Everyone suddenly seems very drunk. I feel like the only one still in control of my faculties – apart from Katie, perhaps. Mark has seized the deer’s head from the wall and is parading around with it, wearing it like a mask, pretending to charge at people. I can see how drunk he is after downing that bottle, his movements uncoordinated. Samira shrieks – something between laughter and real terror – and ducks away from him, falling back onto one of the sofas.
‘Mark,’ I shout, ‘put that back.’ But he doesn’t hear me – or he ignores me. There is no reasoning with him when he’s like this.
Giles, meanwhile, is strolling around the room, drinking straight from an open bottle of champagne. As though struck by sudden inspiration, he puts his thumb in the end and begins to shake it, furiously – like a Formula One driver. Then he lets go, aiming for Julien. Julien cowers beneath the spray – a fountain of champagne – as it soaks the front of his shirt, his groin. A good deal of it missed him, though. I see it flooding onto the sheepskin rug, the rich fabric of the sofa …
‘Stop—’ I shout, running towards them. ‘Stop!’ But they’re completely oblivious to me. In their drunkenness they seem somehow outsized, their actions bigger, more dramatic. Now Julien leaps at Giles, catching him by the front of his shirt and yanking down, the shirt ripping open, buttons spraying everywhere, landing with little pinging sounds. Mark turns and sees them. He drops the deer’s head, like a child who has caught sight of others playing with better toys. He cannons towards them as though not wanting to be left out, tackling both of them about the necks. The three of them lurch, struggle, and then topple. There’s a crash as they come down, straight into the glass coffee table in the middle of the room. The dancers – Miranda, Nick, Bo and Samira – stop what they’re doing and look over. I watch as the glass cracks down the middle, slowly, almost ponderously, and then shatters into fragments, which skid everywhere. The three of them surface, blearily.
‘Oh, fuck,’ Giles says. Then he giggles.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ Julien slurs. ‘Don’t worry Emma—’ he looks about for me, ‘I’ll pay for it.’ He stretches out both his arms. ‘I’ll pay for all of it.’ He puts out a hand to Mark, who has somehow managed to clamber to his feet. ‘Help me up, mate.’
Mark takes it. He begins to pull Julien to his feet. Then, just as he’s almost lifted him to full height, he lets go, so that he crashes back to the floor. I wonder if I’m the only one who saw that it wasn’t an accident.
‘Sorry, mate,’ he says.
Julien is looking up at him, and he’s trying to laugh. But his eyes, I see, are intense, almost black.
It’s all going horribly wrong. I look about me at the wreckage of the room, to the beautifully dressed dining table beyond – which seems to be mocking me. This is not anything like what I had planned. Then, on the wall clock, I see the time. I could weep with relief.
‘Hey,’ I shout, making a funnel of my hands over my mouth, knowing this might just catch their attention like nothing else, ‘it’s nearly midnight!’
MIRANDA
We stumble outside to the edge of the loch. Julien is hunched over himself – I think he might have hurt himself a bit when he was messing around with Giles and Mark just now. They broke a table, for Christ’s sake – they’re like children. Katie is still wrapped in one of the big woollen blankets, over the top of her clothes. She can’t still be cold, can she? She’s always been so bloody fragile. Still, I feel quite bad about my behaviour. Not for Mark – he had that coming, ever since last night. But Katie hasn’t done anything to me, really, beyond being a bit distant and not much fun. Sometimes these impulses overtake me – the urge to push things a bit further … even the urge to wound. I can’t stop myself, it’s like a compulsion.
I’d like to say something to Katie, to apologise, maybe, but I can’t find the words. The champagne has hit me really hard. My breath is misting in the air, but I can’t actually feel the cold, wrapped as I am in my own little blanket of booze. I feel numb. I’d forgotten I had so much wine before the champagne. My thoughts are jumbled, my mind fuggy. Maybe it would be better if I were sick.
The countdown to midnight begins. ‘A minute!’ Emma shouts, looking at her watch.
I stare up at the stars. The new year. What is it going to bring for me?
‘Thirty seconds!’
I look around at the others. They’re all grinning, but their faces, in the light thrown from the Lodge, look strange, spectral, and their smiles look like snarls.
Mark stands poised with a new bottle of champagne. He hasn’t glanced in my direction once, since the game. I’m used to having his eyes on me. I don’t miss it, of course I don’t. But at the same time, as I stand here in the dark, I have this feeling of being invisible … untethered … like a balloon that might suddenly float up into that starlit sky.
‘Twenty seconds …’ The others are chanting now. ‘Nineteen, eighteen …’
I don’t like it, all of a sudden. It feels like the countdown to something terrible … the explosion of a bomb. I imagine the little red lights blinking down.
‘Five, four, three, two …’
‘Happy New Year!’ The rest of us parrot it in response. Giles is fumbling with a lighter at the shoreline.
‘Be careful!’ Samira calls, her voice high and shrill.
‘Come on!’ I shout, trying to shake off the bad feeling. ‘We’re all waiting!’
Finally, Giles seems to manage to light the thing. He staggers backwards. Then there’s a promising fizz, and then a whoosh, and a big red rocket erupts from the ground with a sound like a scream and explodes over the loch. The water reflects it: a thousand tiny fragments of fire. It’s beautiful. I try to focus on it, but everything is spinning. The silence afterwards is so … heavy. The dark around us is so thick, like I could reach out … touch it. If we were in London – or anywhere near civilisation for that matter – we would be able to see all the other firework displays going off around us. Reminding us of other people, other life. But here we are absolutely alone.
I can still hear the scream of the firework inside my head. But it no longer sounds the same, it sounds like a person. And I have this thought … that it wasn’t like a firework at all. More like one of those safety flares. SOS. Fired from the deck of a sinking ship.
Julien comes back over to us. ‘It’s not quite Westminster fireworks,’ he says.
‘But who wants Westminster – all those sweaty bodies pressed together – when you can have this?’ Emma asks. ‘This place,’ she spreads her arms wide, ‘and best friends.’ She links her arm with mine, and smiles at me, a proper, warm smile. I want to hug her. Thank fuck for Emma.
And then she begins to sing – her voice is surprisingly good. I try and join in:
Should old acquaintance be forgot,
and never brought to mind?
Should old acquaintance be forgot,
and days of old lang syne?
Ok, I know I’ve had a lot to drink but together, out here in the dark and silence, our voices sound beautiful, and there’s something vulnerable about the noise. The trees around us are so thick and black. Anyone could be watching us, going through this little ritual together.
It must be all the booze, I think, that is making me feel so … strange. There’s a loud bang, and I jump with shock. But it’s just Nick opening another bottle of Dom. He pours it into glasses. As he passes one to Katie, I see her face, and it makes me shiver. What’s wrong with her? It can’t all be due to her dunk in the loch, can it? She doesn’t even look at the glass of champagne being passed to her, and it slips from her grasp. ‘Whoops!’ Bo says, catching it. ‘That was nearly a goner!’
Nick raises his glass. ‘To old friends!’ he says. He looks straight at me while he says it. I don’t know why, but I have to look away. I down my glass.
There’s a strange pause, now. No one seems to know what to do next. The landscape around is so quiet in the lapse. I feel my stomach do an unpleasant somersault; the ground beneath me seems to shift under my feet. Wow. I’m definitely drunk.