Chapter 11
Margo tsked. “Come along now, it’s quite straightforward so long as you do exactly what I say. Now, hold your palm out flat in front of you.”
Casey did as she was told, a knot of anxiety in her stomach pulling taut as she looked down at her open hand and waited for the interdimensional travel to begin. “Why do I have to—”
“Fooled you!” yelled Margo, as a red-hot chestnut flew out of the fire with a high-pitched whistle and smacked Casey in the middle of her forehead.
“Ouch!” Casey screeched.
“And here we are,” said Margo serenely.
“Was that really necessary?” Casey snapped, rubbing her forehead. And then she noticed her surroundings. The sun was beating down on her skin, and she was standing on a sandy beach with palm trees and mangroves behind her and the gently undulating cerulean sea ahead.
“Distraction is best when traveling through time,” said Margo.
“Wow! Where are we?”
“A small uninhabited island in the Gulf of Thailand.”
“Uninhabited?”
“Except for you, yes.”
The sound of her own voice wafted along the beach, and Casey followed it, until she found the source. She sucked in a gasp and stumbled as a powerful wave of dizziness swept over her.
Margo steadied her and then began to rub her back in soothing circles. “Don’t worry, it’ll pass. Happens to most people the first time,” she said. “It’s a mild form of shock, a perfectly natural reflex to being faced with one’s alternate self.”
Casey took deep breaths until her discombobulation began to ease. She tried to make sense of what she was seeing, but there was absolutely no sense to be had.
“And today we’re going to catch a fish. Yes, Graham Norton, yes, I catch and create all my own sushi.
I’ll show you how I do it.” Other Casey was sitting cross-legged in front of a small fire.
She was wearing a matching bra and knicker set, which once might have been a baby pink color but were now greige.
She had a cape of sorts made from large leaves that appeared to have been stitched together with vines, draped across her shoulders.
Her hair was so long that she had pulled it together at the nape of her neck and secured it by tying it into a knot, and she was tanned the color of stewed Yorkshire Tea.
But the tan paled into insignificance when compared to the extraordinary length and thickness of her leg hair and the mass of dark curls exploding out the sides of her knickers.
“Now,” Other Casey continued, “today, Graham, we are putting the final touches onto the homemade fly lure to tempt those fishes onto my line.” Between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand she held a small artificial fly.
Using the fingernails of her left thumb and forefinger she plucked a thick black hair out of her left knee and added this to the fly.
“What do you think of that, Graham Norton?” she asked.
Casey had been watching all of this with the kind of horrified fascination that she usually reserved for watching Botched.
“If you keep your mouth hanging open like that, you will almost certainly eat a bug. This island is insect paradise,” Margo warned her.
“What the f…I mean, how…what happened to me? And why am I talking to myself?”
“You’re not; you’re talking to him.” Margo pointed to the left of Other Casey’s knee, where a small green lizard was sitting in the sand, looking up at her with its bulging eyes, seemingly rapt by her every word.
“Graham Norton is a gecko?”
“Graham Norton has been her faithful companion these past two years, ever since she rescued him from a snake.”
Suddenly Other Casey’s head snapped up from her fly to scan the horizon.
In the distance, a yacht had just come into view.
Other Casey jumped to her feet. “Quick, Graham Norton, ship ahoy!” she shouted, bending to scoop the gecko up and onto her shoulder and kicking sand over the little fire to extinguish it.
Then she turned and dashed into the cover of the trees.
“What is she doing?” Casey asked exasperatedly. “This could be her chance to get rescued!”
“She doesn’t want to be rescued.”
“What? That makes no sense. Why not?”
“Because, my dear, in this timeline you said yes to Sam’s proposal.”
“I did what?” She balked.
“Not only that, but you actually married him.”
“Oh my god! Why?”
“Well, everyone in the restaurant was looking and you didn’t want to make a fuss, so you said yes. At least you were spared the meme,” Margo reasoned.
Casey looked up and down the deserted beach. “And this is the alternative?”
“One of them.”
“I’m not sure how much of a win that was,” said Casey doubtfully. “How did I go from accepting Sam’s proposal to befriending a lizard on a desert island?”
