Brenda closes her eyes and the image vanishes. She could keep them closed. Ignore it. But would it still be there when she opened them? Is this what happened earlier? Did Tiggy get shown a projection like this of Giles? Some sort of memory feed?
She needs to see.
‘Close your eyes, Tiggy,’ James calls over from the paddleboards.
Amelia gets up off her knees and walks over and lays a hand on Tiggy’s shoulder. ‘It doesn’t matter, Tiggy. I can’t see it. Try not to get upset. It’s just a game, remember?’
‘Those bitches,’ Tiggy says, just loud enough for them all to hear. ‘This is not a game.’
Amelia crouches down beside her. ‘Tell me then, Tiggy. Talk me through it.’
Brenda tips her head back up to the sky. She’s Tiggy again, on-screen. Still pretending she can’t hear what the other girls are saying, but the volume has been turned up loud enough for her to hear them now.
‘Silly little cow. No matter what he does, she stays. Too pathetic to make a name for herself on her own merits.’
‘Did you hear what he did with Cressida and Lorena? Talk about filth . . .’
‘She’s not that pretty, is she? She does all that contouring, but if you actually look at her face . . .’
‘Shut up!’ Tiggy on the beach says, clamping her hands over her ears.
Tiggy on-screen says nothing.
Feeling another wave of swooning dizziness, Brenda leans back into the lounger, closes her eyes. It was a mistake to have that third glass of wine. She never drinks this much, and with the heat . . . and . . . her leg itches again. A vision swims in front of her, as though it’s imprinted on her eyelids. A fresh one; not Tiggy’s. A small scene replays itself. An island, a long time ago. Waves crashing against rocks. A voice carried on the wind. ‘No!’
Her eyes fly open again.
Brenda is back inside Tiggy’s vision, just as she gets up slowly from the sofa, the glass still held tight in her hand. She catches a glimpse of herself in a mirrored pillar, and her face – Tiggy’s face – is completely devoid of expression as she smashes the champagne flute against the high glass table where the three women stand, their faces fixed in horror as she raises a hand above her head, then thrusts the stem hard and fast towards the blonde woman’s face.
Lucy
‘Woah,’ Lucy says, laying one of the flasks on the bar. ‘That was quite . . . unexpected.’ She’s gazing out at the sea, still not sure what’s just happened. Did she really experience a woman being glassed, through the eyes of sweet, naive little Tiggy?
‘You’re telling me,’ Scott says. He swivels round on the bar stool. ‘Hey, where’d she go?’ He swipes a hand in front of his face. ‘That was so weird, right?’
Lucy turns, and the projection remains in her vision – a horrible freeze-frame of Tiggy’s hand clutching the broken flute, the woman’s face etched with pain and terror.
Tiggy is no longer on the sand, where she’d fallen back in shock when the scene started to play. Brenda is sitting up on her lounger, mouth wide open in a stunned ‘O’. James and Amelia are running towards the rocks in pursuit of Tiggy, who has fled the scene.
Lucy closes her eyes for a moment, but when she opens them the projection remains paused, hanging there above the calm sea like an angry, mocking cloud. It’s been left on the still of the blonde woman’s face as she reels backwards from the high glass table, a jet of dark red blood frozen in the air as though someone has shaken a bottle of ketchup with the lid off and caught it on time-lapse photography. Reflected in one of the club’s many mirrors, Tiggy’s face is fierce – mouth open, teeth bared in a silent warrior’s cry. The two brunettes have simultaneously thrown their hands over their faces, either in shock or as protection, or possibly both. It is a stunning visceral image – mainly because it shows a scene that is so unexpected in its horror that it takes a while for the brain to absorb it. And just like that, it flickers, then disappears.
‘That can’t be real,’ Scott says, shaking his head. ‘No way was that real.’
‘What? The technology, or our Tiggy?’ Lucy asks.
Scott blinks at her. ‘What? Both, I guess. But yeah, Tiggy.’
‘She’s a dark horse, that’s for sure. I had her pegged as pretty but vacant. Would never have thought she had that in her.’ Lucy pours herself a drink and tops up Scott’s. If this image is true – and at the moment she can’t see how it isn’t, as it’s been revealed as if through Tiggy’s own memory – then this could be the scoop of the century. She’d thought Cheryl Tweedy punching a toilet attendant at the height of her Girls Aloud fame had been a good one – but Cheryl had somehow bounced back from that to become the unthinking nation’s sweetheart. There’s no way Tiggy can come back from this. If this is leaked, she will be destroyed.
‘I’ll bet she just about broke the Bank of Mom and Pop to make that go away, huh?’ Scott says.
‘I’ll drink to that,’ Lucy says, and Scott swivels back round to chink her glass. He raises his eyebrows at her, and she shakes her head. ‘Wow. Just . . . wow.’
A light breeze has started up, fluttering the coloured bunting that hangs around the hut. A gull circles overhead. Across the bay, near the rocks, she sees that Amelia and James have found Tiggy and are trying to coax her into coming back to the bar. She’s shaking her head, gesticulating wildly. James tries to take her by the arm, but she shakes him off. ‘It’s bullshit!’ She’s screaming, and her words are being carried towards them on the wind, like the distant screech of the gulls. ‘It’s not real. Someone’s made this, to make me look bad.’
Scott sniffs. ‘It’s not completely ridiculous. You must’ve heard of all this deep fake stuff they can do these days. If a bunch of amateur nerds can do it with actors’ faces on YouTube, think what anyone with half a brain is doing. The CIA use it to trick people during interrogations. Make it look like someone they love is being tortured.’
‘I think you’ve been watching too much TV.’ Lucy rips open a packet of peanuts and pours them into a bowl. ‘You don’t really believe any of that, do you?’
‘Are you serious? You’ve no idea . . .’ His voice trails off and he shakes his head. ‘Though you never know, do you? She seems like a sweet girl, but—’
‘Got to watch the quiet ones.’
They take a drink, complicit now in their solidarity.
‘Still,’ Lucy says, ‘it’s the tech that’s weirding me out as much as anything.’ She taps the tracker, but nothing happens. ‘It’s incredible how it works – how we all see it through our own eyes . . . but we were seeing it as if we were Tiggy.’
‘I agree, for once.’ Scott sips his drink. ‘Deep fake or not, having my own personal video stream is seriously whack.’
Lucy spies Brenda leaving her sunlounger, and as she starts walking towards them she seems to be limping slightly. Interesting. What with her and Scott, they’ll be abandoning the injured left, right and centre.
‘So maybe she did something to Giles . . .’ Scott says, just as Brenda arrives back at the bar.