by Rick Wood
They always seem so great once they’ve gone.
16
2 hours, 5 minutes
Tense, turgid looks exchange between the final three captives. Looks that they attempt to disguise, but seep through like water through sand. Looks of doubt, of distrust, of wariness.
Milo’s death was the curve ball the remaining survivors needed to evoke their suspicions.
They are all promptly aware that this may be the end of their lives, and with every hour, those chances get higher and the odds get worse.
They started at five to one.
Then four to one.
Now there’s three.
Soon it will be fifty-fifty.
That is, if they survive the next hour.
Ashley.
Everly.
Tariq.
They know it has to be one of them.
Ashley decides to take charge. He stands, giving an air of composure that he hasn’t recognised in the others – a defiant, definite, decision-making mind taking over as he averts his eyes away from the corpses either side of his feet. But the moment he goes to speak with the decisive voice he has mentally coerced himself into, he looks at Everly and Tariq and he remembers – it’s one of them.
Or so they were told.
He backs down.
Each of them find their bodies physically aching. Drowning in the fatigue of anxiety. A tired state mixed with an alert state can produce a headache that would rival any dirty hangover.
It is said that wrinkles are evidence of a good life lived – that they are evidence that one has experienced life to the full. This includes all the ups and downs, but I imagine that it’s the downs that cause most of these wrinkles. And if that’s the case, then they are ageing by the second.
And they are feeling it.
Feeling their muscles limpening, feeling their energy drain. The adrenaline is long gone now and all that is left is despair.
There was always that possibility in the background of their thoughts that this was fake. That this was staged. That they were somehow being pranked. That a television show presenter was going to burst in at any moment, laughing with the composure of a lunatic, pointing out where each camera was hidden.
But that possibility is now deceased.
The pieces of skull and brain and skin and face and blood and puss and hair and violence that decorate the walls following Milo’s demise is enough evidence for them to presume that the threat is not only strong, or that it is sickeningly pertinent – but that it is inevitable, and there is little they can do about it.
Ashley leaps to his feet and does what he should have done two hours ago.
He bashes every wall, stomps every bit of floor, leaps to every inch of the ceiling. He attempts to barge open their confines, his thrashing echoing around the metallic box, his perseverance failing to wear thin. Multiple actions of pressing his ear to the wall assured him there is hollow space outside their containment, and he is determined to find his way out.
“It’s no good,” Everly weakly speaks.
“What?” Ashley retorts.
“It’s no good. Whoever’s got us in here has got us in here. There’s no escape.”
“Well at least I’m fuckin’ doing something!” Ashley stands back and looks at the wall, then continues bashing against it. He has always been someone to take action; even at school, he’d get in trouble for standing up to teachers he thought were unfair. He despises people who are happy to just sit back and accept things as they are – his steroid abuse notwithstanding. “We’ve been playing this all wrong. It’s trying to make us argue. What we need to do is find a way to escape from it.”
“It?”
Ashley stops and realises he has been referring to their situation, and the villain who placed them in said predicament, as ‘it.’ Not he, or she – it. And this only highlights further to Ashley how little hope they have.
“Guys,” says Tariq, squatting over Milo, taking something from the corpse’s pocket.
It is a note, and as he reveals it, the other two gather over his shoulder.
“Why’s it in his pocket?” Everly asks.
The question lingers like fog on the air.
“Maybe he put it there,” Tariq suggests. “Or maybe whoever put us in here put it there.”
“I’m pretty sure that wasn’t there a few minutes ago,” Ashley points out.
They look at each other sheepishly, exchanging looks of suspicion. Each of them rack their minds to remember where the others had been in the last few minutes. Trying to decide who may have had an unnoticed opportunity to place a letter in the corpse of this racist imbecile.
And it doesn’t escape Ashley’s attention that Tariq is the one who discovered it.
“Both of you turn out your pockets,” Ashley demands. He does it himself to prove that there are no further notes.
Tariq and Everly quickly follow. Nothing.
Ashley contemplates what to do next.
“Surely we should read the–” Tariq goes to say.
“No,” Ashley interrupts, snatching the note and throwing it to the floor. “If one of us is planting notes on the others, then they have to have those notes somewhere.”
“What do you suggest?” Everly asks.
Ashley hesitates. Sighs.
“We search each other.”
“Okay,” Tariq agrees, and holds his hands out.
“No. Patting down won’t do it. We need to be thorough.”
“How thorough?”
“We strip. Let the others look in our clothes. Show each other our bodies. Show we have nothing to hide.”
“I’m not stripping off in front of you two,” Everly objects, her eyes narrowing, both demeaned and degraded by the suggestion.
“It’s not a sex thing, don’t get excited. I don’t give a shit what your tits look like.” He pulls a face like Everly is the most ridiculous person in the world. “But if one of us is the killer, the easy way to know would be to check, right? Yeah?”
“Go to hell. I am not taking my clothes off in front of you.”
She folds her arms, glaring at him with such intent she practically pierces a hole through his chest.
