by Phoebe Locke
He checked through his unread mail first. The same old department-wide messages about cleaning out the communal fridge, about separating recycling in the kitchen bins. Spam from two second-hand bookselling sites, and from a dating agency he had joined, in a fit of defiance, three years ago. He deleted that one without opening it, adding in the online takeaway receipts and the group email chain from some school friends who were trying to plan a get-together. None of that mattered now.
That left the emails from students – all scenarios familiar to him now after several years in the job, no excuse for an extension unturned – and then one from a sender he didn’t recognise. [email protected]. The subject line I know.
It was a subject line designed to get attention and for that reason he paid it little. He felt sure he knew how it would end; some other dating agency or app, probably, with something cheap and tawdry and spammy: I know . . . where your soulmate is or perhaps the more direct I know where your next great lay is waiting. And so he clicked on it, knowing he had nothing to fear.
Realising, quickly, that he was wrong.
16
2018
‘What do you think of me?’ Amber asks Greta as she flicks through songs on her phone, already plugged into the stereo of their rental car. She’s insisted they put the roof down, too, and Greta, who forgot to tie her hair back, is trying to navigate the entrance ramp to the freeway with strands of it snaking repeatedly over her eyes.
It’s just the two of them, the boys finishing up some location shots from an emailed list Federica sent at 3 a.m. London time. It’s their last day in LA and the week has passed in a blur of studio lights and the same prepared answers slipping out of Amber’s mouth, all presumably dreamed up by the US arm of the talent agency she’s signed to – Greta assumes in an attempt to drum up as much interest as possible in the North American rights for her tell-all book. But when it comes to their cameras, to their film, she hasn’t had anything new to say. Greta’s hoping that when they get back to London, Federica will be able to coax and cajole the answers she wants from her. She thinks that if Amber knew how much research Federica is doing on Sadie Banner’s story instead of her own, it might persuade her to open up a bit. Because Federica’s obsession is growing; the file of evidence they’ve been building up on the shared drive getting rapidly larger, the list of people Federica wants to interview longer and longer. The list of things that Amber said she would not discuss getting steadily chipped away at behind her back.
Greta doesn’t want to go down that road. She’s read and read and read about the Tall Man, about girls who thought he’d made them special, about daughters disappeared, and now she lies awake at night, watching shadows.
So when Amber, finally free of publicity commitments, asked if they could go to Disneyland today, Greta agreed. Disney, surely, can be relied upon to be shadow-free.
‘What do you mean?’ she asks now, safely in lane.
‘Do you like me?’ Amber flips down the sun visor and checks her make-up, running a finger across her newly plumped lips. Her hair is tied neatly back, a full ponytail which swings when she moves. ‘Do you think I’m a bad person?’
Greta considers this. ‘I’m not sure I know enough about you to like or not like you,’ she says. ‘But no, I don’t think you’re a bad person.’
She wonders if this is true. She sat backstage and watched Amber do another TV interview yesterday, this time for one of the daily news shows. She watched her sit in the green room beforehand, flicking through a magazine until she found a picture of herself, and then trawling the pages for another mention, and she watched her saunter on to the set and settle herself in one of the matching armchairs set up for the interview. She saw (as she’s seen all week) how Amber’s voice became soft, timid almost, and how, as the interviewer asked ‘Do you think you’re innocent?’, the tears welled up and began to fall. ‘I took her life and I have to live with that for ever,’ Amber replied, allowing one to slide slowly down her cheek, and then, when the cameras were off, she returned to the green room to eat the KFC she had asked for and to chat with the B-movie actor who had waited to meet the famous Amber Banner.
‘I don’t want to go back,’ Amber says now. ‘I like it here.’
‘Do you?’ Greta hates it. She hates the endless highways and tailbacks and billboards, the strip malls and perfect white smiles. She hates Hollywood most of all. On the way back to her hotel last night, she passed a woman sitting on the edge of the street, busily slapping at a dirty foot, trying to locate a vein among the grime and bruises. A cluster of girls in skinny jeans clacked past, oblivious, and a bus full of tourists sailed by, while cheerful 1950s rock and roll pumped out of the vast souvenir shop on the corner. It feels like everywhere she goes, a child is crying; that everywhere she turns, a man eyes her from a cab or a window or passing her on the sidewalk, their gaze trickling over her skin like ice.
