Stranded (26 page)

I catch myself thinking along these lines and make an effort to stop it. I love Ed. I trust him completely. Yet I am not sure that I should depend on my own judgement. It has not always been good in the past.

Nobody is speaking. We are all sticking around the fire because, I think, everyone knows that to head off alone would be to invite suspicion. We stick together, and try not to look at each other. Suddenly there is nothing to say. Mark has not arrived from the other beach. I see Cherry looking for him, often. I wish I had had the confidence to stay there too. The atmosphere here is stifling and poisonous.

‘It makes no sense,’ Ed says, out of the blue. ‘I cannot think of any scenario in which that phone is legitimately here. And yet, here it is. Could it be a collective hallucination?’

Katy shrugs. ‘Could be. That’s as plausible as anything else. I think the lizard might be done, guys. Shall I do the honours?’

‘I’ll get some plates,’ I say, and I feel all their eyes on me as I head into the jungle to pick banana leaves. I want to turn and clarify that I will not be locating the battery and making a mysterious telephone call, but I manage to stop myself. If I said that, it would only confirm my guilt, in their eyes. I find the leaves I need, make sure I have one for everyone, including both Gene and Mark, and head directly back to camp, ensuring that no one can possibly think that I had time to do anything else.

‘Here we go,’ I say, handing them over. Katy has put the lizard, which is now charred black, its eyes exploded out of their sockets, on to the lid of this beach’s ice box.

‘Thanks,’ she says. ‘We’re waiting for it to cool down.’

Ed, Katy, Cherry and I sit and stare at the lizard. Jean sits and stares at all of us. Ed suddenly turns on her.

‘For fuck’s sake, Jean!’ he yells. ‘Stop looking at us like that!’

She raises her eyebrows, but says nothing, and goes to sit next to Gene instead.

The lizard is the most delicious food I have ever tasted, and I thank it profusely for giving itself to feed us. I want to say grace, to thank not a divine provider, but the food itself. I manage, however, to restrain myself.

‘Did you kill it?’ Katy asks Ed, through a mouthful. It is properly dark now, and there is a cloud over the moon. ‘I meant to ask, but we were rather overtaken by events, weren’t we?’

‘Yes,’ he tells her proudly. ‘I wouldn’t have just brought back a dead one, because it would have poisoned us all. I was off collecting fruit, and it was on the ground at the bottom of a tree, doing that thing where they stand completely still and hope you don’t notice them. I jumped on it. I didn’t think for one second it would still be there once my feet landed, but it was. It started hissing at me, which was very disconcerting. I didn’t have a weapon to hand, obviously, so I just stamped on its head until it died.’

‘Wow,’ says Katy.

‘Respect,’ I tell him.

‘Ed,’ says Cherry. ‘You are a hero, and I don’t care what Jean says.’

‘I too,’ he says, ‘do not care what Jean says.’

‘Me three,’ I mutter.

Katy looks awkward. ‘I know where you guys are coming from,’ she says quietly. ‘I mean, of course that phone doesn’t belong to one of us. It’s impossible and ridiculous. It was obviously here for some reason before we were – that is completely clear to everyone but Jean. But look at her. Her husband’s about to die. Tonight, I would say. Her son, to all intents and purposes, is already dead, but Gene won’t let him go, so she hasn’t been able to process the grief. When Gene dies, if she gets away from here, she’ll have to deal with switching off Ben’s machine. I can see why she’s clinging on to the suspicion thing, can’t you? So let’s give her a bit of a break.’

Ed nods slowly. ‘When you put it like that. Yes. Sorry.’

‘Hey.’ I see Katy smile warmly in the starlight. ‘Don’t apologise. You provided the lizard. You’re safe.’

‘I can see that too,’ I say. ‘About Jean. I think I’ve been too wrapped up in myself. I could be a bit kinder to her, even though she does seem to think I’m plotting in some unspecified way to keep us all here for ever, and never see my daughter again.’

‘That,’ says Cherry, ‘is because she doesn’t believe you have a daughter. Poor woman. Of course she’s losing it.’

We all watch Jean stroking her husband’s hair back from his face. He is still mumbling an undecipherable stream of slurred words under his breath. Jean is speaking urgently, right into his ear, looking across at us from time to time. It is clear that she is talking about us.

Mark comes back just as I am drifting off to sleep. Suddenly he is standing over us.

