by Alison Bond
She picked up a blinking call and tried to keep half an ear on the gossip but it was impossible (the woman on the end of the phone swore blind she knew nothing about the debt on their joint credit card, why should she have to pay for a stinking husband’s affair?) When the call finished, or rather, when the woman had hung up on Kelly after calling her a bitch, Kelly put her phone on ‘Do not disturb’ and went over to the television in the corner.
‘What’s happened?’ she said. It must be huge for the television to be dragged into service. She hoped that it wasn’t anything too awful.
‘It’s just so sad,’ said Chartreuse.
‘My dad was crazy about her,’ said someone else.
‘I can’t believe she’s really dead.’
‘Who is?’ said Kelly. ‘Who’s dead?’
‘Ruby Valentine,’ said Chartreuse. ‘Yesterday. I heard it on the radio driving back.’ Her voice dropped to a dramatic whisper. ‘Suspected overdose.’
As she said this the news headlines began on the television and the sombre voice of a BBC newsreader confirmed that screen legend Ruby Valentine had been found dead in Los Angeles.
‘Oh, I don’t know if I’d say legend,’ mused Chartreuse. ‘Icon maybe.’
What’s the difference?’ someone asked.
‘Well,’ said Chartreuse. ‘I suppose an icon is more like David Bowie, but a legend is, say, Elton John.’
‘Can we please listen to this?’ said Kelly. ‘She was neither. One’s a symbol of something and one’s a story that may or may not be true, okay?’ She shook her head dismissively, earning a sour look from Chartreuse. ‘She’s an actress.’
‘Was,’ corrected Chartreuse. ‘Sorry, didn’t know we were in the presence of such a big fan.’
A windswept correspondent on a beach with a pink house behind him reported that although they were waiting for official confirmation there seemed little doubt that Ruby had committed suicide. Then the short news item was over and the weather forecast began.
‘Is she Sofia Valentine’s mother?’ said one of the girls.
‘Grandma,’ said Chartreuse with authority. ‘Can you believe it?’
Kelly wandered back to her desk trying to work out how she could get away with looking at the news on the Internet. Maybe if she angled her screen differently or waited until her team leader went out for one of her marathon fag breaks. She wasn’t a huge fan as such but it was an intriguing story, a deliciously macabre piece of gossip. Ruby wasn’t exactly Kurt Cobain or Marilyn, she was older than that and her fruitful career had been on the wane, but she was a fallen star nonetheless. Her grand-daughter Sofia Valentine was one of those poindessly famous people who seemed to get paid an awful lot for not doing very much at all and was always in the tabloids.
Kelly’s mobile rang and Chartreuse’s head whipped round, looking for the source of the jaunty ringtone. ‘No personal calls!’ she snapped.
‘It’s my dad,’ said Kelly. ‘It might be important.’
‘Keep it short.’
Kelly turned her back before she could see Chartreuse tapping her swatch. Who wore a swatch in this day and age? Did she think it was retro? Was it?
‘Dad,’ said Kelly, ‘what’s up?’
‘You have to come home,’ he said.
What’s wrong? Are you okay?’
‘Nothing’s wrong but you have to come home.’
She didn’t believe him. She could tell by the tone of his voice that something had happened. She tried to ignore her instinctive sense that it was something bad. She promised to be there in a little while and told Chartreuse she had to leave early as there was a family emergency.
‘That’s impossible.’
‘What’s the big deal?’ said Kelly. ‘The late shift will be here in a minute.’
‘I wish I could but…’
‘But what? It’s my dad, and he needs me. I’m going. I’ll stay on tomorrow and make up the time.’
‘Kelly! I said no.’
Kelly was already half-way across the office. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but I’m going. I have to.’ She was thinking that if Chartreuse gave her one more reason to quit then she would, right here and now. In fact, half of her was begging for an excuse to do it. Unemployment would motivate her to seek out a more interesting life than this. If she was lucky maybe she’d get fired.
