‘Snap,’ he said.
Chapter Six
Wow. He sat suddenly on the edge of the unmade bed, the nicotine still swimming through his bloodstream. Something which might have been pity swam along with it, but he pushed it away with long-practised ease. That was weird. Strange kid. Wonder how she gets by with that scar? Maybe she’s used to people staring, maybe that’s why she didn’t once look me in the face. Well she ain’t gonna see sympathy here. The momentary need to bolster the cigarettes with a glass of something tickled his spine and he jumped up, began firing up the laptop. Early morning was best for writing, the sun hadn’t yet reached full baking potential; even in October it could still burn through metal at midday, but just now the air still held the silver edge of last night’s chill and he could pretend that he was at home. Sitting in the little office in the farmhouse, fire blazing to keep the long shadows at bay; watching the scenery stretching back into the centuries where nothing changed except the positions of the sheep that dotted the moorland like clouds that had shed all their rain.
The Fallen Skies logo pinged up onto the screen and he stared at it for a moment, trying to remember. Before all this. When space and time were new, when I wasn’t carrying this weight of guilt and regret. How far back would I have to go to lose it all? How far? A deep breath shook his shoulders, another attempt at emotion made it nearly as far as his heart before he stopped it, ruthlessly reaching inside himself and dragging it out half-born, killing it with his neglect.
Yeah. Too far back. But you don’t go back, do you? Back is defeat, despair; all those things you swore you’d never feel again. Course, you won’t feel anything else either, but that’s the price you pay for being the Iceman.
But it’s funny how one little thing can force you to remember. Today it was a voice, an accent. A couple of words and a girl with a scarred face and it was like I was sixteen again, back in Leeds, skinny little runt dragging the tail-end of his adolescence for fear of growing up. Back then, scars were badges of courage, like tattoos but with a better back-story.
Before everything went evil. Before everything I am was ruined.
He closed his eyes and let images fill his mind. Huge ships ponderously crossing galaxies, planets of water and fire, shadows which hid in plain sight. A fight for freedom. And then he started to write.
Chapter Seven
Felix was irritably awake when I got back to our room, squatting against the small bedside cupboard, doing tricep dips.
‘Bloody jet lag,’ he puffed. ‘It’s the middle of the night as far as my brain is concerned. Been anywhere exciting?’
‘Outside,’ I muttered. I didn’t mention the man with the scars. There had been something in our brief communion under the bronze sky that had gone beyond mere comparison of physical hurts. Something raw. I couldn’t talk about it to Felix. ‘It’s already warm out there.’
‘Hey.’ He sat on the bed and wiped his face with a towel. ‘Sounds like this trip was just what you needed to make you realise there’s more to life than supermarkets and bookshops.’ I watched him dab under his arms and then pull a pure white T-shirt over his head. Felix had an almost perfect body, about which he was horribly vain, and he was already working hard at beating a middle age which wouldn’t come knocking for at least twenty years. ‘So, shall we go look for breakfast, or are you just going to stand there staring at the back of your eyeballs?’
‘I was looking at you. Actually.’
‘Hey!’ He struck a pose. ‘Still got it. Damn, I’m hot.’ A momentary pause. ‘Hotter with sausages, though. You reckon the Americans know about sausages? And bacon?’
‘I think they might have a few ideas. Where do we go for food?’
There was a diner built onto the back of the motel. One wall was made of a series of huge glass doors which looked out over the unimpressive view whilst the rest of it looked as though it had been formed by tunnelling away part of the original building. Doors from the main motel led into it at either end, making it more of a giant corridor than an aesthetic addition; it looked as though someone had seen a picture of a conservatory and tried to recreate one on an industrial scale. ‘Architectural design really passed Nevada by, didn’t it?’ Felix, arbiter of all things tasteful, remarked as we stood in the doorway, watching the movement of people within. Smells wafted from the kitchen, which looked like an afterthought, tucked away behind double doors.
‘It’s busy. Let’s come back later.’ I pressed myself against the wall.
