Page 121 of The Island of Lost Girls

46 | Gemma

Sara is triumphant. She waves her winnings, spread out like a fan, in the air, and tucks them into her bosom with a flourish. She sashays off to the kitchen. Some mouthwash and another line, no doubt.

‘Someone’s pleased with herself,’ says the prince.

‘One could say cock-a-hoop,’ replies one of the new men, and they laugh.

We don’t exist, to them, thinks Gemma. Beyond how they can use us as pleasure accessories. The only difference between us and rubber dolls is that rich men can afford us.

She’s finding it hard to keep her back straight. Her arms keep drifting up to cross themselves across her body as though they have a life of their own, and it takes some force of will to drop them back to her side. As she stands there, smiling, smiling, smiling, she feels gravity drag at her shoulders, press on her spine, willing it to bend.

I was meant to feel better than this, she thinks. I’ve swapped one kind of dependence for another, and Sara doesn’t look magnificent to me any more. Slipping out every twenty minutes to sneak another line. That smile’s not a smile at all. It’s the rictus of a skull in a still-life painting.

She feels her shoulders slump again. Forces them back. I want to go home. But I don’t have a home to go to now. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to get away.

Matthew Meade pushes his chair back. ‘Well, gentlemen,’ he announces. ‘Brandy and cigars and final auditions, I think.’

Auditions?

Meade hauls himself to his feet and collects his stick. ‘If you’d like to follow me?’

‘Let the games begin,’ says Bruce Fanshawe, and there’s another rumble of amusement.

Oh, shit, she thinks. I knew this wasn’t going to be all there was. Four of us, ten of them. We’re going to be working all night.

She feels weary to her bones. Let me go home, she thinks. None of this is worth any amount of money. Just let me go home. There has to be some other way than … this …

The men walk up the corridor that leads away from the stairs, and she hears a grinding noise, like a heavy door sliding back.

‘I say!’ says a voice.

‘Oh, well played!’ The prince. ‘I’d never have known this was here.’

‘Darling,’ Tatiana’s voice drifts back towards them. The prince has already gone from Your Royal Highness to darling, in the course of a little over twenty-four hours. ‘The architect barely knew it was here!’

‘Very Onassis,’ says someone.

‘Yes, we were going for a Seventies vibe,’ she replies.

‘Ah, the glory days,’ says someone else. ‘What a time.’

Matthew Meade’s voice. ‘Wasn’t it, though?’

‘Oh, don’t,’ says another voice. ‘It’ll be years before opportunities like that show up again.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ says Matthew Meade. ‘Plenty of opportunities in global warming before that whole circus winds down … ’

The voices fade, as though they’re entering a space where echoes are forbidden.

Click click click, comes Tatiana up the hall. She has some objects in her hand, some more draped over her wrist.

‘Put these on,’ she orders, and her hostess voice is gone. Empress now. The cold tones of owner to slave.

Tatiana’s accessories turn out to be eye masks. And little rubber wristbands like the ones that let you into clubs, each one a different colour. Red, green, yellow, blue. They don’t get a choice. She is handed green and slides it obediently over her hand.

‘And these,’ says Tatiana. She holds out a bunch of cable ties. To hold, she realises, their wrists together. ‘Help each other,’ says Tatiana. ‘Get them good and tight.’

Her stomach ties itself in knots. I don’t want to. I don’t want to.

And yet they all stand together, and she can see the whites of her companions’ eyes, and they pull on the ends of the straps until the plastic cuts into their skin.

And they wait.