Bright Young Things (7 page)

Take Freddy in Arizona, still mourning the death of Kurt Cobain. He wouldn’t tell anyone if he received a million dollar windfall. He’d spend it on CDs, slushies and bomb-making equipment. Kim in China would spend it on travel, and Jane in Bath might spend it on that creative writing course she always wanted to take. Zak in Iceland might stop his plans to poison everyone at his school, and Cherry in Buffalo will be able to fund her heroin habit without starring in teen porn films. Paul’s totally into the idea of the great teen conspiracy, and how long the mass secret will exist.

For some reason though, Paul’s project is not exciting him today. He’s lost his context, his reason to rebel. He’s lost the job he hated, and that sucks. It’s like the idea of having a girlfriend. Being attached gives you something to fight against. What Paul really needs is another job to get fired from, and then another and then another. Because without it, he may as well slit his wrists.

He sends off for a few application forms. They arrive. And the one he likes best is the one with the section asking about his greatest fear.

‘Where the hell are we?’

‘What the fuck are we doing here?’

‘Who brought us here?’

‘Can you remember anything?’

‘Is this some kind of island?’

‘This is totally fucked up.’

‘Please tell me I’m dreaming.’

‘I still feel sleepy.’

Anne stays silent, the voices distorting in her ears. Sunlight falls on her face and hair, making her feel hot and dirty. This is some kind of island, that’s pretty obvious. There is salt in the air, a small breeze, and sea all around. She counts five other people. They look kind of familiar. No one knows how they all got here. They’re freaking out, although they seem as dazed as she feels.

Four of them are taking out their mobile phones and trying to dial out, with no luck. Anne’s brain hurts. When she tries to make it go backwards she gets that feeling like she’s coming down with flu. She vaguely remembers an argument with her mother, a train to Edinburgh, a cheap hotel and then waiting for a job interview that she didn’t even want to attend. That was what the argument had been about. She can’t remember beyond the waiting – some non-airconditioned room in some sticky building in the suburbs. The interviewer giving her coffee. She looks at the others. They were all there too. Weird.

The island is quiet and still. It has one house, one shed which is next to the house, an orchard, an empty washing line and a load of rough grass with pale flowers. It has the feel of a wintry place, although it is quite hot, just like it was in Edinburgh. Almost completely round, and about half a mile in diameter, it’s the most unlikely place Anne’s ever seen. It seems like the kind of thing you’d imagine or draw, not somewhere you’d actually be. Apart from the house and shed, the only structure on the island is something that looks like a child’s toy windmill stuck on the top of a big wooden pole. It’s taller than the house. There’s a mist out to sea, and it’s impossible to see any mainland. Anne turns and stares at the house. It looks like a holiday home. She’s not sure why. It seems empty, too, although she hasn’t been inside.

It was just outside the front door of the house that they all came to, about fifteen minutes ago. They were all lying next to each other, like a row of dead bodies, with their belongings (two bags, a couple of rucksacks and a folder) beside them. The sign on the door is still there. It says: PLEASE MAKE YOURSELVES AT HOME.

Anne sits down on the grass and picks a daisy, focusing on it so she doesn’t have to focus on this situation. Penetrating the stalk with her thumbnail, she makes a perfect hole, then picks another daisy and threads it through the first one’s stalk. Everything feels very slow. The coffee is the last thing she can remember before waking up here. It must have been drugged. She picks another daisy. She’s never taken drugs before.

When the daisy chain is complete, she binds it around her wrist. The dark-haired guy watches her do this and smiles. He’s been almost as quiet as Anne so far, just watching the others. There is a skinny bloke with dreadlocks, swearing a lot and talking nonsense to a tall, fair-haired guy who just looks dazed. The other two girls are talking. Well, the dark one is sniffling a lot and the blonde one is talking. Anne is intrigued by the blonde one. She’s like a girl from a pop group manufactured specifically to seem cool and unmanufactured. She’s wearing silver sunglasses which prevent Anne from looking at her eyes. She bets they’re brown and her hair is dyed. Her hair is up in two kids’-TV-presenter bunches, tied with seventies-style bobble bands. Anne has some of those herself, although she prefers the ones with little animals on.

