Joni
‘So, it’s day seven on the Island of the Damned, and I’m on the camera because little sister is busy patting the rat and talking music with the Gaelic Undertaker.’
Joni felt compelled to stop marching and interject in the monologue Frankie was directing towards the tiny camera she had pointed at herself. ‘He’s a rodentus Australis.’
‘I thought he was Irish.’
Joni stomped her foot in frustration. ‘You know I was talking about Des.’
‘Oh, sorry.’ Frankie didn’t sound it.
Okay, so Colm was kind of dark and there was something distinctly furtive about him. But Joni liked brooding types. Daragh, on the other hand, was just a moody bastard, who seemed to be getting moodier as the trek went on.
‘Don’t worry about her,’ Joni told Colm in a stage whisper. ‘She never did get the New Romantics.’
‘Ah, but she’s lovely, that sister o’ yours,’ Colm insisted forcefully. ‘A right treat on the eye, and such a competent lass there never was.’
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
‘Maybe,’ Joni admitted grudgingly. ‘But she knows fuck-all about music. Now, tell me, what did you think of that Bono YouTube thing?’
Daragh, perhaps fed up with being left out of the conversation or perhaps with trudging relentlessly up what felt like Mount Kilimanjaro, chose that moment to break his moody silence and launch into an homage to the great man.
He crooned U2’s ‘Stuck in a Moment’, which would have been tragically beautiful had the words not been so shockingly accurate.
‘Right,’ Frankie barked, coming to an abrupt halt and causing each of them behind her to stumble. ‘Enough of life imitating bloody art, who knows where the hell we are? Colm, what does the compass say?’
Colm stopped the humming he always, like some subconscious backing vocal, engaged in whenever his cousin was singing.
‘Ah, now, there’s an excellent question.’ Colm appeared genuinely thrilled to have Frankie consulting him on such matters of state. ‘Now, let’s just have a wee looky here …’
Frankie, Joni, Daragh and Des all dutifully waited while Colm laboriously extracted the torch from the backpack, checked the batteries, shone it on the compass, made a few reassuring noises into his shaggy beard, returned the torch to the bag and cleared his throat.
‘This better be worth it, Bear Grylls,’ Frankie bitched.
‘Ah, now, there is the tiniest of baby-sized problems.’
Something about Colm’s tone hinted to Joni that he was going to say something calamitous. She tried to telepath to her new friend that Frankie could possibly murder him if he said the wrong thing, but obviously he just didn’t have the gift.
‘Y’see, m’lovely, I can’t exactly read a compass.’
It would have been much better if Frankie had exploded. Eruptions can be contained; damage controlled. It’s the low, slow burn that leaves lasting scars.
‘You what?’ She marched back to him.
Colm was standing at the end of their unhappy little conga line, and as Frankie passed, Joni could almost smell her tightly coiled rage.
‘What the flying Freddie Mercury do you mean you can’t exactly read a compass? Do you mean the light is not quite good enough?’
She jabbed a long, beautiful finger into his shaggy chest.
‘Do you mean you feel like you need a second opinion to make sure your initial calculations are on the money?’
She jabbed again, clearly expecting a response this time.
‘No, no,’ Colm confirmed, sounding cheerful for the first time in hours. ‘Just can’t read a compass, really. At all, really.’
Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear oh dear.
‘If you can’t read a compass, why the shoddy, shagging, shit-out-of-luck hell did you take the bloody thing in the first place then?’
Frankie sounded like she wanted to castrate him with her bare hands.
How much longer till she swore properly and was done with it?
‘You said you’d take it. You said, actually, “Here, m’lovely, let me have the wee thing.”’
Joni had to admit Frankie did a good West County.
‘Everyone else said they couldn’t read a compass.’
