Stranded (17 page)

‘And as soon as we met, at Changi airport, we could not stop laughing. We were having so much fun. It was the funniest, naughtiest, most wonderful thing I’d ever done, and I felt that nothing could touch us. We were the golden couple.

‘I do believe in karma. That’s why we’re here. Sorry, guys. We’re here because the Fates are out to get me and Mark. You guys just got swept up in it. We took too much. We overstepped the boundaries.

‘The moment Samad didn’t come back, I knew it. This was the universe getting us back. So my babies are at home without their mommy. I have no idea what day it is, but I do know this: I should be home by now. We were due to start our return journey the day after Samad’s fucking trip. We left the snorkelling till last, so we would still have the salt on our bodies when we got on the plane. Any way you look at it, we should have been home quite some time ago.

‘Which means Tom will have called Liza to find out why I’m not back. Liza will have called my cell a million times. In the end she might have cracked and told him everything. Or she might still be stalling him. I don’t know, but if he doesn’t know the truth yet, he is just about to.

‘And Antonia will be waiting for Mark. I was supposed to get home a couple of days before him. I would have been all tan from “California”, and I would have run into Antonia on the street and chatted about my break, and I would have asked when Mark was due back from Hong Kong, and a part of me would have thrilled at that.

‘But now there are five children without a parent. And we’re stuck here and I can barely look at him, and I’m sick of fucking pretending. And now you all know what we’re really like and you can think what you want about us. I don’t fucking care. Even if Samad came back for us now, it would make no difference. Everything’s gone. We’ve lost it all. Everything. And it’s all our fault.’

Cherry is convulsed by sobs. I stand up and walk over to her, feeling a bit awkward, but no one else is making any move to comfort her. I sit next to her and put my arm around her shoulders like little girls do at school. She leans violently into me and cries into my shoulder, which feels weird as neither of us is wearing anything more than a dirty bikini, and it all becomes very slippery.

‘Oh, Cherry,’ I say, and I pat her back. I try to find some words of comfort, but none come. There is no possible good resolution ahead. Her best scenario is to be rescued and go back to face the music and see her children, but I suspect that will not happen.

‘Well,’ Jean says in the end. ‘You probably wished at some point to be stuck on a desert island with your lover. Be careful what you wish for.’

‘Yeah, I know.’

‘It’s awful for all of us,’ Gene says, his voice gruff. ‘In different ways. Believe me, this is just as bad for Jean and myself as it is for you. Not the same – of course we don’t have a wife and a husband respectively stashed back in Australia; we are genuinely married to one another, more’s the pity – but believe me, it’s as bad.’

‘When you have children,’ I say, ‘and you can’t contact them and you know how bewildered they must be that you haven’t come back – well, that’s horrific, isn’t it? And several of us are in that situation. The marriage thing is almost irrelevant. So Tom is hurt – but you must have known you’d be found out one day. Someone would have seen you walking from Starbucks to the motel with two coffees. You were probably lucky to get away with it for as long as you did. Tom would have got hurt anyway, and Antonia, and maybe you wanted that because it gets you out of a marriage that you sound like you really don’t want to be in. I mean, you and Tom, Cherry. I’m not talking about Mark and Antonia because I have no idea what the story is there.’

I am more animated than I have been since we got here. Cherry’s truth has transported me.

‘They already did.’ This is the first thing Mark has said for a while. ‘They saw her, I mean. I didn’t tell you, Cherry, but a colleague of mine, Jeanette Ogilvy. She saw you. Vaguely recognised you, because on Long Island, people do. Asked me about it. Knew I worked in the motel on a Thursday. Saw you with the coffees on several Thursdays. Put it together. I denied it, but it would have blown open.’

‘Oh great,’ she says. ‘Thanks for telling me
now
.’

‘And those cover stories,’ he adds. ‘They were held together with sticking plaster. One prod and they’d have been in pieces.’

‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘Whatever.’

‘How about you, Mark?’ Ed asks. ‘How are you doing?’

Mark says nothing. I watch the fire reflected in his dark eyes. Then he inhales deeply.

