by Victoria Fox
Maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe she didn’t care.
Maybe friends were the only blood you needed.
As they made their way towards the stage Robin could hear the awards being handed out, the applause and the fans’ euphoria. Beyond the rigging she caught a glimpse of the stage lights and the contagious, addictive glow of the spotlight. It was a serious place to be. Gathered at the Palisades Grand was the elite of the music industry.
Robin pictured a girl in a London bedroom, singing into the mirror as she herself had done once, dreaming of making it big one day. She pictured the girl in a flat. It was painted in astonishing detail for somewhere she had never visited. The carpet was tortoiseshell, a mess of yellows and browns; tired lamps scattered, their shades dusty and damp; a hostess trolley in one corner; and on the mantelpiece a clock trapped at a quarter to three…
The photo she had been sent catapulted towards her through the shadows.
‘Are you all right?’ Polly touched her arm. ‘You’ve gone really pale.’
Robin caught herself. ‘I’m fine.’
‘We’re on.’ Matt slammed his downturned palm into the middle of the circle and the rest of them followed, releasing with a flourish. ‘Let’s rock!’
The woman in the picture was nobody to her, and yet the grim familiarity of her clung on…the scrawled, childlike writing on the back…
ROBIN.
She swallowed her terror.
The second she was onstage, she would be safe.
84
Scotty was shaking like a leaf. Even though his slot had been and gone, the buzz still rushing through him was intense. His first onstage resurgence was over. It was done. And instead of the jeers and boos he had envisaged, the crowd had been angelic. While he had stood waiting for the nominees’ VT to run, he had even seen a group close to the podium talking among themselves, more interested in their own business than in his. Realising you weren’t at the centre of everybody’s universe was a liberating insight indeed.
He decided to watch the rest of the show with Joey and the guys, whose seating was towards the back—a relegated position for America’s once-so-hot boy band. In the interests of retaining a low profile, an escort led him through a staff gangway. When they stopped to let a camera pass, he noticed, tacked to the wall, a security ID poster comprising palm-sized employee mug shots—you never could be too careful these days.
Amid the hundred or so gathered, one stood out.
He recognised that face…but from where?
A red-haired, hard-faced, grisly-eyed woman; he had seen her someplace before but try as Scotty might he couldn’t put a finger on it. On close inspection she bore a resemblance to Robin Ryder—albeit a gone-wrong, skinny-ass, redhead Robin Ryder. But the context was familiar, too: the head and shoulders, cropped and disembodied, pinned to a board…the hollow bearing of the formally photographed…a shard of memory that was quickly usurped by Fenton’s imploring expression and overtaken by the distraction of those emotions.
The woman flashed evil. He should have known where he had seen her image before and could have been able to prevent the carnage if he had…
But no, the connection was lost.
85
Cosmo Angel’s cobalt Ferrari roared up to the sumptuous entrance of the Palisades Grand, where it ploughed through a NO STOPPING sign and screeched to a halt with a furious shriek of tyres. The photographers had a field day as Cosmo leapt out, manic and unshaven, his shirt undone, his hair a frenzied nest, murky pockets of sleep deprivation haggard beneath his eyes…a husk of the Hollywood star he had been. Cosmo hadn’t been seen in public since his ‘Kingdom Come’ disgrace. It was quite a reawakening.
Abandoning his vehicle, he stormed towards the gate.
‘Mr Angel, sir…’
‘Out of my way, fuckhead.’
‘Mr Angel, if you’d just—’
Cosmo grabbed the man’s lapels and pulled him up, lifting him off his feet.
‘Do you know who I am?’ he lashed.
The cameras were going crazy. This was a pap’s wet dream.
Cosmo released the man with such force that he went crumpling to the steps, and barged through, heading straight to the theatre. He was royalty, for Crissakes, it was Access All Areas! Everyone on the planet knew who Cosmo Angel was—and if they hadn’t before the YouTube exposé then they’d recently received a thorough education.
He was here for one reason.
To make Turquoise da Luca pay.
Even thinking her name made him ready to bubble over with wrath.
As Cosmo stampeded through a gauntlet of guardians, each too afraid to counter not just an A-list movie giant but also a rampaging lunatic, he resolved that there was simply nothing more to lose. Turquoise’s actions had crucified his career. They had slaughtered his marriage. They had slain his reputation. They had castrated him. He was a zombie, battered and butchered, and all because of what—the blackmail of some whore?
That was all Turquoise would ever be, no matter how far she thought she had come or how she reckoned to have left little scared Grace behind.
Grace Turquoise da Luca was a slut hooker cash-grabbing, ball-breaking bitch that opened her legs for money.
If there was nowhere to go but down, Cosmo was taking her with him.
86
Leon’s T-shirt was torn and blackened by fire. His skin was slick, chalky with salt and smoke as he stumbled on to the street, one arm raised like a flag.
He was dizzy. He couldn’t see straight. The cars skewed and tipped and weaved.
‘Jesus.’ The cab driver didn’t recognise him. ‘You OK?’
