Authors: Emily Barr
‘He’s lying,’ she says at once. Her face is blotchy with tears but her voice is firm. ‘He’s covering himself. They were paid for? I mean, what the hell? Did you pay? No. Did we? No. Of course we didn’t pay.’
A boy in his late teens is produced from the kitchen. He twists the corner of his faded green T-shirt and shuffles his feet. When he speaks, his English is halting.
‘A man come and pay the bill for the five rooms,’ he says. ‘I not know why. But I take the money and he say bye. I not ask anything.’
The policeman lets rip with a stream of dismissive words. Mark talks over him.
‘What did this man look like?’ he asks.
The boy talks to his uncle, who says: ‘My nephew says he was an old man, perhaps sixty or seventy years old. He have white hair. He was very certain that he was paying the bill and he did not explain except to say he was a friend. When I come back, we went to the rooms and saw that they were empty, so we clean them and put in the next guests there. We think all you have gone.’ He gestures in the direction of the mainland. ‘You know, we have many guests. There is always someone who wants the room.’
The policeman turns to us. ‘Do you know such a man?’ he asks.
‘Not Gene?’ I wonder. We look at one another. Why would Gene have doubled back and paid for our rooms? He did not want to be on that island, stranded and unmissed, any more than anyone else did. In fact, he has come out of the ordeal far worse than the rest of us.
‘Before we left,’ I remember, ‘Katy brought all our room keys back and left them with you. Do you remember that?’
‘Yes,’ says the boy. ‘One woman. I remember.’ He clearly does not recognise Katy.
‘Yes, I dropped them off,’ she says. ‘I handed the keys in. Then we got in the boat, and we left.’
I think of poor Samad, killed on his brief trip back for the lighter. I think of the satellite phone, and a man who looked like Gene ensuring we would not be missed. Nothing adds up.
‘Can I use your telephone?’ I say, because it doesn’t really matter any more what happened. The only thing that matters is getting away.
It is dark in the back of the staff area, where the phone is: there are no windows in the dark-wood walls. A white T-shirt hangs on a nail above the phone, and a single faded yellow flip-flop is in the corner, by my feet.
In the half-light, I press the keys on the telephone handset. Two zeros to get me out of Malaysia. Two fours to get me into Britain. Then 1273 for Brighton. Then the six digits of Chris’s number, which, happily, I can remember.
After some clicking and buzzing, the miraculous British ringtone starts to sound. My vision blurs. My heart pounds throughout my body. Every fraction of a second stretches on as I wait for someone to pick up.
Daisy could answer. I have not got anything ready to say. I know it would be better if Chris picked up, but I long to hear her voice.
It rings and rings. I stare at the dusty floor. When the click happens, it is the answerphone. I do not even get to hear a familiar voice on that, because he has not bothered to change it from the electronic woman who came with the machine.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says, not sounding sorry in the least. ‘The person you are calling is not available. Please leave a message after the tone. When you have left your message, you may hang up, or press one for more options.’
There is a clinical bleep, and I try to speak.
‘It’s me,’ I say. I stop, take a deep breath and try again. ‘It’s Esther. Mummy. It’s a long story. I’ll call again in a bit. I want to try your mobile but I don’t know the number.’ I stop and hold the phone out in front of me, staring at it. Then I think of more to say and hastily pull it back to my ear. ‘I’m in Malaysia,’ I add. ‘I was stuck. But I’m coming home.’
Then I put the phone back down, deflated, and go to tell Cherry it’s her turn.
Ed, Mark and Katy are sitting on the beach. I go and join them. It is peculiarly comforting, to be on the sand with these people.
‘As if some mysterious man strolled up and paid for our rooms!’ Ed is saying as I sit down next to him. ‘Here’s what happened: Mr Paradise thought we’d bailed on him and threw our bags into the sea.’
‘Helping himself to what he wanted first,’ Mark suggests.
‘Yes. That.’
‘And this older man who came along?’ asks Katy.
‘Well,’ Ed says. ‘I would imagine he’s a version of Gene, probably because poor old Gene isn’t here. It’s a story they’ve made up to hide the truth: they thought we did a runner, and were more concerned with renting the room out to other people than anything else.’
