The Lamplighters

Chapter Fifteen

As the days passed, Marla found herself becoming accustomed to her new life in paradise. Whenever Adam dropped by with a food parcel, she imagined herself the Lady of the Manor and he the faithful servant. They drank coffee together outside the summerhouse and got to know a little more about one another. Adam was a business school dropout, who had gotten into the security profession after a brief stint as a volunteer at summer camps. Gradually, Marla opened up to Adam, regaling him with tales of her wilder days and nights in London. At points the conversation became a little muted, whenever Marla began to dwell on the past. She made a mental note to avoid sounding too maudlin in future—nobody likes a Moaning Minnie after all. But there was lots of laughter too, with Adam making fun of Marla’s “posh English accent” whenever he could. She enjoyed his easy humor, and his company in general, but after a time she began to feel there was a downside (isn’t there always). This was her thing; Marla was actually beginning to wonder if there was something “wrong” with her. Waiting for Adam to make a move was becoming something of a thankless task. She wasn’t enjoying the way his visits had descended into a routine indiscernable from the systematic list of chores she had to perform daily up at the house. The initial relaxation of her first few days on the island had turned into a kind of breathless tension—a cycle of expectation and disappointment that left her feeling very much like a tightly coiled spring. Mopping the huge expanse of kitchen floor at the house became an act of aggression and perhaps most disturbingly, Marla had begun chattering to herself like some insane old washerwoman. This wasn’t good, she’d decided, and so opted to visit Jessie in the hope of getting good and loaded on her secret stash—and to hell with the hangover.

“Ah, you’ve got cabin fever already,” said Jessie with an evil twinkle in her eye, “Pietro’s gonna be gloating, that bastard. He said you’d only last a week. I had you down for at least a month.”

“You were running a book on me?” asked Marla, incredulous.

“We sure were. In case you hadn’t noticed, which obviously you didn’t, us old timers went totally cabin a few months back. Wait and see, you’ll be placing bets on all kinds of things soon. One of the oldest forms of entertainment known to humanity, especially for sexy young human beings like us who are stuck on a rock without music, TV or books to keep them occupied!”

“I see. Well, maybe there’s an opportunity for me here. I’ll write the bloody books, then you and the Italian Stallion can read them…”

“Awesome. I like that plan.”

“For a fee.”

“Not awesome. See? You’re settling right in.”

Marla laughed. Finally some of the tension was dissipating. She had been taking herself far too seriously these past few days.

“Does it get any easier? The isolation, I mean.” There was an upward curve to her voice as she mouthed the question. It ended on a hopeful note.

“No. Not really.”

Marla’s face fell again, hope shattered.

Jessie placed a comforting hand on her shoulder.

“Look, you just have to be creative about how you spend your time. That’s all.”

“I did have a long walk over to the beach, met Pietro at his place, it was really lovely.”

“Yes, I saw him yesterday too. He said he’d met you. Listen, you’re a big girl Marla, so I don’t need to tell you to be careful of that one. Hey, was he complaining about not being allowed to go swimming in the sea again?”

Marla nodded.

“Oh I wish he’d change the damn record.”

“It’s his passion though, isn’t it?”

Jessie scoffed. “One of them, maybe.” Her smile shrank. “But anyway, the lovely island walks, they soon get old.”

“I really can’t imagine that.”

“Oh, you can’t imagine it now. Just like you couldn’t imagine booking into the Cabin Fever Motel when you first arrived here—trust me, everything reaches boredom point here. The question is; what can we do about it? What can we possibly do to liven things up around here?”

She looked pointedly at Marla, who was now feeling like a school kid who’d been caught staring out of the window. Her mouth fell open, dumbly.

“Secret party. That’s how.”

“Beg your pardon?”

“That’s how we liven things up. With a fucking party. And you dear—well, I need your help to pull it off. How’s your yoga?”

“My yoga?”

“Yeah. Ever indulged?”

“No, well I went to a pilates class once, but…”

“Follow me, look and learn. Come on, the lawn awaits.”

