Page 43 of The Island of Lost Girls

And in the tub, bubbles popping around a fleshy chest thickly thatched with curly hair, great tree-trunk arms spread out along the sides, sits Matthew Meade.

Tatiana throws herself down on a white leather sofa in the shade. A huge table is surrounded by twelve – Mercedes counts them, silently – bucket chairs also covered in white leather, and in its centre sits an urn of flowers and a huge bowl filled with fruit.

Her head fills with questions. How do they keep this clean? How are these flowers so fresh and yet so clearly not from here? Why are there no flies on that fruit? Why doesn’t it rot, sitting out in this heat? And what do they do in bad weather? That table is bolted down, but nothing else is. What do they do when there’s a storm? Where do they put it all?

Beyond the table, part of the glass wall slides back, and she glimpses the salon within. A thick patterned carpet, a host of padded seats upholstered in red velvet. A bar behind which a hundred bottles sit, held in by brass rails. A glass-fronted refrigerator that reaches the ceiling, filled with racks of bottles. A TV screen the size of her bedroom wall.

She is hit by a blast of cold, cold air. Then a steward steps into her sightline and the glass slides to, and her view is cut off. The glass is tinted. It hides the interior from eyes like hers.

The steward has dark skin and flat cheekbones and looks as though he too comes from an island – only one far, far away. Tatiana, lying down and gazing up at the canopy, doesn’t even look at him. ‘Coke,’ she says. ‘Full fat. None of that diet shit.’

‘On its way,’ he replies. ‘And for you, madame?’

Madame. It takes her a moment to realise that he is addressing her. She stutters, then asks for a Pepsi-Cola, trying to sound as though it’s something she drinks every day. ‘Please,’ she mutters, awkwardly. It feels all wrong. A child giving orders to an adult.

‘And something to eat?’ asks the steward, and she is flailing again. She doesn’t know what to ask for.

He sees her discomfort and takes pity.

‘There is some very good cheesecake,’ he says, ‘left over from lunch.’

Feeling like a rabbit in the headlights, she nods. ‘Mersi,’ she mutters. She glances over the guard rail and sees her father on the edge of the Re del Pesce terrace, fists on hips, talking to a figure bundled up in black. He is frowning. He looks up, and out over the water, and nods. The grapevine has reached him already, she thinks. He’ll have words for me when I get home.

‘Pop Tart,’ says Tatiana behind her back. ‘Strawberry. And some prosciutto. And grapes. Sit down, Mercy, do.’

Mercy? Is this what she thinks my name is?

She’s too timid to correct her. Perches nervously on the edge of the sofa nearest hers.

‘You don’t need the pleases and thank-yous, by the way,’ says Tatiana. ‘They’re servants, for God’s sake. We literally pay them, yuh?’

Movement in the bathtub. Matthew Meade is sitting up. He calls out, and his voice is basso, like a funeral bell.

‘Hello, darling! Are you back?’

‘Yah,’ calls Tatiana.

‘Good time?’

‘Yah,’ she replies. ‘Snorkelling.’

With a great suck of water he lumbers, dripping, to his feet.

Mercedes is mesmerised. His clothes are so well cut that when she’s seen him before he’s merely looked imposing. Sometimes fat. But not fat like this. Matthew Meade is fully, morbidly obese. As he manoeuvres himself from the water and gravity takes hold, his chest slides downwards to form two breasts that put her mother’s to shame. And though his skin is tanned a solid teak, she sees undulations of cellulite from his shoulders all the way to the waistband of his gigantic shorts. An apron of flesh beneath the cloth plumps the shorts out and drags the waistband down, rests on the tops of incongruously skinny thighs.

He heaves himself over the edge of the tub and bends to retrieve a towel from where it lies on a sun lounger. It’s a large towel, large enough to wrap her own body twice, but he strains to tuck it in on itself as he walks towards them. He is looking at her as he comes, and for a moment Mercedes feels an urge to flee back the way she came.

And then he smiles.

‘Well, well,’ he says. ‘And who do we have here, then?’