As she reached out to place his coffee on the table, the slices of toast balanced on her mug of tea fell to the floor, marmalade-side down.
‘Bad luck,’ he said automatically, without even turning his head. She bent down to throw the toast in the wastepaper bin and was struck by the sight of a bunch of withered blooms, almost certainly her own arrangement, rammed inside it. Still more disturbingly, poking up between the dry stems, she saw the corner of a laminated photograph, that if she wasn’t mistaken, was a profile view of herself, taken in the back yard of Seventh Heaven.
At that moment, Celeste was distracted by a quiet beep coming from the storage space above the wardrobe. Raising her head, she saw a tiny red flashing light winking at her from between two filing boxes on the top of the wardrobe. She froze. As her eyes focused on the spot, she could see not only the flashing red dot of light, but also the reflection of a black circular lens. What the fuck was the kid playing at? This was freaky. She understood now why he hadn’t asked her to come straight back with him from college – he wanted time to clear his room and set up the webcam before she arrived. Was he some kind of stalker or pervert – offering his services to fix her computer but secretly pursuing his own agenda to lure her to his room and film her covertly? It was pathetic – and sad.
Her first impulse was to give vent to her outrage and escape but in a split-second decision she stifled the urge to shout and scream, grab her computer and run from the room, and chose instead to pretend that she had seen nothing.
Theo was besotted with her – that much was now blindingly obvious. But however uncomfortable that made her feel, she wasn’t afraid of this dysfunctional teenager. In a way she felt sorry for him, her ghostly apparition. A plan was beginning to form in her head. She needed time to think it through and work out how she could turn Theo’s obsession to her own advantage.
PAST
23
Even before they get to his house where the party is in full swing, she’s swigging from the vodka bottle to get in the mood. Tonight, she’s his girl. The chosen one. Ben installs Tom in his bedroom in front of his gaming console and she loses herself in the cavern of gyrating bodies, and exposed flesh, and loud music, and shrieking teenage girls, and zombie-eyed testosterone-fuelled teenage boys, that his living room has become. But he comes to find her in the throng, holding out a big glass of red wine (sprinkled with something else she doesn’t know about) that she gulps down much too fast, and they dance, and she’s bouncing off the walls and she’s falling into his arms, and it’s never felt so good until he goes off in search of a beer – and doesn’t come back.
The beams seem to buckle and tilt as she makes her way to where he’s entrenched with his pack. Unopposed pack leader – he has a Budweiser in one hand and a roll-up in the other. He’s man-splaying – if that can be a thing for a teenage boy? But he looks like a man. Broad-chested, ripped with muscles, at least six feet tall. Flanker in the rugby scrum and fastest kid on the pitch. All-round sixth form hero. His mood has changed – and his manner – now that he has an audience. He beckons her over – proprietorial, coercive, he who must be obeyed! That is, unless she wants to risk becoming the school pariah, a social outcast… He doesn’t take kindly to losing face!
Despite her best efforts with the make-up (vampire eyes and glossy red lipstick – now smudged from the kissing on the dance floor), next to him she looks like a child. Even in her ridiculously high heels, she only comes up to his shoulder and she’s so slender that she seems breakable.
‘Come here, I saved this for you!’ She inhales deeply and everything goes hazy.
*
She goes over on one ankle and falls heavily against his chest. He puts his arms around her and half-carries her up the spiral stairs to his bedroom. It’s easy – she feels light – and his bulk is rock solid from training for the rugby team.
He puts her down outside his bedroom. The door is shut. Tom is in there. He forgot.
‘Where’s Tom?’ she says, slurring her words. Then more frantically, as he blocks her way, ‘What are you playing at?’ She bursts into tears. ‘Let me past. I want to check he’s OK.’ She beats his solid chest with her small fists.
‘Stop worrying! Relax!’ he says calmly, not moving an inch. He looks down into her anxious blue eyes circled with black stains. ‘He’s got my whole Xbox collection to keep him occupied. He’ll be fine. No one will disturb him here.’