Colm’s response sounded almost logical to Joni, who still desperately wanted to like someone with such excellent taste in music. She remembered that, yes, everyone had said that. She remembered because, at that moment, she’d experienced a moment of sheer fury at their father. He had, after all, taught them to shoot, run, erect a tent, dig a latrine and the exact proportions of a shallow grave, but God forbid he let go of that fucking little dial.
Screw you, Dad, if you’re watching – this is your fault.
Although, looking at Frankie’s murderous face, Joni wondered if maybe it was lucky their father had taught them that stuff about the shallow grave, so they could hide the evidence.
‘Yes, but neither can you, you dimwit!’ Frankie was yelling now, her normally beautifully modulated voice being used to bludgeon Colm where he stood. ‘That is simply absurd. Moronic. It’s –’
‘Um, look, I’m terribly sorry to interrupt while you’re beating on my man here …’ Daragh had been saying very little until this point. His interruption was startling enough to make Frankie stop, mid-tirade. ‘But I’m feeling brutal. D’y’think it’d matter if I took a wee lie-down?’
He pointed to some dimly visible shrubbery over to the left of the track they were walking. Joni could feel that Frankie was about to disgorge a stream of invective in Daragh’s direction. Frankie moved over to him, like a viper ready to strike, flicking her torch into his face, the better to get a clear view of his terror as she scorched him.
But something pulled her up short.
Frankie looked carefully into his face, and gave one noisy exhalation of disgust and resignation.
‘Oh, go on then,’ she allowed. ‘What difference will it make?’
She stood still, watching Daragh meander over to the spot he had assayed and smoothing her cargo pants in her habitual gesture of nervous tension.
It obviously wasn’t enough, though. Joni watched as Frankie picked up a nearby stick and began to slash widely at an outrageous plant beside her, amputating several of the showy purple blooms that looked disconcertingly like penises. Then, breathing more easily, she spun on Colm again.
‘Tell me this,’ she insisted wearily. ‘Did you have any particular reason for suggesting we head in this direction, given you had no bloody idea what the compass said?’
Colm shook his head sadly.
‘Did you choose it because of the huge bloody incline? Think it’d make things more interesting?’
His big, dark head moved slowly from side to side again. ‘It looked right, to be sure, this way did,’ he finally offered lamely. ‘And I’d hate to be the one to worry everyone.’
‘Oh, jolly decent of you,’ Frankie bit out tartly.
Joni wanted to come to Colm’s defence. But, in the cold assessing light of Frankie’s interrogation, his actions did seem rather stupid. In fact, she was feeling rather panicked.
They were lost.
Des, in the way animals can, was beginning to pick up invisible signs of distress. His scratchy little legs were starting to scurry on the spot, like he wanted to run from whatever little-understood danger was starting to make Joni’s blood pressure spike.
Frankie leaned exasperatedly against a tree a dozen or so yards ahead of Joni. The angle of the incline made her look like she was crowned by a million stars.
How had someone like her, all wild-eyed and full of fury and frankness, ever ended up with Edward?
Even now, after all this time, it defied belief for Joni.
Especially now she knew about the cheating.
What had she seen in him? What had she imagined she’d found in that spineless slug? Had it been worth it?
And why was she still with him?
Joni knew, from years of experience, that down this mental path there lay no good. But she felt herself begin to hyperventilate, and the words came spilling out.
‘Oh my God, we’re lost, really lost, and anything could happen. Fucking Irish nob. There’s only this video diary and hidden cameras, and they might not get footage from those till fuck knows when and we’re going to die out here.’
Joni was swallowing great lungfuls of air in between her words. They were becoming thin and thready, and her mouth was drying. She began to consider all the things that could happen to them out here, not the least of which was losing the game and returning home to a guaranteed kneecapping.
‘We could, we could get eaten by a bear or a crocodile or something … I can’t believe they’re allowed to do this to us. Colm, you bloody twit, why did you say you could work the compass? I can’t –’
Joni stopped short as she felt the swift sting on her cheek. ‘Stop it,’ Frankie commanded.
