I Am Dust

by Louise Beech

  ‘She had a knife at her throat,’ Ryan says to him. ‘What else could Ginger do? It was self-defence. She had to do something,or Chloe might have killed her.’ He pauses. ‘Is she … is she …?’

  Edwin doesn’t speak.

  ‘No,’ cries Ginger. ‘No, no, no!’

  ‘What happened here?’ asks Edwin, standing up.

  ‘She just turned up, and she had a knife.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘We never should have done it!’ Ginger kicks the broken Dust picture, looking at Ryan.

  ‘Done what?’ asks Edwin.

  ‘Done the … when we were…’ Ginger can’t finish. Ryan understands though.

  ‘What about the show?’ calls the stage manager from the doorway.

  ‘We’ll have to cancel it.’

  ‘For good?’

  ‘God, no,’ cries Edwin, as though the suggestion is ridiculous. ‘Just tonight. Get them to make the announcement.’ The stage manager nods and disappears. ‘On the first fucking night too. The press will love this.’ He seems to think again. ‘No matter, it’s all press.’ Some of the actors gather in the doorway, gasping and flapping. John Marrs pushes through them, dressed as Chevalier, demanding to know what the delay is. Edwin slams the door on them all.

  ‘You expect me to perform tomorrow?’ Ginger is aghast.

  ‘Of course.’ Edwin sweeps his arm dramatically around the dressing room. ‘This is Dust 2019. We don’t shut down for anything. You’re not dead, are you? That cut’s just a graze. A demented usher broke into your room and tried to kill you and you defended yourself. This fan witnessed it. The police will see that. And the show goes on.’

  ‘Are you insane? My friend is dead.’ She kneels beside Chloe, sobbing into her hand. Ryan hovers nearby, trembling, clearly in shock.

  ‘She wasn’t your friend when you sent me her script.’ Edwin shrugs. ‘If you don’t show up tomorrow, we’ll get another actress. One bigger than you. Now, where is that ambulance?’ He opens the door. ‘Let me through,’ he orders the crowd still huddled there, all trying to see what’s going on. ‘Lock the door after me,’ he tells Ryan.

  ‘What did I do?’ cries Ginger. She puts her head on Chloe’s still shoulder. ‘This is your fault too, Ryan. We should never have messed about with that fucking Ouija board…’

  ‘No, this is because of you,’ he says. ‘You betrayed her.’

  ‘No! I’d never have done that!’ Ginger leaps up and pushes him back.

  ‘Oh, you would.’ Ryan resists her shove. His voice is ice cold. ‘She should have stabbed you to fucking death.’

  Ginger shakes her head and then begins to pace, her flowing robes whispering against the floor. ‘You three,’ she whispers, ‘never be under one roof.’ She repeats it, over and over, and then puts her face in her hands.

  ‘Three came in,’ says Ryan quietly. ‘Only two leave.’

  ‘You’ll defend me, won’t you?’ Ginger pleads. ‘I had no choice, Ryan. She had me by the neck and I hit her. I didn’t know it would kill her, I just wanted to stop her.’

  ‘She had stopped,’ says Ryan. ‘We both know it.’ He pauses. ‘It was murder, not self-defence. But I won’t tell them that.’

  Ginger nods but her face is drawn, and her eyes are haunted, fearful – guilty.

  ‘I was really happy to see her earlier,’ he continues. ‘I couldn’t believe it was her.’

  Ginger sobs into her bloody hand and says, ‘I’m sorry.’ Then she bends down, kisses Chloe’s forehead and says again, ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Will you still go onstage tomorrow?’ asks Ryan after a moment.

  Ginger goes to the mirror and powders her face as though to get ready for the next act. She adds red lipstick as though to strengthen her mouth for any words she must say and fluffs up her hair. Then she turns to Ryan. ‘What choice do I have?’

  When the paramedics come into the dressing room, Ryan and Ginger are sitting on either side of Chloe, as though she’s merely sleeping, and they are watching over her until she wakes.

  59

  There and Yet Not There

  ‘I don’t want to be dead.’ The words come out as the tiniest whisper, and Chloe is sure Morgan can’t possibly have heard them. She starts to say them again, but Morgan speaks.

