by Rebecca Lim
He rolls me over onto my back, bracing himself so that he’s lying half across me and the two of us are hopelessly entangled in the bedclothes. It’s a new kind of imprisoning, but one that does not engender loathing or anger. Just wonder.
Love plays out so differently among the elohim. We guard ourselves, our essential natures, from each other. We were created with self-knowledge, and, as a consequence, are so wary, so loath to cede control, that it’s rare to know what courses through the mind of another of our kind.
There’s that lick of fire along my nerves. I can’t recall even the Devil’s kisses burning me this way.
Ryan’s eyes flash open suddenly and he scrambles back from me with a gasp. ‘You’re so hot,’ he says.
‘And that’s … good, right?’ I reply, puzzled.
He shakes his head, looking at me wide-eyed. ‘No, hot as in scalding. Like trying to kiss a candle flame. Not that I’m complaining,’ he adds hastily. ‘It just makes things a little … trickier.’
We stare into each other’s eyes. Only a few inches separate us, but they could be light years.
‘Food’s on its way,’ Gia calls through the door we’d forgotten was wide open. She leans against the doorframe, grinning. ‘You two look cozy.’
Ryan says, ‘Aaaaarrrrr,’ and flips over onto his back, covering his face with his hands. I see the faint blush on his skin beneath his outspread fingers, a hint of sexy stubble roughening his jaw.
‘Gia!’ I growl. ‘Push off. We’re working something out here.’
‘Ah, young love,’ Gia smirks, ‘so relentlessly hopeful, so nauseating.’
The doorbell to the suite peals loudly and Ryan takes his hands away from his face, looking up at the ceiling. ‘What now?’ he sighs.
Gia’s expression grows serious. ‘The dresses are on their way, and Tommy’s arriving separately with a ton of looks for Ryan to try out. So stop trying to put the moves on her, Romeo, and haul ass into that bath. You’re a mess. No one in their right mind could possibly want you the condition you’re in. When I come back, you’d better be up to your neck in suds.’
Ryan makes a roaring sound of frustration, throws off the rumpled bedclothes violently, then snares his jeans off the chest of drawers and heads for the bathroom. He shuts the door with unnecessary force, moving so quickly that all we get is a glimpse of long, leanly muscled legs in motion beneath the fraying hemline of his tee-shirts.
‘To die for,’ Gia pronounces lightly, already on her way out. ‘Tight in all the right places. You don’t deserve him.’
For a moment, I get something from her that has the feel of loneliness to it, or envy, before her iron control is back in place.
I sit up, hugging my knees tightly. ‘He doesn’t deserve me, you mean.’
She turns instantly, prepared to defend him, her eyes softening when she sees the anguish on my face and catches my real meaning.
‘I’m weak, Gia,’ I say in a low voice. ‘To allow this to continue, to let it get so far out of hand …’
‘Snatching a little happiness for yourself isn’t weak,’ she replies gently. ‘It’s just human.’
At the look on my face, she says quietly, because there’s nothing else to say, ‘Uh, right. Point taken. I’ll get the food.’
6
Tommy doesn’t bother to knock, he just barges right in in his OTT brown leather aviator jacket with the oversized shearling collar and cuffs and de rigueur hardware and pocket detailing, skin-tight black leather trousers, black lace-up boots and black knitted beanie, toting an enormous canvas carryall.
‘Where’s the patient?’ he calls out in his light, silvery voice.
His eyes skim over me briefly and without interest before he heads straight for the closed en suite door and throws it open.
Ryan shouts, ‘What the …?’ and I hear a great slosh as he ducks beneath the water so the soap bubbles cover just about everything there is to cover.
‘You want me to disguise that?’ Tommy exclaims to Gia. ‘Why in God’s name?’
He sets his bag down on the marble tiled floor and slides his beanie off his cropped, dark blond hair, stuffs it into a pocket of his leather bomber. He starts unbuckling that, too, saying wickedly, ‘It’s hot in here. Are you hot?’ before slinging the heavy jacket onto a gilt footstool near the marble-topped sink. Underneath it, he’s still the last word in street fashion, wearing his customary slogan tees under a fitted leather waistcoat covered in hundreds of glittering safety pins.
Ryan glares at me through the doorway. ‘Get these people out of here!’ he yells.
