Page 57 of The Compound

I made my way toward the shed again, where the largest fire was still raging. “There are sandbags,” Candice shouted. “Out the back, they just delivered them!” It was the only time that we had something delivered that we didn’t earn. They knew they had done wrong: the fire had burned beyond what the producers had intended. Or maybe it was their intention, but they still worried that we would die.

I ran, Becca alongside me. The sandbags were heavier than they looked, and we had to drag them together.

I’ll never forget Tom’s face as he stood before the shed, engulfed in great swathes of red flames and falling apart before his eyes. More than once, I wondered if he would try to brave the fire and salvage what he could. He didn’t, of course, but he didn’t help the rest of us for some time, only stood there, looking as though he was staring into the face of death.

In the gentle morning light, the sun shone on a ravaged, ruined compound. The house was fine and the maze, the farthest western point, was entirely untouched, but nearly everything else outside had been destroyed. Ash covered everything, a thousand times worse than what had been blown over from the bushfires: the place was black and gray, stripped entirely of color. Beyond the house, it was no longer clear what land was our own, and what belonged to the desert.

Part

III

Twelve

For a long time, theonly person I spoke to was Sam. Everyone kept to themselves, and the desire to work together—or even to live together—had dissipated in the fire. Each of the six of us was angry about what had happened, for different reasons. Once the fire had been put out, bitter, bitter words were exchanged. Becca made it clear that she blamed Sam and Tom. Candice had stood, covered in ash, her hair singed and her face streaked, and said such terrible things that even Tom turned away. Though they didn’t say it outright, I think that Candice and Andrew blamed Sam and Tom, too. Tom, on top of the injuries from his first punishment, was burned anew; his face was blistered, his hands scarred and misshapen. Sam was too upset to talk to anyone. Even with me he was quiet and withdrawn.

I was entirely aware that it was my own fault. I didn’t, and wouldn’t, excuse Tom’s violence, but he had hit me because I had broken his prized possession. Sam wouldn’t have struck Tom if it hadn’t been me lying on the floor. During that fight, when vicious words had been exchanged, I kept expecting Tom to point out that it had all started with me, but he never did. Sam felt guilty for his part, but, more than anything, I think he was upset to see the garden gone: Jacintha’s herbs, their vegetables, and even the flowers planted by the previous tenants; it was as if they’d never existed. But Sam’s grief over the loss of the garden and vegetation was nothing compared to Tom’s devastation over the destruction of the shed and all that was in it. Aside from the finger-pointing, I think that the real reason that we didn’t talk to each other was because we were all ashamed of what had happened, and what had become of the compound. There had been days when I felt as though I knew the other residents as well asone can know a person—but there were some when I thought the only thing I knew for certain about the others was that we all wanted the compound to be as nice as it possibly could be, and to stay. It was easy to let anger fester, and to pin the blame on someone else, but the fact remained that the compound was left in our care, and it was now laid to waste.

—

Sam and Ihid out by the tennis court, which was around the back and therefore had not been burned, though it was now an insipid gray, covered in ash. Andrew and Candice stayed mainly in the bedroom. Whenever anyone entered, they stopped talking. I never knew where Becca was. Tom stayed mostly in the gray room, emerging every so often to look for Becca. Sometimes he called her name, but she never answered. I was never sure if Tom genuinely liked her, or if he felt obliged to look after her because they were in a couple together.

It’s difficult to say how long we carried on in this manner; I really couldn’t tell you. The big screen showed a different task each day, but we never did them, and it never turned green. I don’t think any of us even did Personal Tasks. I know I didn’t.

I didn’t clean anymore, and everyone else had given up on their roles too. The dishes in the sink grew dirty, and then moldy, and then the rest of the house followed. It was as if by letting the kitchen go to ruin, we had dropped the facade of civility: the shower drains clogged with hair, a toilet seat broke and stayed broken, and the floor became sticky and stained. I left all of my clothes on the floor, and didn’t care much to notice anything else lying around. There was something sort of thrilling about it, actually: you spend so much of your life adhering to all of these rules and ideas—keep everything orderly, keep busy, look presentable. When we stopped following these basic tenets, I realized how meaningless they had been. We got on fine as we were.

