by Ali Ahearn
The drumbeat slowed further.
‘And now … the moment of truth.’ Darryl’s ecstasy was peaking.
‘Who shall be banished, and who shall live to fight another day?’
A moment’s silence swallowed the air before a piercing shriek emitted from one half of the Horny Honeymooners and both of them disappeared from sight, with only a rustic trapdoor where their golden, graceful forms had been seconds before.
Frankie grabbed Joni’s fingers in shock, as the assembled group gulped in the guilty air of freedom.
Just as Joni began to feel the blood rush back to her brain, it happened.
She fainted.
And the combination of the dark, the screaming, the fire and the fainting was more than Des could bear.
‘Look, Sally.’ Frankie was obviously going for polite but having trouble holding it together in the atmosphere of crisis that pervaded the editing tent. ‘For the last time, she did not bring the rodent onto the island. She found it here. Today. I don’t recall reading in the rule book that was a crime.’
Joni saw Frankie’s tic flare and nodded furiously.
Yeah. What she said.
It was kind of amazing that Frankie was batting so hard for Joni to be allowed to keep Des. After all, she’d whispered some murderous things to her on the way over to the editing tent. But what had Frankie thought she was going to do?
Leave Des behind? Just when he was making such great progress?
Wash your mouth out, Frances Sutcliffe.
The Stapler looked like she could feasibly bite Des’s head off at any moment and a sudden fear struck Joni that she might. Like Solomon. To test whether Joni really was attached to the little animal.
Sally looked up as Lex strode into the tent with surprising determination, like a man on a mission. Like a director. ‘What’s all the fuss?’ The look he shot at Sally was pointed. Get on with it.
‘This heiress is claiming it’s not her ferret.’ Sally’s tone was arch.
Lex’s gaze flicked over to Joni, and she thought he gave her the slightest wink. ‘Show him to me.’
Joni hesitated before passing the shaking creature over. Lex took him in his cupped hands, like he was delicate china. ‘Ah …’ he sighed with a knowing smirk. ‘Rodentus Australis.’
‘Pardon?’ Sally’s bullshit meter had clearly just gone through the roof, but she was staring at Lex like she didn’t know quite what to do about it.
‘Native, I’m afraid, Sal. Kind of like a small numbat, I believe.’
‘What the fook are you?’ Sally’s breathing had slowed, and she was looking at Lex even more murderously than she had at Frankie. ‘A zoologist?’
‘Well, yes, actually,’ Lex began cheerfully. ‘Apart from being the director.’ He gave the word a chilling emphasis, looking calmly into Sally’s beautiful eyes. ‘I am a zoologist. Technically. First degree. Balliol. Never quite let it go. Now, tea, anyone?’
Joni and Frankie raised their hands, as Sally stalked from the tent.
‘We have a formal complaint from Guernsey Council.’ The skinny tech working the facsimile machine looked like a messenger waiting to be shot.
‘Screw ’em,’ The Stapler bit out. ‘Technical errors happen. How many texts get sent from that shithole, anyway?’ Then, not waiting for an answer, ‘Can’t believe those whining bitches scored so well. All that fighting, maybe?’
Lex Margate pushed slim half-moon glasses down his nose and looked up from some sheets he’d been flipping through. ‘Focus groups suggest otherwise,’ he drawled lazily. ‘Highest peaks were during “My Favourite Things”. And the overnight cuddling.’
‘They want to see them reconcile?’ Sally’s voice was high, incredulous, as she lifted her long dark hair off her neck.
‘Possibly,’ Lex soothed her. ‘But I don’t like their chances.’
The Stapler paused. ‘Make a helluva climax, wouldn’t it?’
Lex looked at her assessingly, a slight frown creasing his delicate features. ‘You are such a humanitarian,’ he sighed.
The Stapler went on as though he hadn’t spoken. ‘Hmmmm … but it’d only work if the tension stayed really high right till the end.’
Lex spoke again. ‘One song is hardly the Treaty of Versailles.’
