Stranded (29 page)

I said ‘my family’, but I don’t feel that way about them.

As far as I am concerned, my family are the family I work for, the Tao family, whose three daughters I take to school every morning and pick up every afternoon, fitting my college work around them. Both the parents, Eric and Melissa, work long hours in the City, and they have high expectations of their daughters, which means I spend between three thirty and six every afternoon taking them to swimming and music classes.

I enjoy it. I like it that, at eight, nine and eleven, they are old enough to chat to, and I am getting quite good at cooking for them. The house is huge, and I have the attic all to myself, with a television and a bathroom of my own. I know that Melissa and Eric like me to spend the evenings up here, and so I try not to hang around them too much. All I really want, though, is to feel like a proper part of the family.

So that arrived this morning. Then this afternoon the next weird thing happened. This has been quite a day. I was at home, writing notes for an essay about
The Tempest
, when the doorbell rang.

I put my pen down and skidded across the slidey parquet floor in my socks to answer it (I love that floor). I was expecting to sign for a parcel delivery. Instead, there on the doorstep was Victoria.

I knew her at once, but I could not believe what I was seeing. Slowly, I realised that she was ‘dead’ in the same sense that I was ‘dead’. We were both dead only to the Village. I cannot believe I didn’t think of that before.

She looked different. She has short hair now, and she was wearing a pair of round glasses. Her nose is still covered in freckles. She had on tight black jeans and a shiny purple top, and shoes that were pointy and purple.

She was smiling. She said, ‘Hello, Cathy,’ and I couldn’t think of anything to say apart from, ‘I like your shoes.’

She hugged me, and straight away I was crying into her shoulder. My hair was wet and I pushed it out of the way.

‘Hey,’ she said. ‘It’s OK.’

‘I had no idea, Victoria,’ I said, when I managed to pull away and control myself. ‘I truly thought you’d died. Why did I believe that? I should have known, shouldn’t I? Oh, I can’t get my head round it. Look, come in. You look amazing. The same, but different.’

‘You’re looking good too. I don’t call myself Victoria any more, by the way. I changed my name to Karen. Are you still Cathy?’

‘No. Esther.’

‘Your middle name.’

‘I suppose I should have just picked a brand-new one, but it would have felt a bit weird. Karen.’

She laughs. ‘Yes, it did at first. Didn’t exactly protect me from them either. Anyway, I’ve pieced your story together. I saw your death notice. It’s quite handy, watching that column, to see if anyone else has escaped. They always put the death note in about six to nine months later and post it to the person in question. It’s Moses and his special brand of control freakery. So when I realised you’d gone, I got in touch with a couple of people from school, and they said Sarah knew where you were. I followed your trail from there.’

I put the kettle on. ‘I’m so glad you did. I would never have thought to look for you, you know. God, I’m stupid.’

We both smiled, and I felt so warm inside, so immeasurably comforted to be able to share all of this with someone who had trod the same path.

I made us both a cup of tea, proud of the gorgeous house I lived in, knowing that I still had over an hour before I had to leave to fetch the girls. And I asked Victoria/Karen to tell me her story.

She had done a more dramatic flit than me. This is what she said, more or less.

‘I didn’t plan it, Esther. I just packed a bag and stashed it under my bed, because luckily I had the bottom bunk, and then that night I ran. It was urgent because . . . Did you have this? You didn’t, did you, because Moses is your natural dad. They were going to marry you off to Philip instead, weren’t they? Believe me, you’re lucky. I was born outside the Village, and my dad wanted nothing to do with it. And girls who aren’t his children are fair game to Moses. He dresses it up as being what God wants, and to give him his due, he does wait till they’re legal, but essentially if he considers you attractive and you’re over sixteen, he’s going to have you, and you’re going to have yet another one of his children. I didn’t find that an appealing prospect, you know? And I was seeing Sam at school, and I knew it was coming. My own mother was trying to prepare me for it. Hideous.

