The Compound

by Aisling Rawle

On the wall beside the bath was a painting, large and abstract. It was the only piece of art I had ever seen in the house.

We came to the living room and paused uneasily in the doorway. While the dressing room had been messy, this room had been trashed.

There were several rules at the compound. The first was that it was forbidden to discuss that the show was in fact a show, or that we had seen the show before. It ruined the experience for the viewer and the participants, we had been told. The second was that we couldn’t discuss our life outside of the compound unless we had been instructed to do so. The third was that it was forbidden to harm another resident. There were other rules, but they wouldn’t come into effect until the boys arrived.

The truth is, we weren’t interested in getting to know each other—not yet. We were assessing who was the most beautiful and who might cause trouble.

Ten of us: myself, Jacintha, Sarah, Candice, Susie, Becca, Melissa, Mia, Vanessa, and Eloise.

Intelligence can be artificial, but charm is always real, and Susie had that in spades.

Becca was the quietest;

Mia was bitchy.

But it was Candice who shone, and toward Candice that we all gravitated. She was nice, in an offhand kind of way, and had an air of authority about her that we unquestioningly submitted to.

year. I only asked out of my old habit of prompting people to explain things to me even when I knew the answer.

you stayed in the compound only if you woke in the morning next to someone of the opposite sex. If you slept alone, you would be gone by sunrise.

The rewards were delivered through underground vents that connected the compound to the producers’ base of operations. I knew this only from online discussions and speculation around the show. They never showed the tunnels or the producers on television, but I knew that the producers were close by and could intervene if needed.

mean much to me if Jacintha was ranked so low. They didn’t know beauty, these boys. They saw blurred outlines and thought they knew the picture.

I thought that we had lost some crucial bit of power, not from the act of being judged, but by showing that it meant something to us. I wanted to be like the boys, who seemed to have forgotten that it happened the moment they stepped away.

He talked a lot, and after listening to him speak I realized that he had a habit of using big words incorrectly. “Look at that view!” I heard him shout. “Isn’t it just extrapolate?” I thought it might be obnoxious in someone else, but it lent a certain guilelessness that was distinctly charming.

It is life in slow motion, it’s the heart in reverse, it’s a hope-and-a-half: too much and too little at once. It’s a train that suddenly stops with no station around, and we can hear the cricket, and, leaning out the carriage door, we vainly contemplate a wind we feel that stirs the blooming meadows, the meadows made imaginary by this stop.

There was something about Sam that seemed to fill the room: I was aware of his every movement.

It had happened before: residents creeping out of bed in the middle of the night and swapping with another, sometimes returning later in the night, and sometimes leaving their bedmate vulnerable. I felt his eyes on me and knew that he was thinking the same. It would have been easier for us both if I had just said, “I’m not going to anyone else’s bed—I want you.” Instead I said nothing, and woke often, checking to see that he was still there.

Andrew and Tom’s roles placed them in a leadership position, a decision which no one questioned. It made sense to me at the time:

Tom, on the other hand, was more practical, and didn’t like small talk. Tom didn’t like most kinds of talk, actually. But he was more reliable than Andrew:

When I thought of all of the hours of work I would have had to do at home to earn enough for a high-quality white linen dress, I wanted to laugh. Two days’ work, it would have cost me. In the compound, I only had to drink a mouthful of expired milk, and it was in my postbox within minutes.

It hadn’t occurred to him that I might be trying to trick him or hinder him in any way. Andrew still believed, I think, that if you played by the rules and worked hard then you’d be rewarded. I don’t know what I believed at that point; I could only think in the short term.

“No one has ever died on the sh—in here,” Andrew said. He was right. It had never happened. People did die after the show though—there was a long list now of people who’d taken their lives after they returned home—but that was a separate issue.

how depressing it was that Becca and I had been foiled by such a thing as brute strength. I wondered if we were always doomed to fail, because they were strong, and we were weak. Was this how it was always going to turn out? If I stayed here, would I always be under the threat of their strength, the end to every argument, the solution to any problem?

“Andrew has been temporarily removed from the compound in order to receive medical treatment. He has not been banished and will return as soon as is medically advisable.”

“Oh, they fixed me right up. I feel fantastic, now. Fantastic.”

think we should build a monument. Something impressive. Something that screams legacy. I think it will impress a lot of people. And I think it will impress them, as well.”

What do you want your life to look like?” The question alarmed me. It was the one I didn’t want to answer, and the one that pressed most frequently on my mind. I knew what I didn’t want: I didn’t want to go back to work, and do little jobs that didn’t mean anything. I didn’t want to force myself out of bed every morning, and feel like my soul was being pulled from my body.

I wanted to be free from the daily confrontation with the slow decay of humanity and everything we had built. I wanted to be left alone. I wanted quiet.

“I suppose I don’t really know what I’m doing. And if I’m getting into it all—I suppose I’m not very happy, either. Well, I don’t suppose anyone’s really happy, are they? But you know what? It was worth a try. And it was good, wasn’t it? Didn’t we have fun? It’s been really special,”