by Kevin Brooks
After a moment, he said, ‘You know Stella’s going to be there tonight, don’t you?’
Eric froze.
Pauly grinned.
Eric turned slowly and looked at him. ‘What did you say?’
‘Yeah,’ Pauly grinned again. ‘Stella Ross… she’s going to be at the fair –’
‘Who told you that?’ Eric said quietly.
Pauly shrugged. ‘I don’t know… someone… can’t remember. I just heard it somewhere…’
He was looking really out of it now – blinking all the time, his head wobbling from side to side, his eyes glazed. I watched him as he looked down at the ground, staring at nothing, and just for a moment he seemed incredibly sad. But then he closed his eyes and took a deep breath, and when he looked up again, the sadness had gone, and his grin was as manic as ever.
‘Stella Ross, eh?’ he leered at Eric. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve bothered downloading her pictures?’
Stella Ross was something of a local celebrity. Her father, Justin Ross, used to be the drummer in a band called Secret Saucer. They were one of those hippy groups that were really big in the early seventies – long hair, long songs, drum solos, dry ice… that kind of thing. By the time they split up – sometime in the eighties, I think – they’d sold about a trillion records and they were all living in big country mansions with recording studios in their basements and Ferraris parked in their driveways. That’s what Dad told me, anyway. He also told me that Justin Ross used to be a ‘hellraiser’ – taking drugs, smashing up hotel rooms – but about fifteen years ago he’d ‘seen the light’ (these are all Dad’s words, by the way, not mine), and he’d sold all his Ferraris and his country mansion, married a beautiful young model, and they’d set up home on a working farm in a little village about ten miles from St Leonard’s.
His wife, Sophie Hart, was also pretty rich, so together they were worth a huge heap of money. But Stella never saw any of it. She was their only daughter, and because they’d both seen the ugly side of celebrity (Sophie was an ex-hellraiser too), they were determined to bring Stella up as ‘normally’ as possible. Which is why – despite their millions – Stella ended up at the same school as us.
I didn’t actually know her that well, but she was really good friends with Eric and Nic, and she shared their passion for acting. They performed in all the school plays and stuff, and they were always singing and dancing, dressing up, dreaming of the days when they’d all be big stars. Most of us thought that if any of them were going to make it, it’d be Nicole. Eric was always a bit too intense about everything, especially himself. Stella had the looks, but not much talent, and although her parents knew all the right people, they refused to do anything to help her, which really pissed Stella off. Nicole, though… well, Nicole didn’t need any help. She had everything – talent, looks, energy, confidence.
So it was a big surprise when Stella turned up at school one day and announced that she’d landed a part in a TV commercial. She was around fourteen at the time, and it turned out later that she’d got this part by getting all cosy with the sixteen-year-old son of one of her parents’ friends who just happened to be a well-known film director. The TV commercial was for a big supermarket chain. It was one of those serial adverts, the sort of thing that runs for a few months, then a new one comes out, but with the same characters, and then another one… like instalments in a stupid little story. This one featured an endearingly quirky family – father, mother, daughter, son. Stella played the daughter. Her character started off as a cute, but sassy, teenager – all sweetness and charm and innocence – but as the adverts developed, so did Stella’s cute little teenager, and within a year or so she was beginning to get the kind of tabloid attention that didn’t really fit in with the supermarket’s wholesome family image, so they dropped her from the ads. Stella had already left school by then – I think she was being tutored at home – and the only time any of us saw her, including Eric and Nic, was when she was in the papers and on TV, which was pretty much all the time. She was doing all sorts of stuff by then – photo shoots for Loaded and FHM, chat shows, appearances in music videos – but mostly she was just famous for being Stella Ross. The Wild Child, the Fifteen-Year-Old Hellraiser, the Girl of Every Boy’s (and Every Man’s) Dreams.
