Page 3 of Star Struck

‘I am. I mean in the other stuff, not the Victoria and David thing. It’s just . . . yes, I miss my Internet, but . . . all that dealing with people . . . I’m not so good these days, Felix, you know that. You understand.’ I’d half-hoped that he’d offer to make the calls for me, but he’d insisted that it was better for me to do it, that it would be a step towards recovery for me. Yeah, right, and I could have signed up for Come Dine with Me while I was at it, a TV appearance and my inadequate cooking would get me the full set of humiliating experiences in one go. ‘And it’s all confirmed? Gethryn’s really leaving? You know what Fallen Skies is like for rumours.’

‘Yep. And this one’s true. Means that this convention is going to be his last.’ Felix squinted out of the window and shifted himself from foot to foot, then turned to give me a manic grin. ‘So? How about it? Your last chance to actually meet the guy. Or you could, y’know, stay in your room, just absorb the atmosphere. Maybe see him out of the window.’

The house throbbed around me, one second too big, the next too small and pushing half my furniture onto the pavement. That poster shot into full focus, Gethryn becoming huge, those deep brown eyes seeming to smile straight into mine. There was a small worn patch over his mouth where I kissed the poster before bed every night, and I prayed that Felix didn’t know about that.

‘I need to think.’

‘Well, you’ve got until seven. I’ll drop by after work, and if the answer’s no then I’m putting these on eBay.’ Felix rotated once more then headed for the door, still standing open from his earlier entrance. He was just about to step out when he came back and yanked the ticket from my hand. It needed considerable force, and I think, in my shaken and shocked state, that I might have bitten him. ‘Want anything while I’m at the shop?’

‘When I’m short of oversized jeans and funky belts I’m sure you’ll be the first to tell me.’

‘Maybe. Maybe I’ll just let you fester in last year’s fashion.’ A short pause, and then he said, with his back to me. ‘It would be good for you, Skye, change of scenery and all that. You never know, it might help.’

A second of clamour in my head again, and then I touched the wall, the lovely, comforting, solid brick wall. ‘It won’t, Felix. You know it won’t.’

‘All right, maybe “help” was the wrong word. But getting away might give you a break from everything. Put things in a different perspective.’ A moment while he swayed his skinny body in the doorway, waiting for me to shoot him down, and then, ‘Okay, lover, I’m off then. See you tonight, yeah?’ There was the tap and slide of his boots on the stairs and then the definite bang of the front door.

The wall felt dusty under my fingers. My grandmother, who’d left me the place ‘to take care of’, must be absolutely rotating in her grave. I blew, and the dust motes took off, lazily swirled around and then resettled on different surfaces. I ought to clean, I knew. But somehow I didn’t have the energy; there were always other things to be done, other claims on my time. Like work. Even with the Internet down there was reading to do and notes to make.

My job these days was not as high-profile as Felix’s, which, as he worked in a shop at the sharp end of the gay clothing industry, involved the movement of more leather than a cattle drive. In fact, my work was so low-profile as to hardly stick up at all. But it paid and I didn’t have to mix with people who would stare, which was all I really asked of work these days. Gone were the hours spent poring over The Stage for open auditions, obsessing over whether I was too tall, too skinny, whether my nose needed trimming. Now I was a freelance research consultant — basically a fancy name for someone who looked up things that other people couldn’t be bothered to. Currently I was working on researching the life of an infamous pirate, the history of knitting patterns and had two outstanding commissions for a mustard company. No water-cooler gossip, no chance of a selection for stardom, but it was the only job I’d ever had where clothing was optional.

I sorted out my pile of books and prepared to continue work for the author who wrote piracy-porn, taking notes and making sketches of sixteenth-century fashion. I’d stuck Post-Its on the relevant texts and was poised to start skim reading when a new message pinged into my phone, with the characteristic chime that made me want to hide my mobile under something big and wet.

From: Fe Brand

Come on Skye, u no u want 2.

I typed straight back.

From: Skye

I told you I’m thinking about it. And stop using text speak, you’re not twelve.

From: Fe Brand

Yeh, yeh. Cme on, don’t u thnk its tme u got out of tht wheelchair?

From: Skye

You’ve got predictive text stuck on again. Wheelchair?!

From: Fe Brand

It’s a metaphorical wheelchair you pilchard. An emotional one. You don’t have the monopoly on grieving and all that crap, and if I can get on with my life after what happened, then so should you. So, what the fuck, let’s go to America!

Serious stuff. So serious that he’d abandoned his jokey, half-text-speak, and mentioned things we didn’t talk about in real life. Things so raw and overwhelming that we pretended they’d never happened. I dropped the phone and my fingers began twisting around one another, plucking at my nails. The skin around them was nearly healed, but ugly white scars streaked each fingertip.

From: Fe Brand

And stop doing that shit with your fingers.

I smiled without meaning to. Felix knew me so well. But then, we’d known each other for . . . how many years? Ten? More, maybe, by now, but I’d stopped counting. Stopped even thinking about him as a person, as a man. He was just Fe, irritating as an itchy bum. So much like Faith that I hadn’t been able to look at him for the first six months after the accident without seeing her looking back from behind those hazel eyes. I’d become so accustomed to the feeling that it had worn away without my noticing, until one day he was just Felix again.

From: Skye

Whereabouts in America?

Chapter Two

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