Here’s What Every ‘Love Island’ Contestant Is Going to Do Now

It’s over, and all I’m left wondering is what the villa smells like after everyone there has gone. Does it smell: airy and clean and vacant? Does it smell: the way warm skin smells on the flat of a duvet after you have left in the morning for work? Does it smell: like the hot horny pregnant smell I imagine follows Wes and Megan around everywhere they go? Does it smell like Dr Alex talking about cars into a frosty, swirling abyss, the wind rushing to fill the void where any shred of banter should live inside his rigid pink body? Does it smell like tropical tanning oil and Jack telling Dani he loves her? Does it smell like Caroline Flack walking slowly down a gravel driveway? Listen closely to the walls, slick with fuck-sweat, moisture dewy on them, daubed with the word “MUGGY”, and what does the wall say? Closer, closer now: it sounds like hair extensions rustling, and rich idiots smearing their waxed chests with lipstick, and it sounds like, again and again, chanted like a monk: loyal, loyal, loyal.

The real game starts now. We know their names, their types on paper, we know their summer more intimately than they know it themselves. We know their Instagram handles, diligently managed for them by mums and brothers, and we know their secrets, splashed in red across newspaper front pages. We know the hot truths they confessed about each other, the crushes they’ve had, the hand-stuff they’ve performed. But now they have to go out there, into the world, and spin this heat-pulse of fame into something sustainable, something long-term.

Who will boom and bust into obscurity? Who will die and who will thrive? Does anyone remember Savanna? Anyone? Does anyone remember her? Does she even remember herself? Was Savanna the invention of my fevered mind?

OLD LAURA & BORING PAUL

Old Laura (*1) taps into a very unique segment of the reality TV-watching public – panicked 29-year-olds – and I think that is important. Old Laura represents something that nobody else on the reality TV circuit truly represents, and that is a fear of death. We have enough young reality stars targeted at teenaged and early-twenties girls (the gloss of the Kardashians; the puke-and-banter of the Geordie Shore Geordies); we have enough reality lads to keep Britain’s gymspiration reserves stocked for decades to come (Aaron Chalmers, Mike Thalassitis, the new king Adam Collard). We have queer reality stars and rich reality stars and poor reality stars, and we have reality stars your mum likes and reality stars your mum hates (weirdly, Gemma Collins fulfils both of these roles), and we have Arg. We have something for everyone alive, apart from 29-year-olds who are a bit disappointed at how life turned out and are now very much staring down the barrel of 30, rushing onward like a train, and for that we now have Old Laura.

Leveraged properly, Old Laura’s tragic heroine thing could actually make her a superstar. If she doesn’t slip down the slope of typical Instagram endorsements – charcoal toothpaste, luxury rental cars, bikini voucher codes – and instead embraces the reality and fear of life itself, she could become enormous. Laura, holding the keys to her new flat on the outskirts of Blackburn, “Not really where I wanted to buy but it’s #allicouldafford.” Laura, eyes hurting after staring at a series of screens for 15 years straight, finally succumbs and buys glasses. Laura reading a novel from the BBC Top 100 Books You Need to Read Before You Die because she fears she has not yet experienced enough culture. Laura adopting a dog and loving it a slightly uncomfortable amount. Laura, radiantly marrying Boring Paul, not really who I wanted to marry, but he’s #allicouldpull. Boring Paul is essentially a surfboard with a semi-handsome face on it, i.e. he is a tool, he is there only to project love onto, he does not need to deflect it back, and for that reason the future of Paul is irrelevant – I have already forgotten his name. But Laura… Laura’s descent into fame really could be something worth a watch.

NEW JACK & NEW LAURA

Jack and Laura are going to have a nice fortnight or so having luxurious intercourse in a variety of high class hotel rooms, and good on them to be quite honest, but this will abruptly stop and she will drop off the face of the fame planet forever in about two weeks or so (I have the feeling that New Jack does not save any numbers to his phone, I just have a very distinct, unshakeable feeling about this, and they will break-up because one day he just refuses to WhatsApp her saying where to meet him, and that is fine).