Ashley looks at his watch, then back up at her.
“We don’t have time for this.”
Her arms remain folded as her head turns away.
Ashley steps forward. Stands intimidatingly over her. He’s a boxer, and he knows how to cast someone in a shadow that will make them feel small – but Everly stands tall. Ever the feminist.
“Maybe you protest too much,” Ashley says in a slow, sinister voice.
“Maybe we need to–” Tariq attempts, but is ignored and interrupted.
“I’ll go first,” Ashley decides.
He takes his top off. He watches Everly out the corner of his eye, sure that she won’t be able to help affording herself a glance before shifting her eyes away, repulsed at herself for doing so. His biceps are thick, his pecs are sculpted, and his abs are expertly moulded; he’s used to women looking at him.
He removes his tracksuit bottoms next, leaving just his underwear. As he does this, he throws his top and trousers to the other two. Tariq inspects every part of the clothing, then hands it to Everly. With a look of preposterous redundancy, she takes the clothes and looks herself.
“You still have something on,” she points out, then instantly regrets it.
This is the point Ashley would usually stop.
Steroids have a way of making some of you bigger, and some of you smaller.
But he is committed. His life is resting on the removal of his underwear and, as ridiculous as that thought makes him feel, he has to go through with it.
He removes his Calvin Klein boxers and throws them at the others. He turns his head away so he doesn’t have to look at them, so he doesn’t see the laughs, the giggles, the agape mouths in astonishment that something could be that small.
Fucking steroids, he thinks.
&nb
sp; He puts his hands in the air and turns around, showing his round arse cheeks, and eventually returning to full frontal.
“Satisfied?” Ashley asks.
The others blankly nod.
“Right, give me my clothes back.”
They throw his clothes back and he returns them to his shivering body.
“Right, Everly, we’ll be kind. Tariq, you go next.”
With a glance of shame to Everly, he bows his head. He has been married for most of his life and no new woman has seen him naked in a long time. He feels guilty, as if he is betraying his wife somehow – but also feels inadequate, like he doesn’t want to be judged.
After all, how would you feel taking your clothes off in front of two strangers with two corpses at your feet and the pressing urgency of death lurking on the next hour?
Tariq shyly presents his torso, perfectly preserved as what magazines have come to know as ‘the dad bod.’ He throws his ill-fitting chinos to the others, along with his white briefs. They inspect, allow him to rotate, and return his clothes. He feels glad that their expression didn’t falter, and that he needn’t feel judged.
“Okay, honey,” Ashley says, immediately regretting using the condescending term to address her, knowing this will inevitably make her less responsive. “It’s time.”
She folds her arms and gives him the look his mum used to give him when he arrived home drunk out of his face at fifteen. It is what she termed ‘the stink eye’, and he has come to know the expression well.
“You can give me that face all you want,” he says. “If you ain’t guilty, you’ll do it.”
“Or maybe if I’m not willing to be your stripper then I will die with some dignity.”
“Come on,” Tariq says in a voice barely audible. “Please.”
She looks to Tariq and rolls her eyes, aggravated. Annoyed at everything. At Ashley for proposing the stupid idea, at Tariq for persuading her, and at herself for agreeing to undress before two blokes. She knows if the killer is her or not, she does not need to prove anything – except she does, and she knows this, deep down.
Her vest comes off first, getting caught in the steel contraption fixed around her neck, which only exasperates her temper further. She throws the vest at Ashley with the vigour of a baseball pitcher and the aggression of a UFC fighter. He takes it without breaking his face of steel and checks it.
Next, she removes her jeans and throws them at him. Scars from years of self-abuse glisten on the inside of her thigh – the necessity to hide them does not come up much to a single mother who works at the checkouts. Intimacy is something she is rarely afforded. She feels embarrassed, and guilty for feeling so. But it comes as a relief that the others don’t seem to care.
She covers her bra with her arms.
“We still got a bit to go,” Ashley points out.
“Really?” she says, shaking her head with a face full of spite.
“Come on, just get this over with.”
With a scowl, she moves her arms to her back – which may have only been a small, insignificant movement, but still displays all the disgust and anger she is currently feeling – then she allows her bra to drop. Her underwear comes next, and she thought she could not feel worse than she did when she woke up in this room, but she can, and she does.
Ashley and Tariq are prompt in returning her clothes, and they all turn away and face the wall as she redresses.
An uncomfortable silence descends on the room. A feeling that they are truly lost.
No one had anything to hide. No more hidden notes.
But what did they expect?
For it to be that easy?
“What now then, genius?” Everly spits.
“I’m sorry,” Ashley says without any sincerity. “We had to know.”
“Well now you know. And I know you’re a dick.”
“Hey, I don’t want to be here any more than you do.”
“So what’s the next move then, big shot?”
Ashley’s mouth moves but no words are produced.
“How about we read the note?” Tariq suggests.
The note. Ashley had forgotten. He picks it up.
