by Victoria Fox
Shapes were coming through the forest. Voices: a rescue party.
Even in her delirium, or perhaps because of it, the thought crossed Tawny’s mind that one of them might be a hot guy. She hoped her mascara hadn’t run down her face, that her clothes weren’t too torn, that her tint hadn’t smudged and her hair wasn’t a total bush. She hoped there were no cameras. That no journalists that had gotten wind of it. Give her an hour, some time to reapply her lotions and potions because, right now, it wasn’t Tawny Lascelles in the middle of the jungle.
It was something … ugly. Something like Tawny Linden.
The scream turned into a burble. She would sue whoever was responsible for this so fast their asses dropped off, the airline, the pilots, the fucking organisation that had invited them out here in the first place, she would sue every goddamn party that had come within a thousand miles of this sonofabitch trip and, once she’d sued them, she would sue anyone who dared ask her a single fucking question about it until she’d had at least a year in a recuperation spa and was feeling back to her old self.
Her old self …
Tawny had a habit of never quite engaging with the scene she was in, rather always observing it, as if she were a spectator to the movie of her life. Here, now, she saw one person and one person only: the girl she used to be.
She crawled towards voices, rescue, return, and reached out to the light.
Senator Mitch Corrigan used his upper body to lever himself free from whatever was holding him. He expected the feeling to come straight back into his legs but it didn’t. He tried to move his toes. He had visions of a doctor, in a clean, pristine hospital back in Texas, knocking a spatula against a heel. Can you feel that? No. No, he couldn’t.
Mitch hauled out into the open. Outside, the heat was intense. The light was faint. The air pulsed. Why wasn’t he dead? Why was he still breathing?
The remainder of the cabin smouldered on the tangled, rotten floor. The supermodel was screaming, a constant alarm. The Italian was gone.
In the distance, three outlines were approaching.
Mitch strained to see. A woman and two men: an apparition, distorted beyond being human. Their movements were unnatural, the one in the middle taller, but stooped, his head lolling forward on his neck. Mitch had seen them before. Where from? Then he realised, and with it came relief, for there were no accidents.
These were the same creatures that had abducted him that night in 2012.
Blinking through the hallucination, Mitch backed up and slumped against a tree. You found me.
He waited to be taken. He always knew it would happen. Rossetti had known it would happen. If he would not go to them, they would bring him in.
‘Mitch?’ said a voice.
His addled brain told him it was Melinda. His wife, his best friend, as she had been on their wedding day twenty years ago, soft lips and warm hands, Melinda …
‘Mitch, it’s Angela, open your eyes.’
The dream evaporated. Reality hit.
34
The wreckage the others had been caught in carved an open space through the thicket. A hulking scar dashed back through the forest, a ghostly passage of flattened foliage and punched shrubs. Hazy, humid heat soaked the air. The surrounding wall of jungle creepers was dark as night, pockets of sun flashing through in winking bursts. So lofty was the canopy that it hurt to look up: a distant, dappled aperture to an out-of-reach sky. Down here, daylight barely penetrated.
Tawny’s screams had guided them. The supermodel was hugging her knees to her chest, her mouth an open gash of despair. Angela shook her. She screamed louder.
Angela slapped her round the face, eliciting a shocked yet fleeting silence.
‘Kill me,’ whimpered Tawny. ‘I’m begging you. Kill me now.’
‘Like hell I will. You’re stuck here like the rest of us.’
‘I thought you were them!’ Tawny cried. ‘Rescue!’
Angela dragged a stick through the ground. Her mom, Orlando, Luca, Dino, did they know yet what had happened? Noah. Right then she would have given up all hope of rescue for the chance to tell him she was all right. She could not stand the thought of his distress or his grief, of losing his smile for just one second: of his unhappiness.
‘They’re coming for us,’ Eve said. ‘Any second. Rescue is coming.’
Minutes passed. The heat was fat and cloying, busy with insects.
‘We need a plan,’ said Angela. She tacked on, ‘Just until they do.’
The cockpit was obliterated. Eve helped Angela lug the captain from the deck, reeling under his weight. She had never touched a corpse before and it surprised her how cold it was, even in the oven of the jungle. Across the clearing Tawny gagged, choking saliva onto the stinking ground.
They deposited the body behind a mound of earth.
‘We have to find the other one,’ said Eve. ‘The co-pilot. He might still be alive. He could help.’
‘How?’
‘Radio. Flares. Emergency supplies. I don’t know.’ Stuff she had read, random lines and warnings, anything to keep her moving, keep her doing, even if half of it was from some idiotic daytime movie she might have once seen. It didn’t matter. She was here. This was now. The others could do what they liked. They could scream and panic, they could freak out and fall apart, but not Eve. All she cared about was getting her baby home. She would take down anything and anyone who stood in her way.
‘What about the attendant,’ said Angela, ‘the woman?’
‘Her, too.’
