Power Games

by Victoria Fox

  He sensed it was Celeste before she opened her mouth. The Italian woman had a definite scent, unlike any of the others.

  ‘You’ve got the hang of this,’ she commented.

  ‘Want a go?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ever done it before?’

  ‘Once.’

  ‘Did you catch anything?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He smiled, lifting muscles that hadn’t been used in days.

  ‘You don’t give away much, do you?’ he said.

  ‘It was an accident.’

  ‘What was?’

  ‘When I fished—just a fluke, I couldn’t do it again.’

  ‘Says who?’

  ‘My boyfriend.’

  Jacob was surprised, and a little disappointed. He didn’t know why. He thought about all the girls he’d had sex with, and whether or not they’d had boyfriends. It had never occurred to him to ask. It hadn’t mattered.

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know you had a boyfriend.’

  ‘We’ve been together a long time.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Carl.’

  Jacob ground his stick into the sand, twisting so it stayed upright. He crouched, unsteady, and she helped him. He splashed his chest with water.

  ‘Does he make you happy?’

  ‘That’s a personal question.’

  ‘I’m a personal guy.’ But the question had surprised him, too. It was because Celeste had been so kind to him. He hoped that somebody was kind to her in return.

  ‘He’s good for me.’

  ‘That isn’t what I meant.’

  She sat down next to him. ‘What about you?’

  ‘What about me?’

  ‘Any special girl?’

  ‘Lots of them.’

  ‘Are you in love?’

  He smiled again. ‘Now who’s being personal?’

  ‘You don’t have to answer.’

  Jacob lifted his shoulders. ‘Love’s overrated. This soulmates thing, I don’t believe in it. Sexually compatibility, on the other hand …’ But it felt like the old him talking.

  ‘So the rumours are true.’

  ‘Rumours?’

  ‘You are a playboy.’

  ‘I doubt you’ll ever see me as that after what we’ve been through.’ A pause, then: ‘Thank you. I wanted to say that. I mean it, I really do. For what you’ve done. We don’t know each other, Celeste—you didn’t have to. Thank you.’

  Jacob had never said anything like that before and meant it. Normally when he got sensitive with a girl it was because he wanted to get into her knickers.

  Celeste was quiet a while, then said: ‘It’s nothing.’

  ‘Carl’s a lucky man.’

  ‘He isn’t, really.’

  ‘He is. I know.’

  ‘Some days I think this happened because of me … The crash. This.’

  Jacob had felt it too. Perhaps they all had.

  ‘I’d love to know how you work that one out,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve done things I’m ashamed of.’

  ‘Who hasn’t?’

  ‘I’m not a good person.’

  ‘Who is?’

  ‘It was always going to happen. I deserved it.’

  ‘For what?’

  He heard her breathing.

  ‘I killed my best friend.’

  The words should have floored him, but, at that point, in that particular place and at that particular time, they made absolute sense. He waited for her to go on.

  ‘Until I met Sylvia,’ Celeste began, ‘I felt so lonely. My parents moved around a lot when I was small. I never made any friends. It was only when I went to college in England that all that changed. We were like sisters. She knew me better than my own family.’

  A beat. ‘What went wrong?’

  ‘Nothing. That was just it. One day everything was perfect, the next it was ruined.’

  ‘How old were you?’

  ‘Twenty.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘So am I.’

  ‘You can tell me, you know.’

  She shifted next to him. ‘I know.’

  And so she did.

  From her first term at Oxford, she and Sylvia had been inseparable. Eight years had passed since the loss of her best friend, but it haunted Celeste as if it had been last week. Ever since then, she had struggled to regain control, to feel as if she had a say over anything that happened in her life. If something like that could ambush her, right out of nowhere, something unforeseen and until then unimaginable, how was it possible to govern a single day, an hour, a minute, let alone a lifetime?

  She missed her. She missed her so much. Celeste had felt powerless since forever. Powerless to her parents’ whim, powerless to the school, powerless when Sylvia died, powerless with men. She had to create her own power somehow …

  Celeste had been driving that night. The girls had gone to a party, deep in the countryside, and the lanes home had been long and winding, the car’s headlamps sweeping across the dark bulk of hedges. Celeste’s decision to take the wheel, of opening the door and climbing in, of fastening her seatbelt: frozen snapshots. These moments that can change a life—or take one.

  And Sylvia, with a whole world ahead of her, her hair streaming loose as they had rushed through the night; laughing, her neck thrown back, the radio blasting their favourite song. That was how Celeste kept her friend, moving, spirited, not in the coffin they had buried days later. The car had come from nowhere, from a hidden lane, its lights only just switched on, no time, no time, though she had swerved and they had hurtled towards the tree and after that nothing, only black.

  Celeste hadn’t been drunk, but she had been drinking. She should have made sure that Sylvia had her belt on. She should have seen the car before she did. She shouldn’t have had the radio so loud, maybe then she would have heard it. She should have kept control when they went off-road. She should have accepted a ride off the boys who had left at midnight, and only hadn’t because Sylvia had begged her not to since one of them had kissed her in the library and she didn’t know if she liked him.