New Jack, however, is destined for a sort of fame, because i. he’s quite astonishingly good-looking and seems to be accelerating in handsomeness as the seconds go by; ii. he’s very banter and takes to the form of the Instagram story – where Love Island alumni live and die – quite easily; iii. he’s got “Celebrity Big Brother winner” written all over him; and iv. because every year one man from the Villa graduates into a celebrity relationship with an already-famous woman, and this year that will be Jack. He’s going to meet Olivia Attwood at a PrettyLittleThing party or something and end up engaged to her. He’s going to meet Ellie Goulding backstage at some Croatian dance music festival and there’ll be loads of photos of them bathed in golden sunlight and holding hands. Jack’s arm is very visible in the background of one of Little Mix’s Snapchat stories. Jack will spend the next three years as some sort of celebrity boy concubine, occasionally posing in Gucci sunglasses in a top-down BMW or getting publicly slated by Nando’s for abusing his black card, occasionally having to move out of Georgia Toffolo’s house, and honestly there are worse ways to live aren’t there.

EYAL

Eyal is already signed up to Celebs Go Dating and his management are almost certainly working gangbusters in the background to get him on other shows too, and I just feel like by the end of the year I will have seen Eyal Booker do everything it is possible to do on TV: Eyal scared by ghosts, Eyal slowly saying “wow” while Dynamo shows him a card-trick, Eyal on some sort of Channel 4 show where celebrities get naked and say why they don’t like about their bodies, some as-yet-uninvited BBC Three title where Eyal learns to be a tattoo artist (“InkStar” or “Celebrity Ink“, I haven’t decided yet), Eyal on a beach resort, struggling to mix a cocktail. Fundamentally, we will have Eyal Booker pushed on to us whether we like it or not without anyone pausing and stopping long enough to go: but is he actually likeable? Does anyone want to see more of him? And he will be able to get, I would say, a good year’s worth of employment out of that. Beyond August of 2019, I truly don’t know how the lad is going to find work, but he’s going to milk enough to buy a house outright in the meantime, and we will all have to be the ones who pay.

WES & MEGAN

Genuinely quite scared for the western world having to deal – as it will – with the sheer amount of shagging energy Wes and Megan are about to exert, because they have been shagging, in the villa – discreetly, semi-discreetly, and then quite close to openly rutting on top of the work surfaces – but now, without the 24/7 glare of the cameras around them, they are going to really shag. Whatever room they are doing it in will start glowing red with friction, concrete foundations beneath them start cracking, hotels collapse around them, chaos, screaming, fire. After they’ve both cum on each other a few hundred times they will emerge blinking to the outside world, and I can’t quite call how it’s going to go.

Megan, a fit, emotionless Essex native, is seemingly custom-built for a couple of seasons on TOWIE, escalating her fame by another million or so Instagram followers before leaving it behind; Wes, in a series of slightly-too-tight bomber jackets, has hundreds of turn-quickly-sideways-and-laugh-too-loud appearances on celebrity panel shows in his future. But as a couple, I can’t tell how they’re going to go. Will they be Olivia-and-Alex-from-Series-2, where Wes goes out and dutifully does 350 PAs in 340 nights, and Megan stays at home and Instagrams lip gloss kits, until they are both rich and unassailably famous? Will they split – magazine covers and recriminations – after a couple of short weeks, Megan becoming instantly the most viable single woman in the UK, Prince Harry genuinely a bit annoyed about the timing of it, a succession of high profile celebrity relationships before really bafflingly marrying Rio Ferdinand? Could she crack America by being in a DJ Khaled video then go to live a really rich and inexplicable life in Dubai? I just can’t tell! I can’t call this one!

