She was in such a heightened state of nerves that she honestly couldn’t have said whether she wanted James to be in or not. When she heard footsteps tumbling down the polished pine floorboards of the narrow little staircase, which she had jokingly called the Stairs of Doom when she lived there, she caught her breath. Because even through the closed front door, she recognised James’s particular way of taking a flight of stairs, the way he jumped the last three and then padded barefoot to the door—
‘Melody?’ he said in surprise and disbelief as he opened the door.
It’s a very odd thing to be in a relationship with someone whose face is plastered on billboards, flashing on TV ads, staring thoughtfully from the covers of glossy magazines. Previously, Melody had been completely insulated from this effect, because she had known James for years before he had become Dr Who, had fallen in love with him just as James Delancey, just another aspiring actor. Now he was not only a heart-throb, but a cultural icon. The outfit that he wore as Dr Who – the artfully disarranged hair, Hoxtontrendy skinny jeans, tight-fitting patterned knit cardigan, and Converse sneakers – weren’t James’s personal style at all; he was much more conventional. But his slim figure carried them off perfectly: he wore the clothes with dashing ease, and looked so handsome in them that teenage girls, waiting outside the stage door to get his autograph after seeing him as Romeo, had screamed, stormed the door and fainted with such regularity that the theatre had had to hire extra security staff.
However, when James came back from Cardiff after a bout of filming the show, he wasn’t Dr Who in any way. He was the James he had always been, with his holey sweaters and his fringe flopping naturally over his forehead without the hair wax his make-up artist used to work and piece his blond locks so they looked as if they were arguing with each other. Melody had never been bothered in any way by the status James had developed since they had been together.
Not until now.
Melody froze, staring up at him. She couldn’t even remember a time when James’s face, James’s body, as familiar to her as her own, hadn’t been hers to touch, to stroke, to nuzzle against. They had always been very tactile, hugging, kissing, walking down the street with their arms linked, curling up together on sofas or armchairs, happiest when physically connected to each other. Now, it was as if a force field existed between them. Melody yearned to reach up her hand, to wrap it around his neck, stroke his soft silky hair, pull his head down for a kiss: but she couldn’t. James was no longer an extension of her. And his fame made it even stranger, to be so close to him but no longer with the right to hold him close to her. For a second she felt like a crazy stalker, as if their years together had never happened. It was surreal, horrible, disconcerting.
And yet James hadn’t changed at all. He was in his flannel pyjamas, one of his old navy sweaters from school pulled on over them; he hadn’t changed in any way. It’s me that’s changed, she knew, watching James’s expression as he took in the contours of her face, visible below the layers of foundation. He raised a hand to push back a lock of her black hair, staring at her with great concentration, one thumb gently stroking her cheek for a moment as he did so, making her tremble. ‘You’re cold,’ he said, misunderstanding the reason for her shiver, backing away from the door so that she could come in. They had knocked through all the internal walls in the small cottage before moving in, wanting to make the space look as big as possible; even the Stairs of Doom were open-plan, without a railing. One step inside and Melody was in the sitting room, glancing over at the fire, which was ready to be lit, the ash scraped out from the grate and a few pieces of newspaper bunched up in balls beside it.
‘Melody—’ James couldn’t take his eyes off her. ‘Did you – your face—’
He couldn’t even get the words out to ask why her face had some tell-tale swelling over its contours. He said he couldn’t bear to think of me letting people cut up my face...
‘I put it back!’ she said quickly, urgently. ‘I put it back the way it was! Everything!’
‘I don’t understand,’ James said, looking confused. ‘I showed the surgeon a picture of me,’ she said eagerly. ‘Not a head shot, a proper one. The one you took of me when we were on holiday in Goa. And I said that I wanted my old face back, like that. Exactly as it was. He even did a tiny implant on my chin where it’d been shaved down—’
James winced, flinching back.
‘James, I was such an idiot,’ Melody went on, grabbing his hands, looking up at him. ‘I made one mistake after another. I wish I could explain to you how I got caught up in it all, how it happened. Brad was really convincing – he sort of sucked me in, he told me I was going to be the new Ava Gardner, and he made the film sound amazing – and the screenplay was amazing, you know it was, you read it...’
James flinched again at the mention of Brad, and Melody thought she knew why.
‘Nothing happened,’ she insisted, her voice rising with the need to convince him, remembering the snide gossip that Felicity had so gleefully passed on. ‘I promise, nothing happened at all. Ever. I promise.’
James looked shamefaced; he ducked his head, his hair hanging in his eyes.
‘But it’s okay if you – I mean, I left you hanging, not knowing when I was coming back, even if I was coming back – I messed you around – I’d understand if something happened with you... ’ Melody tailed off.
She was lying: it wasn’t okay, not at all. The thought of James twining his body around another woman’s, his smooth skin against hers, the delicate salt of his sweat on her tongue, his arms holding her, his hair falling into her face as they made love, was inexpressibly painful to her. She had always thought that she and James would never be unfaithful, would be together for the rest of their lives, no one ever coming between them. Perhaps it was a ludicrous dream for an actor to have, with the travelling and temptations on set and in the rehearsal room, a profession where a marriage lasting ten years was considered a Hollywood lifetime, but she had truly thought that she and James could be the ones to beat the odds. They had the connection everyone dreamed of, a love that had flamed into life instantly, but hadn’t burnt out as quickly as those fast affairs usually did, settling instead into a real companionship.
