Lovers and Liars Trilogy

  “Sure, sure—she’s nice.” Cassandra sounded impatient. “And she talks. Mina, we don’t have the time. Also, she’s always asking questions—like, how’s my mother? Where’s my mother? Why lie more than we need, right?”

  “I don’t know.” Mina’s small pale face contracted. “I feel guilty, I guess. My parents are going there for drinks this evening. What if she mentions she saw us?”

  “So what if she does? They know you’re coming here.”

  “Not this early. If she mentions the time, my mother will know something’s wrong. She’ll know we played hooky—”

  “Oh, forget it,” Cassandra said carelessly. “She won’t even remember. If your mother does ask questions tomorrow, make something up. Say one of the teachers was ill. Who cares? It won’t matter by then.”

  “What if my mother calls tonight?”

  “She’ll get the answering machine. We’re going to the theater, remember? In Bath. With my mother. It’s a long drive, we’re meeting friends for dinner afterward, then my mother’s driving us back. We won’t be home until after midnight… Come on, Mina, it’s a perfect alibi. Not even your mother can crack it.”

  “What if someone at Charlotte Flanders’s mentions your mother’s away? What if she told someone in the village that she was going to New York?”

  “No way,” Cassandra said with a shrug. “She doesn’t bother with people in the village. She calls them the peasants. Anyway, it was a last-minute thing—she just took off. Just relax, Mina, let’s make this place look occupied. Then we’ll eat, all right?”

  Cassandra ran up the wide staircase that led up from the hall and turned off to her right. Mina followed more slowly. She tried to persuade herself that she was not having second thoughts about this scheme of Cassandra’s. After all, Cassandra had been to raves before, and she said they were amazing, just great. The one at Glastonbury last summer, the one outside Cheltenham just before Christmas, and now the one tonight.

  Cassandra had told her all about it, what it would be like: a huge barn up in the fields, miles from the nearest house; hundreds of cars, buses, trailers bringing kids and new-age travelers from all around. Music and dancing and stars so bright and seeming so close you could reach out and touch them. And the man called Star. Cassandra had told her all about Star.

  Mina mounted the stairs and turned left. She entered a succession of opulent, overfurnished bedrooms, all advertisements for Cassandra’s mother’s skills as an interior decorator. Mina switched on lights and drew chintz curtains as Cassandra had instructed her to do. Cassandra’s mother was so careless; just taking off like that for New York, leaving Cass alone in a large house. Her own mother seemed to forget that Mina, too, would be sixteen in a few months. She continued to treat Mina as if she were ten: she worried about everything—men, parties, cars, smoking, drinking. She saw the world as a dangerous place filled with pits ready to entrap her daughter, but the nature of these traps embarrassed her. She would try to discuss them with Mina, and then she would become flushed and confused. Sex and drugs were the two things she most feared, but she could never quite bring herself to use those terms, so she would talk about “boys” or “pot,” or clip little scare stories from the newspapers about unwanted pregnancies or heroin addiction and leave them on Mina’s desk. The transparent subterfuge made Mina angry. She would ball up the clippings and throw them away unread.

  Until her father was posted to England, until Mina began attending the Cheltenham Academy, until Cassandra became her friend, Mina had for the most part accepted her mother’s fussing: she loved her mother and could see the protectiveness was well meant. Then, a few weeks before, during the Christmas holidays, when she and her mother were alone in their house, Mina had picked up the telephone extension in her room, intending to call Cassandra. She had interrupted a conversation between her mother and an Englishman whose voice she did not recognize. She was about to replace the receiver, then stopped.

  “Darling,” Mina heard her mother say urgently, “darling, I’m desperate to see you too. But I can’t. Mina’s here—we’ll have to wait until next week.”

  Mina felt herself go very cold, then very hot; the blood rushed into her neck. She stood there, unable to move, still clutching the receiver. She heard it all, the whispered questions, the reassurances of love, the details that spelled out lies and adultery. Then she replaced the receiver very quietly, went into her bathroom, and was sick. Lies, lies, lies, she thought to herself: the lies made her miserable and furious, and her thoughts tangled and hot. After that she was much more prepared to listen to Cassandra, and much more prepared to emulate her: so what if it involved lying to her mother? Lying didn’t matter now that Mina knew her mother was a cheat.

