‘And what bloody sort is that, mate?’ says Roberto. ‘Going particularly gorgeous this year, were they? Look at us.’
‘Yes, look at us,’ says Lance, with the look of a man punched in the gut. ‘We are exactly what they needed. They get a hell of a lot of applicants for this kind of show, we all know that. So how do you narrow people down? You lose a few that would never be the sorts they’d want.’
‘People that aren’t attractive enough, obvs,’ says Summer.
‘So, you filter them out,’ says Liv. ‘Then who else?’
‘Lads with no chat,’ says Roberto.
‘Yes,’ she continues, ‘Introverts, the unrelatable, the unfriendly, there are a lot out there. The producers wanted this series to feel as real as possible. The reality TV bubble is bursting. People want the real deal. Social media has made it look like movie stars are talking straight to you through their mobile devices, the bar has been raised on what’s authentic, what’s daring, what’s glamorous.’
‘So who else do they cut?’ says Lance.
‘People that dress like knobs?’ says Roberto.
Liv looks at Roberto’s luminous Hawaiian short/shirt combo and bites her tongue. ‘Sure, let’s file that under other general quirks.’
‘Then you disqualify people that work in TV,’ says Summer. ‘People who’ve been seen on other shows, or whose characters or faces resemble people who’ve been on TV recently.’
‘Yes, Summer. Very good,’ says Lance.
‘So then you have a pretty low number,’ says Justine.
‘Relatively speaking,’ says Liv. ‘It’s still well up there.’
‘But then you remove all the nutters, right? And pick from the rest,’ says Roberto.
Lance bangs the book down on the kitchen island counter-top. ‘Close,’ he says. ‘You remove the nutters and then you pick from them.’
And they are left in a brief moment of silence while the words sink in.
Zack: Afloat
Zack is adrift, cloud-diving through a haze of violet sky.
He’s taken peyote before, just once after a Uniqlo shoot in Cancun. He couldn’t convince any of the other models to do hallucinogens, so he took it in tea with a couple from Glasgow and a medicine man named Mao, who told them he ‘found strength in the union of the eagle and the condor’, which seemed comforting.
‘Good for you Mao, man,’ said Zack at the time. And an hour later both birds were biting at his soul.
But this wasn’t like that. It was more like the moments of silence at the end of a high-intensity yoga class, when he found all his chakras unlocked allowing the prana energy to reach the manipura and therefore run straight from the perineum to his brain.
Or like in the middle of a gong bath, when Zack is laid out semi-supine and the ‘more difficult sounds’ are being played in the sound therapy room. The high-pitched drilling drones, the murmurs with unknown instruments that run through every cell, those deep gongs that reach the bowels.
He feels quite apart from his body, a piece of himself having lifted up out of the rest, and flung him into a quaking stratosphere, which once he has shot through the clouds, opens out into a vista of stars. He fears how large these heavenly bodies are, but their beauty dazzles him, the trails of live dust that spread out like tentacles astounding him. Yet, how small and meaningless he feels overwhelms him, as he gasps for ice-cold air, tumbling through this abyss that terrifies and comforts him in its extremity.
He’s as empty as he felt after a cleansing ritual in Colombia, where he took five enemas in a week. He is so open. And his heart is as wide as it was after he had that double-bill of reiki and acupuncture.
That is if he could feel his heart, or any of his body for that matter. Normally his heart would be beating fast, even in a dream, but here he feels nothing, not even the chill of numbness in his bones, nothing but the atmosphere running through his dreads like a fibre optic current.
As he tumbles, he drags his eyes from the tail of a flaming star and looks at his body. In fact, not so much at, as for. For his body is nowhere to be seen. And it is this revelation that rocks him awake.
He feels the frost on his eyelids still, as they roll open, he sees a gun-metal grey box, that surrounds him like a prison.
Through it, he has the smallest hint of widescreen vision. He still doesn’t feel his body, but that doesn’t seem so bad, it doesn’t seem so wrong, or unusual. He can’t turn his head, but that too just feels like ‘the way it must be’. Everything has taken on the terrifying and beautiful feeling of his dream scape. Which leads him to conclude, not unreasonably, that he’s still in a dream, but one of a different colour.
