Power Games (24 page)

‘Why me?’ the model wailed.

‘Fear is what you can’t see. It’s what you don’t know. You’re going to see and you’re going to know, then there won’t be anything to be frightened of any more.’

Tawny kept scrunching balls of her hair, as if she was scrabbling around in a crate of moss for something she had lost. Kevin thought of all the times he had tried to jerk off over her in magazines, locked in his mom’s upstairs toilet or in the bathroom at Cut N Dry when he got bored halfway through a meeting.

Mitch volunteered. ‘There should be three of us.’

‘Four,’ Eve insisted. ‘You can’t make me stay.’

‘You’re staying.’

‘What are you going to do about it, Angela?’

The idea of a fight breaking out was somehow appealing, like a thunderstorm after a heat spell. Angela seemed ready to say something. A silent threat passed between them. Eve backed down.

‘I’m not sitting round here doing nothing,’ Eve muttered. Jacob groaned. Tawny shot him a disgusted look and folded her arms.

‘Stake out the fuselage,’ Angela told Eve, ‘there might be first aid. Keep Jacob clean, and hydrated. Don’t leave him alone.’

‘We should get moving,’ said Mitch. ‘While it’s still light …’

Angela turned to the model. ‘Tawny?’

‘I don’t want to.’

‘There’s no choice.’

‘What about my heels?’

‘Take them off.’

Reluctantly she obeyed. Angela seized them, and, with a swift flick to each sole, sliced the spikes off with her knife.

‘Let’s go.’

36

S
cant breeze filtered through the tight vegetation. It was challenging; with no path to steer them every step was an effort, hands in front, parting the thicket, a foot at a time. Every so often they would stumble across a trampled route, studded with the imprint of hooves, and follow as far as it led.

Tawny wanted America. She wanted JP, and Minty, and her entourage. She wanted to brush her hair and wash her fucking armpits. She felt like a dog. Right now she ought to be luxuriating in her villa in the mountains, Adonis boyfriend beckoning her back into bed, the blue pool glittering and her fragrant skin bronzed in the sun. She couldn’t remember the last time she had been this dirty, this soiled, this disgusting.

Yes, she could.

Come with me, sweetheart. I’ll look after you …

She wondered what had become of Nathan. She hoped he was rotting in a ditch.
Little Orphan Annie
, he had called her. Bastard.

The burn in Tawny’s calves, not dissimilar to the one she sometimes got after completing a runway show in eight-inch stilettoes, told her they were moving uphill. It was hard to decipher their position because the trees were massive, their shafts zooming to vanishing point hundreds of feet up in the air, eclipsing any stab at orientation. Even the sky eluded
them. Claustrophobia seemed a perverse notion, but the vines were so close, the drench of the air so stifling, that it was hard to breathe.

Angela was up ahead, beating a stick through the undergrowth, the back of her top a horseshoe of sweat. Mitch was responsible for keeping time, instructing rest or else pushing them on, even when ten minutes felt like two hours. Jacob’s gold watch was the only timepiece to have survived the crash: he had forwarded the hour partway through the flight, and the watch appeared, at least, to be working properly, though there was no way of checking until they cleared the canopy.

Tawny lagged wretchedly behind, their route strewn with complaints that she could not go on, that this would surely kill her and that she was about to die of thirst. They were all thirsty. One bottle to share between them, sipped in small doses every twenty minutes. She craved her aloe vera juice, kept slipping into wild and brilliant daydreams about oceans so full of it that she could dive right in, become one with the liquid, cool and drenching.

The trio climbed higher. Tawny heard a distant, rhythmic sigh.

Angela picked it out too. She stopped. ‘Listen.’

Unmistakably, it was the sound of the sea. The group faced each other. This was something they recognised, something that could take them away, something that could transport them home. Energised, they pressed on. Tantalising slivers of azure flickered through the leaves. Tawny pictured a lifeguard rushing out of the waves and scooping her up in his arms, abs rippling and his dark hair windswept. Safety.

‘The canopy’s thinning,’ said Angela. She wiped the back of her wrist across her brow. ‘The higher we get, the more we can see.’

