Page 5 of Star Struck

Chapter Four

I jerked into a loose kind of wakefulness as the car drew up under a tree, dusty with leaves and ornamented with some kind of bird I didn’t recognise. My limbs were dull and unresponsive, my attempts to sit up made me look like a cadaver being poked. ‘Wha’?’

‘This is it.’ Felix’s voice was edgy, excited. ‘This is the convention. Look at it, Skye, all the cars! And there’s one of those great big van things, whatchacallems . . .’

‘Horse box.’

‘Winnebagos. Wow. How American. And look, there’s one of the Shadow Fighter craft.’

Sleepily I turned my head until I could see the black triangular ship, parked incongruously on a trailer behind a Volkswagen Beetle. Its swept-back wings looked a little the worse for wear in the white sunlight and part of the paintwork had peeled off near the pilot’s section, but that just added to the glamour in my eyes. It was real, it was used. It looked as though it genuinely had flown through the B’Ha sector with a Skeel warrior on its tail. Despite the Valium my heart beat a tiny bit faster.

Felix turned in his seat. ‘Okay, we’re going to have to get out now, Skye. Take a deep breath, lover, it’s not a long trip, I can see the foyer from here.’

I slumped back against the seat, unable even to rally the sense of terror I knew I should be feeling at the prospect of that overarching sky pressing onto my head. Felix opened the door and helped me to manoeuvre myself out onto the sandy concourse. ‘Here we go.’

The light burst upon me as the hot air hit. Air rattled into my lungs and yet the feeling of suffocation grew.

‘Look, I know you’re Valiumed up to the hilt, but is there any chance that you can walk?’ Felix panted, lugging my unresponsive body along the length of the car, propping me against the hot metalwork with blatant disregard for the potential for third-degree burns.

‘Can’t . . . feel my . . . feet,’ I mumbled, through numb lips. Life streamed past, dreamlike.

‘Oh, this is just bloody great. What am I going to do now, leave you here and hope that everyone thinks you’re a really convincing special effect?’

The air blew across my face, incendiary-hot and laced with grit. I could barely summon the strength to blink. Slowly and inevitably my legs gave way and I slithered down the car’s bodywork in a sweat-lubricated collapse, landing with my skirt bunched under my buttocks and my shirt rucked over my bare midriff. The smell of hot tyres made me feel slightly sick.

Footsteps approached, soft in the dust and I saw a pair of feet surrounded by the trailing hems of what looked like pyjama bottoms. ‘Hey. What’s up?’ The voice was unfamiliar. British. Northern English to be exact, the flat vowels reminding me of home. I tried to look up but could only waggle my head.

‘Just a little hitch, nothing to worry about.’ Felix bent his head to my ear. ‘Skye, you might want to get up here, this guy is a definite twelve on the ten-point scale.’

‘She looks pretty out of it,’ the considering voice went on. ‘You might have to carry her.’

‘What, with my back?’ Felix stood up again. ‘We’ll wait a minute; the drugs should be wearing off by now.’

‘Oh, right.’ The voice softened, not quite as far as sympathy but definitely less brusque. ‘Not a good traveller then, your girlfriend?’

‘Girlfriend? Seriously?’ Felix threw me a look. ‘Well, she’s a friend, she’s definitely a girl, but my God, if there was a wrong end of the stick award, you just took it.’ Felix went into full camp mode. ‘I’ve had this all the way from England, d’you know she can’t even pee unaided when she’s like this?’

Er, hello, I wanted to say, you insisted that the tranquillisers would help . . . I didn’t need them at home any more. Much.

‘Look, I’ll give you a hand; it’s too hot to leave her here.’ And the next thing I knew I was being lifted and hurled across a bony shoulder, with my skirt pinging free from my buttocks to fall up around my waist leaving my knickers on display. If I’d been half-way capable I would have kicked and screamed, but the Valium was still jamming my system like an unfriendly radio-wave; I knew I was the subject of some indignity but couldn’t do a damn thing about it.

As my head lolled onto the chest of my carrier I registered a rib cage under a thin T-shirt, lots of dark hair brushing against me, and I must have been hallucinating a little, because it looked to my slightly unfocused eyes as though there was half a broken pencil sticking out of his mouth.

‘This is very kind of you.’ Felix was trotting alongside. I hoped it was his hand that pulled my skirt down to conceal my cheap chain-store briefs. ‘Very impressive, throwing her over your shoulder too. Very butch. I know she looks like there’s nothing to her but, phew, she’s got really dense bones, our Skye.’

Thanks, Fe, I thought, as the man dropped me unceremoniously into what felt like a leather armchair.

‘’S okay. She looked a bit uncomfortable out there on the ground.’ A pause during which I tried to look up again, but couldn’t get much more than an impressionistic view of various limbs and a patch of wall covering which gave the initial impression that Nevada motels were decorated by the state’s trainee graffiti artists. ‘Anyhow. If you’re here for the convention, I’ll see you around.’

There was a short pause, during which my rescuer left and Felix took in our surroundings. I felt contained in the armchair and my breathing slowed. Fe started to giggle.

‘Wow, trust you to find the yummiest guy around to get carried by. Stay there, I’ll check us in.’

I didn’t enquire into the alternative to staying, bearing in mind that I had almost no control over my arms and my legs seemed to be made of fuzzy felt. I sprawled against the leather, head hanging over an arm and my hair pendulous in the heat. An upside-down view through the huge tinted window showed me a vast brown sky, overtopped by a vast brown plain. A couple of spectral mountains in the far distance looked like an enormous sway-backed old horse sketched against the sky and served to emphasise the immediate flatness. In my head Nevada = Las Vegas glitz, not that bottom-of-a-pond flat beigeness.

There were people moving around me, a general feeling of swirling humanity. Voices collided, accents clashed. All I could see though, from my position in the chair, was feet, and my drug-padded brain did its best to match intonation to shoe-culture. The drawl of the southern states seemed to marry up to several pairs of Kicker boots and one pair of flip-flop sandals standing near the window. The brittle English tones belonged to some polished brogues and high heels walking towards the door. Two pairs of bare Scandinavian-designate feet paddled briefly into vision and then out again, and an immaculate set of New York loafers hesitated beside me for an instant before meeting another, similar pair and disappearing from my field of view.

‘Okay, I got our key.’

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