The thing was, though, that the tasks hadn’t started. The housemates talked and talked and thought out loud and ran alternative scenarios about what might be going to happen to them, but none of it did. They were all wondering when it was going to start. Perhaps the problem was that they were too self-aware, too aware of the setup; perhaps the problem was precisely that they were talking about it so much? It could be that there was a taboo on asking these questions out loud; it was making them seem too needy, too aware of the audience. In short, maybe they were doing something wrong. It was vital to think about the viewers all the time. It was also vital not to seem to be thinking about them. To Iona this was an interesting conundrum for the first day or two, but gradually more oppressive. She was having to work hard at it and could tell that the others were too. She had a theory, one she hadn’t shared with the others yet: that this was a new kind of show, one where there was no interaction with the producers or the viewers, no games or tasks or challenges or external organisation, no structure. They wouldn’t be told what to do. They would just be evicted, expelled, one at a time. It could start at any point. They were waiting for it to start, but perhaps it had already started. Just a theory, but it could be true, and if it was true, Iona had figured it out but was pretty sure the others hadn’t.
The pool was OK, because you could just lie there, or dive in when it got too hot. Her room was OK, a sanctuary, the only place in the villa where she felt she could just be herself, by herself. Though that of course wasn’t entirely true; they were all being watched all the time, and the moments when you were on your own could reveal a lot about who you were. You had to be particularly careful about the amount of time you spent primping and floofing. You didn’t want to underdo it so badly you looked like you’d been dragged through a hedge, but on the other hand you didn’t want to be caught seeming vain, taking too much trouble, pouting and striking poses. And there was also the fact that you weren’t winning anyone over while you sat or lay on your bed. Nobody changed their minds about someone because that person was sitting alone in their room. You need to get out there. So Iona did get out there.
It was the kitchen and dining room that were difficult. The issue she had noticed on the very first morning, about the noise, was more and more prominent. It was the flat hard reflective surfaces that caused the trouble.
Iona’s father had been a poker player in his youth (a very good one, according to him), and he had once said that the best way of telling whether someone was telling the truth was to listen not to what they were saying, or even to the tone of their voice, but to the echo of their voice. As time went past in this sharply echoing indoor space, a cool room where they spent more time together than anywhere else in the baking-hot villa, Iona began more and more to notice the sound not of the other contestants’ voices, but their echoes. The voices would often be lifted, bright, happy, joking. The echoes sounded flat and angular and full of silences; full of holes, contradictions, meanings that weren’t supposed to be there. Positive greetings – ‘Hi!’, ‘How are you!’, ‘Love the outfit!’, ‘Looking good!’ – sounded like curses or lies. The echo of a joke sounded like an insult. The echo of a friendly question sounded like a jeer. The echo of a friendly comment dripped with loathing. They spent lots of time in that kitchen. And yet when you spent time there you came to think that everything about the villa was the opposite of what it seemed to be: that good feelings were full of hate, that friends were enemies, that laughter was violence, that there was no such thing as love.
On the morning of the seventh day, Iona woke early, a shaft of light from the corner of the blind catching her eye as she rolled over in bed. The spectacular Balearic light was one of the principal characters in the villa. In the morning it was slanted, yellow, insistent: get up! Show yourself! Act natural! It wasn’t the kind of light that made it easy to lie in bed. Nobody came out on top in a contest like this by lying in bed. The morning sun here reminded you of that. Then, as the morning wore on, the light gradually hardened. From midday through the early part of the afternoon the light was so bright it was almost metallic. It gave you thoughts of escape, because you knew there could be no escape. The sun was like a giant staring eye. There was no colour to it, just pure light. It was so bright, so hard, it was frightening. However much sun cream you put on, you could feel yourself cook. Getting out of the pool into the sun you felt like a lobster climbing into its own pan, fizzing and sizzling.
The way you could tell this part of the day was coming to an end was by seeing colour start to return. The white sky went blue, the blazing vertical light started to tilt and turn silver, then yellow, then, as the day turned to evening, gold. The colours of the garden and villa and the contestants and their clothes looked like themselves, only more so. Everything was lovely in that brief period of glow, especially the six of them, during that golden hour which here was shorter than an hour; but they were never more aware of being filmed, surveilled, watched and judged and assessed and ranked for popularity.