About six months ago, after a wild night out at some swanky club in London on her sixteenth birthday, Stella ended up in a hotel room with a guy called Tiff. Tiff was a singer with a boy band called Thrill who’d recently come third in a second-rate talent show on cable TV. Apart from Stella and Tiff, no one really knows exactly what happened that night, but within a few days their relationship had broken up and a series of intimate photographs of Stella had appeared in a Sunday newspaper. They were pretty grainy pictures, shot on a mobile phone, and they didn’t really show very much – the newspaper edited out all the naughtiest bits – but suddenly the whole world was talking about them. The newspaper that published the pictures was one of those papers that’s always ranting and raving about paedophiles, and now here they were, happily showing pictures of a near-naked girl who’d only just turned sixteen.
So, of course, all the other newspapers went mad, calling them hypocrites, purveyors of filth, while at the same time showing edited versions of the photos themselves, just to let us see what they were talking about. And then another series of pictures appeared, this time on the Internet, and these weren’t edited at all, and so the story just kept going and going… and all the time, Stella got more and more famous…
And Eric and Nicole despised every second of it. They were jealous, for a start, especially Nicole. She’d always hated the whole famous-for-being-famous kind of thing, and what made it even worse for Nic was that Stella had been her friend. They’d dreamed of stardom together, they’d grown up imagining what it would be like, but now that Stella had actually made it, she didn’t want anything to do with Nicole. She didn’t call her. She didn’t text. She didn’t email. She didn’t return any of Nic’s messages. She acted as if she’d never even known her.
With Eric, though, it was slightly different. Just before she’d left school, around the time she was beginning to get famous, Stella had gone out with Eric a few times. They were both only fourteen then, so it wasn’t really a relationship or anything, they just used to meet up in town, maybe go to the pictures… that kind of thing. Then one night, at an end-of-term dance at school, we were all just hanging around at the back of the assembly hall, waiting for some crappy local band to come on, when all at once a side door opened and Stella came bursting in, crying her eyes out. The side door led out to the school grounds, so we all just assumed she’d been out there with Eric, doing whatever they did, and they’d had an argument or something. But then, a few minutes later, Eric came in through the side door too, and he looked incredibly calm. In fact, he looked almost serene. Without saying a word to anyone, he walked across the hall, got up on to the stage, and went over to the microphone. Everyone was watching him now, wondering what the hell he was doing… everyone, that is, except Stella. When Eric had come in, she’d given him the most hateful look I’d ever seen, and then as soon as she’d seen him getting up on the stage, she’d just turned round and stormed out. And when Eric started talking into the microphone, I understood why.
‘I don’t know if this is the right time or the right place,’ he’d announced, his voice booming out through the speakers, ‘and I’m not trying to make a big deal out of it or anything, but I just wanted to let everyone know that I’m gay.’
And that, in a very big nutshell, was what Pauly was talking about in the den that night. Eric and Stella, their history, the photographs of her on the Internet, the fact that Eric was gay… all that and more, and everything it meant, it was all there in that one stupid sentence: Stella Ross, eh? I don’t suppose you’ve bothered downloading her pictures?
If Eric was offended by Pauly’s remark, he didn’t show it. He just stared at him for a moment, his eyes quietly thoughtful, then he shook his h
ead and turned away.
Pauly looked over at me. ‘Have you seen them, Pete?’
‘Seen what?’
‘Stella’s pictures… the ones on the Internet.’
‘No,’ I lied.
He grinned. ‘I bet you have.’
‘Christ,’ Nicole muttered, passing me the joint again.
Pauly looked at her. ‘What?’
‘You…’
‘What about me?’
‘You’re obsessed with her.’
‘I’m not obsessed –’
‘Yes, you are. You’ve always been obsessed with her. Even before she started flashing her tits around –’
‘She doesn’t –’
‘Shit,’ said Nic, ‘you were having wet dreams about Stella Ross when you were twelve years old.’
Pauly wasn’t grinning any more. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said sulkily.
Nicole glared at him. ‘Yeah, you do.’