We were a lifeless bunch, but I felt no pressure to entertain, or to be entertained. I knew from watching the show that there were often weeks, particularly before it got down to the last five contestants, where things slowed down and became dull and dreary. There were times when youwatched, waiting for drama to start, desperate for something to happen. But just because nothing happened, it didn’t keep you from watching the following night. At some point, you stopped waiting for something to happen. The dullness almost became the point: the monotony was soothing, even, like watching livestock drifting across a plain. And then, when something dramatic did happen, it was an adrenaline-jolting surprise to your system, a jarring reminder that no one ever really knew what these people might do. You came to crave it again and again, that shock factor, the surge of conflict, the possibility of violence. From my years as a viewer, there was a part of me that knew that at some point, drama would happen again—its origin either organic or manufactured—but the fact that I was living it rather than viewing it didn’t make it any easier to snap out of the stupor. Reality had become a slippery thing: I wasn’t certain on what part of my life I was an active part of, and what was a result of the machinations around me. But that, to me at least, felt no different from how it had been on the outside.

For the first time in my adult life, I stopped doing my hair and makeup, and usually wore shorts and a sports bra under a silken dressing gown. There was no point in being shy with Sam. I had seen myself the day after the fire—covered in ash, my face swollen and bruised, my eyes red, and a small but noticeable bald spot where Tom had ripped the hair from my head. I looked so terrible that I gave up without another thought. My hair, my face, my splotchy skin—it was too bad to consider rectifying.

Those weeks in the compound remain hazy to me, and I don’t remember what Sam and I spoke about or if we spoke much at all. I think we played some games, making up silly rules as we went. I remember playing tennis with fruit instead of a tennis ball: the first to burst the fruit lost. It was childish, but it was diverting. Sam was playing along for my sake, I knew. I suspected that he would have done anything I asked him then, partly because he wanted me to be happy, and partly, I think, out of guilt over his role in our punishment.

One day, as I was making ice pops in the kitchen, I looked out the window and saw Sam standing in the remains of the garden, tall andbroad-shouldered, almost exactly as he had appeared on the first day. He was trying to make a new fence for the perimeter using some of the leftover wood, but the wood splintered when he tried to hammer it into the earth. He threw it toward the desert in frustration and sat on the ground for a long time, looking out at the sand. After a while, he went and picked up the piece of wood, and left it spiked loosely into the silt, a rough marker of where the boundary line lay.

It occurred to me then that he would leave, too, and soon.

I worried that if I addressed it I would only highlight the problem: Sam was ready to move on from the compound, while I couldn’t. The uncomfortable truth was that when Sam left, he would return to a life where he was of use to the people around him. He was a smart guy, and had an important, meaningful job; he cared about the environment and sustainability—whereas I struggled to remember what went in the recycling bin. I was stuck in a dull job I didn’t care for, and I couldn’t scrape together the money to do anything meaningful, like travel, or go back to school. It was my own fault: whenever I had any money, I spent it immediately, mostly on the fast-fashion brands that Sam despised. What he didn’t realize was that there would never be a better opportunity for me than this one. I couldn’t see myself ever owning a house. Not, at least, until my mother died, and even then I wasn’t sure; she didn’t like me very much.

One day, sitting in the shade of a wall, I watched Candice emerge from the bedroom with something clenched in her hands. She went to the dumpster—now overflowing and stinking—and hesitated before it, perhaps reluctant to be confronted so viscerally by our own filth. Then she let go of what was in her hands, letting it drop to the scorched earth. There was no breeze to move it, and I thought at first that she had dropped a mouse; but I saw, upon closer inspection, that it was a chunk of her own hair. I looked at her retreating form and saw that she had cut it carefully enough, though it wasn’t a particularly flattering style on her. I knew how much Candice had loved her hair, and felt puzzled over what I’d seen, until I realized that it was strange enough to suggest a Personal Task. Candice, I saw, wasn’t ready to give up yet.

Good for her,I thought, and dozed for the rest of the afternoon.

—

We might have continuedin this way for longer still if not for Becca, who found Sam and me passing a lemon between us on the tennis court. I was startled when she appeared, as though I had seen a ghost. In truth, I had almost forgotten she still lived there.

“Is everything okay?” Sam asked.

“I want to do the Communal Task.”

I squinted at her. “Why?”

“Why not? We need to get back to stocking the house with essentials. We’re running out of toilet paper. We have no shampoo, only soap.”

I wanted Becca to leave. Childishly, I turned away. Sam sighed.

“There’s so much that we need,” he said ruefully, “it seems fruitless to even try to begin again.”

Becca didn’t say anything, but she didn’t go, either.

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