Allegiances and alliances were covertly forming. You couldn’t say anything explicitly, of course, but you could do a lot with body language and eye talk, with grunts and nods and even silences: silence of assent, silence of letting something hang there, amused silence, disgruntled silence, disbelieving silence, drawing-someone-out silence, silent disagreement and disobedience. Iona always got on best with intelligent people. That meant the person she should be getting on best with in the villa was Liam, who was clearly and self-evidently bright, and, it made her grit her teeth to think this, Nousche. But that didn’t work. Liam was a game theorist, an angle-player, a manipulator and reader of rooms, and to make it worse the person he got on best with – was always having tiny muttered colloquies with, side-of-the-mouth – was Nousche. As for Nousche, well, she was still and always Nousche, still her incredibly annoying, permanently calculating, dissembling, sneaky, undermining Eurosnake self. So the people with whom Iona would normally have clicked most easily were not only not her friends, but were in an unnerving alliance with each other. As for the others, Harry in a sense didn’t count. He was good-natured and weak and not very bright. They got on well but Harry was like a dog: he would get on well with anyone who petted and fed him (which incidentally was something they had to do, since Harry was the only person in the villa who never cooked anything; you wouldn’t trust him to be able to make toast). She was left with Eli, who was so good-looking it was distracting, and was one of those men who have never had to learn how to talk, because women are always fainting and falling into bed with them on sight. So he was off-the-scale attractive but also exhausting since you had to do literally ALL the conversational work. This meant that the person she got on best with was Laz. That would be a surprise at first sight, but it was much less so once you’d seen Laz at close quarters for a day or two. She was noisy and up-for-it to compensate for a secret self that was private and shy.
When Iona got downstairs to breakfast on that seventh day, Laz was already in the kitchen, stirring something on the stove.
‘Oi oi,’ she said, but quietly.
‘Oi oi,’ said Iona, also quietly. ‘What are you making?’
‘Porridge. “Keeps me regular,”’ she said in a voice which made it obvious she was quoting somebody, even though there was no possibility that Iona would know who it was. That was one of Lara/Laz’s habits and it meant that at times, for all her outgoingness and good nature, you couldn’t tell what she was saying, beneath the various layers of impersonations, special voices, ironies and mini-playlets. ‘No carbs for me,’ she now said in a different voice, one which could, just possibly, be an impersonation of Nousche, in which case Iona officially thought it was hilarious.
‘Moi non plus,’ Iona said, joining in the anti-Nousche moment, but not too obviously so, just enough that only clued-up viewers, and Laz herself, would know what she meant, if that indeed had been what she meant.
‘Are we the first up?’
‘Herself and Liam are doing laps,’ Laz said, making vague waving gestures with her arms, possibly indicating breaststroke. By using ‘herself ‘ to mean Nousche, it was clear that she was drawing lines. This was an escalation. Oh, it’s on! Iona came over to the breakfast bar and sat down at the counter. She was having a little think. The best move was probably to egg Laz on while not appearing to, while also sending signals that she was on the same side, but not coming across as too much of a mean girl. Bitchy but deniable.
‘Laps before breakfast,’ Iona said, her tone making it both a question and a statement. ‘Laps after breakfast. You know – bit of curd. A few berries. “Breakfast.”’ This last word in broad Australian. Iona didn’t roll her eyes but she flared them slightly, in on the joke but subtly so.
‘Fancy some porridge?’
‘Why not?’ Iona said. Laz put the saucepan she’d been stirring on the breakfast bar, then followed it up with bowls and spoons and sat opposite. She dolloped porridge into the bowls, pushed one across to Iona and started blowing on the bowl in front of her.
‘I vant some berries,’ Iona said in a German accent, for no other reason than that she thought Laz would find it funny, which she did, very.