‘Drive.’ He climbed in. ‘No questions, just drive.’
‘Whatever you say.’
Leon’s lungs were charred, fighting to keep up. In the back seat he shook, desert-hot then glacier-cold, his chest compressed as though he had been winded.
‘D’you need the hospital?’
‘Faster,’ he instructed. ‘Drive faster.’
Downtown they hit traffic. Leon thought of the first words she had said to him, when they had met in London; her dark eyes guarded, a warm, deep blue:
I was handling that myself…
That was Robin all over. Never asking for anyone, never needing a soul. Tonight, there was no choice. She was in danger.
‘Hey—!’ the driver hollered as Leon busted open the door and took to the packed gridlock, chasing the ground, pushing towards that last lone goal that was beautiful in its simplicity. The more he ran, the more his body opened up to the pursuit, clean air rinsing through him and his legs falling into the rhythm that they had known for so long. He was lighter than the wind, quicker than water, flying so fast it felt as if someone were at his back, giving him what he needed as he shot past parked cars and stationary trucks, rigid with their bottled-up impatience; not like him, free as an eagle, flying, flying…
The glinting peak of the Palisades Grand soared into view, a shining prize that shimmered in the fading sun like a relic. Light bounced off its silver contours and one second he was close enough to touch, the next impossibly far away.
Leon ran and ran, he didn’t know where his might came from, something bigger and braver than he was, something he didn’t understand. He let it in and then it was as if the ground left his feet, the goal coming closer.
He pushed past security, a web of arms battling to rein him in but they weren’t swift enough. Speed was his missile. The intruder was unrecognisable as Leon Sway, his face and arms streaked with soot, his T-shirt ripped and pitted with holes that revealed his shoulders and back. As he tore through the lobby, heavies chasing and raising support, feeling for their weapons but to no avail, the throngs parted like waves to let him through.
‘Sir, stop right there, sir!’
‘Stop that man!’
‘Somebody get him!’
A screeching siren sounded in his wake, security alerts winging around the building.
‘Police!’ they
hollered. ‘Stop or we’ll shoot!’
Never. They would have to kill him first.
87
The glare was too blinding. The lights were too hot. The crowd was too loud. Robin felt like she had back in San Francisco, a sitting target, exposed and vulnerable.
The throbbing bass counted her in and she missed her cue, the lyrics deserting her so that Matt threw her a fleeting quizzical look before repeating the refrain.
She couldn’t get a grip on the rhythm; it was like deciphering a foreign language. At last her voice came through but she was off-pitch, the world discordant, jangly as keys, and time distilled to the moment she couldn’t escape from. She was overcome with a need to flee.
Her gaze was drawn into the darkness beyond the stage, where something unknown and unseen lurked, terrifying as a monster under the bed. Beyond the pounding beat and the sound of her dwindling vocal a distant siren sounded, high and thin and so very faint that Robin thought it might be inside her own head, the shrill approach of panic.
88
Ivy heard the alarm go up. Nicki Soba’s radio crackled with the news.
Red alert. Security breach. Stations on guard.
This was it. No time to waste. They were coming.
She melted into the horde of fans at the brink of the VIP pen. All attention was on the stage, and shrouded as she was in obscurity Ivy trembled with promise. The section had been cordoned off. Already she could see the goons receiving their instructions: one by the rope, another up in the circle, a third by the nearest exit.
How had they got on to her so quickly?
There was no time to think, no time to hesitate. She had a plan to detonate.
Robin had taken the spotlight, inciting the cheers that had proved the soundtrack to her shameless, blessed, cheating life.
After all these years there remained just a hundred metres between them.
Hello. Remember me?
As Ivy stepped forward, drawing a hand inside her coat to retrieve the butt of the firearm, she shivered at making history that could never be rewound. When all was said and done these people were no better than her. They didn’t have the secret…she did.
That was what Robin never realised. She never stopped to think about average people or the average life she had deserted, her neglected, forgotten-about wasteland of a past, and the thing about the past was that it liked to find a way of coming back.
Now, Ivy was anything but average.
She forced herself to wait a moment, brief as it was, to savour her arrival, before raising a gun to the air and pulling the trigger.
89
The first bullet smashed through a giant candelabrum, amputating it from its moorings so that it hung, drunkenly suspended, precarious as a severed finger. Robin’s music cut and she went to scream but the only sound she heard was the cold blare of the security alarm.
Fear and confusion crashed through the auditorium as the arena hurtled to its feet, rushing to escape the raining bullets that sprayed the crowd like cattle as they darted for survival, stumbling over jewel-encrusted gowns and thousand-dollar Armani suits.
Mayhem. Chaos. Bedlam. The whole place moved like a landslide, tipping like a rocking boat in a squall, terror ripping through Robin along with the intoxicating aroma of fear. Bodies hit the floor. Blood smeared across the tableware. Chairs were thrown. In their desperation they trampled over each other, the spike of a heel in an ear, the tear of a dress, the pushing and shoving.
Someone grabbed her. ‘Fucking hell, let’s go!’
