Authors: Emily Barr
‘And that leaves me, does it?’
‘It does. You’re the one that makes sense. You have a dark side, anyone can see that. You say you’re divorced with a child, but what proof is there?’
I cannot let that go. ‘What proof is there of anything any of us say? Isn’t that the whole point? We don’t know each other.’
‘No. We don’t. But I think I’m starting to know you a bit.’
‘Mark! You’re being completely mad. What is your scenario, then? Why would I have brought an incomplete satellite phone to the island, mysteriously carrying it here without anyone noticing? Tell me what I’m up to. I’d love to know.’
He scratches his head. ‘I haven’t completely worked it out yet. Here’s one idea: you visited the island before we came on the trip, and left it behind. You’ll use it to get picked up at some point, which I hope is going to be soon. As for why, I can’t say, as I don’t know what your real life is like, in the outside world. Who you really are. I’m thinking you’ve done something terrible, and you need to lie low without anyone being able to find you. This is a pretty good place to do that, don’t you think?’
I retreat from him further, but he follows me, staring at me with possessed eyes, wanting me to crack and confess. Ed, I see, is still lying comatose on the sand, exhausted from battling Cherry back to shore. He will not be coming to my aid. Nobody is in a position to help me, and I am not sure that anyone but Ed would do it if they could. I touch Mark’s chest with both hands. That is strange. I have never touched him before. Using all the strength I have, I push him away. He staggers, taken by surprise, and looks at me in triumph.
‘See!’ he crows. ‘That proves it.’
‘Oh, Mark.’ I lie down next to Ed. ‘Just stop it. Stop talking and leave me alone. You moron.’
I cannot sleep. Most people here, I realise, think the same as Mark. They think that I am the bad guy, that for some mysterious reason I have set up this whole situation. I wonder whether, if I swam out to sea, anybody would come after me. Ed would, I remind myself. But he has just done that for Cherry, and he has no strength to do it again. I could get into the water and swim away and nobody would be able to stop me.
I could just swim out a little way and put my head under, and breathe the water into my lungs. I would be gone before anybody noticed. That would be better than staying here. Our diet of fish and fruit is sustainable, and we could, I know, live here, amid recriminations and divisions and accusations, indefinitely.
I try to find Daisy in my mind and send her messages across the world. ‘Tell them to go and check the islands,’ I urge her. ‘The islands out in the sea, near Perhentian Kecil.’ She is awake. She is in Brighton, maybe at school (working that out is beyond me), sitting in a classroom and wondering where her mother has gone. Perhaps she will receive my message in her head. Maybe she will pass it on. She could call the British coastguard and get them to alert the Malaysian one. Someone could come and look for us. They must have noticed that we are all missing. In fact, it seems impossible that, over the past few weeks, absolutely no one has been out here looking for us.
The fact that a telepathic message to my ten-year-old is my best plan for getting off the island means that things are hopeless. Mark is sitting a little way away, staring at me and muttering under his breath. Ed, Katy and Cherry are flat out on the sand, and I have no idea what state any of them are going to be in. Jean is leaning over Gene, stroking his forehead, wholly absorbed in him. The fire is low. The night is bright. Nothing is going to change. There is no one here I wholeheartedly trust, and nobody trusts me.
I must drift off, because when I open my eyes it is light. There is a tinge of pink above the horizon. I check immediately for Mark. He is sitting up, staring at me with crazy eyes. When I look at him, he comes closer.
‘Leave her, Mark.’ It is Jean, who is standing over me, looking down on me.
‘Why? If she’s the one . . .’
‘And what,’ says Jean, ‘if she’s not? What if that thing was already here, or what if it belongs to someone else?’
I close my eyes and block out their endless paranoid speculation. I lie still and wish myself anywhere in the world but here. I retreat into my head and talk to Daisy. I hallucinate food. I refuse to speak to anyone or to open my eyes.
Even when I hear things happening around me, unusual things, I do my best to block them out. The sounds I can hear must be in my mind. The gasps and the excited voices cannot be real. The sound of an engine, approaching the beach in broad daylight, is definitely not something I could really be hearing, so I assume I am dreaming it. The excited shouts, the splashing of people running into the water; none of that can be real. It is a dream I like, however.
