Bright Young Things

by Scarlett Thomas

  ‘I don’t like this,’ says Thea.

  Bryn suddenly shivers. He’s scared by the tone in Thea’s voice.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Emily asks Thea.

  ‘That smell . . .’ she begins.

  Paul flicks on the light. Bryn grabs Emily’s arm. She screams.

  Anne, Jamie and Thea are standing behind Bryn and Emily. They all push forward.

  ‘Oh fuck,’ says Anne.

  Paul’s standing in the room, staring. ‘Hot Christ,’ he mumbles.

  Thea takes a few steps into the room, then she screams too.

  ‘Spider,’ she shrieks, stepping behind Jamie.

  There’s a spider on the floor. It’s about to crawl over the body of a dead man.

  The spider is black, orange and furry. The man is blue. He looks frozen, lying in the pose he must have died in: hands on his chest, mouth in the shape of a scream.

  ‘I think she’s missed the dead guy,’ mumbles Anne.

  Thea’s panicking. ‘Fuck you. Of course I haven’t missed it, I just . . .’

  She runs down the stairs. Bryn hears a door slam.

  Emily starts to cry. ‘Fucking fucking fucking . . . shit,’ she stammers.

  Bryn’s never seen a dead body before.

  ‘This is bad,’ breathes Paul. ‘How long has he been dead?’

  ‘Not long if he was the one making those noises,’ says Jamie, surprisingly calm.

  The spider moves.

  ‘Oh, shit,’ says Bryn.

  Everyone except Paul moves back.

  ‘Did it kill him?’ asks Jamie.

  ‘No,’ says Paul. ‘It’s a tarantula. They’re not deadly.’

  The spider runs over to the far side of the room and disappears.

  ‘I thought they were,’ says Bryn uncertainly.

  ‘Urban myth,’ says Paul. ‘Is the body warm?’ he asks.

  No one offers to find out.

  ‘Hello?’ he says, when there’s no response.

  ‘I’m not going near it,’ says Bryn. ‘You can if you want. I think we should just go.’

  Everyone seems paralysed. Then, after a few seconds, Anne walks over to the body and touches it. Everyone seems to hold their breath, as if the dead guy is suddenly going to leer up at her or something. She seems calm as she touches his neck. ‘He’s stone cold,’ she says.

  The room seems more silent and cold than ever.

  ‘I wonder what made the noises,’ murmurs Jamie.

  ‘Who the hell is he?’ asks Bryn. ‘What’s he doing here?’

  ‘I’ve seen him somewhere before,’ says Paul.

  ‘Oh f. . .fuck,’ stammers Emily. ‘It’s the job interview guy.’

  ‘Jesus,’ says Jamie. ‘This is horrible.’

  ‘I agree,’ says Paul. ‘Let’s go.’

  Thea’s at the bottom of the stairs, hopping from one foot to the other, sobbing.

  ‘Has it gone?’ she wails.

  ‘What, the dead body?’ asks Paul.

  ‘No, you arsehole. The spider.’

  ‘Settle down,’ says Anne.

  ‘Fuck you,’ says Thea. ‘You stupid, stupid . . .’

  Now Emily’s crying again. She’s wringing her hands.

  ‘What’s happened?’ she pleads. ‘Why is everyone being so mean?’

  ‘Where’s the spider?’ begs Thea. ‘You have to get rid of the spider.’

  ‘Will you shut up about the spider,’ says Jamie. ‘It’s only a—’

  ‘What, only a spider?’ shouts Thea. ‘Maybe for you . . . but I . . . Oh, Jesus, I fucking hate you all. I’ve seen dead bodies before, for Christ’s sake. I’ve sat by people’s bedsides and watched them die. I wish you’d all grow up. Death is tragic and sad and a waste, but it’s not fucking scary. You’ll all be dead one day. Spiders are my greatest fear, remember, and although that poor dead guy’s not going to hurt me, a fucking tarantula is.’ She looks around her, like some sort of animal looking for a way out. ‘I can’t even get away from you all since we’re stuck in this hell-hole. I wish I’d never filled in that stupid form and I wish I wasn’t here. I want to go home.’

  Emily’s sitting on the bottom stair, her face in her hands.

