Let's Pretend, page 25
‘What do you think?’ said Talia’s voice from behind me.
‘It’s … magical. Did you set this up for the photo shoot?’
‘No. I did it for us. You and me and Sarah. Adam’s three favourite girls.’ She took me by the arm. ‘I’m so glad you like it.’
I rubbed my eyes. ‘I think … too much champagne … I think I need to go back inside. Did you check on Sarah? Is she OK?’
‘Sarah’s fine. Sleeping like a baby. Sit down here for a minute – rest.’ Gently, she helped me to a sitting position at the side of the pool.
‘What are you doing?’
She’d pulled off my boots and was taking off my socks.
‘Talia – ! Stop it.’ I swatted her away but, giggling, she reached for my feet again. Then she slipped out of her silver sandals, hitched up her dress and sat down next to me, trailing her feet in the indigo depths.
‘I like to come and sit here, sometimes, thinking of Adam. Remembering. The water’s gorgeous …’ She rested her head on my shoulder. ‘You should try it.’
‘I’m not swimming in your weird-ass shrine.’ Lumberingly, I got to my feet. My bare feet. How had that happened? I made it to the bench and sat down heavily.
Talia pitter-pattered after me. ‘You should think about it,’ she said earnestly. ‘As you’re here. It will bring you closer to Adam. I know how much you miss him. I do too. But you came first, of course. I’ve always known that. The connection you two had … You’re way prettier than me, and much more talented, and effortlessly cool … yet even you couldn’t keep him, in the end.’
‘Adam was never mine to “keep”,’ I said effortfully. ‘He was a gay man. We were in a professional relationship. The end date was literally written into our contract.’
‘As was mine,’ said Talia, nodding. ‘Set to finish as soon as Luke Zane wrapped. I’m not stupid, Lily. Obviously Adam was always going to move on from me. He’d find a co-star or a proper pin-up and he wouldn’t need me, or my money, any more. I was only ever a stop-gap. I know that. I also know that the only reason Adam was nicer to me than he was to you was because he basically thought I was a child. That’s all right. I didn’t mind.
‘What I didn’t expect was how … real he made me feel. Solid and shining. Someone who other people actually saw.’ She smiled dreamily. ‘Because they see me now, don’t they? They chase after me, in fact. Everyone wants to talk to me. About Adam and our time together … It’s lucky Sarah depends on me so much – for guidance, as well as other things. It means I’ll be free to concentrate on all the important and exciting ways I’m going to keep Adam’s memory alive.’
I closed my eyes. As if blocking out the view would block out the words that were coming.
‘You were his best girl. But I was his last girl. I’ll always have that.’
Dark water was pouring through me. ‘Oh Talia…’ I whispered. ‘What did you do?’
She took my hand in hers. ‘The same as you. I did the same as you and Adam and Dido – I turned myself into a different person. A wig, new eyebrows, this funny prosthetic nose … I had no idea how easy it was. Honestly, I was transformed. Inside and out! The boatman I hired assumed I was a stripper. As a surprise for the party, you know. I was able to buy a bunch of drugs off him too. Then the two of us snuck off on his little motor boat, puttering through the creeks at the dead of night. And all that lurking in the pine wood! I really did feel as if I was in the movies …
‘Anyway. The boatman took me back to the village half an hour later or so, I paid up, then went to change and get into my car. Do you want to know something funny? What I really worried about was that people would somehow realise the croissants were stale. I’d picked them up in the evening, you see, before the drive down, so they were sawdust by the time I got to the house. Obviously they couldn’t have been freshly baked that morning.
‘But I was quite confident my boatman was never going to come forward. Not when the police said they were searching for whoever supplied Adam with the drugs. (Turns out the local fishermen do a roaring trade!) The man couldn’t know the stash I bought from him is sitting at the bottom of the salt marsh. I had to be very selective, very specialist, about where I got the fentanyl from, after all.
