by Celina Grace
“What’s the matter?” I slurred.
“I’m not into chicks,” he said, quite simply.
“Oh good,” I replied, just as simply and then we both burst into giggles and forgot all about it, back to normal in seconds.
So the days rolled on. After three weeks, I felt as if we’d lived there forever. The world of university and family and real life had receded into some distant memory, washed in a kind of sepia-toned nostalgia, as if it had been thirty years ago rather than a matter of weeks. The fact that Janey and I both had to start our next year at university at the beginning of September seemed incredible, as strange as if we were both due to go to the moon or something equally unlikely. The golden times we were having seemed infinite; as if we were two insects imprisoned in amber.
Life was good and it wasn’t until a few more weeks went by that I became aware of the first wrong notes, the first intimations that something wasn’t quite right.
Take Wade, for example. I’d already spoken about his drug use and how I quickly became accustomed to it. But that didn’t mean it didn’t bother me. He was never straight: he was either comatose or catatonic, and only for a few brief hours a day, when he played music, did he in any way approximate a normal state of consciousness. I asked Cody about it once and he looked uncomfortable but he agreed with me.
“Yeah, he’s an addict, Eve. But what can we do? He’s an adult, he makes his own decisions. Grimm will probably cart him off to rehab once the album’s finished.”
I didn’t know who was supplying Wade with his drugs, but I suspected it was Race. He was the only one who left the manor grounds, to get food and drink and other supplies. I didn’t ask him about it. The only other person I mentioned my concern to was, oddly, Merian. She was quite a frequent visitor to the manor, coming down about once a week. I think it was to make sure that Blue and the boys were actually doing what the record company thought they were doing - making progress on their new album.
Merian had made it clear that she held me and Janey in utter contempt, right up to the moment where she came across me reading Pride and Prejudice, one day. Fittingly, I was sitting in the library – it had actually been a real library, one of the those big, old-fashioned ones you get in stately homes, with wooden shelving right up to the high ceiling and rails along which a ladder had once run. All the books had gone now, of course, or were ruined - some old leather-bound ones remained but they were so mouldy as to be unreadable – but it was still quite a peaceful place to sit and have a good read. I’d had a twinge of conscience about all the summer reading I was supposed to be doing for university and so had taken myself off to make a start.
Why Merian had come to the library I had no idea. She opened the door and said, ”Oh!” at the sight of me. I was equally startled. I waited for her to sneer and slam the door shut, but instead she came in and walked over to me.
“So you’re not a total moron after all,” she said, once she’d seen what I was reading.
“Funnily enough, I’m not,” I said, in as bored a tone as I could muster.
She smiled rather reluctantly. “You’ll have to forgive me,” she said. “You’re the first groupie I’ve met who seems to have a brain in her head. You can’t imagine the kind of girls who I normally have to suffer.”
I looked her directly in the eye. “Now, you should know not to judge a book by its cover.”
“And if you’re so intelligent, you should learn not to use clichés,” she responded smartly.
I grinned.
“Where’s Blue?” she asked, a moment later. I told her I thought he was in the studio. She nodded, apparently satisfied and turned to go.
I hesitated. Okay, so I’d just made a bit of headway with Merian, but that didn’t mean we were friends. But… that morning Wade had been so comatose at breakfast that, for a frightening second, I thought he’d actually died. How long was it going to be before we all woke up one morning and found that he really had? I had to say something.
“Merian,” I said hesitantly, but it was enough to stop her in her tracks, her hand on the handle of the library door. “Can I ask you – I mean, I just wanted to ask you about Wade.”
“Wade?”
I stumbled over my words. “Don’t you – do you think – don’t you think that he’s really quite ill? With drugs, I mean? Shouldn’t we do something?”
For a moment she was silent. Then she shrugged her bony shoulders in her smart suit jacket and said “You’re right, of course. But take it from me, if an addict’s not ready to give up then nothing anyone else says or does will make any difference.”
