Bright Young Things (33 page)

‘Stop it,’ says Anne quietly.

‘No, kick it hard,’ says Jamie. ‘Fucking cunt,’ he shouts at the dead man.

‘We’re not like him,’ says Anne softly. ‘Come on. Let’s just go.’

‘What are we going to say to Emily?’ asks Paul.

‘Nothing,’ says Anne. ‘We can’t tell her. Bryn’s right.’

‘Are you all right to go downstairs?’ Thea asks Jamie.

‘No,’ he says. ‘I want to go home.’

‘We all want to go home,’ says Thea. ‘But you’ve got to be brave.’

‘Can’t we just tell Emily?’ says Paul.

‘No way,’ says Jamie.

‘Yeah,’ says Bryn. ‘Her fear is the worst one. We can’t let her see this stuff.’

‘I find her fear scarier than mine, seeing it like this,’ says Thea.

‘Yeah,’ says Anne. ‘I don’t find the syringe scary, or the key, or the spider . . . But these other things are so horrible. And the fact that he was going to lock us in our rooms . . .’

‘Which room is the single key for?’ asks Paul. ‘I wonder where I was going to be imprisoned. I wonder why my bedroom wasn’t enough.’

He picks up the key and puts it in his pocket.

‘We’d better go down for lunch,’ Bryn says.

‘Not a word to Emily,’ warns Thea.

‘Agreed,’ says Paul.

Everyone else nods.

‘I’m not going to be able to eat anything’ says Anne.

‘I’m going to be sick,’ says Jamie.

‘Come on,’ says Thea. ‘Let’s go.’

Emily’s sitting by herself at the table. In front of her is a plate of pasta and tomato sauce. Everyone else’s plates are untouched. ‘Sorry,’ says Paul.

They sit down. No one says anything.

‘It’s got cold,’ says Emily. It looks like she’s been crying again.

‘Are you OK?’ asks Anne.

‘Me? I’m fine, silly,’ she says sadly. ‘I just wish your lunches hadn’t got cold.’

No one’s touched their food yet. Bryn tastes some.

‘It’s perfect,’ he says, looking like he’s going to be sick.

‘Mmm,’ says Thea. ‘Just right.’

‘Yum,’ says Anne, forgetting to taste any at all.

‘So. Escape,’ says Emily, once everyone’s tucking in to their lunch.

‘We need to know where we are,’ says Jamie blankly.

‘We’re in the UK somewhere,’ says Paul.

Has someone given this lot tranquillisers or something? They’re all acting weird. Emily’s not sure what’s going on.

‘We do need to know more specifically, though,’ says Thea tiredly.

‘Anne can research that,’ says Emily. ‘And then check the tides.’

‘I’ll try to cut a path down the cliff,’ says Thea, looking at her plate.

‘Will you be all right doing that?’ asks Bryn.

‘Of course,’ she says. ‘Why wouldn’t I be? There’s a scythe around the back.’

‘Maybe Death left it there,’ mutters Anne.

‘Paul can design the boat,’ says Emily.

‘No, Jamie can do that bit,’ Paul says. ‘I’m shit at boats.’

Jamie’s eyes look all red. Maybe he’s got hayfever.

‘OK,’ he agrees, smiling weakly. ‘I’ll have a go.’

‘What are you going to do?’ Thea asks Paul.

‘Design the motor, of course.’

‘We don’t need a motor, do we?’ says Emily. ‘Can’t we just have oars?’

‘Have you ever rowed a boat?’ says Paul. ‘Anyway, it’ll be fun.’

‘This
is
real, you know,’ says Emily sternly.

‘So?’ he says.

‘I don’t think you understand. This isn’t a game.’

There’s silence for a few moments.

‘We all know that, Emily,’ says Thea eventually.

‘What about me?’ asks Bryn quickly. ‘What shall I do?’

‘Um . . .’ says Emily.

‘Materials research,’ says Jamie.

‘And buoyancy,’ adds Paul.