‘I’ve been thinking about this,’ he says, his voice loud and portentous, bringing me instantly to complete consciousness. ‘I think we do have a traitor in the camp. I know who it is. And do you know how I know?’ He does not wait for an answer. ‘I saw a boat!’

Everyone stirs at that, though I instantly disbelieve him.

‘Honey,’ says Cherry’s voice, uptight and worried. ‘What are you talking about?’

I manage to twist myself around and look at him. The sky is now so dark that it is almost impossible to make him out.

‘I saw one. A light out at sea. What does that signify? A boat. Ship. Vessel of some sort.’

‘So where is it?’ I ask him.

He pauses. ‘It went away.’

‘Oh,’ says Ed. ‘Great. You’re sure about that, are you?’

‘Yes. I am sure.’

I lie back down. There is no point engaging with this. I suspect that Katy is following the same plan. Jean is sleeping away from the rest of us, with Gene. I block out the sounds of Mark’s increasingly unhinged conversation and do my best to focus on sleeping, but I wake up again when I hear him saying to Cherry: ‘You don’t want to know who the traitor is, then?’

‘No,’ she says, with unusual vehemence. ‘I actually don’t.’

‘Well I’ll tell you anyway. Then you can be wary. It’s Esther.’

I almost laugh. I nearly turn around to defend myself. Then I decide I cannot be bothered with any of it, and I force myself to escape from it all by drifting into blissful, straightforward unconsciousness.

Cherry wakes us in the darkest part of the night, by yelling: ‘Boat! A real one!’ She is standing right above me, screaming.

The clouds have blown away from the moon, which is nearly full. The stars make me feel grounded. Cherry is pointing at the sea and shouting the same word over and over again.

As ever, it takes me a few seconds to orientate myself.

Ed is quicker. He is sitting up, and then his deep voice is joining Cherry’s high excited one.

‘It
is
a boat!’ he says. His voice grows louder. ‘There is! You’re right, Cherry. There’s something out there.’

Katy and I spot it. ‘There! It’s there!’ We all shout at once. There is a light, an electric light, somewhere close to the horizon. I am aware that it is the first electricity any of us have seen for weeks. All of us are shouting at the tops of our voices. Jean joins us, looking around beadily.

‘You see?’ she says. But then even she joins in the shouting.

I stare at the light, willing it to change course and come closer. Ed ushers us all away from the fire and throws more fuel on it. I realise that this is the only thing to do, and join him, grabbing leaves and branches from the forest and running back, past Gene, who is so still that I wonder, briefly, if he has died yet. We throw everything we can on the fire, and the leaves, luckily, are dry now, so they burn brightly though quickly.

‘Will they come?’ Katy sounds breathless. ‘Is there anything else we can do? Anything at all?’

Mark is next to her. ‘No,’ he says. ‘There’s not. The fire is all we have. They’ll see it and come closer, because there must never be a fire out here. Which means they’ll want to check it out.’

I suddenly remember Mark announcing me as the traitor, and I walk away from him. I have no desire to learn what it is about my behaviour that led him to judge me like that.

Ed takes my hand and we stand and watch the light, desperate for it to grow, for the shape of a boat to form around it.

It does not happen.

The next thing I know, someone is running into the water and swimming away.

‘Cherry!’ Katy shouts. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Cherry!’ Mark yells. ‘Don’t be an idiot! You can’t swim that far!’

But she is not listening. I stand rooted to the shore, and watch her splashing through the moonlit water, swimming with surprising strength in the direction of the light.

‘She can’t do that,’ Ed says. ‘We need to get her back. She’ll drown.’

‘Are you guys strong swimmers?’ Katy asks. ‘I’m not bad and I’ll give it a go unless one of you wants to.’

‘I’ll get her,’ Mark says. I catch sight of the sceptical look Katy gives him, before they both walk into the water together. After a moment, Ed follows them.

‘Did my lifesaving course back in the day,’ he says. ‘I’d feel terrible if I didn’t give it a shot.’

My swimming is far too weak for me even to try. I stand on the shore and watch in terror as three of my allies and one bizarre enemy disappear out to sea. They cannot, I think, leave me here with a dead man and a paranoid woman who thinks I am plotting against her. They have to come back. I feel entirely abandoned by them, just as we were by Samad.

The sea is lit up like a shifting silver cloth. I stare at the three heads that are ploughing away from me, feeling that I can keep them safe if I never take my eyes off them. Cherry is out in front, swimming purposefully towards the light. She is like a moth, I think, compelled to throw herself at the electricity. Two of the others are gaining on her, though I have no idea which two they are. The other is slowing down, and whoever it is, I am willing them to turn and come back.

