by Victoria Fox
It seemed to Aurora that her parents weren’t spending much time together at all these days: whenever she’d Skyped or called from the UK, they’d scarcely known the whereabouts of the other. She hoped they weren’t on the brink of a divorce. Despite the wealth of clichés attached to their names, this was one they had so far managed to avoid.
There were several cabins and lake houses on the ranch, of which Creekside was the biggest. It was a rambling wooden lodge with bearskins on the floor and antlered deer heads bolted to the walls. Aurora thought it was weird since her dad was the least macho guy she could imagine. In fact, with all his cosmetics and clothes and his gentle manner, he was quite, well, feminine. He hadn’t hunted the beasts down himself, of course, but it was as if he enjoyed parading the alpha thing. Sometimes, when he was writing, he’d pace the floor, hands on hips, and stand wide-legged in front of one of them, Stetson on tousled head, for minutes on end. A man with highlighted hair gazing into the eyes of a stuffed dead deer. One mousse looking at another moose. She supposed it was his creative prerogative.
‘Dad, I’m going out!’ Aurora yelled up the stairs. She counted the seconds to his reply, always ten when he was working, as though it took this long for her words to reach him.
‘Sure thing, baby,’ it wafted down eventually. ‘Be careful.’
Be careful? What could she possibly get up to here? She wandered out on to the wide porch, a summer seat swinging gently in the breeze. The prairie grasses whispered and sang; a wild duck flew low over the horizon.
She missed Pascale badly. Life seemed so mediocre without her. Despite the rigours of boarding school and how much Aurora disliked it, Pascale always found a way of making things exciting. She could be anywhere with Pascale and enjoy herself.
As Aurora wandered down to the creek, the sun sweltering overhead in its hot blue sky, she wished her best friend were with her. They had slept together numerous times now, but it hadn’t affected their relationship. Pascale always acted as if nothing had happened, and after the first few occasions Aurora caught on that this was the way things were: sex was just another thing they did together. At first it had crossed Aurora’s mind that she was gay. Despite the number of guys she’d been with, it was possible—look at Lindsay Lohan! But with Pascale it was like she could be a guy or a girl, old or young or thin or fat (maybe not fat) or whatever, it didn’t matter. She was just … Pascale. She was fascinating and alluring and you wanted to be with her all the time and that was it. Pascale talked about her boyfriends in Paris and no doubt was screwing one right this minute. Aurora chose not to care. The bond they shared was unbreakable. It was a different thing, separate to the baggage of a conventional partnership.
At the water’s edge, she knelt down and trailed her hand through the glittering silver. Her reflection stared up at her. Though the weather in England had done zilch for her skin, Aurora appeared younger than she had before she went away. Her eyes had lost their steeliness, her mouth its cynical line. She saw she was more of a girl again.
‘What’re you doin’ down here?’ The strong, lilting Southern accent made Aurora jump. ‘It gets dangerous by the water, y’know.’
The man was about forty, broad and well built, and wearing a red and brown lumberjack shirt and work pants. She recognised him as one of the farmhands, Billy-Bob. A real hick: thick as you like, would probably shag anything that moved, but with a hot labourer’s body. Perhaps this break didn’t have to be so uninspiring, after all. Aurora stood, dusted off her bare knees and fixed him with an ice-blue stare.
‘Does Tom know where you’ve got to?’ Billy-Bob asked. He had fair stubble round his chin, on the cusp of growing into a beard.
‘How dangerous?’ Aurora asked.
Billy-Bob frowned. ‘Huh?’
‘You said it got dangerous by the water.’ She took a step forward. It had been too long since she’d had a man. ‘I asked how dangerous.’
He stayed where he was. ‘Let’s get you back up to the house, little girl.’
Aurora reached out and put a hand on his chest. It was warm and solid. She could feel his steady workman’s heart beneath her palm. He didn’t flinch.
‘I’m good at handling danger, you know,’ she murmured. ‘I’m good at handling a lot of things.’ Her eyes flicked down to his crotch—even through his jeans she could see the size of him. She came closer, pressing herself up against his body. He smelled of sweat and grease, and the invigorating cool of someone who spends their time outdoors. Sure enough, he stiffened.