Then someone is shaking me.
‘Esther,’ says Jean. ‘For God’s sake. Get up. There’s nothing wrong with you. Or do you want to stay here?’
I look at her.
‘What?’
‘It’s happened, Esther. Someone’s come for us. Open your bloody eyes, woman. It’s a boat.’
I do.
And it is.
Cathy
January 1989
I haven’t thought back on it for the entire six months I’ve been here. I chose not to, because I wanted to close my mind and get on with life. I only dealt with the day ahead of me, and that was how I got through. No dwelling allowed.
It worked, most of the time. Better than I expected it to work.
I have been, I think, like a foster daughter to Michelle and Steve, and I don’t think they’ve minded having me here. I’ve done lots of babysitting and I pick the boys up from nursery more often than Michelle does. Apparently they told their nursery staff the other day that I’m their cousin, because they got me confused with Sarah. It’s nice being their cousin, and no one has corrected them yet.
It feels like a lifetime ago that I came here, fresh from the Village. I do my best never to look back at it, and certainly I do not allow myself to wonder what ripples my departure might have made. Sarah comes over every month or so – she gets the train into London from Hampshire, and then out to Isleworth. I love it when she comes to see me. We go out for coffee and cake, because her mum gives her the money for it.
She tells me about Martha.
‘They went straight after Sean Holden,’ she told me that first Sunday after I left. ‘According to Martha, you were seeing him on the quiet. She went to Moses and told him that. So poor old Sean’s got the whole of the Village on his doorstep demanding to know what he’s done with you, not believing him when he has no idea what they’re talking about, and actually pushing their way into his house and searching for you until his mum called the police.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘That was a bit of a red herring. Martha started it.’
‘Well it was good. It took the heat right off us. They haven’t a clue.’
‘Didn’t they tell the police I was missing?’
‘Not yet. They want to find you themselves.’
‘That’d be right. They don’t like the police at all.’
‘Listen to you!’ she said. ‘“That’d be right”? That’s a very un-Cathy thing to say. Where did that come from?’
‘I’ve been watching
Neighbours
,’ I admitted.
In the end, though, they did call the police. Martha told Sarah, she told her parents, and Sarah’s parents went to the station and told the police the truth. Two police officers came to visit me here. I had to sit in the kitchen one evening with Michelle and Steve and go through my story with them. It ended with them saying that I was clearly well cared for and happy, and leaving me alone. They even promised not to tell Moses or Cassandra or any of them where I was.
I was surprised to think that Moses had no power over the police. They weren’t scared of him, I could see that. They thought he was pathetic. One of them called him a ‘tosser’ when he thought I wasn’t listening. That was a revelation to me. Perhaps he was just an old man; perhaps I didn’t need to live in fear of him tracking me down. Perhaps I had a right to live how I wanted to live.
They never did come after me. I have been living here, going to college, studying. Michelle found out that I could get some benefits, which I did, by filling in some forms, and I have had a little bit of money of my very own for the first time in my life. I am studying, just for one A level, at evening college. I chat sometimes to a couple of au pairs at the boys’ nursery.
And it is that which has led me to the next thing. Michelle bought me a copy of a very odd magazine called
The Lady
, and she has helped me apply for jobs as a live-in au pair. There is one based quite near here, in Teddington, and I’m going for an interview on Tuesday.
‘You’d be living with a family,’ she said, ‘and doing what you do here, but they’d be paying you properly for it. Which I wish we could do, Cathy. I thought you’d be difficult and that I’d regret taking you in. You were such a mousy thing. But you’ve been no trouble at all.’
That was nice of her. I told her that I’d been brought up to be no trouble at all, and she said that perhaps, in that case, I was still brainwashed.
I’m not, though. I don’t think I ever was. I think I was following my community’s traditions without ever questioning them, in the same way ordinary people do. My community just had stranger traditions.
I went to a normal church once, to see what it was like. It was weird: there were parts of the God I knew, but not enough to make Him recognisable. Everything was half-hearted. The idea of going to a normal church just for an hour on a Sunday morning and living a free life the rest of the time freaked me out.
I have not been back.
The morning is clear and clean, and we are leaving.
