The Winner, page 14
Heather looked blankly at the hand for a moment. She’d almost forgotten about the party; it felt far away, disconnected from the bubble of intimacy she and Duncan had created around themselves, making the blonde’s arrival feel like an invasion. She held out a hand, heart still racing from the almost-kiss.
‘Hello. I’m Heather.’
Ruth pumped her hand with a firm grip, the sort of handshake used to assert dominance in board meetings. Then she sucked on her cocktail straw, considering Heather through narrowed eyes.
‘What number are you?’ she asked.
‘Excuse me?’
‘Sixty-four,’ Duncan said.
Heather looked back and forth between them, baffled. ‘I’m sorry, but I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘Oops, sorry. Of course you don’t.’ Ruth reached to give Duncan’s arm a squeeze. ‘We must remember not to keep slipping into shop talk, mustn’t we?’
Duncan looked at her for a moment without speaking, then turned to Heather.
‘We use numbers to identify the winners. The contest has been running for two and a half years now, with two winners a month, plus the occasional bonus round to replace those disqualified over low follower numbers. You’re our sixty-fourth winner since the contest began.’
‘Can you believe it’s been that long?’ Ruth sighed, edging closer to Duncan, looking up at him. ‘Wherever does the time go?’
He retrieved his glass from the wall and took a sip. ‘Was there something you wanted, Ruth?’
‘Why would you even ask that? This is the first time I’ve ever seen you out socialising. Can’t I just be excited that you’re here and come over for a chat?’ He gave her a level stare and she ran a hand over the top of her short-cropped hair. ‘Okay, fine. Now that you bring it up, I was going to suggest you consider doing the GQ interview.’
‘You mean reconsider. Since I’ve already said no.’
‘But it’s GQ! The cover piece! You can’t put a price on that kind of publicity.’ She gave Heather a smile filled with unnaturally white teeth. ‘He’s shy, you see.’
‘I’m not shy. I simply recognize that I’m not good at interviews. Are you forgetting the last time?’
‘Well, I’m sure you won’t make that mistake again—’
‘It wasn’t a mistake. It was an honest response.’
‘But no one expects an honest response! This is about image and branding.’
‘What did you say?’ Heather asked Duncan.
‘Something about my motive for setting up the company. I don’t remember the exact wording.’
‘Well, allow me to refresh your memory.’ Ruth pulled herself upright and raised an eyebrow in what was apparently meant to be an impression of Duncan.
‘“I have always been fascinated by the human appetite for fame. I wanted to control the means by which it is dispensed, completely uncoupling it from talent.”’
Heather laughed. It was just so … bald, so utterly devoid of diplomacy or spin.
Duncan shot her a sideways glance and smiled. Heather smiled back, then turned to find the brand manager watching the two of them with a small frown.
‘So are you here all by yourself?’ Ruth asked. ‘I can introduce you around if you’re having trouble making friends. Seems silly to be wasting your time talking with management when you should be catching up with the other CelebRaters. Like going to a school dance and hanging around with the teachers all night!’
‘Actually, I’m waiting for Tessa Abbot.’ Heather took her phone from her bag and checked the screen. Still no DM. ‘She’s flying in from Edinburgh, but I guess she’s been held up.’
Ruth shrugged. ‘Why guess? Just check her location.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Didn’t anyone show you how to use Friend Finder? All the Winfluencers are on there.’ She snapped her fingers towards Heather’s mobile. ‘Hand it over and I’ll show you.’
Heather didn’t like giving up her F-phone, but she wanted to see what Ruth meant so she passed it across, watching the screen as Ruth went into Settings. A moment later, she was looking at a map of London. There was a cluster of overlapping black Fs on the location of the party, along with a red, pulsing dot that presumably represented Heather.
‘Looks like everyone’s here …’ Ruth said. Then, ‘Aha!’ She tapped on an F closing in on Chiswick from the direction of Heathrow. When she expanded the screen around it, the F was replaced by a name: Tessa Abbot. ‘There she is. Just around the corner. Maybe even closer than that, since the Finder can be a bit laggy. So you’ll have a friend to talk to any second now!’
