Star Struck

by Jane Lovering

  ‘Third prize, the pilot’s uniform … is …’

  Jared paused for dramatic effect, and Felix breathed in my ear, ‘That guy is just the most fantastic man it has ever been my privilege to date,’ which put me off and I didn’t catch the winner’s name. A small group in the corner nearest the doors cheered and whooped, and a lot of shoulder-slapping went on.

  ‘Second prize.’ My whole body stopped, even my heart seemed not to beat. I was suspended in the moment, held up by hope.

  ‘Skye?’

  Now it was my turn to ssssshhh, craning my head forward.

  ‘A dinner date with Gethryn Tudor-Morgan,’ Jared said slowly, as if it was necessary. Behind me, a girl who had her fingers crossed so tightly that her hands were white, was muttering ‘please God, please,’ and the lady in the Quo shirt crossed herself furtively.

  Jared opened an envelope, someone in the crowd shouted, ‘Oscar for Best Picture goes to –’ and everyone laughed, diffusing some of the tension that had built around us. It was like waiting for a thunderstorm to break. My hands were sweating.

  ‘Jennifer-Lee Warner!’

  To my left a girl with long, blonde hair gave a scream. ‘That’s me. Oh, thankyouthankyou …’ and began spinning around to receive the congratulations coming from everyone standing near. I was ashamed of my sudden relief and managed a ‘well done’, accompanied by a smile which probably looked quite scary from the other side of my face.

  ‘Hey, Skye.’ Felix squeezed my fingers until I turned to face him. ‘First prize now.’ His eyes were very wide, firmly fixed on the slender figure in the tight jeans on the stage. I wasn’t sure if it was lust or ambition burning behind them.

  ‘Yeah. First prize. Hooray.’

  But he didn’t hear, or chose not to.

  Jared looked at the crowd from lowered lashes and Felix gave a small moan. ‘First prize,’ Jared repeated. ‘A part in the new series. I’ve seen the scripts for the two-parter, and, man, is it going to be exciting. I think Jay gave some hints yesterday as to what we can expect.’ He held out a hand and I noticed Jack for the first time, standing behind some of the other crew members at the edge of the stage. He gave a half-smile and a shrug. ‘Whoever wins this prize is gonna get some huge surprises, not only a part but the entire series’ scripts autographed by the whole cast, a day on set, you name it.’

  Felix’s lips were moving as though he was praying.

  ‘And the winner.’ A rip of paper. ‘Skye Threppel!’

  Felix sagged. ‘You did it,’ he whispered. ‘You actually did it.’

  The crowd looked around. I hadn’t made a sound, suddenly empty of all feeling, and my fingers crept up to my scar. I’d won a prize I couldn’t even use. A mutter rose as everyone wondered where the winner was.

  ‘Here!’ Felix held up our joined hands. ‘Skye is here!’

  And then I was surrounded, hands reaching out to touch me, pat me, as though my luck was a communicable disease, a solid push of bodies crowding me. I began to gasp.

  ‘You did it.’ Felix was still whispering. ‘I’m on the show. This is it, Skye, this is my break.’

  My skin prickled with sweat and I felt suddenly sick. My lungs wouldn’t work, there was more air going out than getting in, too warm, no oxygen … and then the dark, rushing over me, pouring like water behind my eyes, and I was dropping …

  *****

  When I opened my eyes again, I was lying on a bed. The light was muted and soft and the air con was turned down low, so that the temperature was cool but not unpleasantly so.

  Jack was standing at the window with his back to me. I half-raised my head, took in my surroundings, and flopped down again. ‘I don’t know why I don’t just move in,’ I said. ‘All my most embarrassing moments seem to have happened in here.’ My mind jumped away to the overheard conversation of the night before, Lissa’s quiet sadness at his intransigence. She’d sounded as though she’d expected nothing else from him, as though a lack of concern, a lack of caring was normal for him and yet, here he was, rescuing me yet again from an awkward situation. Which was the real Jack Whitaker? The intense writer with the wicked grin, or the man they called the Iceman – emotionally arid? And – my mind held the question up in front of me but didn’t dare even to put it into words – where did Gethryn feature in all this?