Marla plummeted towards the ground again, as her belly dipped causing her legs to give way. As her outstretched palms skidded across the grass, she tried to twist her head to one side and ended up rolling onto a garden sprinkler. Arching her back and sitting up painfully, Marla rubbed her lower back with one hand. It was very tender where she’d pivoted onto the sprinkler valve. Both her hands were stained green from the grass and began to sting furiously with friction burning. Yoga, it seemed, was not very relaxing.

The complicated move that Jessie had assured her was “beginner-level stuff” was called “Downward Dog”. Marla honestly thought “Collapsing Cow” would be more apt a description. Jessie did too, clearly, as she spent the next five minutes rolling around with laughter on the lawn watching Marla fail. Her student gave up, lying back down on the soft grass breathless, remembering to avoid the sprinkler head this time round.

“Giving up already?” Jessie was still laughing.

“I’m glad to be the source of so much amusement,” Marla said dryly as Jessie lay down next to her, shielding her eyes from the sun with a saluting hand.

“You’ll get the hang of it. Takes practice, that’s all. Just wait ’til I show you ‘The Wheel’.”

Whatever “The Wheel” was, it sounded downright painful and Marla wanted no part of it. She rubbed at the tender spot in her back and quickly changed the subject.

“Are you serious about what you said earlier—about throwing a secret party?”

“Deadly serious.”

“Who would we invite?”

Jessie gave her a stern look.

“Jesus, you’re so transparent. You can invite Adam if you want, I think we can trust him. But none of the others, especially Anders—he’s a total slime.”

“Where would we have the party? The houses are off-limits right? And the rule about gatherings—Fowler was pretty adamant about that.”

“The whole point of having a party is to stick it to The Man. And where there’s a will, there’s a way.” Jessie lowered her voice. “There’s a mansion on the other side of the island, around the coastline from Pietro’s place but off the beaten track, surrounded by huge old trees. We call it The Big House.”

“The Big House?”

“Damn straight. The place is fricking massive, and really cool, it looks like the oldest house on the island. Thing is, it’s all locked up with shutters and shit. The security defenses are all computerized. I’d love to find out what’s so precious they lock it up in there.”

“So how are we going to get in?”

“Simple, I hack into the computer network and modify the house’s security parameters. If I do it behind the scenes, the Chief and his boys won’t notice a thing; it’ll look like everything is functioning normally. Then we slip in through the back door.”

“So you’re a computer hacker now?”

“Look. I could tell you but…”

“Yeah, yeah. But then you’d have to kill me right?”

Jessie nodded sagely.

“But what about Fowler’s rules, hey? What if we get caught?”

“Screw Fowler’s rules. And we won’t get caught. I have a plan Marla, a very good plan.”

“I don’t doubt that. It’s just… I can’t afford to mess up my chances of getting paid.”

“Don’t worry your pretty head about it toots. An integral part of my plan is that it is founded upon the bedrock principle of not messing up getting paid.”

Jessie’s words were doing nothing to reassure her. She had a fleeting vision of herself, Jessie, Pietro and Adam standing in front of Fowler’s desk stone drunk and wearing idiotic party hats, desperately trying desperately to explain themselves.

“Admit it, you want to stick to The Man too. I see it in your eyes.”

Marla was of two minds, but the idea of spending the night partying with Adam was tipping the balance a little.

“So, there was another reason I brought you out here toots, apart from yoga practice I mean…”

Jessie’s voice had taken on a hushed, conspiratorial tone. Marla turned to her, placing a hand over her forehead to block out the sun. She was a mirror image of Jessie, partners in crime.

“Don’t be too obvious, but I want you to lie back and look up at the trees to the right of the house. Make it look like you’re just stretching out, relaxing.”

“I don’t understand…”

“Just. Do. It,” Jessie whispered firmly.

Marla did as she was told. The trees to the right were away from the sun and as Marla’s eyes adjusted she could just make out a white bird perching high up in the topmost branches.

“What do you see?”

