Bright Young Things (36 page)

‘You poor thing,’ says Jamie, putting his hand on her shoulder.

A tear runs down her cheek. ‘I always pretended it didn’t bother me. I mean, it was the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen in my life. You know, it actually looked like those pictures of developing babies you see sometimes on TV. But I was so determined to be grown up and put it behind me that I just walked out of the hospital the next day and decided I would move on. At the time I believed that coping with a trauma was just mind over matter. Like, if you don’t actually count something as a trauma then it doesn’t have to be one. After all, loads of people have abortions. My friend Lucy had one in her lunch break. I just decided it wouldn’t be a big deal.’

‘Sounds like a fucking big deal to me,’ says Thea.

‘Yeah, I guess it was,’ says Emily. ‘Anyway, now you know.’

‘Do you just blank out with stress?’ asks Anne. ‘Or is it more random?’

‘I thought it was random for a while,’ she explains. ‘But then when I looked at it with my therapist, I realised there was a kind of pattern. Often it would be when I was really anxious about something, but I wasn’t admitting it. You know the kind of thing. My conscious self would think everything was totally cool, but my unconscious self would know better. I’ve never been able to stay with a boyfriend I didn’t love – which is, like, all of them – because I’d start blanking out all the time, like my unconscious telling me he was wrong for me.’

‘I get panic attacks,’ says Anne.

‘What for?’ says Jamie. ‘There’s nothing wrong with your life, surely?’

‘It’s not my life that’s the problem,’ says Anne. ‘It’s everything else.’

‘Is there any cure?’ Bryn asks Emily. ‘For the blankness, I mean.’

She laughs. ‘No, probably not. You see, it
is
my life that’s the problem, and I can’t run away from myself. Of course, the world doesn’t exactly help. All the pressure: trying to find a decent job, a flat in a cool place, a bloke, a good friend, the right food, worrying about your parents dying and planes crashing on London and IRA bombs and tube disasters and hijackings and radiation from mobile phones and GM food and psychopaths and muggers and corrupt policemen and date-rape drugs and carbon-monoxide poisoning and toxic-shock syndrome and road accidents and drive-by shooting and war and people being horrible to refugees and debt and prison and horrible bank managers. Maybe Anne’s right. Life totally sucks.’

Paul’s laughing. ‘When you put it like that . . .’ he says.

‘If it wasn’t so horrible and there wasn’t a dead person here . . .’ begins Emily.

‘What?’ says Jamie.

‘Well, this would be a great place to . . . I don’t know.
Heal
.’

‘Heal?’ says Bryn. ‘That sounds a bit new-age.’

‘Well I’m only saying,’ says Emily. ‘It would just be nice to not have all that stuff any more. If I could escape from the world, then I reckon I’d probably be all right. Then I wouldn’t need to escape from myself, because it’s the way I react to the world that’s a problem.’

‘It’s like we’ve overdosed,’ says Thea thoughtfully.

‘Overdosed?’ says Jamie.

‘Yeah. We’re only in our twenties, but we’ve already overdosed on the world.’

‘Heal,’ says Jamie thoughtfully, like he’s meditating.

‘Shall we go through to the sitting room?’ says Paul. ‘I’ll make coffee.’

In the sitting room, people are talking about escape.

‘How soon do you think we can do it?’ asks Thea.

‘There’s your ankle to consider,’ says Jamie.

‘It’ll be all right tomorrow, I’m sure.’

‘And if it’s not?’ he says.

‘Then I’ll take my chances and go in the boat with you lot.’

‘What boat?’ says Jamie. ‘I don’t remember making one.’

‘We’ll sort something out,’ says Paul.

Bryn ends up making the coffee, since Paul cooked. He places dripping mugs on the floor next to each person and then sits down on the sofa next to Thea. Everyone’s here, except Emily, who’s still in the kitchen.

‘We fucked up pretty bad today, didn’t we?’ says Bryn.

‘We suck at escaping,’ says Anne.

‘It’s not like any of us have been in this situation before,’ says Jamie.

‘Makes you realise you should have joined the Scouts after all,’ says Paul.

