Chapter 10

“ARE YOU OKAY?”

Joel spoke the words into the pitch-black, and I rolled over, facing him across the wide expanse of bed. In spite of the uncurtained windows, the room was incredibly dark. Clouds had covered the sky, blocking out the moon and stars, and the Ever After Villa faced out to sea, so we couldn’t even see the shapes of the other villas. The only illumination was the unblinking red LED of the camera mounted in the corner of the room, and the faint reflection of the lights from the island, bouncing back at us from the sea. In their dim glow, I couldn’t see Joel’s expression, or even really his face, just the outline of his body beneath the white sheets. He was huddled as far away from my side of the bed as it was possible to get—quite far, given I had done the same.

“Yes, I’m okay,” I said. “I just can’t sleep.”

“Me either. I think it’s the wind.”

It had picked up after the camera crew had left, and now it wailed through the palm trees with a long, low urgency, making it hard to sleep. The sea had roughened too, and I could hear it slap-slap-slapping against the veranda with a kind of contained violence. Presumably this was the storm the crew member had mentioned back on the mainland. Clearly it had arrived ahead of schedule.

“Do you think this place is safe?” Joel asked now, and I shrugged one shoulder, forgetting he couldn’t see me.

“It must be reasonably robust, or it’d blow away every time they had a monsoon. Wait, do they have monsoons here?”

There was a silence as Joel tried to figure this out.

“I don’t know,” he said at last. “Isn’t the monsoon to do with landmass? They don’t have it in the Maldives, I know that.”

“Well, regardless,” I whispered, “I’m sure they’ve had storms before, so the fact that this place is still here is reassuring.”

I heard, more than saw, Joel nod—heard the movement of his beard against the pillow, though even as I said the words it occurred to me, we didn’t actually know how long this villa had been standing. Maybe it had never weathered a storm. Still, there must be building codes. Mustn’t there? Joel spoke again, and I dragged my mind back to the present.

“Are you okay about Nico? It must have been a shock. I know it’s not—you know. Not what you planned.”

“No.” That was putting it mildly. I sighed and turned my pillow to the cool side, willing myself to relax, but I was too keyed up.

After Santana had fixed us up a rudimentary picnic from leftovers she’d found in the staff quarters, Joel and I had been dragged off to the one-to-one booth for interviews, and then to the Ever After Villa, which had, horrifyingly, been dressed up as a romantic honeymoon suite, complete with a heart in scattered rose petals on the bed, a champagne bucket full of ice, and two white fluffy robes. There was only one bed, and Camille shook her head when I asked about the possibility of getting some kind of blow-up mattress.

“I’m sorry, Lyla, there’s nothing of that kind on the island, and as you can see, getting a regular mattress across the jetty wouldn’t be easy. Plus it wouldn’t look great on camera. But I’m sure this one is big enough for two. You can always build a pillow wall!”

In the end, after Joel and I had changed into the robes and done a series of mortifying champagne toasts to each other, followed by shots of us leaning side by side on the veranda fence, staring up at what was supposed to be the moon, but was by now nothing but clouds, the crew had relented and let us go—although more, I suspected, because it was five to nine and Camille was getting increasingly antsy about Baz’s injunction to be back on the Over Easy before nine o’clock.

Before they’d left, I had managed to get the basics of what would be happening to Nico.

He was back on the ship, being filmed and debriefed right now, and then, as soon as the rest of the crew rejoined the boat, they would set sail overnight for an island about six hours away with a helicopter pad, where he’d be picked up and flown back to Jakarta for return to the UK.

The Over Easy would turn around and return here in time for another day’s filming. That was why Baz had been so insistent about the 9 p.m. cutoff—there was a very narrow window for them to get to the helicopter site and back in time for breakfast.

After the crew had left, Joel and I had had a polite but ultimately futile argument about who would take the floor, lots of but I insist and no don’t be silly, I prefer a hard surface.

In the end though, sense had prevailed and we’d agreed to sleep at the far sides of the very large bed, which was honestly farther away from each other than if one of us had been on the floor. We agreed though, not to tell Romi.

“If she asks, I slept in the bath,” Joel said firmly, and I nodded. It was only afterwards, when I was changing into an old T-shirt for bed, that I looked up and clocked the impassive black lens of the camera mounted in the corner of the room. I had no idea what footage they’d be using—hopefully not me scrabbling to unhook my bra—but it would most definitely not show Joel sleeping in the bathroom. It might be better for Joel to tell the truth, given it was going to come out anyway. That said, I wasn’t convinced he and Romi were going to survive this experience. Not just the Ever After Villa—I didn’t flatter myself that my fatal allure had the power to break up long-standing relationships—but the whole thing. The TV show, the exposure if it aired… all of it.