Joni was too surprised to respond. Her sister had never, ever hit her.
Even then. Even seven years ago.
The shock was enough to silence her. And the hurt was so great, she didn’t have it in her to be angry.
Frankie was on a roll. ‘You’re right. It is dangerous out here. You can’t melt down. You’re better than that. Stronger than that. I know you are.’
‘You don’t know anything.’ The words felt like they were wrenched from the darkest place in Joni’s soul as she cupped her smarting cheek. ‘You know nothing about how weak I am.’
As she finished speaking, a strange frog-thing croaked in the distance, in a sing-song cry that sounded uncannily like a low, grumbly It’s true, it’s true, it’s true.
It was true.
Frankie didn’t know what she was.
‘Look at me.’ Frankie directed Joni’s tear-streaked face towards her own clear, sad-eyed one. ‘I do. I do know. And I know how it ended. In the end. You are stronger than you think.’
What did she mean? Did she know? Could she mean …?
So many things neither of them knew about the other.
But Frankie wasn’t finished.
‘At the moment, I’m worried about that lad over there.’ Frankie thumbed a swift, quiet gesture towards Daragh. ‘And you can’t afford to be wrapped up in yourself right now. I think he needs some help.’
Joni looked over, confused, and suddenly saw what Frankie had seen when she’d allowed him to rest moments ago. He was prone in the shrubbery to the left, shaking but quiet. His cousin had gone to him.
A fever?
Something about the tableau looked familiar. The way Colm looked, resigned and scared. The way he held Daragh’s head, in his big, hairy hands, soothing him and saying something into his ear. Afraid, but not freaked out. Practised. Joni knew what it looked like. But couldn’t accept it. And couldn’t accept that Frankie could have seen it first.
Frankie was all business. ‘We need to –’
‘No, Frankie,’ Joni interrupted firmly. ‘I know what needs to be done. You don’t know how to –’
Frankie rolled her eyes at her sister. ‘Look, Joni, you’d be surprised what I know about –’
Something about her sister’s tone, her casual assumption that she could fix everything in the world, even this, enraged Joni. She felt seven years of melancholy and loneliness rise up in her. She wanted to stick the knife and twist it until Frankie really did know about pain and injury.
‘No, Little Miss Perfect. What would you know about addiction, in your pretty world with your bloody pearls and your fucking marmalade? You and that cheating gobshite? Sit down and take a number for a minute, would you?’
Joni started over to Colm and Daragh and Frankie caught her arm.
‘For your information, you little cow,’ Frankie snarled. ‘For the last five years, I have been the sole executive of Pick Me Up and this is exactly what we do. So, I do know something about addiction.’
‘You …?’ Joni’s eyes were wide and wild in her head. She’d heard of them. Who, in her situation, hadn’t?
But nothing made sense. Frankie? She was an economist.
‘Why, Frankie?’
‘Because of you.’
Frankie turned on her heel to go to Daragh and, before Joni could say, Come back here and tell me more, the moment was gone.
‘What the feck will we do?’
Colm, so composed while admitting his treachery with the compass, was suddenly a nervous wreck. ‘Joni, Frankie – what will we do? Jesus, Mary and Joseph, we’re lost.’
Joni had no idea. And neither did Frankie. Colm knew it. Daragh, growing more silent, sweaty and terrified with each passing moment, knew it. Even Des, cowering unhelpfully inside her clothes, knew it. And Joni certainly knew it. But, knowing you were well and truly shagged and admitting it were two entirely different things. Joni knew all about denial and felt obliged to put her skills to the test to get them out of their current funk. Denial was dead easy, once you knew how. A simple three-step program.
And if there was one thing Joni knew, it was programs with steps.
First step, fury. ‘Listen, Danny Boy. You little fucker. You have no right to fall apart right now. You are the one who screwed this up royally. Crapping on about the New Romantics and leading us up Mount fucking Everest while you had no clue in hell where we were or how the bloody hell we could find out.’
