The island, p.6
The Island, page 6
We passed by more domed pods containing arcade machines, an oxygen bar and a surf machine. I was surprised and not a little concerned to see that one dome contained a circle of padded chairs, each one with an IV-drip stand beside it. A poster on the wall advertised ‘hangover beating IV hydration and vitamin blasts’. Yellow dust had blown in, layering over the shiny leather of the chairs.
“Oh wow,” Carla peeped in around me. “Do you think that actually works?”
I gaped at her, horrified. “You can’t seriously be considering it. Look, it’s filthy in there.”
Carla blew a raspberry. “No one is going to need it ’til the second day – they’ll probably clean it up by then. Besides, when will I ever get the chance to try it again?”
“Never, hopefully,” I muttered. I meant it too, the only time I wanted to be hooked up to something like that was if I was in a horrible accident or literally dying. The idea of having an IV just for the hell of it was wild. Maybe because I’d actually administered them before, albeit to animals.
“Come on guys,” Ari complained. “I want to get to the beach before it’s absolutely mobbed.”
As we started to walk again she nudged in between us. “But I agree with Jody. If you let someone hook you up to an IV here, you’ll get all forms of hepatitis and die – and I don’t want to pay your third of the rent this month so, no dying for you.”
Carla groaned. “Right…especially now that…”
Ari coughed hard and took a deep slurp of her drink, apparently I wasn’t the only one getting dust caught in my throat. It was impossible to avoid breathing it in.
“Spoilsports,” Carla muttered, then poked her tongue out at me.
Ari was right to be worried as it turned out – the beach was rammed already. The metal fence ended in an arch of purple windmills, the kind you’d put on top of a sandcastle, all whirring away in the wind. It made a big statement, but the crowds beyond it had more impact. I realised, as we picked our way through sunbathing groups, that it wasn’t even that nice of a beach. I’d been expecting white sand, blue water and blinding sunshine. The stuff of Instagram holiday pictures. Well, the sun was definitely out and it was swelteringly hot, as for the rest…well.
The beach wasn’t sand at all, mostly chalky pebbles and course grit, like something off of a building site. I spotted one chunk of concrete and then started seeing them everywhere – wedges of weathered grey concrete, some pierced with rusting rebar. Even a few bricks with the mortar worn down and clinging on. It was like a building site. Or a bombsite.
The sea, where it met the pebbles, was a wide band of yellow foam, clotted with rubbish and seaweed. Beyond that, it was at least blue and clear, so you could see down to the odd take-away container or dark brown blob of what I really hoped was seaweed.
Having grown up in Dorset and spent most summer holidays there, or visiting family in Devon and Cornwall, I’d been on some of the most beautiful beaches in England. I’d appreciated them all, from the rugged to the smoothest golden sand. This, was however, not one I could find the beauty in. It was also not how I had imagined my trip to Greece. It looked more like the one time I’d been to Skegness with the school – in winter when the sand looked like dirt and the strong tides had thrown up rubbish for the wind to toss around.
I glanced at Ari and Carla to see if they were disappointed. Ari looked as grossed out as I felt. Then again she was from Norway and from what she’d shown me of her family pictures, they had amazing beaches. Or at least, she’d only been to the really good ones. Carla however was gamely picking her way over to a slanted slab of concrete. She climbed up onto it and arranged herself so she’d get the sun on her legs. Ari and I settled on the lower end of the slab.
“Isn’t it lovely and warm?” Carla said, with her head tilted back. “God, I haven’t been to the beach since…Southend, when we were in third year. And that was hardly a scorcher of a week, was it? I think I actually caught a chill.”
That explained it then. Though I found my mood dipping at the mention of that trip. The first time I’d known either of them to lie to me.
I remembered Carla telling me about trips she’d taken to Amsterdam, Berlin and Prague in the two years since university, but she’d never mentioned anything that wasn’t a city break. As a London girl all her life I guessed she was more suited to having everything within easy reach.
