Stranded (33 page)

Chris hammers on the door while I am wearing nothing but a dressing gown. I run down the stairs to let him in, and his face immediately gives away the fact that he knows he has screwed up completely.

‘Come up,’ I say, over my shoulder. I was married to this man for nearly a decade. He can see me getting dressed.

‘Blimey, Esther.’ He sits on the bed, our bed, and looks at me. I look back, wondering if he reads the fury in my eyes. He does, I am certain, but it is not that he is recoiling from.

‘What?’ I demand, pulling on a clean bra that is now too big for me and doing it up on its tightest setting, to no avail.

‘Esther. What has happened to you? You’re a fucking skeleton.’

‘Yes. As I said.’ I pause. Did I say? ‘I went on a fishing trip. We stopped on this completely remote island for lunch. And the guy went off to get his lighter and never came back. Twenty-nine days later, a boat spotted our fire at night, as far as I can tell, and the next morning someone came out and rescued us. Twenty-nine days, Chris.’

He says nothing for a long time. Then he sighs.

‘I believe you. I completely believe you. That is a much more Esther thing to do than deciding you were going to stay on some paradise beach shagging a young man indefinitely and that you didn’t want to be a mother any more.’

I turn and stare. ‘What?’

‘Well.’ He sighs and puts his feet up on the bed, and even though he has horrible clumpy boots on, I do not complain. ‘You did email me and say that was the plan. It came from your account. You set up that Hotmail account before you went, right?’

‘Yahoo. No one has Hotmail accounts any more, do they?’ My mind is whirring, trying to work this out.

‘Oh. I think the emails came from a Hotmail account. Actually, I’m sure they did. Because I thought that too. That Hotmail was a bit, you know, 1999. But you’d said you were setting up a new email, and there were emails from you, with your name on them. And they said you were blissfully happy on the island, and Daze and I wrote back saying that was good. Because I was totally being the responsible guy here, you know? Doing my fucking best. I was rising above your tone and helping Daisy to write back to you with the stuff she wanted to tell you, all her news, the dogs, I took her riding, she did a swimming thing – you know.’

‘I don’t,’ I tell him. I am chilled to the bone. ‘I absolutely don’t. I sent you emails from Kuala Lumpur. Twice. The first few days I was there. There was no internet on the island. So I didn’t send you anything, apart from texts.’

Chris twiddles with his ponytail

‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Daze liked the texts. She said you sounded nicer in them. Like her real mummy.’

‘That’s because I was her real mummy.’ I button up a workish blouse that I wore for one of my many and boring admin jobs. ‘Daisy knew, then. She knew what was me and what was . . . someone else.’

‘I guess.’

The blouse flaps around me like a tent. It is silky and extremely secretarial. It will do. I flick through my skirts, searching for one with an adjustable waist.

‘Chris,’ I say over my shoulder. ‘Have you got your car?’ He nods. ‘Tell me when we’re on the way. What happened. Because if I stop and think about it now . . . You do, though, remember me telling you that Daisy was never going to have any contact with my so-called family? Remember that they were never, ever allowed to know she existed? Remember you wanted to put a birth announcement in the paper, because you were being Mr Fucking Conventional, and I stopped you because I could not bear to take the risk that my birth family might find out about her?’

He nods, apparently unable to answer. He is avoiding my eyes. The seconds tick by.

‘I dropped her there,’ he says, eventually.

I am ready. ‘Let’s go and see, then, shall we?’

He leaps up from the bed, his face set.

‘Come on, Esther. Let’s do it. Let’s go and find her.’

Chris has parked around the corner. There is a cool breeze coming from the direction of the sea, and it blows into my face. For the first time ever, I am glad that I do not have a sea view. Not having to look at a watery horizon is a refreshing idea.

‘So you’re just off the plane,’ Chris says.

‘Got back a couple of hours ago,’ I tell him. I look at the sun. Although I have lost track of time, it seems to be the middle of the afternoon.

‘Knackered? Jet-lagged?’

I shrug. ‘Least of my problems.’

‘Let’s pick up a coffee on the way. Take it with us.’

‘Oh.’ I think about that. ‘I don’t like coffee any more. But yes. Why not?’

I sit in the front seat and buckle up my seat belt. My ex-husband looks across at me.