Billy-Bob glanced over his shoulder once or twice, seemed to think for a moment, before fumbling with the buckle on his belt. Aurora smirked. Men were so easy.
Up at Creekside, Tom Nash gazed out of his studio window at the expanse of grassland that ran down to the river. He watched as Billy-Bob Hocker came into view, check shirt sweating from his morning’s work, his strong, wide back and the swagger of his gait as he made his way up from the water. As the farmhand rounded the stables, stopping to pat their prize stallion on the nose and scratch the animal’s muzzle, Tom backed away from the glass. He felt like the yearning pariah hidden up in the attic, craving a reality that could never be his.
Tom ran a hand across his forehead, imagining it was a slate he could wipe clean. He picked up his favourite Gibson acoustic and started to strum absent-mindedly, reluctantly turning his thoughts to Aurora and wherever she might have got to. He knew he ought to spend more time with his only daughter while she was here, but this darned album wasn’t going to write itself.
Ordinarily Tom didn’t find the creative process quite so difficult. Perhaps it was because, this time, his wife didn’t care about being involved. Sherilyn was too out of it: it was enough for him to get the material down, stick her in front of a recording mic and encourage her to deliver the notes. Or maybe she was still reeling from Aurora’s behaviour last year. Even now her legs shook whenever she was forced to venture into the games room back in LA, and he himself thought twice before using any of the pool cues.
On darker days he worried Sherilyn was at risk of blowing the whole thing open, jeopardising all that they had worked for; the reasons why they had made that choice in the first place. And there were reasons, of course there were. How could America’s number one duo, advocators of good, clean-living Christian ideology, possibly confess to …?
What his wife needed was to get away, drink in some air and stop listening to that shrink Lindy Martin once and for all. He swore Lindy made up all kinds of horse shit to keep Sherilyn coughing up the cash, and the more shit she got fed, the hungrier she became for it. Was he the only sane one left in this family? Women! No wonder he was the way he was.
Maybe he’d organise her coming down here by herself for a few days—that might help her get things back on track. They were both concerned for Aurora, but at least school seemed to have calmed her a bit. Even so, what Aurora needed right now, above all else, was her mother.
That reminded him.
Putting down his guitar, Tom opened his desk drawer, pulled out his chequebook and flipped it open. As he did every time, he paused a moment before, teeth gritted, he filled in the amount of money. Writing it in figures was preferable to penning it in full: it was enough to feed a small country for a week. Tom felt nauseous after he’d done it, but this was coupled with a pinch of respite. Another three months before he had to do it again. He could rest easy till then.
He flicked on the radio, hoping for inspiration. Instead, Billy Ray Cyrus blasted into the space. Sonofabitch! He slumped back down in front of the equipment. Was it a sign this record was jinxed?
No way. Tom Nash was in a different league. He was a megastar, the heart of the country and western music scene and the core of conservative Uncle Sam. Keep paying the bills, four times a year to make sure they kept quiet, and long may it stay that way.
He checked himself in the mirror.
Billy Ray, eat your heart out. For starters, he had better hair.
Aurora had be
en back at school a month when she found out she was pregnant.
‘You look rough!’ diagnosed Eugenie Beaufort in the dining room one morning. Aurora was spooning sugar on to her cereal in an attempt to garner energy. Her body felt wracked and tired, and she was having difficulty keeping food down.
They sent her to the san. Nurse Cranley put her in a horrible room with bars on the windows and a creepy picture of a Pierrot clown on the wall, a drooping yellow flower hanging from its downturned mouth.
‘Is there any possibility you’re pregnant?’ she asked straight away.
‘Um, I don’t think so,’ said Aurora, concentrating solely on not being sick.
‘No, or you don’t think so?’
‘I don’t think so.’ She got into bed and pulled the starched white linen up to her chin. Nurse Cranley brought her a bucket and told her to stay put.
Pascale visited at lunch with a test. ‘I can tell you are without you even doing it.’
‘Don’t say that,’ Aurora groaned.
‘Well, I can.’
‘How?’
‘The colour of your skin.’ She helped Aurora sit up and peered down the corridor for approaching staff. ‘Better you find out with me than with that old hag. Come on.’
