Page 22 of Star Struck

‘You told me to come to you if I needed anything, didn’t you? I mean, last night, I didn’t dream that, did I?’

‘No, but I’m impressed that you remember. You were pretty out of things.’

‘Felix doped me.’

‘He what?’ Jack waved me inside and cleared his laptop off the bed, where he’d obviously been working. The screen had the Fallen Skies logo in one corner. ‘That’s a bit . . . immoral, isn’t it?’ He sat where the laptop had been, tucking his legs up in front of him in a kind of half-yoga pose which made the pyjama bottoms gape revealingly around the fly, giving me flashes of pale blue Lycra. ‘Sit down and tell me.’

‘I can’t. I can’t sit down. I’m so angry, I want to hit someone.’ I paced up and down the floor around the bed, Jack’s head swivelling to keep me in view. ‘I just went down to reception, found out that the activity of today is a quiz, yes?’

‘Yeah. Big thing. Main reason for the whole convention.’

‘Yes. I remember reading about last year’s.’ I wasn’t going to confess to the all-consuming fire of jealous hatred I’d felt, flicking through magazines to see pictures of the winner, a self-possessed girl, draping herself all over the cast and crew. ‘I knew there’d be one this year, but . . .’ I stopped short of revealing that I may have been intrigued, but my lack of self-confidence would never in a million years have let me enter. ‘Last night, Felix said that I was taking part in something? I didn’t dream that either?’

He blew a long breath. ‘He entered you. And you didn’t know?’

I began slapping the wall. ‘I should have. I should have realised that Felix thinks altruism is some kind of learning disorder, that he’d never bring me all the way out here just to — just to cheer me up. He’s been planning this!’ I rounded on Jack. ‘How the hell can he have entered me without my knowing? Don’t you have to sign things or something?’

A shrug, and Metallica threatened to abandon his skinny shoulders. ‘Course.’ He swept his hair back from his face and frowned at me. ‘It’s all done properly you know, we’re not some fly-by-night, single-series merchants. Could he forge your signature? I mean, we try to keep it all watertight but there’s only so much we can do.’

‘Yes.’ My fists were tight. I’d got handfuls of my shirt on each side and was twisting, feeling my scars catch on the fabric. ‘When I was first out of hospital I used to give him my bank card to get money out of the cash machine and to get shopping. I . . . I wasn’t coping very well, I just didn’t think . . . He must have learned to copy my signature from that.’

‘Wow. He’s like immorality Ground Zero, isn’t he? Does he . . . I mean, he doesn’t . . . you’re all right, aren’t you? He’s not . . . God, what am I trying to say here?’

‘Fe has a very loose interpretation of what’s right. Anything that benefits him is a good thing and he can’t see any reason not to do it. I’m just so angry that he didn’t come out and tell me! I thought we were coming over here to meet . . . I mean, to socialise, to get away from York, to help me stop dwelling on things. All wide-eyed innocence and “it will be good for you”, you know? When what he should have been saying was “let me drug you up, drag you to the middle of nowhere and then force you to enter a competition”!’

‘And he’s your friend? Bloody hell, I’d hate to meet your enemies.’

‘I’m sure in Felix’s head it all makes sense. But the question is, why? What good is it going to do him if I enter?’

Jack stood up and grabbed my arms, pulling them forward. I saw his scar stretch and flex as he reached out and wondered if mine looked like that under tension. ‘The quiz, it’s really tough. I mean I don’t know the answers and I wrote most of the series. How much do you really know about Fallen Skies? I mean, really? Are you an obsessive fan? Watch it, sit on the forum, read up on everything?’

My arms went limp in his grasp. His hands were cold. ‘Yes.’ That was me, obsessive.

‘First prize, y’see, is a part in the next series. Nothing big, a walk-on probably, not really thought about it much, we tailor the part to the winner.’ His eyes were looking somewhere inside, not at me. ‘Probably this one guy I’m writing, veteran of the Shadow War . . . yeah, could be Seran Vye . . .’

‘Shut up. What is it with everyone’s obsession with men in uniform? So, Felix wants me to win . . .’ That was why he’d asked all those questions about me trying out for a part. If things had been different, he’d said. Different enough that I’d still have the confidence to stand in front of a camera? Knowing all along that I wouldn’t, couldn’t.

And then the whole plan snapped into focus. I knew exactly why Felix had brought me here. ‘He wants me to win the part for him,’ I said, almost breathless with the audacity. ‘He entered me knowing I wouldn’t take the prize if I won it — and then, there he’d be, stepping into the breach.’ I half-laughed. ‘I can just picture him now, combing through the tiny print to make sure it would be allowed. Wow. You have got to admire his deviousness.’

Jack seemed to realise he was still holding my arms. Slowly, one finger at a time, he released his grip. ‘If he’d asked you nicely, told you what he wanted, would you have come here?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe.’ But I knew that if Felix had asked me to fly to America just to try to win him a part in a series, I’d have refused. Would have chosen my cosy little house, my safe, established little life over everything. But the way he’d put it — that it would be good for me, and then, once I was here, that I could take things at my own pace, stay in the room all the time if I wanted to — lying bastard.

‘So, will you do it?’

I shrugged this time. ‘I might, just to get every answer wrong. That’d show him.’

Jack grinned. ‘Yeah, go for the booby prize, it’s a series of Scratch-n-Sniff cards. Somehow I don’t see Felix as a Scratch-n-Sniff kind of guy. Not of cards, at any rate.’ The grin fell away and he was left looking darkly serious. ‘You care a lot about him, don’t you?’

‘Of course I do. Felix’s sister Faith was my best friend. We went through drama school together, got our first jobs in theatre together, I even moved in with her family for a while. Fe was just her brother, just this bloke tomcatting around at the edge of our circle — he’s two years younger than Faith, two years behind at drama school.’ I found myself twisting my fingers again, picking at the scars. Questions about the past always did that to me. I answered by rote now. Practised. ‘And then, when I got together with Michael, and he was Fe’s friend, we were a bit of a foursome.’ Now my hand went up to my face. ‘But . . . I don’t know. Everything to do with Michael is stuff Felix has told me, the gaps he’s filled in for me, you can’t understand if you haven’t been there. Not knowing is . . . Fe is all I have left. He’s the only person who remembers . . .’

‘You mean you don’t?’

I stared at him for a second then tapped my head. ‘Brain damage. I was thrown through the windscreen, back of my head got crushed, there was a blood clot on my brain and they had to operate . . . My memory got . . .’ I waved my fingers in the air as though playing an invisible harp.

‘So, Felix is like your professional rememberer? That’s actually quite cool, there’s a whole sci-fi concept in there.’ He tailed off. ‘You don’t remember the accident?’

‘Only what Felix has told me. We were on our way home from a New Year party, Faith and Michael were in the front, Felix and I were in the back, and we crashed at high speed.’ The words were empty of any emotion; I might as well have been reporting the plot of an EastEnders episode.

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