Temptation Island

by Victoria Fox

  Except the truth.

  Aurora felt like sitting down in the middle of the store with her head in her hands and just waiting for them to carry her away. This wasn’t living; it was surviving—and only just. She could see no exit. Her confession to Casey had been a waste of time. All it did was prove that no one was ever going to believe her. The island’s story was too far-fetched, too much like fiction.

  And yet it was real.

  Tom was too busy and important to bother with her. He hadn’t even cared when he was away on tour, supposedly fending for the family but what he didn’t realise was that she needed him at home. She didn’t need his cash or his fame or his credit card. She needed answers. She needed explanations. She needed him. Her father.

  Her father…

  She choked on a sob.

  Stupid! Don’t cry. They ‘re nobody to you, remember?

  Aurora fingered the collar on a thousand-dollar vest. She slipped it from its hanger, checked the tag and held it against her, like any ordinary shopper. Without caring who saw, she wandered with it casually draped over one arm, pretending to browse the other items that caught her eye. Then she slid it quietly into her bag and made her way out.

  Easy.

  Too easy.

  ‘Hold it there, miss.’

  Approaching the doors, she quickened her pace.

  ‘Miss, you need to stop right there.’

  She turned. Security loomed over her.

  The big guy took her arm. ‘I think you’ve got something that belongs to us.’

  ‘What the hell were you thinking?’ Tom Nash signed the release papers with an angry flourish and yanked Aurora’s elbow. She’d never seen him so mad.

  ‘It was an accident,’ she mumbled. ‘It sorta fell in.’

  ‘Don’t insult me, Aurora,’ he warned. They emerged from the police station and headed towards Tom’s Escalade. He’d recently had his highlights touched and the effect was a kaleidoscope of flashing honeys and coppers. Beautiful hair. Girls’ hair. ‘I’m this close to snapping right now.’ He pinched a sliver of air between finger and thumb.

  She got in and slammed the door. ‘Sorry,’ she muttered.

  ‘Sorry doesn’t cut it. You know I’m up to my neck in it defending you to the record company. First your mother and now you! Don’t think Stuart didn’t call me. Jesus H, Aurora!’ He banged the steering wheel. ‘Some days it’s like I’m the only one keeping this family afloat.’

  Family, my ass.

  For the gazillionth time she opened her mouth to confront him but no words came out. How was she meant to begin? What was she meant to say?

  ‘I thought that school had finally sorted you,’ Tom ranted on. They crossed the street at speed via an illegal manoeuvre. Car horns blasted. ‘But theft? What next?’ He turned to her. ‘Sometimes I don’t know where we went wrong!’

  Aurora stared out of the window, biting down hard on her lip.

  ‘Well?’ He was waiting for the attitude, the backchat. It didn’t come. ‘What have you got to say for yourself?’

  ‘There’s nothing to say.’

  ‘Don’t you see how lucky you are?’ His voice trembled. ‘I never had what you have when I was a kid. I had nothing. Less than nothing. I never even knew kids had lives like yours! You’ve got it all, everything you could ever want or need, and I’ve given it to you. I’ve given you everything! But it’s still not enough, is it? Theft? When all you had to do was ask me for the money? What would make you do such a stupid thing as that?’ He ran a red light. ‘When have we ever deprived you, Aurora? Go on, when have we?’

  She spoke so quietly that he had to ask her to repeat it.

  ‘I said,’ she mumbled, ‘who’s we?’

  Tom didn’t understand. ‘Your mother and me, who else would I be talking about?’

  She snorted. ‘Mother. Sure.’

  They drove the rest of the way in silence. Tom’s knuckles were white on the wheel. When they arrived at the mansion, he told her she was grounded.

  Being grounded for a day was one thing. Being grounded for a week was entirely another. Seventy-two hours in, Aurora was going out of her head.

  The house was empty. Tom had back-to-back interviews and Sherilyn, for once, had ventured out. Trips to see her Lindy were the only incentive she had to leave her bedroom. She was a complete state, a brittle-boned doll. Like mother, like daughter, Aurora thought wryly.

