Bright Young Things

by Scarlett Thomas

  ‘We agreed not to, though,’ Paul reminds him.

  ‘Yes, but now she thinks we think she’s mad. And now she’s driving me mad being overnormal while we all pussyfoot around her. And the more we pussyfoot, the more normal she tries to be, because she thinks we’re doing it because of how she was last night. It doesn’t seem fair. You know, we’re trying to protect her and she gives us a hard time for being weird.’

  ‘Was she giving you a hard time?’

  ‘Oh, she was making tasteless jokes about drowning.’

  ‘She’s probably scared,’ says Paul. ‘We all take the piss when we’re scared.’

  Jamie folds his arms petulantly. ‘I don’t.’

  Paul laughs. ‘Well, maybe you should try harder.’

  ‘Where’s your spider?’ asks Jamie.

  ‘He’s in his cupboard. He’s scared of Thea.’

  Jamie manages a smile. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Down by the cliffs. She didn’t want anyone to go with her.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Who knows? So what do you make of that helicopter letter?’

  Jamie takes it out of his pocket and unfolds it. Everyone read it upstairs.

  ‘Well, no one’s coming,’ he says, looking over it.

  ‘No,’ says Paul. ‘No one’s coming to kill us.’

  ‘Or set us free,’ says Jamie.

  Paul finishes the washing up and sits at the table playing ‘Snake’ with Jamie for long enough to take his mind off the Emily problem. Paul’s having trouble thinking about motors and boats and escape. He’s too fixated on the key in his pocket and the parallel universe in which he’s a prisoner somewhere in this house, more of a prisoner than he is now, actually imprisoned in a room; his greatest, greatest fear.

  Why the hell did he tell the truth on that form? It’s not as if he’d usually tell the truth about something like that. Maybe he just found the question interesting, and that compelled him to be honest, as if to reward whoever had constructed the form for asking such good questions. Or maybe he was just caught off guard, like with those trick-series questions where you end up saying green traffic lights mean stop, or whatever. Name: Paul Farrar; Age: 25; Place of birth: Bristol; Degree: Art; Greatest fear: Imprisonment. You just get used to filling in the boxes, don’t you?

  Predictably, the key ends up fitting the basement door. Paul accepts this with a small lump of fear in his throat. It didn’t actually happen, he tells himself. Everything’s all right. He never did get locked in this room, and his captor is dead. He forces himself to take one, then two steps into the room, unable to shake off the irrational fear that someone could still come and lock him in. His breathing is short and shallow as he tries and fails to take a third step.

  It’s funny the way prisons only become prisons when there’s a chance you could be locked in them. Paul tries to remember how unthreatening this space was when he first came in here. It was horrible, sure, but it wasn’t his prison then. Unable to take any more steps, he retreats from the room and locks the door. But the act of locking the door suddenly frightens him. He imagines locking himself in there by accident and then losing the key, or locking himself in and then having an urge to swallow it. Stupid, he knows, but terrifying. It’s like that fear people have of throwing themselves from high places, or jumping in front of a train. Paul once knew someone who couldn’t wait on a train platform because she thought there was a risk that one day her body would just throw itself in front of the train, independently of her mind. She couldn’t trust her own body, and now Paul knows how that feels. He unlocks the door and puts the key back in his pocket. He needs to find Anne.

  She’s in the library.

  ‘How’s it going?’ he asks her.

  ‘Not so well. I don’t understand these tidal charts.’

  She’s blissfully normal. Thank God.

  ‘Do you know where we are, then?’ he asks her.

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘Then how can you work out the tidal charts?’

  ‘Well, since they’re the only ones here, I assume they’re the right ones.’

  ‘Cool. Let’s have a look.’

  ‘OK, here,’ she says, giving them to him.

  He looks at them for a few seconds.

  ‘I think everyone’s in crisis,’ he says, putting the charts to one side.

  ‘It’s this whole fear thing,’ says Anne. ‘It’s upsetting people.’

  ‘Hmm. The escape thing isn’t helping. It’s that neither-here-nor-there feeling.’

