Unloved Island

“To us,” she said.

“To us,” he smiled and they clinked their glasses.

The sun dipped slowly towards the sea-lined horizon as Isabel and Gavin lost themselves in each others eyes, semi-fuzzed and slightly misted by their half-sipped cocktails. It had been an eventful day. In the space of eight hours they’d arrived, met each other – along with their co-island inhabitants – and orientated themselves around this near-perfect location. 

Everything was as exceptional as promised. The rooms, the kitchen area, restaurant, bar, social facilities, the pool, sauna, hot tub – everything was just as the pictures promised. Expertly designed, beautifully crafted, meticulously constructed. It was, as they and their fellow guests had not yet tired of saying, just too perfect.

Perfect too had been the hand-crafted breakfast, served on arrival, complete with high quality pastries, carefully French-pressed coffee and the kind of fruit salad you actually wanted to eat rather than leave on the side for decorative purposes until the flies and mould destroyed it. Sharp, sweet, bitter and balanced.

On arrival, Gavin and Isabel stood in the welcome circle together with the other guests. As she stood there, Isabel felt a frisson of excitement which she usually interpreted as meaning she was in the presence of someone special. However she tamed these thoughts, deciding instead to put it down to the general excitement of being selected. These were to be unique days, days to feel things she’d never felt before. A time of excitement and life changing thoughts, conversations and meetings. Surely this feeling couldn’t be traced to just one person?

And yet the feelings grew. Wherever she went, whether hanging out on the sofas in the lounge area or going for an exploratory walk around the landscaped tree-lined garden, the barrier to the wilder forests beyond, the initial excitement did not recede. Instead it built, and gradually she realised it was building around Gavin.

By tea-time she’d determined that she needed to speak with him – speak with him alone and not in front of the other guests. She’d already heard his mellow voice in response to the introductory questions and she needed to hear more. 

So far she’d picked up that he was a high-level private security professional, tasked with protecting the physical and mental wellbeing of various celebs at specific events. Film premieres, nightclubs, personal appearances, intended-to-be private nights out, they would relax while he perspired gently through his black tie and dark glasses, at attention while stood at ease, ready to spring at anything or anyone who stepped out of line. 

She noted his perfectly styled hair, his insistence on being clean shaven into the evening, the way he considered his words before saying them. The way his words created more than sense, but also images, feelings and thoughts that she enjoyed playing with and exploring.

“What are you thinking about?” he asked her.

“Oh, you know,” she said. “Life. The chances of things happening. The way the sun makes this kind of light at this time of day.”

He smiled, almost losing himself for a moment.

“It’s hard to believe what happens sometimes, isn’t it?” he said with half a smile.

“Oh yeah,” said Isabel. “Sure is.”

They leant in towards each other. Closer now, feeling each other’s breath on their brows. 

“I can’t believe it,” he said.

“Me neither,” she said.

She picked up her cocktail and threw it over him before smashing the glass onto the beautifully executed decking by his chair. Without pause, she turned on her flip-flop and walked off towards her room.

“Arsehole!” she screamed over her shoulder. “Never talk to me again!”

Gavin pushed his chair back past its tipping point so it crashed down, the back further splintering the glass, and taking a dip in the small cocktail pool that had formed. 

“Get lost!” he shouted back. “You think you’re so great.”

“At least I can think!” Isabel spat back.

“And yet you make no sense!” yelled Gavin, hoping this would be his final parting shot as he wasn’t sure what he was going to say next.

With that hope he headed off towards the Look-Out Tower, a particularly romantic location, surrounded by water on all sides, and elevated from the rest of the harbour.

For Gavin it was the ideal location for a vape.

—

Nathan tore his headphones off as he scanned the live feed.

“They’re good…” he said under his breath. “Too good…”

“Camera three, get pick up shots of the broken glass,” scampered Lottie, at the monitor beside him. “What do you mean it’s not photogenic? Rearrange the pieces if you have to. Just get on with it – do I have to think of everything?”

A disembodied hand appeared on one of the TV monitors in front of them, trying to make the shattered pieces of cocktail glass look more accidental than they already did.

“What if they’re too good?” said Nathan, suddenly turning to Lottie.

“What?” said Lottie only half listening.

“They might be too good,” repeated Nathan. “If they’re too good we’re done for. Or we might be.”

He reeled off a crowd of expletives and he snapped his headphones out of the control panel and walked out of the room. Lottie grabbed three notepads and followed in his wake.

Down along the corridors in the back of the hotel, up three flights of stairs but down four more, round the swimming pool filtration and heating system, past the one-way glass wall where a dozy cameraperson was taking cut-away shots of the dining room on the other side and finally into a meeting room.

