He leaned back against the sun-warmed wall of the shed and breathed in the smell of acrylic paint and hot plastic from the props, overlaid with a vinegar smell from a spilled jar of pickles. The smell of Fallen Skies. Artificial substance and sour preservation, in a room that a four-year old could break the lock off. And this is what I’ve done with my life.
His mind drifted, aided by the medicinal tang of so much vinegar in a confined space, until it landed on the thought of Skye and he felt his skin prickle into goosebumps. Cute girl. Weird friendship she seems to have … with a guy that’s way too controlling for it to be good. Two steps into the shed and he could run his hand over the reassuring solidity of the Shadow Fighter, another step and he had his hand on the sleeve of the costume of a refugee from one of the frozen planets. And why am I even thinking about her? I’ve got enough problems, don’t need a girl with self-esteem issues to add to the collection of Great Fuck-Ups of Our Time, and if she needs help … I am so far from the person she should have anywhere near her.
A sudden burst of laughter from somewhere outside. Jack straightened up, took his hand away from the costume, and gritted his teeth. It’s all pretend. This, Fallen Skies, who I am, who I’ve become, it’s all pretend. So, this whole Iceman thing I’ve got going on, the person people believe me to be, the stone-cold writer-man – the thing that stops me from wanting … needing someone … how real is that?
Chapter Eleven
I was woken by the sounds of a Spanish argument and the banging of pans. Felix must have left the window open. I huddled down and turned over but the noise continued and then the dog joined in, shrill yelps that rattled and echoed around the yard until I had to get up.
My mouth was dry and I was thirsty. Couldn’t work out why. Little, half-remembered snippets from last night kept drifting through my head; the firmness of Felix’s hold on me as he carried me to bed, Jack pushing my hair away from my face. And Gethryn, always back to Gethryn, talking to me outside the diner, taking my hand, looking in my eyes.
I swallowed water and rinsed my face. How much of last night had been real, and how much had been some complicated form of hallucination? The whole of the last twelve hours flowed together in one confused image: drinks, Jack’s smile, Felix’s touch. And still, Gethryn. My one, huge, dream-come-true moment and I was kicking myself for my gaucheness, my cautious reactions, when what I should have done was entrance him with my wit and sophistication. Shouldn’t I?
I dressed. Still no Felix; he was probably sleeping in. A quick shard of jealousy cut a curl from my heart and I imagined myself lying sprawled in someone’s arms, or involved in a bed-bouncingly enthusiastic leave-taking, but when I tried to imagine the man concerned all I could conjure were memories of Michael dragged from photographs. It made me shudder, and I didn’t know why.
The corridors were quiet at this time in the morning as I wandered down the stairs, in case Fe had found his way to the diner without me. But the place was still locked up, although I could see girls inside, tying on aprons and turning on coffee machines, so I went back to reception, where I found Antonio earnestly pushing letter pegs into today’s Board of Events.
I read it as he prodded the letters into place. When he finally stepped back to admire the overall effect, I was so close behind him that he nearly broke my nose.
‘Miss! Why you read so close?’ He eyed me cautiously. ‘You all right?’
‘This … this is today?’
‘Yes. Much excitement. Much competition, I think.’
Even knowing Felix, even knowing that he was so self-centred he had his own gravitational field, I still had trouble believing it. ‘The bastard.’ But even given all that … why? What was in it for him?
Leaving Antonio standing baffled, I chased back up the stairs to find Felix still conspicuously not in our room. I wondered now if it was deliberate, if he was going to avoid me until the last possible minute, and if he did – how the hell did he think he was going to get me to go along with it? I slammed around the room, hoping that he’d come in just so I could throw things at him, but he continued not to arrive. Bastard! He’d spent the night jumping on some gorgeous guy, leaving me sleeping off the effects of – what, something to keep me out of trouble? To keep me from asking questions? Well, think again, Felix, my old mate, because I’m good at questions. But then, who could I ask, who did I know out here who’d even answer? Jack.
