Power Games (25 page)

‘Am I sitting in it?’ She shot up, swiping her ass. ‘Is it on me?’

Angela knelt to the heap. ‘What do you think made this?’

‘Who cares? Shit’s shit—and it stinks.’

‘Pigs,’ said Angela, answering her own question. ‘Nothing bigger than that.’

Tawny’s eyes bugged. ‘Like farmyard pigs?’

‘The tracks we saw would suggest hooves,’ she said, ‘rather than paws.’

‘Paws?’

‘Big cats: tigers, leopards, I guess. Like Celeste said.’

Tawny squawked: ‘But all we’ve seen evidence of is pigs. Right?’

The forest twitched. It was hot and potent.

‘Let’s keep moving all the same.’

‘Hang on.’ Tawny stopped. ‘I need the bathroom.’

‘Can’t it wait?’

‘What’s the difference between going in the trees down there and going in the trees up here? They’re the same fucking trees and it sucks either way.’

‘Fine.’

‘Come with me.’

‘No,’ said Angela. ‘We stay together.’

‘With him checking me out?’

Mitch turned, embarrassed.

‘Mitch has got more on his mind right now than you taking your knickers off.’

‘Can’t. Stage fright.’

‘I’m staying here,’ said Angela.

‘And leaving me alone to get my hundred-million-dollar-insured ass chewed off by an alligator?’

‘You’re being ridiculous.’

‘Am I?’

Angela looked into the murky trees.

‘Fine. Let’s get it over with.’

They took just a few paces from the pig run, but it was so snarled underfoot it might as well have been a hike. Tawny tried not to think about all the things she might be stepping on—snakes and creepy-crawlies, beetles and rats, not to mention the reeking manure that was still caked to the underside of her shoe.

She squatted uncomfortably on the mulchy ground. Peeing in this sick tropical nightmare was peculiar, an ordinary necessity in the most extraordinary of places. She wondered if she was the first person ever to pee on the island. Was she disrupting some finely balanced eco-system? Maybe she would be responsible for extinguishing all life on this godforsaken hell-hole—starting, she thought grimly, with herself.

As she hauled up her pants, she spied what appeared to be a flat expanse of clay running parallel to the route they had been on. It was scattered with green, reedy shoots, and looked quicker and easier to navigate.

‘I’m going this way,’ she yelled back.

Tawny shot off before Angela could stop her, deciding she
had had quite enough of struggling through the undergrowth for one day, thank you very much.

As soon as she stepped onto it, she knew she had made a big mistake.

The clay gave way. Her foot sank.

The ground turned to mush, sucking and binding and slurping. Tawny’s leg was quick to follow, first her ankle, then her calf, then her thigh, vanishing with queasy efficiency into the peat, as if the maw of some great beast was devouring it.

She toppled forwards, putting her hands out to break the fall, and the gulping, lapping mess swallowed them too. Horror ambushed her. ‘HELP ME!’

A snap of branches and Angela’s voice surfaced from behind: ‘It’s a swamp.’

‘Get me out of it! For God’s sake, get me out of it!’

She tried to turn, but the gloop was too thick, caked to her waist like cement.

‘Don’t move.’ Angela stepped round to the rim, crouched on a bed of shoots, and held her arms out. Her eyes met Tawny’s at an angle that suggested if they didn’t think fast Tawny wouldn’t be moving anywhere again any time soon.

‘If you struggle,’ she said, ‘it will make it worse. I’m going to find something to pull you out. Breathe. Nice and easy, Tawny. Try to stay calm—’

Tawny’s stomach plunged into the bog. ‘
Don’t you dare leave me!
’

Insects buzzed on the reeking surface, midges and flies crawling up her nose and across her lips. Tawny honked a sob. The swamp burped.

‘Listen to me. Are you listening?’

‘I’m listening!’

‘Make yourself as flat as possible. Lean forward. Lean into it, like this—’

‘You’re trying to kill me!’

‘Pretend you’re swimming. Now take the end of this, it’s strong, OK? Take it.’

The mud bubbled and belched. Tawny felt it creeping up around her breasts. Moving an inch was like trying to lift a car. She let the mud claim her.

I’m going to die. I’m going to die in a horrible stinking bog and no one will ever find me. No one will know what happened to me because we’ll never be found.

