by M. T Hill
Shep holds his fingers to his head.
Kapper coughs. ‘Shep…’
Shep touches his crown. His hair is all but gone. He rubs his scalp, finds the matted little tufts that remain. No pattern to it: only nature. It’s a process. The way it’s been all along. If you disturb a nest, you take responsibility for its children.
Shep understands what he’s done to the island. What’s happened to them all. What’s happening to Kapper. The way Kapper’s body will swell, shed hair, like his has.
The big man’s nose scrunches up. ‘What?’ he asks. ‘What’s up?’
Shep clears his throat. ‘You can see it,’ he gets out, throat boiling. ‘My hair.’
‘Course I can. You’re fucked.’
‘Ta,’ Shep says.
‘Ta?’
‘I haven’t lost the plot.’
Kapper comes back to the cot. ‘No one’s said that. And I saw that hornet, you know. In the end.’
Shep reaches over with his hand. Holds it open, fingers splayed. Unsure what else to do.
Doubtful, Kapper takes it. A slow interlacing. Another moment to clasp. This close, Shep can see how Kapper’s skin is already lined with black filament, that the hair on his wristbone is vanishing.
‘I’m sorry,’ Shep says.
Kapper shakes his head and squeezes. No accident this time. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he says. Now he’s Shep’s brother by blood, not only through jacking.
The Journalist
They approach Vertex Island by mid-morning, darting through cloudless sky towards thousands of flashing red lights that describe the scaffold’s bulk. But rapt as Freya is, there’s no time to admire the view. The plane dips sharply for the short runway; Freya kneads her thighs and wishes she were religious. Even the cabin crew look worried by their angle of approach.
The rear left wheels connect. The jet sticks in, distorted crops of the scaffold flashing through her window. She bumps shoulders with an otherwise silent woman next to her.
When the plane brakes to a halt on the runway, Freya exhales.
‘Welcome to Vertex,’ the pilot says. ‘Local time is ten-thirty. Current temperature – pretty bloody warm.’
Two long flights in twenty-four hours have all but finished Freya. She’s lethargic and senses a grimy film on her body, and almost can’t stand.
‘I need a beer,’ the woman says, drawing photography equipment from under her seat.
‘Long day,’ Freya agrees. ‘I wouldn’t say no.’
The photographer hauls herself up. ‘If we don’t drown in sweat first.’
* * *
The flight attendant opens the door. Hydraulics and sliding parts. The suffocating heat collides with a bizarrely moreish ocean and chemical smell.
The plane stands on a recently surfaced runway, and the runway lies in the gossamer shadow of the tower scaffold. Off the plane, half-blinded by brilliant light, Freya stands in awe, neck craned, following the tower’s silhouetted form from base to shining apex. It’s exactly as Shep’s forum pictures showed, finely wrought yet brutalistic in sum. As the other journalists alight and crowd around her, cooing similarly, Freya counts weldspark flashes in the structure’s sides. She thrills to spot red and yellow blobs up there in the mesh – a crew at work.
‘All that cash,’ the photographer comments at her shoulder. ‘Madness.’
‘It is,’ Freya says. But truthfully, it’s not the investment that amazes her. It’s the craft. The will of it. Where would you even start? The scaffold tower’s height is already intimidating, and yet the tower in its final form will be monstrous. This, the ‘beta’, is the smallest Russian doll in the set that will encase it, layer up around it. And when the lift cable is actually attached and the satellite anchor goes into orbit, it’ll be more overwhelming still. How many cranes had it taken? How many people? How many individual rivets had been driven through its body?
It might just be impossible to write about. It might be that she has to write around it.
‘Would you do it?’ the photographer asks.
‘What, sorry?’
‘Work up there.’
Freya doesn’t know. Maybe she’d have to stay long enough to grasp the tower’s effect on her psyche. Going by the press literature, she’ll be closing on eighty years old when it starts running. Does feeling so insignificant before it – so short-lived – not make this tower even more oppressive? She gulps, and a bubble of panic pops in her gullet. Alien. The word that keeps popping up from the edges. The word she can’t bear to think, valid as it is. The scaffold is already so vast, so intricate and deliberate, so artificial, that it’s otherworldly. Like a crash-landed spaceship, or an upended alien city.
