Stranded (28 page)

Soon the beach looks small. Then we are around the corner of the island, looking at a vista we have never seen before. The sun is already high in the sky and the water is golden. The sea is perfectly still. It feels as if the waves have stopped, the whole natural world on pause, while we make the transition from one time and place to another that is entirely different.

I grip Ed’s hand as tightly as I can. I cannot say anything. This is so abrupt.

Our rescuers are asking us questions, but we speak almost no Malay, and they speak only a couple of words of English. No one is able to tell them our story, and we are unable to ask them if they know Samad. I watch Katy try his name out on them, saying ‘Samad? Samad?’ over and over again, but there is no reaction.

Eventually, one of the men conveys, through the medium of mime, that they were out fishing, and that they saw us. At least I think that is what he is saying. I want to ask why no one else has been past in all this time, and how often they come fishing this way, but the language barrier is unsurpassable. The fact that they are here, picking us up, suggests that Mark’s worst Armageddon scenarios were not true.

I look into my fellow passengers’ faces. Mark, Cherry and Katy are more familiar to me than anyone has been, ever. At this moment I know them better than I know my own daughter, because I have no idea what Daisy is doing or what state she is in. Until I see her, I will not believe she is all right. Until she sees me, she cannot possibly
be
all right.

I wonder if we will all drift apart and head in our own separate directions. Perhaps the past however-long-it-has-been will instantly seem unreal. Maybe we will all go home and deal with the ramifications of our absences, forget about each other and let our time on the island fade into insignificance.

The little boat bounces across the water. I try to convince myself that this is the beginning of the journey that will take me back to Daisy. Soon we will be on Pulau Perhentian Kecil, where there are phones.

I might hear her voice. The thought of it makes me retch with nerves.

Nobody speaks. We spent so much time fantasising about exactly this, and now it has come.

The engine of the boat is wonder enough. Soon we are going to be in a place with generators and electricity, with computers and the internet, with mattresses and sun cream and petrol, a place in which it is perfectly reasonable to plan to get into a metal vehicle and expect to be carried safely through the air to a place that is unimaginably far away, and, when you get there, to find your daughter.

There is a long strip of land in the distance. Beyond it is a longer one, that takes up the whole horizon.

One of the men points. ‘Pulau Perhentian Kecil,’ he says. I realise that the land behind it is Malaysia itself. We plough through the small waves, coming closer and closer to land.

All of us are tense. Mark and Katy look shocked as we all realise we are nearly there. Nearly back. About to step into the world we left.

Then we are approaching one of the bigger beaches on the island. There are huts and hotels all the way along the sand. It is still early, but there are people around: two runners in shorts and vest tops, a man and a woman, are making their way along the beach, and I remember that people do, in the real world, expend valuable energy just for the sake of it. A man in a white apron is carrying cardboard boxes of food from a small boat like the one Samad had towards a building. He puts a tray of eggs carefully on the sand. A white woman sits on the beach and leans on a backpack.

We come closer and closer until we are able to climb from the boat directly on to the wooden pier. I remember, suddenly, my arrival on this island, and some of the passengers getting out here. Everything looked charmingly primitive then. I try to see it with my old eyes, but I cannot.

This is time travel. We have been plucked from a world in which we drank from a spring and roasted a lizard, and brought to this dizzying place, and it is impossible not to be overwhelmed to the point of nausea. Now I really feel that I have no reserves: all I want to do is stay on the boat, and stare at the land, and rock to and fro. I only manage to step back into the modern world because of Daisy.

The woman with the backpack looks up at us, as we are helped, one by one, from the boat. She looks again. She frowns and stands up.

She looks odd to me. Although she is, I suppose, probably not a person who would be classed as fat, everything about her is excessive. Her cheeks are smooth and plump, and between her short T-shirt and the waist of her long skirt, flesh bulges rudely out. Her hair is jaw-length, neatly cut, and a slide in the shape of a flower holds it back from her face.