As I stare, the single figure stalls. The other two reach Cherry. It is hard to see from the beach, but there is flailing, an obvious struggle. I stare in horror as they seem to pull and fight one another for an impossible amount of time. Then, finally, the figures start to head back towards the shore. It takes them for ever to get here.

‘Don’t worry.’ Jean has crept up to me so quietly that I never noticed. She puts a claw-like hand on the top of my arm, and I want to shake her off but, somehow, don’t. I cannot think of anything to say to her, so I just stand and stare out to sea instead. The figure that stalled is swimming back to the beach, and as it comes closer I see that it is Mark. Mark, the most self-consciously alpha of us all, is not who I expected to see. By the time he reaches the beach he is gasping for breath, clearly beyond exhausted, and he staggers past Jean and me without a word and throws himself on the sand beside the fire.

We stand and wait for the other three. I dread what is about to happen.

Cherry is still alive. We put her beside the fire. She is shaking violently, and her eyes are closed.

‘She wouldn’t come back.’ That is all Ed manages to say. I sit up close to him and hold him as best I can, but he has no reserves left. Katy is shuddering and gasping for breath, not speaking to anybody.

None of us has commented on the fact that the boat has continued on its trajectory and passed out of sight.

Nobody says a word for hours, not even Jean. We sit up in the tropical night, and keep the fire burning, and nobody has anything left to say. Much later, when it is nearly morning, Ed mutters: ‘She didn’t want to get to the boat. She wanted to die.’

‘You saved her,’ I tell him.

‘What right did we have,’ he mutters, ‘to do that?’

We all sleep late into the next day. We wake up burned by the sun and slick with sweat. I am acutely aware that Ed and Katy saved Cherry’s life, against her will, while I stood on the beach and did nothing. If it had been just Cherry and me, she would have died. I am useless.

I fetch bananas for breakfast and attempt to cook them slightly to make them taste nicer. As I do so, I try to be reassuring.

‘Whoever was on that boat last night,’ I say, ‘will have seen our fire.’ I announce it as if I mean it. ‘To be out in a boat at night, that probably means they’re fishermen, which means they know the area, which means they know this is an uninhabited island. So they’ll know there are people here, and in the morning they’ll tell someone.’

A dubious silence greets this hypothesis.

‘Or,’ says Katy, ‘they’re out at night because they’re up to no good, smuggling or something, and the last thing they’ll do is tell anybody. Because if fishing boats ever passed this way, we would be long gone from here.’

‘Yeah,’ agrees Edward. ‘Or that.’

The boat does not come back. Nothing happens. Nothing else turns up on the horizon and there is no sign at all of anyone coming to pick us up. I did not expect it, but the glimpse of electricity and everything it implies, coupled with Cherry’s crazed swim and set against the background of the satellite phone, has conspired to turn our camp into a snakepit of paranoid despair.

I have had enough. I do not like these people. I don’t care about them any more. I do not have the choice, but all the same, I know that I have used my reserves, and that everybody else has too. I can no longer push Daisy out of my head. She is with me all the time, looking at me with her face furrowed in confusion, reaching out to me. I stretch out and try to touch her, but our fingers never meet.

‘Esther,’ says Mark, crouching down next to me and using a surprisingly gentle tone. ‘Look. We have no idea what’s going on here, but I know that the phone is yours. Tell us where the rest of it is. Or go and make a call and get someone to pick us up. Either will be fine.’

I look at Daisy. She vanishes.

‘Fuck off,’ I mutter. I cannot be bothered to defend myself.

‘I won’t.’ He still sounds gentle, which is unnerving. ‘Just tell me, Esther.’

‘Why? Why would it be mine? It’s not.’

‘It fucking is. This is why I think so.’ He seems to experience a surge of adrenalin, and suddenly leans forward so his face is right in front of mine. I pull back and he follows, his face so close to mine that I see his features, which I once thought were handsome, in double. He looks ugly and, I think, deranged. ‘Number one. It’s not Jean and Gene’s. They found it, for a start, and also he’s about to die. Number two, I know it’s not mine and I can vouch for Cherry. That leaves you, Ed and Katy. Katy’s the practical one who’s taken care of everything. She would make that call if she knew how, and get us home, sooner than anyone else would. Ed’s too much of a nice guy. You can tell by looking at him that he’s too normal to pull a stunt like that.’