by Daisy Pearce
‘No. Not at all. Not with you.’
‘With Marco then?’
‘I don’t know. It’s hard to describe. Martha agrees with me though, don’t you?’
‘You’ve talked about this? With each other?’
‘Oh no,’ Martha says as Carmel says, ‘Yes, of course.’ They exchange a knowing glance and I’ve never felt so lonely. I want to cry. My jaw is clenched so tightly I can feel the pulse like a hard, throbbing percussion.
‘So, you don’t like my boyfriend, and you don’t like the way I look. Anything else?’
‘Come on, Stella.’
‘No.’ I pull away as Carmel reaches for me, grabbing my bag. I am simmering. I have to get away.
Chapter 7
Marco is tracing a figure of eight on the bare skin of my arm. We are lying in his bed on crisp white sheets. His room is twice as big as mine. Bare floorboards and a huge Rococo-style mahogany bed, hand-carved and lavish, almost decadent. He props himself up on an elbow, facing me.
‘You’re too good to her.’
‘We’ve been friends a long time.’
‘Just – be careful, Stella. Okay? With your dad and everything, you’re not thinking too clearly. And this money – how much have you given her now?’
‘Oh, Marco—’
‘Listen. This is my job, kitten. This is what I do, help people make sound investments.’
‘God, I love it when you talk finance.’ I’m shifting slightly, lifting my hips. He presses them back down gently, shaking his head. Bastard.
‘You like that, huh? Like it when I talk about dividends and stock specific risks?’
I groan, and he bites me quickly, urgently, on the tender part of my neck. I gasp at the pain of it, surprised. He is still smiling.
‘How much is she asking for? A hundred? More?’
‘A bit more.’
‘Oh, Stella. How much is a bit?’
‘Another two hundred, towards her party.’
‘If you give it to her you can kiss it goodbye.’
‘She’s my friend.’
‘When was the last time she did something for you?’
I hesitate.
‘It’s my money.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘I’ll do what I want with it. If I want to squander it, I will.’
‘Uh-huh, move over a little.’
He moves between my legs, running his tongue over the mound of me, pressing his hot breath into the soft fabric of my knickers.
‘I wouldn’t dream of telling you what to do, Stella.’ Another sharp bite, near my hip. This time I clench my fists. He is smiling, I can hear it in his voice.
‘Can we stop talking about this, please?’
‘Just promise me.’ A soft kiss, another. ‘Promise me you’ll tell her no if she asks again. Stop enabling her.’
I know what he means. Every time Carmel takes her credit card out she jokes about the smell of burning plastic, about how she hopes to marry someone old and rich with a heart problem. She’s always been that way, ever since we were students together at university. I’d once told Marco about how she’d spent her entire grant on an original Seditionaries T-shirt and had to shoplift food for two whole terms.
He takes my hand and kisses my fingers one by one. He is tentative again, almost reverential. If I couldn’t feel the throb from the places where he has bitten me I would think he was harmless.
‘Did you find out who’s been calling you?’
‘No,’ I say sharply, and don’t offer any more.
The phone calls had begun four days ago, in the middle of the night. I’d woken cold and uncomfortable, my neck stiff. My phone had lit up the dark of the room with a pale, eerie glow. Number Withheld, the display said. When I’d answered there had been nothing for a second or two and then a long, low exhale before whoever it was had hung up. Since then it has happened five or six times, always the same. Carmel wants me to go to the police.
‘She’s worried,’ I tell Marco now, who snorts derisively. ‘She said Marigold! has been in the papers a lot recently with Lesley Patterson’s funeral and now this thing with Anne Gregor. It always stirs up the weirdos.’
‘Did you hear Anne Gregor didn’t make it?’ He makes it sound like she’d been running a race. I stare at him open-mouthed.
‘You’re kidding.’
‘I’m not, babe, no. I read it last night on Twitter, of all things. They’re calling it the “Marigold! Curse”.’
‘God. God. She was only a bit older than me.’