‘Yeah.’ Amber smiles at herself in the mirror and flicks the visor closed. She glances out at the city disappearing beside her. ‘I’m, like, new here. Do you know what I mean? Nobody knows me, but people are interested.’
‘People are interested in you in London, too,’ Greta says, accurately.
Amber scoffs at this. ‘Please. I’m a freakshow there. They just want to get a shot of me looking crazy. They want me to flip out and start smashing their cameras, so they get up in my face. They try and run my car off the road. Here the paps open doors for me. They pay for my stuff at Starbucks.’
This is true. Greta has seen it happen more than once over the last week. And Amber has never acknowledged it, or commented on it, and now there is no camera on her.
‘Is that why you agreed to do the film?’ Greta asks. ‘So people could get to know you better?’
‘No.’ Amber shrugs. ‘The money was good. Hey, slow down!’
Greta slams on the brakes, realising as she does that – for once – the road ahead is clear. Amber stretches an arm up above the windscreen, phone in hand, and snaps a photo of the road sign high above them, the lane instruction: Anaheim, a Mickey Mouse silhouette beside it. The sky is bright and blue beyond.
‘Perfect,’ Amber says, looking at the image and then opening Instagram. ‘Urgh, I love this song.’
They drive in a companionable silence for a while, the landscape wide and dusty under the endless blue. Greta tries not to think about the schedule for the next week, which Federica also set out in her email, packed full of location work, interviews, research. She tries not to think of the latest text from her, either, sent at 4 a.m. LA time: Sooooo sorry again. Disaster here. I think this could be it: over. Done. Don’t know what to do. Followed, one minute later, by: Could you suggest to A that we do a school visit on Tues? I know she wasn’t keen on filming there before but think it’ll be a strong image – remind audience how young she is.
Seven minutes later: xxx
Greta can picture the scene when they arrive back in London. Federica puffy-eyed and sulky, endlessly checking her phone. She’ll turn it on for Amber, of course, will heave her suitcase on to the trolley for her (the trolley abandoned to Greta minutes later) and move her carefully through the airport and into the waiting car, chatting all the while, letting Greta, Tom and Luca fall behind. And when Amber is safely in the hotel they’ve booked for her in London, the façade will fall. Then it’ll be the two of them, the boys making their excuses, and Federica will pull her chair up close where her warm, meaty breath can reach Greta. The words will spill out, the details of whatever Millie, Federica’s novelist girlfriend, has found out or done (the latter unlikely; the former inevitable), and somehow this will feed back into a discussion of the project and all the ways in which Greta could have handled the situation better.
They’ve worked together twice before; once when Greta had just finished college and a friend’s uncle, whose Hertfordshire estate was a popular (and profitable) filming location, got her a job as a runner on a period drama. Federica was an assistant director while
the director was a formidable man in his fifties, known for wandering around the set in dark glasses, whispering acidly to his assistant but never speaking to any other member of the crew. Federica, on the other hand, with her bushy hair wrangled into a ponytail at the base of her neck, her own sunglasses always helping to marshal it back, spoke to anyone and everyone, a machine-gun patter of complaint as she walked through each room and tent: ‘You – what’s wrong with that reflector?’ ‘You – what is that painting doing there?’ ‘You – learned your lines today for a change?’ She took a liking to Greta, who moved fast and never answered back, and when the poor set assistant hung the painting on the wrong wall yet again, she was fired on the spot and Greta – ‘You’, a stubby finger stabbed in her direction – installed in her place.