  In the last of the opulent bedrooms, Mina stopped. She had caught sight of her own reflection in a cheval glass; she looked herself up and down with a cold and critical eye: a small, thin girl in a drab school uniform skirt and sweater. How she hated her red hair, her pale complexion, her freckles, her flat chest. I look twelve, Mina thought, and wished for the thousandth time that she resembled Cassandra, who was tall, golden-haired, careless, and daring, Cassandra, whom God had blessed with breasts.

  It was still not too late to change her mind, she told herself. It was possible her mother didn’t really have a lover, and the conversation she had overheard was innocent. It was possible that this whole painful past month was some horrible mistake.

  But Mina knew that it was not. She felt the tears well behind her eyes, and blinked them back. She let the anger swell and rip. Anger was preferable to tears, because it gave her courage. She thought: I will go, and serve her right. Then she turned and ran back downstairs to the kitchen. There Cassandra was staring with disgust into an empty refrigerator.

  “Can you believe that?” she said on an indignant note. “I mean you’d think she’d have left some food. There’s a few tins of baked beans, some bread, and that’s it…” She slammed the door, then, recovering her temper, gave Mina a quick smile.

  “Look what I bought,” she said, reaching for a tote bag and tipping its contents onto the table. “Hair gel, makeup, some of those water-transfer tattoos—check them out, Mina, aren’t they great?”

  Mina looked at the fake tattoos doubtfully. There was a black scorpion, and a hawk and a dragon, and some letters that spelled HATE.

  “We’ll fix our hair and our faces—you can borrow some of my old clothes, I think they’ll fit… How much money did you bring?”

  “Ten pounds.”

  “Shit. That’s not enough. We want to score, right?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Whizz, tracers, maybe some E’s. A little Ecstasy—you wait, Mina, it’s fantastic. It makes you feel really sexy. Hey, techno music—I hope they play the Prodigy. Maybe Liquid Death. I’m going to dance all night… Hang on. There must be some money here somewhere.”

  Mina watched Cassandra open kitchen jars and canisters. She wondered sometimes if Cassandra was hurt by her parents’ indifference. Cassandra always spoke of it as an advantage, but Mina wasn’t always sure she spoke the truth. Once, when she came back from a weekend with her father, who was forty, and her new stepmother, who was twenty-six, Cassandra had cried. But that was nearly a year ago; now Cass never spoke of her father, and rarely saw him. Mina hadn’t seen her cry since.

  In the fifth container, Cassandra found some money. She tossed it down on the kitchen table with a little smile of triumph.

  “I knew it. Forty quid. Great. We need plenty. Just wait, Mina! This is going to be great.”

  Cassandra began rolling a neat joint. She lit it, inhaled deeply, then passed it across. Mina drew the sweet smoke down into her lungs; after a few minutes she began to feel lightness and lift. It made her feel calm and floaty and safe. It drove all the anger and muddle away, so she forgot about her mother and the telephone call that changed her life.

  “Will Star be there?” she asked, breathing out.

  Cassandra’s face bec
ame dreamy and soft.

  “Sure he will. I told you. Just wait till you meet him, Mina. He’s, like, truly amazing. Wild. When he touches you…”

  “What happens when he touches you?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t describe it. But he just takes your hand, maybe, or touches your arm—and you can feel this power, and it’s passing from him to you, and it’s just—filling you up…”

  They went upstairs and changed, and molded their hair into Medusa-like snakes; they painted their eyelids gold and their lips black. They applied the fake tattoos last of all. Mina fixed the black hawk to her left cheekbone. Cassandra pasted the scorpion to her forehead, the dragon to her throat, then she held out her left hand, and Mina helped her apply the four letters that spelled HATE.

  “We look brilliant,” Cassandra declared as they inspected themselves in the bathroom mirror.

  “Great,” said Mina. She still felt floaty. “We look great.”

  Cassandra gave her a hug.