‘They haven’t even begun to do a number on you yet,’ I say, drifting in and standing behind Gia and Tommy. ‘This is nothing. Consider yourself lucky no waxing or exfoliation will be involved.’
Tommy looks at me again, quizzically. ‘Do I know you?’ he asks. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever worked with you before, but there’s something about you that seems familiar.’
He purses his lips and scans me from head to toe, as if the answer might lie in the shape of my calves or the way I’m standing.
‘I’ve got that kind of face,’ I tell him. ‘What’s in your bag of tricks?’
He kneels and rummages through it, pulling out bottle after bottle of hair dye. ‘Take your pick!’ he says. ‘We can put some highlights or lowlights through it, or take him back to a dirty blond, or maybe a dark auburn — so distinguished. Silver is so last season and will completely wash him out, as will a deep black. Too gothic against his pale skin. We could even go two-tone, like Juliana out there. Radical, but different.’
‘No!’ Ryan exclaims, horrified, from within his nest of bubbles. ‘What’s this all about? You’re not touching my hair.’
Tommy ignores him. ‘I’ve got wigs, weaves, facial hair, lashes, fake goatees, the works — a truckload of man makeup, caps, hats, frames.’ He gives Gia an accusing stare. ‘You were rather cryptic on the phone. I had enough trouble getting the finance department to release the gowns to me and arrange for a letter to be typed up stat saying they were a gift from Atelier Re — Domenica almost burst an artery on the spot when I dictated that part.’
‘Will someone tell me what in hell is going on?’ Ryan splutters. ‘I’m right here. And the answer is no, to all of it.’
I scan the items littering the bathroom floor and settle on an instrument with a wicked, saw-toothed blade on the end, an electrical cord trailing from it.
‘The dye idea will take too long,’ I say. ‘Can you clip it? Right back?’
‘Sure I can,’ Tommy replies, frowning. ‘But are you sure? It would be a damned shame.’
‘Mercy?’ Ryan says uncertainly, seeing something in all our expressions that tells him this is no joke.
‘Luc likes to wear his hair long as a general rule,’ I say quietly, not quite meeting Ryan’s eyes, ‘when he’s not showing up in the front row of fashion parades in a bespoke three-piece suit and designer stubble. So a buzz cut would be perfect, Tommy, thank you.’
I bend and study the hats and caps on the floor, selecting a dark grey woollen beanie and an anonymous-looking navy baseball cap with a discreet, embroidered logo on it that looks like a quartered wheel. I look up to see Ryan blanching in sudden understanding of what this is all about.
‘It’s got to be lo-fi, Tommy,’ I murmur, shifting my gaze back to the slight young man standing beside Gia. ‘We’ll be on the move anyway, and he’s less of a target if he isn’t staying in the one place. But I can’t change the way he walks, or speaks, his foot size, his hand span or how tall he is. So in case someone does spot him, I need something that will completely change the way they register his face.’
Tommy and Gia exchange glances before Tommy says, ‘Well, it’s obvious really.’ He bends down and picks up a pair of plastic, rectangular-framed, dark tortoiseshell spectacles with clear lenses, and a pair of wraparound sunglasses with impenetrably black lenses, like bug’s eyes. ‘If it worked for Clark Kent,’ he murmurs, straightenin
g up, ‘it’ll work for him. Both frames are so heavy they’ll completely swamp his face. They’ll be all anyone takes in at first glance. Pair them with a hat and he’ll be just another schmo with bad dress sense.’
‘It’ll have to do,’ I murmur, scooping up the electric clippers and handing them to Tommy, who passes me the two pairs of spectacle frames in return.
‘We’ll wait for you outside,’ I tell Ryan gently as Gia and Tommy precede me out of the room and I close the door behind us.
Tommy moves one of the antique dining chairs across the room, and unplugs a beautiful but useless lamp, plugging in the clippers in its place. With the air of someone about to be executed, Ryan finally emerges, clean-shaven, with still-damp hair, from Gia’s rooms in a tee and jeans and bare feet. He sits reluctantly in the dining chair.
As Tommy fires up the clippers, the doorbell to the suite peals again and a concierge wheels in a clothing rack on which hang two gowns, each zipped into a hand-sewn, protective cover made from some diaphanous, shimmering fabric I can’t name. I recognise both gowns immediately as Designs 13 and 28 of Giovanni Re’s final collection: the first one, slim, one-shouldered, sleeveless, in Giovanni’s signature rosso Re, with a complicated neckline and plunging back; and the second, silver, strapless, 1930s in feel and heavily sequined. The night I met Bianca St Alban at Atelier Re, they’d been laid out for me to model for her, but I never got around to trying them on.