‘I didn’t realize I was being tracked.’ Heather found the discovery unsettling, but Ruth clearly didn’t pick up on that because she nodded enthusiastically.
‘Handy, isn’t it?’ She handed back the phone. ‘It takes away that whole worry of “who’s at the party and will I be the first to arrive?”’
Duncan must have heard the disquiet in Heather’s voice because he said, ‘Don’t worry. The finder is no different from the apps families and peer groups use to locate each other. Most Winfluencers find it useful.’
She looked down at the screen again. Tessa’s F had moved to join the others, a stacked tangle of letters.
‘It looks as though she’s arrived,’ Heather said. ‘I’d better go look for her.’
‘How was the conference?’ Heather asked, after she’d found Tessa by the coat-check counter, wearing frayed denim shorts and a white vest, a leather jacket over the top.
‘Gruelling. Practically slavery.’
‘Really?’
‘No. Not really. I just had to wander around wearing one of these girl-biker jackets, letting people take selfies with me, then stand on the side of the stage looking fascinated when the CEO spoke. Boring as hell but otherwise okay.’
They sat down at one of the tables lining the wall beside the dance floor. A thick, white candle flickered between them. There was no one at the other tables. It was too early for dancing and most of the other Winfluencers were by the pool. Scattered shards of yellow and white light rotated across the empty dance floor. Heather put on a fresh coat of lipstick using the illuminated hand mirror the make-up artist had given her. She looked good. But then, it was hard not to look good at the New Heights; its famously flattering lighting was rumoured to have cost a fortune.
‘The fans seemed to like your Edinburgh posts,’ Heather said, tucking the mirror and lipstick away. ‘Up two places in the ratings. Seventh. Nice!’
Tessa shrugged off her leather jacket, hanging it round the back of her chair. ‘Not as nice as you, though, Miss Sixth.’
Heather flushed, half with embarrassment, half with pleasure. ‘Can you believe I’m in the Top Six?! I don’t know what happened to lift me up a spot. I haven’t done anything special.’
‘You were tagged in a couple of photos with Noah. That always helps. People are probably wondering if there’s something going on between the two of you.’
‘Well, there isn’t.’ Heather watched a woman in a blue sarong walking across the empty dance floor. She looked familiar. ‘Noah’s great to look at, but he’s not my type.’
The woman drew nearer and the penny dropped: Rebecca, the former flight attendant who’d lifted up her top in one of the late-night videos she’d watched with Duncan. Heather waved and Rebecca waggled her fingers in return before disappearing in the direction of the loos.
‘Really?’ Tessa looked towards the terrace doors at the other end of the club, where Noah was chatting with Nima, a ‘hair artist’ whose vlogs offered styling and product tips for Afro Caribbean hair. ‘I thought he was everyone’s type.’
Nima must have said something funny because Noah laughed. The hair artist leaned closer, placing a hand on his arm. She was wearing her hair in layers of tiny braids with a copper band at the end of each one. Creating them must have taken her most of the day and by tomorrow night the braids would be gone, replaced by something new. Still, it clearly worked: fourth in the ratings.
‘Well, he’s not mine,’ Heather said. ‘I tend to go for older men.’ She passed her index finger through the base of the candle flame – a trick Ronan had taught her when they were kids – watching it flicker. ‘I’ve been told I have daddy issues.’
A champagne waiter appeared and Heather took a glass – she couldn’t face the bar queue again – watching the bubbles race for the surface, pale gold in the candlelight.
‘Like drinking stars,’ Heather said.
‘Sorry?’
‘How Analise described champagne.’
‘Oh. Yeah, I remember.’
Heather looked Tessa in the eye. ‘What really happened to her? Noah said Analise was trolled but …’ – You learn to step over them – ‘I don’t believe it.’ Then, remembering the edict about discussing depressing topics, ‘Sorry, if you’re worried about talking here, we can go somewhere else or—’
‘I’m fine staying,’ Tessa said firmly. ‘I’m okay with most Triple F rules, but draw the line at letting them tell me what I can and can’t say in private conversations when there’s no one else around. As for Analise being trolled …’ She sucked in a breath. ‘Believe it. Because it’s the truth. Some bastard tormented her.’