“Oh, you know how it is, one thing leads to another,” said Margo, tearing a mango in half and biting into the flesh.
Casey looked into the trees, where she could just make out the silhouette of a rudimentary lean-to and next to it some scraps of clothing hanging over a low branch.
She remembered that night in the restaurant so vividly; the sensation of being hopelessly trapped still flooded her stomach with panic when she thought about it.
In those seconds after he’d proposed, when he was down on one knee waiting for her answer, she had looked around and seen a hundred mobile phones pointed at her and heard the silence of a hundred breaths collectively held as they awaited her response.
And in that moment, however briefly, she had considered saying yes so as not to make a scene.
She’d told herself that she could let him down gently when they got home.
But even if she had temporarily accepted his proposal to avoid a brouhaha in the restaurant, she wouldn’t have actually married him. Would she?
The yacht on the horizon had passed out of sight, and Other Casey emerged from the tree line with Graham Norton perched on her leaf cape.
“I think we’re safe,” she said as she knelt on the sand and began to gather dried leaves and sticks into a pile.
“You can’t be too careful. It was a yacht just like that one that I fell off on my honeymoon.
” She shuddered despite the sun beating down on them.
“That’s what you get for chronic people-pleasing.
I can see you judging me, Graham Norton, but how was I to know that there was a local journalist in the restaurant that night or that when he wrote the story, an entrepreneur would read it and offer us an all-expenses-paid honeymoon if we agreed to be in his advertising campaign?
It all just spiraled out of control. There comes a point where you’re in too deep to back out, and nobody likes a fusspot.
Thank goodness that dolphin helped me into the shallows or I might have drowned…
or worse, been found and had to go back to being Mrs. Moon. ”
Casey listened with fascinated horror. “Is this for real?”
Margo nodded. “Happens more than you think,” she said authoritatively.
“Some people are so worried about rocking the boat, upsetting the applecart, and other such analogies, that they find themselves living lives they would never have chosen for themselves. To be fair, winding up stranded on a desert island is rare.”
“I can’t believe that I people-pleased myself into a marriage with a man I didn’t love because I was worried about making a fuss.”
Margo snorted. “Believe it, baby. You put the ‘suck’ in sucker! It’s all the same in the end: In this timeline you end up hiding from the world by living on a desert island, and in your timeline, you hide from the world by making yourself an island.
” She pointed at Casey and then made an L shape with her thumb and forefinger and pressed it against her forehead.
Other Casey, meanwhile, had begun to twizzle the end of a stick against a small block of wood very fast between her hands until it began to smoke, and then she threw on some dried moss and began to blow on it.
A small flame appeared, which she nurtured by blowing on it until she had started a modest fire.
Casey was quietly impressed. Her years of Girlguiding had certainly paid off in this version of her life.
“And that,” said Margo, making a show of dusting off her hands, “is how you came to be stranded on one of the islands of Mu Ko Ang Thong, a charming archipelago in the Gulf of Thailand.”
“Will I be okay?” she asked as her counterpart went back to preparing her fishing line while Grahan Norton looked on attentively.
“Present only, remember,” said Margo, and then seeing the consternation on Casey’s face, she added, “But I happen to know that there’s a strapping young fisherman who fishes these waters and there’s a good chance that their eyes will lock over a tasty crab. Time to go.”
Casey smiled. “Good luck, other me,” she said, blowing a kiss each for Other Casey and Graham Norton as the sand began to whip up around her.
—
Casey opened her eyes to find herself back in the store just as chestnuts began exploding out of the fireplace in a scalding blizzard of claggy crumbs, which Margo proceeded to try to catch in her mouth and which Casey spent the rest of her shift scraping off the ceiling. Her mind swirled as she worked.
“I just keep thinking about how desperate the other me must have been to prefer being a castaway to being married to Sam,” said Casey, rinsing a cloth in a bucket of water.
“Doesn’t reflect well on the young man, does it?” Margo replied, plucking a piece of nut off a copy of Robinson Crusoe and throwing it into her mouth. “So, what have you got planned for your days off?”
“Not much. I’ll probably visit Nigel, spend some time with my niece and nephew. What about you? Can I trust you not to traumatize my coworkers or explode the store in my absence?”