Later, when Greta had notched up several similar and better jobs, a producer she had come to know and like (and once, ill-advisedly, allowed to kiss her in a prop storage warehouse in Shoreditch, a smell of mothballs and oil filling her throat, a broken neon arrow flashing feebly in a corner somewhere) had recommended her to Federica for a new film she was working on. Federica had invited her to her office in Soho and then, when Greta was ten minutes away, had texted to change the meeting to a coffee shop in Bethnal Green. Greta had arrived thirty minutes later, her thin floral top stuck to her back with sweat, the waistband of her jeans rubbing fiercely into her flesh. And Federica, sitting at a small wobbly table out on the pavement, dark glasses on and hair fluffed out into a sunlit cloud behind her, had simply smiled and taken a sip of her coffee. ‘You’ll learn,’ she’d said, and Greta has.
The low-budget film they worked on then – a tiny crew of six, including Tom and Luca – had been a terrifying success. Not overnight; a cult success, followed by a moderate one, until suddenly Federica was stepping up on to a glassy stage, standing at a gold-leafed podium with an award clutched tightly in those wide, flat hands. A documentary about a notorious husband and wife who murdered hitchhikers in Texas over a period of three years, it gained critical praise for the access Federica was able to wheedle from the couple’s children. Amber has already told Greta that she’s seen it three times.
When Greta tells people that she worked on that film – which was originally called A Sort of Darkness, after something the youngest son of the couple said in one particularly harrowing interview (after sitting in on this interview, Greta drew her hotel blinds and went to bed at 3 p.m., every available blanket wrapped around her despite the blistering temperature outside), and which the distribution company eventually persuaded Federica to call My Parents Are Murderers – they like to tell her how much they love it. ‘Like a horror film,’ one friend gushed to her at a house party in a cramped flat in Camden. ‘Except real!’ She said it like it was a compliment, they all do. But they weren’t there. They don’t know.
A child is crying again, she’s sure of it. It takes her a second to remember that they’re on the highway, just the two of them. That the speakers are playing a song from Amber’s phone, the melody high and wailing.
‘We’re almost there!’ Amber squeals, leaning out over her door to take a photo of another sign. ‘Oh my God, I’m so excited.’
And Greta’s surprised to find she is too, just a little. It feels a bit like they’re escaping, leaving something behind, even though she was apprehensive at being alone with Amber, the twin ballasts of Tom and Luca cut adrift. She remembers going to Tivoli Gardens with her parents on a holiday to visit friends in Copenhagen when she was small, the way the rides whirled and people smiled and the way her hand felt in her mother’s.
She turns on to Disneyland Drive and wonders what Tom is doing, whether he and Luca are still working through Federica’s wish list of footage (a list that includes such specific items as ‘Child on beach with balloon or ball. Wind carrying balloon/ball away?’ and ‘Teen girls/young-looking drinking/laughing dark bar lots of neon’) or whether they’ve given up and gone for a beer somewhere. She could text and invite them to come here, she thinks – if the traffic stays this light, they could make it in time. It’d be nice to have Tom there, maybe.
But when she pulls into a space in the vast parking lot, Amber turns, a hand flashing out white-hot against Greta’s arm. ‘Thanks so much for bringing me,’ she says, those cattish green eyes locked on Greta’s. ‘It’s nice of you.’
Before Greta can reply, the hand is gone again, its heat evaporating slowly from her skin, and Amber is climbing out of the car, her ponytail whipped up by a breeze as she looks around the car park in search of the shuttle bus that will take them away.
They walk up Main Street, Sleeping Beauty Castle looming ahead of them, while Amber aims her phone at buildings and characters. Outside a taffy shop, she asks a guy dressed as Aladdin if she can take a photo with him – and then surprises Greta by pulling her into frame too. There they are, the three of them with their faces close together, Amber’s arm stretched right up to fit them in and her other hand gripping Greta’s.
‘I always loved Aladdin,’ she says when they are walking away. ‘That was my favourite of the films.’ She glances at the photo and then at Greta. ‘I used to sit on this rug we had in the house and pretend I could fly away on it. So lame.’
Greta smiles. ‘My brother and I used to pretend we were the Aristocats.’
Amber considers this, eyes narrowed. ‘I didn’t know you had a brother.’
‘Yes. He lives in the Middle East at the moment. He’s a journalist.’
‘Fancy. Shall we buy some taffy?’
