies to come to daddy.’

‘Yes, I’m sure you can, Gene,’ Katy says, in the head-girlish voice she uses when she is organising us. ‘Why don’t you give it a go? I think we can dig for bait in the forest, you know. Worms and stuff.’ Her voice is irritating, but I know that I do not have the mental capacity to make the most basic connections – for example, that before you eat fish someone has to catch them, and before you can go fishing you need some bait – that Katy is managing. That means I cannot complain about her bossiness; I have, instead, to go along with what she tells me to do.

All the same, it is annoying. I try not to let it show on my face.

She does not give me any chores, so I wander around the beach. It is a sandy prison, but instead of bars it has water to the horizon. When I pass Cherry, who seems mainly to be sitting and staring at the sea, she looks up.

‘Hi,’ she says.

‘Hi,’ I reply.

‘This is fucked,’ she observes with a sigh.

‘The most fucked thing ever.’

‘You have a little girl, don’t you?’

I think of Daisy. I am almost certain that I should have been home by now. If Ed is right about how long we have been here, my fuzzy reasoning suggests I should be getting back round about today. Perhaps yesterday, or maybe tomorrow.

I imagine Daisy with Chris, waiting for a mother who is probably never coming. I picture her confidently expectant about my return, planning what she is going to tell me and what we are going to do. Daisy always has ideas about what we must do, when we have been apart. They normally involve her drinking hot chocolate with whipped cream and marshmallows in a café, and going to the cinema.

I imagine the hours passing as I don’t turn up. I picture Chris getting around to calling Emirates, and his surprise and annoyance on discovering that I was not on the aeroplane. I see this bald fact through his eyes and know that he will picture me lazing on a beach and forgetting to go to the airport.

‘Yes I do,’ I say. I cannot think of anything to add. ‘I don’t want to talk about her though,’ I say, looking at Cherry’s expectant face.

‘You’re tough,’ she says.

‘I’m not. I just can’t bear it.’

‘Yeah. You . . .’ I wait for her to finish, but she doesn’t. A tear trickles out of the corner of her big blue eye. I wonder what she is crying about, since she has her husband with her. I decide not to ask.

‘Hey, don’t cry,’ I say in the briskest voice I can manage. ‘That wastes water. We’ll get out of here. And Katy seems to be doing a good job of making sure we stay alive.’

‘She’s bossy as hell, that one.’ Cherry has dropped her voice. ‘I mean, hello? We’re all adults. We don’t need the bloody Queen of England to tell us do this, do that. Fetch water, catch a fish.’

I laugh in spite of myself. ‘I know! She’s very bossy. But at least she found the water and stuff. She saved us. I thought I was dead. It’s weird, isn’t it? Coming back from the dead. I’m not sure I’ll ever be certain I’ve come back to the same place.’

‘I almost wish she hadn’t saved us. You know? Because she knows we owe her everything now. I don’t like owing someone like that. It’s like we belong to her.’

‘At least you’ve got Mark.’

She shakes her head. She raises her eyebrows, then speaks in an odd tone of voice.

‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘I’ve got Mark.’

I stare at the horizon with her. Both of us are waiting for the sight of a boat that is not coming. It is the most hopeless activity there has ever been, and yet it is the only thing we can possibly do.

There is limitless water, and it restores me. I am not the same person: I do not think I can ever be the same person. I am absolutely certain that I have been through a portal of some sort and come out somewhere different, being someone different. This stupid island looks like scenery to me now. I want to find the place where the illusion ends, to see what is hidden behind it.

All the same, my headache recedes. It is still there, my brain still throbbing with a pulsating ache as though there were a creature in my head struggling to get out. I often wonder what kind of creature it is. A sea creature, I think; perhaps a giant squid. It lives in my head and it pulses away, but I can live with that, or I will until the day it bursts forth.

And now, with the water from the spring, with the bananas and papayas that Katy and Ed have been gathering, I am almost strong again. My knees often tremble but they do not give way. I can climb the boulder to look out to sea. I can fetch the water without having to take someone with me to help with the carrying. I can, for the moment, survive.

Then Gene and Katy catch four fish. They are not huge, but they are, as Gene says over and over again, protein. He insists that protein will make us all strong. The fish have silver scales and staring eyes. Gene casually whacks them against a rock and they die.

We cook them on the fire, wrapped in banana leaves, which singe but mostly do not catch light. As the light of the day recedes, Jean eases Katy out of her way and takes the fish apart. She pulls the flesh from the bones and divides it into seven piles, each on a banana leaf for a plate, arranged on top of the ice-box lid.

‘I am being scrupulously fair,’ she says firmly whenever anyone gets too close. ‘I’ll show you how fair, in fact. You can come and choose your helping and I’ll go last. That’s how fair I am.’

Nobody demurs. We are like toddlers now, each greedy to look after ourselves, to meet our own needs before anyone else’s. I take a leaf and retire to a place near the fire. We do not need its warmth, but the comfort it gives is unexpectedly immense. Without the fire we are just a collection of stragglers, abandoned in the most remote place possible. With it we are a small community of (so far) survivors.

Only in the glow of the flames is it possible to cast ourselves in anything approaching a romantic light. We have not chosen one another’s company. We did not want to be here. We all want to be away from here. All we want is food, water and a boat. No one tells you about the squabbling that goes on on paradise islands, about the loo arrangements you have to make with holes in certain parts of the jungle, and with leaves. No one tells you that you while away hours at a time by silently choosing the person you would like to die first, so that you get to split up their portion of food. I would choose the Australians, along with Mark because he makes too much noise. I have not told anyone this; at least, I hope I haven’t.

‘So,’ Cherry says when we have eaten our fish, accompanied by a lot of fruit. ‘While we’re here. While we wait. Does anyone want to tell us anything about themselves?’