‘Aw, come on Skye, don’t bottle on me now. I want to know whether they serve grits. Always wondered what the hell they are, I mean, come on, who names food after stuff you shovel?’ Felix grabbed my elbow but I pulled back.
‘You go. I’m not really hungry; I’ll just go back to the room and …’
But my words were cut off by a commotion at the far end of the diner, where a door gave entry to the other end of the motel. What could only be described as an entourage came sweeping through, two girls with such smooth hair that I could only imagine that they never slept on it, followed by a burly man carrying a clipboard, followed by –
I gave a small moan.
‘That’s Gethryn Tudor-Morgan over there,’ Felix hissed unnecessarily in my ear. ‘Just coming in! He’s up early, maybe they have to hose him down before they put him in front of us.’
‘He doesn’t need anything doing to him from where I’m standing.’ I moaned. ‘Oh God.’
In the middle of his thrusting crowd, Gethryn looked smaller than he did in my head. I knew his height, of course I did, five foot nine, half an inch shorter than Felix, but there was something about real life which seemed to diminish him a touch and add a layer or two of flesh to his jaw and cheekbones. He’d grown his hair out of the ragged, streaked untidiness that he’d had in last year’s publicity photos into a tidy version of a surfer-cut, gained a Californian tan and stubble and glowed with stardom. And, oh, what a star! Even with all the pictures and the posters and the frame-grabs, I’d never managed to conjure the reality of the man, the full-on, slender-hipped, broad-chested reality. The reality which was standing by a table on the far side of the diner, looking slightly hung-over.
I found myself trying to tidy my hair with my fingers. ‘Great.’ I groaned in the back of my throat. ‘I could have put a skirt on.’ I pulled the tucked-in shirt from the waistband of my jeans so that I didn’t look so much like Disco Dad. ‘And maybe had some kind of hot-wax treatment.’ My frizz of hair sprang back from between my hands into its customary pubic bush impersonation.
‘Well, it’s hardly my fault you can’t dress yourself! Come on, I want to see what they do when I order gravel.’
‘Grits.’
Felix gave me a Look, but the proximity of Gethryn had wiped any trace of my sense of humour away. All I could see, all I could think, all I could feel, was sitting himself down only a score of tables away from me, propping his chin on his hands and gazing, dark-eyed, at the breeze-block walls. There was a brief scuffle as Felix and I fought to take the seat facing towards him and his party, but I won and Felix had to collapse gasping into the opposite chair.
‘That, my darling, was below the belt.’ He rubbed himself under the table. ‘You didn’t need to pinch my nadgers quite so hard; a simple “please” would have done the job.’
A waitress approached to take our order, spotted Felix’s furtive sub-counter massaging and wheeled away smartly. I hid behind the menu and stared out from behind some mouth-watering waffle pictures. ‘Oh. My. God.’
‘Well, he’s all right I suppose, if you like that taut and rippling thing. Which, I have to admit, is growing on me. I wouldn’t mind some action backstage with him, if you get my drift.’
‘I think the natives of Alaska got your drift. Whisper, Fe, please.’
‘My parents didn’t send me to drama school to learn to
whisper, lover. Projection, it’s what gets you noticed.’ Several of Gethryn’s collection of people were glancing our way, a forest of frowns springing up amid the ruthless busyness and chatter. ‘See?’ Felix projected at me. ‘They’re noticing us already.’
‘Through laser-sights, I should think.’
A different waitress, rather older, approached our table. Just as I was about to order toast and coffee, she spoke. ‘I’m afraid I’m gonna have to ask you to leave.’
‘But … breakfast …’ Felix began.
‘Yeah, well, y’see, we don’t allow lewd behaviour in this diner, and that’s how it is. If you can learn to keep your hands to yourself, then we might reconsider, but for today –’ She jerked her head at the door behind us.
‘But I …’
‘I don’t wanna have to call the boys.’
Dejectedly Felix stood up. ‘I was only rubbing my crotch,’ he said, compounding matters still further. ‘It’s Skye’s fault. She grabbed me.’