‘I was a Brownie for a day,’ says Anne.

‘What happened?’ asks Jamie.

‘I got expelled for saying fuck.’

‘Were none of us in the Scouts or the Guides or anything?’ asks Jamie.

‘You must have been in the Scouts,’ says Anne. ‘Weren’t you?’

‘No,’ he says. ‘It was on a Monday night and my mum had to work.’

‘But you wanted to be, though, I bet?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You know,’ says Anne. ‘It is funny, don’t you think?’

‘What?’ says Thea.

‘Well, we’re all so useless,’ she says. ‘We’re the perfect kidnappees.’

‘Did the dead guy know that?’ asks Jamie. ‘Do you think it’s significant?’

‘I think it’s an accident,’ says Anne.

‘How did it happen?’ asks Paul.

‘What?’ asks Emily, walking in with a tea towel.

‘We’re just wondering how come we’re all so incompetent,’ says Anne.

Emily laughs. ‘I see.’

‘Paul isn’t incompetent,’ says Thea. ‘He could design some system to get us out.’

‘What, a teleport system?’ he says. ‘Get real.’

‘See,’ says Anne, laughing. ‘We all suck.’

‘Well, we’re all urban young people,’ says Emily defensively. ‘We’re not exactly geared up for survival in the fucking wilderness.’

‘It’s ironic, isn’t it?’ says Jamie.

‘What?’ says Emily.

‘Well, that we got here by claiming to be Bright Young Things.’

‘We are Bright Young Things,’ says Paul. ‘We’re just not very practical.’

‘But we are going to do it,’ says Jamie.

‘Yeah,’ says Emily. ‘We’ll prove ourselves wrong.’

‘They always escaped on
The A Team
,’ says Bryn. ‘Yeah, and when we get out of here, we can go on
Trisha
,’ says Emily.

‘What’s
Trisha
?’ asks Thea.

‘Never mind,’ says Emily.

‘So much for healing,’ says Bryn.

Bryn’s got a headache.

‘Does anyone want anything from the medicine cabinet?’ he asks.

‘He just can’t help drug-dealing,’ jokes Paul.

‘Yeah, you’re funny mate,’ he says. ‘Anyway, I’m going to give all that up.’

‘Seriously?’ says Thea.

‘Yeah. I’m going to sort my life out when we get home.’

‘Cool,’ says Emily. ‘I think we could all do something like that.’

‘Not the life-change thing, please,’ groans Anne.

The cold air out in the hall clears Bryn’s head almost instantly. Nevertheless, he could do with one of the Tamazepams he saw in the medicine cabinet up in the dead guy’s room. The stuff up there is far superior to the medical supplies in the kitchen. In the kitchen there’s paracetamol; upstairs there’s co-proxamol. In the kitchen there are some plastic plasters; up here there are proper bandages. He must remember to take an ankle support down for Thea. He wonders why he didn’t think of it before. Anyway, he doesn’t know why someone would have sleeping pills on a desert island, but it’s cool, because jellies are Bryn’s favourite. Of course, he’s going to give up drugs and all that one day; it’s just not going to be today.

Bryn’s already been up here exploring once. The room’s full of fucked up but interesting things (apart from the fear stuff and the body, that is): loads more seeds, fertiliser, hosepipes, funny tubes, some kind of air pump, supplies of paper, pens and notebooks, water-purifying tablets, rolls of material, wool, and about fifty bars of soap.

He necks a couple of jellies and goes to leave. There are some planks of wood and old bookshelves stacked against the wall just by the small toilet. He didn’t do a very thorough job of materials research or whatever the hell it was earlier on, but now he wonders if you could make a boat out of all these bits of wood. Of course he’d have to test their buoyancy, but they could be just the thing. He starts pulling the planks away from the wall, examining each one. They seem to be the top, bottom and sides of a large crate. Soon, without even really noticing, he’s shifted all the junk away from the wall, and it’s only then that he realises there’s another small room behind it.

When he goes downstairs, he’s carrying an inflatable boat and an outboard motor.

