There are two days’ induction and selection for which candidates receive ten thousand pounds, with the chance to win the main prize if they pass the audition process. The final challenge will take place over five days and may be subject to change as this is a pilot series…
How hard can it be to go on the run for a week? I was a Venture Scout back in the day.
I place a call to HR.
Chapter Three LYDIA
It’s one thing to glibly agree to a challenge a month ago in a bright sunlit office in the anonymous safety of the city but now, pulling into Oxenholme station, which looks just like something from The Railway Children, I’m having second, third, fourth and ninety-second thoughts. Fleeing for Your Life suddenly sounds terrifying, especially surrounded by open country. For the last hour there’s been nothing but fields. Where are all the buildings? The people? The cars? Where the hell do you hide out here?
With a pang I think of my grandmother’s home, the one she left to me. The one my parents have ravaged with their neglect over the last twenty years. I could cry when I think of the sagging roof, the broken windows and the unkempt garden, and that’s just the outside. God only knows what it’s like inside. I swallow a hard lump. I have to do this. I can do this. I have to restore the sad house. It symbolises the family life I experienced when my grandmother was alive, the normality and order that came with living with her. Once she died, all that disappeared. That house is so much more than a mere building to me.
I’m not going to give up at the first puny hurdle, which is that I can barely lift my suitcase down onto the platform. I shove, push and pull the outsize case, trying to get it out of the door, and when I look up for help, I see Tom bloody Dereborn is disembarking from the next carriage and watching me, his lip curling, his disdain obvious. Then, to my utter surprise, he strides over and takes it from me, lifting it and lowering it to the platform with a quick grunt.
‘What the fuck have you got in there?’ he says.
‘What are you doing here?’ I ask, horrified by the quick punch of excitement my body produces at the sight of him.
‘Same as you, I’d imagine.’
He dumps my case on the ground and turns his back on me to pick up his own fancy rucksack, navy blue with dozens of straps and plastic catches in co-ordinating orange. It’s a proper boys’ adventure piece of kit with orange mesh pockets of varying sizes, packed with bottles of water, bananas, a book and his mobile phone.
It doesn’t bother me. At school I was always the poor relation, woefully ill-equipped. Not anymore. My case might be huge, but I can guarantee I’m prepared for every eventuality.
The tiny train station is the gateway to the Lake District, where, according to the paperwork, we’re being picked up and taken to ‘base’. The word brings to mind military-style tents and men in combat gear. Said paperwork has been sketchy about the exact details of the next two days and what is involved as they’re ‘subject to change’, though it had included a detailed waiver and a release form, and a loose two-day itinerary. Today we’ll meet everyone during an orientation session and tomorrow there will a day’s team-building audition process to assess our suitability for the programme. I’d really like to have known more to prepare a little. I have a lot riding on this.
I sneak a look at Tom’s stern profile. Christ, just imagine if the production company knew we’d slept together and hadn’t seen each other until last week. It would increase our chances of being picked to take part as it would make good telly. But I can’t let them know. It was humiliating enough that we slept together and then the bastard couldn’t wait to get rid of me afterwards.
I can remember it so clearly. As the sun started to go down on Sunday and the evening drew in, it was as if he morphed into another person. One minute he was kissing my shoulder and then the next, he was hustling me out of his apartment like his pants were on fire, and his parents were due home any second – except I’m pretty damn sure it was his place given the all-grey, tasteful and blatantly single-guy decor. I can’t decide whether I’m still mad as hell with him because of the way he pulled the plug on that weekend or because he pretended he didn’t know me.
I’ve gone over a gazillion times what I might have said to trigger it that Sunday evening – that portcullis coming down, the warmth fizzing out of those blue eyes turning them steely grey. I saw it again when we were on site in Spain.
I met Tom Dereborn … I can’t bring myself to call him Tom because while my body might know his intimately, having been expertly filled, fucked every which way by his, until the other day I never knew his full name.
Exactly eleven months ago, one Friday evening, he sat down next to me at one of those interminable industry conference dinners. From the moment his shoulder brushed mine, firing up an electric frisson-fuelled awareness, I was conscious of his every move. Even the low-pitched timbre of his voice, gravelly and smoke-filled, set off a crazy flash of lust curling and twisting through me. We barely spoke, both of us intentionally concentrating on our other neighbours as if determined to ignore the Northern Lights flare of energy dancing between us. Halfway through the main course – could have been chicken – I bent to pick up the napkin that had slipped off my lap and he bent at the same moment to gather it for me. His hand touched mine and for some stupid reason, my breath caught in my throat as I looked into his deep blue eyes.
‘Do you want to get out of here?’ he asked.
Without so much as a blink of hesitation, I nodded.
‘Meet you in the foyer in five,’ he murmured out of the corner of his mouth and got up from the table.
I remember slugging back the wine in my glass, picking up my clutch bag and forcing myself to watch the second hand of the big grand clock above the ballroom of The Dorchester until exactly five minutes had passed. I half expected to find that he’d gone.
Shamelessly and without a second thought I followed him into the cab the concierge had called up for us. Our mouths fused the minute the door closed. I never felt such desperation to get so close to someone. It was as if a jar of fireflies had been emptied into my brain, dazzling me with sparks. Every long, slow, drugging drag of his lips over mine made them brighten, and when his tongue touched mine, they exploded, sending cascading vibrations fizzing down through my sternum.
I suspect when it came round to Sunday evening, he regretted the whole weekend.
Accepting that is like a tiny stab wound, small on the outside but it goes deep. I was good enough to fuck senseless, but nothing else. It makes me mad at him all over again as well as reinforcing that awareness that I’ve always carried with me that I’m somehow lacking in some way. I’m good at my job, I have friends, people like me, but there is something intrinsic, a basic essential bit of me that is wrong in some way. Over the years I thought I’d got used to it, but his rejection of me after the intimacies we shared has scored deeply.
Sometimes I wonder if I imagined the connection between us. I’ve replayed that weekend so many times in my head, but I’m a realist, not given to flights of fantasy and I know it was there. I didn’t imagine it. Tom chose to reject it, but it was there.
Pride stops me bringing the subject up. Fuck him.
I stagger a little with the weight of my case and almost bump into him as I try to keep up with him.
‘Kitchen sink?’ he asks raising a supercilious eyebrow.
‘Look, why don’t we call a truce?’ I suggest. I’m not built for conflict. I like to fly under the radar, which is what I’ve tried to do for most of my life.
‘A truce would suggest we’ve fallen out,’ he says.
I frown, completely disconcerted by this statement.
‘I disagreed with your approach in Barcelona but I’m adult enough to accept that colleagues will have differing opinions.’
I gape at him because I am truly flabbergasted, gabberflasted and dabbergaffled.
Before I can shout, ‘What about the sex?’ an exceptionally tall man, with shoulders so wide he must have to turn sideways to walk through doorways, approaches us.
‘Lydia Smith, Tom Dereborn?’
Still simmering, I leave Tom to say yes.
‘I’m Mark, one of the team. Welcome. Car’s out front.’
The man-giant takes my case without so much as flinching at the weight and leads us to an eye-wateringly bright orange Land Rover in the car park.
‘Welcome to the Jaffamobile,’ says Mark when he catches me examining the colour.