  ‘Most people don’t,’ she says gently.

  ‘But my heart is still beating.’ Morgan let’s go of Chloe’s hand; Chloe keeps the other on her chest and can feel her heart pulsing beneath.

  ‘It’sbeating here,’ says Morgan. ‘Just not there.’

  Chloe shakes her head; her reflection mirrors the denial. ‘But, look – I’m there, I exist.’

  ‘Here,’ repeats Morgan. ‘Not there.’

  ‘But I’m real. I’m breathing.’

  ‘Only here.’

  There and yet not there… A line from her own script.

  ‘No. I can’t be dead. How can I be? We were fighting, and then I blacked out like I often do. I lowered the knife. But, God, there was blood, wasn’t there? What the hell happened?’

  ‘Look in the mirror,’ says Morgan.

  Behind them, in the glass, Chloe watches the final scene unfold; sees Ginger grab the bottle and hit her; watches herself fall; sees her last breath. She watches with great sadness as Ginger and Ryan sit beside her lifeless body while paramedics try and revive her. She longs to climb through the glass like Alice and go back to the beginning of the Dust interval and never go to the dressing room with Ryan.

  ‘I wasn’t really going to kill her,’ Chloe cries, pushing her chair back from the mirror. ‘I was just so angry. I loved her and I hated her. I wanted to scare her. But I stopped, I did, I’m sure of it.’

  ‘You did,’ Morgan agrees gently.

  ‘And she still hit me? Still killed me?’

  ‘Who knows how she felt. She must have been very scared. She didn’t know if you might attack her again, did she?’

  ‘I thought I’d just blacked out.’ Chloe’s feelings of distress and sadness are somehow less; softer, as though felt through a filter. Is this what being dead feels like? Then she realises something. ‘Why didn’t the dressing room look bloody when I came around then?’

  ‘You just saw it how you had last seen it.’

  ‘When did it happen? How long ago?’

  ‘There, it happened at nine-fifteen on Thursday the fifth of September, twenty-nineteen. Here, there is no time, as such. Here it’s always just … now.’

  Chloe won’t accept it; she can’t. It isn’t possible. She can feel the breath in her lungs and the hair on her arms. ‘But I haven’t said goodbye to anyone. I’m too young. No. I’m not dead.’ She stands up. ‘I’m going home. No, not home; I’m going to see my mum and dad.’

  ‘That’s what I found the hardest,’ admits Morgan, still golden gorgeous in the glow of the mirror lights. ‘Never getting to say goodbye to anyone properly. But there are ways you can. Love lingers. It’s still there even if you’re not.’

  Chloe marches to the dressing-room door. ‘No. I want my mum. I’m going to her.’

  ‘Chloe, sweetheart, stay here,’ begs Morgan ‘For now. Please. If you go out there, into the world, you’ll see them, but they won’t see you, and it hurts. It hurts so much. I’m warning you. I did it. Stay with me and wait for them to call you.’

  ‘Call me?’ Chloe pauses at the door.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Like on my phone?’

  Morgan shakes her head. ‘That doesn’t work here. They might call you somehow though, and you’ll know when it happens.’

  Now Chloe is afraid to leave the dressing room. What if it’s true? What if she is dead and she goes home, and her mum can’t see her? Doesn’t respond when she speaks? It will be unbearable. Maybe she should wait. Just another hour.

  ‘Sometimes my mum used to look up when I went there,’ says Morgan as though she knows Chloe’s torment. ‘She’d tell my dad later that she had been sure she smelt me. She got so upset about it that I sto
pped going. I hated seeing her so tormented. Sometimes it’s kinder to stay away … unless they come looking for you.’

  ‘My mum will come looking for me,’ cries Chloe. ‘I know she will. But will she know how to? Oh God. Will she? Does she know yet that I’m dead? I can’t bear it – does she?’

  Morgan ignores the questions, and says, ‘I responded to you on the Ouija board when you called because you bewitched me – and I came back when Dust returned because I knew you’d be here with me soon.’

  ‘You knew this would happen?’

