Page 37 of Star Struck

‘I can’t act any more, Jack. I can’t even remember what it was that made me want to stand up in front of people. I get nervous now just ordering off Amazon. If I ever had any confidence it’s gone. I’m useless, hopeless, I’m even bloody pointless now, an actress who’s so stressed out in crowds that she passes out . . . Felix can have the part. I don’t want it.’

Now his expression was very serious, almost grave. ‘What’s happened to you, Skye? What’s made you feel so worthless?’

‘This.’ I pointed at my scar. ‘And this.’ I parted the hair which had grown back after the operation as an even more unmanageable wiry fuzz of curls than it had been before, to show the fine line of scarring where my skull had been opened up. ‘Losing your memory doesn’t just mean that you can’t remember things. It’s not as simple as that. It means you lose all the things that define you — every decision I made in that year before the accident, every conclusion I reached, gone. Anything. Everything. Whatever made me me is gone. Okay, yes, I’m glad I’m not dead, on the whole. Glad that, instead of going through the windscreen face first, by sheer fluke I went through backwards, so my face got gashed instead of crushed. I’ve got a lot to be grateful for. But all that gratitude doesn’t help when I can’t even remember meeting my own fiancé! Do you see? And then there was Fallen Skies, about people setting up a new world, being allowed to forget what had happened before, in the Shadow War. New lives. And Gethryn . . . Lucas James . . . He’d done terrible things, awful things, but he was allowed to forget and start again, and I loved that, loved the new beginnings, the redemption. The idea that just because the past was gone didn’t mean that the future couldn’t be great.’

Jack tipped his head forward so I couldn’t see his face. ‘Skye, Gethryn’s just an actor, he does what he’s told, says the words he’s given. The new beginnings, wanting a new life . . . that was me.’ Then his head came back and I could see the stress lines around his mouth, deeper now. ‘That’s some kind of irony, that is. You fancy the guy because he’s talking about recovery and rebirth, and it’s all my words.’ A hollow kind of laugh. ‘Bit of a Cyrano de Bergerac moment here, I think.’

‘What about your whole “Iceman” thing?’ I couldn’t stop myself, the words just had to come out.

‘What? What do you mean?’

‘Last night. I overheard you and Lissa . . . she was saying about you being called the Iceman? I thought it was just because you were . . .’ I felt myself blushing, but drove on regardless, ‘because you were cool. But Lissa said it was something to do with having no emotion?’

‘Ha!’ Jack let out a long breath, like a sigh, and jumped up from his seat on the bed. ‘Shit.’ He began a rather fevered rummage through pockets and drawers as though he’d forgotten I was there, finally finding a battered packet unopened behind his laptop. There was a shaky and sweary couple of moments while he tried to find a lighter that worked, but he finally brought it all into conjunction and blew a long string of smoke into the air. ‘It’s nothing.’

‘Right. So that’s why it drives you to smoke, because it’s nothing.’

He stared at his fingers for a second, turning his hand over to examine the filter tip. ‘Yep.’

‘Jack, you only smoke when you’re wound up. And you’re smoking now.’ I watched his back view as he placed himself in front of the window again, staring out at the desert and blowing smoke which stuttered across the room before vanishing like lost ghosts.

‘Hoist by my own habit,’ he muttered, not turning round. ‘Skye, when I said it was nothing, I meant it was nothing to you. None of your business. Okay?’

I stared at him, from the tousled dark fall of hair which hung to his shoulders, his defensively straight back, down past his, admittedly tasty, tightly jeaned backside to where his bare feet dug into the carpet as though he was anchoring himself to something. He was intense, like no man I’d seen. I half-hoped that he was about to confess that his accident had destroyed his ability to feel, as mine had stopped me remembering; a moment of wanting that kind of connection with him. ‘Is there anything I can do to help?’

‘Yeah. Come to the ball with me.’ A sudden grinding out of the cigarette in a cup, and he’d turned to face me again, a con-trail of smoke following his movement. He stretched out his arms as though the muscles were sore, and flexed his fingers. ‘Please.’