“A white bird.”

“Look again.”

“What the hell is this about Jessie?”

“That’s no bird. Look again.”

Marla squinted up at the trees once more. The white bird looked strangely still. No song emanated from its black beak.

“Marla, it’s a security camera.”

“No it isn’t…”

“Yes it is. And they’re all over this island, watching us night and day.”

Marla’s skin flushed cold.

Marla could see security cameras everywhere as she and Jessie walked through the trees towards her own summerhouse. She could see them in the white of the clouds peeking through branches and in the feathers of songbirds perched on the gatepost as they approached the house. Then they were part of the house itself, insinuating themselves into the neutral stucco background beneath the eaves. She felt herself becoming twitchy and nervous, watching for the glint of a lens, listening out for the whirring of tiny camera motors. Shouldn’t have smoked that joint, thought Marla, get a bloody grip. I mean it’s not as though London was exactly short on security cameras. Paranoia, that’s all this is. You’ve got The Fear…

“You okay, toots?”

Jessie was part way up the path to the house. She looked back at Marla who had stopped at the gate, staring blankly up at the white stucco giant.

“Fine. I’m fine.” She walked on, catching up. “Let’s just get inside shall we?”

She passed Jessie, who looked a little concerned by Marla’s behavior, and headed for the summerhouse door. It was framed by late afternoon shadow, cool and inviting.

Inside, Jessie poured them both a stiff drink from a little stainless steel hipflask that she had hidden behind a throw cushion. Marla slugged back the drink, balancing out the effects of the smoke and the heat.

“Why didn’t you tell me about them before? The cameras?”

“Look, you seemed so damned blissed out, I didn’t want to lay any downers on you. I thought you’d spot them yourself soon enough anyway, city girl like you.”

“Must be losing my touch, or my eyesight. Or both.”

Marla felt positively myopic. How had she missed these spies in the skies, watching her as she walked up the path to the house, tracking her movements as she made her way to Jessie’s and Pietro’s? Why didn’t she notice them zooming in on her as she chatted with Adam outside the summerhouse?

There’s a thing, thought Marla sighing with relief. Maybe there isn’t anything wrong with me after all. Adam didn’t want to make a move because he knew the cameras were there! Her sigh became a dry chuckle. Then her chuckling stopped—he should’ve told her about the cameras sooner too. Whatever, she’d just have to drag him inside and jump him next time. Try zooming in on that, pesky cameras. Then a new flood of paranoia invaded her daydream—what if there were cameras inside the summerhouse? In the bedroom. The shower? She looked up at the ceiling, nervously peering into the corner shadows.

“Oh don’t worry girl, they’re not inside,” laughed Jessie, reading her mind.

“Yeah but… How do you know that?”

“First thing I checked. Fucked if I’m giving Fowler a free show of my ass.”

Marla made a harrumphing sound, unconvinced. But, try as she might, she could see no cameras inside her little home.

“So are you gonna help me? Get this party started?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“No. No you don’t.”

“What do I have to do?”

“Easy. Go for a jog.”

First yoga and now jogging? This was turning into a full-blown triathlon. Marla snatched the hipflask from Jessie’s hand and drank from it defiantly.

Jessie’s instructions seemed simple enough. Three days from now, Marla was to get up at seven o’clock, have a light breakfast of fruit and juice, then shower. She would then slip into a pair of shorts and a vest and start jogging at exactly eight o’clock. Her route was to take her away from the house, down the path she had first walked up on her arrival at the island, then down past the security building. Reaching the steps on her left, she was to jog down them and onto the jetty, where she would be required to perform a series of seductive stretches to distract Fowler’s bored black-clad security drones.

And the purpose of this fool’s errand? To divert interest, enabling Jessie to sneak round to The Big House and break in undetected. So they could have a secret bloody party.

