explain the situation at home, and I mention the police, but he simply shakes his head as though none of this is possible.
‘What about the Edinburgh branch? You can’t simply up and leave at a time like this.’
I make to answer, but there’s an LCD screen on a wall beside us and the noise is starting to rattle my head. The news comes on, and from the corner of my eye I spy my wife’s face. Both Dean and I turn to see a headshot of Eloïse enlarging on the screen until it is filled.
And in local news, charity campaigner and mother-of-two Eloïse Shelley went missing from her home in Twickenham yesterday. Her family and friends are desperately urging anyone with information to come forward.
Gerda pops up on screen. There’s a microphone in her face and she’s standing in the doorway of my house looking drained and wild-eyed. Her voice shakes.
‘She hasn’t been seen for over twenty-four hours. This really is extremely distressing and urgent. We’ve got two grandchildren, the youngest only twelve weeks old. We plead with anyone who has seen Eloïse to contact us immediately.’
Komméno Island, Greece
It’s morning. The sky outside the porthole window is grey and brooding. It’s so cold that the bedsheets feel damp to the touch. It takes a few moments to get my bearings. Sleep seems to have made a huge difference to how I feel. The terrible pain in my breasts has stopped. My head isn’t as sore, either. Still, when I move across the floor of the attic to the door, I find it locked, or jammed. Either way, it won’t budge, and it takes a minute or two of pounding my fists against the wood for Joe to come and open it. He explains that the wind must have caught it and offers to help me down the stairs, but I refuse. I cling to the old wooden banister and take each step very carefully.
Eventually I find the bathroom, close the door, testing the lock several times before sinking down to the ground. There’s no shower in here, just a sink and an old tin bathtub with rusty taps and a cobwebbed window. The water doesn’t seem to run any other temperature than ice cold. Sariah tells me they get their water from a cistern out by the hay barn so it’s not particularly plentiful.
I peel off the pyjamas that Hazel lent me and study the naked woman in the small shaving mirror above the sink. This woman who is me. She is Caucasian, slender, somewhere between thirty and forty, with thick honey-blonde hair to her shoulders. A long face, skinny arms and round hips, the chest streaked with blue veins. Her shoulders are defined, and beneath a layer of loose skin around the belly button is a firm six-pack. Lines fan around the eyes. A small, irregular nose, light green eyes and ears that stick out a little. No tattoos or scars. Her nails are unpainted and short, filed into neat ovals. Her left cheekbone and forehead are horribly bruised, and there are aubergine-coloured splodges on her shins, her right hip, and both arms.
Why don’t I recognise myself? Why isn’t my body familiar? Where do I live? Do I work? Do I have kids? The white space in my mind is luminous, unyielding. Why don’t I know my own name?
Gingerly I stretch out the arm that doesn’t hurt as badly as the other and touch the mirror to confirm that this is my reflection. I want her to talk back to me, to tell me my secrets. I read this body like a puzzle, a remnant of a larger story.
There’s a groove around the base of several fingers, as though I was wearing rings that have since vanished – the third and fourth fingers of my right hand, my wedding finger. Was I married? I rub my thumb up and down the faint circular indentations in my skin, willing myself to remember the ring that has vanished, if not the person who gave it to me.
I find a bar of soap on the side of the bath and slowly scrub the sour smell of brine off my skin and out of my hair, careful not to touch the cut at the right side. It stings so badly. Hazel told me she washed the clothes I was found in yesterday – a bra, pants, yellow T-shirt and jeans – and that she put them on the washing line outside to dry. She also lent me some of her clothes.
Wrapping a towel around me, I stagger painfully to the kitchen and out the back door to the stone steps that lead down into the grassy patch at the back of the house. I find my jeans, T-shirt, bra and pants all swaying on the line alongside the life jacket. I finger it, pulling at the straps.
A wave of dizziness forces me to sit down on a patch of dry grass. I can’t bear to think that someone else died on the trip to this place. Someone I loved, perhaps. After a long while I force myself to focus on my surroundings. George asked me before why I came here. There must be a reason. I must know this place.
I sit for a while and study the farmhouse, pitched as it is on a sudden incline, subjecting it to buffeting winds. It’s bigger than I expected, given how small the rooms seem inside: a tall stone building with patches of crumbling masonry, a spatter of orange tiles on the ground indicating that the roof is in disrepair, too. Metal balconies jut out from two of the upper windows that are crowned by explosions of vibrant pink flowers, lending the place a certain rustic charm. Part of the roof is flat, and there I can make out something that looks like a flat-screen TV with a huge battery attached to the top of it. Perhaps a solar panel – that would explain how the farmhouse has electricity.
A number of outbuildings are visible at the bottom of the hill, rusting and overgrown farm machinery indicating the property’s former purpose. After a while, a feeling of familiarity stirs in me, a small nudge from the recesses of my mind telling me I’ve seen this place before. It’s enough to get me to my feet to have a look around.
The island isn’t what I expected. It looks neglected, abandoned, with stone relics visible in the distance of what appear to be unfinished houses. The earth is dry and parched, and the nearby trees are gnarled and overgrown and filled with thorns. There’s a sense that everything here has to work very hard to survive.
I wonder how anyone would even begin to walk around the island – there’s a narrow dirt path leading from the farmhouse to the trees below, but I don’t imagine there could ever have been vehicles here. It’s a bit of a wilderness. Beautiful, yes, but a savage beauty – not the sort of place anyone would come for a holiday.
I make out three buildings on the north side, the closest one clearly a house that someone didn’t bother to finish. On the west side there are a handful of small beaches strung along the coast, but they appear rocky and treacherous. The ocean wraps itself around the island like a blue cloth dotted with the blurry outlines of boats and landmasses.
Did I really travel that distance across the sea alone? If I was drunk, did I really have the presence of mind to wear a life jacket? Did someone else accompany me? Did they drown?
It is daunting to think that the island is uninhabited. I can’t fathom how Joe, Hazel, Sariah and George don’t feel marooned out here. Or maybe they do, now that their boat is gone.
I check that no one is watching before stepping into my knickers and jeans, then slip the towel to my waist and twist awkwardly into my bra and the yellow T-shirt, my muscles shrieking with the slightest movement. Both the T-shirt and jeans are good quality, both with designer labels. Am I the sort of person who would buy a designer T-shirt? It doesn’t strike a chord. But then, nothing does. I have the sense of being reborn, wiped clean. The ghost of someone else.
When I turn to go back inside I see movement between the house and the outbuilding that looks like a small
