Call Me Star Girl

by Louise Beech

  He didn’t answer that question; instead he said he preferred the years with odd endings, like 2007 and 2017. ‘Those seem to be the years that have meant the most,’ he said. ‘When I left home and came here and started university. When I met you.’

  I thought about it. ‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘My mum left in 2003. I met her again this year – 2017. A month before I met you.’

  ‘Odd years, odd stuff,’ he said. ‘Good odd.’

  I can listen to Tom talk forever; it means I don’t have to. It means I can lean back, and all my thoughts go to sleep. I’m at peace. If he ever bored me, I don’t know what I’d do. I’m not tired of him yet, but he does scare me sometimes. Is that the thrill of being with him? But how much fear is too much?

  The radio never used to bore me. Every shift was different. The commercials were repetitive, like a heartbeat between songs, and they sustained the show. But the music varied; the beats changed. Recently it’s begun to feel samey. Like I’ve run out of words. People have been saying that radio is dying for years, but it’s only the way that people listen that has changed. Thanks to apps and streaming we’re actually more accessible.

  Accessible: the thought of that depresses me. I like difficult to reach. Challenging.

  The music ends, and I talk about what’s happening on the local roads, about the schedule for tomorrow, and say the next song will be ‘Love Yourself’ by Justin Bieber because no one has asked for it. I could talk about the murdered girl. I could say her name, unlike the tweeters, where she’s #thegirlinthealley. It’s late enough for dark musings, just as it’s late enough for romance.

  No one has responded to my open invitation yet, but I know one person will. Because he has called every Friday for the last three weeks, and one random Tuesday.

  To tell me he knows who killed Victoria Valbon.

  That’s her name.

  He might call and tell me everything tonight. His name. How he knows. And who he thinks it was.

  For now, I play music I hardly hear because I keep thinking about Tom; about when we first talked about playing dead.

  3

  STELLA

  THEN

  My mum once told me I began wrong.

  When I was eleven, she lit a cigarette with a jewelled lighter and said I grew transverse in her womb, an elbow nudging her cervix as though to escape early. She said that, when my feet emerged before my head, covered in mucus and blood, she knew I’d be an awkward girl.

  When I was twelve she left me with the woman next door. The only thing I had to remember her by was an antique, cut-glass perfume bottle with a star-shaped stopper, and enough perfume inside to let me smell her now and again. She was floral, sweet, gone.

  When I was twenty-six she came back.

  Eight months ago, we met again.

  She was waiting at her window for me, as though she’d been standing there for the last fourteen years, and I simply hadn’t known. Where her hair had lost some of its colour, her eyes remained bright; they flashed blue, like the phones at the studio. The way they always had when I was small. I felt that if I went away for another fourteen years and came back, she would still be standing there, still waiting, and that I’d feel again the buzz of our reunion.

  I’ve tried to retain that high since we first met again. I’ve tried to let it carry me. Tried to let it thaw my heart. Replace her perfume.

  I did still sometimes carry my mum’s antique bottle with me after we’d met again. I used to unplug the star-shaped stopper when I was alone and let the floral scent fill the air. I wanted to keep her sweet like it was. I wanted to flush away the many questions she hadn’t – and still hasn’t – answered. Ones I haven’t asked because I don’t want to ruin anything.

  ‘Oh, you still have it,’ she said, when she saw it in my bag during our reunion. ‘All this time, I wondered if you’d keep it.’

  She held it in front of her face, the thick glass decorating her cheeks with flecks of rainbow. Her eyes dimmed with an emotion I couldn’t decipher – because I didn’t know her well enough.

  ‘I thought I’d never see it again.’ She looked at me, perhaps realising she had lost much more than the bottle the day she left. ‘You looked after it all this time?’

  ‘Have it,’ I whispered.

  ‘Oh, no, you should keep it.’

  I shook my head and said she should take it back.

  ‘No, it’s yours.’ She touched the intricate stopper.