The girl with short dark hair looks serious. She vomited as soon as she woke up, and now she’s crying, her blue-green eyes all red around the edges. She’s the most sensibly dressed of everyone wearing a long skirt, plain vest top, suit jacket and a small silver necklace. Anne didn’t bother dressing up for the interview. Well, you don’t nowadays, do you, especially if you don’t want the job. She’s wearing a short combat skirt, a Pokémon T-shirt, a snowboarding-style fleece jacket (yes, it’s summer, but it’s a cool jacket) and a child’s plastic necklace with matching bracelets, all in candy colours. Her straight brown hair is down, and she’s wearing no make-up except for pink cherry-flavour lip-gloss and black mascara.

She takes off her trainers and starts making a daisy chain for her ankle.

It’s too hot out here. The quiet is freaking Anne out. Where are the cars? Where are the people? Where is the bustle? All she can hear is the waves against the cliffs and a few sea birds. It smells and sounds like the villa in Tuscany, not that she’s been there since she was about twelve. This was so not what she expected when she got up this morning.

The fair-haired guy says he’s going to walk around the circumference of the island. This won’t take him more than ten minutes. A couple of the others call to him to be careful. The island is high above sea level, and Anne can’t see if there’s any way down or not. Falling would be a pretty good way to get down, she thinks. As he sets off towards the cliff edge, Anne pretends this is a videogame and she’s controlling this guy. He’s a bit like Duke Nukem, but without the porn or the guns or the muscles. She presses forward on her imaginary direction pad and circles him around the island. He returns and reports what she could have predicted. There’s no way down. As if someone would drug them, bring them here, and then just let them walk – or swim – away.

‘Shall we go inside, then?’ asks Pop Girl. ‘It’s too weird out here.’

The good-looking dark-haired guy is the first to get up.

Inside, the house is dark and cold. It smells a bit of something that could be mothballs. It’s dusty, too. The front hall is big and square, with a red tiled floor and a staircase leading to a balcony upstairs. There are no carpets, just huge rugs everywhere. A large painting of the earth is hung at the top of the stairs, all blues and greens and swirls of sea. Anne wonders if this island is on the picture somewhere, and if so, where.

‘What’s in here?’ the dark guy asks Vomit Girl. She came inside briefly for a glass of water, Anne remembers, just after she was sick.

‘A sitting room off there,’ she says, pointing to the left. ‘A library thing down at the end and a kitchen around the back.’ She smiles weakly. ‘I’m Thea, by the way.’

‘Paul,’ says the dark guy, smiling back.

Anne can’t remember if they spoke at all at the place in Edinburgh. She thinks not.

‘Shall we all have a look around?’ suggests Duke. ‘Get the lay of the land.’

Pop Girl giggles. ‘Yeah, let’s get the
lay of the land
,’ she repeats. He blushes and a couple of the others shift around. Then everyone drifts down the corridor. Nothing about this seems very real. Anne’s wondering who’s going to panic first, but no one seems to know how to react.

‘Is there anyone else on this island?’ asks Dreadlocks. ‘Or is it just us?’

‘If there is anyone else here, they’re being very quiet,’ says Paul.

‘There’s no one in here,’ says Thea.

‘There was no one outside,’ says Duke.

The house is pretty much as Thea described. The sitting room off to the left is big, and looks weird without a TV. There are no electronic devices of any kind in the room, just a couple of big brown sofas and a large Indian rug on the bare, unvarnished floorboards. There’s also an open fire, a mantelpiece with nothing on it, a bureau and a single table, pushed to the side of the room. It’s cold and dusty and Thea’s shoes make an echoey, clicking sound on the tiles. Anne’s legs feel heavy and she wishes she could go back to sleep.

Upstairs there are six bedrooms, three to the right and three to the left. Each door has one of their names on it. Whoever planned this intended the boys to be along the right, the girls along the left.

‘Hot Christ,’ says Paul as they walk, dazed, from room to room.