Away from the others, Angela asked: ‘Are you OK? Is everything OK?’
Her meaning was clear. Eve pretended it wasn’t.
‘I’m fine.’
She didn’t stick around for the useless sympathy in Angela’s eyes, the same Silvers eyes that had regarded her pityingly over dinner at The Ivy the month before. Instead she turned, felt her weight on the ground, her roots in the soil, and glared darkly into the trees. We’re in this together. We don’t need anyone else.
Why should she? Eve never had.
Time drained. It felt like hours, but they couldn’t be sure. Eve’s was the only phone they could locate and she grappled with it, hoping against useless hope, as if the crumpled lump of metal might miraculously fix itself.
She thought of all her contacts hidden inside, the conversations, the emails, the arrangements to meet; the one time Orlando had put a single kiss on the end of his text message and she hadn’t commented on it, and anyway it had never happened again, but Eve had liked it and kept it where she deleted so many others.
She wanted her phone back to make those calls but she also longed to see those names, to prove she hadn’t imagined those people and those lives and that her own life thus far hadn’t been one long strange fantasy that was now at an end.
Across the clearing Jacob Lyle began to moan, turning his head, disorientated, as he broke into bursts of troubled consciousness. His injuries were severe. Angry red welts obscured his face, ragged wounds singed with black, the skin tender and raw. Celeste Cavalieri sat with him and took his hand. She spoke to him softly, in Italian. Gradually he returned to silence, a temporary peace.
Eve’s heart did not bleed. Sympathy was energy and she needed all she could get. Besides, in a way, Jacob was spared. He did not have to see it. He did not have to meet the nightmare.
The heat was incessant, the jungle a sweltering snare. Angela brought water from the tail, but the bottles went dry and in the hottest part of the day it was impossible to contemplate a return trek. Thirst tortured them.
They waited for the sound of helicopter blades: the charge of the search and the reassuring buzz of human conversation, the safety of stretchers and the medical team that would carry them all back to civilisation.
The helicopter blades didn’t come.
They waited to hear their names cried out.
Their names didn’t come.
They waited for the call of a ship.
The call didn’
t come.
Kevin said: ‘How long is it going to take?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Angela.
But she did know, then, that not all of them were going to make it out of here. Not all of them were going to survive.
35
Kevin snivelled. He stripped off his T-shirt. His narrow, bare chest glistened with muck and oil. ‘We’ll die here,’ he said. ‘We’re all going to die.’
‘You might,’ said Eve. ‘I’m not. They’re coming.’
‘When?’
‘Soon.’
‘How d’you know?’
‘We’ve got a US senator with us. This is going straight to the top. They’ll throw everything at it. It’ll be soon.’
Kevin swiped his tears away with the back of his hand. He wished he wasn’t such a crier. Chicks were meant to cry, not tough guys like him! Still, he was only a kid. Joan always called him her special boy, her baby prince—technically he wasn’t an adult till he was twenty-one, and that meant he needed looking after.
Mitch Corrigan was watching the forest. The senator reminded him of Sketch, only fatter and balder. Mitch’s hair, so carefully arranged at Jakarta, was now sliding off the back of his head like a flattened animal. ‘We should get out of the jungle before nightfall,’ he said. ‘It isn’t safe.’
Nightfall. Kevin shivered.
‘But they’ll be here by then,’ insisted Tawny. ‘Before it gets dark.’
‘We’re in a remote group of islands.’ Celeste spoke for the first time, her voice quiet but her words deafening. ‘Rescue might take days.’
‘Days?’
‘Maybe.’
Tawny started crying. ‘Oh, what would you know?’ the supermodel lashed. ‘I mean, who the hell are you anyway?’ A shape scampered in the undergrowth and she shot up, eyes bugging. ‘I can’t do it!’ Tawny blubbed. ‘I can’t make it five minutes in this shit-pit—I can’t make it days, I hate the outdoors. Rats and spiders; snakes—!’
‘Snakes and spiders are the least of our worries,’ said Celeste.
‘What is that supposed to mean?’
‘Leopards. Tigers. Orangutans.’ A pause. ‘Crocodiles.’
‘OH MY GOD!’
Angela stood. ‘This isn’t helping,’ she warned. ‘Before we get carried away, we make a reasonable guess about where we are. OK? Then we do this one hour, one minute, one second at a time if that’s what it takes. We’ll make shelter. We’ll build fire. We’ll use what we can from the aircraft. People survive in worse conditions. Our best assets are each other and if we work together we can pull through.’
The group eyed one another suspiciously.
‘We should explore,’ said Angela. ‘Find the highest point. That’s what we should do. Who’s coming with me?’
Kevin considered it. No fucking way! Who knew what was out there?
‘I am,’ said Eve.
‘Not you.’
‘Why?’
Angela challenged her with a gaze. ‘Tawny, you’ll come,’ she said.
‘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
Scant 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.