  I shook my head again, more insistent. I had carried it around with me all through school. Some kids had laughed when they found it, threatened to pour it away. I could hear them still, their voices shrill. I was prepared to surrender it now though, now she was back.

  ‘I want you to keep it,’ she said again. ‘Because…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she said softly.

  We both looked at the bottle.

  ‘Anyway, in a way I don’t need it … You’re my star girl now.’

  ‘Am I?’

  She had never given me an affectionate name when I was a child. Never called me sweetheart or angel. I wanted to cling to this new name, to bask in her attention. And I also wanted to smash the bottle on the floor.

  I laughed instead. ‘Sounds like one of those novels that has “girl” or “wife” or “sister” in the title,’ I said. ‘We just need a killer twist and a cliffhanger ending, and we could have a bestseller called Star Girl.’

  ‘I didn’t even realise,’ my mum said after a moment.

  ‘Realise what?’

  ‘That’s what your name means: star. I read it in some magazine a few months ago. I didn’t know that when I picked it after you were born.’

  I knew this already. But I didn’t ruin her words by saying so. I let her talk. I let her in. I try every day now to remember all we said to each other at that reunion. Then I’ll be prepared if she leaves me again.

  Floral, sweet, gone.

  4

  STELLA

  WITH TOM

  Tom brought up playing dead three weeks ago, the day they found Victoria Valbon in the alley.

  The news of her death broke at lunchtime. I was in the garden with the laundry, wondering why the yellow washing line bounced too high for my fingers. Damp clothes hung heavily over my arm – Tom’s underwear, my blouse, our sheets. Hot vapours filled the air, like steam from post-shower-sex bodies. There was something erotic about washing Tom’s clothes, even after ten weeks of living together. Even now I bury my face in his T-shirt when he’s not there, inhale the scent of work and car and sleep and man.

  When I was ten, I told my mum I’d never wash a man’s socks; I was adamant I’d be subservient to no one. She said if I loved someone, one day I’d do anything for them. No, I insisted. No, I won’t. But I’ve learned with Tom that if he’ll wash mine, I’ll do anything he asks.

  I jumped again to reach the washing line, like a child trying to catch a butterfly. It was like the world had dropped, leaving the line beyond my touch. I loved its distance; the challenge. Finally, I got a chair. Our clothes flapped on the line like those flag markers at a CSI crime scene.

  Stephen Sainty’s familiar voice drifted from the kitchen.

  Despite what my caller, Chloe, said, I find his tone rich and warm; he delivers misery with beauty. He looks nothing like his voice; most of our presenters don’t. I can’t count the times a listener has come to the studio and said with disappointment that Stephen isn’t what they expected. He sounds like a large furry bear, but he looks like a bulge-eyed frog, his spindly arms as white as new sheets, his hair loose stitching. His voice filled the garden. I always play the radio at home. Antisocial shifts mean daytimes alone. I like my own company, but I need background noise to drown my thoughts.

  Stephen said a young woman had been found in a local alley. His voice didn’t waver as he said looks like a savage murder and unidentified and motive not clear. I felt sick when I thought of there being relatives; a family without their girl, not yet kn
owing they didn’t have her anymore. That gets me every time. It was what every newsreader said on every station and all the TV shows for the rest of the day – a family are going to be utterly bereft.

  I know all about families without their girl.

  I’ve been that girl.

  I went inside, holding the peg bag. On the radio, brutal and police are baffled and mindless continued. I ran to the sink and threw up green stuff that swirled into the plughole like venom. At least she wouldn’t have to have to pay bills or worry now. She would never be sick.

  I waited for more vomit. A knock on the door interrupted my pause. I wiped my mouth and went to answer it. It was our builder wanting payment for some recent roof repairs; he admitted that some tiles had fallen on the washing line and snapped it, so he’d retightened it. Wild ginger hair sprang from a weathered face covered in red freckles.

  ‘Ah, that’s why.’ I was disappointed at the mundane explanation for my elevated washing line.