He sticks his tongue out and feels the cold of the metal walls that surround him. Through the widescreen gap, like that of ferry doors half open to the land or sea from the point of view of the car, he sees other grey boxes surrounding him.
He flutters his lips to see if he can. He blinks a few times to warm up the top half of his head. He coughs and hears the sound echo back to him. Then listens as it falls away to nothing.
He can hear voices he recognises, but in a far-away place, and colours thrown onto the boxes by some stimulus. He is reminded of being a child and looking up at projected stars on his playroom walls and ceiling. He’d watch it for hours he recalls, until night became day, until it was difficult to discern whether he was awake or asleep. It seems to Zack his whole childhood was made up of those images, projected onto his pale-blue childhood wall, broken by a teddy bear dado rail.
Teddy bears have no brains. He thinks for a moment.
Then he focuses on the task at hand. Peering to the left and right. But his only real view is ahead, where another box stares at him, its metal eyelids open, pointing out into the clinical confines of this room.
He steels his eyes, adjusting to the dim light of the room, to look closer, and give shape to what lies in the box a few metres in front of him.
If all dreams have meanings, he prefers the space one, he thinks. That was about being tiny and out of control, and for an anxiety ridden, Instagram-obsessed control freak, in a real-life horror scenario, it made perfect sense.
He remembers what’s going on back in the real word and thinks that realisation must mean the walls of this place are fading and he is slowly waking. But he knows it will be the reverse of waking in a cold sweat to realise it was all some horrible dream. He’d rather stay here in the mundanity of this ambivalent room, than face the reality of the danger that waits in the waking world.
He fights to hold on to sleep. Focusing on the box in front of him. The dark in the box taking shape. Ordering itself into things he recognises. Two green orbs. With black pin pricks in their centre.
Another pair of eyes.
Eyes that he knows well.
01.01 a.m.
Zack wakes, and as the room’s blurred lines take shape, he is disappointed to find himself surrounded once more by the raised voices and gravity of this living world.
He shakes off the slumber, remembers who he’s supposed to be and speaks.
‘What’s the flex?’ he says.
‘We’re all psychos,’ says Summer. ‘Apparently.’
‘Well, yeah,’ says Zack, with a grin that slowly melts.
‘That’s what Simon says,’ says Tabs, and the good doctor doesn’t deny it. ‘We’re all fruitcakes, nutcases, sociopaths—’
‘Possible,’ says Simon.
‘You what, mate?’ Lance says.
‘Possible sociopaths,’ he replies. Then with his eyes closed he goes on. Every other pair of eyes in the room lighting up with revelation as he speaks…
‘I watched videos from the last thousand applicants I was left with. I was charged with weeding out the “I just want to be on telly”, drinking-hat-wearing, ironic breakdancing lunatics. The first-generation reality TV lot.’
‘Small mercies,’ says Zack.
‘My job was to find the people right on the edge with difficult dark areas they
couldn’t talk about. The ones who might snap. The ones who, for instance, talked of not wanting to have therapy because they were… worried what people would find inside their heads.’
‘Don’t quote me, mate!’ says Roberto.
‘Red flag, you’re in! That was the way it worked,’ says Simon, a sudden kamikaze energy about him. ‘Any history of possible violence? Perfect! Temper and rage issues? Come on in, Justine!’
‘I told you private things!’ she cries, Roberto holding on to her.
‘They’re all going to come out now,’ says Simon, pointing to the book. ‘Toxic masculinity? Please, Lance, come and join us in Tristan Da Cunha.’
Lance silently decides that’s just what a cuck beta male like Simon would say.
‘Shallow field of emotions? Summer, there’s your golden ticket!’
‘This is cray. That’s not even true,’ says Summer, her face completely placid.
‘We decided on people who had never sought help for any existing trauma, so then we’d be safe from being sued. People who really didn’t know how far along the cliff-edge they were. The law of averages told us if we wanted beautiful psychopaths, we would find them. Trust me, there are many of them walking among us.’