This wasn’t meant to happen. She was Tawny Lascelles. She was beautiful.

She had wound up no better than a pig—a pig with painted toenails!

‘Got it? Now take a deep breath, as deep as you can.’

Tawny shook her head, the only part of her still free. No. No, she couldn’t!

‘I won’t let you go. You’re going under and once you’re under you need to stay as flat as possible so I can draw you towards me.’

‘I can’t. I can’t! I can’t do it!’

‘You have to.’

The trouble was that she couldn’t relax her breath enough to get a lungful. Air was coming short and quick, blood burning in her chest. If she held it for more than two seconds she would pass out. The sludge sucked.

The first things it filled were her nostrils. The mud was surprisingly cold, and stank of rotten eggs and decomposition. It leached into every orifice, syrupy, gelatinous, barely liquid. Even through her closed lids she sensed the absolute dark of this macabre underground and gripped as tight as she could to her lifeline, the flimsy wire, terrified it would break, on
the end of which she pictured Angela Silvers in that heavenly sphere called daylight, the jungle, anything to be back in the jungle …

Oxygen was running out. Her heart smacked against her ribs. Her ears plugged with mud. It leaked between her lips.

The cord was running between her fingers; she was losing it, she was fading …

Images reared, hideous as gargoyles. Cruel images she had locked away for fear their resurrection would choke her. She couldn’t die here.

I’m a survivor … remember? Remember what happened, Tawny Linden?

Yes, she remembered.

She remembered escaping the dancing bar that chill January night, boarding the bus, her make-up smudged as she shivered in her borrowed coat. She remembered fleeing back to Sunnydale, a poor little small-town girl ready to admit defeat, to accept that the life she’d dreamed of would never come to fruition. She remembered weeping in expectancy of the reunion, a safe place, finally, after all she’d endured, but it wasn’t to be. Her family, bitter and blank, as if she were a stranger, telling her she had betrayed them and was no longer their daughter, their sister, she was
nothing
to them; and her hot, stinging tears, begging them to take her back,
please, please, please take me back …

You’re dead to us
, her family said.
Never come here again.
Oh, she remembered that.

She had sought refuge on the streets, hitching her way upstate as fast as she hitched her skirt. Men found her pretty; she lived to see another day.

Then one night, three of them, high on crack, their heavy boots tripping across her sleeping rough and she closed her mind and soul to their clawing hands but she could not close
her body. She had endured it before; all through the Rams she had endured it. But this was different. Fierce. Endless. At the end of her road, desolate and alone and utterly without hope, Tawny Linden passed out … and woke up in a hospital bed.

She never told staff what had brought her there. Could not admit the shame and humiliation of the years. But, at her lowest point, she found her deepest strength: a kernel that refused to back down, that had to triumph whatever it took. Tawny could not sink any more, and if that didn’t mean heartache then it meant freedom.
Ambition.
She could become anything she wanted—but what? In the mirror she spied her bruised reflection, pretty but torn—and a light in her eyes, a savage light that made her extraordinary.

One day, flicking through a magazine, she locked on a world-famous model. That was it. That was her destiny. She would become the most ravishing, successful catwalk kitten in the history of fashion. She would seek revenge on all the people who had wronged her—her family, Nathan, the guys at the Rams, the freak with a stammer, the men who’d assaulted her—by defying them all.

A trip to LA and a queue of castings and that was it: the rise had begun. She would never forget the first thing the owner at Thunder Models had said:

You’re the most incredible girl I’ve ever seen.

She had come so far. If she could survive that, she wasn’t dying now.

No way.

This wasn’t Tawny Linden any more: this was Tawny Lascelles.

Fresh air hit her lungs. Tawny slumped onto the earth, gasping and coughing the rancid peat from her mouth and nostrils. She heaved for breath, her body weighted with what felt like half a ton of mud.

She lay on her back, arms cast wide, her chest rising and falling.

‘What’s going on?’

Mitch’s voice broke out of the forest. Tawny wrestled onto her elbows, her eyes gleaming blue from the crusted, black grime of her face. Her hair was matted in thick, glooping tendrils, Medusa-like, a creature emerged from the deep.