‘Fucking hell,’ says Paul, when Bryn walks back into the sitting room.

‘Is that a boat?’ says Emily.

‘Shit,’ says Jamie. ‘Where did you get that?’

‘Upstairs,’ says Bryn, putting it, and the motor, down in the middle of the floor.

‘Cool,’ squeals Emily. ‘This is
so
cool. Does the motor work?’

Paul pokes at it a bit and then pulls its string. Nothing happens.

‘No,’ he says.

‘Why would there be a boat upstairs?’ muses Jamie.

‘It was behind a load of crap,’ says Bryn.

‘But still,’ says Emily. ‘You’d think that the dead guy wouldn’t just leave a boat lying around. I mean, we’re just going to fuck off now, first thing tomorrow, right?’

‘I suppose he didn’t know he was going to be dead and that we’d have carte blanche to search through everything in his room,’ Anne points out.

‘Maybe the boat was for him to get away in,’ suggests Thea. ‘Since he didn’t have the helicopter coming back for him.’

‘The motor doesn’t work,’ Paul points out. ‘It won’t get very far.’

‘Do you know what’s wrong with it?’ asks Thea.

‘No,’ he says.

‘Can you mend it?’ asks Jamie.

‘Don’t know,’ he says. ‘Probably.’

Paul makes a start on the motor immediately. Anne’s helping him and talking about some weird holiday in California. The fire’s still hot, but seems to be dying. The rain has almost stopped, although the wind’s still strong. Emily imagines all the power from the wind going through the turbine and being stored in the batteries. It’s a comforting thought, that the elements are providing power for the house. All the noises soon become hypnotic and Emily yawns.

‘Where are we all sleeping tonight?’ she asks.

‘Down here again?’ suggests Bryn.

Paul groans. ‘No way. My back won’t take it.’

‘Or mine,’ says Thea. ‘That floor’s too hard.’

‘It’ll be cold upstairs, though,’ says Bryn. ‘On our own in those rooms.’

‘The fire warms the whole house,’ Jamie points out.

‘But not enough,’ says Bryn. ‘And I’m not sleeping on my own with a dead body one floor above me. No way.’

‘We could all sleep together in one of the beds,’ suggests Emily.

‘What, in a single bed?’ says Thea. ‘Get real.’

‘We could double up,’ suggests Bryn.

Emily gets the impression he doesn’t want to be alone tonight.

‘I’m going to be doing this for a while,’ says Paul.

‘Do you mind if we go to bed?’ says Thea.

‘No,’ says Paul. ‘You need to rest for tomorrow.’

‘I’ll go with Jamie,’ says Emily.

Jamie looks astonished. Happy but astonished.

‘Are you sure?’ he asks, slightly breathlessly.

‘Don’t get excited,’ she says. ‘I only want your body heat.’

Jamie looks like he can’t get up fast enough. Emily winks and smiles at Thea.

‘Right, then,’ she says, getting up. ‘Is everyone else going to be OK?’

‘I’m going to stay and help Paul,’ says Anne.

‘That leaves me and you then,’ Bryn says to Thea.

‘Needs must,’ she says, getting up and yawning.

‘I haven’t changed my socks for three days,’ he warns her.

‘Don’t worry, you won’t be getting undressed,’ she says.

‘Oh,’ says Bryn. ‘Right.’

The four of them go upstairs.

At most, Emily’s spent a total of half an hour in ‘her’ room since she arrived on this island, but she’s still managed to spread her stuff around everywhere. There’s an empty tampon-holder on one of the pillows (romantic, huh?), and the chest of drawers is covered with bits of tissue, two lipsticks (she brought four), some loose face powder (spilled), a comb, some hairspray, a small pocket mirror, her tweezers and some old receipts that were at the bottom of her bag. Her original knickers are on the floor and the spare pair, which she wore yesterday, are soaking in the sink.

‘Sorry about the mess,’ she says to Jamie.

He looks nervous. ‘Are you sure about this?’ he asks.

‘About what?’ she says teasingly.

‘This,’ he says. ‘You know.’

‘Have you never shared a bed with a girl before?’ she asks.