Page 16 of The Compound

Five

The next day we realized that we were running out of food.

When we had arrived we had roughly estimated that the kitchen’s contents would last us two weeks, but we had vastly underestimated just how much the boys ate in a day.

We now had only two loaves of bread, both of which were hard but still edible, a couple dozen bananas, some vegetables, a bottle of honey, and a large bar of chocolate.

It was unclear how things had dwindled so quickly.

I secretly suspected that someone had been getting up in the night to eat.

The lack of food worried us and led to the calling of a meeting. It was Andrew who gathered us all together. He was wearing a shirt and trousers, a little too overdressed for the heat, and I wondered if he had changed for the occasion.

“First of all, thank you to Sarah and Vanessa for alerting us to the dwindling food supplies. The most important thing that happens in the compound is cooperation, so we’re all going to have to pitch in to make it through the next day or so, and to make sure that this doesn’t happen again.

“Vanessa and Sarah, I’m going to put you in charge of food.

This will involve divvying up the portions to last us until tomorrow.

We’re going to have to do as many tasks as we possibly can today in the hopes that one of the rewards will be food.

Even then, we’re going to have to be careful.

Going forward, Vanessa and Sarah will be in charge of inventorying the food and dividing the portions.

” At this, Sarah looked around, as though daring us to argue.

We all stayed quiet, waiting to hear what our roles wouldbe.

“While we’re sorting this out, we need to establish a better way of maintaining the compound.

The place is getting dirty and disorganized.

At present, there’s sixteen people living here.

I’m dividing the jobs into eight categories, and I’m going to need volunteers for each group.

Let’s call them departments, for the sake of clarity.

Raise your hand if you’d like to volunteer for a department. ”

Generally, in seasons past, everyone fended for themselves, pitching in as they could, although inevitably some people pulled their weight more than others.

While I didn’t relish the idea of having an assigned job (hadn’t we come here for a break from all of that?), I was slightly smug at how organized and competent we all must have appeared.

I thought of the contestants from five years ago, who the media had called the Sloppy Seven.

When they first arrived, they had been moderately untidy, but grew progressively worse as they fell out with each other.

Then there were only seven residents left, but none of them seemed to like each other, and, in a breathtaking display of mutual passive aggression, they all stopped cleaning entirely to try to smoke each other out.

They lived in genuine filth—overflowing toilets, maggots on the counters, mice in the beds—until one day they collectively decided to leave rather than to fix the mess they had made.

When the next set of contestants arrived and saw the place they had cried.

Two of them left immediately. It was a real hoot.

I don’t know if the others were thinking of the Sloppy Seven, too, or if they just agreed with the familiar structure of industry, but no one protested against Andrew’s proposed departments.

As Andrew was speaking Tom stood quietly beside him, once or twice jumping in when Andrew had lost track of who had what job, and I suspected that Tom was likely responsible for thinking up the division of labor.

I wondered, had it been Tom who proposed the idea, in his stoic, serious way, if we would have questioned it; Andrew had presented the idea with such enthusiasm and confidence that it felt like we were all collaborating on a fun project rather than being instructed to carry out manual labor.

The departments were as follows: Food Organization and Preservation: Vanessa and Sarah; Food Preparation: Candice and Carlos; Cleaning (Kitchen and Living Room): Becca and me; Cleaning (Bathroom and Bedroom): Mia and Seb; Communal Task Managers and Reward Distribution: Tom and Andrew; Yard and Pool Maintenance: Ryan and Marcus; Safety and Well-Being: Susie and Evan; Repairs and Construction: Jacintha and Sam.

Andrew and Tom’s roles placed them in a leadership position, a decision which no one questioned.

It made sense to me at the time: Andrew presented a compelling argument, and Tom the gravitas to make it seem like he knew what he was doing.

I thought that Candice looked a little put out, and the truth was that if I had to vote for someone to lead operations at the compound, it would have been her.

But she hadn’t volunteered for the role, so I kept quiet.

With the responsibilities thus divided, our home became infinitely more livable.

I hadn’t really noticed how run-down the place had been getting until we began living in a structured manner.

It meant we didn’t have as much leisure time, but Tom and Andrew organized a schedule so that we would always, without fail, finish a minimum of five Communal Tasks, with an aim of finishing seven if time allowed.

They took to their new roles with a committed zeal that encouraged the rest of us to take our own roles seriously.

If I was in the kitchen and someone else was there, I tried to always have a sponge at hand so that I looked busy.

Andrew was boundlessly enthusiastic and liked to give pep talks before tasks.

“Just think about all the things we could achieve,” he liked to say, gesturing around him.

Even when he wasn’t organizing a task, he was always “on,” walking around the compound, checking on everyone.

“Everyone okay?” I often heard him call, his upbeat voice echoing across the grounds.

“Having a good time? Yes? Excellent.” He was easy to like.

There was a boyishness to him; running alongside his earnest desire to help others was his love of games, jokes, and general fun.

There was a part of his charm that sometimes veered into ridiculousness, but we mostly chose to ignore it to preserve the peace.

Over dinner one night, he said that potatoes were so much more expository with butter.

I’m not sure what precisely he had meant to say, but the people sitting beside him nodded, and I nodded too.

The word wasn’t right, but there was hardly any point correcting him when we all knew what he meant. Potatoes were better with butter.

Tom, on the other hand, was more practical, and didn’t like small talk.

Tom didn’t like most kinds of talk, actually.

But he was more reliable than Andrew: if you asked Andrew for help or advice he often spoke a great deal about what could be done, and then got distracted on the way to fixing the problem.

Andrew left you motivated but no further along with what you had wanted to achieve.

Tom generally tried to solve the problem on the spot, and if he couldn’t do it himself he delegated it to someone else.

He was good at that: people generally liked it when Tom came to them and asked for their assistance.

He often went to Jacintha, who had a quick mind and could turn her hand to anything.

Sam had similar skills to Jacintha, but Tom very rarely went to him to ask for help.

Tom only occasionally delegated jobs to me. I didn’t mind. I didn’t want any more work todo.

That first day after the meeting we had a breakfast of bananas and coffee, and completed our first task quickly and painlessly: in exchange for a shelving unit, we had to swap our clothes with a member of the opposite sex.

Because Ryan was so much bigger than me, I swapped with Seb, who, with a hangdog face, took my leggings and T-shirt and gave me his shorts and T-shirt.

The shelves were of a decent size, and Andrew and Tom decided to place them in the hallway, by the entrance.

Some people put their shoes on the lower shelf, and others put sunscreen and hats and aloe vera on the other shelves.

It gave our entrance a homey feel, even if the absence of the door took away from the general effect.

Then we were instructed to compliment each resident of the compound, in exchange for a net for cleaning the pool.

We were placed in an assembly line, the boys standing still and the girls moving to the right each time.

I moved along, giving and receiving compliments without much thought, eager to get to Ryan.

“You have gorgeous hair,” Ryan said when I reached him.

I had my compliment for him ready to go. “You have the best body of anyone here,” I said.

He smiled widely at that, looking the most pleased I had ever seen him. “I work out,” he said modestly, as if it was something I didn’t know, as if I didn’t see him lifting weights for hours a day and doing press-ups before he came to bed.

Jacintha nudged me, and I moved on to the next person. I wasn’t looking forward to complimenting Sam. I had seen him that morning, on the way to breakfast, and had given him one of my curated, customer-service smiles, but he hadn’t looked at me at all. I didn’t like the way that we’d left things.