I laughed and then winced as she missed a stitch of my wound. She’d poured some vodka on the cut already to sterilise her, which I’d been manly enough to pretend didn’t really sting that much. I had no idea whether it would do the trick or not, but right then I didn’t care.
“I’ve worked on dozens of sets over the last five years,” I said, pretending that a cut like that was just a night’s work for me, “and – let’s be fair – most of you actors are pretty damn useless. When Sinatra was here he made some flunky peel his oranges for him. He didn’t like the citrus on his fingers, he said.”
She rolled her eyes. “Well, Sinatra’s a singer and that makes him doubly temperamental.”
“You’re a singer too!”
“No, I’m not.”
“Yeah, you are. I saw you in that film where you were a nightclub hostess in Manchester. Sorry, I’m no good with names. But you carried the song brilliantly in that.”
Perhaps she blushed a little; it was hard to tell in that darkened corner. Her expression remained passive and unreadable, but instinct told me that she liked the compliment. I think that’s what made her such a big star on a 25ft-high screen, that even in close-up she was so wonderfully enigmatic.
“No,” she said firmly, as she tied off a knot at the end of the stiches in my arm. Her tone was one of mild exasperation, the exact same tone she’d use to tell off an errant suitor in one of her films. “I’m an actress who can hold a tune a bit, I’m no singer. If I was a singer I wouldn’t have taken care of your arm. I’d have let you bleed out while complaining about the sight of it all, whining about my dancing getting interrupted.”
I laughed and she laughed with me. It was a lovely trilling sound, delicate and light. Despite all the films I’d seen her in, despite me mooching in the background once or twice on the same set as her, I had never actually heard her laugh. Laughter – genuine laughter – seemed such a surprise, in contrast to the image of Eden St. Michel I had in my head, that I laughed some more. As the two of us convulsed in the corner, that blood-soaked napkin dropped to the floor and was ignored.
We’d only had a few minutes of conversation, but already it had occurred to me that her voice was a touch softer than the one she used in the films. Educated yes, smart undoubtedly, but there was a kindness to it that was lacking in most of the characters she played. Her characters were hard-boiled, they were broads, they were scary and loved the fact.
A smile still on my face, a twinkle making its way to my eye, I watched her as she reached up and gently rolled down my bloodied and torn shirtsleeve. She hung it back in place and nodded at me to do up the cuff. As if my shirt was ever going to be wearable again, regardless of whether it was done up properly now.
“There you go,” she said, matter-of-fact. “Nurse St. Michel knocking off duty. You’ll have a scar for a while. Possibly it will never fade. But that’s okay, I like scars.”
Our eyes met properly as I leaned in to her. Even in the gloom I could see how dazzlingly gorgeous her blue eyes were.
“Do you really like scars?” I asked.
Her voice was cool. “I like men and men have scars. Or at least real men do.”
I grinned my best wolfish grin, my lady-killer grin. “You’ll be pleased to know, then, that it’s not alone. The life I’ve had, I’ve got quite the collection.”
A smirk played at the corners of her lips. “I could tell that just by looking at you, Mr Jones.”
“You know my name?”
The shrug she gave was nonchalant. “You work in the business, Mr Joe Jones, and I work in the business. You even worked on one or two of my films, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t do any stunts for you, though.”
“Well, we’re hardly the same build. You couldn’t pull off this dress, no matter how much you tried.” She winked. “The point is that of course I know your name. Do you think that because you don’t have your own dressing room, I’m one of those who wouldn’t know your name?”
A chuckle came to my throat. I hoped it sounded casual, despite how thrilled I was. Thrilled and a little scared. This was Eden St. Michel telling me off, and as anyone who had ever seen one of her films knew, no one issued a rebuke like Eden St. Michel.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “I just thought…”
Her left eyebrow rose. “You just thought what?”
Now I felt a touch of genuine embarrassment. “I just thought you were like the rest of them. I worked on the same film as Sinatra for a couple of weeks too, and I guarantee that for all his ‘boys together’ act, he never learnt my name.”
“Well, I’m not Frank Sinatra.”
“I know,” I told her. “You’re far more beautiful than Sinatra.”
She laughed loudly and clapped her hands, then turned back to me and ran her fingers without any bashfulness down my chest. “You know, I’ve been told I’m beautiful so many times and in so many different ways in my life, but never quite like that.”
I held up my hands. “I’m very sorry, I should have known that you weren’t the normal movie star. A normal movie star wouldn’t have sewn up my arm so delicately. I really am very sorry.”
Her hand lingered on my chest. “Apology pending,” she told me. “You’ll have to make it up to me.”
“I will.”
She leant in closer and, with the tenderness of silk, stroked my injured arm. Her front teeth bit into her bottom lip. “Do you know what I like most about this new scar of yours?”
“What do you like most about it?”
“That you got it playing the hero for me. That’s always going to make it special. I’m always going to love this scar because of that.”
Our arms were touching, our knees were touching, my hand was hovering just above hers. Her face filled my entire vision and, enigmatic as it generally was, there was no mistaking what she wanted.
“Maybe you can come and visit it one day.”