Colm looked suitably contrite. Good.
Step two, feign calm. Just channel Frankie. She took a deep breath and pinned Colm down with the force of her grey eyes.
‘Everything is going to be fine. Just keep taping.’
Colm picked up the camera Frankie had tossed away.
‘If we don’t use the video diary, we’ll be disqualified, remember?’
‘She’s right, Colm. Do what she says. And any more crap from you and I’ll make what I did to that bush,’ Frankie gestured dramatically at the beheaded shrubbery beside her, ‘look like nothing compared with what I’ll do to you.’
Colm swallowed and nodded as Daragh moaned.
Joni nodded too. Onwards and upwards. Step three. Pretend to have a plan.
‘We’ll keep filming like we know exactly where we’re going. Until we do.’ Joni crossed her fingers behind her back like a six-year-old. ‘In the meantime,’ she gestured to the shaking Daragh, ‘we need to take care of our man over there. How bad is he?’
‘Ahhhh …’ Colm looked like he didn’t want to admit to anything, and Joni thought in a single, whizzing instant about all the people she had made tell lies for her over the four years she had gone AWOL. Amazing what people will do. Lie for you, even to you; even help you as you convince yourself you’re not really so screwed up. Even when you’re a toxic, lying shite.
Everyone except G.
A memory. Six years ago.
A year after The Incident, a year after things had really started to go wrong.
But, out of habit, Joni had managed to limp over to G’s. For Big Brother. The best series yet. A one-legged cross-dresser had been smuggled into the house and caused an uproar by snogging the Hunk and calling the Princess a cow. And then mooing at her.
But this night, even Big Brother could not distract G.
She held a mirror with a steady hand. ‘Look at you.’
In anyone else, it would be a gesture of disgust, but with G it was just frankness. And sadness. Mingled with a tiny shot of determination.
This was a conversation whose time had come.
‘Ugh, no thanks.’
Joni was cramming Pringles and Starbursts into her mouth. She was unsure when her next meal might be and still vaguely aware of the need for sustenance.
‘Look at yourself, my girl.’
G’s voice caught as she said the words, but her hand was steady as she held Joni’s chin and prised it upwards. Joni had no choice but to confront the scarecrow staring back from the gilt-edged oval mirror G held firmly in her soft, bumpy hands. That girl looked forty-two, not twenty-two. She didn’t look edgy and carefree. Forever young, as Joni tried to convince herself, on good days.
She looked sick, and sad, and old.
And finished.
At least, that’s what G had told her. And G never lied.
Three hours later, Frankie and Joni were exhausted.
Colm looked shattered too, although, as well as being terrified of Frankie, he was now sufficiently frightened of Joni not to mention the fact. Daragh had been getting progressively worse since Colm had admitted his cousin’s heroin addiction. He was curled inwards, fetal and terrified, as the things that hunted him took hold. Joni knew that right now he was the only one who could get himself through this. How bad was he? And how badly did he want to live?
Plenty of lads coming off heroin didn’t want to live at all.
Not after they realised they had to get through this first.
It had been hard enough for Joni, with the crack, and the rest. She knew enough to know this was harder.
Joni, Frankie and Colm sat beside Daragh, taking turns to use their precious, dwindling water to rinse out the cloth to wipe his brow. An hour ago, he had tried to make a run for it, but Colm, the heavier of the two cousins by forty pounds, had crash tackled him. Daragh had been furious, fleeing demons only he could see. But it was no match for his cousin’s calm determination.
‘Why aren’t you singing?’ Frankie asked, which Joni had been wondering as well.
‘It only makes matters worse.’ Colm was speaking quietly, his accent so thick Joni had to strain carefully to catch the words. ‘He loves the music, for sure. But it … breaks him open when he’s like this. Strange, huh?’