I closed my eyes, pretended a moment of faintness. ‘I don’t have a costume or anything.’

‘Hey, I was just on a panel with our wardrobe girl, I’m sure I can persuade her to release a couple of costumes. What do you fancy, B’Ha? Pilot?’ He grinned at me round a tightness in his eyes. ‘I can see you as a pilot, in one of those uniforms.’ He leered and I had to laugh; his face wasn’t meant for anything as insalubrious as letching.

‘I’m not sure.’

‘I’ll get someone to bring some stuff to your room. You can choose what you want to wear and send the rest back to wardrobe. Come on, I’m prepared to do all this, least you can do is agree to come. You must have been to a fancy dress ball before, surely?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘But . . . how bad is this memory loss thing? Presumably you remember your parents, your childhood?’

I let my thoughts go. ‘Yes, of course. Only child, doting parents who emigrated when I started drama school. It’s all in there, just . . . they’re all . . . furry.’

He gave me a half-grin. ‘Furry?’

‘Well, fuzzy then. When I look back it’s like looking through — oh, I don’t know, a sheet of tracing paper. Something like that. Not quite opaque but not clear either. I do have one or two vivid memories of those years between teenage and twenty-seven, but not that many. Not enough to be able to pin down, to say “this is what I thought”. Everything from the year leading up to the accident, though, is stuff I’ve been told, memories I’ve fabricated.’ I shrugged. ‘But I’ve remembered every day since I woke up in hospital, with Michael and Faith dead. How about you? Did your accident leave you with any problems, or just the scars?’

I stopped, saw his expression and felt embarrassed. He’d gone goosebumped; I could see the little hairs on his arms standing up as his fingers closed over the leather thong around his neck, even though the room was warm. He fiddled with the necklace under his T-shirt, twisting it back and forth and, although he seemed to be watching me, his eyes were far, far away. Watching something else, something that made his skin chill.

‘Jack?’ I swung my legs over the edge of the bed, an instinctive move to get closer to him. ‘Are you all right?’

A moment with no answer. Then his eyes lifted to mine. ‘I’m thirty-five. I’ve lived nineteen years past the accident, and still I live it every day. Perhaps that is the real problem.’ His voice was soft. ‘Survivor guilt, Skye. You know about that?’ A short laugh. ‘Maybe you do.’ A deep inhalation. ‘And I’ve never said this to anyone else, not even the doctors. Never told them how much it still haunts me, like . . . like I can feel Ryan, just there.’ He waved a hand vaguely over his shoulder. ‘There’s people down there . . . dressing up as my characters, discussing them, fucking analysing them, can you believe it? And all the while, these pilots, these alien creatures, all my novels, the Two Turns North storylines — they’re my way of working through what happened.’ Now his gaze bored through me, eyes like black holes. ‘My whole life has been trying to work through what happened. And after that, anything else is just . . .’ he threw his hands wide, ‘meaningless. I exist for my work, Skye, for writing, for trying to put into words what’s happening to me. That makes me, I dunno, careless with people. I can’t — oh God, I’m going to use some terrible Americanism here — I can’t relate.’ Now one arm lay loosely at his side, as though he’d even stopped trying to express things through body language, and the other hand hooked back into the necklace. ‘And then I met you and . . .’

I stared at him. ‘So you think I’m, what, different? Because I know how it feels not to be dead?’

‘You’re not like . . . you don’t . . . I can’t explain. You’re something else.’ He dropped his hand from his throat and shrugged. ‘I don’t know what I’m trying to say here. I don’t know why . . . And, for the record, yes, I can dance.’

‘You’re really messed up, aren’t you?’ I asked it softly, half-hoping he wouldn’t hear. But he did, and his head went up higher, his eyes slipped from mine to stare at some spot near the ceiling.

‘Of course I’m messed up,’ he said. ‘I’m a writer.’

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