‘Among you. We are them, apparently,’ says Zack, his voice so calm.
‘Zack, wonderful Zack, such a beautiful find. In case you haven’t realised, Zack tends to adopt a different personality depending on the scenario. The public at home couldn’t even tell he was a fake. I couldn’t wait till he got tired of the wild man act and started being as refined as he was when I first met him.’
‘I know what I am. You’ll get no mea culpa from me …’ but Zack stops when he sees his natural voice has left every one of them slack-jawed. They suddenly realise the Zack they knew is dead. ‘… Oh come on, everyone loves a reveal.’
‘Yes, they do. But even peak TV has got predictable. We wanted drama that could fly off in any direction. So we got… a girl who was… a chronic hypochondriac,’ says Simon.
‘Dawn?’ says Liv.
‘Yes,’ says Simon. ‘But I really thought she was getting better…’ He breathes deep, stuffing his emotions down. ‘Then there was Tommy. A man whose IQ literally couldn’t be registered. But only because he was so locked into the idea of himself as handsome and thick that if you put a test in front of him, he would spend the entire time with his pen over paper, completely paralysed. It was magnetic to watch. Thing is, he was actually very emotionally intelligent.’
‘I think so, too,’ says Summer, trying to force out tears.
‘Hmm, not sure you’re the perfect person to judge,’ says Simon, and before she can come back at him, he charges swiftly on. ‘We play these roles, you see, qualities are endowed to us and we stretch out to fill the mould. I found Tommy refreshing. Most people in this world embody the opposite: the Dunning-Kruger Effect, the bias that means people don’t have the skills to recognise their own idiocy and therefore erroneously think themselves smarter than others. And if you’re worried you’re being paranoid, Roberto, don’t be. I am talking about you. You are the Yin to Tommy’s Yang.’
‘What?’ says Roberto. ‘Speak English, brains. What’s wrong with being smart?’
‘And there we have it,’ says Simon.
But if he’s looking for a laugh, it’s a shade too cruel, and the group are understandably busy dealing with the life-defining revelations he’s just flung at them.
‘So Simon puts together this gang of misfits,’ says Lance, ‘That are, and I quote, “Perfect for riotous TV, that is, if they don’t end up killing each other.”’
A shot of fear hits Simon. Letting all these poisonous cats out of their bags is just the first part of the end, the second part is trying to survive surrounded by them.
‘… Well, I was right, wasn’t I?’ says Simon. ‘Remember, I simply mentioned your unique qualities. You all share certain things that got you put in here—’
Liv hushes him with a hand, picking up the notebook after deciding not to let him control how he fills all the blanks laid out before them.
‘Under some duress from the producers I ensured that each contestant would have Social Potency. In other words, the ability to charm and influence others.’
‘Nothing wrong with that,’ says Roberto. Despite the fact that everyone in here would say he’s the one least possessed with that quality.
‘Machiavellian egocentricity,’ Liv says, chewing on the words that supposedly sum her up. ‘Then, cold-heartedness….’
‘I’ve been told it by lovers many times,’ says Justine. ‘It is a strength in many ways, no?’
‘Impulsive nonconformity,’ says Liv.
‘I’m a bloody rebel, what can I say?’ says Zack. Liv doesn’t realise she hasn’t met Real Zack before, but from the little time she’s spent with him she appreciates his levity. He should be himself more often.
‘Carefree Nonplanfulness,’ says Liv. ‘Not just a made-up word, but one that describes someone doing things without considering their consequences.’
And they’re all thinking of one of the group. But Summer doesn’t bite.
‘Fearlessness.’
‘We left that one actually. Because, you know, they need to see a bit of fear on your faces,’ says Simon.
Their looks are daggers from all sides.
‘And Blame Externalisation. An inability to take responsibility for one’s own actions.’ Words which send Liv’s eyes rolling towards Simon himself.