‘This whole place stinks,’ the photographer adds thoughtfully, ‘like baby shit.’
And the plane they arrived on screams away.
After a short wait, a four-by-four pulls up to the runway. A glum-looking woman in designer sunglasses climbs down from its passenger side. To Freya she’s every bit the PR: dark two-piece suit, feline contouring, hair scraped into a tight bun. Bright yellow heels nauseating against the blasted scrub. Freya admires her instantly: here’s a woman deliberately at odds with this island. And practical or not, the shoes are fun.
‘Good morning,’ the PR says. She’s swaying a little, which Freya finds distracting. ‘How’re we all feeling on this lovely day in paradise?’
The group murmurs a response.
‘You’ll spend the next two days in my care,’ the PR says, before telling them all about Vaughan arriving this evening ‘for supper’ after a guided tour. Sweat rolls from Freya’s fringe. She wonders where Shep and his crew are right now.
‘If you’d like to follow me,’ the PR says. And the whole group goes along with the charade, the photographers discussing loudly which of their lenses will get the whole tower in shot.
They pass no workers on their way to the next stop, a ‘bar and restaurant’ made of two shipping containers whose fenced-off ‘roof garden’ is accessed by steel walkway. Like the PR, the building is out of place on Vertex, doubtless installed for the junket in some nod to luxury, an abstraction of urban living. Freya can’t pinpoint why, but it makes her uneasy – a feeling that only grows when they go inside to find three exhausted-looking staff handing out paper fans. Ten minutes later, the same three staff stand mixing breakfast cocktails behind a kind of faux-rustic bar. The youngest actually looks ill – he has sores around his mouth and is sweating profusely.
As technical videos loop on the container’s ribbed walls, Freya sneaks away from the group and climbs up to the sparse roof. She sits on a scrap of fake grass beneath a parasol. The shade here is pleasant; the view overlooks the runway, the tower’s base pad. A moment of quiet, a chance to reflect on the fact that, tiredness aside, she’s actually made it here, to admit to herself that Shep is somewhere close.
She spaces her fan and wafts it around her face. Would she spot him, or he her? She’s hopeful for many reasons, but if the island really counts as a city, then in cities you only ever bump into the people you never want to see. What are the chances of him just appearing? In two days? She’ll have to look for opportunities.
Freya is about to finish her drink when the PR’s heels ring in the stairwell. She looks on, bemused, as the PR comes across the roof and dallies at the edge. Here the PR reapplies lipstick, before circling Freya and sitting down. She pushes her sunglasses up onto her head.
‘Taking a moment?’ the PR asks.
Freya swallows. The woman’s lipstick is smeared all over her cheeks and teeth. Her eyes are glassy, distant.
‘All this… bullshit,’ the PR slurs.
Freya tries to humour her, but a fake laugh isn’t enough.
The PR isn’t fazed, either way. She yawns and asks where Freya came from. ‘Actually, hold that thought,’ the PR adds. ‘I need to piss.’ She stands, hutching up her skirt. Freya winces as if the PR might do it right there.
The PR notices herse
lf, grimaces. She says, ‘Maybe later. You should steal some toilet tissue and hydration sachets from downstairs, by the way. I haven’t passed a shit for three days now.’
‘Right,’ Freya says, and taps her cheek. ‘I don’t mean to be funny, but you’ve – your make-up’s run.’
The PR grins oafishly. Pads her face. ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘We can fix it.’ She returns to the stairwell, skirt still up round her waist.
Freya sits there, staring into space, wondering what just happened.
* * *
From the bar, the PR lolls towards the tower’s base pad, the junket in tow. Freya tries to distract herself by taking in the scaffold’s construction, conjures the sense of climbing it. Hard metal. Cold metal. Cutting metal. How would she record how it looks and sounds? Closer to its formwork, the similes come easily: Eiffel, Burj Khalifa, Freedom. Babel, if she had to nail the cliché. But close up, the similes start to break down. The tower isn’t there to be admired, doing that fetishizes the work of the people involved. Instead, it’s a totem to their labour. It’s taken dedication, planning, precision to get this far. Sacrifice, no doubt. Very often, Freya knows, climbers have to suspend beds high up on mountains. Does Shep do that here? Is he up there right now, making tea and taking photos? Taking a slash off the side?
