by Daisy Pearce
‘Don’t leave me,’ I tell him and then—
‘Stella!’
Marco’s voice, sharp and flat like a gunshot. I jump, scrambling to my feet.
‘Stella!’
I stare into the fog. I can’t risk running along the cliff in this, not with the crumbling, unsafe ground. I can run to town along the road, maybe make it as far as the Daltons’ before Frankie dies. I don’t like the whistling sound his breathing is making, and I don’t like the sticky pool of blood slowly spreading beneath him. I can call an ambulance if I lock myself in the bathroom, but my phone is in the house and to reach it I will have to get past Marco. And what about Carmel? I can’t leave her. She has come here to help me.
‘Stella!’
‘Hold on, Frankie, hold on.’ His eyes have closed again. I lean forward, kiss him on his forehead. ‘Hold on.’
Marco is waiting at the house, standing in the doorway. He is very pale, his eyes hooded pools of ink. He is singing, I can hear it more clearly as I get closer. The theme tune to Marigold!, the one I’ve always hated.
‘There’s Bonnie and there’s Eddie and there’s Mum and Mikey too,
Daddy, Lucy, Frisky, we’ll never forget you!
But who is coming out to play to say how do you do?
It’s little Katie Marigold, with eyes of sparkling blue!’
I’m standing in front of him and now he reaches for me, pulls me towards him. I am limp, in shock. Real love is glacial, hard and cold. It is not this love, this meteorite, this fiery comet, obliterating. Marco has scarred me, the force of his impact. I am shaken by it.
‘Frankie’s hurt.’
‘He’s dying,’ he tells me flatly. ‘I saw him hit the dashboard. Made a sound like you wouldn’t believe. Still, when you’re that fat, perhaps it’s like wearing an airbag.’ He smirks at me. ‘I thought you wanted to see what was in the loft. Isn’t that why you called Frankie to come and visit you with his enormous tool?’ He laughs at his own innuendo. ‘Well, Stella? You must have figured it out by now.’
‘I don’t kn—’
‘Oh, come on, honey. Come on, baby girl. You were never that great an actress. In 1989 Smash Hits described you as wooden as a plank in a wig. Did you know that?’
‘No.’ I’m telling the truth. My mother kept all the bad press away from me, every negative review, every insult. I can see why now, because it still stings.
‘You know what I did?’ Marco has guided me into the house, closing the door softly on the mist, on Frankie. ‘I bought every single issue of that magazine from eleven different newsagents, and I burned them all in the garden.’
He is looking at me, deadly serious. I look down at what he is holding. It is the doorstop, the cast-iron one which props open the back door. There is something stuck to it. Is it hair? Is it hair?
‘Every single one. No one says that about Katie Marigold. Not about my girl.’
‘We need to call an ambulance, Marco. For Frankie. He could die.’
‘Could he? Yes, I suppose he could. Get one for Carmel too.’ Marco doesn’t move. ‘Light me a cigarette, would you?’
Wait.
‘What do you mean, Carmel too?’
He doesn’t answer, and I run towards the doorway, calling her name. My legs feel like rotten wood, as though they are going to splinter and give way under me.
‘Carmel!’
I can see blood. That is the first thing. Spatters of it, coin-sized, leading from the kitchen to the sitting room. A smear of blood on the doorpost there, jewel-red. Something flips in my stomach. I walk slowly, but I don’t say her name again. She is lying on the floor of the sitting room, parallel to the couch, as if she had crawled the last few feet and not quite made it. I swallow the gorge which is rising in me. She is face down, surrounded by a halo of blood so glossy I can see the reflection of the window in it. I approach her, put my hand on her back. There is no rise and fall of breath. One of her shoes hangs off her feet, exposing a heel, her dainty toes. I want to cry.
‘Don’t turn her over.’
It’s Marco in the doorway. I try to inhale but my chest is painful and tight. Her hand is curled above her head. He has struck her a violent blow, but she can’t be dead, I tell myself. But look. Look at all that blood.
‘Don’t, honey. You don’t want to see that.’
‘What did you do to her?’
‘Knocked a little sense into her. Come away. Come on. It’s for your own good.’
