Power Games (46 page)

Nature worshipped him. Scampers in the undergrowth retreated to let him pass, and the inquisitive eye of a monkey on a branch told him he was feared.

The animals could smell it. The birds could sense it.

Kevin Chase was king of the jungle.

He wished he had another name. That one no longer belonged to him. His previous life faded a little more each
day. By now it was a smudged image, hazy and bleached. He thought of no one from the old world. It was how he imagined reincarnation, to be born again, and in glimpses he might catch frayed snippets of the past—performing on stage, running an interview, filming a video, those lyrics that played on a loop in his mind—but as soon as they arrived they were gone. They held no significance for him any more.

He came to a circular glade, into which a shaft of golden sunlight poured like wine from a jug. At its centre, he knelt, dragging his hands through a pit of soft mud and smearing it richly over his body. He took his time, the charge through his groin sizzling by the second but he enjoyed the anticipation; he knew the release would be all the more satisfying. In long, smooth strokes, he caked his erection.

Spreading his knees wide, he thrust his hips forward. He wanted to fuck. Right now he would fuck anything. The mud melted, a kaleidoscope of bucking browns and greens, and frantically he searched for a hole to put it into, anything, and located a pit of sticky, fuzzy moss clinging to the side of a tree trunk. Flinging his arms around the column of bark, Kevin pounded his erection inside, breaking through the tangle of leaves and twigs until it met with something soft and springy.

He threw his head back, picturing the tree as a woman’s body: the Little Chaser who had seduced him after
The Craig Winston Show
, Tawny, Celeste, Angela, anyone who would let him, and held on tight and rocked against it, fucking the life out of nature because nothing else was enough. His thighs pummelled the tree and he lifted his ass from the ground, clamping his legs around it, working like a piston, hanging helpless with his hands and feet bound.

He could feel the tide rising. The girl beneath him would be on all fours, screaming her orgasm, and he would make her come and then—

With a howl, Kevin ejaculated into the tree. The climax was so extreme that the sky shivered and shook in his glassy, lust-drugged perception. He fell against it as one lover to another, his cheek crumpled against the bark.

Slowly he withdrew, careful not to snag himself on the rough exterior.

Only then did he realise he was stuck.

Not his dick, thank fuck, but his arms and legs. The bark, whose stickiness had seemed to him so erotic mere moments before, was smothered in tacky, gluey gum.

The sap had him stuck fast.

He tried to tug loose. It pulled like the time he was a kid and had soldered his fingers together with superglue, and Joan had to douse them in vinegary nail varnish to set them free. Agony. He tugged, and tugged again.

‘Shit!’

His cock, now limp, dangled forlornly between his legs. He looked like a giant peanut, sludged with mud, a pair of panicked eyes glittering from a dirt-caked face.

With horror Kevin realised that his dick was prickling with needles of fire. Daring to look down, he saw the skin there was covered in a rash of tiny red pimples.

Mouth open, eyes wide, he watched as an army of red ants swarmed out of the hole in the tree, antennae twitching as they spread across it like seeping paint.

I fucked an ants’ nest!

Kevin was unable to contain his scream. Rearing violently, he thrashed against the gluey prison but his fingers and toes weren’t budging.

He had to think straight.

I fucked an ants’ nest!

The insects were in their thousands now, and still spilling out, the lip of the hole thick as an earthenware pot. Kevin
focused on doing it one millimetre at a time. Gently he could prise one wrist off, then the other, then use his grip to help with the feet …

It took an eternity. Hell was refreshed when he discovered the ants could jump, driving up his arms with itchy speed, nipping his flesh with their miniature teeth and leaping to his face, where they wrapped a crawling scarf around his neck and shoulders and he hadn’t the capability to swipe them off.
I fucked an ants’ nest!

It was prolonged torture, and when finally the glue released him and he broke free, nursing his bruised, pecked balls in the palms of his hands, he fell back on the ground and could have burst out laughing. Swatting his body, he managed to dust off the majority of the insistent, wriggling army, digging about in his ears, under his arms and between his legs. He examined his dick, which was a livid, angry pink.

I fucked an ants’ nest!