Now, two hours later, I was lying awake in the dark, listening to the wind and wondering whether Nico too was lying awake in a cabin on the Over Easy. Maybe he hadn’t even gone to bed. Maybe he was busy pouring out a stream of bile to some exhausted camera crew. Or maybe he’d drunk himself into a stupor and was snoring his head off.

“What did you put on your answers, then?” Joel whispered, and I sighed.

“Pretty much exactly the same as you, going by the snippets they broadcast. I mean, our ideal nights out were virtually identical, and I picked The Godfather as my favorite film too. And for the place I’d love to go but have never been, I put Venice.”

“Same. What did you put for your favorite book?”

“Rebecca. What about you?”

“I put Remains of the Day,” Joel said. “Romi put Fifty Shades of Grey.” He sighed, and above the sound of the wind, I could hear him rubbing his hand unhappily over his face as if trying to rub away the reality of the day. “I know. Says it all, doesn’t it?”

“Joel, why are you together?” I asked, without thinking, and then wished I’d bitten my tongue. “I’m sorry, that was— I didn’t mean it like that; it’s just that the two of you—you’re not…”

“What?”

“Not a very obvious couple, I guess?” As soon as the words came out of my mouth, I regretted them. I had tried to phrase it as neutrally as I could, but I could tell that Joel was nettled. His voice, when he spoke, sounded defensive.

“I could say the same about you and Nico.”

I shrugged. I wanted to argue, but he had a point, one the last few days had made painfully obvious. There was a silence, and then Joel spoke, his voice very low, as though he were trying to make sure it didn’t get picked up by any hidden microphones.

“I don’t honestly know anymore. We’ve been together for years—we met backpacking in Goa after uni, and somehow being far from home… maybe it felt like we had more in common than we did. But since then… we’ve just got more and more different. She doesn’t like any of my friends. I try, but to be honest, I’m not really interested in any of hers. I’m sporty, she’s not. I’m a saver, she’s a splurger. We watch completely different programs. When we met in Goa we were both these grubby, cheapskate students in flip-flops and ripped T-shirts, and since then she’s got more and more high-maintenance, while I’m only marginally more scrubbed up than I was in Anjula Beach. But it’s more than that. We just don’t spend any time together anymore. And somehow now we’re here…”

He trailed off. I thought of Nico and me, the nights I spent at the lab, listening to my podcasts as I pipetted and aliquotted my samples, Nico off at some bar. The way he was extrovert, I was introvert. He was instinctive, I was analytical. He lived life in the moment, I was a planner. And the way we had rubbed along for the best part of two-and-a-half years, our mutual attraction papering over the cracks… until Ever After Island had turned them into a chasm.

“I know what you mean,” I said at last, a little unhappily, and suddenly I wished I’d never brought up this topic in the first place. “Well, we’d better get some sleep, I guess. Good night, Joel.”

“Good night, Lyla,” he said, and then turned over, and within a few minutes I heard the sound of faint snores.

It took me longer to drop off, made uneasy by the weather and, perhaps, by our conversation. But I was finally drifting into sleep when there was a particularly loud roar from the wind and a huge wave came up and over the jetty, slapping into the windows of the villa. I heard the glass creak with the impact, and when I sat up, I could see drops of water glinting on the polished floor where the wave had forced its way under the frame.

Leaning over, I flicked the light switch beside the bed. Nothing happened. I flicked it back—stupidly. I’m not sure why that would have worked. Still nothing. Then I scrambled out of bed, feeling for the fluffy robe I’d left draped over the foot, and went to the master switch beside the veranda, toggling it back and forth. Nothing. Nothing. The power must be out. I felt suddenly, deeply uneasy.

Joel was asleep, or seemed to be. In the darkness I could just make out his shape, sprawled against the white sheets.

“Joel,” I whispered. “Joel, are you awake?”

“Wha?” he mumbled, throwing out an arm.

“The power’s out. I’m getting a bit worried about this storm. I’m going to see if I can find anyone, see if there’s anywhere else we can sleep.”

“?’Kay,” Joel muttered. I wrapped the robe more tightly around myself, picked up the sandals I’d been wearing earlier today, and opened the door onto the veranda.