“I’d love to,” she said, “but first you’ve still got to make it up to me for the grand mistake of thinking I’m just a normal actress.”
“And how would you like me to make it up to you?”
“You can kiss me, Joe,” she said. “You can kiss me.”
And I did, sat in that corner in a mix of passion, stitches, stained napkins and fresh scars.
She was the love of my life, I’m never going to deny that.
But our relationship was born in a puddle of spilt blood, and I can’t deny that either.
From the audio recordings of Eden St. Michel
“Oh, Joe Jones. My Joe.
“Of course my name is always linked in the press with his. Even though it’s nearly eight years since I really saw the man, since we said our goodbyes, it’s still our two names that are joined together. Ha! If I’d given him the nod he would certainly have married me. Perhaps I should have done that. Then our names would be linked by something proper and decent, and not just the terrible scandal.
“It’s strange to think about. All those films I made when I was at the height of my career, and there were some good ones in there, but whenever my name appears in the papers for whatever reason – be it a play I’m in, or even one of my old films playing on television – they go through the whole episode again, step by bloody step. All those films I made, how big a star I once was, and my name is forever entwined with a former stuntman who I once had an affair with.
“No, that’s unfair. Really unfair, in fact. I liked Joe. I always liked Joe – from the first moment I saw him I knew that I damn well liked the way he looked. Even though he was seemingly oblivious to me.
“Now there’s a sentence you won’t get many film stars uttering.
“Beautiful actresses don’t tend to fret much about men not paying them attention. But of course it wasn’t really that he wasn’t interested in me or didn’t find me attractive. He just thought that his place in the system meant that he couldn’t mingle with someone like me who’d climbed up on the blessed pedestal of stardom.
“He didn’t know how little care I gave to those silly little societal rules.
“So, what did I like about him?
“Well, I liked his height and his big broad shoulders. I liked his wavy blond hair and the fact that he wasn’t stereotypically handsome. His face was – and, I guess, still is – a bit scrunched up. All the features grouped together in the middle, with lots of space around. You could almost say he was moon-faced, apart from the fact his face was almost rectangular in shape. But that’s okay, as it went with his long lean body. What else? I liked his soft Welsh accent, I thought that was damn sexy. And I liked how good he was at projecting confidence while actually deep down being quite shy.
“I liked how kind he was. I liked how he made me laugh.
“So, I don’t really mind that whenever I get written about in the press, our assignation is mentioned. I don’t mind it at all. It’d be nice if they concentrated occasionally on how good a film actress I was once upon a time, but I suppose that the scandal happened and the scandal is more interesting than just a puff piece for my ego.
“Of course, Joe never gets mentioned in the press without it being in conjunction with my name. Although, bizarrely, I did see a photo of him last year in the Daily Mirror where he was in the company of that young American slut, Tiffany Tolworth.
“I felt jealous for about five minutes, but then realised that no matter what he was up to, he wasn’t going to fall in love with anyone else like he was in love with me. Even after all that happened, I guarantee you that I’m still the love of his life.”
Chapter Three
February rains were pelting down on the dark Soho streets, but luck was on our side. Within minutes of coming up from The Cinema Club, we’d got a cab and were zooming back to her place.
She lived in an elegant second-floor flat which looked directly onto Green Park. The kind of digs that the likes of me generally didn’t even dream of, let alone get invited into. It was a two-storey place, tastefully decorated straight from Harrods, or some place like that. In short, it was the kind of home I’d only ever seen in the type of magazines they keep in doctors’ waiting rooms – and even then, I’d have worried about grubbying up the pictures with my fingers.
Not that I really took it all in that first night. No, it was kissing and undressing each other right from when we stumbled in through the front door. It was bumping into stuff right until we made our way up to her king-sized bed with its pink bedspread and heart-shaped pillows.
Eden naked was an exhilarating experience. She was so svelte and lithe, a natural athlete who might have come straight from a ballet school. There seriously wasn’t an ounce of fat on her. She was lean with beautifully slender thighs, a tiny waist and small but pert breasts (she told me her brassieres were always padded for her films). Her backside was so tight I could cup it neatly in my palm. She was physical perfection, a colt of a woman, brimming with so much energy that I thought she could go until dawn without a moment’s tiredness.
I was used to girls having a certain amount of bashfulness about their bodies. Switching off the lights and trying to find a handy blanket to throw around themselves even after we’d done the dirty. Not Eden, though. There didn’t seem to be a flicker of self-consciousness: she knew she was a goddess and didn’t need some man to confirm it for her.
In fact, as she lay back, completely naked and propped up on her elbows – her skin smooth and glimmering from the light of the bedside lamp – she made me feel a little self-conscious. For the first time ever, I felt bashful about my own nakedness. Even though she’d seen my biceps, and my shirt had been slightly open as she operated on me so she’d seen most of my torso too, with her eyes on me in that bedroom I had the sudden doubt that I wasn’t going to live up to her magnificence. That I wasn’t going to be man enough for her.
I smiled my way through it. Enjoying the novelty of having the lights on and trying not to show I was intimidated. Fake confidence is almost as good as the real thing.