There is nothing remarkable about this woman. She is a bog-standard backpacker, right down to the bag that has just fallen over at her feet. She is also entirely exotic: this is the person I was, without realising it, a few weeks ago. Even though I knew we had all changed, I find her astonishing.

My legs tremble as I step from the side of the boat on to the wooden steps of the pier. One of our rescuers, the younger one, grabs my hand from the land side of the operation and pulls me to stability. When we are all off, they usher us along the pier to the shore.

I sink down, back to the sand, enjoying its familiar safety at the same time as noticing tiny pieces of litter and cigarette filters in there. Although I am aware of activity going on, people talking to us, the backpack woman asking questions of Katy, the men who picked us up talking on mobile phones and everyone beginning to notice us, I cannot focus on any of it. My head hurts.

Jean and Gene are still there, still on our island. The two things I can hold in my brain are: send help to them, and call Daisy. There are many other things we will need to do. We will, I suppose, find out why we were left there. We will make arrangements to go home. We will find our old bags.

When I look at Ed, though, he smiles down at me.

‘It’s OK,’ he says. ‘Esther. We’re safe. It’s over.’

It happens in a blur. People talk to us. They talk about us. They stare at us with concern and horror. News of us spreads around the resort, and people come to look at us. People from all over the world stand in front of us and take photographs. I do not even try to tell them not to. We are curiosities, and I understand that.

When I see a man staring at the picture on the back of his camera, I want to ask him to show it to me, but then, at the last second, I don’t want to know. Somebody takes control; I have no idea who they are, but it is a man and a woman, local people I think. They lead us along the beach and into a building that has miraculous tiled floors, smooth and manufactured and incomprehensible. The café they sit us in has walls that are not there, open to the elements apart from the supporting pillars. We have a view of the sea and the beach. It is not, for any of us, a compelling view. I am far more interested, astounded even, in looking at the furniture, and the people, and the food and the drink. I stroke the back of the plastic chair Ed is sitting in. The processes that led to its existence seem impossible. I do the same with the table, the plates, the clothes people are wearing and everything else I see.

Customers arrive in twos and threes. I glance at two women in sundresses sitting at a nearby table, and when I look back to our own table I see, again, that we are skeletons. The women look at us with as much curiosity as I am gazing at them. We look like concentration camp survivors next to these people. Mark and Cherry have remained, as far as I was concerned, the pinnacle of glossy physical perfection throughout our time on the island. Now, when I look back to them after staring at the random people at the tables around us, I wonder how I could possibly not have noticed them losing their shine. The five of us on our table look like extras from a horror film.

The owner of this place, I presume, comes over, bearing a tray of white china cups. The two men who rescued us pull up chairs.

‘I bring you coffee,’ the man says, smiling. I stare at the coffee. I had forgotten all about it, but now that I see it, I remember, dispassionately, that I used to love this drink. I drink it white, I remember that much, so I pour some milk in from the little jug.

‘I call the police,’ the man adds. ‘They are coming. So tell me what happens?’

I take a sip from my drink and wince. This, I think, is what coffee tastes like? I look quickly to Katy, because she is sitting directly opposite me. She has the same reaction. We catch each other’s eyes and smile. I put the cup down and push it away. It turns out that I have not been craving coffee at all. I thought I had.

I am not going to answer his questions. If I talk about this, it is going to be to the police.

A waitress arrives, looking at us with barely concealed horror, and puts a plate of food in front of each of us. We did not order, but they have brought us eggs and fried potatoes, toasted white bread with little foil-wrapped pats of butter and tiny plastic containers of jam. This is the food we dreamed of. It is the stuff of our hallucinations. A few hours ago, on that beach, we would have killed for this, for a plate of eggs and potatoes. It was the simple things that held the most appeal, I see now. We never dreamed of anything gourmet. It was just chips and eggs and easy things, bits of food that were almost, but not, attainable.