It’s strange seeing them again. From life to life, I’ve never been able to carry anything concrete with me. My existence to date has had a terrifying aura of impermanence, of hallucination, as has the entire objective world. Until Ryan. When he and I collided, everything began to change. And now the room is filled with people I’ve met before under vastly different circumstances, and the rooms themselves, the dresses, are known and familiar things. It’s a seismic shift for me, the effects of which I think I’m only beginning to feel.
Juliana barely glances at the two dresses before telling Gia in a low voice to take them away. As the gowns are wheeled back out of the suite, Gia catches the look on my face and murmurs, ‘Don’t worry, they’ll be there in the car. What’s so important in Moltrasio anyway? Nothing could make me go there. You saw the footage. There’s nothing there now except death.’
‘Death has been and gone and taken what he wanted,’ I reply absently, thinking about how those two frivolous gowns give Ryan and me a reason to be in the heavily compromised lakes region. Once they’re delivered into Bianca St Alban’s hands, I can start looking around Moltrasio for traces of Nuriel: in the sky, in the water, the soil, the trees. You can’t just make one of the elohim vanish into thin air, especially one that doesn’t want to go. Knowing Nuriel, she would have left some clue.
Juliana signs the letter of introduction on Atelier Re letterhead before she and Dottore Pellini take their leave together. All the while, Tommy administers Ryan’s buzz cut in the background, with Carlo and Jürgen looking on in sardonic amusement, pointing out places he’s missed.
The doorbell sounds again, and Gia and I supervise the laying out of a mountain of dishes and beverages that emerge from the trolleys wheeled in by two female hotel staff in maroon and gold uniforms. Irina suddenly lets out a bloodcurdling shriek, followed by the loud clang of something metallic hitting her closed bedroom door. The young women exchange covert glances before excusing themselves from the room.
Gia grins at me. ‘Bet Magdalena the nurse wishes Irina was still under.’
‘I’m done here,’ Tommy calls out.
Gia and I turn away from the dining table and I’m shocked by how changed Ryan appears. He looks thinner and older, the dark shadows under his eyes, the pallor of his skin, the remarkable lines of his facial bones, his skull, all accentuated.
‘Oh, Ryan,’ I say softly, appalled at what I’ve allowed to happen.
‘I like it,’ Gia says in a no-nonsense voice. ‘I think he looks edgy, hot. Kudos, Tommy, you didn’t even draw blood this time. You,’ she indicates Ryan curtly, and again I get that faint wash of unhappiness from her, ‘get over here and get stuck into this feast.’
Tommy sets down the clippers and rolls up the newspapers he laid out around Ryan’s chair, bundling up lengths of shornoff hair in the process.
‘Is it that bad?’ Ryan replies, getting up and walking over to me.
I don’t reply, still troubled by the transformation in him.
He doesn’t ask for a mirror, or even look for one, and that’s him all over. He just doesn’t give a shit about the way he looks or the impact he has.
He holds my gaze challengingly and says, ‘It’s still me.’
And you’re still heart-stopping, I think. Even to those not in possession of an actual heart. All I say aloud, gruffly, is, ‘Eat.’
As Ryan wolfs down what looks like his body weight in food and drink, Gia hands me a black and grey backpack with splashes of fluoro green across it. We go through the contents together: that all-important letter of introduction, the beanie, the cap, the spectacles, the sunglasses, a lighter, a cylindrical silver flashlight, a handful of chocolate bars, a bottle of water, a pocketknife, a disposable razor, a small canister of deodorant, a travel-sized bottle of whisky, a small chamois cloth, a bar of soap, an Atelier Re-branded five-pack of black boxer shorts in size M, two pairs of hiking socks, and thirteen hundred and seventy euros in notes.
‘Because that’s all I have on me,’ Gia says crisply when I try to return it.
‘It’s too much,’ I say, looking at the pile of bills in my hand — tens, twenties, fifties, hundreds — in candy colours.
‘Take it,’ she insists in a fierce whisper. ‘You might be able to walk through walls, but Ryan needs to survive like the rest of us do, the regular way, and that takes dough. Buy me a meal if you ever swing by North London and we’ll call it quits, though, by the look of things, food’s optional for you lot, isn’t it?’