‘Who?’
‘I have no idea. Unsurprisingly he – or she, since trolling is an equal opportunity role – didn’t leave their actual name. Just some creepy made-up one: “All Knowing”.’ She frowned. ‘Something like that.’
‘I thought Analise didn’t care what trolls said?’
‘This wasn’t a normal troll. Whoever it was had got hold of private information about her. A secret.’
‘So he – or she – outed Analise on social media?’ Heather frowned, searching her memory. ‘It couldn’t have been that bad a secret, since I don’t remember seeing anything about it.’
‘Nothing was said directly; it was all sly and subtle. Hints that no one but Analise would have understood.’
‘Do you know what the secret was?’
‘I do.’ Tessa took a breath that hitched in the middle. ‘She called me one night drunk. Hysterical. She told me.’
‘And?’
Tessa touched the corner of each eye with a fingertip. ‘Like I say. It was private.’
‘Fair enough.’ Heather drank some champagne and they sat in silence for a while, lost in their own thoughts as music and laughter swirled all around. Then Heather began to speak.
Later, she would wonder what had possessed her to spill her guts to a woman she’d known such a short time. Whether wine and champagne had eroded her judgement. Or whether Tessa simply happened to be there when the pressure inside finally reached critical. Because Heather had never talked about the day her father died. Not to her friends. Not even to her family. The grief had always felt too dense to cut up into words, an immovable weight lodged in her core. But as she looked at Tessa’s face, dragged down by sorrow for her lost friend, not caring how it made her look or whether it broke a rule, something inside her shifted.
‘When I was fifteen, I came home from school and found my father in the bathtub. He’d overdosed on sleeping pills.’ Tessa drew in a sharp breath, then placed a hand on hers. ‘I called an ambulance. Did CPR. But it was too late. He’d swallowed most of the vial so …’ She shook her head. ‘He’d always had bouts of depression. “Dark patches” my mother called them. But he always came out the other side, back to his old self, full of life. Of love. How could he throw it all away and abandon us like that?’ She felt the old hurt swelling inside her, pressing against her lungs. ‘My mother couldn’t handle it. She retreated into herself, barely speaking to me or my brother. She moved away as soon as we were old enough to fend for ourselves.’
Tessa’s fingers tightened on hers. ‘I am so sorry.’ Liquid sheened her eyes, making them gleam in the candlelight. ‘That’s just … utter shit.’
Heather surprised herself by laughing. She felt suddenly lighter, as though gravity’s pull had weakened.
‘Yes. It is exactly that.’ She touched her eyes with a knuckle, dabbing away a tear before it could ruin her make-up. ‘I’m guessing Analise was like my dad. On the surface, she seemed bright and bubbly. But that must have just been a front.’
Tessa shook her head, lips pressed together.
‘No, it wasn’t the same. Obviously she had to have had underlying mental health issues to … do what she did. But Analise didn’t just fall into her darkness. She was pushed. And pushed hard.’ She stared into the candle flame and Heather sensed that she was deciding whether or not to tell her something. Heather waited, breath held. Then Tessa nodded, apparently to herself. ‘Okay. What I’m about to say can never leave this table.’
‘Of course.’
Tessa picked up her champagne, draining it in one gulp. Took a deep breath. ‘Analise had a daughter.’
Heather’s eyebrows rose. She wasn’t sure quite what she’d been expecting, but definitely not this. ‘A daughter? Really?’
‘Yeah. She was only fourteen when she got pregnant, so she gave the baby up for adoption. But when she became a Winfluencer, she finally had money and tracked the girl down, planning to ask the adoptive parents if it would be okay for the two of them to get to know each other. But something must have gone wrong because she’d ended up in foster care instead, bounced from place to place, with no one properly consistent to love her.’
‘Oh, how sad! Couldn’t Analise do something?’