As I stepped out onto the jetty, the strength of the wind hit me—literally. It buffeted me like a physical thing, sending me staggering back against the wall of the villa. Dimly, I could see the gangway stretching across to the beach, but now it was swimming with water, each wave overtopping the decking as it peaked. The fairy lights strung along its length were dark, and if it hadn’t been for the rope balustrade sticking up out of the water, I wouldn’t even have been completely sure where the central section was. Now I felt an echo of Zana’s earlier terror as I stepped gingerly onto the slick planks, the waves splashing at my calves as they crested. As I crossed, I could feel the gangway creaking beneath my feet, but the struts were solid and unmoving, so I had no real fear of it giving way, and the shape of the island made a natural harbor, sheltering the villa and its jetty from the full force of the waves. Still, I was relieved when my feet touched the sand at the far side. I pulled on the sandals and made my way up the beach and into the woods, heading for what I remembered as being the route to the staff quarters.

In the shadows of the trees, the night was even darker—clearly the Ever After Villa wasn’t the only place to have lost power—and I had to keep my hands outstretched in front of me to prevent myself from stumbling face-first into a palm tree. Luckily the pebbled path felt distinctively nubbly under the thin soles of my sandals, which stopped me wandering off course, and when it forked, I was able to remember roughly the right direction. As I walked, I could feel the wind tugging at my robe, my hair whipping at my face, and hear the far-off crashing of the waves, punctuated by the screams of the birds in the trees. I tried to imagine what it would be like to be an animal on a night like this. Were they scared? Or exhilarated? Maybe they were used to it.

Rain had started to fall in fat, sporadic drops by the time the pebbles under my feet changed to hard concrete slabs, and I came out into a clearing surrounded by the distinctive huddle of the small, metal-roofed staff huts, quite different from the roomy villas dotted around the rest of the island. The huts were dismayingly dark, and silent, but I knocked on first one, then another, and when there was no answer, I began opening doors.

The first turned out to be the one-to-one booth—I hadn’t recognized it in the darkness—and was empty apart from the wicker throne and the camera, standing there silent and unpowered. In the second hut was what seemed to be a rather sparsely utilitarian kitchen, all stainless steel and the scent of bleach. I could hear the drumming of the rain on the corrugated iron roof as I stood there, screwing up my eyes and trying to make out shapes in the darkness.

“Hello?” I called out, but there was no answer, and I turned to leave.

Either the wind had picked up, or it was much stronger on this side of the island, but as I closed the door of the kitchen hut, the wind ripped it from my fingers, slamming it against the frame with a force that would have taken off a finger if I’d still been holding the doorjamb.

As I made my way across the courtyard to the last two huts, I found I was crouching, trying to make my body a smaller target for the wind and the rain that was now beginning to spit quite hard, but even so, as I came close to the third hut, a piece of something—a branch from a palm tree, maybe—came whistling through the darkness and struck me across the cheek with shocking force, making me cry out and fall to my knees.

I knelt there, gasping, and then after a moment put my hand up to explore my face. There was a cut across my cheekbone, and I could tell the flesh around it was beginning to swell. I was going to feel that in the morning—and I had no idea how a bruise like that would look on camera. I definitely hadn’t brought any makeup heavy duty enough to cover it up, though maybe the production team would have something. Still, there was no time to worry about that now—the rain was coming down with shocking force, and I just needed to get out of this storm.

When I stepped inside the third shack, I almost stumbled again. I’d been bracing so hard against the driving wind and rain that its absence seemed shocking. This hut seemed to be some kind of break room for the crew. There was a makeshift table with a kettle and a number of mismatched chairs, and up against the far wall were two bunkbeds. Both were empty, but the bottom one looked like someone had been sleeping there—there were sheets thrown back, and the pillow was dented, but when I put my hand to the mattress, it was cold. Whoever it was could have left hours ago.

In the dim light I could see notes scattered around, an empty packet of Oreos, and someone’s sunglasses, but nothing I could use. Perhaps a mobile phone would have been too much to hope for, but a laptop didn’t seem unreasonable. Whatever they’d had though, they’d clearly taken it with them when they went to the Over Easy.

There was only one shack left now, and I didn’t hold out much hope for crew members. It was by far the smallest, smaller even than the OTO booth—and from the outside it looked more like storage than a sleeping area. Still, though, there might be a phone in there. Surely there had to be something on the island.

When I stepped inside it took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, and when they did, I could just make out it was full of equipment. I could see what looked like more cameras, a bank of what might have been sound or mixing decks and… I peered into the darkness. There, in the corner, was a green LED, its glow reflecting off a fluffy boom mic propped up against it. Did this place still have power?