Katy is restless, unfocused. ‘But I don’t care,’ she says. ‘It’s sad about Samad. The rest of it? So what? We’re back. I’m not going to hang around talking to the police, who are clearly out of their depth. Nothing is going to happen, because the person who left us there is dead and the whole thing was an accident. I want to get as far away from here as possible. I’m going to head off on my own and get to grips with everything, and go home in my own good time. If I melt away, don’t worry about me.’
I understand Katy’s position entirely. ‘I wish I could do that too,’ I tell her. ‘I’d come with you in a second. But I need to get a passport and get home to Daisy.’
‘I know you do.’ She puts a hand on my arm and smiles. ‘And you will. You’ll be back in a day or two, I know you will. Just keep the pressure up.’
She leans over and kisses me on the cheek. Then she gets up and walks away from us. I wonder whether we will ever see her again. If anyone can look after herself, alone in Asia without a bag or any documents, it is Katy.
Cherry joins us. Her face is puffy and red, and she is trembling all over.
‘I just told him we have lots to talk about,’ she says, lowering herself to the ground and conspicuously not sitting anywhere near Mark. Mark’s jaw is twitching, and he is trying to mask his anxiety by talking too quickly.
‘What did he say? Did he say anything about me? Did he mention Antonia? What’s going on back there?’
She shakes her head. ‘I didn’t talk for long. Just said I’d had a mishap and would explain when I got home. He didn’t say anything about you. He was crying just to hear me. I could hear the kids in the background.’
She is looking away from Mark, out to sea, the direction all of us looked in whenever we could, just in case.
‘Mark?’ I ask, to distract him. He looks at me. Soon, I think, his beard will be gone and he might be a little bit more like the smooth newly-wed he once appeared. ‘Do you still think I’m some sort of traitor?’
He smiles and looks embarrassed. ‘I apologise for that, Esther,’ he says, looking at his own fingers, flexing them experimentally. ‘No. Of course not. I was just . . . I suppose it was getting to me.’
I laugh at his understatement. ‘That’s OK then. It’s fine. I just wanted to check.’
‘You were pretty crazy there for a while, Mark,’ Ed tells him.
‘We all were,’ I add, quickly. I do not want any rifts reopening now, not here, where we are safe again. ‘Forget about it. I wish we knew where Jean and Gene are and what’s happened.’
‘I don’t think Gene can still be with us,’ says Ed. ‘He didn’t want to be. I hope Jean’s OK. I hope one of her other children is coming out to take care of her.’
I call Chris again, but again I get the answerphone. I leave a stream of consciousness, explaining as best I can what has happened to me. I try to ring his mobile, but I get the number wrong and end up having a flustered conversation with a woman in South Wales. I try to remember his work number, or the numbers of anyone I know. They are all gone. I try my own home number, but when I hear my voice speaking from an earlier era on the answerphone, I hang up.
Things become strange. I exist from one moment to the next, no longer trying to make sense of anything. Sometimes my vision goes blotchy, and my head hurts. Whenever I eat, I will the food to stay down. I cannot cope with the noise, or the people. I cannot cope with the fact that Daisy is not there, and nor is Chris. I feel that I am failing. I barely notice someone organising beds for us. I don’t care what happens, as long as I can get home.
I wake up confused. There are noises outside. My heart leaps at the prospect of rescue, and then I realise I am lying on an actual bed, one with a mattress, and as consciousness returns, I remember it all.
I roll over and yawn. Ed is next to me, fast asleep. He has shaved, and this has made him look different. Soon his face will fill out again and he will be back to the way he used to be. I look at him for a while, feeling an unbearable tenderness, and wonder if I will see him after we get away from here. I reach out to stroke his cheek, and he stirs slightly, but does not wake up.
We are in a hut at one of the resorts at Coral Bay, halfway down the island. The roar I can hear must be a generator. The voices belong to people I don’t know.
This hut even has a bathroom attached, so before I leave I go in there and shut the door. I must have been in there last night, but everything was such a blur that I cannot even remember it. I think we were so stunned and exhausted that we barely took anything in at all.
There is a real loo. That is nice, though it seems crazily luxurious. There’s a white shower cubicle, and when I turn the dial, actual water flows into it in a cluster of tiny needles. Before I stand under it, I glance in the mirror above the little basin.