Not so strange, Joni thought. Then she jumped as Frankie quietly grabbed her hand. It felt good, and she tried not to think. She couldn’t afford to break open the thick floodgate of empathy, and let sadness and self-loathing overwhelm her.
‘Time to puke,’ Joni announced, with an effort at cheerfulness. ‘Get him up.’
‘All right, me old man,’ Colm encouraged his cousin, as he took the brunt of Daragh’s almost-inert form, and Joni and Frankie tried valiantly to balance the rest from the other side. ‘Time for walkies, eh? Down the pub, just you and me, back home, eh? Imagine we’re on the Killarney Road, and it’s time to stop and smell the flowers.’
Once they had travelled the few yards across to the vomiting spot, Colm lifted Daragh forcefully from the middle, as Joni had instructed him, and squeezed twice, swiftly.
Nothing happened.
‘It might be he’s all done?’ Colm looked hopeful.
Joni glanced at him doubtfully. Frankie asked, ‘How long did you say it’s been since he stopped?’
‘I’m not precisely sure.’ Colm was being evasive, and Frankie thumped him once, hard, between the shoulderblades. He looked entreatingly at Joni and she rewarded him with an identical thump.
I’m on her team, not yours, you twat.
The thought surprised her. I really am.
‘Okay, okay,’ Colm admitted. ‘He seemed out of it last night. But I think that might have been the end of his stash.’
‘How the hell did he get it through Customs?’ Joni had thought getting Des through was a miracle.
Colm looked sheepish. ‘Ah, well, you know, we were in that VIP line, and I think my man must have put the stuff someplace only a doctor should go …’
Frankie caught Daragh’s big face in her long fingers.
‘How do you feel, sweetheart?’ She was murmuring softly to him. ‘Do you feel sick, my little love?’
Daragh groaned, forming no words but answering more articulately than if he had.
‘Okay then,’ Frankie soothed. ‘So you need to be sick, and I’m going to help, okay?’ Daragh nodded, groaning again, sweat pouring down his face like tears.
Or maybe it was tears, Joni wasn’t sure.
‘Away with ye. What y’ going to do?’ Colm was still soft, afraid.
‘Help him.’ Frankie looked at Colm as though it were obvious. ‘Keep hold.’
Continuing to hold Daragh’s face, Frankie silently signalled Joni, who immediately moved over to her, and helped as Frankie skilfully used the fingers of one hand to prise open his mouth. With the other hand, she jabbed two long fingers into his slack mouth. They seemed to disappear into his neck, and time seemed to slow as she extracted them and repeated the motion. Then it happened.
Great, long heaves breaking apart the very core of him. Grey green, the stuff covered the loamy floor at their feet, gathering in pools and mingling with the muck and decay of the rainforest. Going on and on until it seemed impossible there was anything left. And then finishing with one final heave.
When it was over, Joni motioned to Colm to take Daragh back to where he had been lying previously. He was spent and shaking, but the wildness was gone from his eyes, and he looked like he might sleep, at least for a few moments.
Now Joni was shaking. She reached for her absent locket under her shirt and looked up at the stars, fighting for space in the crowded sky. For the last seven years, whenever she had looked up at the sky, Joni had wondered whether Frankie was doing the same. And now they were together, looking at the same sky.
Somehow she’d let herself get used to having Frankie around.
‘Why did you come, Colm?’
Joni was surprised by her own voice. It sounded deep and solid. Like Frankie’s.
‘You had to know this would happen. More to it, why did he come?’
Colm paused, and he too examined the sky, as though seeking answers from it, and started lamenting in what had to be Gaelic.
Joni nodded sagely. ‘What the fuck does that mean?’
Colm shrugged. ‘I was no help. Been taking care o’ him since he was a babby, but I’ve been useful as a lighthouse on a bog with this. We had to do something. Didn’t talk ’bout it. We just threw our hats in, and let the fairies decide.’
Joni rolled her eyes at Frankie, who rolled hers back. Fucking Irish.