Marla had decided she needed her head examined. She wasn’t even sure if jogging that far was possible. The last time she had run, really run, was for the number 29 bus on Tottenham Court Road. Wishing she hadn’t pointed this out to Jessie, she now faced the prospect of two “practice runs” leading up to the main event. Anyone watching on the cameras would get used to seeing Marla taking a morning jog. They would, in fact, think she was being a good girl and following Fowler’s rulebook guidelines about daily exercise. Her change in route down to the jetty though, coupled with the sexy stretches, would create enough of a stir to prevent them from noticing Jessie skulking through the trees towards The Big House.

With a resigned sigh, Marla pulled on her sneakers and jogged out the door. Truth was, she needed a party just as much as the others did, even if it meant exercising. And if Adam was around—well, a little interest from his cohorts might provoke him to finally make a move next time he and Marla were alone.

Closing the blinds in her little room, Jessie carefully slid the laptop from out of its hiding place. The plastic casing actually creaked as she opened up the lid and wiped dust from the grubby screen. She hit the power button and the battered old machine’s hard drive made an alarming grinding sound as it booted up. She should have gotten used to the noise by now of course but the skittering growl, like that of an ancient pet cat, never failed to give her the willies. It was a deeply unsettling sound to her, the sound of the island’s only unauthorized laptop threatening to die horribly, taking with it her only hope of hacking into the network. She felt nervous, twitchy, and gnawed on one of her fingernails. Jessie hoped she’d been convincing enough about the party, that Marla wouldn’t suspect anything. Getting inside the Big House, all that was true of course, but merely a by-product of what was really at stake here. The machine’s tiny screen flickered into glorious life (if slightly burned out through the layer of grime)—the expanse of pixels lighting up her face with the red glow of The Consortium Inc. corporate logo. She’d been tempted to grab a different desktop wallpaper off the net, a picture of the New York skyline, civilization, anything—heck, even a picture of The Hoff in his Speedos would do. But to do so would be too high a risk; she needed to stay within the intranet parameters wherever possible, only straying outside at the last moment. She remembered the thrill of first hacking the communications protocols and finding the island’s satellite uplink. It had taken a week of solid decoding—all so Vera could make a call home. What a mistake that had turned out to be. Jessie tried to put such bitter regrets to the back of her mind and focus on with the job in hand. Even after months away from the mainland, her grasp of operating code had not diminished. In fact on an archaic machine like this, which forced her to learn everything all over again, she could genuinely say her coding had improved. She involuntarily crossed her fingers, willing herself to be lucky when the time came. She would only have a few minutes to hack in and she’d better be ready. The laptop had better be ready too. Jessie hissed through her teeth as the dirty glow of the screen dipped suddenly. She had almost forgotten to plug the power cable into the wall socket to charge the baby up. Quickly rectifying the problem, she flicked on the wall power. The laptop’s little yellow light came on, just below the border of the screen, to tell Jessie the battery was charging. She kicked back tensely and smoked a cigarette, waiting for the light to turn green.

Chief of Security Fowler wrestled the pistachio nut from its shell and bit into it, never once taking his eyes off of the bank of monitor screens in front of him. The observation room, affectionately known as “The Snug”, was both his sanctuary and the nerve center of his entire security operation. He had as many eyes as a fly in this place, one screen giving him a view of sandy coastline, another floating high above the jetty. Dozens of cameras, dotted around the island, constantly feeding him visual intelligence about what the hell these goddamn Lamplighters (not to mention his own work-shy grunts) were up to. Still no goddamned sign of Anders. Fowler was beginning to suspect the worst. His best guy, washed out to sea or worse. What a waste.

Flicking the pistachio shell into the wastepaper basket, he selected another nut without looking away from the screens for one second. Fucking blink and you’ll fucking miss it, the foul-mouthed Senior Prison Warden used to say to him. His old boss was a man with a sense of humor so dry you needed to take a glass of water with every joke. Fowler marveled at the clockwork precision with which the screens clicked from one scene to the next, on a never-ending cycle of pan and track back, pan and track back. Looking at the screens, the Chief was reminded of the three-sixty degree view of the watchtower at the Prison—Bentham’s Panopticon, a favorite invention of Fowler’s from the nineteenth century. It featured a central watchtower around which prison cells were situated. The effect was such that the inmates began to police themselves, as they were unsure when they were being watched—either by the guards or by each other. Rather like the Panopticon, the cameras not only served to monitor, but to subtly discipline the island’s inhabitants. The Snug was his very own watchtower, and he was so very pleased whenever he saw the fruits of his labors being projected onto the screens in front of him. Like right now, for instance.