  ‘Why what?’

  ‘I can’t reach to hang out my clothes.’

  He shrugged. There was egg in his ginger beard. I handed him three hundred pounds in twenties. He scribbled a receipt on a headed notepad covered in soil and gave it to me with fat fingers.

  ‘What am I supposed to do?’ I asked. ‘Get a chair every time I needed to hang laundry?’

  He put my money in his back pocket and said, ‘A local girl died, I just heard it in the van – and you’re worried about a length of bloody washing line?’

  ‘You don’t know me,’ I snapped, and shut the door.

  I leaned on it and closed my eyes. He was right. I always worry more about the small stuff, about too-high washing lines, about broken toasters, and getting to appointments late. Life’s greater tragedies – bereavement, childhood abandonment, loss – seem to make my body produce endorphins that blunt its response. Blunt might be the wrong verb. Cushion. Disguise. Protect.

  But I always throw up.

  I walked around the house, looking, as I had so many times, at our things. Tom is messy; I’m tidy. But we compromise. He leaves the chopping board wildly diagonal, covered in jam and crumbs, a knuckle’s distance from the worktop edge. I prefer it further back so the crumbs don’t fall on the floor – unattainability intrigues me, but I like my inanimate objects within easy reach. Tom and I meet halfway: the chopping board sits a fisted hand’s distance from the edge. But I wash it and put it back straight, while he leaves it crumby. It’s our game. Each of us is briefly right when the chopping board goes our way. Neither of us complains at the other; we each just quietly put it our own way.

  It’s the same in all the rooms.

  The blood-red sofa in the living room sags where we sit, Tom always on the left, me on the right with my head in his lap. If he’s not here, the four grey cushions sit in a row like prisoners queuing to be executed. If he’s home, they’re on the floor. I love his mess. That he can sit without worrying about disarrayed soft furnishings or wonky picture frames.

  It might rub off on me, eventually.

  Tom would be home soon; he’d taken a rare afternoon off. I couldn’t wait. I hadn’t yet lost the thrill of his return. Hadn’t yet let him see me looking untidy or undesirable.

  We’ve known each other seven months. ‘Known each other’ is an odd set of words. Do people know each other after seven months? After seven years? Seven decades? I hope not; that they might makes me want to sell up and go and live on an island. I don’t want to know Tom. I want there always to be something still to learn.

  But I realise one day I’ll know everything, just as he will know everything about me.

  Will we cope with it?

  When we moved in together I had a special key made for each of us. One of the maintenance men at work was making them, mostly to sell as gifts for people turning twenty-one, but they weren’t selling very well. People had complained they were too sharp, like the edges hadn’t been finished properly. Someone even told me they had slashed their finger open on one. But I felt sorry for him, so I bought two. They’re not the kind of key that opens a door, but a larger version in sterling silver. I had our two initials engraved into them: S and T.

  Tom hardly spoke when I gave him his unusual gift. He studied it quietly, his eyes appraising the silver with great seriousness.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said softly. ‘I love it.’

  He attached it to his keyring with all the other keys.

  ‘I love you,’ he said. ‘I know we’ve only been together nearly four months, but ours isn’t just any four months. Ours is the kind of four months that people write books about.’

  The phone rang, disturbing my reverie. I should have known it was my mum. Even though we’d only recently met again, I still felt I knew her; maybe because all the things we’d done separately in between somehow fused us, smoothed out the flaws, allowed space for acceptance. This didn’t mean it was easy – it still doesn’t, even now.

  After we got together again she somehow seemed to know when I was thinking of her. I’d look at a picture of us on the computer and she’d text me; or I’d wonder if I should ring her for a change; and then she’d call. This time though I’d been thinking of Tom.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind,’ she said, like she always does, eternally apologising for being here again after so long away.

  ‘Why would I mind?’ I switched the kettle on and straightened the chopping board.

  ‘I’m never sure you’ll be there,’ she said.