‘Oh, I’m sorry, but I’m not one of you,’ he says, though he can tell they’re not convinced. ‘The first work of a psycho-analyst is to analyse oneself. I have my own issues, but they’re not the same as yours. I’m a sell-out. I didn’t finish my doctorate studies because I thought there was money in TV. I’m a hack. You’re all looking at a hack. But a hack who’d never hack you all to pieces. I love my work too much.’
Liv holds the book high, but she can’t hide the fact that Simon has done a decent job of extracting most of its weight. And on his own terms.
‘So that’s all of us, laid naked, our heads put in boxes,’ says Justine.
Simon frowns, the metaphor disturbing him.
And all the while, a body lies outside, another is lost, another is irretrievably stuck half inside, half out in a storm that has cooled for now. In a hiatus, comprised of the Beachers wondering whether to purge any last truths, lest Simon brings them out to haunt them, Zack runs his hand along the shotgun, as if to comfort it when he’s really comforting himself. Because, all the while, the killer waits among them.
‘I have something to admit,’ says Lance. ‘I’ve never killed anyone.’
There is a certain amount of anticlimax about the admission. ‘I just know people will’ve started to think I have. But I ain’t. I could’ve a few times and it wouldn’t be so hard. Just a little crack of the neck and you’re done. I’ve thought about it when a prick has tried to come at me with a knife. But when I’ve eventually turned the situation around, I’ve always managed to hold back. I’ve always avoided that little crack of the neck. And I think that counts for something.’
‘I have,’ a voice says under lamplight.
Their heads turn and see the meek face it comes from meet their eyes. ‘I have,’ Tabs affirms. ‘Killed someone.’
‘Wow,’ says Roberto.
‘Stop saying wow,’ says Summer.
‘All right, who died and made you queen of—’
‘A lot of people have died Rob. Or are you too busy thinking you’re ten steps ahead of everyone to realise that?’
‘Oi—’
‘Guys,’ says Zack. ‘I think Tabs was in the middle of a fairly important admission.’
‘Sorry,’ says Summer.
‘Sorry, not sorry,’ says Roberto.
Summer rolls her eyes.
‘My grandfather died a few weeks before the show started, as I mentioned,’ Tabs mutters, in the hush. ‘He’d been in hospital for nearly a month and the
y said there was no way back. I know everyone thinks I’m filthy rich, but my parents didn’t want any of his money. And anyway, he said he wanted his whole estate to go to either his sister or a children’s hospice. My parents are bleeding hearts and had fallen out with him multiple times, so somehow they were all for being left with next to nothing. I tried to tell them that they had their retirements to think of. And me. But it was a muddy, difficult and painful time. And on top of it all, his sister, my great aunt, was taken ill too, with a stroke. I’d visit both of them, always her first, then him. On his lucid days we’d talk for hours. I’d stay late at night at his room on Harley Street. Visiting hours weren’t applicable. He had an arrangement with the hospital, which most likely included lots and lots of money. One night he was in so much pain. We’d discussed certain overdose plans, but the law is pretty clear. However, that night he looked me in the eyes, begged me to help him. I’d have made it a better end if I could, but a drug would’ve been traceable in his bloodstream, and what happened seemed to happen by itself. A pipe pulled out here, a pillow over the face there. And he was free.’
Zack watches the thin curls of smoke pass overhead, and catches Liv’s eye. They share a silent thought that must wait for later.
‘I don’t think that makes you a murderer, love,’ says Roberto.
‘I didn’t say it did,’ says Tabs. ‘I said I’d killed someone.’
‘Oh right, sorry.’
‘Shall we make a deal that you don’t speak until this is over?’ says Summer.
‘Why you always so extra?’ says Roberto.
‘Pff, it’s you that’s extra. What did Simon say, inability to take responsibility for your actions?’
‘Ah give over, Sum, I’ve had enough of you to be honest with you,’ he says.
Summer twinkles at him, a thought behind her eyes. It’s like they’re two duellists, and as he’s fired and missed, she knows she can take her time to aim.
‘I think the problem is you couldn’t get enough of me, Rob,’ says Summer. ‘In fact, you couldn’t get any of me at all.’
Beach Bodies, Part 3 Page 4