The bedrooms are identical. They are all white: white linen, white towels, white walls.

‘It’s just like a hospital,’ says Pop Girl, yawning.

‘What kind of hospitals do you go to?’ asks Thea. ‘It’s more like a hotel.’

‘What kind of hotels do
you
go to?’ asks Pop Girl, raising her eyebrows.

They both laugh sleepily. They seem to have established that it’s not like a hospital or a hotel.

‘Whatever,’ says Paul. ‘It’s still fucked up. Hot Christ.’

‘Can you stop saying that?’ asks Thea.

‘Saying what?’ asks Paul.

Each of the rooms also contains a blank, white notebook, and some white clothes.

Anne’s stomach does a kind of flip, but she doesn’t say anything.

‘What is going on here?’ asks Thea quietly.

A small staircase leads to an attic room, but the door is locked.

‘Kitchen?’ suggests Pop Girl. ‘I’m really thirsty.’

‘We need to work out what’s going on here,’ says Duke.

As they walk down to the kitchen, it strikes Anne that this place was probably used as some sort of hotel or guest house once. Otherwise why would all the bedrooms have bathrooms?

‘Does anyone else feel sick?’ asks Pop Girl. She’s made it to the kitchen table and is sitting slumped over it, heaving about, being dramatic. Everyone else is sitting at the table as well, except for Paul, who is trying to put the kettle on, but has found that the electric stove doesn’t work. He finds a small camping stove in the end, with a full gas cylinder, and uses that. He doesn’t seem to have any trouble filling it, and water comes straight out of the tap. There’s running water here, at least, then, although Anne’s not sure where it comes from.

‘Yeah,’ says U-rated Duke Nukem. ‘I feel queasy.’

‘I’ve got bad gut rot,’ says Dreadlocks.

‘I’m OK,’ says Anne quietly.

‘You look pale,’ says Duke.

‘You do actually,’ says Paul.

‘Everyone says that,’ she replies. ‘It’s normal. Don’t worry.’

‘You should get a sun bed or something,’ says Pop Girl.

Anne doesn’t say anything. She likes being pale. It suits her.

‘I feel better now I’ve puked,’ says Thea. ‘What are your names, by the way?’

‘Emily,’ says Pop Girl.

‘Anne,’ says Anne.

‘Er, what, me?’ asks Dreadlocks. ‘Er, Bryn.’

‘Jamie,’ says Duke.

‘Paul,’ says Paul again. He’s going through the cupboards.

‘What are you doing?’ asks Thea.

‘Trying to find some cups.’

‘Do you think we’re supposed to . . .’ begins Bryn.

‘What?’ says Emily sarcastically. ‘“Make ourselves at home”? Of course we’re supposed to. Or – I know – maybe we could just not drink anything until we all collapse and die. Then I guess we won’t get into any trouble.’

Bryn seems offended. ‘Sorry,’ he says huffily.

‘I think we’re already in trouble,’ says Thea.

Paul looks over at Bryn. ‘I think we should go ahead and do what we want, just like the note said. For Christ’s sake, we didn’t exactly ask to come here.’

Bryn looks pissed off. He lights one of Emily’s cigarettes. Thea lights one too.

Anne’s thinking about those TV programmes where members of the public get duped by some trick or other, sometimes involving throwing puppies off a bridge (not
really
!) or giving someone something to hold and then running away. The joke is always that trusting passers-by will be happy to stop and help without realising that they are being set up for a joke, or will try to stop the ‘comedian’ from throwing the puppies over the bridge, without realising that there are no puppies, without realising that the
joke
is that there are no puppies. By trying to stop the comedian from throwing them over the bridge, the passers-by seem stupid, because the comedian and the audience know that there are no puppies.

‘So who wants coffee?’ asks Paul, having found some cups.

Everyone says
me
or grunts, except Anne, who doesn’t like tea or coffee.

‘What do you think they gave us?’ asks Jamie.

‘Downers?’ suggests Bryn. ‘They sometimes make me feel sick,’ he adds.