The skinny tech looked over at The Stapler, ignoring Lex’s words. ‘Who should we team them with for the trek, Sal?’
The Stapler twisted one long piece of hair around a finger. ‘Looking at these figures, it’s hard to know. These girls are so popular, whoever it is, they’re fucked.’
She paused.
‘So, I guess it’s those Irish fookers. God, I hate those maudlin arseholes. Too much Edgar Allan fookin’ Poe, not enough Billy Connolly.’
Chapter 7
Frances, Day 5
If someone had told Frances a couple of months ago she’d be living in some bizarre alternate-universe cross between Doctor Who and Gilligan’s Island, debasing herself almost hourly on a national television show, she would have called the men in white coats.
Now, sitting hooked up to an electrical device straight from a Siberian gulag, being zapped for food, she wished they’d come for her.
So far, week one had consisted of increasingly degrading daily challenges – this one taking the prize – with each challenge earning them extra food rewards so that the couples could stock their pantries further.
They’d already been given the basics: rice, dried legumes and spam, to last them for the duration. Staples from The Stapler. Ugh! No fruit or bread or real meat. No condiments or seasonings. Nothing remotely appetising.
In other words – winning the challenges was vital if they didn’t want to leave the island looking like Auschwitz victims. Or with some heinous disease, like scurvy. Or Mad Pig Disease from the spam tins that looked like they’d been around since the Crimean War.
Of course, as The Stapler had so sweetly assured them, anything that grew naturally on the island could be used in meals. Which would have been handy had one of them had a botany degree or had there been a witch doctor somewhere in the family tree. But they didn’t and there wasn’t. And Joni, who had apparently absorbed some useful information from G’s National Geographics while ogling tribal penises, had insisted the more colourful a berry-or fruit-bearing tree, the more poisonous it was likely to be.
In short, Frances was starving. She could already feel her waistbands loosening. As crash diets went, this really sucked.
She’d rather be on the Cabbage Soup Diet.
Takahiro and Kazuki were the only ones thriving. Neither of them had a problem with spearing and eating raw fish. Frances knew each contestant brought their own unique set of skills to the game but, as far as she was concerned, it wasn’t sushi unless it was wrapped in seaweed and served in a cute little purpose-made container. With itty-bitty foil packets of soy sauce.
Of course, they also had the unfair advantage of knowing one hundred and one ways to make rice appetising, which didn’t lessen Frances’s jaundice towards them. Takahiro and Kazuki were going to be able to leave the island and head straight into a sumo tournament.
‘We need your answer, Frances.’
Frances ignored Darryl Driscoe and the other couples as they leaned in closer. She was aware only of Joni, sitting opposite, sweating on her answer. They were losing the game, badly, but they’d entered a twilight zone in which neither cared. There was a lot more going on than Darryl knew or either of them wanted to admit.
Suppressed angst.
Her mother’s hippy shrink might have called it ‘passive-aggressive transference’.
The Stapler called it ‘Truth by Taser’.
Frances just called it ‘getting even with Joni’.
And Joni had caught on damn fast.
Endurance Island’s most sadistic game yet involved each of the teams being hooked up to an electric-shock device – just an unpleasant buzz, The Stapler had assured them – and coerced into answering questions about their team mate.
The questions had been given to each contestant an hour before the challenge had begun. They’d all been forced into seclusion to answer them and then surrendered the answers to The Stapler. They’d been kept separate until it was their turn, so no-one could collude.
The real kicker was the punishment for being wrong.
If a contestant’s answer did not match their team mate’s, the team mate got zapped. Not the person who got it wrong, the team mate.
A very effective way to set team mate against team mate.
The more electric shocks meted out, the smaller the food reward earned.
Today they were playing for tinned soup.
‘What is your sister’s favourite colour?’ Darryl intoned again.
Magenta. Frances had known what Joni’s favourite colour was since her sister had been able to say the bloody word. Magenta. Not pink. Oh no. Joni had always had a flare for the dramatic. Her gaze flicked to Joni’s hideous green curls. ‘Green.’