Anne Gregor had been Bonnie, the second-youngest of the Marigold siblings, with corkscrew hair and a round, moon-like face. She’d originally tried out for the part of Katie Marigold but, as my mother never failed to tell me, she couldn’t get the voice right. That soft, waxy lisp.
‘Well, I’m just warning you. It’ll probably be in the papers again. They’re calling it heart failure, but what they mean is coke, surely. She was an addict at fifteen, if I remember right.’
‘God,’ I said again. I’d read all the stories, of course, when I was a teenager. How Anne Gregor had snorted so much coke her septum had perforated. Five grams a day even while pregnant. But that had been a long time ago, and hadn’t I also read, fairly recently, that Anne Gregor had been clean a decade or more? It had been a feature in a Sunday supplement, I was sure of it.
‘Joey’s back in the news, of course,’ Marco says, his hand running over my hip. ‘Talking about how hard fame is.’
I laugh out loud.
‘Joey Fraser loves a bandwagon. He should have tried walking in my shoes and dealt with some of the shit I had to.’
Marco looks surprised. His hand glides over my stomach, draws me close enough that I can feel the prickle of his stubble.
‘Like what, babe?’
I sigh. He kisses me in the place between my ear and collarbone and asks again.
‘I used to get weird post. Really weird. My mum couldn’t always – what’s the word, to get to something first?’
‘Intercept.’
‘Intercept it, yeah. And it came to my home address, which fan mail didn’t, usually it went to the TV studio. And of course when I saw my name, so beautifully written in ink, I opened them.’
Marco is waiting, watching me with his dark eyes. I can remember when we had met thinking he looked sleazy, too old for me. I had been wrong. He presses his mouth against mine for a moment, and I think I feel the faintest stirring of an erection pressing against me. He says, ‘Go on.’
‘Are you sure?’
He nods. So I tell him about the letters I used to receive containing hair clippings and used tissues, handfuls of dirt and dead flowers. I’d unfold spidery hand-drawn maps with red lines drawn on them to show all the different routes to my house. One afternoon in the spring, just after my tenth birthday, I’d opened an envelope to find a little doll made of wax with pins bristling from its mouth. It had been wrapped in a single frilled sock, the twin to a pair I’d worn and lost on set a week before. The director had been furious because we hadn’t been able to find another pair, and he’d said it would ruin continuity. My mother had told him to be a fucking professional and just shoot me from the fucking knees up. I can remember hearing her outburst through the partition wall of my trailer, shocked at her language.
Marco looks genuinely shocked, his eyes round and glassy.
‘That’s awful. I’m so sorry.’ He shudders, and there are goosebumps running up his arms. ‘Some people are sick.’
I nod, plucking at the sheet between my thumb and forefinger. Marco lays a hand gently on my arm.
‘Did you tell your parents?’
‘Yeah. My mum went to the press. Said people like that needed exposing. They came to our house and did a photoshoot in the garden with the two of us in front of the buddleia. She made me hold up one of the letters for the camera. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to touch it. It didn’t feel good. She said all publicity was good publicity.’
�
�Did you ever go to the police?’
‘Of course. But it wasn’t considered a threat unless they did something to physically harm me.’
‘This is unbelievable.’
‘My mother was furious. She called it voodoo. Said it was someone on the set, someone jealous of me. She wanted to interrogate everyone to find out who. The director said no. Probably the only time he ever stood up to her.’
I lie back against the pillows as Marco moves on top of me, and now I can definitely feel his erection, heavy against my leg.
‘You must have been frightened.’
‘I was.’
He leans over and kisses the inside of my arm. There is a tattoo there; a hummingbird about the size of a coin. He had laughed when he first saw it, surprised. Katie Marigold with a tattoo, he’d said, shaking his head. The good girl gone wild.
Another kiss, moving down. My stomach is flat and empty because I live on my nerves. He plants another kiss on the warm skin there, blows gently on me. He moves inside me with tender urgency and later, when I find I am sleepwalking again, the marks of his teeth are still on my shoulders.
I find myself in the hallway, just outside the door of Marco’s apartment. I am crippled with cold, violently shivering. I blink in surprise as I hear Marco’s voice saying my name over and over, ‘Wake up, Stella, Stella, Stella. Wake up.’