They kept walking. Every occasion the growth seemed to
break, the brow teased them by lifting again, revealing yet another chamber of crawling dark. Mitch took over at the helm, slicing a way through the branches.

All at once, they hit a plateau. It came upon them suddenly: a smooth table of grey and pink granite, sparkling in the sun. It was big, the size of a tennis court, and the sky above it was wide and bracingly blue.

Angela hauled herself onto the rock and spread her arms. Up here was a new kind of heat: a dangerous, blazing one that came from a raging ball of fire. At this height, the sun seemed close enough to touch. Its searing furnace bounced off the granite plinth, baking them from beneath. They felt it on their shoulders, their backs, biting into their arms and hands.

Tawny slumped down, her head between her legs. Her normally gleaming blonde mane was coarse and bedraggled. Her feet stung with blisters.

‘We made it,’ said Angela.

‘We didn’t make it,’ said Tawny. ‘This is just a deeper circle of hell.’

The jungle might be clammy, but at least it wasn’t naked flame. Mitch squinted. It had to be midday, or thereabouts. The gold watch read 12:30.

‘Over here.’ Angela crossed to the lip of the rock. Mitch joined her. His shirt clung. His toupee was itching. Beads of damp prickled on his scalp. He scratched the hairpiece, felt it dislodge and self-consciously patted it back into position. Not that he should care, but by some faint constancy to what had brought him here, he still did. As if the removal of the toupee signified more than a creeping baldness. It was the façade he had been wearing all this time. The one he couldn’t do without.

From this vantage point they had a better view of their territory.
They were on an island, a small one, maybe a couple of miles long, and in the shape of a lozenge whose ends have been pinched and drawn out of form. To the east, the direction from which they had come, the landscape was serene. Beyond the jungle canopy was an arc of flawless white beach. Its sand was alabaster-pale and impossibly smooth, at its widest point dissolving into a shallow, emerald, crescent-shaped lagoon. Half a mile out, a ridge of red coral broke against the ocean. Wavelets lapped over the reef, beyond which the water was deep cobalt, sprawling as far as the eye could see.

Mitch scanned the horizon for signs of life, another rock, someplace like theirs, a dimple however distant or minor, to break the faceless curvature of the Earth. Nothing. The horizon was a melting, liquid line, the definition between sky and sea dissolved because both were the same colour, equally still and equally indifferent.

The air quivered like a plucked string.

To the west the picture was more hostile: a jagged line of cliffs that petered out into the immense ocean, dimpled with caves and grottoes. A jutting cluster of crags splayed out like a serpent’s tail, and harsh clusters of rock were beaten by the crash and froth of waves. Dark, swirling water threw up white spray.

There was no sign of life—no settlements, no boats.

They could make out the smash in the trees where the jet had entered, not far from the coastline. ‘We’ll set up camp on the beach,’ said Angela. ‘It’s safer there.’

‘Safer?’ Tawny baulked.

‘We don’t know what’s out there.’

Mitch thought:
I do. I know what’s out there.

‘The beach makes us obvious,’ said Tawny. ‘People will see us!’

‘There are no people,’ said Angela.

‘How do you know?’

‘Because I have to go on what I can see, and right now I can’t see anyone.’

‘What about later, when it gets dark?’ Tawny envisaged a line of torches dancing in the night, through the forest, coming to get them, and Jacob’s crispy body impaled on a spit, turning amid a circle of shadowy hungry faces! ‘
Cannibals!
’

‘If you want to take your chances in the jungle,’ said Angela, ‘be my guest.’

‘I’m not doing anything by myself.’

‘Being obvious is what we want. We want people to see us, don’t we?’

‘Not if they’re cannibals!’

Angela lost patience. ‘Shut up, Tawny, or I’ll slap it out of you again.’

Tawny sulked. Angela returned to the trees. Dejectedly, the model followed.

Mitch went to go after them. As he did, his eyes travelled down to a hidden inlet beneath the line of the cliffs. It had to be close to the crash site.

He peered, not quite trusting himself the first time.

But there it was.

A spread of ivory shore, pristine and unscathed, the sand smooth as silk—apart from a trail of human footprints threading across it and into the slit of a cave.

