Spring Clean

I was floating on my back in the lake, watching the glittering figures in the distance. Florence Welch poured from Saul's speaker. He'd declared himself creative director of the Spotify Jam and was currently bickering with Ronan about removing every Drake song from the queue.

The setting sun caught my colleagues as they sprawled across the dock - their skin gone metallic, their hair full of light - for a moment I couldn't have told you what species they were.

They'd invited me into their strange world order, one hand outstretched and the other crossed tightly behind their backs. They'd taught me their made-up language of synergies and circling back. They'd taught me self-optimisation through repression and hierarchy and a steady flow of depressants and stimulants until there was no more me left in myself.

They remade me in their image. Pitted me to make room for something else.

My mind accepted the arrangement with little resistance, but my body had started objecting. A tremor in my hand. An involuntary eye twitch. Hair coming out in clumps.

Whenever you go against your nature, your body finds ways to remind you. Or so they say.

For three nights, I hadn't slept.

That doesn't seem long in the scheme of things, but it was long enough to blur the edges of rational thought, and a fever had crept in. Figures at the edge of the treeline dissolving when I looked directly at them. Hearing my name repeated in muted chorus from nowhere in particular.

And it was hot.

So fucking hot.

The kind of heat that slowed down time. The blood turning beneath my skin felt thick as peat. The lake reflected a white-gold sky so bright it hurt to look at.
Everyone seemed slightly dazed, lethargic.

I pricked my thigh with the underside of my earring, curious whether blood would rise to the surface or whether I'd just deflate like a punctured balloon. I suspected the latter, so was surprised to see a thin red ribbon drifting across the water.

Saul looked up from the dock.

"What are you doing, May?"

"Purging."

He nodded solemnly.

"The lake must be fed."

"Okayyy..." Imogen said, plucking the joint from his fingers. "That's enough of that."

She was wearing a bikini the colour of wet cherries, a Vogue Slim dangling from her glossy lips. She and Ronan were playing some invented card game nobody else understood. The rules appeared to consist entirely of her letting him win.

Whenever he did, she'd hold out her arm and he'd extinguish his cigarette on one of the small brown moles scattered over her skin.

She grinned, lazy and wolfish. I'd never noticed how sharp her teeth were before.

"We all need to purge," Saul continued.

He sat unusually upright behind them, pretending to read Nietzsche. He'd been staring at the same page for the last hour. It had taken him less than forty-eight hours of the Goldman Stanley Wellbeing Offsite to abandon ‘Rich Dad Poor Dad’ for ‘The Birth of Tragedy.’

"I'm a girl," Imogen said. "Every day of my life since fourteen has been a purge."

Saul ignored her.

"The more intelligent and rational a person is, the more they need a way to release their primitive instincts."

"Oh my God."

"I'm serious. We live in a culture of repression. It's not natural"

"Speak for yourself. My life is great."

"You cried during bonus season."

"That was psychological exhaustion. Completely different."

The Goldman Stanley consulting apprentices treated leisure with the same performative intensity they applied to networking: they’d arrived at the so-called Wellbeing Offsite with branded quarter-zips, five-dot Zyns, and enough ketamine to tranquilise a horse.

The quarter-zips now lay abandoned across the dock, each embroidered across the breast with the firm's golden lyre and the words Where Potential Ascends.

Officially, the retreat existed to encourage 'interdisciplinary cohesion among emerging talent.'

Unofficially, everyone called it Spring Clean.

"Nature knows no kings," Saul said suddenly.

Nobody responded.

Even he looked slightly surprised he'd said it out loud.

Ronan cracked open another Damn Lemon.

"Right. Have a day off."

Saul sighed.

"You lot spend eleven months of the year ranking against one another. Assessing each others performance. Optimising yourselves."

"And?"

"It’s not a human way to live. Eventually something leaks out. Like a pressure valve.”

"Mate," Ronan said "you've spent two days reading Nietzsche by a lake."

"Don’t spar with me on this, I'm giving you all a free pass to party. And I never party"

It's true, he didn't. We all did - frequently - but the Goldman Stanley version included Thirsty Thursdays in Broadgate Circle and exorbitant quantities of cocaine.

"Why didn't you say so?" Ronan perked up immediately. "I've been dying to see you drunk since Q1."