She turned and stared defiantly at her team leader, who she noticed was openly reading the entertainment headlines on the Anonova website. Kelly’s pale blue eyes were cold and challenging. I dare you.
Chartreuse looked at Kelly in surprise as if she had suddenly seen a new side of her, a side that wouldn’t take no for an answer. Not the subservient underling she took for granted. She didn’t know how to deal with this rebellious streak.
Kelly held her gaze. She felt strong because she didn’t care.
‘You look a bit like her, you know,’ Chartreuse said eventually.
‘Like who?’
‘Ruby Valentine.’
That was unexpected. ‘Um, thanks. So I’ll see you tomorrow’
Chartreuse backed down and Kelly’s thoughts of adventure subsided, which was a relief. She had no idea what she’d do if she lost her job.
‘Fine,’ said Chartreuse. ‘But don’t forget what a nice person I am.’
She’d try to remember.
2
It was just starting to get dark by the time Kelly pulled her battered yellow Corsa into the potholed side road which led to her childhood home. The main reason she was still living here was simple. It was a beautiful house. The artist in her father had chosen his backdrop well. It would be hard to imagine a view more perfect than the one which rolled out to greet her as her engine tackled the steep incline of the driveway. Even through the drizzle she could still see the last of the muted winter sunlight somewhere west of here, dropping away into the distant sea beyond the hills. On a summer’s day it was magnificent.
She loved growing up here, just the two of them, Kelly and Sean, as tight as the twin shells of a Pembrokeshire clam.
Up close, the ancient farmhouse revealed its flaws like the wrinkles of an ageing screenstar. Bricks were held together with moss and a prayer, the mortar having long since crumbled, victim of the damp Welsh air. Both the attic windows were riddled with cracks, and black holes in the regular pattern of the roof tiles revealed the vulnerable spots like missing teeth in a smile. Kelly knew that indoors there would be the steady rhythm of drips into a bucket or a saucepan. She had long ago stopped nagging Sean to get the house fixed up; it simply wasn’t a priority for him and at times she thought that he enjoyed the shabbiness, that it reflected something of himself. She could relate to that.
Besides, now she was all grown up she supposed that bringing their house up to date was her responsibility too and she had neither the means nor the drive to begin. Once that particular realization had hit home, Kelly suddenly found the ailing heating system charming rather than annoying, and thought it was quaint that you could race pennies down the gentle slope of the kitchen floor.
She pushed open the heavy wooden door, which scraped on the stone flooring where the wood had warped and swollen. ‘Dad?’
The smell of developing fluid and damp roll-ups tickled her nostrils. The familiar smells of home. There were no buckets, just a puddle collecting behind the back step, following the pitch of the floor. Kelly grabbed a dishtowel from the crowded sink and jammed it into the puddle with her heel. It was instantly sodden.
‘Dad?’ She looked for a clean saucepan, but there were only two and they were both dirty. She turned on a tap and the pipes rattled like a chesty cough. The house groaned.
‘Kelly?’
‘It’s me!’ She wiped the saucepan hastily and placed it under the drip before turning off the tap and running towards the sound of his voice.
Sean was in the most chaotic room in the house. Tucked away at the back, unchanged in two centuries, it had a flagstone floor and no natural light. The room had vari
ously been Sean’s darkroom, Kelly’s den and a junk room. Now it was reclaimed as an office but Kelly suspected it was still a junk room at heart.
Sean was hunched over his desk, an anglepoise lamp casting a single halo of light in front of him. He was too old for freckles but there they were, scattered over his nose and cheeks, across the pleats of his laughter lines all the way up to his thatch of grey hair. Shy freckles because it was winter, but marks of boyish charm that would never fade away completely.
When he looked up she thought his eyes looked strange. Was it possible he’d been crying?
‘Hello, love,’ he said. ‘Nice day?’
‘What’s happened?’ she said.
