Nine Perfect Strangers

‘Stop that,’ said Carmel severely, and Frances could tell that was the voice Carmel used when one of her little girls was being annoying.

‘Sorry,’ she said at the same time as Carmel said, ‘Sorry.’

It was, according to Napoleon’s watch, 9 pm. They had been in here now for just over thirty hours. They hadn’t eaten for over forty-eight hours.

People had begun complaining of headaches, light-headedness, fatigue and nausea. Waves of irritability swept the room at intervals. People bickered, then apologised, then snapped again. Voices quivered with emotion and skidded into hysterical laughter. Some people drifted off to sleep and then woke with a loud gasp. Napoleon was the only one who stayed consistently calm. It felt like he was their unofficially appointed leader, even though he wasn’t issuing any instructions.

‘Don’t drink too much water,’ Heather had told Frances when she’d seen her returning from the bathroom after filling her water bottle yet again. ‘Only drink when you’re thirsty. You can die from drinking too much water because you flush out all the salt in your system. You can go into cardiac arrest.’

‘Okay,’ said Frances resignedly. ‘Thank you.’ She’d thought drinking lots of water would stave off the hunger pangs, although she wasn’t as hungry as she thought she would be. The desire for food had peaked just before they’d found the useless Russian doll package and then gradually begun to wane until it became more abstract; she felt like she needed something, but food didn’t seem to be the answer.

Her friend Ellen was a fan of intermittent fasting and she’d told Frances that she always experienced feelings of euphoria. Frances didn’t feel euphoric, but her mind felt scrubbed clean, clear and bright. Was that the drugs or the fasting?

Whatever it was, the clarity was an illusion, because she was having difficulty differentiating what had and hadn’t happened since she’d got here. Did she dream of her nosebleed in the pool? She hadn’t really seen her dad last night, had she? Of course she hadn’t. Yet the memory of talking with her father felt more vivid than her memory of the nosebleed in the pool.

How could that be?

Time slowed.

And slowed.

Slowed.

To.

A.

Point.

That.

Was.

So.

Slow.

It.

Was.

Unsustainable.

Soon time would stop, literally stop, and they would all be trapped in a single moment forever. That didn’t seem too fantastical a thought after last night’s smoothie experience, when time had elongated and contracted, over and over, like a piece of elastic being stretched and released.

There was a long, heated discussion about when and if they should turn the lights out.

It had not occurred to Frances that there was no natural light down here. It was Napoleon who’d figured it out; he’d been the one to find the light switch this morning when he woke up. He said he’d crawled around the room on his hands and knees and run his hands around the walls until he found it. When he flicked the switch to demonstrate for them, the room was plunged into a thick, impenetrable darkness that felt like death.

Frances voted for the lights to go off at midnight. She wanted to sleep: sleeping would pass the time, and she knew she’d never sleep with those blazing downlights. Others thought that they shouldn’t risk sleeping; they should be ‘ready to take action’.

‘Who knows what they’re planning next?’ Jessica shot a hostile look at the camera. At some point she had scrubbed off all her make-up. She looked ten years younger, younger even than Zoe; too young to be pregnant, too young to be wealthy. Without the make-up, the cosmetic enhancements looked like acne: a teenage blight that would pass when she grew up.

‘I don’t think anything sinister is going to happen in the middle of the night,’ Carmel said.

‘We were woken up for the starlight meditation,’ said Heather. ‘It’s entirely possible.’

‘I liked the starlight meditation,’ said Carmel.