by Emma Dibdin
I get out of the car too, numb, edging closer to her.
‘If you don’t get back in your car and drive back to LA, I will use this on myself. If anyone tries to come near us, if you try to follow us, or send us messages, I will use this on myself.’ Her voice trembles. ‘If I ever see you again, I will use this on myself.’
I believe her. And so does he.
‘When you regret this decision, in a month or two, know that you can come home. Take some time, cool off, and when you’re ready your suite will be there, untouched, waiting for you,’ Clark tells her, as he’s backing up gradually with hands in the air, as though he’s the one at gunpoint. This will be my final image of him, the one that lasts, the one that feels true.
‘Burn it to the ground,’ Skye snaps, and keeps the gun at her temple until he’s back in the SUV and Lenny’s starting the ignition, his face impassive as ever. The things he must have seen.
After the sound of their engine has faded into the distant buzz of the freeway, I reach out and put my hand on Skye’s arm. The bare skin of her wrist, just hard enough to feel her pulse there, to feel her alive. She doesn’t shake me off.
Epilogue
The first night I ever spent in LA, I hiked for three hours up to the Hollywood sign as the sun went down, cicada song spiralling around me. I had been awake for twenty-seven hours, too wired to sleep on the flight from London, and arrived at the summit on a knife’s edge between exhausted and exhilarated.
I didn’t know until too late that the trail I picked brought me out directly behind the sign. Six-and-a-half miles of shadeless upward climbing all to look at the back of a landmark, a bruising anticlimax. But the sunset spread itself out over the city as I sat there behind the H, peaches and gold giving way to velvet darkness above the skyline’s twinkling lights, and it felt like a show put on for me alone, a welcome parade. My Hollywood was born that night, aglow with promises, and only now that I’m a thousand miles away in the desert can I look back and clearly see the ending of it.
Fictional worlds have lost their hold on me, I realized yesterday when I started adding up how long it had been since I watched anything. Eleven days, including three on the road, the longest I’ve gone without screen time in my living memory. When Skye and I stopped at a roadside bar with a TV playing sitcom reruns I had to fight the urge to cover my eyes and ears, as though I have an allergy now. Maybe overexposure. Maybe I know too much for the artifice not to grate. Or maybe the bar was just too loud and my anxiety too close. We didn’t stay long.
We’ve been driving east, since Monterey, our destination unclear and for now unimportant. Outside of Las Vegas we passed a billboard with Clark’s face on it, stretched out above us: Loner. Returning This Fall. This ad was made and paid for long before I published my article, and maybe by next week it will be pulled down. Maybe all of this will do him some lasting damage. Or maybe the machine will keep on turning the way that it always has, and he will weather this storm just like he always does, and everybody will be calling Clark Conrad the nicest guy in Hollywood again by the autumn. That poor guy, they’ll say, I’ve never seen a smear campaign like it. I heard that journalist was a really crazy fan, couldn’t handle it when he broke up with her.
Skye and I still haven’t quite found a rhythm, a way of talking that doesn’t feel insane, but we’re close. Her Hollywood is different from mine, her loss more gaping, but she brought me with her for a reason and it was not benevolence. We share something, in the wreckage Clark left behind, in the days we’ve spent on the road together, and though I made her promise to lose the gun once we end up somewhere permanent, I have stopped worrying that I’ll wake up and find her dead.
The glow has receded. It began to fade months ago, with Skye’s blood in the water, with Schlattman’s eyes on me, with Bridget Meriweather’s picture, with Carol’s skittish story, with Clark’s hands around my throat. It was never really there, in fact, but like any beloved fictional thing its loss leaves behind an ache, and in time I will find a way to live without it.
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About Emma Dibdin
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About Emma Dibdin
EMMA DIBDIN grew up in Oxford, and now lives in New York. She is a writer and journalist whose work has appeared in Esquire, Marie Claire, Harper's Bazaar, Cosmopolitan, and Total Film.
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First published in the United Kingdom in 2018 by Head of Zeus Ltd
Copyright © Emma Dibdin, 2018
The moral right of Emma Dibdin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (E) 9781786694058
ISBN (HB) 9781786694065
ISBN (XTPB) 9781786694072
Cover photograph: © Cristian Todea / Arcangel
Author Photo: Martin Bentsen
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