  ‘Are people afraid of escaping?’

  ‘Yeah. Shitting themselves. I mean, we weren’t exactly rushing to escape before.’

  ‘Why do you think that is?’

  ‘It’s scary,’ he says. ‘Cold water, big waves, high cliffs.’

  ‘Do you think we were supposed to?’ asks Anne.

  ‘What? Escape?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  He thinks. ‘I’m not sure. I do wonder if that guy was studying us, you know, like, Can they switch on the electricity? Can they keep warm? Can they handle their greatest fears? Can they escape? ’

  ‘I thought that. But why would he leave all that food for us?’

  ‘Maybe it was more a fear thing than a survival thing.’

  ‘But then why the electricity?’ says Anne. ‘And the logs?’

  ‘Well, he got here at the same time as us. Maybe he wanted to stash himself in his attic before we came to. Maybe he just didn’t have time to switch on the power or organise heating.’

  ‘Who knows?’ says Anne.

  ‘Maybe he didn’t mean to actually hurt us,’ suggests Paul uncertainly.

  ‘What, you mean he was going to cure us of our fears or something?’

  Paul laughs. Anne’s said this in such a cynical way.

  ‘You never know,’ he says. ‘We’ll never know now, will we?’

  ‘Isn’t that weird?’ she says. ‘Not ever knowing.’

  ‘Maybe it’s best we didn’t find out,’ he says.

  There’s a noise coming from one of the other rooms. Paul can hear someone calling for him. It sounds like Bryn. ‘I’ll see you later,’ he says to Anne.

  When Paul gets to the kitchen, Bryn’s co-ordinating a rescue party.

  ‘Thea’s slipped and hurt herself,’ he says, soldier-style.

  ‘We need to get down to help her, and lift her back up to the top,’ says Jamie.

  ‘OK,’ says Paul. ‘Lead the way.’

  ‘Come on,’ says Bryn urgently.

  They all march efficiently out of the door.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Anne knows Paul’s right about people being afraid of escaping. You only have to go and look over the cliffs to realise what a stupid idea the boat thing is. But what are their other choices? Are they all really such slackers that they wouldn’t even bother trying to escape? Maybe before, but not now, with all this dead body and greatest fear stuff. The trouble with this whole situation is that it’s just way too real. If this was a videogame, you’d just find the preprogrammed way out. And it probably would turn out to be down the cliffs in a boat. But if this was a videogame, you’d probably die a few times before you got it right. As far as Anne knows, no one here is into extreme sports, or white-water rafting, or anything like that. Not in real life. And when you look down those cliffs and think about actually dying in that freezing grey water, it’s actually real. It’s not a game or a book or a film. It’s something that she and everyone else here have to really do. And the thought makes her feel sick.

  The escape is the first real thing about being here. Coming here didn’t feel real, in the sense that they didn’t really come here as such, they just woke up here. Even discovering the man and the suitcase didn’t feel totally real. It’s not like they actually saw him die or anything. They will never know what his plans were, why he brought them here, or what those horrible fear-props were all about. Their experience of him will only ever be second-hand or made up. The only real thing a
bout the man is the gaps he left, the gaps which people have to fill in with their imaginations, with guesswork and with bits from old horror films and urban myths. In reality, nothing about him or the threat he posed can ever exist outside everyone’s imaginations, and that’s the way Anne likes it.

  Anne’s whole life has been about avoiding the real, and she doesn’t want that to end now. She doesn’t believe in anything; she doesn’t subscribe to anything. From an early age she rejected what was normal, not by doing really wild or wacky or different things, but by doing nothing. She didn’t attend her classes at school because she didn’t want to. She didn’t feel that learning all that crap was actually going to do anything for her. And she was right; it didn’t. And when she did learn stuff, it was the cool stuff. Studies on suicide, bizarre conspiracy theories, existentialism, nothingness, postmodernism. When you’re born into a world where everything is false, and in which you are never going to make a difference, what other alternative is there than to just skate around on the surface, making pretty patterns?