‘You— You’ve killed her.’
‘I was defending you.’
I look up at him, confused. He is holding out his hand to pull me up. I don’t know what to do, should I take it? I don’t know. I look down at Carmel again. She can’t be really dead, can she? Not really, really. But I’ve never seen so much blood and still it is growing as some vital artery pumps out the last of her. I close my eyes and see stars and then Marco is pulling me up onto my feet.
‘Can you walk?’
‘You killed her.’
‘She was trying to attack me. It was self-defence.’
I look at him aghast as he walks to the window, bending down to look outside. We are back in the dining room now, and I have to lean on the mantelpiece for support.
‘Why was Frankie in the car with you?’
‘Bumped into him turning into the lane, right at the top. Looked like he’d been running to get here, like he was about to have a heart attack. Fat men shouldn’t run. I told him that. It’s dangerous, I said. You want to know something funny? He didn’t want to get into the car. Kept walking, head down. “Do you want a lift, Frankie? Do you want to get in here with me?” Just shook his head. Then I saw what he was holding.’
‘What?’
‘A hammer.’
Marco puts the doorstopper down gently on the polished surface of the table.
‘I had a bad feeling, Stella. Like he meant to hurt you. After everything you said about him, and then here he is, in thick fog, alone, with a weapon, heading to the cottage. I couldn’t let that happen. So I told him to get into the car, that I needed him to help me – to help you. Told him you’d finally lost the plot, that I was worried about you. That convinced him.’
‘You’ve as good as killed him. Both of them.’
‘Accidents happen, honey. In the mist, on twisting lanes, driving too fast. Recipe for disaster.’
My stomach knots itself slickly. I have to get to my phone. It is on the table. I can see it from where I’m standing. If I am careful I might be able to slide it into my pocket or up my sleeve without him noticing. Marco looks at me carefully, his mouth twitching in a barely concealed smile. That’s the thing about Marco. He always could read me.
‘It’s just us now. As it should be.’
He walks to the table, picks up my phone and slides it into his coat pocket. When he smiles at me my skin crawls.
‘Tell you what, Stella, here’s what we’ll do. I’ll take you up to the loft, because I’m the only one with the key and your pal Frankie would’ve taken off his fingers trying to break through that padlock – and if you’re a good girl – if you behave – you can make a call, get a doctor or whatever. Okay?’
He’s lying, of course. He has no intention of giving me my phone back or letting me call an ambulance. I feel like screaming but instead I just say okay because my friend is dead, my friend who lit up a room like Oxford Street at Christmas, she’s dead, and so what else is there?
‘I don’t trust you when it comes to doctors.’
He laughs. It is rich and warm and pleasant, as though the woman who taught me how to roll a joint isn’t lying in a pool of blood next door. I have to keep my head. I have to think clearly.
We’re standing in the hallway. The light is diffuse and grainy. I am trying not to shiver, not to think about Frankie bleeding out alone on a dirty, unpaved road. I choke a sob and Marco looks at me, just once, his eyes crawling over me like searchlights. He is holding up a key, small in his large hand. One look at his ey
es confirms all I have feared. There is nothing there at all. The mask has slipped, revealing a simple cold fury.
He unlocks the door and opens the hatch, drawing down an aluminium stepladder. He stands aside so I can go up first and I am suddenly sure that this is the place where I will die. About us that strange smell that has haunted all my days here is rising, rising like the mist. Like rolling dunes at the bottom of the ocean where a body may be buffeted by the tide for long months, flesh stripped from bones, seaweed threaded through empty eye sockets.
I start to climb up into the darkness. I can hear him below, telling me there is a light switch to my right, and I grope for it with fast, frightened breath. I find the switch. I turn it on, cry out. There is someone up here with me. A woman.
‘Marco!’
‘Isn’t it great?’ He is smiling, delighted. ‘Do you like it?’