  ‘I want my mum,’ she says. ‘Please sort this out, someone.’

  Thea is still looking for somewhere to go. Eventually she runs into the sitting room.

  ‘What the hell are we going to do now?’ asks Jamie.

  ‘Please do something,’ Emily says. ‘Please, Jamie.’

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ he asks. ‘What can I do?’

  ‘Make it better,’ she says.

  Jamie sits down next to her. ‘I don’t know how to,’ he says. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Paul,’ says Emily, looking at him with big teary eyes.

  ‘What?’ says Paul. ‘What?’

  ‘Can’t you do something?’ she pleads.

  Everything has gone. No one’s drunk any more. No one feels sexy.

  ‘I can’t bring him back to life,’ he says gently.

  ‘I don’t want him brought back to life!’

  ‘Well, what do you want me to do?’ he asks.

  ‘Just fix this. Somehow.’

  ‘I’ll make some tea,’ says Anne.

  ‘You know how to make tea?’ asks Paul.

  ‘In a crisis, yes,’ she says, smiling. ‘Sugar for everyone I guess?’

  ‘Thank you,’ says Emily, clutching Anne’s hand as she walks past.

  Thea’s on the sofa, her knees clutched up to her chest.

  ‘All right?’ says Bryn, walking into the sitting room.

  ‘I want to be by myself,’ she says.

  ‘Fine. I’ll go then.’

  ‘No. Don’t. I just . . .’ She starts sobbing again.

  ‘It’s shock,’ Bryn explains. ‘You’ll be OK.’

  She narrows her eyes. ‘Will I?’ she asks scathingly.

  ‘Yeah, for sure. You just need to take some deep breaths or whatever.’

  ‘Deep breaths or whatever. I’ll keep that in mind.’

  ‘I was only trying to help. What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Get rid of the spider.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Yeah. Just get it out of this house. In fact, get it off this fucking island.’

  ‘And then you’ll feel better?’

  ‘Please get rid of it,’ Thea says softly. ‘Please.’

  She’s rocking backwards and forwards now, like a mental person.

  The real-life element of this has totally gone for Bryn. He feels like he’s watching a film. He almost feels like laughing, not because this situation is funny, but because it’s so bad. He wants to piss himself because the alternative is to shit himself. He wants to laugh at the movie character who’s just decided to go up to an attic with a dead person in it, because he’s nervous for them, and he knows something horrible is waiting if they do go up. He also wants to cry because that movie character is him.

  No one’s in the hall any more. They must all be in the kitchen.

  Bryn stands at the bottom of the stairs. This is what he hates about being a man. He’s as scared of going up there as any human being would be. His penis is not going to protect him from this. He starts walking up the stairs, not sure if he’s ever going to have the guts to get there, and not really knowing what to do if he does. He wonders if the spider is already loose in the house. It was pretty big and furry, so it probably won’t be too difficult to find, if it has stuck around, and not been scared off by Thea’s screaming.

  The others seem a long way away, even though they’re only two floors below him.

  The small staircase leading to the attic feels colder now. Bryn realises it’s because there’s a draft coming from the attic room, now the door’s open. It’s completely silent, and pretty dark. The light coming from the attic room is a hellish yellow glow, and Bryn imagines that some demon is whispering to him to come towards the light. He gulps. This is totally fucking stupid.

  H
e can’t help imagining the worst case scenario. He knows what it is, no competition. The worst case scenario would be if he walked into that room and the body wasn’t there any more. Imagine that: the dead man risen, or maybe worse, never dead in the first place . . . He just wanted to make them think he was.

  Paranoia comes all too easily to Bryn. He knows people who made a mistake and ended up dead as a result. Like his dad, for example. Bryn sighs. He sweats. He sort of swears to himself, although this seems too theatrical. He wants to pace, but ditto. In the end there is no other option than to just enter the room.

  The body is still there, lying on the floor in exactly the same position as when they left. Bryn tries not to look at it (in case it winks, or moves, or does that Fatal Attraction thing). Instead he looks at everything but the dead body. There is a bed on the far side of the room, which is made up with blankets (no duvet). There’s a battered old brown suitcase propped up against the bed. Bryn’s still too scared to move. He’s been trying to tell himself that it’s only a dead body, but his strategy is not working. It’s not something he really practised as a child, not like it’s only a storm. He wishes one of the others would come up, but no one does. He wishes there was something to listen to other than the howling wind outside. Howling wind, for fuck’s sake. What next? Zombies?