The first thing I think is that this is not a mirror but a window, and that there is a woman staring through it at me. I switch the shower off and step closer to it. She comes closer too. I make a few faces and she makes them back at me.
I am forced to conclude, in the absence of any other possibilities, that this is what I now look like. I avoided mirrors yesterday, but now I have to face myself. This woman with blotchy sun-battered skin, with brittle haystack hair, with startled eyes, is nothing like the way I imagined myself, even in my most pessimistic moments. I splash my face with water but it makes no difference. Weeks of island life have ruined my face.
There are a few toiletries in the shower, and I set to work, washing my hair over and over again, cleaning my salt-dried body, trying to find the real Esther underneath the destruction wrought by a month under the sun. There is a tiny bottle of conditioner, and I have used it all before I remember Ed, sleeping next door. He will want to condition his hair too. I had better go and hunt some more down.
I dry myself with a limp white towel that was hanging on a hook. The luxury of a towel! Then tentacles of reality begin to reach through my befuddlement, and a revelation arrives.
Daisy! I am going to see my daughter again. Chris will have received my messages and he will have told Daisy that I am safe. Alive. Today I will talk to her. It will be shocking for her, because I am weeks late and she probably thinks I’m dead, but I’m not. I am really, properly alive.
Ed is still sleeping when I leave the room and step out on to a veranda. We are, it transpires, high up above the resort of Coral Bay, in a row of wooden huts reached by several sets of makeshift-looking steps. I lean on our railings and stare out, phenomenally disorientated. After a while (I have no idea how long), a door opens somewhere behind me, and a voice says, ‘Esther.’
I look round, and there is Katy emerging from the door next to ours.
‘I thought you’d melted away,’ I tell her. ‘You said you were going to.’
She laughs. ‘I know I did. The practicalities of real life ambushed me. It’s hard to melt away when you’ve got nothing.’
‘No Apocalypse, then.’ I gesture to the normal beach life below us. ‘No nuclear meltdown. No war. Nothing.’
‘No,’ she agrees. ‘It wasn’t the world. It was just us. How are you feeling?’
‘Strange.’
‘Yes. Me too. I’m not sure I slept. It’s the thing we were longing for, and then it happened, and there’s a part of me thinking it would be so much easier if we were still out there.’
I do not reply to that. She comes and stands next to me.
‘Anyway,’ she says. ‘I spoke to my family. And I spoke to my ex. They were a bit surprised. Understatement.’
‘It’s not often you get to be a dead person calling in, I suppose. I’m going to try home again now.’
Katy smiles. ‘Yes – you’re bound to get them this time.’ She gives me a little wave, and sets off down to the beach. I watch her go, down steps that are built on wooden supports above massive uneven rocks. She grips the handrail as she goes, and she looks as nervous about being out in the world as I feel. As I watch, she talks to a man on the sand, gestures up towards me. The man walks her to a boat that is waiting on the sand, and she gets in it, and I hear the whine of its engine as she disappears in the boat, around the corner. I imagine her going back to Paradise Bay to try, again, to find our bags.
Ed finds me in the café, all showered and cleaned up, and we smile shyly at one another.
‘I had no idea what I looked like,’ I feel obliged to say apologetically. ‘That mirror was shocking.’
He laughs and kisses me. ‘What are you talking about?’ he demands.
‘Well, I am completely ravaged by the sun,’ I explain. ‘I look terrible. Ancient and with awful skin.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. You looked lovely then and you look gorgeous now. Esther, stop it with that talk, OK? Living without mirrors is good for the soul.’
I roll my eyes. ‘OK. I need to call Daisy, but it’s still night there. But I could still call. I think I’m holding back a bit because . . .’ I’m not sure why. Because I am never going to be able to make this up to her. Because she might never believe that I didn’t abandon her on purpose. Because I will break down uncontrollably if I speak to her and I’d rather just get on a plane and appear in front of her where I can hug her. Then she will really believe I am back.
‘I know,’ Ed says. ‘The funny thing is, I’m the same for different reasons. It was easy yesterday, when we were all freaked out, to say I was letting people with kids do the phoning first. Today I’m going to have to do it. But I know that if I make a grand announcement about being safe, they’ll be confused, because they won’t even have noticed I was missing.’