Now it is in front of me, and I am not hungry. I look at Mark, the most conspicuously hungry of all of us, and watch him gingerly load up his fork with food. He puts it in his mouth. All of us are staring. He chews it. He smiles with his mouth but not with his eyes, and gulps it down.

‘That,’ he says, ‘is going to take some getting used to. There must be more calories here than we would have managed in our whole time on the island.’ I realise that he could be right. In all that time we had no fat at all, beyond whatever might have been in the fish. The fried potatoes are swimming in oil and it is making me feel queasy, a reaction that is tempered by hunger.

‘Oh,’ says Katy. ‘We are blessed to have been allowed to step from that Stone Age existence into this level of civilisation. It’s like walking through the whole of human development, and ending up here, just a few miles from where we were, in a place where they have restaurants and cooked breakfasts, and knowing that that’s just the start of it. It’s . . . not easy, though. Is it?’

We all nod our agreement.

I force myself to eat a piece of toast. It is all I can stomach. Then I have a second piece and dip it into the egg, just because I know that Jean and Gene are still on the island, and I know that Jean must still be dreaming of food. I eat the egg for her, and after a while it feels good.

‘Have we asked someone to go to Jean?’ I say suddenly, terrified that we have all simply forgotten, in our befuddlement.

‘Yes.’ Cherry speaks for the first time since we set foot on this island. ‘Those guys there. They sorted it out. Katy did too.’

Katy nods. ‘It was the first thing we did. Made sure there was medical help going out to them. It’s all in hand.’

Ed looks at the men sitting with us, and says to the owner of the café: ‘Do you know a man called Samad?’

The man frowns. ‘Samad?’

He turns to our rescuers and they talk to each other in what must be Malay. None of us says anything more to explain our plight. We wait for an answer. In the end, he turns back to Ed and says, ‘You know Samad?’

‘Yes,’ Katy says. ‘You?’

The man nods his head.

‘I do not know Samad,’ he says. ‘Not myself. But know his friends, his family. Three, maybe four weeks ago, he is dead.’

When two policemen stride into the café, I put my fork down, scared, all of a sudden, of whatever it is that might be about to happen.

Cathy

February 1989

Until today, I have been getting on with life, living quietly, doing my best to make my way in the real world. I think I have been doing well. I have a routine, and I love it.

Today, though, two things happened that have shaken me up.

A letter arrived for me. It came to college and I picked it up from my pigeonhole. It was handwritten, addressed to Esther Godschild, and there was a Hampshire postmark.

That scared me. I didn’t want to open it, but then I knew that if I didn’t, I would spend forever wondering what was in it. In the end, I felt that whatever it was, it wouldn’t be as bad as anything I was imagining, so I ripped it open on impulse.

There was no letter inside, just a newspaper cutting. I unfolded it with shaking fingers, knowing before I looked at it what it was going to be. I suppose I suspected they would do this all along, but I never wanted to think about it very much.

It was the deaths column from the local paper.

The death is announced, it said, of Catherine Esther Godschild, aged 16, beloved daughter of Moses and Cassandra Godschild and child of God. April 16th 1972–July 14th 1988. May she Rest in Peace.

That was it. Seeing my name, and the date of my death, chilled me to the core. I don’t think I will sleep tonight.

I am telling myself that I have been away for eight months, and all they are doing is trying to intimidate me. I knew I would be dead to them when I didn’t go back. I was never going to see any of them again anyway.

But now I know they have been spying on me. They know I go to college here. They know I am calling myself Esther. They probably also know that I have changed their chosen surname of Godschild into Goodchild, because it sounds more normal. Occasionally other students even snigger at that, because it sounds funny to them, me being called Good Child, and I want to explain to them how very much more normal it is than anything else in my upbringing, but I don’t. I relish the fact that I no longer stand out too much to risk it.

Hannah, who I’m quite friendly with on the course, saw me reading the cutting and came over. I put it away quickly.

‘It’s nothing,’ I told her. ‘Just some stupid thing someone sent me. About my family.’ And I ripped it into pieces and put it in the bin, which felt good.