He doesn’t like being made to wait. Her tousled agitation makes him horny as hell. He manhandles her along the corridor to the bathroom door. It’s also locked. He knocks on the door and rolls himself a joint. He shoves her back against the wall, holding her upright with one arm and exploring down the front of her top with his free hand. Her lips are blow-job-red. He takes the joint from his mouth and places it between them before bending down to kiss her breasts. God – he hadn’t expected to want her this way, but her skin feels so soft and she smells so good! He flicks the lighted joint from her lips to the floorboards, presses his mouth against hers and hungrily forces his tongue to the back of her throat until their teeth clash.
He’s so hard inside his jeans that it hurts.
Still kissing her deeply, he raps loudly on the bathroom door. There’s no answer, just a stomach-heaving noise that sounds like someone throwing up into the toilet bowl.
She gags. The combination of spirits and red wine and pot and his curry breath and searching tongue and the pressure on her belly and the noises off have done their work. He’s not too drunk to pick up on her disgust and pulls away abruptly. She sways and slides down the wall to her knees so that her face is level with his hips.
Feeling like the lead in his own porno clip, he grabs her thick long hair at the nape and pushes her head firmly forwards with one hand while he plucks at his belt with the other. He feels the weight of her skull as her head lolls. She is literally ‘off her head’. His fingers work at his buckle. Inside the bathroom, someone flushes the toilet. He hesitates. Behind the door, the retching noise begins again. And then he changes tack.
‘Come on you need some fresh air,’ he says, dragging her up roughly by the arm. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
PRESENT
24
It didn’t take me long to get your website fixed – simply a case of neutralising the virus I’d introduced into the software. And before I logged out from your laptop, I introduced a system upgrade, developed by me, especially for You.
You asked for it. You wanted anti-virus software to improve the security of your website. I gave You a copy of my own – specially modified, of course. I could make money out of this one day – I’m good and there must be a market for it – at least on the Dark Web. But for now, it’s for my own personal use. Anti-virus software with an additional modification – my own brand of spyware. With it, I can access a mirror image of your screens 24/7, real-time, at the click of a button. For as long as You want to make a success of your business venture, I hold all the cards. CelestialHeadstones.com is nothing without a website.
The other day You put me in my place. Made me feel like an awkward, adolescent boy when you came to my room. You’re better than that. We’re better than that.
I’ll forgive You – just this once.
*
The young woman was flipping through the florist’s Wedding Portfolios when Celeste came into the Bridal Room at Seventh Heaven. She looked up and gave a big smile. She had a confident and open face with perfectly straight, whitened toothpaste-ad teeth, big trusting puppy-dog eyes, and stunning blonde hair. Although it was only ten o’clock on a Wednesday morning, she was wearing a full face of make-up with false eyelashes and glossy pink lipstick. Celeste groaned inwardly but immediately checked her instinctive dislike – it wasn’t fair to judge her before she’d even opened her mouth to speak. Perhaps she felt under pressure to look this way? Perhaps it wasn’t her fault that she looked like a Barbie doll?
When the bride-to-be introduced herself, Celeste was relieved to hear
her American accent. So, she wasn’t one of the Made In Chelsea set – they were always so demanding – for those women always had such set ideas and impossible ideals of perfection. Meghan had told Celeste that the bride-to-be had come in for an initial consultation – but it soon became clear that she had already decided to use Seventh Heaven as her wedding florist and that the wedding date was imminent – there was no time to lose.
Celeste happily spent more than two hours with the new client explaining all the options and running through the albums and online galleries that Meghan had put together showcasing previous weddings and illustrations of designs for the bridal bouquet, bridesmaids’ flowers, buttonholes for the groom and best man, flower headbands and corsages for the ladies in the wedding party, flowers for the ceremony and flowers for the reception. As Meghan had said, it was good for her to be working on flowers for a joyful event for a change – she realised now that all the time she spent working in graveyards had been making her morbid and depressed.