  He turned round and smiled at me. He certainly didn’t look like a man without feelings. ‘You passed out.’

  ‘I kind of gathered that.’

  ‘I carried you up. Told them I’d do the publicity stuff later, said I was feeling a bit ill myself. They’re all down there now drawing up the paperwork in case it means that there’s something contagious going around; I think that they’re two minutes from putting out a Legionnaire’s alert.’ He gave a grin that lightened his eyes and sat on the edge of the bed. ‘Felix says you’d agreed to give the part to him if you won?’

  ‘Yes, sort of.’

  ‘Sort of.’ Jack repeated, shaking his head.

  ‘It was for Faith.’ I felt ashamed for some reason, as though I should be explaining myself.

  ‘You think you owe Felix something because his sister died?’

  ‘No, I don’t owe him. But I can’t take the part anyway, Jack. The scars …’

  He leaned forward and ran a finger over my face. ‘There’s always something. You could be a Thulos telepath.’

  ‘Yeah. Silent, under fourteen layers of latex. What’s that, your perfect woman?’

  He smiled again. ‘Yowza.’ Then the smile faded. ‘You went along with it for second prize though, didn’t you? I saw your face, waiting for the announcement.’

  ‘I can’t act any more, Jack. I can’t even remember what it was that made me want to stand up in front of people. I get nervous now just ordering off Amazon. If I ever had any confidence it’s gone. I’m useless, hopeless, I’m even bloody pointless now, an actress who’s so stressed out in crowds that she passes out … Felix can have the part. I don’t want it.’

  Now his expression was very serious, almost grave. ‘What’s happened to you, Skye? What’s made you feel so worthless?’

  ‘This.’ I pointed at my scar. ‘And this.’ I parted the hair which had grown back after the operation as an even more unmanageable wiry fuzz of curls than it had been before, to show the fine line of scarring where my skull had been opened up. ‘Losing your memory doesn’t just mean that you can’t remember things. It’s not as simple as that. It means you lose all the things that define you – every decision I made in that year before the accident, every conclusion I reached, gone. Anything. Everything. Whatever made me me is gone. Okay, yes, I’m glad I’m not dead, on the whole. Glad that, instead of going through the windscreen face first, by sheer fluke I went through backwards, so my face got gashed instead of crushed. I’ve got a lot to be grateful for. But all that gratitude doesn’t help when I can’t even remember meeting my own fiancé! Do you see? And then there was Fallen Skies, about people setting up a new world, being allowed to forget what had happened before, in the Shadow War. New lives. And Gethryn … Lucas James … He’d done terrible things, awful things, but he was allowed to forget and start again, and I loved that, loved the new beginnings, the redemption. The idea that just because the past was gone didn’t mean that the future couldn’t be great.’

  Jack tipped his head forward so I couldn’t see his face. ‘Skye, Gethryn’s just an actor, he does what he’s told, says the words he’s given. The new beginnings, wanting a new life … that was me.’ Then his head came back and I could see the stress lines around his mouth, deeper now. ‘That’s some kind of irony, that is. You fancy the guy because he’s talking about recovery and rebirth, and it’s all my words.’ A hollow kind of laugh. ‘Bit of a Cyrano de Bergerac moment here, I think.’

  ‘What about your whole “Iceman” thing?’ I couldn’t stop
myself, the words just had to come out.

  ‘What? What do you mean?’

  ‘Last night. I overheard you and Lissa … she was saying about you being called the Iceman? I thought it was just because you were …’ I felt myself blushing, but drove on regardless, ‘because you were cool. But Lissa said it was something to do with having no emotion?’

  ‘Ha!’ Jack let out a long breath, like a sigh, and jumped up from his seat on the bed. ‘Shit.’ He began a rather fevered rummage through pockets and drawers as though he’d forgotten I was there, finally finding a battered packet unopened behind his laptop. There was a shaky and sweary couple of moments while he tried to find a lighter that worked, but he finally brought it all into conjunction and blew a long string of smoke into the air. ‘It’s nothing.’

  ‘Right. So that’s why it drives you to smoke, because it’s nothing.’

  He stared at his fingers for a second, turning his hand over to examine the filter tip. ‘Yep.’