A number of scenarios had presented themselves to her on the drive home. They had run out of money and needed to sell the house. He was sick. He had found her diaries from when she was seventeen years old and discovered that she had not, as she’d always insisted was the case, saved herself for marriage. Or maybe, just maybe, it was good news. He’d won the lottery on his first try. One of his old photos was being used in a major advertising campaign. Some of his new photographs were going to be exhibited. He had a girlfriend.
From his expression she could not tell. It was not an expression she’d ever seen before. She walked towards him and as she got closer she could see that he’d been staring at some old photographs. Photographs of Ruby Valentine.
She picked one up. ‘This is gorgeous,’ she said. And it was. A black and white studio shot of a much younger Ruby, her eyes reaching beyond the camera, maybe to someone out of shot who was responsible for the laughter in her face.
Sean pushed away from the desk to allow Kelly to look at the photographs properly. There were dozens, all of Ruby. Some of them were candid shots taken at parties, some of them were posed, still more featured her on set between scenes. There were photos of Ruby on her own, in company, playing with her children. Intimate shots that captured her over the years. And one of Sean with his arms around her, receiving a kiss on the end of his nose.
‘Oh, Dad,’ she said, pulling up a chair of her own. ‘You knew her? These are incredible. It’s awful what happened.’
Kelly had always been aware that her father had had many famous friends in his heyday. To be photographed by Sean Coltrane in the Sixties and Seventies really meant something. She knew this the way other girls know their fathers are doctors or drive trucks for a living, with respectful interest which occasionally drifted into boredom. After all, she could never recognize half the people in his shots. There were only a few survivors, like Ruby, who were still stars. Sean mainly photographed landscapes these days and it was hard to get excited about sand dunes on a greetings card. Landscapes were less rock and roll but he insisted he liked it that way. ‘Once upon a time,’ he said, ‘you were able to catch fame off guard, take a photograph of the person and not the image. Now the image is all they’re willing to give. Everyone is “on” if there’s a camera nearby’ Sean still occasionally took portraits, as a favour, or for charity. Once, thrillingly, so Kelly had thought at ten years old, for a stamp.
Kelly picked out a stack of photographs to study, her interest grabbed by a more pensive Ruby, heavily pregnant and deep in thought. ‘Were you very close?’ she said.
Sean raised his eyes to hers and this time there was no mistaking it. Tears threatened to fall. ‘I was in love with her,’ he replied.
Blimey. ‘Did you… I mean…’ How could she ask her dad this question? Did she really want to know? The thought of him having sex was bad enough but the thought of him having sex with one of the sexiest women in the world… She wasn’t sure if she could handle the mental image that presented. Ugh, too late, so she asked away. ‘Did you sleep with her?’
‘We were friends for a long time,’ he said. ‘Then we had an affair.’ He took the top photograph out of her hand and traced the curve of Ruby’s swollen belly. ‘Then we had a baby girl.’
‘Huh?’ Her train of thought stopped dead and then backed up. What the hell? A baby?
‘I should have told you,’ he said. ‘I should have told you years ago.’
‘Told me… what?’ said Kelly, her train of thought thoroughly derailed. ‘I have a sister somewhere?’
Ruby’s eyes were starting to look hauntingly like her own. Half of her knew the truth before he said it.
‘We had you.’
‘Me?’
‘Kelly, Ruby’s your mother. Was your mother.’
The rest of the photographs dropped from Kelly’s hand on to the cold stone floor. She fled.