Kevin collapsed onto his back, drained, his chest rising and falling and scattered with bites. His palms and the soles of his feet were sticky. Sitting up, he prised off some of the gunk, which came away in a clinging white web.

The presence at his back didn’t alarm him, because it carried such weight and bulk that at first he thought it was a rock or a giant stone or something. Only when it grunted and moved, a thick, padded sound, a
thump-thump-drag
, did he pause in what he was doing and wonder what the fuck had just witnessed him nailing a tree.

The presence grunted, and expelled a rubbery wheeze not dissimilar to a horse. There was a smell of shit, and zoos. As Kevin turned, a shock of orange hair filled his vision. Long strands draped over the creature’s arms and legs, tousled and swathed like the shawl of a hippy aunt, and its face was a
wide grey plate, the rim tough and circular, in the middle of which lay an arrangement of very human-looking features, and an expression that reminded Kevin of his dead grandpa.

A peculiar knot of red curls capped the animal’s head, and surrounding its nose and chin was a paprika moustache and beard. It was shovelling crunchy leaves into its mouth with lazy, languid appetite, its teeth churning like a cement mixer.

Its hands were enormous and grey, the colour and texture of elephant skin.

Kevin and the orangutan stared at each other. Once one mouthful was done, it reached out and snatched another, stripping the plant in a single swipe. It appeared weary, and faintly amused. Appetite sated, it began scratching its armpit. Still, it did not take its eyes from Kevin. Kevin found this disconcerting a) because he was naked, b) because he had just fucked a tree, c) because he had just fucked an ants’ nest, and d) because the orangutan’s eyes were not the eyes of a stupid pig, or an angry croc, or even the Great White he had slayed—these were the eyes of, well, it had to be said, a
person.
They were wise and knowing, maybe slightly depressed. They seemed to say:
You think I’ve got an easy ride here? Munching leaves, sleeping and shitting, what kind of a life is that?
Kevin had the wild notion of returning to LA with the orangutan, taking it to the Hollywood Bowl, throwing shapes at Supperclub, for lunch at the mall, and then whale-watching at Newport Beach. Maybe he could even slap on one of his stage outfits and have it perform on his behalf. That was all he had been reduced to in the latter days, anyhow—a strutting, idiot monkey.

Except, this monkey was no idiot. Its scrutiny drenched Kevin in shame. He pictured his bare ass rutting the tree, the shrieks he had released and then the indignity of his struggle to get away. Had there been a whole audience of them here?
Was this the one that had been left behind, finishing his popcorn while the credits rolled?

It regarded him with an edge of pity, and Kevin did not like to be pitied.

Who should pity him? He was king!

Kevin stood and dusted himself off.

‘What you looking at?’ he challenged. ‘Huh? What’s the big fucking show?’

The orangutan continued to stare.

‘Ah, screw you.’

Kevin went to go. Just as he did, the world exploded with an almighty, ear-splitting roar. There was a deafening
thumpthump-drag
as the orangutan’s fists pounded the ground and dragged its body up. When Kevin turned, all he saw was the inside of a gigantic and terrifying mouth: the orangutan’s entire head seemed to have opened up, like a game Kevin used to have where these plastic hippos’ jaws sprang back on hinges to receive winning pellets. Its teeth were tombstonebig and dirty yellow, and on the top were two brutally sharp canines, protruding from a stippled, grey gum. Its tongue brought to mind slabs of unsavoury meat in the butcher’s window.

The orangutan’s face was shrivelled to a walnut. Its eyes had vanished.

Kevin started to run.

Thump-thump-drag … Thump-thump drag …

It was chasing him, and with surprising speed for an animal that size.

Naked, Kevin broke through brambles and stalks, tearing in his stung, mud-caked, post-coitus state through an impenetrable jungle and, in doing so, flattening the way for his psycho persecutor. He tripped on knotted clumps and fell and staggered, but he could not stop. He considered mounting
a tree and clambering to the top, but a faint image swam to mind of an orangutan hanging out in the branches and he decided against it. The weight of the animal seemed to shake the forest floor.

Thump-thump-drag …

Thump-thump-drag …

The creature was gaining on him, beats between rhythms narrowing to a slice.