  ‘Jack, you only smoke when you’re wound up. And you’re smoking now.’ I watched his back view as he placed himself in front of the window again, staring out at the desert and blowing smoke which stuttered across the room before vanishing like lost ghosts.

  ‘Hoist by my own habit,’ he muttered, not turning round. ‘Skye, when I said it was nothing, I meant it was nothing to you. None of your business. Okay?’

  I stared at him, from the tousled dark fall of hair which hung to his shoulders, his defensively straight back, down past his, admittedly tasty, tightly jeaned backside to where his bare feet dug into the carpet as though he was anchoring himself to something. He was intense, like no man I’d seen. I half-hoped that he was about to confess that his accident had destroyed his ability to feel, as mine had stopped me remembering; a moment of wanting that kind of connection with him. ‘Is there anything I can do to help?’

  ‘Yeah. Come to the ball with me.’ A sudden grinding out of the cigarette in a cup, and he’d turned to face me again, a con-trail of smoke following his movement. He stretched out his arms as though the muscles were sore, and flexed his fingers. ‘Please.’

  I closed my eyes, pretended a moment of faintness. ‘I don’t have a costume or anything.’

  ‘Hey, I was just on a panel with our wardrobe girl, I’m sure I can persuade her to release a couple of costumes. What do you fancy, B’Ha? Pilot?’ He grinned at me round a tightness in his eyes. ‘I can see you as a pilot, in one of those uniforms.’ He leered and I had to laugh; his face wasn’t meant for anything as insalubrious as letching.

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘I’ll get someone to bring some stuff to your room. You can choose what you want to wear and send the rest back to wardrobe. Come on, I’m prepared to do all this, least you can do is agree to come. You must have been to a fancy dress ball before, surely?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘But … how bad is this memory loss thing? Presumably you remember your parents, your childhood?’

  I let my thoughts go. ‘Yes, of course. Only child, doting parents who emigrated when I started drama school. It’s all in there, just … they’re all … furry.’

  He gave me a half-grin. ‘Furry?’

  ‘Well, fuzzy then. When I look back it’s like looking through – oh, I don’t know, a sheet of tracing paper. Something like that. Not quite opaque but not clear either. I do have one or two vivid memories of those years between teenage and twenty-seven, but not that many. Not enough to be able to pin down, to say “this is what I thought”. Everything from the year leading up to the accident, though, is stuff I’ve been told, memories I’ve fabricated.’ I shrugged. ‘But I’ve remembered every day since I woke up in hospital, with Michael and Faith dead. How about you? Did your accident leave you with any problems, or just the scars?’

  I stopped, saw his expression and felt embarrassed. He’d gone goosebumped; I could see the little hairs on his arms standing up as his fingers closed over the leather thong around his neck, even though the room was warm. He fiddled with the necklace under his T-shirt, twisting it back and forth and, although he seemed to be watching me, his eyes were far, far away. Watching something else, something that made his skin chill.

  ‘Jack?’ I swung my legs over the edge of the bed, an instinctive move to get closer to him. ‘Are you all right?’

  A moment with no answer. Then his eyes lifted to mine. ‘I’m thirty-five. I’ve lived nineteen years past the accident, and still I live it every day. Perhaps that is the real problem.’ His voice was soft. ‘Survivor guilt, Skye. You know about that?’ A short laugh. ‘Maybe you do.’ A deep inhalation. ‘And I’ve never said this to anyone else, not even the doctors. Never told them how much it still haunts me, like … like I can feel Ryan, just there.’ He waved a hand vaguely over his shoulder. ‘There’s people down there … dressing up as my characters, discussing them, fucking analysing them, can you believe it? And all the while, these pilots, these alien creatures, all my novels, the Two Turns North storylines – they’re my way of working through what happened.’ Now his gaze bored through me, eyes like black holes. ‘My whole life has been trying to work through what happened. And after that, anything else is just …’ he threw his hands wide, ‘meaningless. I exist for my work, Skye, for writing, for trying to put into words what’s happening to me. That makes me, I dunno, careless with people. I can’t – oh God, I’m going to use some terrible Americanism here – I can’t relate.’ Now one arm lay loosely at his side, as though he’d even stopped trying to express things through body language, and the other hand hooked back into the necklace. ‘And then I met you and …’

  I stared at him. ‘So you think I’m, what, different? Because I know how it feels not to be dead?’