Never in my wildest imaginings would I have thought that it would have been me who ruined it.
‘I left you,’ she went on bravely. ‘I went off and left you in the lurch – not just with everything here in the house, but the play too.’
‘It was our dream, Mel,’ James said passionately. ‘To play Romeo and Juliet together in the West End. And now that’s gone for ever! We can never get that back!’
‘I know, I know...’ Tears were forming in her eyes. ‘That’s all my fault, I know it is. And I know you might be seeing Priya, and I can’t blame you for that, not at all...’
‘It was just a fling!’ James said swiftly. ‘Barely anything at all! I was so lonely and miserable – I was saying all these lines to her but I kept imagining you – it was always supposed to be you as Juliet! It lasted less than a week. We both knew it was a mistake. And then we went back to being friends and it was actually so much easier afterwards...’
Melody dabbed at her eyes, frightened not so much of her mascara running but that the tears would wash away the foundation and show James the fading bruises below. It wasn’t that she needed to look perfect for him; they’d spent whole weekends holed up together without her putting on a scrap of make-up. But she knew how much he loathed the idea that she had had plastic surgery, and she didn’t want him to see the evidence, not so soon.
‘So you’re not seeing Priya?’ she asked, her emotions utterly confused. She hated that he had been with Priya, even for a few days. But the relief at hearing that it had been so shortlived, that Priya had failed to replace her in James’s heart – and she believed him, because James had never lied to her – was overwhelmingly positive, a huge rush of happiness. ‘No! No, I’m not!’ James assured her urgently. ‘We’re mates
&n
bsp; – I had a party a couple of days ago, and she came along, which was nice – she snogged me, but that was just ’cause a pap was there—’
‘Oh!’ Melody threw herself into his arms in a total release of tension. She wrapped herself around him, breathing in his sweet smell, his woolly sweater, his almost painfully lean body whose hollows and curves and bones were even more familiar to her than her own. ‘I love you so much,’ she said, the tears starting up again. ‘I missed you so much. I’ve been so unhappy without you, I’m so sorry for messing up so badly... please say you forgive me and we can go back to where we were before!’ Her chest was hurting, pressed against James so tightly, the scars from the removal of the breast implants aching. But she didn’t care. She wondered if James would even realise that she’d had those taken out too. He was used to feeling her body this way, he had never hugged her with those awful spongy balls attached to her front. He would have hated them, and she had hated them too. Not being able to sleep on her front, not knowing what clothes to wear over them, being embarrassed by her own cleavage, by the looks men would give her, as if they thought that she’d had the boob job for their especial benefit. And not only that – as if they had the absolute right to leer, because I did such a stupid thing to myself deliberately, turned myself into some sort of Barbie sex doll, making my boobs their property.
I was such an idiot to mess with my body like that. What was I thinking?
And then she remembered the corset fittings, everyone fussing around her, the moulded plastic cups jutting out in front of her chest, unfilled, Brad and the costume designer in a huddle, muttering about how DC Comics would react when they saw the test shots... the comments that padding wouldn’t do it, that Wonder Woman was supposed to be much more curvaceous... her feeling of total failure as she looked down at her too-flat chest, that she had been let down by something completely out of her control...
‘All I want is to go back to where we were before!’ She was sobbing now. ‘We were so happy, we can be that all over again, like nothing’s changed—’
‘Mel—’ James pulled back, holding her shoulders, looking down at her, his eyes wide and serious. ‘There’s something I have to tell you about—’
‘Something? Don’t you mean someone?’ came a high-pitched, upper-class voice from the top of the stairs, and Melody swung round in horror to see Felicity standing there. A born actress, Felicity knew exactly how to make an entrance, and how to dress for this crucial scene. She was wearing one of James’s shirts, a faded old denim one, and, apparently, nothing else at all; it was unbuttoned to where cleavage would have shown, if she’d had enough flesh for cleavage. Her long pale legs, glossy with just-applied body lotion, were almost entirely visible under the ragged hem. She had managed to tousle out her sparse blonde locks into a very impressive bedhead, and either she had applied a couple of coats of mascara and lip gloss, or the make-up she had on the evening before was actually as miraculous as the advertisements said, and had lasted perfectly without a single smear or smudge.
As she started down the stairs, kicking one leg elegantly forward without looking down, her eyes fixed on Melody’s, she could have been a Miss World competitor in a bikini, finding the next step expertly, able to hook her heels backwards just enough to make her entire descent without taking her gaze from her rival.
‘Well, this is a surprise!’ Felicity said lightly. ‘Boxing Day morning, of all times for you to show up, Melody! Has James offered you some coffee yet? He was just going to make us some...’