It is a small boat, but bigger than the one we arrived on. There are two men on it, local men, and they are gaping at us and talking to each other using words I do not understand. Seeing new people is confusing, and I do not know how to respond to them. One of them smiles kindly at me, and I look away. Their faces are clean-shaven, and they are wearing proper clothes that do not have holes in, and that are clean. One of them, the younger-looking one, has on a T-shirt that is so white it hurts my eyes.
The only thing to do is to get into the boat.
Ed wakes up when I shake him. Katy was awake before me. Cherry is still weak from last night, and I think about how close she came to drowning herself, and how horrible it would have been, the night before our rescue. Mark tries to carry her to the boat, but he is not strong either, and in the end the bigger of our two saviours picks her up and puts her on board. It looks easy for him. She looks as if she weighs nothing at all.
We gather up our paltry possessions: the two books we all read several times, long ago, the towels, the sarongs. We throw the water bottles into the ice boxes and take it all away, conscientiously leaving no trace. I even drop the satellite phone in, despite all the trouble it caused.
Ed and I walk down the beach together for the last time. We hand an ice box to one of the men, who slings it on board. Ed takes my hand and we look back at the world we are leaving. This is no paradise. The beach is an expanse of grit. I long for electricity and progress and every little convenience that exists in the world.
More than anything else, though, I long for Daisy.
Mark, Cherry and Katy are on the boat, sitting in a row and looking dazed. Katy is managing to smile. Mark’s eyes are darting around. I can see his mind ticking over. Mark trusts no one, and he is, transparently, wondering who these men are and where they are going to take us.
Jean and Gene are still on the sand. Both the men are standing over them.
‘We should go and help carry him,’ says Ed, and we both walk back up the beach, even though I am terrified to turn my back on the boat lest it should vanish.
As soon as we are close enough to hear her, Jean calls out.
‘We’re not coming,’ she says.
‘Jeannie.’ Ed kneels down beside her. ‘Jean, this is the thing that’s going to save us all. It’ll save Gene. We can get him aboard.’
‘No.’ She is adamant. ‘He wouldn’t last the journey. He’s staying, and I’m staying with him.’
‘You’re not!’ I tell her.
‘We are, and there’s not a thing you can do about it, young lady. Get yourself back to that daughter of yours. If she exists.’
‘She does.’
‘I believe you. Also, I don’t care. Go on, be off with you.’
‘But Jean.’ I cannot think straight. ‘You can’t stay. You can’t. We can’t let you.’
‘Oh shut up. I’m not moving him. Look at him.’
We do, and I stare for a long time before he takes a shallow breath. He is slick with sweat, but his face is so white that it is almost yellow, despite the sunburn.
The reality of us somehow picking him up and getting him on to the boat is, I realise, unthinkable.
‘We’ll get someone to come and pick you up,’ I tell her. ‘From a hospital, I mean, or something.’ I had, I realise, forgotten all about hospitals. ‘A hospital,’ I repeat. ‘That’s where Gene needs to go. Isn’t it?’
I look to Ed for confirmation. He is nodding.
‘We promise we’ll do that, Jean,’ he says. ‘You two stay here then, and we’ll send someone out to get you.’
‘If you like.’
‘Of course we will,’ I tell her. ‘It’ll be the first thing we do.’
‘Well. We’ll see. We’ll just stay here, the two of us. We have water. We know where to find food by now. No rush.’
I look at her in bewilderment. Then I step forward and kiss her leathery cheek. She pulls away and frowns.
‘No need, Esther,’ she says, drily. We walk back towards the boat, which is still there, waiting for us. Then we are aboard, Ed and I sitting opposite the other three. The bench below us is smooth planks of wood, five of them in a row. It is the simplest thing, and yet it is miraculous. I stroke the wood, imagining the machinery that has made it the right length and texture, the process of fitting it into the boat.
Ed’s hand is on mine. The engine starts. All of us look back to the beach that has been our home for an indeterminate amount of time. Jean and Gene are in their place by the treeline. Jean holds up a hand. We all wave back to her. Then we start to move. We pull away from the sandy prison, through the clear water, heading back through millennia of progress to the twenty-first century.