I hammered on his door until he opened up, looking rumpled but unsleepy. He was wearing the pyjama bottoms again, and this time they were topped with a Metallica T-shirt that looked as if it had belonged to several other men previously, all of them bigger.
‘What? Oh, it’s you.’
‘You told me to come to you if I needed anything, didn’t you? I mean, last night, I didn’t dream that, did I?’
‘No, but I’m impressed that you remember. You were pretty out of things.’
‘Felix doped me.’
‘He what?’ Jack waved me inside and cleared his laptop off the bed, where he’d obviously been working. The screen had the Fallen Skies logo in one corner. ‘That’s a bit … immoral, isn’t it?’ He sat where the laptop had been, tucking his legs up in front of him in a kind of half-yoga pose which made the pyjama bottoms gape revealingly around the fly, giving me flashes of pale blue lycra. ‘Sit down and tell me.’
‘I can’t. I can’t sit down. I’m so angry, I want to hit someone.’ I paced up and down the floor around the bed, Jack’s head swivelling to keep me in view. ‘I just went down to reception, found out that the activity of today is a quiz, yes?’
‘Yeah. Big thing. Main reason for the whole convention.’
‘Yes. I remember reading about last year’s.’ I wasn’t going to confess to the all-consuming fire of jealous hatred I’d felt, flicking through magazines to see pictures of the winner, a self-possessed girl, draping herself all over the cast and crew. ‘I knew there’d be one this year, but …’ I stopped short of revealing that I may have been intrigued, but my lack of self-confidence would never in a million years have let me enter. ‘Last night, Felix said that I was taking part in something? I didn’t dream that either?’
He blew a long breath. ‘He entered you. And you didn’t know?’
I began slapping the wall. ‘I should have. I should have realised that Felix thinks altruism is some kind of learning disorder, that he’d never bring me all the way out here just to – just to cheer me up. He’s been planning this!’ I rounded on Jack. ‘How the hell can he have entered me without my knowing? Don’t you have to sign things or something?’
A shrug, and Metallica threatened to abandon his skinny shoulders. ‘Course.’ He swept his hair back from his face and frowned at me. ‘It’s all done properly you know, we’re not some fly-by-night, single-series merchants. Could he forge your signature? I mean, we try to keep it all watertight but there’s only so much we can do.’
‘Yes.’ My fists were tight. I’d got handfuls of my shirt on each side and was twisting, feeling my scars catch on the fabric. ‘When I was first out of hospital I used to give him my bank card to get money out of the cash machine and to get shopping. I … I wasn’t coping very well, I just didn’t think … He must have learned to copy my signature from that.’
‘Wow. He’s like immorality Ground Zero, isn’t he? Does he … I mean, he doesn’t … you’re all right, aren’t you? He’s not … God, what am I trying to say here?’
‘Fe has a very loose interpretation of what’s right. Anything that benefits him is a good thing and he can’t see any reason not to do it. I’m just so angry that he didn’t come out and tell me! I thought we were coming over here to meet … I mean, to socialise, to get away from York, to help me stop dwelling on things. All wide-eyed innocence and “it will be good for you”, you know? When what he should have been saying was “let me drug you up, drag you to the middle of nowh
ere and then force you to enter a competition”!’
‘And he’s your friend? Bloody hell, I’d hate to meet your enemies.’
‘I’m sure in Felix’s head it all makes sense. But the question is, why? What good is it going to do him if I enter?’
Jack stood up and grabbed my arms, pulling them forward. I saw his scar stretch and flex as he reached out and wondered if mine looked like that under tension. ‘The quiz, it’s really tough. I mean I don’t know the answers and I wrote most of the series. How much do you really know about Fallen Skies? I mean, really? Are you an obsessive fan? Watch it, sit on the forum, read up on everything?’
My arms went limp in his grasp. His hands were cold. ‘Yes.’ That was me, obsessive.