Whilst Carla sunbathed above us like a mermaid on a chunk of crumbling cement, Ari took out a bottle of sun cream and began to reapply. She’d always made her opinions on skincare very clear, especially when it came to sun protection. It had been her ever-present refrain even in our university days as she waved a bottle of factor fifty at us, yelling “You’ll thank me when you’re forty!” as she did so. She didn’t just wear sun cream in summer, she wore SPF daily – something about even indoor lights and screens causing damage to the skin. I was never going to be able to keep that kind of routine up, but it did seem to be working for her. Her face didn’t even have a faint trace of what might one day become a wrinkle. Carla, like me, had baby frown lines and freckles. Though on her they looked adorable. I just looked five years older than I really was, according to Nick at least. Who had never missed an opportunity to remind me that my ‘peak years’ were fast running out and that soon I’d be twenty-five and hitting ‘the wall’. Even then, he’d complained about me ‘wasting money’ on anti-aging creams, and said they cluttered up the bathroom. More than once he’d thrown away whole jars of Olay because they were in the way of his hair trimmer or deodorants.
“The dust’s just going to stick to you, and the sand,” Carla pointed out, once she noticed what Ari was doing.
“What sand?” Ari said. “It’s basically road salt.”
Carla tisked. “So negative. Lighten up, babe. We’re in Greece! Loosen up.”
Ari rolled her eyes and dotted sun cream delicately across her cheekbones. “Do you want some of this or are you committed to the leather suitcase look?”
Carla made a grabby hand motion for the bottle and applied the barest hint of sun cream on her arms and face before passing it on to me. I went for full coverage, even though, judging purely from the tight, dry feeling on my shoulders, it was probably already too late for me. It was far from the thick white cream Mum had forced on me as a kid. Even Ari’s sun cream was some fancy brand imported from Japan that didn’t leave a horrible white cast behind. I was probably never going to feel even half as cool as her.
I dug three of the pre-mixed cans of cocktail out of my bag, where the sweating metal had picked up scraps of fluff and particles of crumbling receipt. With our plastic cups refreshed I raised mine up, already feeling self-conscious before I even began to speak. My sun-creamy fingers slid against the plastic.
“Here’s to…Lethe, then, I suppose?” I said.
Ari huffed, clearly still nursing bad feeling over our experience so far.
“Oh come on, it’s not that bad,” Carla said, knocking her cup against mine. “Look, you’ve got sun, sand…”
“Grit.”
“Sea,” Carla continued, ignoring Ari’s attempt to derail her. “There’s music, drinks, good vibes and so many people to have fun with. Even if it’s the worst festival you ever go to in your life, at least you got to be here. It’s exclusive, remember? That means even if it sucks we can say ‘we were there!’. Best of all, we’re not stuck at work or hiding from the rain in our damp little house share, watching other people have fun on Instagram.”
“…true,” Ari allowed, then cleared her throat and raised her cup. “Alright then – to being anywhere but home.”
“Anywhere but home,” we chorused, and chugged semi-chilled rum and colas which tasted of aspartame and little else.
With the second drink (third if my first swallow of that petrol masquerading as vodka counted) I felt the warmth in my chest expand. All the clenched up, sharp little worries in me were unravelling. At the very least I was numbing them away. It was the most relaxed I’d felt in weeks. Months. Nearly two years. The sun on my face felt so good and even if the beach was littered with rubbish and the festival was at the centre of a dust cloud, that didn’t change anything. I was going to have a good time, no matter what.
“Hey again!”
I looked up at the stranger, a girl about our age in cut-off shorts and a ‘Lotus-eaters’ t-shirt with the sleeves hacked off.
“Um…hi?” Ari said, sounding just as confused as I felt by this stranger’s arrival.
“Micah, hi!” Carla smiled, beckoning her into the heart of our group. “Guys this is Micah, I met her while I was buying drinks at the airport. She lent me change for the vending machine – which I can now pay back,” she said, rummaging in her bag.