It’s a mannequin. I can see that now that my eyes have adjusted to the thin light. She wears a wig, softly curled at the edges, and a dress of sickly jade-green with a long sash wound about the waist. Marco pulls himself up through the hatch and closes it quietly behind him. Now it is the two of us, here in this tiny low-ceilinged room. I look around. There are boxes and an old vacuum cleaner shoved into the far corner, thick with dust. To my left are several bulky shapes shrouded in dust sheets. A low futon, the mattress old and fusty-looking, sunken in the middle, has been pushed against the wall. It is dappled with stains. I can’t imagine sleeping there, where the roof meets the eaves. In the thick darkness it must be like being in a coffin.
‘You know what it is, right?’ He is looking at me eagerly. ‘Come and see it. Come and feel it. It’s silk.’
I walk forward stiffly and dutifully stroke the fabric. ‘Soft.’
‘It’s perfect, isn’t it? Look at the buttons, the detail is amazing.’
I look at them and it drops into place with such gravity my stomach rolls. The buttons are round and golden and big as coins. The shoulders puff at the sleeves where little ribbons are knotted in oversized bows. There are Chinese dragons stitched onto the hem. I have to put out a hand to steady myself. The room pinholes as though I might faint.
‘“Katie Marigold and the Chinaman”, right?’
‘Right,’ I manage, and then because he expects more, ‘It’s my dress.’
‘That’s right! It’s a perfect copy, just a little bigger. You did the song in this one, do you remember?’
‘Uh-huh.’
The wig on the mannequin is a carbon copy of my hairstyle all those years ago, Regency ringlets in a dark treacle colour. I touch it, moving it gently with my fingers.
‘Careful,’ Marco tells me, ‘that’s human hair.’
I pull my hand back as though stung and he laughs.
‘Silly. It’s from Russia. I had to pay a lot of money for that.’
He has pulled the dust sheet away from the object in the centre of the room and now I see it is a clothes rail, at least fifty dresses: ruffles and prints, crinoline and taffeta and stiff cotton. My head is spinning. I wish I could breathe properly. Marco is almost giddy with excitement, pulling out a red-and-white candy-striped smock and turning it on the hanger, holding it up to the light.
‘“In Your Dreams, Katie Marigold”,’ I say. ‘God, Marco. How did you make all of these?’
‘I don’t make them, Katie. I have a lady in Kent, a seamstress. She is very, very talented. Has been doing this for years. She thinks I’m a cross-dresser and that suits me fine if it gets the clothes made.’
‘You’re not?’
He pulls a face. ‘Of course not. What kind of question is that? These aren’t for me to wear. They’re for you.’
I have to be very careful here, I tell myself. ‘Marc-oh.’ I am speaking very carefully, very slowly, the way I had with Beverley Dalton at first. ‘“Uncle”. That’s you, isn’t it?’
He laughs jerkily – heh, heh – it doesn’t sound like him at all. Then he exhales, just once, and there it is. That phlegmy, wet rattle. I feel sick.
He looks up at me. ‘You’re so funny on the phone. I can hear the way your voice trembles. It’s exciting.’ He has been rummaging beneath the futon and now he finds what he is looking for. ‘Ah – here it is!’
Marco pulls out a box and places it on the floor. Inside, shoes. Little buckled-up Mary-Janes, in patent black and red. Just like the ones he’d given me to wear to the party in Essex. My pulse throbs just once, hot jets of blood.
‘I have to get out of here. I can’t breathe.’
‘God, you are spoilt, aren’t you? Even now. Joey Fraser said it and your Aunt Jackie said it and Daddy Marigold called you a high-handed little bitch to the Daily Mirror in 1988 and that was the end of his career. You know what? They’re right. Every one of them. Look around you. Have you any idea of the amount of effort I’ve gone to for you? Each sequin is individually sewn. Every fabric swatch was sent for my approval. One dress took ten months to get right. All for you, Katie.’
‘What about Ellie?’
His face changes suddenly, becoming a cold fury which frightens me. His eyes glitter in the darkness. ‘What about her?’
‘I mean, did she wear these clothes too? Was she Katie Marigold, at least for a little while?’
‘She tried her best. She was a poor imitation. You though, you’re the real thing.’