‘Trying not to think about any of it,’ he says. ‘Was doing OK until my lover here decided to share the joy with you all. My wife does not deserve any of this. Obviously. She will be better off without me. She’s a wonderful woman, intelligent and, as Cherry says, beautiful. She could do better than some dick who’s off fucking a neighbour every Thursday. Going away with another woman pretending that
she
, not Antonia, is my wife. Sleazebag. And the boys. They could use a better role model than this one. I know Antonia and I know for sure that there’ll be no second chances. She has self-respect. She won’t let me back through the door. All I hope is that I get to go back and be a McDonald’s dad to them. Have them at weekends, try to make it up to them. Rather than just vanishing for ever like this. How am I doing?’ He pauses. ‘Crashing remorse and self-loathing pretty much sums it up.’

‘They’ll think we’ve run away together,’ Cherry says suddenly. ‘I didn’t think of it before, but they will. If . . . if nobody ever comes. If we live here for the rest of our lives, however long that might be. Not long. Then Tom and Antonia will think that Mark and I have run away. That we never intended to go back. That we’re starting a new life without a word.’ Her voice is wobbling all over the place. ‘And Hannah and Aaron, and Adam and Brett and Connor. They’ll all grow up thinking we . . .’ She cannot say any more, and once more I cradle her as she sobs uncontrollably on my bony shoulder.

‘That won’t happen,’ Katy says firmly. ‘Certainly you will have a lot of explaining to do. But I am completely confident we’ll get away. We have drinking water. We caught fish. At least we’re not stuck up a mountain or something. In a way we’re lucky. We’d have to be here a long time before we came anywhere close to running out of fruit, and the sea’s all around us and we’ll get better at catching things from it now we’ve done it once. We can survive here. We can live. Somebody will come and pick us up. We’ll keep the fire going. Don’t worry, Cherry. I promise you, as far as I possibly can, that we won’t be dying here.’

‘What makes you so sure of that?’ asks Jean, her voice dry. ‘If one might ask.’

Katy hesitates before she says: ‘I just believe it. I know most of you don’t, but I believe in God and I have complete faith in Him to look after us. And believing gives me strength. You can choose whether to expect the best or the worst. I’m choosing to expect the best. We can only guess what happened to Samad – goodness knows, we’ve exhausted speculation on that front – but I cannot see that seven people can disappear, just like that, and no one ever looks for them. I was sure there would be water on the island, and there was. It’s the same thing. I’m sure we will get away, and we will. People do not just get abandoned and die all forgotten.’

‘To be fair,’ Mark says, ‘it’s you, Katy, that’s kept us going. The rest of us were bloody useless. If Katy hadn’t kept at it and found the spring, we’d all be dead. That is an indisputable fact.’

We all nod. It is sobering to have to acknowledge that only one of us had the presence of mind to find the thing we needed to survive, while the other six lay down with no fight whatsoever, and gave up.

I look at Katy in the firelight. She is better than all of us. We should not snipe about her being bossy, and I vow not to, ever again.

‘It’s probably easier when you don’t have children, you know,’ she says lightly. ‘I’m single. I’d split up with my partner not long before I came here. I don’t have anybody who’s going to be devastated by my failure to return. That is actually a huge burden not to have. I know that you guys, Jean and Gene, have children. Esther has her little girl. Now we know that there are a load of kids in Montauk wondering where Mummy and Daddy have got to. It’s just me and Ed who haven’t reproduced. So I think Ed and I can see more clearly than the rest of you, and all I can see is that we need to do everything we can, because every day that we survive, even thrive, is a day closer to the day a boat comes and picks us up. And even if that never happens, we may as well live here as best we can. Food makes a difference. You can see that tonight. Cherry had barely managed to say a word in days, and actually having something close to a proper dinner gave her the strength to tell us her story. Which I would say has done all of us good, in an odd way.’

‘Maybe,’ I hazard, ‘like Cherry said, we
should
all share our stories. It might make the time go quicker. I feel better for thinking about other stuff. I’d never even heard of Montauk but I really liked that
Eternal Sunshine
film and now I feel I can imagine the place. And some of the things that go on in it.’

Neither Cherry nor Mark responds to this, but I see Jean and Gene looking at one another.