She couldn’t. Her feet were rooted.
A crimson glimmer flickered in the shadows, bright as a ribbon, a flame in the black.
Robin knew that woman. She had seen her before.
She saw her every time she looked in the mirror.
‘It’s her,’ she whispered.
If ever she had doubted it, validation came when the weapon was raised and Robin found herself staring straight into the barrel of a gun.
90
By the time McEverty and Moretti arrived on the scene, they were too late. The Palisades was scene to mass evacuation and hysteria, the stadium spewing out a gush of stricken luminaries as camera crews rolled up and reporters took their posts, chattering into microphones as the news broke, too much to take in and even more to communicate…the coverage of flashing lights and cutthroat excitement behind which lives were still being lost.
‘Am I seeing this?’ McEverty was sick to his stomach.
Inside was carnage. Gunshots rang out. Armed squads were prepped to bring the assassin down amid a writhing pack of thousands, vested up and packed with ammo as they were released into the hectic fray.
‘She got here first,’ quailed Moretti, bending to catch his breath, his hands on his knees. ‘The broad beat us to it.’
An overwrought woman, rabid with fear, was ejected from the melee. Beyond the wild hair and slashed dress he recognised her as an RnB songstress. She clutched on to him.
‘Do something!’ she wailed. ‘You have to do something! People are dying in there!’
McEverty pulled his gun. ‘We’re going in.’
91
As if in a dream, Robin watched the woman approach.
Her hair was redder than before, her gaze more gleaming, ripe with destruction.
Bodies were strewn; fallen or dead, it was impossible to tell. Robin braced herself, knowing she was going to die but that she wasn’t ready. This was her life. She had worked for it, she had earned it; it was only just starting to happen. This couldn’t be the end.
A round of bullets sounded from the rear of the space. An army piled through, lasers crossing the massacre like ticker tape.
‘Don’t you know who I am?’ Her accoster’s voice was close enough to hear, intimate, as if they were alone in a vacuum, the still, silent plug at the heart of a tornado.
The gun came in, mere feet away now. It was near enough for Robin to see the polished metal and the pallid hand that held it.
Numbly she nodded. The woman was her age. Beneath the surface discrepancies, they looked the same. She had known it since San Francisco. She had known it all along.
‘We’re family. It’s nice to meet you, Robin.’ Her voice was elusive, one second tight to Robin’s ear and the next far away, like a message coming from the distant end of a tunnel.
Robin’s tongue was thick. She couldn’t speak.
‘I’ll do anything,’ she whimpered. The words seemed to come out regardless, her basic instinct for survival. ‘Please…’
‘Say it.’ A thin smile.
‘I can’t—’
‘Say it!’ The gun shook.
Robin remembered the grip of the woman’s hand in hers, cold and stifling…
The messages, the roses, the scrapbook, the phone call…
The childlike handwriting on the back of the photo…
The old lady in the chair, the clock stuck at a quarter to three…
The girl in the London flat…
‘You’re my sister,’ she choked, searching the woman’s eyes for compassion, affection, anything at all. Only the gun stared back. Behind it, her attacker spoke the words she had let go of such a long time ago, believing they would never arrive.
‘That’s right. We’re family, Robin. I’m the family you never had.’
Robin dropped to her knees. White noise flooded through her brain.
‘We should have turned out the same, you and me. We would have, if you had stayed and I had gone. Only I didn’t get that choice.’
She thought she would pass out. Somehow she managed to stay upright, palms in the air, begging for mercy. If she lost consciousness that would be it: she wouldn’t wake up.
‘It can’t be,’ she gasped. ‘It can’t be…’
‘You lived while I perished.’
‘I didn’t have a choice.’ I don’t want to die. ‘I’m like you. I’m just like you—’
‘It’s too late.’ The blue eyes flared. ‘You don’t des
erve this. The place you came from, the people you came from…You don’t deserve it. I’m the one who paid the price.’
‘My mother…’ Robin had trained herself out of saying it, thinking it, even.
‘Your mother was a drunk. She ruined me. She took me to hell and I never came back. Where were you?’ Though it was a question, the words couldn’t escape that horrible, dead, flat tone. ‘You left me behind. I was your responsibility, and you left me behind.’
‘Please,’ she sobbed, tears pushing through the shock, ‘I never knew, I swear it—’
‘People like you think you can walk away.’
‘It’s not what I wanted,’ she pleaded. ‘It’s not what I chose.’
‘I didn’t forget. I never forgot. I’ve been following you. I know everything. I know you better than anyone. Isn’t that what sisters are for?’
From deep within, Robin found a kernel of strength. It was defiant, self-possessed, unwilling to falter or to fail. If it had seen her through this far, it would see her through again.
‘Don’t hurt me,’ she beseeched, her arms reaching. ‘We can talk about this. We can work it out—’
‘No time.’
‘There is, please, there is—’
‘We’re through.’
The gun was levelled squarely at her forehead.
‘Goodnight, Robin.’
92
A shot was fired. Impact hit her from the side and Robin was thrown, a crack of white light before darkness spun.