  Sherilyn’s room was predictably locked, but she knew where the key was kept. It was in the same place she hoarded all the drugs she imagined no one had a clue about.

  The bedroom door opened, releasing a musty, lived-in smell. It was a mix of the cloying scent Sherilyn used to wear and a staleness like breath. Four or five empty chocolate-box trays were strewn across the floor around the bed and it was dark, the blinds drawn.

  Aurora sat on the unmade bed sheets. A packet of pills had been attacked on the cabinet, next to a half-drunk glass of water. Aurora examined the packet, some kind of sedative. She felt defiant touching things, as if she were disturbing artefacts in a museum.

  Getting a taste for snooping, she padded into Sherilyn’s bathroom and rummaged about. Painkillers, sleeping pills, Valium, Xanax … there was a whole pharmacy in here.

  Back in the bedroom she began opening drawers, pulling stuff out and tossing it on the floor. What she was searching for, she wasn’t sure. A birth certificate? A letter? A contract?

  A photo of baby Aurora in the arms of a woman who wasn’t Sherilyn Rose?

  Ridiculous. Of course her hunt threw up nothing. Real life wasn’t like the movies.

  Sherilyn hadn’t updated her walk-in closet in some time. It was a separate room, wall-to-wall with hanging garments, mostly from the eighties in peach and pastels, the underwear compartment filled with baggy, shapeless panties, some of them stained. Whoa. Aurora was pretty sure they didn’t have sex any more, but even so. Morbidly fascinated, she rifled through.

  At the back of the space her hand touched what felt like a card. She pulled it out. White on one side, gold on the other. There was script on the front but because it had been torn, the edges papery and ragged, it was impossible to make out what it said.

  Aurora felt about for the remaining pieces, just two more. When she pieced them together, she saw what the card was.

  Bingo.

  Reuben van der Meyde was having a party. On Cacatra. This summer.

  It looked like the mother of all parties.

  The mother.

  No doubt Tom and Sherilyn were very special guests. Except they, or at least she, had elected not to go. Surely it was only right their daughter should take their place.

  Aurora held tight to the card, so tight that the tips of her fingers deadened, as if she had found herself in a strange unfamiliar country and this was her passport home.

  51

  Stevie

  Stevie could spend hours watching boats on the Thames. One came into view under Waterloo Bridge and she didn’t take her eyes from it till it passed Blackfriars and disappeared off towards Canary Wharf. It was all she could do. If she watched the boats, she didn’t have to look at her husband.

  And if she didn’t look at her husband, she didn’t have to acknowledge what he had just told her.

  ‘I didn’t want you to know,’ Xander said. ‘That’s why I didn’t say anything. Because once you know something like this, it’s impossible to go back. I wish I could.’

  She said nothing.

  ‘You have to understand I couldn’t keep it to myself. It’s a part of my past and I can’t suffocate it and pretend it didn’t happen. Not with you.’ His gaze pleaded with her but she refused to meet it. ‘I don’t want this marriage to fail. I can’t lose you. Please, Stevie.’

  The anonymity of London was what she loved. Not because she and Xander were seated in overcoats on a bench on the South Bank, unrecognisable as they clutched polystyrene mugs that steamed in the freezing wintry air, but because English people were too proud to let on
that they’d noticed. They might glance over once or twice, bury their chins in their collars and scarves and mention it later: that they’d seen someone famous, but it was no big deal. She was rarely approached in her home city. Now, especially now, she was grateful.

  ‘What you’re telling me,’ she said, and her voice didn’t sound like hers, ‘is that there are kids in Hollywood whose parents aren’t really theirs?’

  ‘Yes.’

  It sounded absurd. A joke gone too far. ‘How many?’

  ‘I’d say fifty.’

  ‘You’d say?’

  ‘Fifty I know about.’

  The world turned on its head, reflections of buildings in the grey line of the river switching things the wrong way round. Terrible, terrible.