Micah waved her off with a heavily tattooed hand. “No worries – you two must be Ari and Rosie?”
“Jody,” I said, feeling slighted, despite my buzz. That was me, the forgettable one.
“I’m camped up over in the like…southern corner of the campground,” Micah continued. She didn’t seem to have heard me. “If you guys fancy popping by for a drink one evening or whatever. I’ve got a link here too, if you’re in the mood for something else.”
“Oh, cool,” Carla said. “How do they get stuff past security? You should have seen the stuff they were confiscating, there was so much of it.”
“No idea,” Micah shrugged. Her easy smile made me envious. She was so clearly comfortable even though she barely knew us at all. I was anxious around Ari and Carla even having lived with them for a while now. “I mean, it’s probably not that hard – not with all the staff, the different businesses coming in and out – plus you know, the sea. Anyone could rock up on a boat, couldn’t they?”
“That’s a good point actually,” Ari said, glancing at the water. “There’s no security to stop people just turning up and getting into the festival, is there? Anyone with a boat could just get in for nothing.”
“And with anything,” Micah said, raising an eyebrow. “Here, let me give you my number in case you feel like hanging out later.”
She gestured for Carla’s phone and tapped her number into the contacts. Her own phone buzzed with a message and she took it out to save the contact. “Carla, with Ari and Joey.”
“Jody,” I said, slightly too loud, I realised when all three of them looked at me. “Sorry…it’s Jody.”
“…cool,” Micah said, then widened her eyes slightly at Carla as if to say ‘the fuck is her problem?’. I felt my face flush beyond the beginnings of sunburn.
“See you around,” Micah exited our little group and headed off across the beach. A moment later I heard her cheerfully greeting someone called Meg. She was just the life and soul of the party. I winced at my own bitterness as if it was a taste on my tongue. I wasn’t being fair to her. I was being jealous because she made this all look so easy and I felt like it was the hardest thing in the world to do.
“Right, well, I for one could use something to eat,” Ari said, draining the last of her drink. “What do you guys say to finding some chips or something on the way back to the tent?”
“I might stay here for a bit,” Carla said, lying out on the concrete. “Work on my tan, recover a bit from the early start. You go on though.”
“Alright – Jody what do you feel like doing?” Ari asked.
I felt pulled in two directions. I’d had no plans to leave their sides through this whole four-day nightmare, but I hadn’t considered that they might split up. Anxiety churned in my stomach. It was something Mum had drummed into me before I went off to uni. You never walk home alone and you never, ever, let a friend go off on their own. Though no one I’d met at university had seemed to follow that rule. Not even Ari and Carla.
The few times I’d been roped into going out with the girls and their extensive friendship groups, all of them third year students and much cooler than me. I was always the first to head home. I was never good at staying up late when I was tired and footsore and sick of pretending to have a good time. Then everyone else would just stampede towards the next club, leaving me to get the bus by myself. The most Ari or Carla had ever done was say goodbye or ask if I was sure I wanted to go home. Still, nothing bad had ever happened to me. So maybe Mum’s insistence was just another of the rules she’d lived by that no one else did – like it being rude to share your problems with people you didn’t know well. Something which had locked her away in loneliness after Dad died, and made her determined to surround me with people – no matter how I felt about it.
“I’ll…come and get some food,” I said, realising that as well as needing the loo, I was also feeling a bit lightheaded from hunger.
“Catch you up later,” Carla said, hardly lifting her head up.
Together Ari and I navigated our way across the beach, now completely rammed with people sitting and standing, eating and drinking. The smells of the sea and the sun cream on my skin mingled with that of ripe rubbish which pressed in on me from all sides. I was already dreading the concert that evening, dreaming of the moment I’d be able to get into my sleeping bag and shut out the world. More than something to eat, I was craving the privacy of being in my own head. At least once we were trying to get some sleep I wouldn’t have to worry about looking like I was having the best time of my life.
