Stranded (25 page)

‘Precisely,’ Jean agrees. ‘And it raises, you must agree, a number of questions, starting with the very one Mark just articulated.’

‘Forget the questions.’ Cherry is excited. ‘It’s a telephone. I’ve seen those ones on the television news. The reporters use them when they’re somewhere that normal phones don’t work. Afghanistan. You know. So that, in your hand, is a telephone that would actually get us off this island. Before we get all “what the fuck”, why don’t we scour the place until we find the batteries, and get ourselves a fucking boat?’

‘Yes.’ I can barely speak, but I need to add my voice to hers. ‘I don’t care why it’s here, if we can make it work. If that can get us home . . .’ I force myself to finish the sentence, because in my head I am only with Daisy. ‘Then that is the only thing in the world I care about.’

‘Yes, yes,’ Jean tuts. ‘I know, you two. I’m a mother too, I had the same reaction. Of course Gene got off his poor old backside and together we dug up everything we could find. I walked through the entire jungle, it felt, looking for loose patches of earth. And of course we can continue with that, but it’s not an efficient use of our time. Because we could carry on looking until we die. Far better, in my opinion, for the person among us who brought it here to tell us where the batteries are hidden. Where’s young Ed? Where’s Katy?’

We all turn and scan the beach, though neither of them, clearly, is here.

‘Ed and I slept by the fire,’ I say, ‘because the hut was horrible. I just woke up about ten minutes ago, and he wasn’t here. I’m sure he’s around somewhere.’

‘Hmm.’ Jean is suspicious instantly. ‘And Katy?’

‘I don’t think she’s awake yet.’

As if summoned by our collective will, Katy emerges from the hut, her sarong knotted around her waist, blinking at the daylight. She stands at the top of the steps and yawns loudly.

‘Ahh,’ she says. ‘Well. The indoor life is not, it transpires, everything we’d hoped for. Morning, everyone. Jean! Hello. What is . . .’ She suddenly runs, almost stumbling, down the unreliable steps. For a moment I think she is going to fall, but she lands on her feet on the sand. ‘Is that a phone?’ she says. ‘What on earth . . . ?’ Her eyes are wide as she joins the respectful group marvelling at the bizarre object.

‘Yes,’ Jean says. ‘It is a non-functioning satellite phone. It is inconceivable that it was brought here by anyone other than one of our group. We need Edward.’

‘I’ll find him,’ says Mark, and he strides away towards the buildings and forest behind them, calling Ed’s name.

While he is gone, I try to make sense of this.

‘You mean, someone here has hidden this? I just can’t get my head around it. Surely it was left here when this place’ – I point to the dilapidated buildings – ‘when this place was abandoned? I mean, of course none of us has a secret phone. Because all of us are desperate to leave.’

‘Yes.’ Katy is nodding, and I can see from her face that she is still trying to compute the situation. ‘It’s impossible that we brought it. What makes you think we did, Jeannie? It only makes sense as something that was already here.’

Jean is shaking her head. Her cheeks are hollow, and the bones of her face all jut out. She looks like a skull draped with skin.

‘I’d love to think that,’ she says. ‘I would. But this place has been left to the elements for some time.’

‘Do you think, though?’ asks Cherry. ‘I mean, sure, there’s creepers growing through everything and the wood has rotted. But might that not be something that happens very fast around here?’

‘I don’t think so.’

We stand in silence for a while, waiting. I try to run through it in my head. Jean’s idea is nonsensical. She seems convinced that somebody among our small and close-knit band is conspiring against the rest of us. That cannot possibly be true: in fact, the idea is laughable.

When Mark and Ed come back, I smile with relief. Mark’s arms are filled with bananas and papayas, and Ed is carrying, rather gingerly I think, a large dead lizard. He puts it carefully down on the ice box lid, and walks over.

‘Mark told me,’ he says, looking at the phone. ‘We have to make this thing work. It’s like a bizarre and miraculous lifeline, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, yes.’ Jean is scathing. ‘Can we now take the fact that it’s unexpected as read. I want to know which of you people brought it here, and more than that, I would like to know where you’re keeping its batteries.’ She stares around the group, looking from face to face.

‘But I don’t think any of us brought it here,’ Cherry says again. ‘Like we were just saying. We can’t have done, Jean.’

‘You can’t
not
have done. What I am saying is that I no longer trust a single one of you. Until we discover who brought this, all of you are under suspicion. I have no idea what’s going on, but I am absolutely certain that this phone, new and shiny as it is, belongs to somebody here.’