  “I’ll introduce you to Star, promise,” she said. “You’ll really like him. And he’s bringing some new stuff. It’s amazing, he says. The best ever. He brought it back from his friends in Amsterdam the other night.”

  Chapter 4

  ACROSS THE VALLEY FROM the manor, the thin young man with the lurcher, whom Charlotte had glimpsed earlier, continued his walk. He turned off the river road onto a track, and headed uphill to the beech trees. He walked at a leisurely pace, scenting the evening air: he could smell damp grass, woodsmoke, the residue of exhaust fumes, and—nearing the wood—the stink of fox.

  He paused to look back across the alley to the curve of the river, and the village beyond. He noted the church tower, the graceful façade of the manor, the lights in the cottage windows. It was a famous view, one that had changed little in four hundred years, and—the epitome of a certain Englishness—one much featured in Cotswolds guidebooks. The young man looked at it with loathing: safe, smug, complacent, rich. Star hated the English countryside; he preferred the textures, smells, and dangers of city streets.

  Star—it was not his real name, but it was now the only tag he answered to—rolled saliva in his mouth, then spat. His dog cowered at his heels. Star jerked the length of string that served as a leash, and walked on. He entered a clearing on the edge of the beech wood. There, parked discreetly behind a wall, its lights cut, was a brand-new 5 series silver BMW.

  “Yours?” said Star to the plump, smartly dressed young man who was standing next to it, blowing on his fingers and stamping his feet.

  “Christ. You made me jump.” The young man swung around. “Why do you have to creep up on people like that? This place gives me the willies. You’re late.”

  “Your car?” Star repeated. The young man recovered himself. He gave a tight grin, and made a seesawing gesture of the hand.

  “In a manner of speaking. Classy, isn’t it?”

  Star gave him a look of bilious contempt. He did not like the man, whose name was Mitchell, and who worked in the City money markets; he did not like his car. He shrugged.

  “German shit. If you’re going to buy German, get a Mercedes, they’re best.”

  “Who said anything about buying?” Mitchell grinned again. He edged away from Star, who had not washed recently, and who smelled richly of sweat.

  “All fixed for tonight?” he went on, again stamping his feet. “Christ, it’s cold. I’ve driven all the way from London. I’ve got the usual friends joining me, so I damn well hope it’s fixed.”

  Star was wearing a huge, torn, tweed overcoat. From one of its pockets he produced a small and very expensive mobile telephone. Mitchell regarded this object without surprise, though it was greatly at odds with Star’s gypsyish dress. Star punched in a number.

  “One more call,” he said. “And, yes, it’s fixed.”

  “Sweet?” Mitchell said on an interrogative note. Mitchell’s taste was for speed and teenage girls, if possible in combination. Star’s task was to provide both, so he understood the question at once. He pushed back his long black hair, let the number ring, and smiled. Star was blessed—or cursed—with startling good looks, and the smile, practiced before many mirrors, was intended to disarm. Mitchell, who knew Star of old, was not disarmed. He noticed now, as he had noticed on occasions before, that Star’s blue-black eyes had a nasty glint in them, a not-quite-sane might-do-anything worship-me-Charles-Manson sort of glint. In the fading light Star’s eyes and teeth gleamed. Mitchell took one step farther back.

  Star spoke briefly into the mobile phone, then disconnected, and snapped it shut.

  He finally answered Mitchell’s question.

  “Sweet?” he said. “There’ll be three hundred people. Three hundred minimum. And the pigs don’t have a sniff of it. Feel the power in the airwaves, man—that’s sweet if you like. The tribes are gathering. I’ve got music, fire eaters, jugglers, lots of gullible little rich kids.” He laughed. “One big fucking stairway to heaven, man—I can promise you that. Trust in Star. Have I ever let you down?”

  “Yes,” said Mitchell, recovering his nerve. “You have.”

  “Example?”

  “Last summer, for example. Ground-up fucking aspirin. Ground-up fucking dogs’ worming tablets. Twenty quid a tab for crap. My friends weren’t pleased. I wasn’t pleased. More like a grave than a rave that was—I was throwing up for two days afterward. That little Dutch bitch you fixed me up with gave me the clap—” He paused. Star was not listening.