Chapter 7
Ari and I found a stall that wasn’t absolutely swarmed with hungry people and got two containers of fries. I got nuggets as well, because I needed something to help keep me from tipping over the edge of buzzed into messy drunk later on. Not because I was particularly hungry. I’d started to feel a bit queasy. It was probably the smell of rubbish, or the early start.
I’d been expecting maybe something a little bit more regional, food-wise – gyros perhaps, or even just kebabs. This stuff was straight out of the late-night takeaways of home, produced so quickly that nothing was crisp or brown, just barely cooked through and bland. It was oddly comforting in a weird way. Something familiar.
“Not a single proper vegan option,” Ari groused on the way back to the tent, eating her salted fries. “Not even vegan mayo. Festivals are literally packed with veggies and vegans and…new-age type people. Not a single vegan option! We should burn this place to the ground.”
I suppressed a laugh at her pantomime of outrage. “Maybe there’re other stalls that have better options? We can look later.”
A cloud of purple smoke drifted over us and I waved it out of my face. There were coloured flares going off all over the place. I had no idea if people had brought them in or if they were part of the overall ‘experience’, but it was making navigating the crowds even more confusing.
“I hope so. I can’t last three days on fries. I mean…I could but I’m not gonna. For a start my stomach’ll be a mess and I’ll be bored out of my mind. Where’s the falafel? Where are the smoothie bowls and the bean burritos?” We’d reached the tent and Ari dragged a cheap fleece blanket out of her suitcase and tossed it on the dusty ground to sit on. “I’m making myself hungry.”
I sat on the blanket and kept half an ear on Ari’s fantasy food rant, the rest of me was taking in the sprawling mass that the campground had become. More and more people had been arriving whilst we were at the beach. We were packed in, only the first to arrive had space between their tents. We’d been lucky to find a patch to set up that wasn’t yet hemmed in on all sides, but in the time we’d been gone our neighbours had arrived and pitched their tent less than a meter from ours. The paths between the wobbly rows were barely a foot wide and littered with guy ropes. In just the short time I’d spent looking around I’d seen three people stagger over them, and even as I thought that, I spotted one girl completely face-plant, scattering chips everywhere.
“Ouch,” Ari said. We watched her friends scoop her up, the group weaving drunkenly onwards. “I forgot how fast people get messy at these things.”
“Is it going to be like this for the entire four days?” I asked. “Don’t they want to remember any of this?” Though to be honest, I would be happy if I could spend the next four days in a semi-drunken fog.
“You do remember it…mostly,” Ari shrugged. “It’s like…childbirth. You have to forget how horrible it was and cling to the magic or you’d never do it again.”
I stared at her in horror, but Ari just laughed. “It’s true! Just think of a double rum and coke and a spliff as being the epidural. It gets you through sleeping on the ground, stinking of sweat, hovering over a loo with no seat and eating greasy, awful food that costs twice as much as it should. Being constantly exhausted and thirsty and hanging. Then, once it’s over and you’re home and you’ve slept it all off and unmatted the glitter from your hair…you remember the way you felt in the crowd and the moment the beat dropped on your favourite song with thousands of people there screaming. That’s the magic part.”
I wanted to believe it but I was also worried that I couldn’t feel the ‘magic’ like she could. In a crowd, hemmed in by bodies and sound and being seen – I wasn’t sure I could ever feel anything but the desire to escape.
“Speaking of which,” Ari said, her philosophical musings apparently done for the evening. “I’m going to get ready to head to the stage. Can’t go looking the way I feel – tired and fresh off of a cramped plane.”
She zipped herself into the tent and I heard the rustling of bags being opened. Right, the concert. There had been music all day, pumping through speakers all the way along the security fence. I’d felt its heavy bass line like a second heartbeat since we arrived. But I supposed Ari and Carla would want to see most of the acts live, from in front of the stage. Especially now it was getting dark and there would surely be more of a light show.