No sooner than she’s pictured him, made some element of the tower understandable through him, the crocodile of journalists veers away. A small commotion has broken out ahead. Even from a distance it’s clear that something has happened under the tower. Except it’s like no one else has noticed, much less cares. The rest of them, in their bright red helmets, are too distracted by the interplay of light and steel above.
Freya drops to the rear of the group to try and get a closer look.
‘I’ve… I’ve been told we’ll now take you up for a viewing at last light,’ the PR tells them. Her voice isn’t solid enough and the disquiet spreads – everyone in the press junket glancing at each other. The PR woman smiles. ‘It’ll be worth the wait. Now, if you can follow me on to the crew quarters, we’ll demonstrate how a blend of advanced catering solutions and state-of-the-art building services has created a comfortable living experience for our hardworking colleagues. If you’d like to share any pictures at this point, please be sure to tag Vaughan Holdings’ construction partner, Vertex Management. There’s free Wi-Fi inside.’
Freya stays at the rear, peering at the base pad. A group of workers stand around a lump of equipment on a sheet of blue tarpaulin. The heat-haze makes it hard to see their faces, but they’re jeering and shouting, and most of them are topless, some stripped right down to their underwear. As she watches, they take it in turns to kneel down and slap or punch the tarpaulin, before standing up again, covered in oil or paint, which they smear across their bodies.
Freya carefully steps away from the departing group. They’re not only smearing themselves in this stuff – they’re dancing. One of them, a short man, has removed his helmet and is tugging violently at his hair.
Someone grips Freya’s arm, spins her away. It’s the photographer from the jet.
‘Don’t,’ she hisses, dragging Freya back into the group. And Freya turns cold.
‘What?’ Freya asks. ‘Why?’
‘Shut up,’ the photographer mutters. ‘Act normal. Wait.’
Freya feels slow. Dread-weighted. As the group swallows her up, she looks back. It might be the haze, the light. It might be the heat. Something about the bulk of the equipment on the tarpaulin had seemed wrong, as if it wasn’t mechanical at all.
* * *
The crew cabins are neat and numerous. Stacked in rows, padlocked from the outside, many with neat red crosses taped across their doors. A worker sleeps on the cracked ground outside one of them, hardhat tilted over his face. Freya can’t help concentrating on his chest to check he’s actually breathing. She doesn’t see it rise, but tells herself to stop being paranoid.
The group marches up to a large teepee-like structure attached to an outbuilding, generators running at the back. The photographer looks distracted, and Freya is desperate to ask how she’d overreacted.
‘An army marches on its stomach,’ the PR says, ‘so Mr Vaughan hired Michelin-starred chefs to design a high-energy, super-nutritious diet for our workforce. In turn, we keep smiles on their faces.’ She pauses then, well-rehearsed. All Freya can picture is Shep chewing with his mouth open. ‘Let’s go inside, shall we?’
After the canteen, the journalists bunch into an immaculate landscaped garden. It’s obscenely out of place – an effect topped off with a KEEP OFF THE GRASS sign.
‘Here,’ the PR starts, ‘we’ll give you a quick tour of the crew kitchen. Designed in collaboration with the University of Wales, this facility boasts vanguard technology including the latest advances in automated cooking.’
The group piles inside, and Freya seizes the chance to confront the photographer.
‘What’s going on?’
The photographer’s eyes are red. ‘I saw him,’ she whispers.
‘Saw who?’ Freya stumbles.
The photographer tilts her head to the tower.
‘Who did you see?’ Freya urges.
The photographer wipes her eyes. Her strong body odour takes Freya back to fever-dreams on some ancient holiday. Possibly her last with the girls before she’d moved in with her ex.
‘Outside the bar. Before. When you were… oh God, I saw him. Falling.’
Freya grabs the doorframe. ‘He fell? From where?’