Everything went quiet then. Pauly went back to staring at the ground, Nicole lit a cigarette, I stubbed out the dead joint, and Raymond just sat there, gazing at nothing. Eric seemed worried about something. The cigarette in his hand had burned down to a stub, but he didn’t seem aware of it – he was just sitting there, staring into space, chewing intently on a thumbnail.
As I studied him in the flickering candlelight, the angles of his face seemed to shift, and just for a moment he looked exactly like Nicole. I’d experienced the same thing with Eric before. Although they were twins, Eric and Nic weren’t exactly alike, and most of the time Eric’s face bore little resemblance to his sister’s. Physically, they were both very similar – same nose, same mouth, same eyes – but somehow the same features didn’t add up to the same thing. On Nic, they were beautiful. But on Eric, for some reason, they just didn’t quite fit together, and this gave his face a strange kind of almost-beauty – neither ugly nor beautiful, but at the same time both ugly and beautiful. Sometimes, like now, when Eric’s face momentarily became Nic’s, it was like watching a blurred picture slowly coming into focus – becoming what it was meant to be. This time though, as Eric’s face morphed into Nic’s, it also took on the weird patterns and shapes I’d seen on Nic’s face earlier… triangles, rectangles, cones and pyramids… and when he moved his hand, dropping his dead cigarette to the ground, I saw trails in the air, slow-motion after-images of the movement…
I closed my eyes.
‘I’m going,’ I heard someone say.
The voice sounded odd – slow and deep, thick and distorted.
‘You coming, Nic?’
When I opened my eyes again, Eric had got to his feet and was looking over at Nic. His face was pure Eric again.
‘Nic?’ he said.
‘I’ll catch up with you at the fair,’ she told him. ‘I just want a word with Pete.’
I looked at her.
Ignoring me, she turned to Pauly. ‘In private.’
‘What?’ he said.
‘I need to talk to Pete about something.’
‘So?’ Pauly shrugged. ‘I’m not stopping you.’
Eric nudged him with his foot. ‘Come on, don’t be such a wanker.’
Pauly looked up at him and grinned. ‘You gonna buy me some candyfloss?’
Eric smiled. ‘I’ll kick the shit out of you if you don’t move your arse.’
‘Fair enough,’ Pauly said.
As Eric helped him to his feet, Nic glanced over at Raymond. ‘Do you mind?’ she said, smiling at him.
He stared at her for a moment, blinked his eyes, then looked at me.
I didn’t know what to do. It didn’t feel right, asking him to leave. I knew he wouldn’t feel comfortable on his own with Pauly and Eric, so he probably wouldn’t want to go on to the fair with them, and I didn’t like the idea of him going home on his own. It was dark now. It was ten o’clock, Saturday night, and that’s not a good time for anyone to be on their own in Back Lane, let alone Raymond. But, at the same time, I didn’t want to embarrass him by letting the others think he needed looking after.
∗
I don’t know how much of that is true. I suppose some of it is, maybe most of it. I mean, I really was worried about Raymond, and I really did feel responsible for him… but I know, deep down, that my overriding desire was to be on my own with Nicole.
I looked at her now, wanting to ask – how long will we be? – but I just couldn’t say it.
She smiled at me. ‘Don’t worry.’
I didn’t know what she meant.
I turned back to Raymond. He was still looking at me, still just waiting. It might have made things a bit easier for me if there’d been some anger in his eyes, or even a bit of disappointment or something, but there was nothing. Nothing but trust.
‘If you want to wait –’ I started to say.
‘It’s all right,’ he said simply. ‘I’ll see you at the fair.’
I stared at him, surprised. ‘Are you sure?’
He nodded and started to get up.
I just watched him, unable to speak.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said, smiling at me.
‘Right…’ I muttered.
I sat there in silence, watching them go: Eric first, stooping quickly through the door; then Pauly, leering over his shoulder at us; and then Raymond. I thought he’d look back at me as he left, maybe say a few words, or wave goodbye. But he didn’t. He just ducked down through the doorway and disappeared into the night.