‘First prize, y’see, is a part in the next series. Nothing big, a walk-on probably, not really thought about it much, we tailor the part to the winner.’ His eyes were looking somewhere inside, not at me. ‘Probably this one guy I’m writing, veteran of the Shadow War … yeah, could be Seran Vye …’
‘Shut up. What is it with everyone’s obsession with men in uniform? So, Felix wants me to win …’ That was why he’d asked all those questions about me trying out for a part. If things had been different, he’d said. Different enough that I’d still have the confidence to stand in front of a camera? Knowing all along that I wouldn’t, couldn’t.
And then the whole plan snapped into focus. I knew exactly why Felix had brought me here. ‘He wants me to win the part for him,’ I said, almost breathless with the audacity. ‘He entered me knowing I wouldn’t take the prize if I won it – and then, there he’d be, stepping into the breach.’ I half-laughed. ‘I can just picture him now, combing through the tiny print to make sure it would be allowed. Wow. You have got to admire his deviousness.’
Jack seemed to realise he was still holding my arms. Slowly, one finger at a time, he released his grip. ‘If he’d asked you nicely, told you what he wanted, would you have come here?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe.’ But I knew that if Felix had asked me to fly to America just to try to win him a part in a series, I’d have refused. Would have chosen my cosy little house, my safe, established little life over everything. But the way he’d put it – that it would be good for me, and then, once I was here, that I could take things at my own pace, stay in the room all the time if I wanted to – lying bastard.
‘So, will you do it?’
I shrugged this time. ‘I might, just to get every answer wrong. That’d show him.’
Jack grinned. ‘Yeah, go for the booby prize, it’s a series of Scratch-n-Sniff cards. Somehow I don’t see Felix as a Scratch-n-Sniff kind of guy. Not of cards, at any rate.’ The grin fell away and he was left looking darkly serious. ‘You care a lot about him, don’t you?’
‘Of course I do. Felix’s sister Faith was my best friend. We went through drama school together, got our first jobs in theatre together, I even moved in with her family for a while. Fe was just her brother, just this bloke tomcatting around at the edge of our circle – he’s two years younger than Faith, two years behind at drama school.’ I found myself twisting my fingers again, picking at the scars. Questions about the past always did that to me. I answered by rote now. Practised. ‘And then, when I got together with Michael, and he was Fe’s friend, we were a bit of a foursome.’ Now my hand went up to my face. ‘But … I don’t know. Everything to do with Michael is stuff Felix has told me, the gaps he’s filled in for me, you can’t understand if you haven’t been there. Not knowing is … Fe is all I have left. He’s the only person who remembers …’
‘You mean you don’t?’
I stared at him for a second then tapped my head. ‘Brain damage. I was thrown through the windscreen, back of my head got crushed, there was a blood clot on my brain and they had to operate … My memory got …’ I waved my fingers in the air as though playing an invisible harp.
‘So, Felix is like your professional rememberer? That’s actually quite cool, there’s a whole sci-fi concept in there.’ He tailed off. ‘You don’t remember the accident?’
‘Only what Felix has told me. We were on our way home from a New Year party, Faith and Michael were in the front, Felix and I were in the back, and we crashed at high speed.’ The words were empty of any emotion; I might as well have been reporting the plot of an EastEnders episode.
Jack tipped his head back and looked at me from under a heavy overhang of hair. It made him look remote somehow. ‘You weren’t in the front?’
‘No. It probably saved my life.’
‘Your … best friend was sitting next to your fiancé?’
My breath caught. Raked down my throat like a mis-swallow. ‘Yes.’ I gulped, couldn’t get air down fast enough and began to panic. Sweat broke out on my forehead, my breathing began to race and yet I still couldn’t fill my lungs. Sickness rose, but I couldn’t throw up, didn’t dare, how could I breathe if I was vomiting?
‘Skye.’ Jack spoke suddenly close, right by my ear. ‘It’s all right. Relax. Just breathe.’ I could feel a cautious hand stroking my hair. ‘Don’t think about it; let your body do the work for you. Trust me, it wants to breathe, when you fight you’re stopping it from doing its job.’