‘He’ – the photographer sobs it – ‘he was looking at me.’ She lowers her face. ‘He was laughing.’
Freya takes the photographer’s hand. ‘Are you sure?’
‘How did no one else hear?’
‘Why didn’t you tell someone?’
‘I did. The PR. I tried.’
‘What did she say?’
‘I was lying. That I’m jet lagged.’
‘Bloody hell,’ Freya says. ‘We need to find someone else – now.’
The photographer drops her kitbag to her knees, reaches inside. ‘I was shooting the tower. Here.’ She loads an image on the back of her camera, enlarges it with two fingers. A crop of the tower, and dead-centre, blurry but discernible, a streak of blue.
Freya wrests the camera from her. She spreads two fingers and the image magnification increases. She holds the camera up. She hands it back. ‘Maybe it was loose tarpaulin,’ she says. She has to believe it. She has to believe that the tarp’s contours, the way it’s falling, don’t make it look like there’s somebody inside.
• • •
The smell of the kitchen worsens Freya’s faintness. Her knees are watery. At the front, by the ovens, the group has folded around the PR. Off to one side, the photographer is in a worsening state. Freya motions at waist level for her to go back outside.
‘What’s the matter with her?’ another photographer whispers.
Freya ignores him. She’s looking for someone, anyone, to alert. The PR droning on about square meals a day, about the logistics of their operation. ‘Supplies reach port every few days, and your trip happily coincides with a ship arriving tomorrow morning, weather permitting…’
Freya notices an arrowed sign on the wall. INFIRMARY. There’ll be someone in there to help, surely.
A fresh surge of adrenaline. Freya mumbles an apology, some vague allusion to the toilets, and breaks away. She moves through overlit rooms filled with shrink-wrapped equipment, glinting surfaces. It’s difficult to adjust to the contrast, the sterile grey. She follows a corridor, shoes slapping polished floor, and calls ‘Hello?’ and still there’s no one. No signs of life. And now a ward whose bay curtains are all drawn. Light sluicing in from slats in the roof.
All of the bay curtains, she realises, but one.
Freya’s world accelerates. It takes an admission to step closer to him, one hand up in lame defence – another to see she’s already too late, that she’s failed him. Like Stephen and Alba before him, Shep
being wired into this cot is confirmation enough that the bunker has done its work.
Alarmed cries fill the ward around her. She’s magnetised now, and they won’t – they can’t – stop her. She’s nearly by his side, and someone is shouting more aggressively, and Freya shakes off a grasping hand and trips, nearly crashes over Shep’s bed. This is how to end her story. This is how she understands. Centimetres from him, where Shep’s condition brings a momentary relief – he can’t have been the person who fell from the tower outside. He lies depleted in a sack, sewn with monitoring equipment. His face is sallow and patchy with bristles. His hair looks hacked-at, the scalp raw, with stains like birthmarks splotched from his forehead to his crown. A knot of dark veins over one ear.
‘Shep?’
He smells deathly sweet, and Freya knows the smell. It was the same at Stephen’s burial tree.
‘Shep!’
But Shep is unconscious, and when she’s sure her fingers will brush his face, rouse him, the security team are on her.
* * *
Later that evening, Freya lies awake on her cabin bunk, reading her notes. She’s been sanctioned, segregated, locked in. Grounded, literally, as the rest of the press group are taken up the tower.
In a way – beyond the heavy-handed security guards shutting her in here until morning – Freya’s situation is simple. If only she’d left things exactly as they were: a man dies after heavy drinking. If only there’d been enough roots down to keep the ground from shifting. Her infatuation has become an obsession, and writing her notes is compulsive, like listening to the same piece of music over and over again. She’s moving towards a conclusion she doesn’t understand but hopes to expose, and she doesn’t yet know what she’s sacrificed to try. Is she a different woman? Is she redeemable? And there he is again – Shep. Shep, so forbidding and dangerous on this island; Shep who, in different circumstances, would’ve been a glancing acquaintance. What would she be doing if they’d never met? If she’d followed Aisha down to London all those months back? Would she have read about Stephen’s death with a fleeting sadness, then moved on? Would she have noticed at all?