Kevin kept going. He would keep going until he reached the sea. He didn’t know what direction he was headed, but eventually he had to hit it—this was an island! Orangutans didn’t go in the sea, did they? Water was its Kryptonite.

Through dense thickets and the heat of his pursuit, Kevin was aware that this was a part of the jungle he had never accessed before. He noticed it not because the sounds and smells were different, or that the ground had changed, or even that the forest was tougher than usual—in fact, it was the contrary. He noticed it because suddenly he was bombing down an already trampled route, not a route travelled by Angela or the others, not a month-old route but what appeared to be an ancient one, compacted like a proper path, smoothed by the passage of countless feet.

Thump-thump-drag …

Thump-thump-drag …

The hunt was growing fainter, but Kevin didn’t slow. He didn’t slow until he lost the sound completely. When he halted, he bent double, hands on his knees, his blood pumping. He absorbed the unfamiliar surroundings.

And the unfamiliar voices …

Kevin gasped.

He stepped closer.

Through a screen of leaves, two dark faces spoke. They were crouched, a pair of upright spears at their sides, over the
carcass of a fresh kill. They wore jewellery made from bones, and grass belts that covered their groins. They delved into the animal hide to retrieve its organs, before hauling it on to their shoulders.

They started walking.

Kevin followed.

92

Day 61

I
n a matter of weeks there would be another life to take care of. What was inside would be out. Eve could protect her child while it was hers to keep, but once it was born she could not guarantee its safety. Beyond its arrival was a whistling blank. Raising an infant, here in this wilderness, for how long, and when would it end?

Orlando came to signify everything she yearned for, and everything her baby would be without: security, a home, a father who wore suits and aftershave, who had an education and read
The New York Times.

Here, Eve had nothing to give except herself. She had visions of it turning into a wolf child, savage and unruly, a being she did not and would never recognise: socially and culturally alienated.

All this time she had feared having a child for the ghost of her father’s crimes. Now, her reality was a different challenge entirely. Some days she wanted to despair at her fate. Others, the promise of new life was the only thing that kept her going.

The undergrowth panted and shivered. Emerging into the speckled glade, Eve spotted a sow, metres away, hidden in the trees and obscured by the hot shade. It stilled, hoofs
stamping the ground. Eve saw that it was pregnant. Its stomach was bulbous, and its nipples long and drooping.

She stood, unclothed, looking back.

Water dripped from her long hair.

She and the sow locked glances. It didn’t acknowledge her as human, just an animal, just the same, and all they were doing was living because they must.

93

Day 62

J
acob dragged the raft down to the water. His gold watch flashed in the sun and his hair was wild. Celeste, on the shore, watched the waves splash around the structure, knowing that come nightfall he would be gone.

‘This is it,’ he said. ‘It’s this or giving up.’

‘I can’t.’ It broke her heart to say it. ‘I’m too afraid.’

‘More afraid than you are of what’s here?’

‘Yes.’

Jacob took her hand. He dipped his head in defeat.

‘I never met anyone like you,’ he said. ‘We can’t let this go.’

‘Then stay,’ she whispered. ‘Stay and pray for home.’

Jacob kissed her. ‘Do you think it would be the same?’ he murmured. ‘Back in our ordinary lives, you and me …?’

‘I’ve forgotten what ordinary life feels like.’

‘So have I. Since you.’

She put her head on his warm shoulder. He wrapped her in his arms.

‘I do think it would be the same,’ she said. ‘We’re not so different.’

‘You wouldn’t say that if you knew me before.’

Celeste pulled back. ‘Nor would you.’

She ran her fingers across his cracked knuckles, chalky with salt and razored by wood. ‘I stole from Tawny,’ she confessed. ‘I feel so guilty about it. I feel guilty about all the stuff I stole, and the reasons why I did it. I’m a thief, Jacob. I’ve been stealing my whole life and I don’t know how to stop.’

She expected judgement, but the face he gave her was one of concern.

‘The first thing I took, I still can’t forget it. I wonder what would have happened if I’d resisted. If I’d said no then, maybe I’d never have taken anything else. My shrink’s given me a thousand reasons why I did it, but none of them makes it right. Just a frail old man; I can picture his face like it was yesterday …’