Page 115 of The Island of Lost Girls

42 | Gemma

They’ve sent the staff away and locked the front gate. Even Paulo the security guy has been sent into town, despite his objections. In the end he’s made them sign a piece of paper absolving him of responsibility if anything goes wrong, and gone down to Mediterraneo with the chef to take up Tatiana’s permanent booking. The doors and windows are closed. No sound in, and no sound out.

Gemma is filled with foreboding.

‘There’s so many,’ she says to Wei-Cheng.

‘Ten,’ says Wei-Cheng. ‘It’s not so many.’

On the yacht in Cannes there were many more. But they were coming and going and there were a lot more girls, too, and they mingled with the rolling party on the foredeck in between punters, just as though they belonged there. Apart from the constant fucking, it was almost like being on holiday.

These men, though. The actor’s not met her eye once since he arrived, and now the others, now that company is here, have taken to addressing the air a few inches to the side of her ears. They look directly, all right. Just not at their faces.

The table is laid for the Meades and their guests and, with no servants in the house, Tatiana has ordered them into weird little black-and-white maids’ outfits. Boning in the bodices that crush their breasts upwards, net petticoats scratching their naked buttocks. And the men have stared and stared from their low-built bucket chairs on the pool terrace as they bent to serve their cocktails. And Tatiana, the only woman among them, sits regal and complacent in an embroidered gold kaftan, her rings glittering as she name-drops and rough hands thrust suddenly up their skirts while they endeavour not to respond with cries of shock.

This is awful, she thinks. The men get worse and worse. It’s as though she started us off gradually, to soften us up. All the way through, bit by bit, I’ve gone, Well, I did that, this isn’t that much more, is it? And now I’ve got bite marks, and my scalp still burns from what that man did last night. And tonight there are ten of them – eleven with the fat old father.

The men eye them like livestock, discuss them nakedly without ever addressing them. Last night there was a pretence; the men asked you questions and twinkled at you as though you might have a choice when they picked you. Tonight? Meat. They’re picking which fillet steak they want to share, and the doors are locked.

If I screamed, she wonders, would anybody hear me? And if they heard me, would they come to help?

Tatiana claps her hands as they clear away the remains of the lobsters.

‘I think it’s time for a party game!’ she announces, in her happy-happy hostess voice.

The men’s voices lull and they look up the table at her, expectantly.

‘Who’s played Distraction?’ she asks.

Behind her, Sara does a little air clap and an, ‘Ooh!’

The eyes swivel in her direction.

‘I always win this!’ she says.

‘You do,’ says Tatiana, fondly. The eyes swivel back.

Gemma waits. Something’s coming, but she doesn’t know what.

‘Girls,’ says Tatiana, ‘you go and get the cheese and Sara will fill you in. I’ll tell the gents while you’re gone.’

They file out. In the pantry, the chef has left two porcelain platters, wrapped in clingfilm, and all they have to do is unclothe them without disturbing the arrangement of cheese, grapes and large ripe figs that have been quartered and splayed like vulvas on beds of white and gold. Two filigree baskets, wrapped, carry crackers, thin as paper. Little crystal dishes glisten with sharp fruit jellies.

‘Isn’t there pudding?’ asks Hanne. She’s been enjoying little pots of ganache, elegant réligieuses, silky panacottas.

Sara left half a dozen lines of cocaine ready chopped out on the marble kitchen surface before they took the main course in. She hoovers one up each nostril with a rolled-up banknote, offers it to Gemma. Might as well, thinks Gemma. She likes cocaine. Likes the way it makes her feel sharp, alert and yet pleasingly numb. She takes it and bends to take her turn.

‘They’re men,’ says Sara. ‘They don’t do dessert.’

‘So what’s this game, then?’ Gemma straightens up, savours the lovely coldness as it spreads down her throat, holds the note out to Hanne. For a moment she forgets that she’s only seventeen. Feels as if she can take on the world.

‘A competition,’ says Sara. ‘Get ready to get your game on.’

‘What?’ asks Wei-Cheng.

‘So they keep talking, and we take it in turns to go under the table,’ says Sara. ‘Five minutes each, I should think. That’s what you usually get.’

‘Oh,’ says Gemma.