‘Sir. Ma’am.’
We found ourselves hustled over the threshold, but with the tiny advantage that Gethryn’s party had all stopped ordering to watch. A couple of walkie-talkie radios were laid upon the table looking like potential trouble.
‘And that was your fault.’ Felix marched crossly away towards the reception area. ‘If you hadn’t tweaked my underparts like that, we’d be stuffing our faces with egg and bacon right now. I’m bloody starving.’
‘Then why are we heading this way? There’s a vending machine on the corridor near our room, get some crisps or chips or whatever they call them.’ I stomped after him.
‘Checking on the programme for today. See if there’ve been any changes. Don’t suppose your ruthless studies of all things Fallen Skies told you anything about the timetable of events?’ Felix chewed the side of a thumbnail and then held his fingers away from him, examining his hands.
‘Well, sort of, but it did say that everything is subject to change. I guess they’re never quite sure exactly who is going to turn up, after all the actors can’t commit for definite and one of the writers had to cry off because she had a baby. So I know there’s all kinds of things going on but I never read a complete timetable. There’s all sorts of stuff …’ My voice fell away at the end of the sentence and I really hoped that Felix was adept enough to understand the dropping tone. Even until I’d got on the plane I’d been wavering. Could I do it? Really? Leave my safety nets, my carefully cultivated self-protection to step out into a world that had shown itself capable of turning and savaging me? I’d not truly believed that I’d ever get here, which had meant that my presence on the Fallen Skies forum had been nebulous and my convention studies had held a certain edge of ‘yeah, right. Great stuff, but not for you, Skye. Seriously, not for you.’ Yeah, Skye, you look away, you avoid the subject …
‘Never mind.’ There was a curious tone to his voice, one I didn’t recognise, but sounded as though it was almost relief. ‘It’ll all be here somewhere.’ And sure enough, there in the middle of the reception area stood a peg board. In white pegs against a black dotty background, and with an almost life-threatening disregard for punctuation, it announced:
‘THURSDAY.
AUTOGRAPH SIGNING IN MEETING ROOM, ONE ELEVEN AM.
SALES MEETING ROOM TWO FIGURE’S; PICTURE’S DVD’S.
TONIGHT DINNER – YOU’RE CHANCE TO RELAX WITH FALLEN SKY’S STARS’
‘I think I just fell into hell,’ I moaned. ‘A “Meet the Stars” dinner? In a place that now thinks you wank under tables and I’m some kind of flop-bodied drug taker?’
‘Well, you are.’
‘Only when it’s necessary.’
‘Well, I only …’
‘No! Let’s keep some mystery. Look, I need some breakfast; shall we go get some disposable food from the machine?’
He huffed but followed me, and we took several packets of assorted convenience foods to our room. I lay on the bed while Felix ripped open unfamiliar packaging and spread the potato- and corn-related products over the table.
‘Okay. You want the greasy orange things or these flat white ones?’
I chose a fistful and munched as I lay. Felix sprawled himself at my feet and dipped idly between crisps. ‘Skye.’
‘Mmmm?’
‘You’re really into Fallen Skies, aren’t you?’
‘What do you mean?’ I’d found something that tasted exactly like Wotsits and was sucking the coating off.
‘I mean, you’ve been a fan since the beginning, but the series started just after the accident, right?’
‘Six weeks after I came out of hospital.’
‘Yeah. So, you know, with the surgery and all that … how much do you really remember about the early stuff? I mean, you had quite a bit of brain damage, didn’t you?’
‘That was the operation.’
‘Yeah, but how much memory did you really lose?’
I stared at him. ‘Fe, you know all this.’
I got a single raised-eyebrow comment. ‘Humour me.’
I found that I was rubbing my scar, feeling the warped skin on my fingertips against its puckered surface. ‘My childhood is more or less intact. Everything from my teens onward is … fuzzy. I can remember bits and pieces but nothing really clearly, and I’ve lost the whole of the year leading up to the accident completely.’ I shrugged. ‘Everything I remember about Michael, about us, comes from photographs.’