“But surely—“
“Seriously, Eve. It is Eve, right? Wade’s nowhere near ready to admit what he does is a problem.” She was silent for a moment and then added. “He’s weak. That’s the real problem. He can’t cope with reality. He has to blot it all out.”
I thought about what she had said. What was so bad about Wade’s reality? He was a key member of an incredibly famous, successful rock band; he was rich and young and good looking, just like all the members of Dirty Rumours. What was there to blot out? I didn’t understand.
“I wish we all had that luxury,” Merian added, and I was startled at the bitterness in her voice.
I opened my mouth to say something in response but Merian cut across me.
“Listen, don’t worry about it,” she said, abruptly. “It’s not your concern. I’m keeping an eye on him.”
I nodded. Clearly I had to be satisfied with that. Merian waited another moment and then raised a hand in casual farewell and left the room.
I returned to Jane Austen but my concentration was broken. I put the book down and stared up at the blotched and cracked ceiling. I kicked the leg of my chair like a schoolgirl. It was funny but I realised then that I was actually quite bored. That made me laugh. I was as bad as Wade! Here I was, in the massive mansion of Blue Turner, hanging out with the members of Dirty Rumours, with as much drink and coke and smokes and sex as I wanted, and I was bored? What was wrong with me?
The ridiculousness of the thought didn’t make it any less true. After a moment I got up. Part of the problem was that I hadn’t left the manor in - God, it had to be over a month. No wonder I had cabin fever. Blue had made it clear that whilst anyone was welcome to leave the manor at any time, the fact that they had meant that they wouldn’t be welcome back. But would he mind if I went for a walk in the woods surrounding the house? Surely not? I decided to sneak out via the side entrance of the house, on the opposite side to the stable block. There was a gate at the back of the lawns that led into the wood; I had seen it from Race’s bedroom one morning. I made my way there.
I felt a little thrill of transgression as I stepped through the gate. A footpath ran ahead of me, winding through the beech trees. Shafts of sunlight pierced the branches above me. I stretched my arms out wide, looking up through the tree canopy above me to the dazzling blue sky above it. Then I started walking, quite slowly, enjoying the sensation of freedom that my steps away from the manor brought me. I tried to remember if I’d ever come into the woods with my cousins when I’d stayed here and thought I probably hadn’t. Hadn’t Aunty Viv had a story about something that had happened to her in the woods, something bad? I groped for the memory but it eluded me. It was so long ago. I tried to remember if she had ever mentioned Asharton Manor during my one visit, but I couldn’t remember that, either. I felt a surge of nostalgic fondness for my aunt. I hadn’t seen her in years, not since my mum died. After the children - my cousins - left home, Aunty Viv and Uncle Joe moved to America. Perhaps I would write her a postcard or something, if I could find her address.
I’d been walking for about half an hour when I realised I was lost. The path had wound, ever so gradually, in a curve that meant when I looked behind me, I couldn’t see where I’d come from and I couldn’t see the manor at all. I felt a jump of panic. If I was lost, how on Earth would I get back? Nobody knew I was here. And if I couldn’t get back, would Blue think I had le
ft the manor for good? I wouldn’t be able to go back. Oh Jesus, this was a disaster… I started blundering about the woods, trying to find the original path, scratching my shins on brambles and catching my hair on low-hanging branches.
After five minutes of panic, I forced myself to stand still and look about me. I wasn’t in the beech woods any more, the trees standing around me like prickly sentinels were all pine trees, dark and forbidding. I was in some sort of clearing. As I stared about me, sweat rolling down the small of my back, trying not to lose it completely, my eye was drawn to a golden glint on the floor of the clearing, near the middle. The sunlight was beaming off some sort of metal object on the ground. I walked nearer, peered more closely. It was some sort of necklace, half buried in the leaf mould. I pulled it free. It was a thin gold chain with a small gold letter on it. The letter ‘A’.
I stared at it. ‘A’. Whose could it be and how did it get here? Well, some walker must have dropped it. That was the most likely explanation. But we never saw any walkers here. I held it up and the little letter span around, glinting in the sunlight. Odd. After a moment, I put it in the pocket of my jeans.