‘The truth is, Lily, I never expected you to be at the party that night. When Sarah messaged me to say you’d turned up, I felt betrayed, actually. It was a real blow. I don’t mind admitting that now. I really believed Adam when he said you and he were over. I suppose it was inevitable you’d start asking questions – that you wouldn’t be able to let things go. I’d feel the same, probably, if it were me. But it’s just such a terrible, awful shame. I can’t tell you how sorry I am.
‘Because there’s always been something a little … bleak, I guess, about you? Not many people pick up on this, but then they don’t know you like I do. And the awful thing is it’s made things easier. I could never have planned you breaking up with your boyfriend, for example. Or whatever went on between you and Dido down by the marsh. Though I suppose that horrible fight with Nina was inevitable once you saw the film. I was lucky there, too. Poor Nina always gets herself into trouble one way or another, doesn’t she?’
‘Nina …’ I slurred.
‘She’ll be fine.’ Talia squeezed my hand. ‘I’ll look after her, and Sarah too. We’ll all rally round. It helps, of course, that you said goodbye.’
‘Good– good– goodbye?’
She closed her eyes, inhaling deeply. ‘“Adam, I’m sorry we didn’t look after each other better. I’m sorry about a lot of things.”’ She opened her eyes again and smiled. ‘That’s the note we’ll find, you see. Closure is a comfort of sorts.’
She had me by the arm now and was pulling me off the bench, towards the pool. I tried to resist but my body had gone limp. ‘Wh– wh– wh–?’
‘A little something in your champagne, that’s all. Similar to the sleeping pill I gave Sarah – I hadn’t expected her to stay on, but there’s a lot to be said for the power of spontaneity. We all have to be flexible; we all have to acknowledge when it’s time to let go. So please don’t struggle. It’s not worth it, not in your last moments. Close your eyes and it will be even more like falling asleep.’
I was so sleepy, and my brain so coddled in cold fuzz, it was almost hard to feel fear. Close up, the dyed water of the pool was so dark as to look black, its depths infinite. I flailed about, floppily, and tried to scream Sarah’s name as Talia gripped me beneath the arms, but the breath in my lungs was as thin and feeble as the rest of me. I was dimly aware that Talia was being careful of me, taking her time – of course, I thought, she doesn’t want there to be any signs of a struggle.
It had begun to rain. Pockmarking the water, pattering on the paving stones, slanting silver in the lights. My bare feet slipped and skidded about, futilely searching for a grip. All those hours in the gym and spin classes had paid off for Talia – she was small but pitilessly strong. I collapsed on the paving with a groan. Her hands were on my side now, briskly rolling me over to the pool’s rim. She leaned over my face, and her eyes were bright with tears.
‘Go to him,’ she said softly. ‘Go to Adam. You can have him for always now.’
I heard my own scream like the echo of something very far away. Still, the shock of the water revived me a little. I thrashed about, tipping over the little silver bowls, getting my arms entangled with the fake lilies. How apt, a distant part of my brain observed. I grabbed at the side of the pool even though I knew it was useless, that I was useless, that Talia was right, and giving up without a struggle was the simplest thing to do. But cold rain pecked at my face, and the warm, inky water smelled of chemicals, burning my throat and lungs. And so I gurgled and moaned, uselessly, and splashed, uselessly, even as the numbness slunk through my brain and my sodden clothes took on the weight of armour. And all the while, Talia gazed sadly down, hands clasped between her breasts, one tiny tear trembling on her cheek.
Until she crumpled to the ground, with a grunt.
A dark figure stepped out from behind her.
I thrashed and gurgled some more.
‘Boo,’ Zalandra said.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Talia had slipped a benzodiazepine into my drink – one of the standard anti-anxiety drugs that date-rapists use, the kind that leaves the body after a few hours without a trace. It was detected in the blood tests I had at the hospital, and a prescription bottle with Talia’s name on it was found in the house. Her story, of course, was that I’d taken it of my own free will, after being left distraught by the break-up with my boyfriend and a fight with my best friend. Talia hadn’t known how much I’d been drinking when she offered it to me. After combining the medication with alcohol, I’d become disoriented and confused and wandered out of the house while her back was turned. Then I’d fallen – or jumped – into the swimming pool.
