The Last Resort(33)

Tiggy had explained all this with such passion that Brenda couldn’t be bothered to tell her that she couldn’t care less – that her assistant always booked her hotels for her, and that she wasn’t particularly impressed by origami towels.

She takes another drink. Tiggy is down by the water’s edge, glass in hand, taking small steps into the sea then flicking her feet up, spraying water across the sand. Giggling to herself. Not too bothered about Giles now, is she?

There’s a beep. Not too loud at first but rising. She sits up straighter, glances across at the others. They are all looking around, trying to see where the sound is coming from. It beeps again, and then the sky seems to shimmer, moving lines flickering across her vision.

Tiggy’s head snaps up and she whirls round to face them all. ‘This is what happened earlier,’ she says. ‘When I was with Giles.’ Her eyes are wide, and the fear is evident in her voice. ‘It’s . . . it’s kind of . . . a video. Can you all see it? I—’

The swirling stops and the image comes into focus, slowly depixelating. It’s above Tiggy’s head, seemingly floating over the sea. Brenda blinks. When she refocuses her eyes, the image reappears. She turns her head and it moves with her.

It’s not floating on some unseen screen – it’s being projected from her own head. How can this be? Her heart starts to beat faster. A strange tingling comes over her. She blinks again, but the image keeps coming back.

She doesn’t like this. It’s a horrible, disembodying experience. But through the transparent projection she can still see the others, circling, holding hands to their foreheads as sun visors. They are seeing it too. Tiggy starts walking slowly backwards, away from the sea. She keeps batting a hand across the empty space in front of her, as if she’s trying to get the screen to disappear. Brenda assumes that’s what she’s doing. She can only see her own projection, and Tiggy through the other side. She looks up again at the sky. If she’s going to be shown something, she might as well make sure she can see it clearly. Tiggy’s right. It is a video, of sorts. A streaming projection. It starts to play, and Tiggy gasps, falling back onto the sand.

‘I thought . . . I thought this would be about Giles.’ She stops talking.

It’s not Giles in the scene that Brenda is viewing. Not yet anyway. It’s Tiggy herself – her face reflected in her phone screen, by way of some sort of mirror app, maybe. So what Brenda is seeing is what Tiggy is seeing as this projection unfolds. It’s all terrifically disorienting. She’s living this scene as Tiggy. She has to accept that, or she might just be sick.

Tiggy lays the phone on the table in front of her, and through her eyes Brenda sees bare legs poking out from the bottom of a short red skirt. She glances around, taking in the plump green sofa in the corner of a stark room. Music is playing – something you might hear in a nightclub, no real words, just thumping bass notes and the occasional breathy moan. Something repeated, over and over again. There are other girls in the room. Chatting to each other, huddled together. An expensively bleached blonde throws her head back and laughs as two scowling brunettes turn to her – Tiggy on the sofa – and they say something, then they laugh again. Brenda feels a fresh wave of nausea. She wants to turn away, but she can’t. The scene is still projecting. Trapped in this awful moment with Tiggy, as Tiggy, Brenda looks down at Tiggy’s hands, watches as they clench tight into fists. Brenda can feel the tension in her own body as Tiggy’s knuckles glow slightly white when she grips harder onto her drink.

‘No. Please. Turn this off.’

Brenda looks down from the clear sky to Tiggy, here and now, where she is curled up on the sand. She can still see her through the projection. The effect sends her mind and stomach reeling in a new way.

Brenda turns to the bar, and then to the piled-up paddleboards. Everyone is watching, living through the ‘on-screen’ Tiggy at a party. Everyone is experiencing this.

Except Amelia.

Amelia is tapping her watch. ‘Come on,’ she says. ‘This isn’t fair.’ She turns to Brenda, as though feeling her gaze. ‘Please. Tell me what you can see?’

Then the real Tiggy, sitting on the sand, curled into herself, rocking gently – just as she did in the visitor centre when the text feed exposed Giles for the cheat he is – sobs, ‘No. Stop watching it. Don’t tell her . . .’

Brenda closes her eyes and the image vanishes. She could keep them closed. Ignore it. But would it still be there when she opened them? Is this what happened earlier? Did Tiggy get shown a projection like this of Giles? Some sort of memory feed?

She needs to see.

‘Close your eyes, Tiggy,’ James calls over from the paddleboards.

Amelia gets up off her knees and walks over and lays a hand on Tiggy’s shoulder. ‘It doesn’t matter, Tiggy. I can’t see it. Try not to get upset. It’s just a game, remember?’

‘Those bitches,’ Tiggy says, just loud enough for them all to hear. ‘This is not a game.’

Amelia crouches down beside her. ‘Tell me then, Tiggy. Talk me through it.’

Brenda tips her head back up to the sky. She’s Tiggy again, on-screen. Still pretending she can’t hear what the other girls are saying, but the volume has been turned up loud enough for her to hear them now.

‘Silly little cow. No matter what he does, she stays. Too pathetic to make a name for herself on her own merits.’