I listened to him following Eric and Pauly down the bank, their fading footsteps stumbling through the darkness, then I turned my attention to Nic. She’d shuffled away from the wall and was sitting in front of me now – her legs crossed, her face glowing palely in the candlelight, her eyes fixed steadily on mine.
‘So,’ she said quietly, ‘here we are again.’
‘Yeah…’
‘Just the two of us.’
I wiped sweat from my forehead.
She took off her shoes and smiled at me. ‘Hot, isn’t it?’
Five
Everything was kind of OK for a while. Me and Nic just sat there talking about stuff – Paris, Stella, school, college – and it didn’t feel too awkward or anything. We were both a bit drunk, I suppose, and a bit whacked out from the dope, and Nic kept taking quick little sips from the bottle of tequila that Pauly had left behind, so I’m not sure if either of us really knew what we were talking about. But it didn’t seem to matter. In fact, the way Nicole was jabbering away – spewing out words like a machine gun – I hardly had to say anything at all. So I didn’t. I just sat there, watching her as she talked – staring at her mouth, her moving lips… the candlelit colours shimmering on her skin. The more I stared, the more vivid the colours became, and as they grew brighter and brighter, the darkness of the den seemed to close in all around us. It was a nice feeling, like sitting in a bubble of light, and there was something about it that made me feel I was inside something alive. It was as if the den had some kind of primitive consciousness, and now that the others had gone, it was adjusting its size to make us feel cosier.
‘Are you all right?’ Nicole said suddenly.
I blinked. ‘What?’
‘Your eyes… they look really spacey.’
‘Spacey?’
‘Yeah,’ she smiled. ‘Like big black saucers.’
‘Must be the drink,’ I said.
Nic laughed. ‘You never could handle it, could you?’
‘What do you mean?’
She smiled. ‘You always used to get like this at a den party.’
‘Like what?’
‘All dreamy and stupid… like you’re living in a different world.’
‘Dreamy and stupid?’ I said.
She laughed again. ‘Stupid in a nice way.’
‘So you’re saying I’m stupidly nice, is that it?’
‘Yeah,’ she said, looking into my eyes, ‘but mostly just nice.’
Everything seemed to change then. The atmosphere,
the heat, the silence… it was all suddenly different. Heavier, stiller, more intense. I could taste the dark sweetness of Nic’s perfume in the air. I could feel the sweat oozing from my skin.
‘What happened to us, Pete?’ Nicole said quietly.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know… me and you, everything we did, everything we had… I mean, how come we ended up so far apart?’
‘I don’t know,’ I shrugged. ‘Things change, I suppose…’
‘They never changed for me.’
She was leaning in close to me now, staring so intently into my eyes that I had to look away for a moment. I didn’t really believe what she was saying, and I knew she didn’t believe it either – she knew as well as I did that we had both changed – but as she moved a little closer to me, and I felt her hand on my thigh… well, I couldn’t have cared less about the truth just then.
‘Do you remember that time in the bathroom?’ she said softly.
I looked up at her. ‘The party at your cousin’s place?’
‘Yeah.’ She smiled. ‘We came pretty close then, didn’t we?’
I nodded, my mouth suddenly dry.
She said, ‘Do you think we would have done it if her parents hadn’t come back?’
‘Maybe…’
She moved her hand on my thigh. ‘It doesn’t seem right…’
‘What?’
‘That we never got round to it.’
I was feeling incredibly strange now – my heart was thudding, my skin was tingling all over, my whole body was buzzing with a warm liquid energy.
Nic said, ‘And now we’ll probably never see each other again.’
We looked at each other, knowing each other.
Nothing needed saying.
Nic’s eyes never left mine as she sat back and started to ease off her vest. I watched, mesmerized, as she crossed her arms, slowly pulled the vest over her head, and dropped it to the ground. I tried to stay cool, forcing myself to concentrate on her eyes… but it wasn’t easy. Her eyes were burning into me now, watching my reaction as she raised her arms and ran her fingers through her hair, subtly flexing her body.