Zalandra’s role in all this was slightly less clear. In Talia’s version of events, Talia was moments from dragging me out from the water when she was disturbed by an intruder. In her confusion, she lashed out in self-defence, only for Zalandra to respond in kind. Zalandra had, in fact, dealt a blow to her head with one of the globed solar lights she’d plucked from a flower-bed.
When Zalandra called the emergency services, she said that she’d struck Talia because she believed Talia was preventing her from giving assistance to me. She was not an intruder, she explained – the doors to the house had been left open, she was acquainted with both Talia and myself, and she had come to Norfolk to follow up an appointment she had made with me. But she withdrew the statement she gave to the police, on the grounds that the prospect of appearing in court would put her under intolerable mental strain. She had, in any case, been too late on the scene to witness Talia’s alleged confession or to be sure of how I had come to be in the water. Or so she said.
Either way, it was lucky for me Zalandra had made good on her threats and tracked me down so relentlessly. Apparently she’d got hold of my mother’s contact details and fed her some bullshit story about being a casting director, angry I hadn’t shown up to an audition. On learning I’d gone to Norfolk, she’d caught the train down that same day, arriving at the house not far behind Nina and with no plan other than to bide her time and wait for an opportunity to confront me. She was rewarded when Nina made her furious exit, slipping through the entrance gates moments after Nina had driven out. Exactly what she’d witnessed, she kept to herself. But with her talent for watching and waiting, I suspected she’d had a ringside view.
If so, Zalandra was probably wise not to admit to it. Almost as soon as she recovered consciousness, Talia was armed to the teeth with the sharkiest lawyers money can buy. Sarah certainly wasn’t saying anything – not about the sleeping pill Talia had given her nor the alcohol she’d watched Talia serve me. Presumably she was too busy with her work for the Adam Harker Foundation to help with police inquiries.
I was ultimately persuaded – by the police, my parents, my agent, my own lawyer – that the case against Talia was too weak for charges to be brought, either on my behalf or Adam’s.
Meanwhile, the court of public opinion was having a field day. What, exactly, had transpired at the celebrity death-house? Rumours were mongered, titbits leaked. A murderous catfight! A suicide pact! A lesbian sex cult gone wrong! The old Tinseltattle slurs were dug up and recirculated. Conspiracy theories abounded, including one that Adam had never really died, just gone incognito – like Marilyn or Elvis – and was living a quiet life in Norfolk the whole time, until his two exes tracked him down, forcing him to go on the run.
Nina asked me if I’d thought about Adam in what were almost my last moments: drugged and drowning in the same pool, under the same wide East Anglian skies. I told her the truth, which was that I’d thought only of myself. Certainly, there’d been no supernatural energy present. No merman or mer-demon to raise me from the depths or drag me down to hell. I felt only the choking horror of my own foolishness. I suppose Adam must have felt that too.
Nina was the only person who really believed my version of events, despite the Momager’s protestations and my lawyer’s platitudes. In some ways, this made everything harder because, of course, I had chosen to believe the worst of her – twice. The fact that Nina didn’t bear a grudge about this was the biggest proof, if proof were needed, that our friendship was over. She forgave me the first time; the second was more of a letting-go.
Nina was the one who told me that Talia had suffered a full-blown psychotic breakdown. Apparently she was whisked off to a secure mental-health facility somewhere in the American desert. It would be five-star, naturally. Kale smoothies and cotton sheets with a thread count higher than my mortgage. There was probably even a swimming pool. ‘I can’t see her ever coming out,’ said Nina.
So Talia had passed behind the ultimate red rope: it keeps us separate to keep us safe.
After the final round of police interviews and legal consultations, I returned to my aunt and uncle’s Brecon hideaway. The last time I’d gone had been a self-inflicted punishment as well as an escape; I suppose I thought the deprivations of the place would improve me. This time I knew that nothing could be salvaged. Yet my first days there were peaceful. I didn’t mind the cold or the rain or even the Collected Works of Bertolt Brecht, which was still waiting for me next to the inhospitable sofa. All I wanted was silence. However afraid I was of my thoughts, I knew I had to be alone with them. Otherwise, I feared the tremors of regret and guilt and fury and terror I felt beneath my skin would intensify into quakes and thunder-claps and grow louder and louder – thrumming through my blood, juddering in my bones and cracking my brain into a thousand dark fissures.