Mark is almost laughing. ‘But why, Jeannie? Who here would hide a satellite phone, and what would the big conspiracy be? I absolutely do not understand how that would work.’

‘No. It’s beyond me too, because there is something going on about which I have no idea. But look at it this way. Who knew each other before we got here?’ She sits down, and the rest of us sit too, staring at her as she speaks. ‘Gene and me. Mark and Cherry. You other three, you’d vaguely met over on the main island. All we know about each other is what we’ve told each other. We can’t check anything from here. So Mark, for instance: you’re a married father living on Long Island. Are you, though? Cherry says you are. But who is Cherry? Do you see what I mean?’

‘Jean,’ I say. ‘Jean, thinking along these lines is awful. It’ll destroy us. Maybe Samad left the phone there. If there’s any sort of conspiracy, it would surely involve him, the man who brought us here and never came back. If we start to pull apart each other’s stories, we won’t last five minutes. I want to trust you all and I’m going to carry on trusting you all.’

‘Is that right, Esther?’ says Jean, turning her bird-like stare on me. ‘Is it, now? What do we know about you? Absolutely nothing, in fact. Is there a Daisy? Is there a loser of an ex-husband? Did your story about staying unhappily married for a decade ever actually ring true? Why are you really here, Esther?’

I am aghast. ‘Jean! I thought you and I were friends? What are you talking about?’

‘I’m just saying that I am not taking anything for granted any more. Ed, you’re more private than anyone here. You have shared next to nothing about your life. The rest of us have all been open. Not you. Why?’

‘Oh, fuck off, Jean,’ he says with surprising venom. ‘Don’t do this. You’re being absurd, and as Esther says, you’re dismantling the only thing we have, which is camaraderie. Don’t do it.’

‘But we have to do it, Ed,’ Jean says. ‘I know it’s not good for morale. But it’s not me destroying the morale. It’s the owner of this thing.’

‘I’m with you, Jean,’ Mark says suddenly.

‘I am too, actually,’ Katy says. ‘I mean, I don’t want us to start turning on each other. But at the same time, this is an actual phone. I don’t know about these things, but is it not, like Cherry says, the only type of phone that would actually work out here? This is probably a crazy and stupid thing to say, but several of us have mobiles that don’t get any reception. Would any of their batteries work in this thing?’

Mark smiles. ‘Nice thought. But not a chance.’

‘Not even worth trying?’

Jean holds open the battery compartment ‘Look. Completely different from a standard mobile, I’m afraid.’

‘Oh. Right.’

‘But,’ says Mark, ‘here’s the thing. We need to work out what it’s doing here. Because I have a feeling that everything has just changed. If someone knows where the battery is, and if we can make it work, then we can get away from here.’

‘And we need to,’ says Jean, ‘because Gene, I have to tell you, has just about given up. I’ve left him lying in the shade with a bottle of water, but I’m not even confident he’ll make it through the rest of the day. He doesn’t want to. So this is me, begging you all. Imploring you. If you know how to make this thing function, please, please show us.’

We have shifted about, unconsciously, so we are sitting in a circle, a little way away from the dirty remains of the fire. Jean, who has taken it upon herself to run this inquisition, stares first of all at Ed, who is sitting to her left.

‘Edward,’ she says, looking into his eyes. ‘Did you somehow bring this telephone to the island in secret?’

Ed laughs, but in a bitter way. He has always been far calmer than me, but now he is, I can see, incensed.

‘Of course I didn’t,’ he says, his fury visible to everyone. ‘How would I have done that, Jean? And why? I mean – why? Why would I do that? It makes no sense at all. We all got on that boat together. None of us had a secret phone in a bag, did we? That thing is bigger than a normal phone. It wasn’t on the boat, and that’s a fact. I don’t understand why you’re doing this, Jean. Why are we not just searching the fucking island until we find the things that will make it work, if they’re here?’

‘See,’ she says. ‘You’ve gone right on the defensive. Esther?’

I squint at her. ‘What?’

‘Is this yours?’

‘No, Jean.’ I cannot even dredge up the energy to fight her. ‘It’s not mine. If I had a working phone, we would have got off this island a long, long time ago. Believe me.’

‘You and Ed are sure you didn’t know each other before we came here?’

‘Sure,’ I say, apathetically. I feel Ed bristling beside me, and try to calm him with a hand on his arm. I see Jean notice this. I cannot be bothered to say anything more. The whole scene has become too surreal.