  The rest of the room is tidy but dusty. There’s an old wash basin by the bed, and shaving things. On the far left-hand side of the room is a door which isn’t quite closed. Bryn can see it’s a toilet. There’s a load of stuff that looks like junk stacked up next to it, again tidily. Bryn can’t tell how long this guy’s been up here, but he must have been here at least as long as they have. He’s probably the person who brought them here. Bastard. Bryn’s suddenly glad he’s dead, and suppresses an urge to kick the body. His moment of aggression passes, and he goes back to being scared. Wanting to get out of there fast, he starts looking for the spider.

  Almost as though it knows it’s been bad, the spider is back in what must be its glass tank, looking, Bryn thinks, sorry and a bit frightened. Not wanting to hang around any longer, he secures the lid, picks up the tank and walks downstairs with it, hoping he doesn’t bump into Thea.

  ‘I think it’s some sort of pet,’ he says to the others in the kitchen.

  He puts the glass tank down next to the kettle.

  ‘Like we care right now,’ says Emily. ‘What is it with this fucking spider?’

  ‘Have you been back up there?’ asks Jamie.

  ‘The guy’s still dead,’ says Bryn brightly, as if he’s saying the weather’s still fine.

  ‘Thanks for letting us know,’ says Paul, and laughs. ‘You all right, mate?’

  ‘Yeah, sweet,’ says Bryn shakily. ‘I just thought I’d better sort out the spider thing.’

  Anne hands Bryn a cup of tea. It’s too weak, but very sugary. He gulps it down all at once. He’s not sure what time it is. Probably about two or three. He wonders if anyone’s going to get to bed tonight.

  Emily’s holding a full cup of tea close to her chest. She’s shaking like she’s very, very cold, and a droplet of grey-brown liquid is working its way jerkily down her cup. No one says or does anything. Jamie, Anne and Paul are acting calm, although Bryn’s pretty sure they’re in shock. Jamie should be saying ‘gosh’ a lot and freaking out, but he’s not. Anne should be acting all selfish, and definitely not making people cups of tea. Bryn’s not sure what Paul should be doing in this situation. Probably nothing, which is what he is doing. Maybe he’s not in shock. He must be. For fuck’s sake, no one finds dead bodies in creepy attics. It just doesn’t happen.

  ‘It’s quite cute,’ says Paul, looking in the glass tank at the spider.

  ‘Don’t let Thea see it,’ says Anne. ‘She’ll have a total spack-attack.’

  ‘Let Thea see what?’ says Thea, coming in to the kitchen. She sees the spider. ‘Oh Jesus,’ she shrieks.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  All the voices – the shouting and swearing and through-clenched-teeth stuff – sound like echoes to Emily. She’s never seen a dead person before. She hasn’t even known anyone who’s died before. That’s all she can think: she’s in a place of death – sudden, mysterious, horrible death. She’s just spilt some milky tea in her lap and she doesn’t care. The warm wet liquid feels like blood. She can’t move, though. If she stays still then it’s like she’s not really here, and if she’s not here then everything’s OK. People die all the time in faraway places, and it’s not like you have to care. So for Emily this is a faraway place right now, like somewhere you might see on TV but not be able to find on a map.

  Every breath she takes is too long. She’s holding each one, aware for the first time of exactly how she breathes – her chest moving, the air going in and then leaving. That’s how simple life is. Could she just die like that man? Is she next? If she died right now, what pathetic thing would Thea find to freak out about? How much more nonplussed would Paul be? Emily’s not sure who she’s angrier with. But they’re not here, right? They’re simply not here. Those shapes, those voices all mean nothing to her. All she cares about is the air entering and leaving her body, and the tears running down her face. Being on this island was all right before she started feeling totally alone; now she just wants someone to hug her and love her and kiss it better. But it’s not going to happen, is it? She’s here with a load of strangers.