‘Get your own focking berries,’ said Laz, also in a German accent. They snorted and giggled together and the noise (and entertainment) they were generating was enough to distract them from the arrival of Harry, who had come downstairs and into the kitchen barefoot and topless. In a villa full of good-looking, not-shy people, Harry stood out for his uncanny, almost supernatural body confidence. He wore a shirt in the evening, when the temperature dropped a few degrees, but in the day he wasn’t usually wearing more than a single garment on his lower body, most often shorts or swimming trunks. There was a shower room over in the pool house, and Harry could not be relied on to lock the door.
‘Guys,’ he said, as a greeting.
Iona held up the saucepan, offering the porridge Laz had made.
‘Um – yeah, cool,’ said Harry. He got himself a bowl and spoon and helped himself. His arrival threw the dynamics out a little, since he could be absolutely relied on to miss all the nuances about trash-talking and ganging up on Nousche while pretending not to. He didn’t speak while eating his porridge but gave little nods of appreciation.
‘Man, that was great. You could like, open a restaurant,’ Harry said when he finished.
‘A porridge restaurant,’ Iona said, giving Laz a look. But Harry, while slow, was maybe not as slow as all that, because he immediately said: ‘Is that funny?’
‘No no,’ said Iona, flustered, cornered, stalling. ‘No, it’s only—’
‘Because lots of restaurants do nice breakfasts. Brunches. People love it.’ Harry said this sulkily. The encounter was turning into a disaster. Iona and Laz were being turned into the mean girls, which was completely unfair – well, OK, it was a tiny bit fair, but they weren’t specifically being mean to Harry at this point, they’d just got a bit carried away over their bonding.
‘People love breakfast!’ Iona said, maintaining eye contact with Harry while as it were directing her mind at Laz, who was supposed to pick up on this new tone. ‘I just thought it was funny to have a restaurant that only did porridge, you know, like for the Three Bears or something. You could call it the Three Bears.’ Again, there was that thing with the echo. Her voice sounded normal when you listened to it, but if you paid attention to the echo, you would think you were hearing a soul in torment, pleading, angrily begging, for release. A terrible noise. Harry, though, had a ginger’s trained awareness for when he was being picked on. He didn’t say anything, just took his bowl over to the sink, washed it, put it on the drying rack. Iona and Laz looked at each other and Laz gave a tiny eye-shrug. This one wasn’t reparable, not immediately. Iona was thinking hard about how this would look, about what her next move or gesture should be, but before she could come up with anything, Liam, dripping slightly, came in from the pool with nothing on but swimming trunks. He was rubbing his hair with a towel. He had the air of a man who knows perfectly well that this sight is to be considered among the eight wonders of the world.
‘Sup,’ Liam said, not really making it a question, still towelling away.
‘The usual,’ said Harry, his tone neutral on the surface but, again, if you listened to the reverberation, it sounded different: it had a hissing, bitter edge. Liam gave Harry a look that showed he knew perfectly well what Harry was talking about. He nodded. Iona realised with horror that ‘the usual’ meant her and Laz ganging up, being the baddies, the bitches, the self-appointed alphas. This could only mean that Harry was already aligned with Liam and Nousche! They had thought they were being careful: they hadn’t been anywhere near careful enough. Oh this was a disaster! If that was how it seemed to the housemates in the villa, for the viewers it would be a hundred times worse. Everything would be magnified, blown up, replayed, commented on. It was literally impossible for this to have gone more badly wrong.
And then it did, because Nousche came in from the pool. Having done the look-at-how-little-I-care-about-being-seen-with-wet-hair thing on the first day, she was now a genius at always having her hair completely on point. Of course that style, the Louise Brooks thing, was easy to manage, but . . . Iona could feel herself getting distracted and forced herself to snap out of it. This was a crisis. She could die on a raft with Laz or she could maybe, just maybe, cut herself loose and oat to safety. Groups of this sort often have an official scapegoat and outsider. New name for that person: Laz.
‘I wish I hadn’t had that porridge,’ Iona said, puffing out her cheeks, making a fat-person face. ‘Bloat city.’ Nousche didn’t stoop to answering that observation, not with actual words, but she did make a tiny little moue, a sub-pout, of agreed amusement. Iona thought: this could work. Don’t overplay it. Subtle. That’s how you crush it, in a situation like this – with subtlety.