  ‘You’re not like … you don’t … I can’t explain. You’re something else.’ He dropped his hand from his throat and shrugged. ‘I don’t know what I’m trying to say here. I don’t know why … And, for the record, yes, I can dance.’

  ‘You’re really messed up, aren’t you?’ I asked it softly, half-hoping he wouldn’t hear. But he did, and his head went up higher, his eyes slipped from mine to stare at some spot near the ceiling.

  ‘Of course I’m messed up,’ he said. ‘I’m a writer.’

  There was a tap at the door and Felix’s voice came through the frame. ‘Skye? Jack?’

  After a long, weighted pause, Jack opened the door to reveal Felix, wearing the biggest smile I’d ever seen. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘They’ve sent me up to ask if you’re okay? Only they want you downstairs. For the signing?’

  ‘Shit!’ Jack shook his head briefly, as though trying to bring himself back to consciousness. ‘Forgot.’

  ‘They’ve been doing my pictures already, God, it was brilliant – like being Miss World. I explained about you, darling, not being fit to take the part. They might want a little siggy from you, but they can wait until you feel better, they said. And if you’re poorly Jack, they’ll put it off.’

  ‘No. No, it’s okay. I’ll go. Get it over with.’ He checked his reflection in the mirror which hung opposite the bed, pulled a face, ran a hand over his unshaven cheeks and grimaced again. Both Felix and I were transfixed, watching him move around the room searching for his glasses and then splashing aftershave randomly across his stubble with the expression of someone who knows it’s too late to shower and who hopes no-one will notice. When he unbuttoned the front of his shirt and splashed some of the aftershave across his chest, Felix gave a small whine. ‘Oh Lord, will you look at him? It shouldn’t be walking the streets, it really shouldn’t.’

  Jack raised his eyebrows and rebuttoned his shirt. ‘I’d better put my face in front of them. Get up when you’re feeling like it and lock up after you.’ He slipped his glasses on. ‘Do I look okay?’

  ‘Be still my beating heart,’ Felix said.


  ‘Actually I was asking Skye.’

  I looked at him for what felt longer than decent. ‘Oh yes. You look okay. But, no shoes?’

  ‘Nah. Catch you later.’ And, with a flip of his hand, he was gone.

  Felix immediately went over to the laptop and switched it on.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Just looking, lover. He might have something incriminating on there. Or some script, something, anything I can work with. Some insider secrets.’ He turned to me, his eyes full of fire and life. ‘You did it, my darling, you actually did it. I’m gonna be on Fallen Skies!’

  ‘Might be just a bit part. Walk on.’

  ‘Don’t care. Think how great it’ll look on my CV. And I’ll get a name check on the closing credits; you never know, might jog someone in Hollywood into asking for me.’

  ‘I thought that’s why you had an agent?’

  ‘He’s useless. Told me to stick to EastEnders auditions. Ah, here we go.’

  The screen burst into life. ‘It’ll be passworded. He’s not going to risk someone stealing his ideas.’

  ‘Yeah, but he might have left something running in the background. He’d never suspect you of trying to sneak a look at his Great Work, would he? Silly, silly boy.’ A sharp look. ‘He seems pretty serious about you, darling. Can’t keep his eyes off you. You getting any action in that direction yet?’ Felix scrolled down the screen. ‘Because I am seriously jealous, he is definitely on my things-to-do list. I tell you, he shows the slightest inclination and I am going for it.’ A moment’s silent reading. ‘You, or no you.’

  ‘We’ve got things in common, Fe, that’s all.’

  ‘Huh.’ He went quiet, then bounced away from the laptop, shutting off the power and carefully tipping the screen to the exact angle it had been before he touched it. ‘Yeah. Useless, but, hey, it was worth a shot. Never mind, tall order really. Right. Okay. You ready to get off your man’s bed yet?’ Then he sat on the bed and the manic choirboy persona dropped away so quickly that I was derailed. ‘Skye, are you really okay with me taking this part? I mean, you can do it if you want to. I won’t mind.’