  Morgan nods. ‘Sit here,’ she says kindly. ‘Days there pass in just a moment here. It won’t feel like long.’

  ‘You knew I was going to …’ Chloe can’t say it.

  ‘Yes. I knew. Back when you were sixteen. I’ve been waiting. It hasn’t been so long for me. Come, sit.’

  Chloe sits back down. She and Morgan are beautiful in the mirror; flawless, aglow, eternal. Then in the glass, the room dissolves and behind them both, Chloe sees Ginger crying into one of her Esme Black dresses, staining it with inky mascara. There is a pile of newspapers on the dressing table; the headlines are ‘Dust Death Doesn’t Stop Show’, ‘Cursed Dust Still Wows Sell-Out Audiences’, ‘Morgan Miller Murder Solved after Twenty Years’ and ‘Dust Star Daughter of Morgan Miller Murderer’. Ginger picks up the story about her mum, stifles a sob, and throws it into the bin. She looks at her wrist then; the charms on her bracelet tinkle softly. She touches the tiny ghost and looks up at the mirror. For a moment, Chloe wonders if she can see them and wants to reach out and touch her.

  ‘How does she have her bracelet and yet I do too?’ asks Chloe, looking at it in her hand still.

  ‘You only have it here,’ says Morgan.

  ‘But you have one earring in. Why don’t you have your other one here?’

  ‘This is the way I see it.’

  ‘Lynda kept it all this time,’ says Chloe, realising. ‘Her husband sent it to the police when they split. You’d think she’d have thrown it away like the award she killed you with.’

  ‘She kept it in a compartment in her jewellery box. Now and again she would take it out and look at it. I could never tell what she was feeling.’

  Chloe looks at the mirror, wondering how many times Morgan must have sat here, watching events unfold. ‘Did you show me Ginger in the mirror?’ she asks.

  ‘No, that’s you.’

  ‘And Ginger hasn’t gone to prison?’

  ‘No,’ says Morgan. ‘Ryan supported her self-defence story.’

  ‘And is he OK?’

  The mirror mists over and a new scene emerges – Ryan walking into a room Chloe doesn’t recognise. It looks a little like the Dean Wilson rehearsal space, but larger. There’s a row of people on chairs with scripts; one of them asks Ryan to stand on the marked spot and begin when he’s ready. Ryan composes himself for a moment. When he looks up, he is young Ryan, full of swagger, magnetic, utterly mesmerising.

  ‘Oh my God, he’s auditioning for something,’ cries Chloe. ‘I’m so glad. After all these years. Good luck, Ryan.’ She pauses. ‘But…’

  ‘What, Chloe?’

  ‘What about me now? I must be hated. They must know I went after Ginger with a knife. My poor mum will be ashamed of me.’

  ‘Your mum is only proud. Chester and Ryan made sure everyone knew that Ginger tried to take your script. The papers spoke kindly about you, said you lost your mind after your childhood friend did that to you. You can see your mum if you want…’

  Chloe shakes her head. She doesn’t know if she can bear to. But the mirror mists over again, despite her grief, and there, beyond the glass, her mum kneels at a white headstone. Her knees are muddied by the fresh soil and she places a bunch of pink roses in the centre of the grave. Then she weeps; quietly, with agonising dignity.

  Chloe does too.

  She and Morgan sit in silence for a while. Chloe supposes there is no word for how long, since there is only here now.

  After a hundred heartbeats, Chloe says, ‘What really happened with Daniel Locke and Harry Bond? Do you know? Why did it all end so tragically for them? For Amelia Bennett. Why did all three of them die and yet … Ryan is OK. And Ginger.’ She looks at herself and Morgan in the mirror; realises it has ended for them too.

  ‘It’s about the kind of person who is drawn to the kind of darkness a Ouija board represents,’ says Morgan. ‘They held their own fates in their hands. Really, troubled teenagers have no place playing with something they don’t yet understand.’ She pauses. ‘Would you like to see them?’

  ‘No,’ says Chloe firmly. ‘But tell me … are they OK now?’

  Morgan nods.

  ‘When this run of Dust finishes,’ she says after a beat, ‘and it returns—’

  ‘It’s coming back?’