‘You never told me anything,’ he says, looking away, putting the key into the ignition. The engine roars into life. I look at a woman walking past, holding the hand of a toddler who is stopping every few seconds to examine something: a snail on a wall, then a tiny weed growing through a crack in the pavement.

‘I know,’ I say. The indicator clicks, and we pull out into the traffic. Chris turns left on to Church Road, past the hall in which I did pregnancy yoga, many years ago. ‘I thought I told you enough. Obviously I didn’t, though. It’s my fault.’

He is staring straight ahead, driving much more carefully than usual. ‘Don’t be silly,’ he says.

‘I was married to you. We have a child. Once I was out of there, I decided, in the end, that I would never talk about it again. But I should have done, to you.’ I attempt a smile. ‘One of the myriad reasons why we didn’t work, no doubt.’

He drives for a while. We are almost out of town when he says, ‘A symptom, not a cause, I’d say. You didn’t feel you could share something fundamental about yourself. Should have been a clue that I wasn’t the one for you. Can you fill me in now, please?’

I think about Ed. I would happily tell him the whole sorry story. I only didn’t on the island because I could not bear to start dwelling on it. Having the Village in my head while trapped in the remotest place in the world with nothing to do would have been a recipe for madness.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Get out of Brighton. I’ll tell you everything.’

After the services on the M23, I have a paper cup of coffee in my hand. It is too hot to hold. I take a sip.

‘Oh,’ I say. ‘This one only tastes of hot milk with a bit of coffee flavour. It’s not like the one on the island at all. This one I can drink.’

‘Knock it back, then.’

I take a few sips. Chris puts his drink down between the two front seats, and starts the engine.

‘You tell me,’ he says. ‘And then I’ll tell you.’

And so, as quickly as I can, I fill him in on my childhood living in what is, unequivocally, a cult. I tell him about my escape, and my death, and the Village’s habit of child-snatching as the coldest, most vicious form of revenge. I do not look at him as I speak, because I do not want to see his face.

When I finish, he says nothing. Silence stretches out. We are on the M25. He overtakes a stream of lorries, then makes a sound like nothing I have ever heard before; it is inhuman, the sound of an animal separated from its young. I do not know what to do, so I close my eyes and wait for it to stop.

‘Esther,’ he says, eventually. ‘If I’d had the faintest fucking idea . . .’

I look at him. His face is green.

‘I know. Truly, I do. I’m sorry. Will you tell me what happened now? I just need to know before we get there.’

Both of us are sober and grim. Chris gives a curt little nod. He takes a deep breath and composes himself.

‘Right. I cannot believe I bought into it. She was . . .’ He collects himself, visibly. ‘So, Daze and I had a few weird emails from you. She’s getting a bit worried. She loves it when you text but she hates the emails because they’re all about not wanting to come home and imagining a new life for yourself in Asia. I was befuddled by them too. But you didn’t write them.’

‘No.’ I am not ready, yet, to think about who did write them, though I know. ‘Then what?’

‘So this woman calls me at home. She introduces herself as Cassie Godwin. “Does that name mean anything to you?” she asks. She sounds nice. Older. Friendly. “No,” I say. “Should it? Sorry.” Because, of course, I instantly think that she’s someone I’ve forgotten and that I’m being awfully rude. “There’s no reason at all that you should know me, my dear,” she says. “But I’m Esther’s mother.” That threw me. I knew you didn’t speak to your family. I knew that you held them in the highest contempt and that you would never tell me anything about them. I had, of course, no clue about what her agenda might have been. And I did know how much you didn’t want them to know about Daisy, but I was pissed off with you. So I was a little intrigued that she’d surfaced once you’d buggered off.’

‘I can imagine,’ I tell him. ‘Of course. And . . . ?’

The traffic is heavy, as, I recall, it often is. We did not sit around on the island fantasising about being stuck in traffic on the M25.

‘And she started to talk. She sounded very hesitant. She said you had disowned your family and run away as a headstrong teen, and they had decided to leave you to it and wait for you to come back. “You know Esther,” she said. “She does what she wants and there is really no point in trying to stand in her way. We decided, her father and I, that we would not contact her. We would just wait. I thought she would come back, but she never did.” Fuck. It sounded bizarre to me. It didn’t sound like you, not the way she was telling it. I should have gone with that instinct.