‘So I ran away. I just waited till about one in the morning, when I knew everyone should be asleep, and I got dressed under the covers, picked up my bag, stepped into my sandals and left. I’d oiled the hinges of our hut door, and I just opened it, walked through it and closed it behind me. Then I walked as quickly as I could over the grass to a bit of the hedge, not the main gate, and crawled through, and ran across a few fields. I knew where the station was, and I didn’t want to get Sam into trouble or let anyone at all know where I was going, because it seemed easier that way, so I walked to the station, checked the time of the first train and went and sat in a hedge nearby to wait it out. The first train is nice and early, half past five, so I was pretty sure I wouldn’t have been missed, and I just walked into the station and got on it with all these commuters. They ignored me because they ignore everyone. I went and stood in the toilet when the ticket collector came around, and so I found myself in Waterloo station, all alone in the world, with no money whatsoever, at sometime after six in the morning.’

‘What did you do?’ I asked her.

She grinned. ‘I phoned my dad, reverse charges. He was annoyed at first to be called so early in the morning, but when he realised it was me and that I’d run away from the Village, he woke right up.’

‘Did he look after you?’

‘He did. He was quite confused and he didn’t seem to know what to say to me loads of the time, and I could see that he felt bad that he hadn’t tried harder to get me out of there when Mum met Moses and took me in. But he did what I needed him to do.’

‘He helped you see how the rest of the world worked.’

She grinned at that. ‘It’s strange, isn’t it? All those things that people assume everyone knows about. And you wonder whether to draw attention to yourself by, for instance, admitting that you never bought anything in a shop before you ran away from home at the age of sixteen, or whether just to ride it out.’

‘Michelle and Steve – Sarah’s aunt and uncle – used to get me to tell their friends all that stuff. I never minded. The more you’re open about things, the less you feel bad about them, I think. They used to get me saying all of that: never went to a shop, never looked at a screen let alone watched TV, never saw a newspaper except in school, had no idea about music and concerts and other religions. They must have hated sending us to school.’

‘They managed to withdraw us from enough lessons, didn’t they? I think the school was so afraid of being accused of religious intolerence that they pretty much did what Moses told them. You know, we didn’t just miss assembly, did we? We missed general studies, anything to do with politics, anything to do with current affairs, anything where we would have had to wear a PE kit. Morons.

‘Anyway, so two years or so later, I saw the entire national media ridiculing the Village because of the impending Apocalypse. I saw Moses addressing the TV cameras, stupid self-important prick that he is, with no idea whatsoever that everyone was laughing at him.’

‘He was on TV? But he made such a big thing about not letting any of the cameras in because he was afraid the media might be the tiniest bit cynical and sinful.’

She just raised her eyebrows at that.

‘I did expect more people to leave after that, I must admit. I thought the Apocalypse not happening was surely as concrete as proof could get. But there was only you, Cath. Esther. Just you.’

‘There are more of them who want to. Even Martha kind of does. I could see it in her eyes. I didn’t dare tell her I was going, though. I nearly asked her to come with me, but I couldn’t, because she might have stopped me.’

‘Poor Martha,’ Karen said. ‘I’m not sure she’ll ever dare to do it. Horrible to be stuck there wishing you weren’t. One day we could go back for her, maybe.’

‘We should. Have you met any others?’

‘Oh yeah,’ Karen said. ‘Quite a few, actually. There’s a group at the Cult Information Centre. You should come along and meet them. We get together occasionally because it’s nice to be with other people who understand.’

I smiled at her and sipped my tea. ‘It certainly is.’ A cult. After fighting against Michelle calling it that, I am now happy to use the word. It diminishes its power almost entirely.

So that is what happened to me today. I discovered I was officially dead, and I met someone I thought was dead. Victoria/Karen. It has been interesting.

One thing she said has stuck with me, though.