  Games are cool because they are so meaningless. You play, you win or lose, and it doesn’t matter at all. And you may as well play games in which life is important, because in the real world, it just isn’t. Anne’s knows that most videogames have nicer environments than the real world, better moral structures, and certainly a value on life, even if it is just one hundred coins. If you want morals, you’d better look to fiction, because they’re not there in the real world. Life’s cheap, but as long as death is cheaper, death will always win. The safety record of any privatised transport company will tell you that.

  Knowing this from an early age didn’t make Anne resort to a life of irony; it just made her stay a child, enjoying the moment and pretending that all the bad stuff in the world is just the trick stuff they put on before they wheel out the really cool parts. Like everyone pretending to have forgotten your birthday when all along they’ve planned a surprise party for you.

  The moment at which Anne decided that the world sucked was when she was about five or so. Blue Peter did a report on Pol Pot, and described the way he killed people’s mummies and daddies. At the time, Anne’s mother was still interested in her, and spent a long time trying to explain the whole thing to little Anne, who had always been a very sensitive child, and who demanded to know how this could be allowed to happen. All the usual questions were asked: If God exists, how can He do this? Why can’t our government stop this? and so on. Anne’s mother gave fairly honest answers to these questions, hard though they must have been to answer, and suggested that if Anne felt that strongly about Pol Pot, she should draw a picture to send to Blue Peter.

  Anne drew a picture of a circle. And on it she drew, and then coloured in, the words: KILL POL POT. She sent it off, but it was never displayed on the programme, or even mentioned by the presenters. It was the first time Anne had really been ignored – and over such an important issue as well. It hurt.

  At five, Anne was already an advanced child, although no one had really noticed yet, because it was demonstrated in such eccentric ways. She’d already been in trouble at infant school for her experiment: Can snails distinguish colour? because the teacher didn’t understand it. It was such a cool experiment as well. Anne always put the snails’ food through the same colour door in their little tank, and created all sorts of data to try to work out whether they’d try the same colour door for their food, even though the position of the door was changed. In the end, the teacher wrote to her mother, and Anne ended up growing a sunflower instead.

  The Pol Pot thing was what really rocked Anne’s boat, though. Her most advanced area had always been logic, which is what had led to the snail experiment. From about three or four, Anne had always been able to project various possible outcomes from an event in order to work out either what might happen if she did something, or, more frequently as she got older, why it wasn’t worth doing something. So once she was aware of Pol Pot, she wondered what would happen if someone killed him. Would that get rid of all evil in the world? No. So what if someone killed all evil people? That would be good, except for one problem: who would decide who was evil? Anne had watched a programme on TV about people who were wrongly accused of things. What if someone decided she was evil – or her mummy or daddy – and came to kill them? If she thought it was right for Pol Pot to be killed, maybe one day someone would think it was all right for her to be killed, and what logic could stop them? So maybe it was right for Pol Pot to be left alone. Perhaps everything he did was just his responsibility, and not Anne’s problem.

  As soon as Anne stumbled on this solution – that the world’s problems were not her problems, she felt much, much better. But something had gone to sleep in her over the months she’d agonised over Pol Pot. She’d thought about other things as well, and at the age of five had decided that it was probably best if she tried not to love her parents so much, since they were going to die someday, and that it would probably be best for her not to have any babies herself, because she’d die and make them sad; or worse, they’d die and make her sad. She also decided not to have a boyfriend, or any friends.

  All the fun she had from that point on didn’t involve anything real. She loved novels with happy endings, and Hollywood films and, of course, soap operas. In these fictions she knew she would find true love and friendship and gossip and excitement, and she could absolutely guarantee that she would get a happy ending. For Anne it was simple. If life wasn’t going to be like a Hollywood film, there was only one option: fuck life and rent the film instead.

