Люси Фоли - The Guest List

‘Don’t forget,’ Will calls. ‘I had to work pretty hard to persuade you to go on a date.’

He’s right. It seemed somehow too good to be true. He told me later that he’d recently got out of something toxic, that he wasn’t looking for anything either. But we really hit it off at that party.

‘I’m so glad you did.’ I smile down at him. It still feels like a kind of miracle, how quickly and easily it all happened. ‘If I believed in it,’ I say, ‘I might think we were brought together by Fate.’

Will beams back at me. Our gazes lock, it’s like there’s no one else here. And then out of nowhere I think of that bloody note. And I feel the smile waver slightly on my lips.

JOHNNO

The Best Man

It’s pitch-black outside now. The smoke from the fire fills the room, so that everyone looks different, hazy around the edges. Not quite themselves.

We’re on to the next course, some fiddly dark chocolate tart. I try to cut into it and it goes shooting off my plate, crumbs of pastry exploding everywhere.

‘Need someone to cut your food for you, big boy?’ Duncan jeers, from the far end of the table. I hear the other blokes laugh. It’s like nothing has changed. I ignore them.

Hannah turns to me. ‘So, Johnno,’ she says, ‘do you live in London too?’ I like Hannah, I’ve decided. She seems kind. And I like her Northern accent and the studs in the top of her ear which make her look like a party girl, even though she’s apparently a mum of two. I bet she can be pretty wild when she wants to be.

‘Christ no,’ I tell her. ‘I hate the city. Give me the countryside any day. I need space to roam free.’

‘Are you pretty outdoorsy yourself?’ Hannah asks.

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘I guess you could say that. I used to work at an adventure centre in the Lake District. Teaching climbing, bushcraft, all that.’

‘Oh wow. I suppose that makes sense, because it was you who organised the stag, right?’ She smiles at me. I wonder how much she knows about it.

‘Yeah,’ I say, ‘I did.’

‘Charlie hasn’t said much about any of it. But I heard there was going to be some kayaking and climbing and stuff.’

Ah, so he didn’t tell her anything about what went down. I’m not surprised. I probably wouldn’t if I were him, come to think of it. The less said about all of that the better. Let’s hope he’s decided to let bygones be bygones on that front. Poor bloke. It wasn’t my idea, all of that.

‘Well, yeah,’ I continue. ‘I’ve always been into that sort of thing.’

‘Yes,’ Femi interjects. ‘It was Johnno who worked out how to scale the wall to get up on top of the sports hall. And you climbed that massive tree outside the dining hall, didn’t you?’

‘Oh God,’ Will says to Hannah. ‘Don’t get this lot started on our school days. You’ll never hear the end of it.’

Hannah smiles at me. ‘It sounds like you could have your own TV series, Johnno.’

‘Well,’ I say. ‘Funny you should say that, but I did actually do a try-out for the show.’

‘You did?’ Hannah asks. ‘For Survive the Night ?’

‘Yeah.’ Ah, Christ. Why did I say anything? Stupid Johnno, always shooting my mouth off. Jesus, it’s humiliating. ‘Yeah, well, they did a screen test, with the two of us, and—’

‘And Johnno decided he wasn’t up for any of that crap, didn’t you?’ Will says. It’s good of him to try to save my blushes. But there’s no point in lying now, I might as well say it. ‘He’s being a good mate,’ I say. ‘Truth is I was shit at it. They basically told me I didn’t work on screen. Not like our boy here—’ I lean over and muss up Will’s hair, and he ducks away, laughing. ‘I mean, he’s right. It wasn’t for me anyway. Couldn’t stand any of that make-up they slap on you, the clothes they make you wear. Not that that’s any shade on what you do, mate.’

‘No offence taken,’ Will says, putting up his hands. He’s a natural on screen. He has this ability to be whoever people want him to be. When he’s on the programme I notice he drops his ‘h’s’, sounds a bit more like ‘one of the people’. But when he’s with posh, public school-educated blokes, blokes who came from the better versions of the sort of school we both went to, he’s one of them – 100 per cent.

‘Anyway,’ I say to Hannah. ‘It makes sense. Who’d ever want this ugly mug on TV, eh?’ I pull a face. I see Jules glance away from me as though I’ve just exposed myself. Stuck-up cow.

‘So where did the idea for the show come from, Will?’ Hannah asks. I appreciate that she’s trying to move the conversation on, spare me any more humiliation.

‘Yeah,’ Femi says. ‘You know, I was wondering about that. Was it Survival?’

‘Survival?’ Hannah turns to him.

‘This game we used to play at school,’ Femi explains.

Duncan’s wife Georgina chips in: ‘Oh God. Duncan’s told me stories about it. Really awful stuff. He told me about boys being taken out of their beds at night, left in the middle of nowhere—’

‘Yeah, that’s what happened,’ Femi says. ‘They’d kidnap a younger boy from his bed and take him as far as they could away from the school, deep into the grounds.’

‘And we’re talking big grounds,’ Angus says. ‘And the middle of nowhere. Pitch-black. No light from anything.’

‘It sounds barbaric,’ Hannah says, her eyes wide.

‘It was a big tradition,’ Duncan says. ‘They’d been doing it for hundreds of years, since the start of the school.’

‘Will never had to do it, did you, mate?’ Femi turns to him.

Will holds up his hands. ‘No one ever came and got me.’

‘Yeah,’ Angus says, ‘because they were all shit-scared of your dad.’

‘The chap would have a blindfold on at the start,’ Angus says, turning to Hannah, ‘so he didn’t know where he was. Sometimes he’d even be tied to a tree, or a fence and had to get free. I remember when I did mine—’

‘You pissed yourself,’ Duncan finishes.

‘No I didn’t,’ Angus replies.

‘Yeah you did ,’ Duncan says. ‘Don’t think we’ve forgotten that. Pisspants.’

Angus takes a gulp of wine. ‘Fine, well, loads of people did. It was fucking terrifying.’

I remember my Survival. Even though you knew it would happen at some point, nothing prepared you for when they actually came to get you.

‘The craziest thing is,’ Georgina says, ‘Duncan doesn’t seem to think it was a bad thing. She turns to him. ‘Do you, darling?’

‘It was the making of me,’ Duncan says.

I look over at Duncan who’s sitting there with his hands in his pockets and his chest thrown out, like he’s king of all he surveys, like he owns this place. And I wonder what it made him into, exactly.

I wonder what it made me into.

‘I suppose it was harmless,’ Georgina says, ‘it’s not like anyone died, is it?’ She gives a little laugh.

I remember waking up, hearing the whispers in the dark all around me. Hold his legs … you go for the head. Then how they laughed as they held me down and tied the blindfold round my eyes. Then voices. Whoops and cheers, maybe – but with the blindfold over my ears too they sounded like animals: howls and screeches. Out into the night air, freezing on my bare feet. Rattling fast over the uneven ground – a wheelbarrow I guess it was – for so long I thought we must have left the school grounds. Then they left me, in the woods. All alone. Nothing but the beat of my heart and the secret noises of the woods. Getting the blindfold off and finding it just as dark, no moon to see by. Tree branches scratching at my cheeks, trees so close it felt like there was no way between them, like they were pressing in on me. So cold, a metallic taste like blood at the back of my throat. Crackle of twigs beneath my bare feet. Walking for miles, in circles probably. The whole night, through the woods, until the dawn came.