In the bathroom Aurora peed on the little white stick and waited, anxiously twisting her thumbs. Pascale sat with her the whole time, on the edge of the bathtub, and told her when her two minutes were up. Sure enough, two blue lines appeared in the tiny window.
Aurora whimpered. This was the very worst thing that could have happened. She had slept with her dad’s farmhand on three occasions while at Creekside, but it was only that first time they’d neglected to use protection. She had to admit she’d been careless with guys before and nothing had happened—trust Billy-Bob Hocker to have some super-sperm potency. Come to think of it, there was every chance he was inbred. Which meant she probably had some six-legged freak scuttling about inside of her.
‘What the fuck am I going to do?’ she despaired.
Pascale was unfazed. ‘You’ll have to have an abortion,’ she said bluntly.
Aurora’s head was spinning. She was too young to have an abortion. The word itself was cold and ugly, reserved for other women, not her. What if it hurt? What if it left her barren?
But she knew she was also too young to have a child. She was still a child herself, for God’s sake! And she couldn’t deal with a normal baby, let alone one whose dad was also its brother or whatever. There was no other way. Pascale was right. It was the only option.
‘My mom and dad can’t know,’ she said, still sitting on the loo with her knickers down by her ankles. ‘They’ll murder me.’
‘Don’t worry, my parents will organise it.’ Pascale stood. ‘They’ll organise everything. They’ve done it for me before.’
Aurora looked up. ‘You’ve had one?’
‘Two, actually.’ She paused. ‘The only way you can keep this to yourself is if we take it out of school. Come to Paris for the weekend. All we have to say then is that you got sick again and needed to stay in the apartment. When you’re better, you can come back.’
Aurora chewed her lip. ‘You’d do that for me?’ She thought of Gisele and Arnaud Devereux, those fierce, powerful politicians of whom everyone seemed afraid. ‘They’d do that for me?’
‘Of course.’ Pascale shrugged, plucking the stick out of her hand. ‘You’re my friend. But for now we need to get rid of this. Quickly.’
Girls weren’t typically permitted to get out of school for the weekend unless it was exeat, but clearly the Devereux family commanded exception. One phone call from Arnaud Devereux, combined with an expertly forged note by Pascale on Sherilyn Rose’s behalf, and the trip was organised for Friday. The girls would travel down to London’s Kings Cross, where they’d take a first-class Eurostar shuttle to the heart of the French capital. Aurora would have been excited were she not so horrified. At night she tried to sleep, that ugly word ‘abortion’ looping over and over in her mind, keeping her awake, staring into the dark and listening to her dorm-mates’ gentle, untroubled breathing.
Aurora decided not to think of the germ of life inside her—because it wasn’t alive, not really, not yet. Unexpectedly Sherilyn and Tom’s inability to have any more kids popped into her head and she endured an irrational twist of guilt. It was stupid. What did she fancy herself to be, some surrogate for her own mother? The thought was fucking ludicrous. Going to Paris, getting the abortion, it was the right thing to do.
The night before they left, one of Tom Nash’s old music videos came on in the common room. Everyone jeered as his leather-clad body ground to the screaming crowd of overweight Middle America. A pair of knickers got thrown at him. Aurora bolted, unable to take either the embarrassment or the guilt trip, as Tom gazed into the camera, beseeching, seeming to ask her, Why? Sure, she’d misbehaved before, she’d done bad things, but nothing that came close to this. This wasn’t a stupid lie like the ones she told her dad from time to time—this was serious. Would she ever again be able to look him in the eye?
In Pascale’s room, they packed. Aurora had brought along her designer cases but Pascale advised her to keep it compact: they were supposedly only going for two nights and didn’t want to give themselves away before they’d even left.
‘You can wear whatever of mine is in the Paris apartment,’ said Pascale. ‘Or my mother has plenty of clothes.’
From her friend’s bedside table, Aurora picked up a framed photograph of two men and a woman. One of the men—Arnaud Devereux, she guessed—had his arm round the woman. They possessed serious, angular features, and judicious, though not unfriendly, faces.
‘Is this them?’ she asked.
Pascale nodded.