‘“Did she ever mention our religious views?” she asked.

‘“She never mentioned you at all,” I told her. And she started to spin me her bloody story.’

‘What did she tell you?’ I demand, fury rising hot through my body. ‘Did she explain that I ran away to avoid having to marry some random spotty boy, chosen solely because he wasn’t my half-brother, at the age of sixteen? Did she tell you about the time we all sat up all night waiting for the Apocalypse?’

He stares at me for so long that I reach over and touch his cheek, to turn his head back towards the road. The pain on his face is impossible to look at.

‘No,’ he says. ‘She did not. Obviously. You told me all that in fifteen minutes. You didn’t tell me in ten years. That Apocalypse thing. It was in the papers, wasn’t it? Years and years go, when I was eighteen or so. I remember it.’

‘Yes. You do. That was me. That was her. That was them.’

He screws his eyes up. ‘It was one of those things that stick with you when you’re that sort of age, because you’re so open to the idea that it might be true. I remember the build-up: the end of the world is nigh, all of that. Everyone was half hoping that it might actually happen.’

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Not as much as I was hoping it. I knew it was going to happen. It had to, because we’d all been brought up with God’s word as the absolutely unquestionable thing. And this was, supposedly, God’s word. Then the world went on as normal. The sun came up. It was the biggest betrayal of my life.’

‘Esther. Why the hell didn’t you tell me any of this before? You just clammed up about your family and said you’d tell me about them one day.’

‘I realise that.’ I try to focus. This is crucial. ‘So how did we get from Cassandra posing as a poor ignored mother to you sending Daisy to stay with her? How did she pull that off?’

My heart rate is galloping. It is the caffeine. It is the past catching up with me. It is the fact that, finally, they have stolen my child.

He sighs.

‘She said that she and your father had been keeping an eye on you from a distance, just to make sure you were OK. She knew about Daisy, however much you might not have wanted her to. She knew where you lived. She knew we were no longer together, and she also knew you were on holiday in Malaysia.’

‘And did it not seem a little freaky to you, that she knew all that?’

‘Remember that by this point, you were pretty much saying you weren’t coming home. I was, stupidly, glad of some support. And she sounded nice, Esther. She really did.’

‘Yeah. I bet.’

‘She asked if she could meet her granddaughter.’

‘At what point did she admit that she lived in a cult?’

Chris moves expertly into the outside lane. He is a much better driver than he used to be.

‘She said she lived in a “spiritual community”. I had the impression it was a bit new-agey, and also that she’d only moved there recently. She said she wasn’t with your dad any more.’

‘Ha!’ I say to that, suddenly sixteen again. ‘She
wishes
she’d ever been with him. She had to share him with every other woman in the place, plus anyone else he happened to take a fancy to. He treated her like scum, and she took it because it was God telling him he was special and the normal rules didn’t apply.’

‘Yeah. Obviously she didn’t mention that. She just asked if it would be possible for Daisy and me to meet her somewhere, just so she could have a look at her granddaughter. I’d just had an email from you that I’d kept away from Daze, talking about this Canadian bloke that you’d met at that resort. So I was feeling a bit “fuck you”, to be honest.’

‘She was writing those emails.’

‘Well, yes. Clearly. At the time I didn’t suspect that. We met her at the park, St Ann’s Well Gardens. I recognised her as soon as I saw her because she looks exactly like you, Esther. It was freaky.’

‘Does she? What does she look like?’ I am biting my lip so hard that I expect to taste blood any second. I have consciously not thought about Cassandra for more than half my life. In my mind, she is tall and skinny with a disapproving face and long blonde hair. Now that I think about it, I can see that, perhaps, I have grown to look like her in the past twenty-four years. The thought has never occurred to me.

‘She’s not as thin as you are now. But she nearly is. And everything about her – her hair, her face, her cheeks, all of it – is exactly you. If I’d seen her walking down the street, I’d have said “that’s Esther’s mum”. Grey hair, though. In some sort of bun affair. She looked like a granny. She looked, actually, like you will look in the future. Daisy warmed to her at once, I could see, because she was the next best thing to you.’