The Neuborn girl had surprised him by beginning a morning jogging routine, lasting exactly thirty minutes and therefore burning at least two hundred fifty calories. Give them a rulebook and they will learn self-discipline, it is in the nature of the subservient. He switched camera views, watching the girl working her way along the coast path, perspiration forming dark patches on her vest. He’d always liked to watch, to look. His eyes had done so from an early age—right from when he was a young boy. He recalled the time he’d been watching his mother from the garden, seeing her brushing her long black hair, unaware of his inquisitive gaze. His father had beaten him later that day with a thick leather belt. Fowler felt his cock stiffen as he watched Marla and leaned closer to the screen, biting into the pistachio nut. An unpleasantly sour taste filled his mouth like bile and, cursing, he spat the bad nut out into the waste paper basket. Wiping his mouth on a handkerchief he turned his attention back to the screen, which reflected the light of the room’s single light bulb. Marla was now a dark indistinct shape, like a trapped fly buzzing on the other side of his window onto the world. He reached out and touched the screen, a little frisson of static crackling against his fingers. Look, but don’t touch.

As she ran, Marla found herself thinking of London again. Taking a deep breath of fresh sea air (in through the nose, out through the mouth), she remembered the stink of the city. Subway air had been her least favorite aspect of metropolitan life, the strangely metallic smell and stagnant closeness was overbearing especially during the summer months. Up on street level it hadn’t been much better. Even on her walks through the park she could still taste the fumes from the millions of car exhausts clogging up the arterial city streets. Whenever summer came, albeit briefly, Marla had enjoyed the sun but dreaded seeing the dense menstrual smog hanging over the tower blocks in her neighborhood. Then when the rain came to wash the last rays away, the streets felt like they were disintegrating into a mass of slime. Rotting garbage and leaf matter pounded by relentless acid rain became an indistinct gloopy mess. This in turn was replaced by the grim black and brown sludge that passed for snow during a London winter. Running past a palm tree, Marla glanced up at it and recalled a holiday poster campaign that had, for what seemed like an eternity, adorned every bus shelter and every billboard in town. “Who would live in the city?” the caption asked, emblazoned in bold letters over a split screen view of a polluted industrial cityscape giving way to a deserted island beach. Weren’t they always deserted and yours only, in the ads? Jogging here now on Meditrine Island in the middle of nowhere, Marla smiled to herself, realizing she had found that very place the adverts always promised but never delivered. Deserted, and hers only. If your average city dweller even got a taste of the clean air here, they’d probably go into a kind of reverse toxic shock. And the peacefulness, the soothing, lulling quiet of it all might drive them to hurl themselves into the sea—thrashing wildly in the water just to make some noise, desperate to make some city-sense of the place. Marla’s ears tuned in on the little sounds that when combined, formed the subtle background noise of the island. The insects chirping and clicking like tiny watch mechanisms, birds singing to one another, their chorus an agreement that this was indeed paradise. In the distance the shushing lullaby of ocean waves massaged the shore. No, this wasn’t background noise, thought Marla. This was background atmos—the very sound a masseuse or aromatherapist might try to recreate using a crummy recording. This was the real thing. As Marla finally came to halt, panting from her exertions, she wondered if she could ever live in the city again after this place. Stretching out the burn from her leg muscles, she looked out to sea. Perhaps there was something out there for her on the mainland, but what it was she didn’t know right now. Maybe she had to come here first, to the island, in order to find it. Wiping a bead of sweat from her forehead, she prepared herself for the jog back to the summerhouse—her temporary home here in paradise.