Imogen leaned across me, bangles jingling in my face.

"You know why they call it Spring Clean?"

"Because that's what your nostril hairs are going to do to the back of Ronan's Amex?"

She rolled her eyes.

"Yes, very funny May. Because every year somebody doesn't come back. Last year it was Kate Chasey.”

"I literally saw Kate last week."

"You didn't know her before" Saul interjected.

The group dissolved into laughter.

"Fine." he folded his arms over his chest. "Don't believe me."

"We don't."

"We'll see who's laughing come Monday."

Ronan stretched, one arm draping itself across Imogen's back as he reached towards the case of beer. She twitched almost imperceptibly at the contact.

Like instinct.

Like hunger.

I looked away. There was something wrong with her, I thought. There was something wrong with her that was wrong with all of us.

“We should do something themed,” Ronan said. “Like... toga night! Proper classic that. Greek Debauchery.”

“Yeh. Toga night” Someone else mused. “Gold leaves. Wine.”

“I Drink, Therefore I am,” Ronan proclaimed, raising his beer like he’d said something profound.

There was a brief pause, then laughter.

Saul grimaced.

"Why are you quoting Descartes?"

"What?"

"Descartes. The French philosopher."

Ronan looked wounded.

"He's French?"

"Famously."

"Absolutely not. We're not having a French party."

"No, seriously. If you want a classical reference, you'd be better with Dionysus. Or Bacchus.”

"Bacchus sounds like a shitty nightclub."

"Sort of my point."

"So we do Bacchus night?"

"It's called a Bacchanal."

Saul said it too quickly.

The word settled over the dock.

"A Bacchanal," Ronan repeated. "That's actually not bad."

"Isn't that all orgies and human sacrifice?" Imogen asked.

"A controlled collapse."

"Controlled collapse sounds like my job description."

The group laughed again.
Saul didn't.

"It's drinking. Dancing. Singing. Fucking." He shrugged. "Are you in or are you out?"

Ronan considered the proposal.

"Can I still wear a toga?"

"Yes."

"Then I'm in."

The heat had not broken by midnight. It pressed against the hills, against the lodges, against our sticky skin like a great hand descending from the sky. The whole forest felt suspended in the moment before a fever pitch.

Callary Pear trees sprayed their heady, putrid scent across the woodland. Everything smelled overripe. Overexposed.
The landscape looked sun-bleached even in the dark.
Rabbits wandered openly across the paths. They didn't startle when approached, just watched us with their still, beady eyes.

Light danced and flickered deep between the trees. Torchlights. Will-o'-the-wisps. Maybe something else.

Imogen plucked a nectarine from a nearby branch and sank her teeth into its flesh.

Immediately she spat it out.

"Jesus. Rotten."

Strings of pulp dripped from her chin like sinew.
She hurled the fruit into a hedgerow.
A fox burst from the leaves.
For a second it stood perfectly still, blinking slowly at us.
Then it vanished.

The bottle of Cabernet continued its slow journey around the circle. In the clearing, somebody had lit a small fire from leaves and bark. Someone else started humming an old folk song, the melody drifted through the trees, gathering voices as it went.

Ronan stood up and pulled his shirt over his head.

“What are you doing?” Imogen looked up, swaying slightly

“It’s thirty degrees at midnight, and you’ve just lit a fucking bonfire”

Then he was in the lake, barely breaking the surface. A few others ran after him, arms linked, socks and shirts abandoned to the grass. Saul raised his quarter zip over his head, then tossed it onto the fire. The golden lyre glittered softly before the flames engulfed it.

“I’ll give YOU ascending potential”

The plume of smoke rose towards the canopy, an axis around which the night began to spin. Everyone's faces distorted in the flickering light. By one in the morning there was a small pile of expensive leather loafers besides the fire.

Nobody seemed interested in putting them back on.

Imogen appeared beside me, carrying a crown woven from foxglove, bluebells and gorse. Her golden hair was dripping water and she was down to her underwear.

Without asking, she settled it onto my head. The pathway back to the lodge was less than five feet away.

Around us, the singing continued. My eye had stopped twitching.

Every year somebody comes back wrong.

The flowers hanging from my temple smelled sweet enough to be rotten.

This year, I thought, it would be me.