  Anne always makes sure that she never watches war films, never reads a book with a sad ending, never tunes in to charity events (Live Aid was the worst), and hardly ever watches the news. When her aunt got cancer, she just tuned her out. She enjoys illness only if it is abstracted; if it happens to a stranger or a minor character on TV. Good characters always recover from illnesses anyway, and even if the worst does happen, characters on TV can be given beautiful deaths which they can more or less choreograph themselves. They can say the right last words, leave the right will, and make everyone they leave behind happy. And if someone dies in a soap, you usually get a new character to replace them.

  Having said that, Anne was too upset to watch either Helen Daniels or Bobby Simpson (she still can’t call her Bobby Fisher) die. They had both become really old friends, and there was no way she could have handled it. But when she saw her own grandmother die in a hospital bed right in front of her, she felt absolutely nothing. Recently, when there have been great tragedies or disasters on TV, she’s tried to feel sad for the people involved – sometimes she has even tried to cry, because that’s what people do. But that part of her is now as dead as Princess Diana, whose actual death Anne just found farcical, and whose funeral she found vulgar. She tried to understand the idea of a condolence book, but just couldn’t. Why would people stand in a queue for hours just to sign a book? It’s totally pointless. Sentimental and pointless.

  Although Anne has no problem with other people’s deaths, she has a great problem with her own. When she was fifteen, she had her first panic attack. She had just completed her best ever poem – her last ever poem, because no other could better it – and she was lying in bed trying to fall asleep. Lying there in the dark she was struck by the lack of sound in her room and in the usually busy street outside. Soon she started listening to her heartbeat. At first it sounded regular and comforting. And until that moment, Anne had never actually thought about her heart stopping, or becoming irregular. But the second she started thinking about it, she suddenly realised how fragile her life was. This lump of tissue, veins and flesh in her body was the thing that kept her alive. It could go wrong, surely? Or just stop? What about heart attacks? Anne had read about heart attacks, and she knew that one of the symptoms was a pain in your left arm.

  Within five minutes, Anne had a pain in her left arm, and an irregular heartbeat.

  Within fifteen minutes, she’d gone to casualty.

&nb
sp; In the next four years, she visited the local casualty department so many times that they virtually banned her, and after that it didn’t take too long for her to develop a Boy-Who-Cried-Wolf complex. She believed that each time she caused a false alarm by believing she was dying, she was actually reducing the chances of them taking her seriously when she was dying – which was going to be soon, considering the condition of her heart. She stopped going to casualty, but the attacks didn’t go away. And once she realised that her heart was probably not going to just give up on her, she focused on other diseases instead: meningitis, MS, BSE; she was secretly incubating all of them. But she never told anyone about the way she was feeling, because she didn’t want to make them sad.

  When she was very small, the family had owned a black cat called Sascha. One day, after being quite ill, Sascha ran away. Anne’s mother explained to her that Sascha was going to die, and that she was going to go away and do it in secret, because she didn’t want everyone to be sad. Anne knew that was what she would do in the end as well. She’d die like a cat, in secret, in private, and without hurting anyone’s feelings.

  Anne doesn’t drink. She doesn’t smoke. She doesn’t ever want to rely on these things, or feel like she might ever have to do without them. For this reason, she has avoided any addictive substance, and she has avoided sex. She knows if she had sex she’d miss it if it wasn’t there, and that she wouldn’t be able to help forming emotional attachments to the men she had sex with. So she just hasn’t done it.

  The idea of having a down-to-earth part-time job has never appealed to Anne. In fact, until her mother threatened to cut off her allowance, she wasn’t at all interested in working. Apart from the cleaning job in her year of existentialism, she has never had a job. Why work for people? Why go out – out of choice – and get exploited? The maths has never added up for Anne. If you sell someone your service, and then they make a profit, you must be selling yourself for a price that’s too low. But here’s the really stupid bit: you can’t up your price because it’s a buyers’ market, even to the extent that your employer decides what to pay you. And since all employers are in the business of making money, they are always going to pay you less than you’re worth. So Anne doesn’t believe in working for other people. Why bother? She’s no good with responsibility, even if she did want to be exploited. The only real possibility for Anne career-wise would be to go into screenwriting or romantic fiction, and she doesn’t even need to try to do these things because her parents are rich enough to support her.