‘Who’s he?’ She pointed to the man standing with them, a small distance away though she imagined the photographer had told them to pose together. He was younger, maybe thirty, and shared some of their physiognomy—you could tell they were related. But where Arnaud and Gisele had softer edges to their expressions, this man did not. He was arresting to look at, almost unkind. A deep scar ran between his nose and top lip.
‘That’s my cousin,’ said Pascale, folding a dress into her Mulberry valise. ‘JB.’
‘Is he close to your parents?’
‘His own parents are dead.’
Aurora put the photo back down. ‘He’s the one who told you that story.’
‘What story?’
‘The one about the Devil in the Dordogne.’
Pascale smiled in a way Aurora disliked: as though Aurora was missing some obvious point. ‘I told you that story.’
‘But he told it to you first. He told you the Devil had come to get you … and that’s what made you afraid.’
Pascale zipped up her bag, and, with it, the conversation. ‘I was never afraid.’
A throng of chattering girls bustled into the dorm, squealing and laughing over a minor rebellion. Aurora and Pascale scooped up their bags and took them downstairs to the hall, ready for tomorrow’s pick-up.
They went to the bushes for a cigarette and smoked in silence, each girl lost in her own thoughts and not quite ready to share them.
23
Stevie
Marty introduced her to Xander Jakobson over lunch at The Ivy. At thirty-two, Xander was a young writer/director who had made his name in a popular US sitcom about doctors. He was very dark, Jewish, and had a serious, searching stare that made him look as if he was about to ask some examining question of the person at the end of it.
Xander’s new movie was a sharp, satirical spin on life on the Vegas Strip. Stevie was in talks for the lead role: a showgirl with a troubled past who receives an irresistible offer from a mysterious stranger. The script attracted her straight away: it was clever, daring and empowering. Xander had managed to get inside the female head seamlessly, every word, every feeling, rang true. The showgirl’s character combined everything that Stevie recognised from her own experiences of
falling in love with the wrong man. She knew it would echo through the hearts of women everywhere. According to Marty, it signalled a breakthrough project for both of them.
The following Friday, her agent called with news that she had the part.
‘You’re going to Vegas?’ Ben Reiner whined. These days he barely left the apartment, slumping into evidence mid-afternoon following a heavy night in which he’d drunk what little money he had, or having spent a morning in a marathon session with a box of tissues and his repulsive downloads—sometimes both. Stevie could no longer stand him.
‘Yes,’ she answered tersely. ‘And it’s probably for the best.’
‘Who’s gonna get the food in?’ he muttered, yanking open the fridge and surveying its scant contents.
‘You could buy stuff,’ she said. ‘It’s not that difficult.’
‘We’re not all rolling in it,’ he retorted snappily.
Stevie knew her own career was highlighting a bitter contrast with Ben’s, but it seemed she couldn’t win. If she were sitting in the LA apartment all day, out of work, sure, it might make him feel better. But who, then, would pay all the bills and provide him with endless pizza takeaway and Oreo cookies? All he seemed to do was hole up with the blinds drawn, watching DVDs and eating Ben & Jerry’s. It was like he had a permanent bout of PMT.
Vegas was a welcome alternative.
The cast and their entourage were being put up in the Desert Jewel Hotel, a monster enterprise on the North Strip. Stevie was met by Wanda Gerund, her PR, a glossy brunette with all the chat and charm of an exemplary publicist, but with Rottweiler tenacity.
‘We’ve promised the press a photo op this afternoon,’ Wanda said once they were up in Stevie’s suite. ‘Save us all the pleasure of them trailing you about on-set.’
Stevie was too busy absorbing her surroundings. It was her first time in Sin City and the awesomeness of it surpassed her expectations. She’d never seen anything like it. People claimed the old glamour had faded, and that nowadays it was less the mob and more Mickey Mouse, but no one could deny the sheer ambition of it. With its kitsch cabarets, novelty hotels and the relentless drum of the casinos, it was the sort of place she ought to have felt uncomfortable. Certainly where the shy girl who’d arrived in New York last year would have felt uncomfortable. Now here she was, amid the opulence, part of it, an actress with her own publicist. It was mad.