‘So when you say you remember the early Fallen Skies stuff, are you really remembering, or half-remembering what people have told you about it?’ By ‘people’ Felix meant him. No-one else had my obsessive interest, although one of the library assistants and I had exchanged some speculation on the new series, but even he had gone a bit glazed-over when I’d launched into my theories about the alien Skeel race and their motivations. Perhaps, on reflection, the queue at the counter should have been my clue that I’d gone on a bit.
I used a finger to knock oily crumbs from my top lip. ‘No. I remember.’ The programme had saved my sanity, how could I have forgotten a single episode? My life had changed beyond recognition; I’d lost Faith, Michael, all my hopes for the future, and along had come a science-fiction drama that had made me suspend everything, even the grieving, for the brief hour it lasted. Gethryn Tudor-Morgan had stormed into my Wednesday evenings and taken me over. ‘All of it. Everything.’
‘Okay. Just curious.’ Felix dipped a moistened finger into a nearly empty packet. ‘Would you … you know, if things had been different, would you have wanted to come over to the States and audition?’
I shook my head. ‘I dunno. Think my hair has always been a bit too much for American TV.’ I smiled, but inside my heart had clenched into a ball. I’d joke and I’d smile and Felix would never know how I felt about my new life. How, deep down in the core of myself, in the place where I allowed introspection, I hated myself for losing any skills I’d ever had, any looks, any confidence. ‘And I’d never get a part now, even if I wanted one.’
‘It’s really not that bad.’ Fe’s eyes ran over my scar. ‘Better than it was, anyway.’
‘Not televisual-friendly though, you have to admit. I could probably try out for War of the Killer Zombies, if anyone’s casting for that.’
‘Yeah. No make-up needed.’ Fe smirked, until I hit him with a pillow. ‘Right then, just for my own personal satisfaction, a little test. What was the name of the first ship that Lucas James flew?’
The answer was there, as soon as he’d finished speaking, as though my new post-operative recall system was all on some instant-access Rolodex. ‘Everyone thinks it was the Medusa, because that was the one he was flying across the Ice Nebula, but it was the B’Ha Virgin. It was only in the pilot episode, which never got commercially screened … think they showed it to advertisers to check the revenue-e
arning response … but it counts. Not many people know about it, but someone on the show once sneaked an illicit clip out – put it up on YouTube. Why?’
‘Just checking, darling, just checking.’
* * * * *
I’d swear I only closed my eyes for a couple of seconds. Just to allow my stomach to get to work on all that saturated fat. But when I opened them the room was empty and all the crisp wrappers had been balled up into the bin, from where they occasionally crackled and spat like plastic flames.
‘Fe?’
I already knew he wasn’t there; it wasn’t in Felix’s nature to sit quietly in a corner – he’d have been banging around the bathroom swearing and covering himself in expensive sprays or trying his hand with the dubious fake tanning lotion he’d bought at the airport. Instead the room was full of muffled sounds from outside and a smell of elderly fried food filtering up from the dumpsters through the slightly open window. It was twenty past eleven.
I shuffled myself back up against the pillows. The room felt secure, promoted from too small to cosy, particularly when compared to the boom and thump of all those voices travelling up the stairwells. I could stay here. It was safe.
But.
Autographs. The signing began at eleven. Gethryn would be there, in Meeting Room One, wherever that was. I could be there too, a mere table away. I could speak to him!
Even as I thought it, my heart sped up and the sweat burst onto the palms of my hands. Yes, Gethryn would be there, but so would just about everyone else who’d come to the convention – that was kind of the point, wasn’t it? To mingle. After all, this godforsaken little motel in the middle of the Nevada desert wasn’t exactly offering any alternative entertainment, was it? You came to see and be seen. To mix with other like-minded folks, to chat and compare and pull apart episodes until your lips bled. To talk about characters who were as fixed in your mind as your own family. To have strangers stare …
Star Struck Page 4