The door slammed behind them. They were lit artificially. There were no windows here, just one huge white board taking up one end of the room. Across the top of the board was written in capital letters: UNLOVED ISLAND, and underneath it Series 1. The rest of the board was taken up with names, adjectives, activities and a series of crazy arrows trying desperately to interconnect them all. 

Nathan traced the names of Gavin and Isabel with his eyes and then his finger. 

“This is all wrong…” he muttered. “All wrong.”

Lottie’s phone went off.

“What? Yes. Follow him. I don’t care what he’s doing, we need the footage. We can cut the vape if we have to.”

She hung up. “Where did we get that shower of a cameraman from?” she asked.

But Nathan was elsewhere.

“They weren’t meant to get together until Wednesday,” he began. “Wednesday. That way the tension would have built up more and what they’re doing now would make more sense.”

He turned to Isabel. “What they’re doing now makes it look like we’ve manipulated them. Lined them up for affection and told them to argue. It’s too early for them to fall out with each other, they need to keep flirting. They’re the flirty ones, The Obvious Couple, right?”

“The viewers are still getting to know them and let’s face it, there are other couples,” said Lottie reassuringly. “Toni and Mike for example. Janine and Ben – they’re getting frisky. They’ll be the first couple out. Betcha. Even Cath and Linda are ‘accidentally’ finding themselves in the same room at once.”

“But Gavin and Isabel,” said Nathan, apparently in some kind of pain. “Gavin. Smart arse Gavin. Isabel the fitness instructor and Gavin. They can’t be The Obvious Couple if they fight all the time. They’re meant to be the slow burners. Why else will anyone watch?”

“You can’t control these people,” said Lottie calmly. “We made that clear from the start. No control, just follow the rules. The rest is reality.”

“Reality!” scoffed Nathan. “It feels like they’re playing with us.”

“We can play back,” said Lottie.

Nathan’s face contorted. Stuck between loving and hating this, what Lottie was proposing went against everything he’d put in the pitch to the broadcaster. 

“If we do,” he began, “and that’s a big ‘if’ – the decision stays here, right?”

“Right,” said Lottie calmly. “In this room.”

Lottie’s phone went off, she answered it while Nathan sat there, pensive, lost in his thoughts.

“Well, follow someone else!” she snapped at the phone and turned it off. Nathan looked up.

“Mike just threw up in the hot tub,” she said.

——-

And so the week passed. Each night the public were invited to vote for the couple they wanted to test the most. And each night Gavin and Isabel were put in temptation’s way, with Nathan behind the scenes smiling to himself.

But even under this pressure, when Gavin and Isabel sailed close to becoming an official couple they still failed to make it to first base. They slow-danced together before hurling chairs at each other. They shared a special meal of exquisite produce before descending into a food fight. They went swimming in the moonlight before Gavin scared the life out of Isabel by pretending to be a shark and she grabbed his trunks off him and just walked off.

Meanwhile, the others fell like flies. Cath and Linda were first to go, collapsing out as they collapsed into bed at the end of a binge evening of rom-coms. Mike accidentally copped off with Janine having brushed shoulders with her as he headed to the bar and she went to the loo. Ben and Toni eyed each other up in a sort of experimental way and even though it was against both of their better judgements they had a snog and according to the rules of Unloved Island a snog, experimental or not, was a snog – a demonstration of affection which terminated your place.

From the control room Nathan carefully shaped the suspense, playing Gavin and Isabel as much as he could as they stayed the course. With viewing figures through the roof and next year’s commission already patching the hole in his company’s expense account, Nathan was happier, although somewhat lighter by the finale, the anxiety and long hours preventing him from eating his usual three a day.

Gavin and Isabel, had done everything. They tasted everything. They jumped on everything. They completed every task, trial, recipe, dodgy activity and role play they were set. They stared into each other’s eyes, held each other’s hands, blew in each other’s ears, massaged each other’s feet and never once let it lead to an open or clear display of affection.

And so they earned their release. Set afloat on the Unloved Island motor launch that had chartered away the failed lovers, but this was taking them to victory and an apparently permanent single life. 

Gavin looked back at the receding island.

“Did it,” he said with satisfaction. “Got the votes, got the money, got away with it!”

Isabel smiled back at him, her hair streaming in the wind and occasionally sticking to her mouth.

“What can’t you do with a bit of dedication?” she said over the noise of the outboard motor.

“Well,” said Gavin. “Since it’s all over, and there are no cameras here,” slight pause, “there are no cameras here, are there?”

The motorboat’s pilot smiled and shook his head. Gavin grinned: “So I guess we ride off into the sunset. Together. At last.”

He stood up to sit next to her while she stretched lethargically.

“Not a chance,” she muttered, hooking Gavins’ left leg with her ankle and sending him straight overboard. The launch ploughed on.