Power Games

by Victoria Fox

‘Then we go right out into the ocean,’ said Eve.

  ‘We shouldn’t do that.’

  ‘Why?’ Tawny pouted. ‘I went in the water yesterday.’

  ‘The lagoon, yes—so long as we stay close to the shore.’

  ‘What’s the big deal?’

  Nobody wanted to say it.

  ‘Sharks,’ said Angela.

  Tawny’s mouth fell open.

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ offered Kevin, inflating his chest. ‘If you’re scared.’

  ‘No offence,’ snapped Tawny, ‘but how much help would you be?’ Kevin going up against a shark would be like a tadpole going up against, well, a shark.

  ‘It’s given me an idea, though,’ said Angela. ‘We need to make fire—for warmth, but also as a signal. Sooner or later, a ship’s got to pass on that horizon.’

  ‘We’ll rub sticks,’ said Kevin. ‘I saw it on Intense Survival. You make this nest of twigs and leaves and things and then pile the sticks on top. We need a mirror, and glass to catch the sunlight, then we build it up and make a spark—’

  ‘We’ll use a lighter,’ interjected Eve. ‘I’ve got one in my purse.’

  ‘That doesn’t solve the problem of the pilots,’ said Celeste.

  ‘Why not?’ Tawny yawned. ‘Burn them.’

  ‘You could do that?’

  ‘Of course,’ Tawny lied. ‘We’re not all pathetic like you.’

  ‘Don’t be like that, Tawny,’ said Angela.

  ‘What? It’s true. Celeste shouldn’t even be here; she’s hardly in the same league. And what’s she done to help out anyway? Oh yeah, she prayed—fat lot of good that did. Hello, God? What, nobody there? Big surprise. Meanwhile poor Jacob was risking his life, trying to save ours—’

  ‘I wish I hadn’t been on that plane,’ said Celeste.

  ‘Wow, no shit, I’m enlightened.’

  ‘And I might speak more if you didn’t criticise everything I say.’

  ‘So it’s my fault now, is it?’

  ‘I never said that.’

  ‘Whatever, bitch.’

  ‘Enough!’ said Angela. ‘We turn against each other and we lose everything. We’re all each other has right now, do you understand?’

  Tawny sulked. Celeste looked away.

  ‘We’ll take the bodies over the mountain,’ said Angela. ‘The same route we walked yesterday. There’s a highland at the top. We’ll carry them over the ridge.’

  ‘What about the woman?’ said Eve.

  Nobody wanted to think about the flight attendant. She was still out there. They hadn’t been able to find her, had scoured the jungle and the crash site. Nothing.

  ‘I can’t promise she wasn’t left in the hold,’ Angela said. ‘When we got out, I wasn’t thinking … It was a blur. I panicked. There was heaps of rubble, and I …’ She spoke the sad truth. ‘She didn’t even cross my mind.’

  ‘We’ll look,’ said Mitch. ‘She has to be somewhere.’

  The senator seemed to think twice about it, before asking: ‘Did anyone take a walk on the beach yesterday? Round by the bluff, towards the caves?’

  ‘We only came down to the beach at night.’ Angela frowned. ‘Why?’

  ‘No reason.’

  ‘Did you see something?’

  ‘Only I wondered if we’d explored that part of the coastline yet. We should.’

  The rest of the group was disbanding.

  ‘OK,’ said Angela, as she stepped off the rock. ‘Good idea.’

  Mitch went off across the sand.

  She watched the statesman go, her eyes narrowed against the heat.

  41

  The rear fuselage was a mangled chaos. Its plummet from the canopy had destroyed what form it managed to maintain through impact, rendering it a wreck of metal and plastic. Shards of aluminum, molten at their edges, were strewn like abstract sculptures. Everything was a crumpled heap. It was impossible to believe that this thing had once been airborne, and that they had been inside it.

  Kevin was rummaging through the remains. He had ripped strips off his T-shirt to wrap around his forehead. His torso was slick with sweat that gathered in his sternum and trickled into the waistband of his jeans. His shoulders were burned, the skin there flaking, and his hairless legs were pimpled with insect bites.