  Emily’s only just realised that this place is nothing like the outside world. In the outside world you’d be able to call an ambulance. In the outside world you can call people and they’ll come and take the bad things away. If a fire starts, you call the fire brigade. If someone breaks into your house, you call the police. If you find a dead guy in the attic, you call a fucking ambulance. Emily suddenly understands that anyone could come and do anything to them here, and there’d be no one she could call. Someone could be careless with some matches and whoosh, that could be it. The house would go up in flames and there’d be no one to help. One of these people could lose it completely, and there’d be nothing anyone could do about it.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  When Paul was six, his mum gave him a surprise. It wasn’t something he’d expected. One evening in spring, somewhere between Crackerjack and Grange Hill, his mum told him to shut his eyes. He felt her put something warm and furry in his lap. When he opened his eyes there was a puppy sitting there, black and orange and brown. A Yorkshire Terrier.

  Paul called his puppy Patch, even though he didn’t really have any patches. He didn’t ever give him bath or de-flea him or de-worm him or any of that stuff, but he loved Patch more than anything else in the world. Patch slept in his bed at night, and waited for him at the window when he got home from school. After school, Patch and Paul would go on elaborate adventures to the local dump or round the back of the shops. They explored the suburban Bristol wilderness at weekends, never doing ad-man things like romping through the woods, but always coming home dirty and smelly and full of super-hero thoughts.

  Ever since he could read, Paul had been obsessed with manga comics from Japan. He didn’t even know his dad had been Japanese until he was ten or so; his mum never found the time to tell him much about his father. The manga comics had been lying around the house for his whole childhood anyway, so he didn’t see anything alien or exotic about them; they were just what lived in the cupboards. He certainly never thought to ask where they came from. When his classmates called him ‘dirty-knees’, he thought they just meant he had dirty knees, and he washed them more carefully during his weekly bath (which he shared with Patch).

  When Paul was twelve and a half, Patch was run over by a van full of grinning men, going too fast to notice the little dog sitting tired in the road, or the little boy on the pavement pleading for the dog to come back. Patch spent a week at the vet’s before dying, and Paul didn’t wash the blood off his arm for a month.

  After that, he could never imagine owning another pet, or loving another animal. Trouble is, Paul’
s one of those people whom animals naturally love, and he just can’t help loving them back. Instead of owning another dog, or getting a cat, Paul joined the ALF and started setting innocent animals free and distributing anti-vivisection leaflets in Bristol town centre. He has been a vegetarian from age ten, and an environmental activist since he was about sixteen. He’s never killed an animal, not even a fly.

  Since he was about nineteen, all of his activism has taken place over computer networks. Paul got his first computer from his mother a few months after Patch died. At first he couldn’t get into it; he just wanted his little dog back. But soon, Paul realised that he could take his mind off everything by constructing simple programs. He might even manage to impress his few friends, he thought. Most of Paul’s friends were girls, though, and were of an age where they’d rather go to the cinema and kiss on the cheek than fiddle with electronics. Paul never had many male friends; they seemed suspicious of him for some reason – maybe his dirty knees. In his really lonely moments he’d cry for Patch and write another computer program, just to kill the hours before bed. Eventually he got over it, and got used to being alone.

  ‘Kill it,’ says Thea. ‘Will someone just kill it, please.’

  ‘Will you calm down?’ says Anne. ‘It’s in a tank, for fuck’s sake.’

  Paul’s already bonded with the spider. He can’t help it. He’s trying to remember what he knows about spiders from his ALF adventures years ago. They did rescue a load of spiders once, he recalls. They were tarantulas, but not this brightly coloured. He remembers that the spiders dug holes in their tanks . . . they certainly liked to dig. He realises that there’s no earth in this tank for the spider to dig in, and it doesn’t have any food either.

  ‘It needs some food,’ he says.

  ‘It needs to die,’ says Thea.

  ‘Are you normally this cruel to animals?’ asks Paul.

  ‘Of course not,’ says Thea. ‘But it’s not an animal. It’s a spider.’

  Jamie sighs. ‘Can’t we forget about the spider?’

  ‘We can if he kills it,’ says Thea.

  ‘We can if she stops asking me to kill it,’ says Paul.