‘Yeah, you sure don’t want to live there. Bloat city,’ said Laz, doing one of her silly voices, her cheeks puffed out the same way Iona’s had been, and Nousche laughed, and then the others laughed too, including Eli, who had come downstairs during all the breakfast drama without Iona realising he was there. Iona started to join in the laughter, even though in truth she didn’t fully get it, and then she realised that Laz’s silly voice was actually an impersonation of Iona, and she saw, with a feeling that the floor was sliding down from beneath her, actually physically sinking down and down and down, descending into the earth – she saw that all of them were laughing at her. Laughter, that was what it was supposed to be. And yet, if you listened to it in the new way, by paying attention to the echo, it didn’t sound like laughter at all. It sounded like the noise made by souls in torment; by beings undergoing torture; it sounded like screams of pain and anger, like nails on a blackboard but in physical form; it sounded demonic. There was nowhere to go outside this noise. The laughter grew louder. Iona moved towards Nousche and then past her and stood in the doorway to the pool and turned to face them. All the housemates were standing in front of her. Nousche was closest and the others were behind her. The light had taken on its harsh, burning, middle-of-the-day flatness. The laughter had taken on its own momentum, they were still laughing, were laughing harder than ever. What did this mean, where did they go from here? What would the viewers think? How would this look? How would they be judging her? And still they kept laughing at Iona, all of them lined up, as the laughter and the sound of torture grew and grew, the sound of souls screaming in pain grew louder and louder, as they stood there, all of them – Iona, Nousche, Harry, Eli, Liam, Laz – and then with that feeling of dropping through the floor, free-falling, nauseous, the rollercoaster plunge in her stomach, the noise of torture in her ears, she got it: Iona, Nousche, Harry, Eli, Liam, Laz.
They could all see her distress, indeed they seemed to be actively enjoying it, but of all people it was Liam who broke things up. He came over to her and p
ut a non-sexual arm on her shoulder. Nousche came further into the room. Harry moved out towards the pool. Laz was doing something at the sink, Eli had turned and gone back upstairs. The room broke up and, as with a shaken kaleidoscope, the old pattern had been permanently erased. Iona must have been imagining things, imagining the feeling in the room, and everything else too.
‘Hey,’ Liam said, his voice low, ‘you OK?’
Iona didn’t think she was, but she nodded. And in truth she did feel a bit better. The others were talking, not loudly and not consequentially, just chat, and it was helpful to listen not to the echo but just to the words, not the undertone but the tone.
‘It’ll begin soon, OK?’ Liam said. ‘The tasks and evictions, they’ll begin soon. It’s not as if this will go on for ever.’
She listened hard to his voice, just the words on his lips. The difference between forever and for ever: she’d been taught that at school. Forever, as in someone is forever going on about something. For ever as in endless, lasting for all time, continuing for eternity. For ever. She listened to what Liam was saying and felt herself believing it, they’ll begin soon, it’s not as if this can go on for ever. Nothing goes on for ever. Does it?
On the Way to the Church
VICKY GRUT
They had driven down from London late the night before. Even before they set out they were exhausted. All the way through the business of leaving their house – locking windows, switching off lights, carrying the bags and the howling baby out to the car – they had argued, bitterly, furiously, until they lost all notion of what it was they wanted from one another and only a sense of miserable, injured, short-changed grievance remained. Most of the five-hour drive passed in silence.
The weather seemed to pick up their mood and magnify it. Rain battered the windscreen. Gusts of wind shook the car. Sarah was afraid they would overturn and be thrown into the whirling, sticky blackness. The usual signs flashed by: Hungerford, Maidenhead, Bristol, Cardiff. Hard to believe such places still existed when they were in the middle of such darkness. For long stretches there were no lights along the motorway and then it felt as if the road itself had been abolished. They could have been driving under the sea or stalled, just a set of headlights drilling into oblivion. And through it all the poor baby slept in his cot on the backseat, unaware that his world was coming undone.
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