  ‘And you helped make this happen.’ Finally she looked into his dark eyes, wondering at the person she’d given herself to, and the way he shook his head suggested she was wrong but they both knew she was right.

  ‘I was starting out in Hollywood,’ he said for the second time. ‘I came into contact with dozens of potential couples, hundreds. It was easy.’

  Stevie wanted to laugh.

  Instead she got to her feet and started walking, thinking only of getting away. She had to be alone. She had to try and process this and work out what to do.

  He followed. ‘Moreau needed me,’ he said.

  ‘To feed back valuable information?’ she tossed angrily over her shoulder. ‘How resourceful.’

  Xander kept pace. ‘I was a trusted asset. Imagine approaching the wrong person. Prospective couples had to be observed over long periods of time.’

  ‘Meanwhile Moreau sourced the surrogates and van der Meyde stuck them all together to make a pretty picture?’ she lashed.

  ‘Stevie, wait. Slow down.’

  ‘What a happy family you must have made.’

  ‘It wasn’t happy. That was why I got out.’ He reached for her, forcing her to stop. ‘And I did get out. That has to count for something, doesn’t it?’

  A cyclist rode past, head dipped against the cold.

  ‘Moreau took over?’ His name was ghoulish to her now; everything about him was. ‘That’s why he spends so much time in Hollywood? Finding people?’

  ‘And other cities.’ The wind was stinging, rain turning to sleet. ‘They’ve got scouts all over the world, retrieving the men and women who can make these children and carry them.’

  ‘You make it sound like a damn production line.’

  ‘It is, in a way.’

  Unable to conceal her disgust, she turned on her heel.

  ‘Don’t walk away, Stevie. Listen—’

  ‘To what?’ She whipped round. ‘It’s one thing you kept this from me, but, hey, we all have stuff in our past we’d sooner forget. What I can’t abide is the idea you were involved at all in something this … evil.’ Her voice broke. ‘Who are you? I just don’t know any more.’

  ‘I’m me.’ He went to touch her but she pulled away. ‘And I believed I was doing a good thing, OK? Helping people. That’s what JB always said. That we were helping people.’

  ‘La Lumière,’ she murmured, the pieces fitting. ‘It’s a foil. It gives him an alibi, a day job. It makes him a businessman. What was yours, then? Actor by day, child farmer by night?’

  Xander went to the river and put his elbows on the railings, rubbing his hands together against the cold. A boat horn sounded.

  ‘How could you?’ she whispered hoarsely. ‘How could you?’

  ‘JB and I, we were close at school. He was my best friend. I worshipped him. And after his parents died, I suppose that worship turned to fear.’ Xander stared flatly at the water. ‘I went along with whatever he said. I always did. This was no different.’

  ‘What were you afraid he’d do?’

  But he didn’t need to answer. Stevie could tell Xander hadn’t been afraid of a temper or an act of violence. He’d been afraid that the friend he’d adored would freeze him out, as JB had done that last term before the tragedy, and Xander would never be close to him again.

  ‘He makes it so you don’t question things,’ he said. ‘You trust him. You put your faith in him. Not once do you question things.’

  ‘You question everything.’

  ‘But I didn’t. What started out as a favour, because it was dressed in a way that made it sound unimportant, inconsequential—just keeping an eye out, a quiet word after a drink or two—became, before I knew it, the most clandestine operation Hollywood has ever known.’

  A tube rattled over to Embankment. Red buses over Waterloo, the chimes of Big Ben and the spires of Parliament … Life carrying on as normal.

  Stevie let his words sink in. ‘And I’ll bet it makes money.’

  Her husband bowed his head and she could see where his hair was cut above his collar and wanted to reach out and touch him but didn’t.

  ‘Van der Meyde discovered in the nineties that two of his close friends couldn’t have kids.’ He named a celebrated Hollywood couple. She was an actress, he, a screenwriter. Between them they had over sixty years in the industry, a wealth of Awards, and three children: two sons and a daughter, now in their twenties. All had followed their parents’ path into show business. The daughter was enjoying an especially lucrative career.