‘We will,’ Jean says quickly. ‘But not tonight. I, for one, am going to have to work up to it. For quite a while. Let me think about it, OK? But we have a story to tell you all. That’s for sure.’

Cathy

July 1988

Life in the Village appears to be carrying on as if nothing happened. Everyone seems to have forgotten that we ought to be playing in heaven by now, talking to Jesus, enfolded in His love for ever more. It did not happen, because it was a lie.

They can carry on with their stupid lives, living by arbitrary rules, obeying no omniscient God but a control freak who calls himself by the name of a prophet and who gets to make all the women pregnant whenever he fancies it. I do not plan to live out the rest of my days in this screwed-up excuse for a community. I am seeing it through new eyes, and it is a revelation, the very opposite of the kind of revelations they pretend to have round here.

I catch Cassandra watching me, and I know that she can see it. She is shrewd with people, my birth mother, and she takes a particular suspicious interest in me.

We should not officially know who our parents are. They are all ‘the Parents’. We are all supposed to be children of God, not of men. Everyone knows, though. Cassandra and Moses are my biological parents. Moses is a common factor uniting most of the under-twenty-fives in half-siblinghood.

Cassandra played her trump card this morning.

‘Catherine,’ she said. ‘I can see you are restless, so I have arranged a wonderful surprise for you, my dear.’

I knew better than to be excited.

‘What?’ I asked, when she stared at me for so long that I knew I had to say something.

‘Marriage!’ she exclaimed. ‘Moses has agreed. You and Philip are old enough now. Your wedding is to be held as soon as we can arrange it. He says the middle of August will be suitable.’

I felt sick, because I had feared she would do this to me.

‘I’m only sixteen, though,’ I complained.

‘You are an adult. You are educated. You are ready.’

‘I’m bloody not,’ I muttered, and she slapped my face, hard. ‘Sorry,’ I said, out of habit, hating her.

‘Cathy,’ she said, when we had both calmed down. ‘When you are married, you will feel differently about your life. Your priorities will shift. You are behaving like a petulant child. That will change when you have a child of your own to think about.’

I looked at her, concentrating hard on not looking like a petulant child, nor like someone who could conceivably, as it were, be a mother.

Cassandra looked back with her clear grey eyes. She has long straight hair like mine, and fine bones and pale, almost translucent skin. Sometimes when I look through magazines that people leave lying around at school, I think that my mother could have been a model. She is tall and skinny and, I suppose, beautiful. Instead she has devoted her entire life to this place. She came here as a young adult. I sometimes try to imagine choosing this over everything else, and that is when I know we will never understand one another.

‘You’ve never been married,’ I pointed out, realising as I said it how sulky it sounded.

‘That is because I was chosen by the Father,’ she said. She meant Moses, not God.

‘And you’ve shared him with most of the women here.’

She pursed her lips and seemed about to slap me again. Then she inhaled deeply. ‘Well,’ she said quietly, ‘that’s one thing you will not have to suffer, as you grew from his seed. And you should be grateful that I have found you a suitable husband. It took a lot of work on my part to have you, rather than Martha, chosen for Philip.’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Lucky me. I am so, so
incredibly
lucky.’

Philip and I have known we were going to marry for many years, and I have tried hard to look on him as my ‘boyfriend’. It doesn’t work: he repels me. The sight of him makes me feel sick, when I think about what we are supposed to be going to do together. There are a couple of boys at school I could feel the right way for: Sean Holden in particular. Sean likes me and often talks to me, and when he does, I find myself smiling and chatting back and wanting to meet him after school and go to the cinema and all the things ordinary people do. This, in itself, feels like a miracle (if I may say something so blasphemous, which I may, in my head) and makes my feelings for Philip (best described as cold revulsion at the moment) impossible to reconcile with my destiny.

I freeze when Sean speaks to me, if there is any chance at all of Martha seeing us together. If there isn’t, then we laugh and talk and I feel myself becoming someone completely different. I turn into the person I want to be.

Philip is the same height as me, but with thick shoulders and fat arms. He sweats. His spots are nearly gone now, but he still smells a bit rancid. I remember when we used to dress him up in girls’ clothes and make him be a princess in our games. If I marry him he will have total control over me. He will become my boss. I will have to do what he tells me to do.