ELLIE & CHARLIE

The money dynamic in their relationship makes Ellie and Charlie incredibly interesting as a couple, and for that reason an E4 show where he slowly idles a Lamborghini in Chelsea traffic while she goes to elocution lessons and plans their wedding will run for two seasons before they both realise they’re too rich for this shit and go off to live a near-silent perfect life in Monaco, both absolutely addled with high-grade facial surgery.

GEORGIA & SAM

Georgia’s going to become a make-up vlogger and Sam is going to go on Instagram a lot posing in his new car, and they’ll break up one month to the day after posting a Winter Wonderland selfie of them kissing, amen.

KAZ & JOSH

Kaz & Josh are the most unerringly beautiful couple in the villa, and they are just very destined for a long, happy, un-stressful life together: move in within a month, buy a house with their endorsement money within the year, Kaz keeps looking radiant and goddess-like at various celebrity parties, Josh in orange-tinted shades posing for a firm handshake with Wayne Lineker, loads of full-flash photos of them eating together, heads gently tilted towards one another, in STK, that sort of thing. They are basically going to turn into the shining exemplar of your-mate-from-school-who-did-quite-well-for-himself-and-who-you-can’t-now-drag-yourself-away-from-unfollowing-on-Instagram-because-hating-him-gives-you-a-special-sort-of-dark-energy: cut to you, drunk and alone at 3AM one Friday in October, scrolling down through months of Josh and Kaz’s Instagram posts, openly sobbing that you aren’t either one of them.

SAMIRA & FRANKIE

Samira is going to get her own swimwear line and be in loads of adverts where the camera zooms up towards her and away again while she lowers her sunglasses by a swimming pool while some aggressive gym-pop pulses in the background, and Frankie is going to be kept like a sort of beautiful pet, allowed to take all her photos for Instagram and buy all her dinners out and occasionally be allowed to sleep in the bed rather than at the foot of it, curled up like a dog, and quite honestly he should be happy with the arrangement.

ALEX & ALEX

Part of me wants to be like: give him a Channel 4 show where he routinely fails to fuck, because my body craves and needs to see this man fail, again and again and again, and again, and again (Celebs Go Dating where he is the only celeb, and he fails on maybe six dates per episode, Alex in an east London basement bar stuttering “so do… you like… tyres” to a bored-looking blonde: that sort of thing). Another part of me wants him banned from my TV forever, and ideally locked in a prison where he can’t ever get out. But I feel like somewhere in the middle, there’s a possibility of middle-ground: Dr Alex, pitched as the next big TV doctor, has a 24 Hours in A&E-type show, only literally every time he stitches up a woman under the age of 35 he also tries to chirpse her, and then there’s some very grey footage of him sweating in a medical ethics committee, and then he is struck off, forever. That, I would enjoy. Alexandra is instantly going to get a really rich older boyfriend and, within three years, become Britain’s most glamorous widow. In 20 years time they’ll make a podcast out of how she got away with his murder.

ADAM & ZARA

Whole magazine interview where he announces he loves her and they’re moving in together, followed by not one, not two, but fifteen girls coming forward and saying he’s sent them nudes since he left the villa, and I predict this will happen in the next fortnight or so—

QUICKFIRE WAIFS-AND-STRAYS ROUND

Idris is… nailed on to be the butt of one of those viral tweets after a screenshot of him attempting to chirpse a girl he met at a P.A. at Pryzm in Leeds (“u look nice…………… lol what u sayin”) does numbers, and then loads of girls come out of the woodwork to share the fact that – and here is the screenshot evidence – he has used the exact same lines on them, and he has to put both his Twitter and Instagram on private, and everyone forgets he exists until he brutally loses an undercard at Tyson Fury’s next fight.

Savanna is… a figment of your imagination! She never existed!

Kieran is… just feel like he’s going to get in with a clique of British YouTubers and end up trying to sell a line of snapbacks that say “K-Nichzz” on them. Inexplicably always seems to be eating dinner at the top of The Shard. Gets into some non-contact Twitter beef with Tom Zanetti. That sort of thing.