‘For the boat?’ asks Bryn.

‘Of course for the boat,’ says Emily. ‘God.’

‘What are you going to do, Emily?’ asks Jamie.

‘She’s going to pack the sandwiches,’ jokes Bryn.

‘I’ll help Jamie,’ she says, hitting Bryn on the leg playfully.

Thea glares at Emily. Emily doesn’t know why. What’s she done wrong now?

Emily can feel something beginning to happen. Last night everyone was friends but now there’s some tension creeping back in. Maybe the friends thing was a bit optimistic. As Thea pointed out early on, they haven’t got much in common. Except, Emily thinks, they have got loads of things in common. Much more than you would have thought. And they all discovered that dead guy, which should have made them bond even more. Maybe everyone’s just tense about escaping. Everyone was fine this morning, so that’s probably it. She gets the feeling that perhaps everyone’s being funny around her because of last night, because they’re worried about another psychotic episode. She wishes they’d all just chill out.

‘Why are we doing this outside?’ Emily asks Jamie.

The sky is still dark grey, and spots of rain are falling on Emily’s cheeks.

‘Because we can see all the sources of wood,’ he says. ‘It’ll help us plan.’

‘Oh. I thought Bryn was doing materials research?’

‘Yeah, but he’s looking at furniture.’

‘Why can’t we look at the furniture too, then?’

‘Because I wanted to clear my head. I thought you would too.’

‘What?’

‘I thought you’d want to clear your head.’

‘Why? There’s nothing wrong with me.’

‘Are you sure?’

Emily’s fucked off with everyone saying things like this today.

‘Why?’ she says. ‘God, I have one moment of weirdness and you all think I’m, like, totally cuckoo or something.’

‘We’re just trying to be nice. We are your friends . . .’

‘I know,’ she says. ‘Just stop treating me like I’m mental.’

‘Sorry,’ says Jamie.

‘Hey,’ she says, giggling. ‘Who do you think is most likely to drown first?’

Jamie doesn’t say anything.

‘Jamie?’ she says, after he’s just stood there for a couple of minutes.

‘Leave me alone,’ he says.

She puts on her smallest girly voice. ‘I was only joking.’

He won’t look at her.

‘Jamie?’

She touches his shoulder, but he shrugs her off.

‘You’re not crying are you?’

He looks up. There are tears in his eyes.

‘Leave me alone,’ he says.

‘What’s wrong? It was only a joke, for God’s sake.’

‘Everything’s gone wrong,’ he says. ‘You don’t even know how fucked up everything is. You’ve got no idea. It’s all gone wrong.’

‘It was only a dead body,’ she says.

‘Yeah, whatever.’

Still crying, Jamie gets up and goes inside.

Emily’s been thinking a lot about drowning this afternoon. It makes her laugh, the idea of drowning. She’s not sure why, because it scares her more than anything else. Well, anything except rape and torture. She remembers someone saying that death is the worst think that can happen to you. How stupid is that? Being tortured would be worse than being killed. But on the general pain/death-ometer, drowning would be pretty bad. She imagines her lungs filling with water; that time when you’re drowning when you are actually breathing water in and out, like an artificial lung.

Her piece of paper is blank. Suddenly inspired, she draws a comic-book boat, a sort of floating banana on a wavy-line wave, with a stick-and-triangle mast. Then, not really knowing why, she draws the remains of five stick people in the water, with air bubbles above them to show that they’re drowning. The one person left in the boat is just watching, but if you look carefully you can see that she is about to throw herself overboard as well.

Paul’s washing up again, trying to sort out the kitchen after lunch.

He doesn’t see Jamie coming in, but he hears him muttering something.

‘What?’ he says.

‘Nothing,’ says Jamie. ‘It doesn’t matter.’ He sits down at the table and puts his head in his hands. His hair’s wet from the rain.

‘What is it?’ asks Paul.

‘Maybe we should tell Emily,’ says Jamie.

‘We agreed not to, though,’ Paul reminds him.