“Come on now, Joe,” Eden purred. “I can’t promise I won’t bite, but I will try not to hurt you too much.”
In the end I just pulled my clothes off as if they were an old bandage, the quicker the better. I even stopped myself wincing as I pried away the dried blood welding the shirt to my arm. As I brought down my trousers and my pants, I even gave her a little wink.
The first time was incredible. It didn’t last long – I didn’t last long – but she went on top and rode me like she was the queen of a rodeo and I was a buck which needed to be broken. She wasn’t too disappointed when I couldn’t hold it any longer, when she proved too much for me, as we both knew it was going to be the first round of many. Her thighs wrapped around my waist, her arms tight around my neck, she kissed me long and deep.
We lasted longer the second time, and I made sure I took my turn on top as well.
Then we lay together in the tiny hours of the morning, she examining my scars.
I had a jagged one just below my left knee which came from an unfortunate (and slightly drunken) encounter with barbed wire during my National Service. There was a long thin slice on my thigh which I picked up in a car accident on a deserted road near Bray. I was doing a crash for a Kenneth Moore film, ramming an old army jeep into a tree, only I didn’t walk away quite as unscathed as a stuntman’s reputation would dictate. Then there was a large star-shaped mark just above my right nipple, which came from a complete accident. Something exploding not quite when it should have. When he saw it, the disapproving doctor shook his head and told me that three inches to the left it would have had a fair chance of piercing my heart, and I just smiled and told him that if it had been three inches to the right all I’d have had was a cut arm.
But now I did have the cut arm. Fresh and still bloody. Eden’s eyes sparkled as she ran her fingers tenderly across her needlework once again.
In comparison, Eden’s body seemed perfect; the physique and figure of a goddess, unmarred by anything of the mortal world. But even though she didn’t draw attention to it, I finally noticed the curiously straight line of a scar across her left hip.
Undoubtedly it wasn’t a new injury, but she still winced when I ran my finger over it.
“I’ll tell you about it one day,” she said, then she licked her lips. “Right now we have other things to do.”
I was on top the whole way the next time and she stared up at me with a furious, all-encompassing intensity. She didn’t scream or gasp, just bit down on her lip and let the eyes do the talking. Telling me with her gaze how much she was enjoying it, what she needed me to do, when she needed me to go faster and when she wanted sweet and slow. Only at the end did she cry out. Arching her back into the pillow with a soul-deep sigh and digging her nails into my shoulder blades.
Leaving fresh but incredibly pleasurable scars. Scars that would fade quickly, but could be recreated again and again.
We lay side by side, our fingers intertwined, breathless.
Eventually she rolled onto my chest and kissed me full on the lips. “I might be a little forward here – after all, we only just met tonight – but would you mind if I told people we were courting?”
I grinned. “If you like.”
“Good.” She kissed me deep again. “A big, scarred, real man like you is always a good thing for a lady like me to have around.”
Chapter Four
When I met Eden, I was renting a tiny room next to a rattling airing cupboard in a small terrace house at the arse end of Pimlico. It was a poky three-bedroom place, me and two other blokes I barely knew sharing the rent.
I didn’t sleep there much after I got together with Eden; I’d have been embarrassed to have her visit. She did joke about it and point out that she’d lived a life before she became a film star, and so she’d be happy to come by as long as it wasn’t an absolute, godforsaken hovel. But then, since her definition of an absolute, godforsaken hovel and mine might differ considerably, I thought it best not to risk it.
Instead we spent our nights at her flat, after evenings out at some of the finest restaurants and clubs Mayfair had to offer. The kind of places you definitely needed a good suit and a tie to get into. Venues which my pay cheque wouldn’t have covered if I’d saved my pennies for a decade. “My kept man,” Eden called me. And she wasn’t embarrassed or judgemental over it, and so I did my best not to feel embarrassed or judged in turn.
Not that she had to pay that often, I suppose. Being with her was like entering another world, one where restaurant owners and nightclub managers would happily shell out for her whole evening’s entertainment – just so they could say that they’d been graced by her presence.
The two of us seemed to have this amazing and instant bond between us. My previous girlfriends had been great girls, we’d got along, but we always seemed to be in slightly different worlds. The man’s world and the woman’s world. We did our best to reach across the divide, but that’s just the way things were. With Eden, though, well – I don’t want to sound like some kind of dog-eared, mother’s romance novel, but it was like we were two pieces snapping together.
Over the next few weeks, we talked and talked, and told each other everything.
Or at least, I thought we told each other everything.
“What’s the most important thing in your life?” she asked me on our second or third evening together.
That one was easy: my daughter Daphne, who was five years old and the jewel of my existence. Even though I didn’t see her anywhere near as much as I should have done, she was still the favourite thing about my life.
When I told her, Eden smiled, warm and indulgent, as if the very idea of me having a child pleased her. “What’s your daughter like?” she asked.
“She’s beautiful. Not at all like her old man. Not that much like her mum either, if I’m honest.” I smiled sheepishly, knowing I was being unkind. “Daphne has blonde hair, blue eyes, apple cheeks, dimples. She’s like the perfect little girl.”
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