‘What’s going on?’
‘Inside. Come on. You’re sleepwalking again, princess.’
My cheeks are wet – am I crying? I press my hands to them. Tears. ‘I’m a mess,’ I hear myself say. And Marco says, ‘No, you are just very sad at the moment.’ He offers me a glass of water and presses two pills into my hand.
‘I only woke up because you slammed the front door,’ he tells me, sitting next to me on the sofa. ‘What if I hadn’t? What if you end up falling down the stairs? Take these, at least we’ll both get some rest that way.’
But I do not sleep for another two hours until the light becomes diffuse and watery with dawn. I lie awake and comfortable, detached from myself, drifting a little. My memory becomes slippery, my thoughts simple flares in some internal darkness. It’s a nice feeling, an anaesthetic.
The next day, though, I am foggy-headed, late for work. I have not brushed my hair, and I look terrible, tired and unsteady on my feet. I tell my manager I have taken painkillers for a bad back, but I don’t know if she believes me. She gives me a cool look, barely nods. ‘Okay, Stella, fine. But you’re the first face our guests will see. Next time a bit more effort, yes?’
I nod. ‘Yes, sure, fine. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.’ But of course it does.
The day I get fired is also the day I am taken to hospital. The two aren’t necessarily connected, or so I tell myself at the time. It’s the pills, you see. Marco has got me some more, and I didn’t ask where from, just said thank you. He’d rubbed the tip of my nose as though I had a smudge there, told me I was a good girl. I’d broken one of those pills in half right then and there and swallowed it with cold coffee. Later, when he went to work, I took another, and another. I fell back to sleep, a deep, heavenly sleep, and when I woke I’d missed my alarm. I jolted but there was no fear. The pills, their delicious numbness, saw to that. I didn’t even get dressed. When I called the hotel, I was slurring. They asked me not to come back. I don’t think I even responded. I fell back to sleep and by the time I wake up the sky is darkening, dull and smoky, and Marco is in the doorway.
‘This is a nice surprise. I thought you were at work.’
‘Oh God, what time is it?’
‘It’s gone six. Are you naked under there?’
‘Yes.’
He is smiling at me. ‘You haven’t got up all day?’
‘I got fired.’
‘Oh, doll.’
‘Don’t. Don’t say anything.’
‘Stay there. Don’t move.’
He pulls something out of his pocket, his phone I think. For a moment I wonder if he is undressing, getting into bed with me. He steps closer, holding it up.
‘Let me take a picture.’
‘No!’
‘Come on. Just one. Just one little one. Please?’
‘No! Absolutely not.’
‘It’ll just be your body. You won’t even be able to see your face. You won’t even know it’s you.’
‘Great, thanks a lot.’
‘Come on, you know what I mean. You’re sexy. You’re a sexy, beautiful woman. Just one photo and I promise I won’t show it to anyone.’
He tugs on the covers. I hold them tightly below my chin, laughing.
‘No way, Marco. I look like shit.’
‘You look great. No make-up. It’s sexy.’
I look at him. He is grinning, enthusiastic.
‘Oh, for God’s sake.’
‘Thank you. Come on, this’ll be great.’
He pulls the covers off me quickly, and my flesh ripples with goosebumps. I move my hands defensively but he brushes them away, shaking his head.
‘No hands. They’re covering up the good stuff. Smile.’
I hear the shutter noise on his phone as he takes a few modest pictures, bending towards me. Then I grab the covers again, burying myself beneath them. He pouts childishly.
‘No more,’ I tell him.
‘Fine, fine. Shall we go to the pub?’
‘Which one?’
‘The Standard?’
‘Aw. That’s Carmel’s favourite.’
‘You two have been friends a long time, haven’t you?’
‘Since college. The first thing she said when she came up to me in class was “I dressed up as you once for Halloween.” That’s when I knew we’d be friends.’
‘When does she leave?’
‘Not for another month or so. She’s going out at the end of this week to look at a flat, comes back Wednesday, and then it’s her big party that weekend. She’s horribly stressed, of course, but this is a dream job for her.’