37

H
e woke up because his stomach lurched.

Another lurch. A surge then drop. The seatbelt sign pinged on. ‘Sit down, sir.’

Jacob careened through the listing cabin. Gulfs of air vanished beneath them.

‘Sir, please sit down. The captain has asked that you all remain seated—’

A scream as they plummeted; the jet shuddered and shook. Somebody started crying. Faces transformed by fear. ‘Can anyone else smell smoke?’

Black night outside; panic within … and that bitter, mushrooming stink.

‘What’s going on? What’s happening?’

Oxygen masks dropped from the ceiling, a mess of tubes and plastic.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain. We are experiencing an issue in the hold and are doing all we can to resolve it. Until that time I ask you to please remain calm. Air supply has been withdrawn from the cabin: this is what your masks are for. We are descending altitude to enable you to breathe more freely …’

From Jacob’s window they all saw the inevitable. Orange flames, bright and angry, lashed at the underside of the wing.
A murmur of prayer:
‘Santa Maria, Madre di Dio, prega per noi peccatori …’

The fuel tanks—We’re done for. They thought it. They knew it. Unless he could get back there, do something … Access to the hold was a feature of this plane, a convenience, a luxury, and now the only shot they had at survival. The heat was intense. Only a fool would go in.

They would die anyway; he may as well die trying.

It was a strange fusion: the prickling burn as vivid as sunshine, yet behind his damaged vision rolled an abyss black as night. In blindness, he was alone.

The pain was out of this world. He dared not raise his hands to his face, certain it would extinguish all hope.

Jacob had reached the summit of terror. He had reached it twenty thousand feet in the sky on a night a century ago. If he had been able to see, he would have looked it straight in its bright, evil eye, and maintained for the rest of his days that he had met terror on that dark path and knew what terror looked like.

Blindness incapacitated him: the vision he had taken for granted all his thirty-two years, this engine that enabled him to see the world, incidental and imperative.

His mind threw up remembered images. Years of watching his conquests, the women’s bodies, their skin, their smiles, their breasts and legs, mouths soldered to his and each other’s, limbs entangled as he gazed on, drinking in pictures, eyes gluttonous for more.

Now he sipped only at a dead screen, blank apart from an insistent red winking, a pulsing star that flashed amid the void, some faint anchor of the old world, some point of reference. A blinking light, yes, and the cameras were rolling—only there was nothing to see. It occurred to Jacob that
he was simultaneously filming and viewing his own suffering.

Serves you right
, a small voice said.
This is karma.

Eve explained what happened, in words that made no sense.

Jacob recalled their exchange at Jakarta: details about the reporter’s face, her brittle English accent, distant and detached. Without the nuances he had spent a decade learning, those giveaways in a person’s expression—traces on which he had built the relationships of his career—there was nothing to connect. As Eve described their trek through the forest, what had brought them here and how Kevin and Angela had lowered him from the wreck, Jacob heard swishing fronds, the brush of the boiling air, and the way the shade moved, a fiery spectrum behind his lids. Messages to his brain were confusing and mistaken, self-deceiving and self-preserving. He deciphered the occasional liquid shape. There was only one thing he cared for.

‘Will I see again?’

But he was scared to see. What had become of him? What monster would greet him on the other side?

There was a pause, before: ‘None of us knows what’s going to happen.’

Eve got up. He heard her move away. No warmth. She was a stranger to him. They all were. People he would once have charmed—women he might once have bedded—turned from him, an empty hole into which communication evaporated.

Of all the eyes in all the bedrooms he had set up in the world, the only two Jacob Lyle cared for were his own. Without them, there was nothing.

Angela stopped. ‘Are you OK? You’re slowing back there.’

In the dappled jungle shadows her companions shifted in and out of light, crisply visible one instant and mottled dark the next. Mitch hauled on, his complexion pallid with sweat and dirt, and he kept his eyes on the ground and never looked up.

‘Ugh!’ Tawny’s cry blasted from the rear. ‘I stepped in shit! I skidded in shit!’

Angela tramped back. The model had slipped, landing on her ass. A fetid pat, bearing the mark of Tawny’s shoe-print, had been flattened, attracting a wave of flies.