‘Katy?’ barks Jean. ‘This wouldn’t be yours, would it?’

Katy laughs, a short, abrupt laugh. ‘Oh, believe me,’ she says. ‘This is the thing I have been praying for. I wish it was mine, if that meant I knew how to make it work.’

‘You need to be a little more specific in your prayers,’ Mark tells her. ‘Next time ask for the battery too.’

‘I’ll give that a go,’ she says. ‘It’s horribly tantalising, isn’t it? The very thing. Inexplicably here. Yet useless.’

I nod at that. Jean turns her attention to Cherry.

‘Not mine,’ says Cherry. ‘Oh my God. I’m like Esther. I’m a mom. And even though I cannot think of any reason why anybody would hide away a thing like that, I can assure you that I
absolutely
wouldn’t. I mean, deliberately keep us all here, away from our babies? So that Mark and I are discovered and divorced and gossiped about and hated? Why the hell would I make that happen?’

Jean shrugs. ‘We only have your word for it, you know. Yours and Mark’s.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘We can hardly check your story, can we? Any of you. Any of you could be lying blatantly about your lives away from here. Don’t take anything for granted.’

‘Oh, Jesus Christ, Jean,’ says Mark. ‘Enough of this. Stop playing Scooby-Doo. Fucking hell. Who’s to say that you and Gene are what you seem either? For all we know, you’ve already called a boat and Gene’s gone off on it. You probably haven’t even
got
a son.’

‘We have. I know that and Gene knows that. All I want to say is this: I am convinced that one of you knows more than you are letting on. I have my suspicions about who it is, but let’s say this. Just get the missing battery, and put it in a place where we will easily find it. No need to say anything. Do that by sunset tonight. No more questions asked.’

She looks around at each of us in turn. When she stares into my eyes, I find myself shifting and fidgeting, wilting under the heat of her fierce suspicion. Then she stands up and walks off, carefully taking the phone with her.

Katy looks around for a moment, then says: ‘This is all so odd. I’m going to go with her and check on Gene. Anyone else coming? I’m not sure the two of them should be on their own.’

Everyone is disconcerted. First Katy goes after Jean, and then Cherry does. Mark paces by the shore, deep in thought.

‘She thinks it’s us,’ I say to Ed.

‘She’s lost the plot completely.’ He is dismissive. ‘Clearly, whatever that thing is doing there, it’s been around longer than we have. She’s found something to fixate on, that’s all. She can fuck off. I think we should go after her, actually, because otherwise you know what she’ll be doing. She’ll be holding court to Katy and Gene and Cherry, constructing outlandish scenarios that involve you and me and some dastardly plot. Ridiculous. Come on. Let’s go and stand up for ourselves.’

I heave myself up. ‘OK. We’d better take that dead lizard.’

‘Now there’s a sentence I’ll bet you’ve never uttered before.’

I smile at him. Ed carries the lizard, and I take the fruit, and we stumble through the humid rainforest, our legs scratched, unseen creatures rustling out of our way as we go. We leave Mark standing still and staring out to sea.

By sunset, we are all, except Mark, slumped on our original beach. Ed’s lizard is cooking on an improvised spit over the fire, and smelling outrageously appetising. I search myself for any residual feeling of revulsion at the idea of eating a huge lizard, but there is none. My whole body is crying out for meat, and I wish I could have it all for myself.

Unsurprisingly, the battery does not appear by Jean’s deadline. The mood of the camp is wrecked. There is almost no cooperation. Gene is lying by himself, his breathing shallow, holding a mumbled conversation with (I assume) his comatose son. Jean and Katy attend to him from time to time, one of them propping him up while the other holds a water bottle to his lips. Even the water bottles are close to giving up, their plastic stretched and cracking. Jean wipes Gene’s face with a sunhat dipped in water, and murmurs to him, sharing, I am sure, her paranoid suspicions.

I do not want to be infected by the new suspicious mood in camp; and yet I find that, in spite of myself, I am. Mark and Cherry’s story is implausible, however you look at it. I trust Jean and Gene, even though I heartily dislike Jean at the moment and would love to be able to blame her for whatever it is we are accusing people of. Ed is suspicious of Katy. In my worst moments I even wonder about Ed: as Jean said, he is the only one of us who has not volunteered much about himself, and he only offered his tale of being the neglected middle child when I repeatedly pressed him.