  ‘I am.’ I’m not the one who left, I can’t help but think.

  ‘I’m going to the shops in a bit. Do you want anything?’

  She asks this every time we speak. It touches me deeply because I secretly long for her to take care of me; and it annoys me thoroughly because she should have asked this when I was a kid. Even if I don’t need anything, I tell her that I do. I let her take care of me, so she won’t feel so bad for not having done so since I was twelve. I can’t handle that I might cause her any sadness; it’s hard enough dealing with your own.

  ‘Get me some eggs if you like,’ I said. ‘I broke mine.’

  ‘A dozen?’ she asked.

  ‘Whatever you think.’ A pause then, which I quickly tried to fill. ‘I’m at work tonight. I leave at nine.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll listen,’ she said, excited as ever about my being ‘famous’.

  The radio was how she found me again. She moved back to the area at the beginning of the year. She said she hoped to see me again, somewhere, somehow. And then, one night, she turned on the radio to try to help her sleep.

  ‘There you were,’ she told me when we met. ‘I knew it was you, even before you said your name. Even after all this time. I was dead proud because you sounded so elegant. So confident. And I knew I was wrong – about what I said when you were small. You aren’t awkward or wilful; you’re strong. You came feet first, so you’d be able to stand on them without me.’

  ‘Great,’ I said, that afternoon when Victoria Valbon had died.

  ‘Great.’ Realising she’d mimicked me, she added, ‘Um, okay. I’ll give you the eggs when I see you later this week.’ She paused. ‘I could drop them at yours?’

  She has never been to my house. Even though we had been seeing each other again for seven months, I’d never invited her over.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said quickly. ‘I’ll get them off you. Tell you what, I’ll pop by in a bit. Yes?’

  ‘Yes. Did you hear the news? Isn’t it terrible about that poor girl. The one they found in that alley.’

  ‘I know,’ I said softly.

  ‘I wonder who she is.’

  ‘They probably won’t announce it until her family are found.’

  ‘No. That’s understandable. Well, I should go.’

  She hung up.

  I wondered for a moment if all relationships could do with a period of separation. They say sex is better after estrangement, too. Tom and I discovered it, of course. Sex. That’s what he said anyway when we first move
d in, even though he had a fiancé before we met. I guess every generation of experimental twenty-somethings thinks they discover it; each couple smiles and thinks it was theirs first. But I can’t imagine anyone else ever had a boyfriend suggest something called ‘playing dead’ and didn’t tell him to go to hell.

  It was later that day, when Tom had been home for an hour and we’d been in bed a while. His black hair was damp from the shower and his jeans were only part fastened, as though he’d changed his mind halfway. He said, ‘What would it be like if we played a game where you were dead?’

  I was thinking that I’d have to get up soon and get ready for work. We’d come upstairs early for sex, and now I had to leave. That’s the only downside to evening work; when others are switching off I must turn on. Tom’s hours are unsociable, too; as a hospital porter, he works all hours, but at least he gets to do days occasionally.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  My heart stilled. A game of being dead? We had played many games, ones far sexier than the one with the chopping board. Games of domination with scarves as our handcuffs. Games of pretend where I dressed as a school teacher.

  But playing dead?

  It felt wrong with a girl just found dead in the alley.

  When I was seven I almost drowned. I don’t remember being scared until afterwards, when I scrambled up the slimy river’s edge and was on the shore, dripping toxic liquid into my shit-brown shoes. My mum had reprimanded me for being reckless and began the practicalities of drying a stubborn child who has just escaped death and is trembling with exertion and exhilaration.

  I wondered if playing some game of being dead with Tom would prompt the same feelings.

  He was watching for my response. He always does when he sets me a challenge. No matter how I feel, I have to play. I love him.

  ‘It could be me, I suppose,’ he said, as though he hadn’t considered it.

  ‘You what?’

  ‘Me who … played dead.’

  ‘Dead?’ I frowned, still not understanding.