Bile rose in Melody’s throat. She looked at James, her blue eyes pleading with him to tell her that Felicity was here because she had got drunk last night at some party, that he’d let her crash here in the spare room, that nothing at all had happened between them—
But she could see from his guilty expression that this swift, innocent explanation for Felicity’s presence in their house was nothing but wishful thinking.
‘You’re seeing her?’ Melody blurted out, as Felicity paused on the second step above the ground floor, keeping the tactical advantage of height.
‘There’s no need to say it like that!’ Felicity said icily. ‘Look at yourself! Go on, look!’
Reluctantly, despite herself, Melody turned her head to stare at her reflection in the mirror over the fireplace. The room was small enough that she could see herself very clearly. And the picture wasn’t pretty. The side of her face that had been smushed into James’s sweater had been wiped of makeup, the yellow-green bruising now lividly chartreuse. Black smudges were smeared around that eye; bizarrely, the other side was still perfect, which just made the effect look even worse.
‘You look all mashed up!’ Felicity continued implacably. ‘What on earth were you thinking, running off to LA to make that ridiculous film, getting your boobs all pumped up like balloons? You’ve made yourself into an absolute laughingstock!’
Everything Felicity was saying was true. Her words were cutting and cruel, but they echoed precisely Melody’s own thoughts about herself. The nastiest ones, the voice that spoke to her in the middle of the night, when she woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep. The voice that told her that she’d lost everything she’d worked so hard for, her lover, her career, and that she’d never get them back.
‘Honestly, you really are nothing but a laughing-stock now,’ Felicity was repeating gleefully. ‘Nobody takes you seriously. Those fake boobs, bouncing up and down in that outfit of yours! James was horrified. Weren’t you, darling?’
Judging her moment, Felicity descended the final two steps and stepped elegantly over to James, resting a manicured hand proprietorially on his shoulder, tossing back her hair seductively. Melody backed away, all too aware of what her face looked like.
‘You said that you’d lost all respect for her,’ Felicity said, leaning in to James. She must have sprayed on perfume before she came downstairs, because Melody smelt it in the air; with increasing misery, she realised that it was one of her own favourites, which she had left here when flying out to LA: with horrible irony, it was called Clinique Happy Heart. ‘You said that you couldn’t possibly ever think of her in the same way again. You said that it felt like you’d never really known her at all...’
It was too much. James’s expression was even more guilty, his lips pinched together as if he wanted to deny the truth of what Felicity was saying, but couldn’t. Ironically, considering that he was a professional actor, in his personal life James couldn’t lie, absolutely hated doing it; it was one of the qualities that Melody loved in him most of all.
But now it meant that he couldn’t even come out with a comforting denial, couldn’t salve the wound that Felicity had slashed in Melody’s self-esteem. It was clear that James had made all those comments to Felicity, and Felicity’s sweetly satisfied smile underlined it; she was too clever to put words into James’s mouth that he had never spoken.
Felicity had turned so that her back was to the rest of the room, blocking Melody from access to the rest of what was still, technically, half her property. The sun from the window behind Felicity streamed in and backlit her flatteringly, striking glints in her hair. She stretched her arm across James’s slim shoulders, easing her hip into his, so that now they looked like a couple confronting an interloper in their house. Melody took another step back; by now, she was at the door. She glanced sideways, to the line of pegs on which coats were hung, seeing James’s old duffel coat, his leather jacket, his nicer tweed coat for smart evenings out. Before, the pegs had been crammed with Melody’s various coats, capes, jackets, hats, scarves – James had often complained about the amount she had loaded onto them, how there was no space for his things.
But now there was plenty of space for all his coats. And next to them was hanging the fake fur cape Felicity had been wearing on Christmas Eve, which Melody remembered that she’d seen swirling around Felicity as she posed next to James for the paparazzo, its hood pulled up to frame her face flatteringly.
Has she been here all the ti
me since then? Hanging out, celebrating Christmas with him, as if she were his girlfriend? Maybe she is his girlfriend, and they assume I know it. Maybe Felicity agreed to come round a few days ago to see if I realised that she was with James, hoping that I’d bring it up...
The thought of Felicity replacing her, moving into the house Melody had bought with James, in such excitement and anticipation of happiness – the bed they had chosen, the mattress they had bounced on in John Lewis, giggling their heads off – made Melody feel that her heart was being squeezed so tightly that she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t speak. Turning, she fumbled at the door, her hands shaking, barely managing to get it open and fall out, running down the pavement as if she were being chased.
And I am, she thought bitterly. I’m being chased by the ghost of myself. The way I was before I fucked everything up, before I went off and left a huge gaping hole in my life, the size of my own body, into which some other woman could jump and get together with my gorgeous, eligible, famous boyfriend...
She was pulling out her phone as she reached the corner, about to ring her father.
They won’t have got that far. And there isn’t much traffic, it’ll be easy driving. Mum can just turn round and come and get me, take me home, and look after me. I can curl up in my old bed, eat cheese toasties, put myself back together, come to terms with the fact that James is with someone else...
And then, setting her jaw – which made her wince, because of the cartilage graft there – Melody pushed the phone back into her pocket again.
Bad Angels Page 29