*
When Kelly was at that difficult age, somewhere between eleven and fourteen when thoughts and emotions collide for the first time, creating one big adolescent mess, she used to lock herself away in her room when she was upset and scare her father half to death. She would stay there for a long while, as long as two days, not eating, not answering Sean’s anxious knocks on the door. Sometimes Kelly found it hard to believe what a little drama queen she’d been growing up. She would sit on the floor, her back against the closed door, and stare at the wall opposite, wondering if she’d ever feel normal, thinking of who she liked and who she didn’t like and what she would say at school the following day and who she would sit with at lunch. The ironic thing was that all the bullies and boyfriends and best friends she had stayed up there worrying about had had no more lasting effect on her life than her passion for shiny boy bands at that time. But the teenage angst was just a cover. She would turn the events of the school day over in her mind and then, when she had calmed down, she would secredy think about her mum.
Just thinking about her mother always made Kelly feel guilty. She felt as if she was being disloyal to Sean. She loved her father intensely and was worried that being curious about the woman who had given birth to her would somehow make him think she loved him less, or that she wasn’t satisfied in some way by her childhood. And she was. She had a fleeting memory of asking him why she didn’t have a mummy when she was very small, far too young to worry about being insensitive, but could never recall his exact words, no matter how hard she strained for them, only, ‘I love you.’
From time to time in later years questions would rise in her throat and she would go to him, determined that this time she wouldn’t chicken out, she would just ask him some stuff and it would be fine, absolutely fine. She wanted to know what her mother had been like, that was all, she wanted to know where she came from. Then all the questions would dry up in her throat when she saw her dad, and how his face lit up in eager, loving anticipation of what his treasured daughter had to say. So she let it slide and slide, until it felt far too late to ask, and the gap in their lives where a wife and mother should be was never mentioned.
Kelly only allowed herself to think, Who was she? Where did she go? Will she ever come back? Am I like her?, when she was locked in her room. When Sean was safely under the impression that she was in a bad mood and all she was thinking about was your average teenage trauma.
Kelly thought she had grown out of it but she felt the urge now, as strong as a drug addict needing a fix, to run up the stairs and shut the door.
‘Kelly, wait!’
She ignored her dad’s shout and only started breathing again when the door was closed and she was sitting on the floor with her back to it.
This was insane. Exciting? No, just insane. She was the long-lost lovechild of a living legend. Not exactly, she corrected herself, not exactly living. Was she supposed to feel sad? Of all the emotions racing through her frazzled head, grief was not the most forceful.
Disbelief? Sure. Shock? You betcha. Anger? Some.
After all this time she’d convinced herself that the truth must be too awful, Sean loved her and so he must be protecting her from something for her own good. But the truth was that her mother was a superstar. Another thought pushed for space in the chaos. God, she must have been loaded! All those things that Sean had said they couldn’t afford, the horse she’d wanted when she was t
welve (okay, so he’d been right, the whole pony thing was a bit of a phase), the holiday to Ibiza that he refused to pay for when she was sixteen (but then, everybody else’s parents had vetoed that grand plan too), the secondhand Corsa he’d picked out for her twenty-first birthday instead of the classic MG of her dreams. Ruby Valentine would have had enough money to buy Kelly whatever she wanted, but what Kelly wanted most – a mother – had clearly cost far too much.
Was it really true? She couldn’t think of any possible reason why her dad would lie to her. Especially about something like this.
She reached across the cluttered bedroom floor for a cheap compact mirror in her eyeline, a free gift when she’d bought two or more items (one to be skincare). She wiped away a thin layer of dust that had gathered on the glass and studied her reflection. Too many freckles (thanks, Dad), unruly eyebrows, the beginnings of a spot on her chin, a smudge of grey on her forehead that she hadn’t even known about. She licked her palm and wiped away the grey smudge. She studied her thick black hair that looked dyed but wasn’t, and her pale, wolfish eyes that everybody said were her best feature. These features had come from Ruby Valentine. Kelly realized with a start that she hadn’t fully believed it until now, until she saw the eyes of a ghost in the mirror.
‘Kelly? Sweetheart?’
Her dad outside her door. It was like being thirteen again. She felt as ill equipped now to deal with unsettling emotions as she had been then. She didn’t trust herself to speak.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I promised her I’d never tell you.’