  ‘What happened?’ he asked. ‘What started it?’

  Mitch Corrigan was tearing through the burst cabin, pulling his way to the back. His wig was skewed to one side and Kevin figured he had lost whatever pins were responsible for holding that road kill in place.

  ‘I don’t know,’ the senator replied.

  ‘The thing is,’ said Kevin, ‘I dreamed this. I dreamed the whole thing.’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘Don’t you think that’s messed up? It’s like I knew it was going to happen or something … I should have said, but like anyone would have believed me …’

  Mitch surfaced, swiping his forehead. He leaned over to catch his breath.

  ‘You OK, man?’ Kevin said. ‘You look kinda sick.’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Is it that flight attendant? Did you find her?’

  ‘Just leave me alone, would you?’

  ‘Hey,’ Kevin held his hands up, ‘sorry for asking …’

  They worked in silence and that suited Kevin fine because Mitch Corrigan was psycho. He came across on TV so confident and together, with his career in movies and the White House and everything, but in person it was like he was jumped up on something. They were all freaking, but the senator was next level. Getting to the wreck had been nuts, with Mitch tensing and checking behind him at every crack of a twig, every snap of a branch. Kevin didn’t mind so much because it made him feel like the big man, which was funny since he cried at a spider in his room at home.

  Home.

  He thought of Joan, and Sketch, and the guys at Cut N Dry. He thought of his Little Chasers.

  What were they going through? What did they think had happened to him?

  The backlash would be unreal. Hard to believe that all those miles away the tragedy was coming to light. Kevin half expected to be able to hear it, a distant explosion. This was part of the same earth, but it didn’t feel like it. Here, it didn’t matter that he was Kevin Chase. It didn’t matter that any of them was anyone.

  Those familiar things he had raged against were now impossible indulgences. Kevin had been a dick. He saw it plain as day. He had taken it for granted, every adoring fan, every one of his mom’s perfumed cuddles, every superstar he had met in his whirlwind social calendar on a power trip that half the globe would happily have given their right arms for, and all he wanted now was every part of it back.

  All the bitching he had done, in the face of all he had. Those people in Salimanta, whose lives were reduced to nothing, no possessions but the clothes on their backs: they were the ones to feel sorry for. Kevin’s gut cramped with guilt.

  He and Mitch unearthed the crate of water: thirty bottles; warm as a bath and it wouldn’t last long but, for now, it was better than nothing. Mitch tore the cap off one and downed half. He held the remainder out to Kevin and Kevin guessed they should save it for the others but he was thirsty and they’d been working so he took it.

  The luggage Angela had hoped for was a lost cause. Part of her bag was intact, together with a satchel containing Eve’s smashed iPad, but that was it. The rest was a mangle of charred garbage. Kevin and Mitch clambered through it, victorious when they turned up something new—a phone charger, a half-demolished sneaker, a face towel, Kevin’s set of headphones, the only thing he had left—

  His pills!

  Fuck!

  Kevin’s lungs constricted. His fingers went tingly. His breath was strangled. He was about to topple over into a panic attack.

  What was he going to do without his pills?

  ‘You got asthma or something?’ asked Mitch.

  ‘I—no—my medication—’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In my bag,’ Kevin gasped,
‘it’s gone.’

  ‘Christ, kid, what are we looking for? A bottle? An inhaler?’

  ‘Pills.’

  ‘Pills?’ Mitch stopped. ‘Can you do without them?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What do you mean, you don’t know? What are they?’

  ‘Vitamins.’ Kevin heard how lame that sounded, even through the jangling chords of his hysteria. ‘Special vitamins.’

  ‘What for?’

  At a loss for his own words, he echoed Sketch’s. ‘To keep me at the top of my game!’ Then he added pointlessly, ‘It’s hard being me, you know!’

  ‘Keep calm. You’ll be fine. It’s just vitamins.’

  ‘It’s not just vitamins—I’ve been taking them my whole life!’

  ‘Doctor prescribe them?’

  ‘No.’ Kevin realised a doctor had never told him to take any pills—only Sketch and the board at Cut N Dry. ‘My management.’