Celeste had to admit that Mia seemed very nice, if a little dumb. Moreover, she, along with her fiancé, appeared to be minted (judging by the gold Cartier bangle on her wrist) and not afraid of flashing it around (starting with the huge stone glinting on her engagement finger). This made her an attractive client as far as Meghan was concerned. It came as no surprise to Celeste that Mia was tempted by the Heavenly Platinum Opulence wedding package, which was the most prestigious offered by Seventh Heaven. It turned out that no expense was to be spared for the wedding, even though the event was apparently going to be small and exclusive.
Mia told Celeste that all the guests at the wedding would be on the groom’s side other than her dearest friend who had been working in Paris for the last two years and was flying over to be her chief and only bridesmaid. She confided that the wedding was being held at short notice and without the knowledge of her family who were all based in the north-eastern United States, mostly in New York City and Long Island – she gave a nervous giggle and tapped her stomach.
‘Nine weeks,’ she whispered. ‘I haven’t told anyone from home about the baby or the wedding, except for my best friend and she’s sworn to secrecy. They don’t like him – my new fiancé, you see. It’s not really fair but my family blame him for the break-up of my previous relationship. They think I’m here on holiday but I’m not going back.’
Perhaps because of all the secrecy, Mia seemed bursting to share and very soon Celeste knew every detail. She learnt that Mia Madison came from a family of old-school Catholics – one of those dynastic Democratic clans that pass for minor royalty in America. Members of her family had rubbed shoulders with the Kennedys for generations and she had grown up in a closed and privileged social sphere. Since high school she’d been in a relationship with a boy from a similar background – in fact, Mia understood that they shared the same bloodlines – were fourth or fifth cousins removed or something of the kind. Mia’s parents had always assumed she would marry her teenage sweetheart (though she herself had suspected for some time that deep down he might be gay, because he didn’t seem able to commit). Whatever!
Mia had met her new English fiancé while working as a celebrity events planner in New York, and well, he’d come on strong and she’d fallen for him hard, and he’d proposed to her after a whirlwind romance when she discovered she was pregnant, and had brought her back to London to get married away from her family, where they could not exert pressure on her to think again or castigate her with scandalised pronouncements about the ‘impropriety and sin’ of her unmarried pregnancy.
‘My future husband has forbidden me from having any communication with my family,’ she blurted out, twisting her engagement ring nervously.
Really? thought Celeste but she kept her mouth shut.
‘So here I am,’ Mia gushed on. ‘The wedding is booked for May 21st at The Chelsea Register office. That gives me just over six weeks to make all the arrangements.’
Of course, they had chosen The Chelsea Register Office in Chelsea Old Town Hall. It was the obvious local iconic venue if you didn’t want a church wedding. Celeste knew that many famous couples had tied the knot there – Patsy Kensit married second husband rock singer Jim Kerr in 1992, Judy Garland wedded Mickey Deans in 1969, only months before the singer’s tragic death, and Bessie Wallis Warfield married her second husband, Ernest Simpson, in 1928, becoming Mrs Wallis Simpson. So many of these marriages had dramatic or traumatic associations. Yet in spite of this (or perhaps because of…) it was still the most fashionable place to get married within the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.
‘An elopement! How exciting!’ said Celeste, her tone half-joking and half-ironic. ‘I thought that was a thing of the past.’ She wondered at the rush.
‘You haven’t met my father… or my brother…’ said Mia only half-joking. ‘It would be a shotgun wedding, or a contract killing if they knew about it!’
‘What about your fiancé?’ said Celeste. ‘Isn’t he going to help with all the wedding preparations?’
‘He’s left it all to me,’ she said. ‘He says he’s got too much going on at work, and I’m the events planner anyway, so he’s told me to sort it all out. He says he doesn’t care what I choose as long as it’s “absolutely fabulous” and I “do him proud!”’ She attempted a comical imitation of the bridegroom’s upper-class English accent.