She picks the biggest box, along with a snow globe with a miniature version of the castle perched inside. She shakes it violently and watches the glitter settle, the last flakes drifting down the glass, and then she wanders off, leaving Greta to pay with a credit card she hopes will hold out for at least a day longer. Federica will pay the expenses eventually but it’s a haphazard affair; a wad of battered and crumpled notes handed over one day, vague promises of a bank transfer another. It’ll all be worth it, Greta reminds herself, though the thought of having to call her parents to ask for a loan in the meantime makes her sweat despite the shop’s industrial-strength air conditioning.
‘Let’s go on a ride,’ Amber says, when Greta rejoins her outside. The sun is climbing steadily in the sky, the heat dry and aggressive.
Greta agrees warily, and they wander through the park, Amber rooting through the box of white-wrappered taffy. ‘It all tastes the same,’ she declares after a fourth piece, her jaw working steadily at it. She hands the box to Greta. ‘Why do they do that?’
Greta’s wariness begins to fade as they pass signs for the Haunted Mansion and Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, Amber heading instead past the castle and into the tamer Fantasyland. She’s surprised, though, when Amber laughs and says ‘This one’ to the old-fashioned flying Dumbos. It’s a little kids’ ride, the elephants slowly bobbing up and down as they turn to the sleepy organ music, but Amber clicks photo after photo on her phone and pulls Greta into line with her.
‘So cute!’ she says. ‘You know, this used to be on the advert for Disneyland when I was a kid.’
Greta doesn’t doubt it. Amber’s memory is turning out to be forensic and photographic; tiny, irrelevant details about things retrieved in an instant. She thinks of those narrowed eyes: I didn’t know you had a brother. She wonders what else Amber stores in her Greta file. She wonders what Sebastian, who has travelled to and reported from war zones all over the world, would think of his sister taking a teenage murderer to Disneyland to gain her trust.
Ride stopped, they climb into the cavity of an elephant, a mother and a fussing toddler in the one in front of them. Amber scans through her phone and Greta can’t help glancing down at the screen too. Twitter: 1,350 notifications. She catches a glimpse of a couple as Amber’s thumb trawls down them.
U sexy for a crazy bitch.
Hey Amber, saw you on Good Morning America. Wanted to say you’re really brave.
watching @amber_banner on tv.
u believe this shit? Bitch is some sick freak
Hey Amber, follow me back? ily
Amber Banner looking fierce on the cover of Hollywood Reporter today. Girl may be twisted AF but I like her style
Greta is numb to it now – she’s trawled through the comments section of too many articles on Amber, has columns on her TweetDeck tracking Amber’s handle and her name (because sometimes people want to draw Amber’s attention to what they are saying about her – and sometimes they don’t). She’s seen the tide of public opinion turn over the course of the trial; Amber going from ice princess and sadistic teen murderess to brave and tragic and badass. The girl who laughed outside the court in which she was facing trial for the most horrendous crime to the girl who stood in the dock and wept as the story of the Tall Man was finally let loose. The girl who stood on the steps of that courthouse with that secret smile, free again. And the whole time, the world was watching. The world was captivated by every sordid detail. She remembers an article that ran on the MailOnline on day 34 of the trial, the day things really began to change for Amber. The way the details of the defence’s case had been accompanied by a full-length photo of Amber leaving the courtroom, a box-out with details of how to ‘Get the look’ and links to lookalike shirts. On the same day, a feminist blog Greta loves ran a piece entitled ‘Amber Banner does not have to cry for you to prove she is innocent: Resting Bitch Face and the perils of trial by media’. Greta’s read all of it. Every column inch, every thinkpiece, every comment, every tweet. They don’t surprise her any more.
She watches Amber’s face as she scrolls through those notifications. A slight reaction here and there; a twitch of an eyebrow or the corner of her mouth. She wonders if they lodge in her memory too – the softer words sinking away while the sharper ones claw their way to the surface. You wouldn’t know it from the outside – but Greta doesn’t want to believe that the outside is all there is. If that is true, there is no story. She thinks of Tom on the beach. It’s easy to get lost trying to find the story in something. Sometimes people are just bad. If Greta starts to believe that, she may as well quit now.