Page 10 of Star Struck

‘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-earning 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 . . .

Breathe.

Or. I could stay in my room. Safe. After all, Gethryn was here, wasn’t he? I’d probably got closer to him during our aborted attempt at breakfast than I would heading downstairs any time soon, where I’d have to queue and compete and I’d still be no more than a face across a table, shoving his own picture in front of him and probably too shy to even tell him my name. I’d wait. Go down later. Yes. Later. And, in the meantime, I’d pop a Valium. That way, it would have time to work, to blunt the impact of the looks, the nudges, the comments made behind raised hands, as though I’d been struck deaf rather than scarred. With a little chemical help I could pretend I didn’t care, pretend that the whispers didn’t touch me.

I swallowed one capsule with half a glass of water, listened briefly to the continued sounds of activity from downstairs and then swilled down another capsule to keep the first one company. Pulled a pillow to myself and cuddled it against me, exploring the cheesy soreness of my mouth cautiously with my tongue. Pined, briefly, for my laptop and tried to ignore my stomach’s cries for solid food, whilst I listened to the tidal noises travelling along the corridors.

There was a large TV in the corner, its standby light an alluring red wink, but I couldn’t find the remote. My search did turn up a Gideon Bible in a bedside cupboard and two sachets of instant coffee, although the kettle was long gone. I remade the bed, pulling the nylon sheets taut and then spent ten minutes staring out of the window at the people in the yard.

It wasn’t what I’d imagined conventions to be like. In my head any collection of sci-fi people was a mass of bespectacled, T-shirted, skinny guys who communicated in quotes and in-jokes and took one another’s picture posing with hardware and props. Which wasn’t me, of course, but I was different. I wasn’t just a fan, I was a FAN, and not for the space ships and the shiny rifles but for the stories, the characters, the knowledge that good would always win. The sometimes painfully beautiful speeches that Gethryn delivered, some of which had made me cry, while others had made me think hard about the nature of my life.

But here, outside my window there were few stereotypes in evidence. Instead, large motherly women chatted to model-gorgeous girls, two guys wearing Skeel costumes from the series — enormous cylinders strapped to their backs, full-face helmets and full-body Lycra suits — posed for pictures alongside a trio of small children playing tag in the dust. The air was loud with greetings and sharp with promise. I could almost cut myself on my own potential, and yet here I was, hanging onto the window frame like a child waiting for Mummy. I hated myself for my weakness, ground my teeth with the desire to walk downstairs but somehow I couldn’t persuade my fingers to let go.

A door opened. I could hear distinct voices from a room further up the corridor, arguing their way to their open doorway, then a pause. It gave me just long enough to scoot across to my own door and open it the crack necessary to peep out.

‘All you ever give a fuck about is your work,’ a roundly American voice was scolding. It had the Californian intonation that I recognised from TV, a voice with the carrying power and destructiveness of a razor-edged Frisbee. ‘Do you really not care about anything else at all? Like, say, meeting your adoring public?’

Out came a slim tanned arm. It hooked itself around the doorframe and dug its nails into the plasterwork, as if anchoring itself against the unpleasantness inside the room. I watched, fascinated. A true American domestic! Like Jerry Springer!

Inside the room, a dull, inaudible tone answered her and she snapped back.

‘Yeah, well, that’s just great. I’m your agent, it’s kinda in the job description for you to need to hang around with me! Unless, you know, you never want to work again, and that’s just fucking ungrateful, Jack, you know that? It’s okay, you being some big-shot writer-guy in the UK, but the network brought you over here to write TV and in the good old US of A they like to see your face, know what I’m saying here? Hermits is for crabs!’

I had to close the door right up to a little sliver to avoid being seen when the arm was joined by the rest of the body outside the room. This gave me the narrowest of views of my welcome distraction, but it was enough to ascertain that she was very thin, wore a tiny white vest over powder-pink jeans and had hair which obeyed the laws of physics that mine broke on a regular basis. Her face matched her arms by being brown, thin and angular. Pretty in the same way that a Wheaten Terrier is; soft and silky but with a mouth capable of inflicting great damage.

I watched the slice of corridor as she swept along past me, then I opened the door a little further as her slender back disappeared towards the lift. I only just managed to withdraw into the room in time to avoid being seen when she stopped and turned. She was so beautifully framed by the window at the head of the stairs that it had to be deliberate, the hard Nevada light giving her a golden aura. ‘I’m tired of it,’ she directed back along the landing. ‘How can I sell an emotionally frigid pig?’

---