‘Yes, but now she thinks we think she’s mad. And now she’s driving me mad being overnormal while we all pussyfoot around her. And the more we pussyfoot, the more normal she tries to be, because she thinks we’re doing it because of how she was last night. It doesn’t seem fair. You know, we’re trying to protect her and she gives us a hard time for being weird.’

‘Was she giving you a hard time?’

‘Oh, she was making tasteless jokes about drowning.’

‘She’s probably scared,’ says Paul. ‘We all take the piss when we’re scared.’

Jamie folds his arms petulantly. ‘I don’t.’

Paul laughs. ‘Well, maybe you should try harder.’

‘Where’s your spider?’ asks Jamie.

‘He’s in his cupboard. He’s scared of Thea.’

Jamie manages a smile. ‘Where is she?’

‘Down by the cliffs. She didn’t want anyone to go with her.’

‘Why?’

‘Who knows? So what do you make of that helicopter letter?’

Jamie takes it out of his pocket and unfolds it. Everyone read it upstairs.

‘Well, no one’s coming,’ he says, looking over it.

‘No,’ says Paul. ‘No one’s coming to kill us.’

‘Or set us free,’ says Jamie.

Paul finishes the washing up and sits at the table playing ‘Snake’ with Jamie for long enough to take his mind off the Emily problem. Paul’s having trouble thinking about motors and boats and escape. He’s too fixated on the key in his pocket and the parallel universe in which he’s a prisoner somewhere in this house, more of a prisoner than he is now, actually imprisoned in a room; his greatest, greatest fear.

Why the hell did he tell the truth on that form? It’s not as if he’d usually tell the truth about something like that. Maybe he just found the question interesting, and that compelled him to be honest, as if to reward whoever had constructed the form for asking such good questions. Or maybe he was just caught off guard, like with those trick-series questions where you end up saying green traffic lights mean stop, or whatever.
Name: Paul Farrar
;
Age: 25
;
Place of birth: Bristol
;
Degree: Art
;
Greatest fear: Imprisonment
. You just get used to filling in the boxes, don’t you?

Predictably, the key ends up fitting the basement door. Paul accepts this with a small lump of fear in his throat. It didn’t
actually
happen, he tells himself. Everything’s all right. He never did get locked in this room, and his captor is dead. He forces himself to take one, then two steps into the room, unable to shake off the irrational fear that someone could still come and lock him in. His breathing is short and shallow as he tries and fails to take a third step.

It’s funny the way prisons only become prisons when there’s a chance you could be locked in them. Paul tries to remember how unthreatening this space was when he first came in here. It was horrible, sure, but it wasn’t his prison then. Unable to take any more steps, he retreats from the room and locks the door. But the act of locking the door suddenly frightens him. He imagines locking himself in there by accident and then losing the key, or locking himself in and then having an urge to swallow it. Stupid, he knows, but terrifying. It’s like that fear people have of throwing themselves from high places, or jumping in front of a train. Paul once knew someone who couldn’t wait on a train platform because she thought there was a risk that one day her body would just throw itself in front of the train, independently of her mind. She couldn’t trust her own body, and now Paul knows how that feels. He unlocks the door and puts the key back in his pocket. He needs to find Anne.

She’s in the library.

‘How’s it going?’ he asks her.

‘Not so well. I don’t understand these tidal charts.’

She’s blissfully normal. Thank God.

‘Do you know where we are, then?’ he asks her.

‘Not exactly.’

‘Then how can you work out the tidal charts?’

‘Well, since they’re the only ones here, I assume they’re the right ones.’

‘Cool. Let’s have a look.’

‘OK, here,’ she says, giving them to him.

He looks at them for a few seconds.

‘I think everyone’s in crisis,’ he says, putting the charts to one side.

‘It’s this whole fear thing,’ says Anne. ‘It’s upsetting people.’

‘Hmm. The escape thing isn’t helping. It’s that neither-here-nor-there feeling.’

‘Are people afraid of escaping?’