There was a nanosecond during which Frances’s small, triumphant smile crossed paths with Joni’s look of alarm and disbelief. Then – Zzzzztttt!
‘Fuck!’ Joni desperately tried to free her finger from its medieval prison as the unpleasant buzz coursed up her arm.
That’s for stealing my red stilettos.
Darryl laughed, throwing a cheesy game-show-host smile at the camera. ‘I’m afraid it was …’ he paused for dramatic effect, looking square into the lens, ‘… maagggentaaaa.’ He waggled his weaves as his tongue rolled the word around and dragged it out.
Frances braced herself for the repercussions. From the moment she’d inadvertently got wrong the name of Joni’s first pet – Jesus Christ, there’d been so bloody many – and got an unexpected thrill from seeing Joni curse and twitch in obvious discomfort, the game had shifted.
Suddenly, soup was secondary.
Suddenly, it was about payback.
Seven years ago, in one blinding flash, Frances had felt as if Joni had strapped her into an electric chair and personally thrown the switch. How many times since then had she wanted her sister to feel just a little of that pain?
Sally Staples’s sadistic little game had given her the perfect outlet. Not even Joni’s bewildered look the first two times she’d been zapped had been enough to make Frances relent. It wasn’t life threatening, after all.
And they were supposed to be working the feuding angle for the cameras, right?
Then, after the third wrong answer, she saw it. Saw realisation dawning in her sister’s gaze. Joni had known Frances knew the answer to what year their mother was born. Instantly, Joni was on to her. And Frances had seen the battle gleam in Joni’s gaze.
Game on.
‘Joni, who was Frances’s first boyfriend?’
Jake. Jake Rogers. Even as Frances silently willed her sister to know the answer, she knew she did. She’d made fun of his congenital limp that got worse every time their father spoke to him, and had called him Jake the Peg behind his back.
But Frances also knew that Joni was digging this personal torture chamber as much as she was.
‘I don’t believe Frances ever had a boyfriend. She was a real slow starter.’
Zzzztttt!
Bitch! Frances clamped her lips down hard, mashing them together until they hurt, refusing to give Joni the satisfaction of a whimper.
Unpleasant buzz, my arse.
It hurt like hell, and afterwards she felt all prickly under her skin, like a million ants were marching there. Her eye tic was working overtime and she put a finger over it to quell its epileptic beat.
As Darryl relayed the right answer to the camera, Frances looked up, straight into Kandy’s and Misty’s wincing faces. ‘You okay?’ Kandy mouthed.
Frances, surprised by the other woman’s empathy, gave a slight nod. She would be, anyway. As soon as her teeth stopped rattling and her finger recovered from the electrical burn.
‘Frances, can you tell me the name of the hospital where Joni was born?’
Still twitchy from her last zap, it crossed Frances’s mind to say Joni had been spawned, not born. Instead, she looked her sister straight in the eye and said, ‘St Jesus, Mary and Joseph’s.’
Frances just had time to hear Nick’s deep laugh before the Zzzzzztt rang loud and clear.
That’s for years of animal do-do in my bed.
‘Ahhh, no. That would be the Fifteenth Lighthorse Regiment Military Hospital,’ Darryl supplied.
Frances looked at Joni, her cheeks hollowing as she sucked in deep breaths. No wonder the girl had always bucked against convention and discipline. Maybe it should have been Joni who was born on the side of the M1 instead of her. It would have been a much more fitting beginning to Joni’s haphazard life.
She remembered how proud Joni had been of Frances’s unique entrance into the world, as if Frances had deliberately chosen to flout conventional birthing practices. Joni had used the story as the basis of every show and tell at every kindergarten and school they’d been enrolled in, the dog-eared newspaper clipping about it one of Joni’s most treasured possessions.
The accusation in her sister’s gaze dragged Frances back to the present and she felt a fleeting moment of remorse. But then a movement behind Joni caught her attention and the guilt was forgotten. Lex was whispering to Sally.
He looked worried and something more than that. Horrified. But then, when didn’t he?