  ‘Yes. But when it does, it won’t be with Ginger.’

  ‘Poor Ginger.’ Chloe pauses. ‘Poor Jess. That’s who she really is. They’re all going to forget me anyway, aren’t they?’

  ‘Never.’ Morgan smiles. ‘When you’re famous, you never die.’

  ‘But I’m not famous.’

  ‘Oh, you are. Your show is.’

  ‘My show?’

  Morgan nods. Chloe looks into the mirror again. The dressing room behind them is a rainbow of flowers, so many that she’s sure she can smell the sweet aroma; no, it’s just her imagination. Sadness seizes Chloe at the realisation that she will never again smell a new perfume or a lover’s skin; Ginger’s skin; no, Jess’s skin. A young woman – one she doesn’t recognise – answers the door and receives another bouquet. She is fresh-faced with her hair scraped back, clearly about to put her stage make-up on; a young, everyday girl who Chloe would have chosen for the role if she’d been able to.

  Behind her, instead of the Dust poster, is the one Chloe saw earlier; She Haunts Me is written in silver, her name just above it; the background is the hundred blues of a sparkly ocean meeting a starry sky; in the foreground is a woman on the balcony of a ship, facing away from the camera. This girl, in this dressing room, is now painting her face to become Abigail.

  A haunting melody drifts from the speakers.

  ‘Only the music of the ocean – wordless, melodic, soothing – and the dance of the waves, and the two of us sinking, forever, together, to the bottom of the sea…’

  ‘This song,’ breathes Chloe. ‘It’s…’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ says Morgan. ‘You wrote those words. They’ve made your show into a musical. It hits theatres on the fourth of February twenty-twenty-one. It’s even bigger than Dust. You’ve left your beautiful imprint on the world, Chloe. They sacked Edwin Roberts after Chester and Ryan reported him, and the new artistic director took on your script.’

  ‘Did Ginger audition for it?’

  ‘No. I don’t think she felt it was the right thing to do. She’ll get plenty of work still, though she’s not as loved by audiences as she’d like to be after what happened with you.’

  ‘That makes me sad,’ admits Chloe. She remembers her rage. But all that’s left is calm now. ‘I still love her. I think I always will.’

  ‘Really, it’s the only thing that never dies.’

  Morgan begins to sing ‘I Am Dust’ as more scenes flash before them in the mirror. A kaleidoscope of past and present unfolds, like a slideshow of holiday snaps: Chester in all his tuxedo finery, opening the theatre doors for eager patrons; Ryan, Jess and Chloe sitting around cardboard letters and a glass, youthful in the candlelight; Chloe falling with Ginger onto the dressing-room sofa, hypnotised, their hair tangled together, raven and blonde, yin and yang, light and shadow; Ginger whispering, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ to a picture of Chloe in the newspaper; Lynda Swanson, ever glamorous in a packed-out courtroom; Chloe’s mum watching the closing scene from She Haunts Me with tears on her cheeks.

  ‘I wanted to play Abigail in my show,’ says Chloe sadly. ‘I never quite believed myself good enough, but I still dreamed of doing it.’


  ‘You would have been sensational. But it wasn’t meant to be that way. You left your words. They’re forever.’

  Forever. Such a long time.

  ‘But I don’t want to sit here like this forever.’ Chloe is tired of the visions. ‘I don’t like watching but not taking part. I want to talk to them. To my loved ones.’ She pauses. ‘This can’t be it. There must be somewhere else.’

  ‘There is.’ Morgan holds her gaze, her eyes sad.

  Of course.

  ‘Why didn’t you go there?’

  ‘I lingered here too long.’ Morgan plays with her right earlobe as though missing that pearl earring. ‘I couldn’t leave my loved ones. And the longer I’ve stayed in this in-between place – not here or there – the harder it is to go where we’re supposed to.’

  ‘How do I get there?’ asks Chloe softly.

  ‘You know how. You wrote it; you wrote Abigail sinking to the bottom of a beautiful ocean. Open up to it. Like when you used to black out – those were your practice runs. Go with it. Say it. Whisper those words. You know what they are.’