I tried to push him away; he was crowding my air, breathing my oxygen. But gradually his slow words and the rhythm of his stroking took over the irregular gasping of my inhalation and I felt my heart rate begin to settle. ‘Sorry.’ I was exhausted. ‘Stupid.’ Couldn’t even stop to think why I’d got so stressed at the thought of the accident. Maybe I wasn’t as over it as I thought.
He was still standing very close and I felt him shake his head. ‘Nah. Perfectly reasonable. We all handle the trauma in our own ways. After my accident I didn’t speak for six months, some kind of shock, they said. Drove everyone completely insane, lot of them thought I was faking it for the attention.’ A high grunt of derision. ‘Yeah, ’cos everyone wants doctors and psychiatrists buzzing round them all hours.’
‘What happened?’
Jack flopped down onto the bed, drew his knees up against his chest and wrapped his arms around them. ‘Like you, car crash. I was sixteen. Ryan, my best friend, was killed; I got my arm nearly ripped off.’ Thoughtfully he flexed his muscles, pulling his hand up to his face and away again. ‘They reattached it, eight hours of microsurgery, and it’s pretty nearly as good as it was.’ He wiggled his fingers in my direction. ‘I’m a bit clumsy sometimes, don’t grip as well as I should, but it’s okay.’ He stared at his palm as though for the first time. ‘Yeah,’ he repeated. ‘It’s okay. Right. Now, you’re going to come to breakfast with me. Couple of cups of coffee and a plate of eggs, you’ll feel better. Then you can decide what you’re doing about this quiz.’ Long legs unfolded onto the carpet. ‘But reckon I’d better get dressed. This is my writing gear and not every restaurant appreciates genius out of its jeans.’
‘I’ll go and …’
‘No, stay there. I’ll just be a minute.’ He dragged open a couple of drawers, withdrew the contents of one of them and headed into the bathroom, half-closing the door behind him. ‘Where’s Felix now?’ His voice was muffled, the T-shirt coming off, probably.
‘Shagging Jared White, I think.’
‘Really?’ A head came round the door and I tried not to notice the exposed chest under it. ‘Good luck to him then.’ There was a thin white scar along the side of his rib cage that I hadn’t been in a fit state to notice last time I’d seen him topless, fading as it curved into the hair scattered down his stomach. He still wore the leather lace; it contrasted with his pale skin like a slash.
‘Oh, I think Felix is up to it.’
Another manic grin and the torso vanished. I could hear the rustling sounds of clothing removal, and desperately tried not to say anything which might call for an appearance. ‘What are the other prizes then? For the quiz, I mean.’
A momentary hiatus behind the door, then Jack emerged buttoning his fly. His chest was still bare, revealing that the scar tore across a nipple before angling down towards his diaphragm. ‘You really want to know? Okay. First is the part in the show. Second is a dinner date with Geth. Third … I think it’s some kind of memorabilia – one of the flight cruiser cockpits maybe, we’ve not really settled yet, depends what’s needed next series.’ He opened another drawer and pulled out a white shirt, sniffed it and held it out to me. ‘Reckon this’ll do another day?’
‘Looks fine,’ I said idly, thinking about that second-prize dinner date with Gethryn. If I could win that …
‘Hmm. You’re not fussy, I’ll add that to the list. Okay. You coming?’ And he yanked the shirt on, did up two middle buttons to hold it across his chest and opened the door, barefoot, pulling a pair of wire-framed glasses from his bedside table and poking them onto his nose as he went.
‘You call that dressed?’ I followed him into the corridor. ‘Don’t you ever wear shoes?’
‘Only if I have to.’ He closed the bedroom door, pausing to check his pockets for his key card. As he patted himself down, I saw Felix heading up the corridor towards our room. His jaunty walk stammered for a second when he caught sight of me and the partly clad Jack and he held a theatrical hand to his forehead.
‘Skye, Skye, Skye, I take my eyes off you for one night and you’re bonking the workforce; what am I going to do with you?’
Star Struck Page 9