But I was not alone for very long.
Three days after I arrived, I came back from a walk that had been cut short by a sudden downpour. There was an unfamiliar car in the muddy yard and a familiar figure waiting on the doorstep. Zalandra.
‘How did you find me?’
She hunched her shoulders. ‘I asked around.’
I put my keys in the door. Perhaps a part of me had been expecting her. ‘You’d better come in.’
_________
‘You saved my life,’ I said, sitting down on the bony sofa. Zalandra elected to stand. She hadn’t chosen to wait for me in the car or even wear a coat, and she must have been outside for a while, as her hair was slicked down with water and her clothes were sodden. The room soon filled with the fuggy smell of wet wool. She still wasn’t as wet as when she’d pulled me out of the swimming pool, of course. ‘I’m glad I’m finally able to say thank you. I think I was too out of it at the time.’
She hunched her shoulders again. ‘It’s what anyone would have done.’
‘But you hate me.’
‘Even so.’
‘Talia didn’t hate me, yet she tried to kill me. You know why, don’t you?’ I watched her carefully. ‘You heard the things she said before she pushed me into the water.’
Another shoulder hunch. ‘It’s not my story.’
Not her story to tell? Or not the story she’d chosen to remember?
‘What is your story, Zalandra?’
She was silent. It wasn’t like the first time she’d approached me, in the coffee shop. Then she’d been hesitant. Fidgety. Painfully shy, painfully resolute. But I sensed a similar calculation going on behind those pale eyes.
I waited, and waited some more. Frustration got the better of me. ‘I mean, I don’t even know your real name, for God’s sake.’
‘It’s Zalandra. I changed it officially not long after we met in that café. It was a spur-of-the-moment choice … but it’s grown on me.’
Bullshit. ‘You chose it because of Adam. Because you’re a superfan. Of those films – the Wylderness Chronicles – and of him.’
She gave one of her small, crafty smiles. ‘Oh, I was never a Wylderbeast. I mean, I saw the first movie when it came out. I didn’t revisit them, though, until after Adam died. It only seemed right, since I was doing his memorial for the fan-site. They’re … OK, I guess. Not my sort of thing.’
I shook my head in an attempt to clear it. ‘I don’t get it,’ I said flatly. ‘You named yourself after Adam’s love interest in the film that made him a star, you followed him to LA, somehow persuaded him to give you a job, turned up at his party.’ Not to mention harassed me, his alleged girlfriend. ‘And I’m glad you were so, uh, involved, because otherwise I’d be dead. But let’s not rewrite history here.’
She blinked. ‘I thought you wanted to hear my story. This is how I tell it.’
‘Then I’m listening.’
‘OK.’ She was doing that blinking and fidgeting thing again. The heavy breathing too. ‘OK. Adam was a good actor. I mean, I liked what I saw of him. But I never paid him much attention until he started going out with you. Suddenly your name and your face were everywhere. Or that’s what it felt like. It felt as if I couldn’t get away from it – from you. I did try. I really did. I knew it wouldn’t do me any good. But then I bumped into you, the day in the café. And I suppose something snapped.’
I went hot all over, then cold. ‘Wait, so you were really st– you were interested in me, not Adam? The whole time?’
‘Zalandra spends most of the first film in disguise,’ she said, so placidly I knew her mildness had to be deceptive, and I felt another flash of heat and ice. ‘She’s trying to avoid her destiny. Until Kastor – Adam – arrives, and she realises it must be confronted after all. Which is a huge letdown, don’t you think? The so-called powerful heroine who still needs a hero to give her agency? All the same, it resonated.’
I waited.
‘Ask me my name again,’ she said at last. ‘Ask me my old name.’
‘What’s your old name?’
Her voice was the thread of a whisper. But her gaze was steady and never left my face. ‘I used to be a flower, like you. I was just like you, Lily, except I was a rose. I used to be a girl named Rose Huntley.’