  It didn’t matter how many times Celeste post-rationalised it. Sylvia had been her friend, her confidante; the girl she had laughed and cried with, the keeper of her secrets, and the first place, really, she had truly belonged … and now she was gone.

  ‘Believe me,’ Celeste admitted, ‘I’m no angel.’

  The waves came up. They both sat alone with their thoughts.

  ‘Do you know something?’ said Celeste. ‘Carl’s the only person I ever told that to. And now I told you.’

  ‘I’m flattered.’

  ‘It helps that you can’t see me.’

  ‘I’d like to.’

  ‘Carl said it was a mistake. But that we have to pay for our mistakes.’

  ‘It seems like you’ve paid for yours.’

  Jacob ran a hand through the sand. It was powder-soft and warm, every grain distinct and magnificent; things he didn’t notice when he could see. Celeste’s story reached into him in a way that would have been impossible had he the pictures to go with it. Had he seen her tears, her trembling lip, he might not have concentrated so hard on the words. As it was, the words touched his soul.

  He hadn’t known he had a soul.

  ‘I’ve done things I’m not proud of either,’ he said.

  ‘I won’t ask what they are.’ There was warmth in Celeste’s voice, easy and conspiratorial. Jacob wasn’t used to having this sort of conversation with a woman, feeling they were on a level. Friends. It felt new, and good.

  ‘Then I won’t tell,’ he said.

  Tawny watched them from the shadows of the trees. The closeness of their shoulders, the elegant back of Celeste’s neck, the way Jacob brushed against her when she spoke. Jealousy bit through her with tiny, stinging jaws.

  She was mortified after their encounter by the pool. When had a guy ever failed to get it up for Tawny? It was ridiculous. A joke.
An abomination.

  If only Jacob could see! Then he would be reminded that she, Tawny, was indeed the fairest of all women and that there were no rivals worth a dime.

  Yet even though she knew this, she accepted the disturbing truth: Celeste had flourished on the island. With her cool, artisan beauty, she brought to mind those haughty, above-it-all dancers with whom Tawny had worked at the Rams. The girls hadn’t been ravishing, far from it, but they had carried a measure of dignity and poise that Tawny, to this day, felt had always eluded her. As if she had the package, the body, the face and the hair, but had never known quite what to do with it. She had never been able to take command of it in that way Celeste had—a quiet, contained control that needed no reassurance from others or guarantee that it existed.

  She teetered on the edge of the void, from which a whistling query sailed up:

  What else have you got, Tawny Linden?

  Just a girl in a subway station, scrabbling for change.

  A girl without a family, without a home. Rejected. A street whore.

  You’re dead to us.

  Tawny’s demons reared their heads, dancing like snakes from a wicker basket. She needed to be the one the men wanted. It was survival, and all the girls knew it.

  She stepped backwards into the jungle. There was only room for one of them on this island, and it damn sure had to be her.

  53

  Dusk lengthened across the sand. Over the ocean the sun was a giant, melting disc, bleeding red and orange. Cliffs gleamed black and dense in the gloaming, and the first winking stars were starting to prick the sky.

  The fish was sweet and salty, cooked on a spit over the fire so the skin was charred and crisp. The innards were white and moist, flaking apart, and the group devoured the meal in silence. Afterwards, full and tired, they surrendered to sleep.

  All except Mitch Corrigan.

  The senator lay awake, his heart shaking.

  He was afraid to go back to the cave, but he knew he must.

  He could hear them calling. Come to us … Come to us …

  Infinite space, the universe more ancient and complex than he could fathom, and still there were those who believed that aliens belonged in the realm of movies: science fiction, a story, just a game. They couldn’t see how much sense it made. On a rock hurtling through the cosmos, dwarfed by others in our solar system alone—what about other systems, other galaxies, the universe made up of hundreds of billions, more, an unlimited number? To assume solitude made no logic.

  Before 2012, Mitch had held these beliefs, but in the vague and detached way of one who knows that in his lifetime, and the lifetime of his children, there would be no movement. It had been someone else’s concern, and nothing to do with him.

  Now, it was everything to do with him.

  There was no doubt they had brought him here. Had he dared to step further into the cave over the mountain, he would have met them face to face—it was almost a relief, after all this time, the promise of closure. No more running and no more fear.

  Would Melinda be there?

  Come here, honey … Come on home …

  His wife was in on it. She was one of them.

  The transformation had been subtle. It had started with Melinda arriving home late, vanishing and reappearing, and refusing to meet his eye. She had been talking differently too, a weary, hollow drawl, so unlike her old voice that it seemed not to be Melinda speaking at all but a voice inside her, selecting the words, nothing but a ventriloquist’s puppet. Next she had stopped cooking. She used to cook every day, whipping up feasts for the family at a moment’s notice. These days she had no appetite. She drank endless glasses of water. He rarely saw a morsel pass her lips.

  If she wasn’t eating food, what the hell was she eating?

  And so it came to this …

  Had the pilots seen lights in the sky? Had the aircraft been guided towards its grisly fate by a beacon sent from another dimension?