‘Right, for that, and for making me stick my fingers down your cousin’s throat, you work the camera.’ Frankie tapped the sliver of electronics in his hand. ‘If we don’t turn the video diary in, we’re out.’
Two hours later, dawn was breaking, Daragh was sleeping peacefully and Colm’s beautiful Irish lilt wafted down the hill like the heady scent of lavender.
‘Ah, dawn breaks o’er the jungle and our spirits are high as we head home.’
A lie, Joni thought. They hadn’t moved an inch and had no idea where they were. But well-executed bullshit. Points for that.
‘Ah yes, look at that, just as I was saying a wee bit earlier. These rolling hills remind me of my home back in …’
Joni shook her head in wonder, looking at the impenetrable jungle. Even with the first light of dawn filtering through the foliage, it looked forbidding. About as far from bogs and shamrocks and leprechauns as anything ever was.
Colm seemed to be reaching the end of his monologue, and looked over at Frankie as he switched the ‘off’ button on the little camera. ‘What now?’
Frankie was as crisp and efficient as if she had slept a luxurious nine hours on a featherbed. ‘Right, Daragh’s going to need water, and we’re out,’ she said. ‘I’m sure I heard running water before. I’ll go and assess the situation, but I won’t be long. And when I get back, rest-break is officially over.’
Joni looked questioningly at Frankie, who smiled back and shook her head. ‘I’ll be fine,’ she said, loping off.
Colm flicked the camera back on, capturing Frankie disappearing down a side path. ‘Ah, sure and all as I’d kill for a pint o’ the black stuff right now, the Mistress Frannie has gone off to find us some water. How ’bout I offer you a few more minutes of Irish loving? Here we go …’
He drew in a breath manfully, as though even he were sick of the sound of his own pretty voice, and started low and sad. ‘“Musha rig um du rum da …”’
Joni groaned. With a trembling Daragh to cover up, a good many video-diary minutes had been occupied with Colm’s maudlin drinking songs. Joni could almost hear the snap of the trapdoor as it swallowed the two cousins whole. She moved over to Daragh, who was beginning to stir, and reached for his hand. ‘It’s going to be okay, my dear,’ she assured him.
Daragh groaned again. ‘I’m such a useless shite.’
Joni shook her head. No.
‘I am so.’ He hiccupped sadly. ‘You don’t know. I’ve always been this way. Dependent on something. M’ cousin. M’ mammy. Now this.’
Joni felt compelled to disagree, but wasn’t quite sure who she was defending. ‘Everyone’s dependent on something,’ she said, with what she hoped passed for wisdom. ‘Some people just hide it better than others. And you know what? We can all get through it, in the end.’ After all, she’d gotten through it, hadn’t she? ‘We’re stronger than we think.’
She stopped for a moment, thinking about what she’d said. Maybe it was true. Her mum, dependent on her dad, even after all these years. Frankie, dependent on that stupid prick of a husband.
Daragh hiccupped again. ‘Oh, no. Me mam’s going to be so ashamed. What will they make of ’t all down at St Gert’s?’
‘It’s okay,’ she assured. ‘No-one’s going to know about what happened here tonight. I think we’ve managed to pull it off.’
It was important to her, somehow, that no-one find out about Daragh, about what he had been through. Especially The Stapler.
‘Now, Frankie’ll be back in the next few minutes, and then we’re going to have to move off. Do you think you can?’
Daragh groaned what sounded like a pained assent, and then mumbled: ‘Aye, aye, missus. Whatever you say. You are truly the boss and I am merely the shitkicker.’
Huh, the shitkicker. For the first time, Joni thought about Nigel. She remembered what he had said about visiting the island during filming for ‘due diligence’. The thought pleased her. She imagined what it would be like to be with someone that together, that normal. And flecky mint-jelly sexy. Pretty good, probably. She patted Daragh kindly on the stomach.
‘Good lad, we’ll be off in a jiffy then.’ But which way?