‘Well, you’ve come to the right place for the flowers,’ said Celeste briskly, thinking privately that the man’s attitude was an easy cop-out. He sounded like a jerk – piling on the pressure with his wedding proposal, forcing her to uproot and emigrate at short notice, cutting her off from her family and then leaving his pregnant bride to do all the work at a time when she should be getting as much rest and relaxation as possible.
Celeste was touched by Mia’s trusting naïveté in pouring out her story to a complete stranger.
‘How did you find us, by the way?’ she asked as Mia was preparing to leave.
‘Oh, that was easy. I just googled “most beautiful wedding flowers London” on my fiancé’s laptop. Seventh Heaven came up immediately – top of the list.’ Celeste cheered inwardly. That must have been thanks to Theo’s computer algorithms. He had been helping her to expand the profile and boost the sales of Seventh Heaven. He knew all the tricks of the trade when it came to ‘optimisation of the digital presence’.
Celeste put down her notebook, gave her fullest smile and leant across the table to take both Mia’s hands in hers. She felt sorry for the sweet young woman, about the same age as herself, so innocent and so eager to please with her guileless American charm.
‘Well I’m so glad you found us,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry. You’re in good hands. We’re going to make sure your wedding day is exquisitely beautiful – truly out of this world.’
PAST
25
He leads her down the stairs, out of the back door and across the lawns. Her stilettos sink into the soft turf so she takes them off and walks barefoot, singing to herself tunelessly and throwing back her head to look up at the stars in the black sky. She knows the way down to the lake. They used to come and play here as kids. He carries her the last bit along the overgrown path that leads down through the trees to the boathouse, swinging her up into his arms like a child or a new bride. At one point he trips on a tree root and she clings on round his neck even tighter and giggles as he swears and lurches forwards before recovering his balance.
The boathouse is padlocked but that doesn’t stop him. Still carrying her across his chest, he kicks down the door, with one hard kick. It seems that no one’s been inside for some time. The air is musty and dank. ‘Boathouse’ is a grand name for it – more like a broken-down old shed. There’s no light inside but part of the roof is missing. Sounds from the party reverberate on the air – pounding music, high-pitched laughter and the occasional echoing shout. In the moonlight shadows the shapes are sinister and menacing. As her eyes adjust, she makes out an old rowing boat raised up on trestles
on one side (that brings back memories…) and on the other a jumble of rusty implements, and dried-up brushes, pots of wood stain and paint, some fishing rods and a broken deck chair. Most of the floorboards have rotted away, exposing the bare earth, icy cold beneath the soles of her feet.
‘Nobody will bother us here,’ he says.
The cold night air has sobered her up a bit and she begins to fear what she has let herself in for. She hasn’t been down to the lake for years. ‘I used to have sleepovers here with the boys when I was a kid,’ he says. He opens a wicker trunk and pulls out a couple of tattered blankets – mildewed and rank.
She tries to keep him talking. ‘I remember coming here when we were little kids too. Remember that time you tried to drown me?’ She gives a nervous laugh. ‘I was scared of the water… before I could swim. You made me get in the rowing boat and rowed us out to the middle of the lake. Then you dropped the oars and swam back to the shore leaving me stranded on the boat.’
He throws a dirty blanket to the floor then pushes her onto the damp ground with one hand as he pulls off his belt with the other. ‘You’re remembering it all wrong,’ he says. ‘You dropped the oars. I swam back to get help.’ Even in her drunken state, Celeste knows he’s lying. In the end it was Ben’s mother who had found them at the lake, swum out and rescued her by towing in the boat. Of course, Ben had blamed Celeste. His mother had been so angry that she had spanked them both for disobeying her orders to keep away from the lake.
‘You always did try to make me your “fall guy” didn’t you?’ she says.
He lies down next to her then pulls her close and makes another ardent ‘learner driver’ attempt at French kissing. His mouth tastes of beer and cigarettes.
No Smoke Without Fire Page 13