I felt a bit calmer now. As I looked up again, I saw the path, just as if I had never lost it. Shaking my head at my own stupidity, I jogged back across the clearing and back onto the path. Finding my way back was easy. I couldn’t understand how I had got so panicky. I snuck back through the gate and sauntered casually back over the lawn, making my way to the swimming pool, where I had a suspicion the others would be.
I was right. They were all sprawled out on the rugs by the pool and Wade, for once awake, was actually in the pool and swimming a slow and lazy crawl from one side to the other. I was astonished, and pleased. Had Merian said something to him? I couldn’t imagine what she would have said to change his habits and it was true that a few moments after I arrived, he climbed out of the pool, wrapped himself in a towel and promptly went to sleep, but it was still reassuring to see him have a few moments of near-natural consciousness, at least.
No one remarked on my absence and I decided not to mention my walk, or the necklace. The afternoon passed in its usual fashion and, after a few drinks and once I was passed the mirror, I forgot about it myself. There was only one moment that made me pause. I was complaining about the heat, holding my hair up off my neck. Janey did the same and said airily “I’m going to get mine cut off, it’s just ridiculous having hair this long.”
“You do that,” said Blue. “And you’ll be fucking sorry.”
It wasn’t so much the words but the tone that underlay them. Janey and I both stared at him. After a moment, he smiled - or at least sort of smiled. Janey dropped her eyes and her hair at the same moment. I swallowed down a rising uneasiness.
Cody said something about another drink then and the moment passed. But it recurred to me that night as I lay beside Race, listening to him breathe in the warm darkness of the bedroom. It was so hot. I spread my hair like a fan over the pillow, trying not to let it touch my skin. Something recalled to me that first night I’d spent there, the strange dream I’d had about the blonde girl. Had that actually been real? I remembered the blonde girl who had been here when we first arrived. April, was that her name? April. It was then I remembered the necklace in my jeans pocket, the necklace with the letter ‘A’ on it. Had that belonged to April? How had that ended up in the middle of the woods?
I turned on my side, fighting down that sense of anxiety again. Did it matter? I turned to my other side and looked at Race’s sleeping face. The air in the room felt suffocatingly hot and I thought for a moment of taking a pillow down to the swimming pool and sleeping in the open air. But, after a moment, I rejected the thought. I was afraid to go outside and sleep on my own. I’m afraid, I whispered to myself. Then I got up and began hunting for the bottle of Valium I knew Race kept somewhere. I was never going to be able to get to sleep on my own. Eventually, I found the Valium and took one with a long swallow of the warm, dusty water from the sink in the corner. By the time I got back to bed, either the effects of the pill or just general weariness was beginning to overtake me. I lifted my hair back onto the pillow again and closed my eyes.
One of the worst things about Janey going missing was how long it took me to notice that she’d gone. We’d never kept tabs on each other and so the next morning I got up and stumbled down to the kitchen, just as I always did, in search of Cody and coffee; not necessarily in that order. I was later getting up than normal, a consequence of my disturbed night and I still felt fogged by the Valium. There was no one else in the kitchen. I made coffee and stood, looking about me, while the kettle boiled. It was not something that I usually noticed but this morning, the general squalor depressed me. I would do some cleaning later, I decided, and was cheered by the thought of actually having something to do for a change.
I wandered out onto the terrace and looked at the view. For once, it wasn’t sunny – the sky sagged like a pile of dirty towels, greyish and damp-looking. I could see a thin thread of smoke rising from somewhere in the pine forest. I frowned. A forest fire? It didn’t seem big enough for that. More like the smoke from a bonfire. Was someone camping in the woods? I couldn’t see Blue being very happy about that. It was then I recalled his voice, the look on his face yesterday when Janey had talked about cutting off her hair. For a second, he’d almost looked like a different person. I made a mental note to have a word with Janey, to see if she was okay and that he hadn’t – well – hadn’t taken anything out on her.