They each gather around him, as much as their chains allow them. Close enough to read, but far enough so as not to feel anyone’s skin or breath upon their own.
Two down, three to go.
But I am still one of you.
You seem to be rather useless at this, so how about I give you a clue?
To figure out who I am, figure out who has less to hide.
Good luck.
Their eyes each rise and meet each other’s.
“But we know none of us has anything to hide,” Tariq says. “We just proved it.”
“Perhaps it doesn’t mean physically,” Ashley says.
Everly huffs once more, folds her arms, turns around and walks waywardly to the other side of the room, stepping over Maya’s leg like it was a twig in her path, or a toy her child had discarded on the living room floor.
“Okay, so let’s try and figure this out,” Ashley says. “Who are you?”
17
Everly
I sit on the same seat with the same numb arse cheeks with the same fake smile I wear every other same day.
It’s not glamorous.
It never was.
But it pays the bills.
It doesn’t pay them as well as it did when I…
Well…
At least I can preserve my integrity. That’s what I tell myself. But when a customer comes up with a pack of bananas without a barcode and has a go at me for it – that’s when I’d trade it all back in and go back to that life.
I have a child now.
A child without a father.
I’m not the Virgin Mary. Far from it. I’m just a woman with a past full of mistakes.
But he isn’t one of them.
And he’s why. Why I resist my past, yet dread my future.
His mother can’t be known for that anymore. She can’t be. She has to show him what real hard work is, what a real job is. She has to show him what life he should choose. She has to set an example… She has to…
I break down for the fifth time this shift. I feel tears pushing at the corners of my eyes and I will them away. A customer hands me their card to pay and I can feel them accumulating, ready to dribble down my cheeks, ready to disgrace my face with humiliation, to show me up, to give away what is beneath.
But I never give away what is beneath.
I don’t know which job is more degrading. One where I have to wear an apron at a checkout, or one where I have to wear…
Let’s just say Pretty Woman made it look a lot more glamorous than it is.
A couple come to the checkout. The woman unloads all their shopping from the trolley. It’s a weekly shop, and I can tell they have kids from the substantial amount of food. They buy the kinds of things I buy for my boy: fruit shoots, ice cream, tiny yoghurts.
He can’t keep his eyes off me.
I know it’s not because of my looks. I’m the oldest thirty-three-year-old there is. Sure, I’m not ugly I guess, but the baby weight clings to me like a joey in its mother kangaroo’s pouch. Bags sit under my eyes like an eternal shadow. My hands shake under too much weight, tired from a life of abusing my privilege.
I’ve never been a drug addict. I was high-class. A thousand pounds an hour. But a high-class client doesn’t make for any more pleasant desires.
But he’s still staring at me.
And then I realise why. His face becomes familiar. And I sit here with the knowledge that could wreck his life and his marriage with one sentence from me.
He’s still trying to figure out where from. He can’t stop wondering. I can see his thoughts trickling through his mind as he’s trying to remember me.
Eventually, he speaks.
“Do I know you from somewhere?” he asks.
Yes. You do. You fucked me over your self-assembled Ikea kitchen table that you cho
se with your wife, after paying me in cash that she and your kid know nothing about.
“No, I don’t think so,” I tell him.
I continue scanning through their stuff.
He’s persistent. If he realised where he knows me, he wouldn’t be, but he keeps going. I almost want to show him. I almost want him to realise so she can know what a filthy prick he is.
“No, I do, I honestly do. I just can’t place you.”
“Maybe she’s an ex-girlfriend,” his wife jokes, and they both laugh that horrible fake laugh married couples do when they want to project an image of their perfect life onto others.
“No, wait a minute, I know where,” he says, flashes of memory pushing to the surface of his thoughts. He probably has images now. Flickers of images.
Then it hits him.
And his mouth is suddenly open.
He doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t want to tell his wife, but he doesn’t want to let this moment pass. How brilliant. A woman he paid an exceedingly generous amount of money to shag now scans his chicken through the checkout, looking like a worn-down, crumpled piece of shit.
“You figured it out now?” I ask, part of me wanting to drop it, part of me wanting to show him up.
Part of me just wanting to get through this shift, but a bigger part of me wanting her to know what a scumbag he is.
“Er… No…”
“Yes, you have. I can tell. Why don’t you say where it is you recognise me from?”
“Er,” he glances at his wife, who slows down her packing of the shopping, intrigued. Then he comes up with a lie, and gives me wide eyes as a prompt to go along with it. “Your kid goes to my kid’s school, right? Yeah?”
He widens his eyes at me, indicating to me I should take part in the lie.
“No,” I say. “That’s not it.”
Part of me enjoys this more than I should. Part of me feels disgraced. This man has seen me naked. He knows what it feels like to be inside of me. He’s fucked me hard. He’s grabbed my hair and bent me over and tried slipping it into my arsehole despite my protestations. I hate him. I hate myself. I hate all of this. I hate this stupid job, my stupid life, his pathetic fucking lie and his pathetic fucking wife.