The Stapler, however, was an expert at zooming in on weaknesses, and could see the sisters had gone beyond the game and were playing something much more personal. She looked at Frances like she was the goose that laid the golden ratings egg.
‘Joni, what year was Frances married?’
Frances sucked in a breath as Joni’s stricken gaze levelled with hers. The year was indelibly branded on both their psyches. Two thousand and four. The year one world fell apart and she’d leaped desperately into her next, brutally hacking away the sticky strands of family.
The year she’d stopped being Joni’s sister.
Frances braced herself for the zap that would ultimately follow. Like a vicious tearing open of stitches that barely contained the mortal wound that had severed their relationship.
‘Two thousand and four.’
Joni’s voice was barely audible, her shoulders slumped, and Frances felt a lump the size of a can of soup lodge in her neck. The fact Joni had saved her from a zap was secondary to the sudden welling of rage.
This is not my fault.
It was Joni’s. Joni had screwed up – not her. Joni’s actions had been responsible for their seven-year silence – not hers. Why, she wanted to yell. She wanted to reach across and grab Joni’s chin, make her sister look at her and demand to know why. Demand to know all the things she’d been too shattered to ask then.
Too broken.
‘Yesssss,’ Darryl bleated in his TV voice. ‘I do believe they have one right.’
The other contestants clapped and cheered. Even Kazuki dared to think for himself and put his hands together. Her gaze caught Takahiro’s and she was surprised to notice fleeting grudging respect there. Maybe even a sliver of pity. Perhaps, beneath the game show warrior, there was a real human being.
But even that wasn’t enough to soothe the fury lashing her insides. They were sitting here, playing this bloody game on this godforsaken island, because of 2004. G manipulating them from the grave was all down to the events of 2004. Frances wanted to put her hands around Joni’s scrawny neck and choke her.
Why? Why, why, why?
‘And now for the final question.’ Darryl smiled down the lens for a few seconds, in a pose that was pure Days of our Lives. ‘Frances, where does Joni currently work?’
Frances stared at Darryl. She could see his lips moving but there was a buzzing in her head that made the words difficult to understand. Her heart was hammering in her chest, louder than the yammering from Darryl’s puffy silicone lips, louder than the roar of insects and the crash of the waves that formed a constant wh
ite-noise hum. She could feel her alveoli seizing as her breath pushed desperately against their pliant walls, seeking admission.
‘Frances?’
Joni was staring at her with defeat and resignation. The rage inside Frances kicked up another notch. This is not my fault.
Frances kept her gaze firmly enmeshed with her sister’s. ‘Pizza Hut.’
Zzzztt!
Frances watched Joni’s arm buck against the current. She saw her white teeth bite into her bottom lip as her eyes glassed over.
That’s for 2004!
‘Alllllrightyyy.’
Darryl reached over and, with a dramatic wrist flick, untethered Frances and Joni.
He bleated on about the soup tally but Frances neither heard nor cared. Joni stormed off towards their shelter, her mike pack sitting snugly in the small of her back. The Stapler ordered the cameraman to follow, while Lex shook his head in disgust. Kandy and Misty hugged her as Nick nodded at her, his blue eyes tinged with concern. Frances’s eye twitched madly as it tracked Joni’s path. She hoped their little personal vendetta had been worth it. She hoped it got them the votes they needed to stay on the island.
Because if 2004 hadn’t signed their sisterly death warrant, this most certainly had.
Frances was relieved to escape to the beach later that evening. Joni had retired to their shelter with Des and, even though she’d built it with her own two hands and it had survived some pretty damn inclement weather, Frances doubted its ability to survive Cyclone Joni should she decide to let rip.
Best to give her sister some distance.
The wet sand at the shoreline was cool beneath her feet, in stark contrast to the warm tropical water washing over her toes. She stared up into the inky night, a host of twinkling stars making her feel utterly insignificant.
It was a pity they didn’t have the same effect on her problems.
A weird prickling at her neck alerted her to a presence behind her and she turned to see Nick walking towards her. He sidled up to her and said, ‘Nice evening.’