I could hear music coming from the studio and made my way over there. Blue and Wade were trading chords on their guitars. I was surprised to see Merian sat over by the window – I hadn’t heard her car. Perhaps she’d come down late last night. She looked ill, white-faced and drawn, behind a cloud of cigarette smoke.
Neither Cody nor Janey were in the room. I asked after Cody and was told he was painting. I thought I’d better not disturb him but decided to go and find Janey instead. I made my way up to Blue’s bedroom, working on the assumption that she was still in bed.
She wasn’t there. I stood in the doorway, looking at the tumbled sheets and gradually became aware of something, a curious stripped emptiness in the room. It took me a moment to put my finger on what exactly was missing. The dresses and skirts that had littered the floor had gone. The beads that Janey had hung from the side of the huge mirror that faced the bed had disappeared. Puzzled, I looked around the room again. All of Janey’s things seemed to have disappeared. What the hell?
I looked in my room – well, Race’s room really. I wasn’t really expecting her to be there, but you never knew… I looked in Wade’s room, and Cody’s massive room. No Janey. I walked down to the swimming pool, thinking that she must be there. She wasn’t. I walked back to the house, quickly, feeling something slightly akin to panic. I burst into the studio room, no longer caring about interrupting a recording session.
“Where’s Janey?” I demanded. “I can’t find her anywhere.”
Merian opened her mouth, clearly about to berate me for barging in. Blue forestalled her. He brushed the hair out of his eyes and then bent his head downwards again, fiddling with the guitar springs. “Oh, yeah,” he said casually. “She split.”
“She did what?” I thought I’d misheard him. “She’s gone?”
“Yeah.” The chords muffled his words. “She said she’d had enough and walked out.”
“But… but—“ I was flabbergasted. “She just left? Without telling me?”
Blue smiled, amused at my reaction. “Looks that way.”
“But… but—“ I stuttered. I couldn’t coherently frame what I wanted to say. Blue took advantage of my speechlessness by launching straight into the first song of the new album. I recognised the opening chords. I was clearly being dismissed. I wasn’t sure whether Wade had even noticed I was there. He had his eyes closed, concentrating on the music.
I looked over at Merian, wondering if she would help. After a moment, she gave me a
small, tight smile and shrugged. Clearly she wasn’t going to elaborate on what Blue had just told me. Perhaps she didn’t know.
I backed out of the studio, shaking my head. Fumbling for my cigarettes, I lit up and walked back to the kitchen in a daze. What the hell? Janey had just left? Buggered off without even a goodbye? The initial shock I’d felt was beginning to be replaced by anger. Who the hell did she think she was, just upping and leaving, without even telling me? Where was she even going to go? The Bristol commune? Back to London?
I lit another cigarette from the stub of the first, and got up. To hell with breaking Cody’s concentration. I had to know more about why Janey had left. Why on Earth would she leave? She was besotted with Blue, she would do anything for him. She would have known, as well as I did, that if she left the manor voluntarily there was no way in hell she would be able to come back again. Why would she do that? Why would she give all this up? It just didn’t make sense.
By this time, I was banging on the door of Cody’s studio. He opened it after a long moment and looked startled at the sight of me.
“What’s the matter?”
“Did you know Janey’s gone?” I demanded.
“What?”
“Janey’s gone. Just upped and left. Buggered off without a word. Do you know anything about it?”
Cody stared at me. His face underwent a curious transformation – as if the features pulled together slightly, a miniscule shrinking. It was hard to tell under his tan, but it looked as though he was suddenly pale.
“Janey’s gone?” he asked, in a low voice. I nodded, staring at him, suddenly alarmed. He looked so weird.
“Do you know anything about it?” I asked again.
“No, I don’t,” he said, quickly. He straightened up and seemed to pull himself together. “I don’t know anything about it at all. What did Blue say?”
“He said she said she’d had enough. Something like that. I went up to her room – Blue’s room – and all her stuff is gone.”