‘Some of the others are older. Jack – remember him? You probably don’t. He’s twenty-nine, he’s got a baby now, and do you know what they did? They actually tried to take his baby a month after he was born. Jack has no proof that it was them, but he’s certain it was. Because the same thing happened to Cecilia. She’s got two little children, and one of them was actually kidnapped when she was about six months old. The police only got her back because this woman stopped at the motorway services and took the baby into the shop, just after the story had been on the news, and the guy who was working there recognised the baby and called the police. Can you imagine? He kept the woman talking – she sounded a lot like Cassandra, by the way – pretending to have a problem with the cash register so she couldn’t pay for the stuff she was buying, until the police turned up. When they did, she just put the baby on the counter and ran out the back and ended up getting away. So if either of us ever has children, Esther, we’ll need to be very, very careful.’

That was horrible. I know how much I like the children I’ve looked after. I can’t imagine a baby of mine being stolen. They wouldn’t be able to keep it because we would know exactly where to go to find them, but I would hardly trust Moses not to harm it just to get back at someone who has run away from him. That is definitely something I need to remember for the rest of my life.

We talk to two policemen. One of them looks to me to be unimaginably fat, though in reality he is probably on the plump side of normal. He has a little beard, and it is trimmed so neatly that I realise how wild Ed and Mark’s facial hair has become. I have not given it a moment’s thought, but they both have proper shipwrecked beards.

The other policeman is small and wiry, and his eyes dart all over the place, looking from one of us to another, roaming all over our ravaged skin and our hollowed cheeks.

They explain to us, carefully, that nearly a month ago, Samad was killed on the island. Somebody stabbed him in the back and dumped his body in the jungle, where it was found half-eaten.

They both insist that this is unusual.

‘On this island,’ they say, ‘nobody is killed. People die, but murder – no. Crime is people stealing tourists’ bags from beaches, and that is all.’

‘Poor Samad,’ whispers Cherry, her eyes brimming with tears.

‘And nobody knew about us,’ Katy says softly. I think of all those hours we spent assuring one another that Samad’s family would know where we were; that if something awful had happened to him they would send boats out to look for us. We were wrong: either they didn’t know, or, most likely, they assumed that since he was back on the island, we were too.

I want to think about poor dead Samad, but suddenly my head is filled with nothing but Daisy.

‘What do we do next?’ Mark asks.

The fat policeman raises his eyebrows.

‘You were staying at Paradise Bay?’ he asks. ‘We will take you there. Find your bags, ask them why they did not report you missing. Then we get you home. You want to go home?’

I close my eyes tightly. I long for my daughter so much that I cannot answer.

New clothes and toiletries materialise from somewhere. I feel odd wearing a strange T-shirt and a pair of shorts. I never wear shorts. They never suited me before, but now I have my new skeletal figure, I can wear anything.

I smear sun cream on to my face. It stings.

We go by police boat to Paradise Bay, all of us. We step into the shallow water and on to the beach. A generator is humming. There is a café with laminated menus, and people are lounging around on chairs, having the food they choose cooked and delivered to them.

There is a garden here, a well, and rows of vegetables. This is what we would, ideally, have recreated on our own beach. I know, now, that it is impossible without the back-up of the outside world. You cannot grow potatoes or any other edible item if you do not have a potato plant in some form to grow it from. There is a laptop computer with its lid closed, and I know that the entire world is available there at the click of a button.

I am feeling a little bit stronger. I start looking around for a telephone.

The man at Paradise Bay is apparently dumbstruck at the sight of us. He peers into our faces, recognition growing. Soon he and the policeman are arguing. At last they turn to us.

‘You did
not
leave your bags in the rooms,’ the man says, switching languages but clearly continuing the argument. ‘You paid for your rooms and they were empty. We were sad you left like that, and it is unusual, but we never knew something was wrong. Never! You must believe this!’

‘We didn’t pay for the rooms,’ Ed says. ‘I didn’t pay for mine.’

‘Nor me.’

‘We didn’t either,’ says Mark, and Katy shakes her head.

The man screws his eyes tight shut, then opens them again.

‘Not yourselves,’ he says quietly. ‘But they were paid for.’

‘Who paid for them?’ I ask.

‘I was not here at that moment,’ he says. ‘It was Ali. My brother’s boy.’ He turns and shouts in the direction of the kitchen. I look at Cherry, because she is beside me.

‘What’s he talking about?’ I ask quietly. This makes no sense.