‘She went to see the girl, offered to look after her, but the kid refused. She’s thirteen now, screwed-up. And angry. She’s spent her whole life blaming her birth mother for her problems, for abandoning her. Analise didn’t give up, though, she kept calling, sending gifts and messages, trying to see her. I’m pretty sure they would have worked things out eventually, except …’
‘Except the troll found out.’
‘Yeah. Comments started appearing on fan sites. Hints really, nothing that would have meant anything to anyone else. But enough for Analise to know her secret wasn’t safe.’
Heather rotated the stem of her glass between a thumb and forefinger, thinking.
‘Okay, so Analise knew the world might find out she’d given up a baby. That’s personal, upsetting, obviously. But for it to trigger a complete mental breakdown?’ She shook her head. ‘There must be more to it.’
Tessa nodded. ‘There is. The troll sent an email to her CelebMail account. She called me up about it, hysterical, the day before the Triple F shipped her off to Sunny Hills. Wouldn’t stop crying. She kept repeating “what have I done to her?”’ Tessa hunched forward, propping her chin on her palms. ‘That’s all I know.’
‘What did the email say?’
‘She wouldn’t tell me. She was pretty incoherent at that point.’
‘Maybe the Triple F would let us access her account, if we explain why?’
Tessa snorted. ‘No chance. They’ll just bang on about respecting her privacy. All they really care about is—’ Her spine suddenly stiffened, eyes jumping to a spot behind Heather’s shoulder. ‘Heads up. Photographer moving our way.’
They sprang into action as the lens swung towards them, pushing up smiles and pushing back shoulders, clinking their now empty champagne flutes.
Heather was hoping to continue the conversation about Analise once the photographer had moved on, but then Nima came over to ask Tessa if she was interested in a ‘collaboration’ involving hair extensions. Amir followed close behind, smiling flirtatiously and carrying a tray of tequila shots. They all knocked one back and the mood of the night changed.
Heather didn’t think about Analise again until later the next day.
CHAPTER 18
The water was like satin, flowing across Heather’s skin as she swam. There was no pain; her limbs ploughed the pool’s turquoise depths in effortless strokes. She rolled onto her back and lay there, suspended between water and sky, gazing at the stars. But when she pulled herself up onto the pool’s edge, the London skyline was gone. Instead, the roof terrace was hemmed in by dense, night-black forest. A gust of wind slapped her skin, raising goosebumps. She stared out at the inky spread of trees, trying to work out what to do, how to get through them. Then, from somewhere inside the darkness, came a rustling sound. Heather was suddenly filled with dread.
Something’s out there. Something bad.
Heather sat up in bed, heart sprinting as she waited for the nightmare to dissolve in the daylight. Then she fell back against her pillow with a sigh. She should never have let Tessa and Amir talk her into that last round of shots; tequila always gave her weird dreams. She groped for the remote control, aiming it at the skylight blind, which rolled back to reveal a thick layer of dark cloud. Heather stared up at it, taking stock of her hangover. A bad one. It felt as though her stomach was on a rollercoaster and her head was in a vice. She threw an arm across her face, wondering whether Tessa’s hangover was this bad.
Tessa …
Heather probed the tequila fog, slowly reconstructing the night. She had told Tessa the truth about her father’s death. She’d done it on impulse, confident that her new friend could be trusted. Now, though, she found herself wondering what exactly that confidence was based on. The two of them had, after all, only known each other for two weeks. And technically, they were competitors, vying for supremacy in the ratings.
Anxiety pressed against her chest as the scale of the risk she’d taken sank in. Heather had handed a rival information she had withheld from the Triple F – knowing it would make the screeners think twice about letting her win. If the truth got out, she could be kicked off of CelebRate. Maybe even charged with fraud.
Heather threw back the duvet and swung her feet onto the floor, the movement sending her intestines on another queasy roll. The F-phone was on the bedside table and she snatched it up, dashing off a DM.
Good morning. Just wanted to say please don’t repeat what I said re my Dad. It’s v private. You’re the only person I’ve told about his suicide in the 8 years since it happened.