  Mitch walked down to the shore. Above the water hung a silver moon, a crescent slung in the sky, throwing silver glow. He could see the shadow of the Earth set across it, and thought as he always did how strange and fantastic it was that that should be his own self reflected, however small: a telescopic mirror.

  Stars abounded.

  Maybe if he went to them, they would set the others free. The others had been a necessary appendage but there was no use for them now. It was Mitch they wanted. Thwarted at Veroli, smeared a hoax, the newcomers had a point to prove.

  Would they lay claim to Eve Harley? Show her what was really going on?

  ‘It’s outrageous that someone in this person’s position could have fallen for the fraud,’ Eve’s latest piece had read. ‘We are asked to trust this man, one whose decisions might some day affect the world, and to entrust ourselves to him. Yet he believes the deception. He sought it out and he welcomed it …’

  She would see. She would repent.

  The cave was calling. Those footprints didn’t belong to the missing flight attendant—they belonged to the enemy. Come to us …

  Mitch became aware of something thick and hairy pooled at his feet.

  Stooping, he encountered a dark, coarse mass enveloping his toes. He had walked into it without noticing. Seaweed? A jellyfish? No, too furry.

  Mitch lifted the thing out. At first he thought it was a washed-up creature, sodden and matted, before realising it wasn’t. It was his hairpiece.

  The bat must have dropped it.

  Mitch held it aloft, dripping and sodden, before pressing it to his head. It seeped down his temples and the back of his neck. He took it off and hurled it back into the sand, where it landed with a wet squelch. Still not satisfied, he knelt and rummaged through the grains, digging a hole, slamming the wig in and covering it up.

  The time for pretending was over.

  Tasting the skin of his fear, Mitch gazed up to the forest and over the ridge.

  If he went, he would not come back again.

  54

  Day 12

  Kevin moved noiselessly through the forest.

  He was deep in the trees, far in on his usual track.

  The sound of hooves came across him diagonally this time, what couldn’t be more than five metres in front. The molten air was charged. Kevin’s spear was raised, his eyes alert, his ears pricked to any sound that might give away its whereabouts.

  The animal had got clever to his advances—but not that clever.

  Kevin stopped, sensing it close beyond the screen of leaves. He exhaled, the expelled air cool against the perspiration on his top lip. Nothing mattered more than this victory. A bead of sweat ran from his earlobe to his chin and fell to the earth.

  It was an effort to hold back, everything primed for action and ready to spring, but he had to wait, he had to be patient …

  In the end, it gave itself away.

  A shuffle. A hot snort—

  And then it was running, charging through the thicket but this time it was a done deal, this time it wasn’t getting away, and Kevin’s vision refined to a point as deadly as his weapon’s as he launched the stick high into the air, his body propelled forward with the motion, watching as the javelin shivered in the steam before sailing towards its target on a fatal trajectory and impaling the boar through its neck.

  He finished the job efficiently. In seconds it was over.

  Kevin slit the knife, belly to throat, so the innards fell out. He butchered the head and the legs. With Jacob’s help he skewered it. He had brought back the impossible: meat.

  He thought of all the times Joan had brought mac and cheese to his bedroom while he was playing computer games, a knock at the door and a tray on the side: plastic containers, film lids and microwaves, knives and forks and a can of Pepsi.

  An artificial world, a toy town, superstores packed with fakes and forgeries. Here was where reality set in.

  Some days Kevin found it hard to remember all that. It was like a photo album whose images were disappeari
ng one by one. He knew he should be crying for them, Joan and Sketch, just as he had at the start, but while his brain computed this message, he could not drag up the tears.

  He told himself he couldn’t afford to. The only way to make it was to throw away the key. Kevin had to change.

  The old him would never survive.

  Tawny gagged into a bush. ‘My God,’ she choked. ‘You don’t seriously expect me to eat that?’

  ‘Makes more for the rest of us.’

  ‘It’s probably got rabies.’

  Afterwards, Kevin went to wash in the pool. His naked body rose proud from the water and he surveyed the surrounding jungle with new eyes. Nothing here could defeat him. He had overpowered a beast. The others held him in reverence; even those who didn’t admit it. He had hunted a wild thing and returned the victor.

  55

  Los Angeles

  On Friday night, Sketch Faulkner arrived ahead of time, manoeuvring his BMW through the crowd of fans at Kevin’s mansion gates. Agonised Chasers hollered for information, battering their fists, as grey, tear-streaked faces materialised like phantoms at the window. ‘Where’s Kevin? Have you found him?’

  If only Sketch had. Two weeks and nothing. Christ, Joan was in a state but it wasn’t an easy ride for him either. He had loved the kid too, in his way.

  Shame seared when he recalled giving Kevin his ultimatum—go to Salimanta or get out the door. How did he come to terms with that? He had sent Kevin to meet his maker. Sketch knew it. Joan knew it. Soon, no doubt, the fans would know it.

  They screamed on. Mics lunged. Cameras loomed.

  How had Kevin learned to live with this? The times Sketch had sat in the car with his client as they had passed through a post-gig fan pit hadn’t been much different. Whether the Little Chasers were worshipping their idol or mourning him, it apparently spawned the same hysterical misery.

  Past the gates, he relaxed a bit, and eased the car to a stop outside the porch.