She runs a purple fingernail idly through the contents of the bag. ‘The rest of this stuff is a jaded old fashionista’s take on what a Boy Scout bag ought to look like. It may come in handy, it may be completely useless. I wouldn’t know. I don’t do le camping.’
After Ryan pushes away from the table, looking slightly sick, Tommy leads him back into Gia’s bedroom and bullies him into changing out of his grimy tee and jeans while Gia and I look on, amused.
‘These are fair-trade organic cotton,’ Tommy mutters as he yanks a couple of long-sleeved tee-shirts over Ryan’s head and leanly muscled bare chest, one cream, one black, before thrusting a black zip-up hoodie with a subtle cable running up either side of the zipper into Ryan’s hands. ‘Cashmere angora blend,’ he says. ‘Feel it. Lightweight, unbelievably warm. From this season’s collection.’
I can tell from Ryan’s face that he just doesn’t get it. He gazes at the hoodie bemusedly and zips himself into it. ‘Uh, thanks,’ he says, shooting me an imploring look. ‘Fits great.’
Tommy hands him a slim-fitting pair of dark indigo jeans. ‘Also organic, hand-whiskered. No two pairs are ever the same.’
‘They’re, um, nice,’ Ryan replies, shrugging into them hastily and half-turning away from us to do up the fly and top button. I see that they’re a perfect fit.
‘The way this isn’t,’ Tommy says with a sniff, holding up Ryan’s beaten-up dark brown leather jacket. ‘It’s torn. You can have mine. It was too big for me anyway. I’m already over it. They give me a new one every year.’
‘If it’s okay with you,’ Ryan says firmly, ‘I’d like to keep wearing mine.’
‘It’s revolting,’ Tommy insists. ‘And it’s only got two pockets,’ he adds, like it’s a crime.
The two men — one so tall, one so slight — stare each other down for a moment.
‘It’s important to me,’ Ryan says finally. ‘And, actually, it’s got three.’
He takes the jacket out of Tommy’s hands and turns back the right side to reveal an interior pocket. He unzips it, reaches inside and t
akes out a flat, black mobile phone like Gia’s, a small booklet with a blue cover so dark it’s almost black, a small black leather wallet and a folded-up piece of paper that’s starting to tear along the creases. He throws everything onto Gia’s bed except the paper. Wordlessly, he unfolds it, and I look up at him, startled, realising what it is a second before Tommy and Gia crowd around to look at the image in his hand.
It’s a colour pencil drawing of an unsmiling young woman with an oval face, a long straight nose, lips that are neither too thin nor too wide, large, wide-set brown eyes, brown hair that hangs down to just past the shoulders. A strong face that is all angles and planes. My face. The one I must try to keep hidden while Ryan and I search out a vanquished archangel.
‘It’s a reasonable likeness,’ I mutter. And it is. Quite remarkably like the face that used to stare out at me from inside the reflections of strangers. It’s weird seeing myself captured this way.
‘She’s beautiful,’ Gia muses. ‘Such a strong and unusual face.’
‘Who is she?’ Tommy calls out, heading for the bathroom waste bin with Ryan’s old tee-shirt balled up in his hands, before coming back and studying the hand-drawn image again.
‘I was wearing this jacket when I first met this girl,’ Ryan says obliquely, his eyes holding mine, ‘and I’ve been chasing her for a while now. So the jacket stays. It’s non-negotiable.’
Gia looks from Ryan to me, sudden comprehension in her expression, and says softly, ‘Well, good for you. You’d look utterly ridiculous in Tommy’s jacket anyway.’
‘It’s a three-thousand-dollar jacket,’ Tommy exclaims, wounded.
‘It’s a traffic stopper, Tommy,’ Gia agrees, straight-faced, ‘and you know it. But I don’t think that’s quite the effect these two are after. The words low and key are not in your vocab, darling.’
Ryan pulls his old leather jacket on over the black hoodie and zips it right up under his neck, before sitting down on the edge of Gia’s bed and shoving his bare feet into a clean pair of thick, khaki-coloured hiking socks and his worn-out boots. Then he gathers up the valuables he scattered across Gia’s bed and returns them to his inside jacket pocket, together with the hand-drawn image, and zips that, too.