Just in case, I felt for the light switch, and flipped it hopefully, but nothing happened. Instead, I groped my way across the room to the LED, banging my shin painfully on a chair. As I got closer, peering into the darkness, I recognized the device it was attached to. It was a radio, the radio in fact, the one the producer had mentioned earlier in the day, and which I’d totally forgotten. Was it working? If the LED was lit, it had to be, surely?

I began to feel my way across its surface, trying to make out the controls. There was a rubbery black receiver attached by a coiling black wire, like a telephone, and when I ran my fingers over the surface of the radio itself I could feel a gridded speaker and a bunch of buttons. When I pressed one at random, an orange digital display lit up with a brightness that made my eyes hurt after the pitch-black of the shed, showing a bunch of numbers and symbols that made no sense to me.

I felt a surge of relief, swiftly tempered by the realization that I had no idea how to work the thing. After some thought, I decided that if the radio had been used to communicate with the Over Easyearlier that day—which seemed likely—it was probably best not to change the channel, since that was the one the boat was most likely to be monitoring. When I picked up the receiver, however, nothing happened.

“Hello?” I said into it, in case it was voice activated, but there was no answering burst of static, only the steady drumming of the rain on the tin roof. I twisted the knob on the radio itself and there was a screech of static, so I turned it hastily back, and then remembered something from watching films—you had to press and release a button on the receiver when you wanted to transmit. Sure enough, when I ran my fingers over the mouthpiece, I found there was a button on the side, and when I pressed it, I heard an answering crackle from the speaker.

“Hello,” I said cautiously. “Hello? I’m not sure how this thing works, but this is Lyla, to the Over Easy.” Then I remembered the film I’d seen and added, “over,” and released the button.

There was a crackle as I did, but although I waited, no answering voice came over the speaker. I pressed the receiver again.

“Hello, is anyone receiving this? This is Lyla to the Over Easy, please come in. Over.”

Again, I let go and waited, but I could hear nothing apart from the quiet hiss of static from the radio and the drumming rain, and the scream of the wind outside the shack.

“Over Easy, can you hear me?” I could tell my voice was getting desperate, but I didn’t try to hide it. This was beyond frustrating. Maybe I was doing something wrong—but what was the point in having a radio if no one monitored it? I spoke again. “The wind is really picking up and I’m getting seriously concerned. Is there any kind of storm shelter on the island?”

I let go of the button and waited again, this time with dwindling hope. If the Over Easy was out there, they were either too far away to hear the transmission, or they weren’t monitoring their radio channels. Both options were worrying.

I was just groping for the receiver again when something struck the side of the hut with a bang like a firework, and a force that made the whole thing shudder to its foundations. The shock made me jump almost out of my skin, and I stood there, my heart thudding, and then reached out to touch the side of the hut where it had been hit. The entire wall was bowed in, and I could feel that in places the corrugated iron had cracked. The rear wall of the hut had been hit by something very big and very heavy. If it had collided with the other wall—the one with the window—it wouldn’t have been stopped by metal sheeting, it would have shot through the glass and most likely brained me. As it was, it felt uncomfortably close to luck that the sheeting had withstood the blow.

I made up my mind. It wasn’t safe here. This side of the island was much more exposed than the villa side. I would go back, tell Joel what was happening, and then make my way to Palm Tree Rest, the villa Nico and I had been allocated on the first night. I doubted it would be locked—evidently the staff quarters weren’t—but if it was, well, then, I’d just break in. If Joel wanted to come—fine. If he wanted to return to Romi—also fine. I no longer gave a shit about the rules. I was just hoping we’d all be in one piece in the morning.

I picked up the receiver. I would make one last attempt before I left, and that was it.

“Over Easy, if you’re receiving this, please come in, this is urgent,” I said, speaking rapidly now. “The storm is getting really bad and I think we might need to evacuate. Just now—”

But I never got to finish the sentence. As I said the words, something huge and dark and shaped like a cannonball came flying through the window of the hut with a deafening crash. Glass flew everywhere, and the object landed with a sickening crunch on the mixing desk, crushing the bank of instruments to smithereens, along with the sturdy table beneath.

I found I was still holding the radio receiver, gasping like a fish. I think I was saying something like, “Oh God! Oh God!”

If I had been standing just ten centimeters to my left, I would have been dead—my chest crushed into the same pulp as the table and mixing desk.

As it was, I could feel cuts from the glass all over the parts of my arms and chest not protected by the robe, and the warm drops of blood beginning to trickle down my skin, mixed with the driving rain now coming through the smashed window, along with the wind.

For a moment I couldn’t move. I just stood there, gasping and shaking, unable to compute how close I had come just now to dying.

Then I let the receiver drop from my hand and ran.