  ‘I’m sure they’ll understand,’ said Mitch.

  But it wasn’t that. Right now Kevin couldn’t give two shits whether Sketch understood or not. It was that without his pills he didn’t know which way was fucking up. He had been tripping on a high wire for long enough—and now this?

  To be stranded out here, of all places, without his precious capsules?

  What was going to become of him?

  Celeste started a fire. She piled the kindling close to camp and used Eve’s light to catch the flame. Blowing the flint, she watched as a thin stream of smoke danced like ribbon, wrapping round the nearest twig, snaking up its length and crackling to life.

  The fire must smoke non-stop. It was their best—their only—chance.

  Celeste understood their place on the map, and it didn’t fill her with courage. This was a vast ocean dotted with clusters of islands, archipelagos made up of scores, perhaps hundreds, of rocks, and theirs was a tiny speck.

  Help could be a long time coming. Had they been near civilisation, it would have arrived by now. Seaplanes would have been sent. Helicopters. Lifeboats.

  They had to be cast out on their own. Their island was invisible. From what the others had said, it was unlikely to ever have been visited.

  Marooned. A word that belonged with Robinson Crusoe: silly and fictional.

  But that was what they were.

  The flames fizzed and spat, too hot to be near, and Celeste went to the lagoon to rinse the dirt from her hands. The water was cool and clear, light enough to be silver, and tiny fish zigzagged through the shallows. She submerged her cupped hands and caught one, feeling it tickle the skin on her palms before letting it go.

  ‘You stupid woman,’ Carl had told her once, when they had holidayed in the South of France. They had taken a boat out, deep-sea fishing: Carl’s favourite pastime though he was yet to have success. Celeste had tried her luck, and on her first attempt the line had snagged, resulting in the biggest reel of the day. Immediately she had unhooked and released the fish into the water. She hadn’t been able to bear its gasping mouth and straining gills, the way it flipped gracelessly on the deck, and how Carl had staked claim to it, this bewildered creature that ought to be free.

  ‘You stupid, sentimental woman.’

  She pictured Carl now in the Venice apartment. It was dull, the weather bad, and he was in his chair at the window. He wouldn’t cry. Carl wasn’t a man who cried. Instead, he would think. About what he could do to get her back—because wherever Celeste went, however far and for however long, she would always go back to him.

  It seemed a long way away, that drizzly Venice apartment. Here, the sun blazed. The water glittered. She was marooned. Nobody was getting her back.

  She turned to the forest, and saw something move.

  Just a slip between the trees: a black, liquid shape, gone as soon as it was there.

  Celeste froze.

  The jungle wall remained still.

  She searched for movement but the shape was gone.

  The heat played tricks: she must have imagined it. But firm as she told it, she didn’t believe. Last night she had witnessed the same thing, a shadow in the dusk, close to the camp, watching them. Like now, the second she turned, it had vanished.

  When the jet had gone down, Celeste had thought of one thing. One person.

  The person she had killed.

  This is your punishment, a voice had said.

  You deserve this. No one can save you now.

  There were no such things as ghosts.

  She made her way up the beach towards Jacob. He was resting in the shade of a palm, a bandage wrapped round his eyes. Celeste remembered him at Jakarta: confident, arrogant, full of bravado. That man was gone.

  They found antiseptic cream in the first aid. Celeste had been swabbing his chest and face. Thankfully the burns were surface wounds, and looked far worse than they were. She could already see new skin emerging, smooth and intact. The key was to avoid infection. If she could keep the damage clean and hydrated, he might just pull through. She prayed he would. She couldn’t imagine what Jacob must be enduring: for all the terribleness of their ordeal, it would be nothing compared with his.

  The first time she had tended to him, he had grabbed her wrists.

  ‘Tawny? Is that you?’ He had been delirious, confused. ‘Who is that?’

  ‘Celeste.’

  ‘Where’s Tawny? Is she here?’

  ‘Yes, she’s here.’