  ‘They were devastated,’ said Xander. ‘It was the only thing they had ever been denied. How could it be they had everything and yet the one thing they truly desired evaded them?’

  She pictured the family. ‘You’re telling me those children aren’t theirs?’

  His silence answered her question. A short, hysterical laugh escaped her lips.

  ‘The kids look like each other,’ he explained, ‘because they’re from the same surrogates.’ He was peeling the layers back gradually, with care, so she understood. ‘These days it’s unheard of to do as many as three from the same foundation. The risk is too great. But the money van der Meyde’s friends were prepared to pay, way back then, sowed the seeds of a revolutionary idea. It was realistic. Supply and demand. And it was lucrative, highly lucrative. We’re talking tens of millions of dollars—and that was twenty years ago.’

  ‘And now? What do they pay now?’

  ‘I haven’t been in it for years. I don’t know. When I stopped, a child could fetch anything between—and this is the whole package, from the initial fee to the twenty-one-year guarantee—thirty million and two-hundred million, dependent on the couple’s means.’

  Stevie said, ‘Jesus.’

  ‘Van der Meyde saw an opportunity and he went for it.’ Xander returned to the water. ‘He’s made a fortune. More than he’s made on any of his other schemes.’

  ‘These people pay for fake children? How can they? How can they live with themselves?’

  ‘You’d be surprised at the reasons.’

  ‘Would I?’

  ‘Remember the riches these clients possess. Money corrupts. There’s a black irony in having it all, you know, everything you ever wanted, but no legacy and no one to hand it to. Some enter into this because they can’t conceive naturally. It really is as simple as that.’

  His voice shook. How she wished it hadn’t.

  ‘Others do it because they’re afraid to fall. Years they’ve spent building and growing a career based on assumptions of heterosexuality, or sexual potency, or family values, when those things couldn’t be further from the truth. But they’d die before they let the world discover that. They want to show the fans their own kids.’

  ‘Can’t they adopt like any normal person?’

  ‘Adoption defeats the point, Stevie. Imagine if—’ here he named a hard-man action hero ‘—had to tell the world he was firing blanks? If the service is there and they can pay for it. What better thing is there to blow a fortune on?’

  ‘Can they be specific about what they want?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, this is Hollywood. If you’re going to spend on a baby it might as well be the one you’ve always dreamed
about, right? Boy, girl, blue eyes, brown hair? Whatever they want, they get? It has to be happening.’

  He nodded, confirming her fears. It was like some nightmare dystopia come to life.

  ‘And what about the ones that don’t come up to scratch?’ Her mouth was dry. ‘Disabilities, syndromes, complications, stuff like that?’

  ‘Van der Meyde lets them go.’

  ‘Explain,’ she demanded, sickened. ‘He lets them go?’

  ‘It’s mercifully rare.’

  ‘Mercifully? Don’t make me laugh.’

  ‘The ones he can use stay on the island. They work for him.’

  The island … She and Bibi had been there, the epicentre of this grim machine. Bibi had been vulnerable, as so many seeking the spa’s remedies. Was that how they spotted the ones most likely to cough up? Get them into therapy; have them admit to something missing in their lives.? She’d put nothing past van der Meyde, or Moreau. They were capable of anything.

  ‘Those with more obvious defects are abandoned.’

  ‘Abandoned?’

  ‘It’s too risky to re-engage them in an adoption process. The couples receive a full refund unless they wish to proceed again, but, should the supposed birth already have been announced, it may be that a new child needs to be supplied with immediate effect. In those cases, couples will stall while a suitable alternative is sourced, informing the press they don’t yet wish to share images. People buy that. New parenthood commands that extra degree of privacy.’

  ‘I’ve heard Hollywood conspiracy theories before,’ Stevie choked, ‘but this is …’

  ‘I know.’

  It made a horrific kind of sense. Stevie thought of those bizarre LA couplings, marriages she wasn’t convinced were real or had heard wacky rumours about but had put down to tattle.

  Fifty? Who were they?

  ‘Who are they?’ she asked.

  He named a few. She was stunned.