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“Did you put her up to this?”
“What? No! Who?”
“Her.” She jerked her head at me. “I saw the two of you plotting together on the boat. Did you give her your answers?”
“No! Of course not. How would I even know to do that? We had no idea what the task would be.”
“Well, if you wanted to humiliate me—congratulations, you’ve succeeded.”
“Romi!” Joel was scarlet with mortification. “First, could we please not do this here—” He made a small, almost involuntary gesture towards the ranks of camera operators spaced around the cabana. “Second, why the hell would I want to humiliate you?”
“You’ve never got over me and Dean. Even though I told you I was drunk and it was a mistake. Even though I said sorry like a thousand times. Are you ever going to stop holding him over my head?”
A muscle twitched in Joel’s jaw and there was a short, charged silence in which the only sound was the palm trees rustling in the wind coming off the sea.
“You’re the only person mentioning his name right now,” he said at last, very evenly.
“Well, he’s not doing it,” Romi announced, turning to Camille. “He’s not going to that villa. Are you, Joel?”
“That is enough.” A deep voice came from the back of the room, and my first clue as to who’d spoken was the fact that the whole crew seemed to stiffen and stand to attention. A small group of producers and assistants parted like the Red Sea and Baz came through, his face dark as thunder. “You—” He pointed to Romi. “I’ve heard enough from you. If you don’t like the rules, you can get off the island. Now.”
Romi opened her mouth to speak, and then shut it again.
“And you”—he pointed to Joel—“and you”—jabbing a finger at me—“will be sleeping in the Ever After Villa tonight, end of. What you do there is between the two of you, but you’ll abide by the rules or fuck off. Got it?”
“Got it,” Joel murmured. He shot an apologetic look at Romi, whose face was scarlet with a mixture of wine, sun, and the effort of not biting back at Baz.
“Now wind this shit show up and get the crew across to the water villa to do the Ever After sequences,” Baz snapped. “I want the whole crew back on the boat by nine p.m. to go over today’s footage.”
“Do you want to leave Phil and Jen here to go over the—” Camille began, but Baz raised his voice.
“I said the whole crew. This is an all-hands meeting. Capiche?”
“Yes, Baz,” Camille whispered, and “Yes, boss,” came filtering back from the few other crew members who dared open their mouths. And then Baz turned on his heel, with Camille hurrying after him, and left, the camera crew following in his wake like a flock of little ducklings trailing after their mama.
After they’d gone, nobody said anything for a long moment. The fairy lights strung round the cabana were swaying in the wind, casting shadows that lurched drunkenly back and forth with each gust. It was Romi who broke the silence.
“Shit show is right. I mean, he said it. Where’s the fucking welfare team? Where’s the psychologist? I know how this stuff ought to run, and this show is a joke. Maybe I will walk.”
“What do you mean?” Santana asked. She was frowning, and looked pale and sweaty, a sharp contrast to her dewy glow from earlier. Now she drew out a boxy blue monitor and pressed something. “God, I need to get some food inside me. My bloods are really low. Has anyone got anything sweet?”
“That!” Romi said, pointing at the glucose monitor stuck to Santana’s upper arm. “That’s exactly what I mean. Where’s the medics keeping an eye on us? Where are the psychological interviews to make sure none of us are off our fucking nut? I’ve tried out for a bunch of these things and none of them have been run like this. We should have had evaluations and access to a trained counselor. You can’t just stick people in front of a camera and wash your hands—not anymore. They’re running this like it’s 1999.”
Angel had stood up and walked across to a corner of the cabana, where the debris from lunch had been stacked up, and now she came back with a banana, more or less intact apart from a bruised stem.
“Here,” she said to Santana. “Is this okay for your sugar?”
“I mean…” Santana took the fruit and looked at it a little dubiously. “Something like juice or gummy bears would be better but… yeah, it’ll do for the moment—at least until I can get to my glucose tablets, or they feed us.” She pulled off the peel, stuffed a piece in her mouth, and said, through a mouthful of fruit, “So… do you think this is shady? I thought it was supposed to be big budget. Isn’t it Real TV’s flagship show?”
“I do think they’re cutting corners,” Dan said. He looked a little worried. “I wasn’t sure at first, but Romi’s right about the psychological stuff. A friend did Love Island, and this absolutely isn’t how it’s supposed to work. There’s supposed to be welfare teams and so on.”
I frowned. Now Dan said it, I recalled there had been mention of a welfare team in the booklets Camille handed out. But where were they?
“And the crew is weirdly small,” Dan was continuing. “From what John told me, they’ve normally got dozens and dozens of people working on this stuff. But Baz seems to be stretched bloody thin. I mean, they’re relying on all these remote cameras that aren’t even working properly.”
“Don’t you think it’s a little weird that there’s no staff outside the production crew?” Santana said through a mouthful of banana. “I thought there’d be, you know, maids and chefs and cleaners. But it seems to be just us and the TV crew. I do accept that the resort isn’t up and running yet, but shouldn’t Baz have brought those people in temporarily?”
“I’m not convinced they’ve sold it,” I said. My voice was quiet, and Bayer turned to me, his eyebrow raised so that the ring glinted in the glow from the string lights.