  Tawny had come rushing. The supermodel refused to care for his wounds, but neither did she like it when Celeste took charge. Were Tawny and Jacob lovers? At Jakarta there had been a definite frisson, equal parts desire and dislike. But for all Tawny’s proclamations, Celeste had seen the way she’d flinched from him in the beginning, recoiling from an attractive thing gone ugly, as if the disease were contagious and her own loveliness could be put at risk; the fear that her rosy, glossy fruit would become pitted and withered, because there was nothing left without it.

  Then again, Tawny didn’t much like anything Celeste did, so there was no way of winning. Celeste didn’t know what she had done to garner such animosity. She wasn’t the sort to make enemies, and it was a shock to find herself on the receiving end of Tawny’s barbed remarks.

  Jacob stirred. Celeste touched his shoulder.

  ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Water.’

  She held the bottle to his lips. He drank from it. Droplets ran down Jacob’s neck and she caught them before they could soak the collar of his shirt.

  ‘I’ll get you more.’

  ‘Don’t,’ Jacob reached out, ‘wait. Stay. Stay and talk to me a while. Please. I can’t … I don’t want to be alone.’

  Celeste sat back down. ‘What do you want to talk about?’ she said.

  ‘Anything. You. Tell me about you.’

  42

  Eve sank beneath the surface of the water. It was a clear pool bordered by soaring rock, making it safer than the sea or the lagoon. The cliffs offered shade, but where they broke pockets of sunlight shone through and danced on the ripples. At one end a waterfall crashed lusciously into the glittering sheet, throwing up spray.

  She floated on her back, listening to the sharp caw of tropical birds, the flutter of high branches as they swayed and bucked under the leaps and dives of wild things.

  Her baby’s heart was beating. A drum within a drum, a rhythm within a rhythm: a part of her. How strange that she had come close to extinguishing it. Even now, against the severity of this place, she would not retract that decision. It had been right then and it was right today.

  Who’s the father?

  Perhaps she should tell. She and Angela had been through enough: what they had seen and heard and been forced to do over the last two days meant surely they could never be shocked again. What did it matter anyway? It wasn’t as if she and Orlando were together. Angela would be surprised; maybe she’d be disappointed. Eve wasn’t the sort of girl he normally went for. She might even be branded a liar.

  Knowing Angela made better sen
se of Orlando. Arrogant, selfish Orlando: Orlando who smelled of expensive cologne and wore suits that cost more than she earned in a year. Orlando who had challenged in her London flat and at their table the night they’d fought, and told her he wanted nothing to do with the life he had made. Orlando who had lost his father, and now his sister, and now the mother of his child, though how much he cared for the last was hard to say. Angela had that same streak of belligerence. She would be tough to argue with. Orlando was the only man against whom Eve’s sharp tongue had been blunted: she sensed it ran in the genes.

  What was going through his mind? What was going through any of their minds? Had the group been written off? Had they been deemed a lost cause? What if, for all their hopes and prayers, no one was looking for them?

  No. Any second now, the boats would sweep in. They would return to their lives, the incident carried with them, and, in a year, maybe two, maybe ten, it would start to fade. It would become part of a long-forgotten dream. Imagined. Impossible.

  Eve swam to the ridge, scooping her arms through the radiant lake. Opening her eyes underwater she saw shoals of brightly coloured fish—pink, purple, gold and green—darting this way and that, their metallic stripes shimmering.

  Reaching the side, she hauled herself out. The jungle pulsated with hidden life.

  She checked she was alone. Her bump was modest and beneath clothes could still be concealed, but naked there was no denial. Angela was right, the group would find out soon enough. Perhaps she had already told (though Angela didn’t seem one to disclose other people’s secrets). Eve could hear the accusations—why had she come? Why had she flown? How could she have been so irresponsible? She had already thrown all she could at herself and didn’t need anyone else’s input.

  They would assume she had accepted for the bloodlust. All they knew of Eve Harley was as a story-hungry jackal. The lure of celebrity, another ego-fuelled set ripe for the pickings, whose jaunt halfway across the world would make front-page news.

  They would assume she had put her job before her unborn child.

  Had she?

  Tawny hated her. Kevin hated her. Mitch Corrigan hated her worst of all.

  She didn’t care. These people meant nothing.