‘Tawny went for a swim,’ said Angela.

She helped the model to her feet, smothered in muck from top to toe.

‘Come on,’ she led the way, ‘and let’s stick to the trees this time.’

Little sleep was had that night. By the time the trio returned to the wreck, it was getting dark. Hulking shadows pooled beneath the trees.

Water sustained them, though all were aware it was a dwindling source. At twilight Eve found three coconuts pitted into the sand, which they prised open with the knife, thirstily devouring their contents and carving the fruit up between them.

Nobody objected to the beach relocation. The darkness in the jungle reminded them all of the crash, and with a new vista came revived hope.

All night they watched the far-off horizon, searching for the light of a boat or an approaching plane. The black canvas, swirling towards dawn into a palette of purple and orange, seemed an artificial sky that smelted in the climbing sun.

No one came.

38

America

‘C
alm down, Joanie! They’ll find him; they will!’

Sketch Falkner watched Kevin’s mother rampage through the Bel Air mansion, her face wild and tear-stained and her hair a ravaged nest.

The TV droned on in the background, a terrible harbinger and a flashing circus of despair. Search planes were being sent over the region. Boats had been dispatched. The aircraft’s final communications were being analysed.

Out on the street, photographers and reporters teemed. Sketch had almost run a gang of them down on his way through, their clamouring and battering relentless and frightening. The tragedy had made monsters of them. This was a Hollywood movie sprung gruesomely to life, a genuine icon for every starring role. On the fringes of the calamity, the press grappled for their part in the story, the biggest the century would see. All across the world similar scenes played out. Families of the missing—managers, lovers, husbands, wives—were being hounded for a comment, and against those closed doors the media assailed the next rung: distant cousins, ex-boyfriends, old bosses, classmates, anyone and everyone who could give it that punch of emotion,
who could speak of the despair and disbelief assailing the nation.

Sketch was in shock. Disasters on this scale just didn’t happen. Not to people like them. Not to Kevin. Kevin, his boy wonder, his protégé, his surrogate son …

‘This is your fault!’ Joan was bawling. ‘You made him go!’

Kevin’s puck face danced in front of his eyes. The last time they had seen him.

‘Joanie—’

‘How could you do it?’ She was frantic. ‘I said to him at the airport, I said,
Kevin, baby, are you sure you want to go through with this?
And he said you were on his back about it, and what choice did he have?
You made him go!
’

Sketch grabbed her wrists as she thrashed and writhed. Joan was manic.

‘Now look what’s happened! My prince is dead!’

‘Kevin isn’t dead, do you hear me?
Kevin isn’t dead.’
Sketch calmed her sufficiently to proffer a glass of water, but Joan slapped it away, causing it to jettison across a priceless Spanish suede futon he had picked out for Christmas. She launched the tumbler after it, smashing it against a trophy showcase.

‘We have to remain calm,’ Sketch said.

‘
Calm?
’ Joan’s face was a twisted mask. ‘Don’t you see what’s staring us in the face? They’re gone! They’re drowned!’

‘We don’t know that.’

‘I don’t care what the news says—they’re lying to us; it’s all lies!’

Sketch drew her close. Joan’s strength sapped out of her and she collapsed.

‘We don’t know the facts,’ he said. ‘They’re doing everything they can.’

‘I want my baby!’ Joan sobbed. ‘
I want my baby back!
’

‘I know you do—but, Joanie, this will all be over in a matter of hours. They’ll bring Kevin home; you’ll see. Right now he’s probably in a lifeboat someplace, catching a suntan! He’ll tell us everything when he gets here—and he’ll need you to be strong for him, OK? He’ll need you to look after him.’

Joan pulled back, sodden with grief, her red eyes wide.

‘You swear?’ she gulped. ‘You promise?’

‘It’s an ocean,’ Sketch said, with a damn sight more confidence than he felt, ‘and some freaking islands. How hard can it be?’

Noah Lawson hadn’t seen Orlando Silvers since he was seventeen.

Physically, Angela’s brother was as he remembered—the thick black hair, the richly tanned skin, the regal features and the air of riches untold—but never had Orlando been associated with this kind of fear. Unshaven and hollow-eyed, he paced the kitchen in the Boston house Noah had last set foot in nine years ago.