Grace is… going to show up in a long read Mail article about getting your fillers out.

Niall… bizarrely popular podcast teaching people who have only ever read Harry Potter in their lives how to fucking move on.

Kendall is… weirdly the most likely to live a really lux paid-for Instagram life for the rest of time, just always in the Maldives or wearing some new sunglasses or something, essentially a hostage with a gun to her head, only the person with their finger on the trigger is whoever runs Missguided’s PR.

Rosie is… destined for a nightclub toilet assault charge and a suspended sentence, sorry.

Hayley… already done a “so what’s Europe?” interview with Nigel Farage, so she is now destined to become UKIP’s pet idiot princess, wheeled out on Question Time at some point, and when an audience member off-handedly makes a comment about her being in UKIP she kicks off, fully standing up behind the desk and pointing, saying: “I’m not in UKIP, right, I’m jUST KEEPINg my oPTIONS OPEn!” and then, clang, like clockwork, stands and loses for UKIP at the next local elections, and in 20 years, tight-faced and the smile even more hollow than before, she is still wheeled out for short videos where she turns to camera, gleaming, and says, “Do YOU know what an immigrant is? ‘Cos I don’t” while Nigel Farage, oxygen tank and a hard-on, chokes on a cigar beside her.

JACK & DANI

Marriage, kids, Romford new build, ITV2 show where Jack, hands-on-head astounded, meets Danny Dyer for the first time, goes fishing with him, learns to nut a cunt, while Dani, eyes squinting into her head with constant delight, has knees-on-the-sofa tea-in-her-hand conversations with her mum and her friends about how much she loves him, six months until he proposes to her in front of a sunset and three ITV cameras, one year until their wedding is on the cover of OK!, slight detour where she goes to be Queen of the Jungle while he Skypes in to Ant and Dec and says on a five-second delay, “I MISS HER!”

Love’s only hope, love’s young dream, you stopped believing in it for a second there, didn’t you, with your life, with the shrapnel of your life behind you, yet another day spent watching the Tinder icon pulse and creak and desperately try to search out new prey for you after you swiped to the end of the meat market, refreshing WhatsApp and looking at the last time the previous three people you ghosted were ever online, blocking then unblocking your ex on Instagram, then blocking them again, a “u up?” text goes ignored, when was the last time you felt the thrill of bodily contact, when was the last time you felt wanted, seen, needed? You had given up on love, hadn’t you, and sure it’s never going to happen for you, but: look. Look at Jack and Dani. Let them make you believe that love is real again. On ITV2’s new show, Jack & Dani: Love Is Real.

@joelgolby

(*1) There are complications in calling Old Laura “Old Laura”, because at 29, she’s not, actually, very old. However: i. a newer and fundamentally younger Laura did come into the villa and we had to differentiate the Lauras somehow; ii. Laura is quite openly in a very different stage of life to the rest of the girls in there, so while they are all talking in hushed shy tones about falling in love for the first time, Old Laura is spitting a cigarette butt over the balcony of love and saying, “Here we go again,” Old Laura very much ready for this rigmarole to end, now, just to find a man with a beard and some viable sperm on him who can go halves on a house and two kids. She’s done being young; she’s done living in Dubai; she’s done with that, hen – she just wants a babby now, a babby and a different surname; and iii. Old Laura is an ancient spirit trapped in the body of a 29-year-old Scottish air hostess, and I think that’s important: Old Laura has been locked in trees, she has encompassed mountains, Old Laura has been rocks and she has been air, Old Laura was buried as a cat in an Egyptian tomb and creaked out of there centuries later, Old Laura has seen skies in every colour that they come, she has seen war and she has seen blood, Old Laura is ancient, Old Laura is time, Old Laura Transcends The Earth And The Sea: and for that reason I think it’s OK to call her Old Laura, alright—