  “What happened to that little bitch, by the way?”

  “She’s dead.”

  “My condolences. The fact remains. You let me down. As such occasions go, that one was shit.”

  “It rained.”

  “It was amateurs-ville.”

  “It was a tryout. Tonight will be different. You wait. This time, my friends came through. I’ve got some serious stuff.”

  Mitchell began to look more interested. “Samples?”

  “No free samples.”

  “Look, I have to be sure this time, all right? I’ve come a fucking long way. I’ve got friends coming from Birmingham—I waste their time, I look like a schmuck…”

  Star shrugged and did not move. There was a silence, a tussle of wills. Eventually, Mitchell produced a fat wallet. He peeled off a twenty-pound note and handed it across. Star ignored it.

  “You’ve got to be fucking joking.”

  “I never joke.”

  There was another pause, then Mitchell peeled off another note. Star took the money and handed him a small packet. Mitchell opened it, examined the pill inside, then swallowed it. He waited, paced a bit, lit a cigarette. Some time passed. Star watched, arms folded. Mitchell talked on. Then, abruptly, he threw the cigarette down. He closed his eyes, swayed against his car, and clutched his chest. Several more minutes passed. Star continued to watch him in silence. Eventually, Mitchell opened his eyes again.

  “Christ,” he said. “Jesus Christ.”

  “Some rush, huh?”

  “Express—and I’m still traveling. Wow. This time you’ve really come through. Where in hell did you get that stuff?”

  “Amsterdam.”

  “God bless the Dutch. What’s it called?”

  “It’s a White Dove.”

  Mitchell closed his eyes once more.

  Star turned. “See you later tonight, then,” he said. “With your friends—oh, and, by the way. You got a discount. For them the price goes up.”

  Mitchell sighed. “Start time?” he said.

  “Eight. Nine. Ten. Time has no meaning to free men.”

  “Don’t give me that hippie shit.” Mitchell opened his eyes. “You like money the same way I do. Also girls. This is Mitchell you’re talking to, remember? I saw you, last summer, with that Dutch kid. And that French girl the year before. One word from me in the right quarter—”

  He broke off and caught his breath. Some new chemical reaction was fizzing inside his skull. He paled, then trembled, then swore. When his vision
cleared again, he saw that Star was now very close to him, the blue-black eyes just inches from his own. He flinched.

  “You saw?” Star said. “Tell me what you saw.”

  “Nothing. I saw nothing. I was just—Jesus, Star, it’s this stuff. I can’t think straight. Come on, we know each other, right? No hassle, we’re…”

  “Oh, sure, we know each other.” Star moved closer and gripped Mitchell’s lapels. “You know me really well. Like, inside out. You know what makes me tick. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. What does make me tick, exactly, Mitchell? Is it money, pills, little girls, like you? Or is it more?”

  Mitchell began to struggle violently. “Let go of me,” he began, his voice rising. “Let fucking go of me, okay?”

  “I think it’s more, Mitchell. I think it’s this—appetite—I have for more. More of everything. More sex, more money, more pills, more thrills, more excess. What should I do with you, Mitchell, now that you know me so well? Should I kiss you? Should I kill you?”

  Mitchell gave a moan. Star was strong, and he was lifting him up now so his feet dangled above the ground. His wide mouth and even, white teeth were now half an inch from Mitchell’s own.

  “Sweet…” Star said, dragging the word out so it sounded like an incantation. He bent forward, then he bit Mitchell’s nose.

  Mitchell gave a howl of pain. Star laughed, and dropped him.

  “Just a love bite,” he said.

  Mitchell rumbled for a handkerchief and mopped his face. His nose was bleeding, and his hands were shaking; the tides of chemicals were still ebbing back and forth in his brain. “You fucking maniac…” He stared at the bloody handkerchief. He looked around him blankly. In the gathering dusk, Star had disappeared. He shook his head, breathed deeply, closed his eyes, then opened them. This time he could see Star. He was standing right in front of him, unaffected by these events, looking much as before. A down-and-out with diabolic eyes. Mitchell shivered, then swore.

  “Who the fuck are you?” he began. “What are you? Why in hell…”