He is grinning at me, exposing gums the colour of liver. Outside I can imagine the fog pressing close to the house, isolating us, turning the cottage into an island on which I am marooned with my past, and a little further away the wreck of the car and the body of Frankie, breathing in that slow, rapturous way. How long does he have? How long do I have, stranded up here with someone whose love is a poisoned arrow? I can see the shape it has burned into him, all those years of pining and wanting, the fierceness of it.
‘I need to get out. Please, Marco, please. I can’t breathe in here.’
‘You’ll get used to it.’
His voice is clipped and cold and he doesn’t look at me as he opens the hatch. I see that he means to leave me up here and I open my mouth to scream but the only sound which comes out is a reedy whisper, something choked. No, no. Then it closes with a soft thunk and the scraping sound of the padlock being fixed into place and that’s when my knees give way.
A little later, perhaps, I don’t know how long. I have been shouting for a long time and banging the palms of my hands on the floor. Now my throat is raw and my eyes sting. The darkness up here is thick and pressing, even with the light bulb overhead. It smells too, something musty and slightly spoiled, like milk left too long in the sun. I am sitting on the edge of the futon with my knees drawn up to my chest. I found a box beneath the bed, an old-fashioned wooden one with a brass clasp. Inside it is make-up – some face powder and a creamy blusher and a little bottle of perfume which smells of grit and violets. I can’t stop thinking I can’t afford the luxury of waiting too long. I wonder if it is getting dark out there yet. I wonder if Frankie is afraid.
I dress slowly, carefully, ignoring the horror crawling up my throat. I leave my crumpled jeans and bra on the bed and slip the green dress over my head. It rustles like dry leaves. At the side a series of hook-and-eye fasteners draws the material together although it is still a little loose at the hips. I tie the sash as I was shown all those years ago, on set on Hastings Pier, the wind teasing my skirts, the smell of face powder and hairspray and the sea. The sea. I can smell it in here as I slip the wig over my hair, securing it with pins from the make-up box. Sea mist and cool air, a dank perfume, rising, rising. I think, just for a moment, that I see something moving in the dark, just ahead. A shadow seeming to detach from the gloom. It is cold in here, and the air is close. Like before a storm.
I am gulping back tears, trying to ignore the weight of sadness on my chest like a concrete block. I can’t think about Carmel. Can’t afford the tears it will cost me. I apply the make-up with hands which tremble slightly, making sure to get the cheeks pink and rosy, almost
flushed. That was the thing with Katie Marigold, there was so much make-up, especially as I got older. By the time I was ten they were painting on my freckles with watercolour paint and a cotton bud, masking the onset of my adolescent acne with thick unguents. I press the powder to my face, turning my skin a rich, creamy colour. Even the smell is the same. I don’t know how he found out what make-up we’d used but then I remember Willowvale. He must have asked a lot of questions, must have tracked down the right people. What was the word? Fanatical.
Finally, I am ready. I feel ridiculous. The wig itches and sits too high on my head, the blusher staining my cheeks like a pink fever. The skirts whisper as I walk across the floor and knock carefully on the hatch. I need to sound calm. I need to sound normal. Lucky I’ve had so much practice.
‘Marco? Marco, can you hear me?’
Silence. I know he’s there though. Sitting close by, waiting. The idea of it – the image of him sitting motionless in the gathering darkness still stained with blood, waiting, waiting with his jaw clenched, is so horrible that I catch my breath.
‘Marco. I’ve made up my mind. Please open the hatch. Please.’
I don’t like the way my voice is softening, becoming girlish, buttery. Katie Marigold spoke like that, careful with her words. Hesitating when the script said pause for laughter. I knock again. ‘Marco.’
Finally, the rattling sound of the padlock, the click. A frame of light appears around the square shape of the hatch in the floor and then a moment later it opens inwards and he lifts his head, squinting into the near darkness.
‘Baby,’ he says softly, his breath hitching, ‘you’ve done a beautiful job. Come here so I can look at you.’
I step a little closer, turning slowly when he indicates I do so. He laughs and runs his hands through his hair.
‘I – oh, wow – I’ve waited for this moment for so long. I can’t believe it, it’s you, it’s really, really you.’
‘It’s me.’