‘Funny really.’
‘How so?’
‘Funny that someone who spends so much time out of her knickers should end up selling them.’
I stare at him for a moment, and when he smiles it is nothing more than a show of teeth. He sits on the end of the bed, holding on to my wrist as if he is checking my pulse.
‘Don’t you like Carmel?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘You didn’t need to.’
‘I just feel – what I mean to say . . .’ He looks at me lucidly, smiling. ‘Do you want to hear this?’
‘I don’t know. Do I?’
‘I just think she takes a lot from you but doesn’t give anything back.’
‘Oh, Marco. Come on.’
‘I told you you wouldn’t like it.’
‘I’ve known her nearly twenty years. She’s my best friend in the world.’
‘I know, I know. I’m sure I’ve put my foot in it. Forget it, forget I said anything. Let’s get drunk.’
‘Now?’
‘Right now, right here. Shall I make us a drink?’
He brings me a Bloody Mary in bed, with a straw and a cocktail stirrer. ‘No ice, I’m afraid.’
I take a sip and it burns my throat. ‘God, what’s in this?’
‘Tabasco and grated horseradish. Is it too much?’
‘It’s fine,’ I assure him, and once the vodka kicks in it is. I’ve never been a fan of Bloody Marys – too close to drinking cold soup in my opinion – but it feels good and decadent leaning back on the pillows in the early evening sipping it, and when he asks if I want another I laugh and tell him yes. Halfway through my second he asks me if he can take another photo, just something for him. Yes, I tell him. Sure. I pose for him with a smile, a drink in my hand. My head is giddy and light and at that moment nothing can bother me. By my fourth drink – this time a strong rum and coke – I am arching my back and bending over the bed and lifting my legs crossed at the ankles, thrilled at his attention, the encouragement.
&n
bsp; Afterwards I dream. There is a woman lying on a slab. She is very pale, her skin tinged blue. It is me, and I cannot move. My eyes are open but I can’t speak or turn my head. I can sense someone is approaching and even though I summon up all my energy I cannot even blink. Then they are standing over me, and I think, Oh, it’s me, only it’s not. Not quite. Her nose is slightly the wrong shape and her eyebrows are too arched. She looks as though someone has tried to draw me from memory, like there is a vital piece of me missing. The me-woman looks worried and is lacing her hands together, pumping at my chest. I’m not dead, I try to say. Can’t you see, I’m not dead? But no words come out of my mouth and now she is bending over me, pinching my nose closed. I can feel her fingers against me, her breath against my cheek. She smells bad, and when she exhales into my mouth, it tastes like the deep sea; a thick, dark breath. She moves back from me and I can see something hanging from her mouth and I still can’t speak, still can’t lift my hands. She is searching my face, hands tracing the lines of my nose, and then her hands move to her own face and find her mouth. I watch in immobile horror as her fingers grasp the thing hanging from her mouth and at first I thought it was a slick of brown drool, but now she is closer I can see it is seaweed, a long strand, and she is pulling it from between her lips like a ribbon and it keeps coming, it keeps coming. I can see the sheen of it in the mortuary lights overhead and I want to scream and still she pulls out more and more, clots of it, of seaweed, as though it has been stuffed by the fistful into her mouth and someone is saying my name, over and over, and shaking my shoulders.
When I finally wake, slowly, grudgingly, I see Carmel and Marco standing over me. I am home, in our flat, and Carmel is crying. Marco has his head in his hands. There is a strong, bitter smell, and I cannot move. When I open my mouth I make a thick gurgling sound – wuh, wuh – and Carmel tells me not to speak.
‘Oh, Stella, oh, Stella,’ she is saying. I close my eyes. I don’t know what has happened, but all I want to do is sleep. Why won’t they let me sleep?
I open my eyes again. There is a paramedic standing over me, handsome and young-looking, clean-shaven. The room is pulsing with a blue light. He is attaching something to the back of my hand, an intravenous line. I stare at it, at Carmel, Marco. My front is sticky and when I put my hand to it my fingers come away red. I feel a needle of fear. I try to sit up.