‘Because deep down you’re an antisocial loner with depressive inclinations and I see it as my duty to rescue you from yourself!’ Grace declared in doctor–patient tones. ‘I’ll be over at your place in thirty minutes, dressed and ready to party.’
2
It was time to go, Grace told me.
There she was at my door, dressed as an angel, totally convincing. Whatever image you have in your head, double it for the effect Grace made in her costume, all gauzy and ethereal with her smooth pale skin, soft, full lips and shining, clear grey eyes. Long, fair curls hung loose. She wore fine silver and gold cord wrapped around her torso over thin white chiffon folds like a Botticelli Venus, showing the curves of her breasts and the lean lines of her thighs. And white feathered wings spread wide behind her.
‘Can I get a ride?’ Holly called over the fence. Her version of angel was bolder, more warrior archangel – with her physique how could she help it? Her blonde hair was invisible under a silver headdress shaped like a helmet, there were no soft folds to her metallic tunic and she wore shiny wristbands and open gladiator sandals, also in silver.
‘Sure,’ Grace told her. ‘Just throw your wings in the back.’
Holly frowned as she strode up the drive. ‘I don’t do wings the way you do wings,’ she said, showing us the two small silvery ones attached to the heels of her sandals. Mercury, messenger to the gods – that was who she was.
Grace and I paused then grinned our approval.
‘Where’s Aaron?’ Grace wanted to know.
Holly shrugged. ‘We had a fight over who would drive. Now he says he won’t go to the party. Do I look like I care?’
‘Poor Aaron.’ I said this deliberately. We all do, as a kind of joke – ‘Poor Aaron’ – every time Holly throws her weight around. Example: she leaves this incredibly gorgeous guy standing outside the music store in town for a whole hour then doesn’t even say sorry when she shows up. Poor Aaron. Or she beats him at tennis then makes sure everyone knows. Poor Aaron again. But he grins and doesn’t seem to care. I guess that means they’re in love.
‘Get in the car,’ I told Holly. ‘And don’t squish my mask.’
For once, Holly did as she was told. ‘Hey, Tania, you rock,’ she told me as she assessed my turquoise and gold splendour with a cool eye.
Compliments from Holly are rare. ‘Did I just hear her say something positive to me?’ I muttered to Grace.
‘Get in the car too,’ Grace told me, glancing at her wrist and remembering that angels don’t wear watches. ‘I’m sure we’re gonna be late.’ Pot, kettle, black.
‘Bye, girls,’ Dad said, coming around the side of the house carrying JFK. He wouldn’t put the book down, wouldn’t eat or sleep until he’d read all eight hundred conspiracy-laden pages. ‘Say hi to Zoran Brancusi from me.’
Grace released the handbrake and slid down the drive.
‘Awesome. Does your dad actually know Zoran?’ Grace was surprised. I find she usually takes stuff too literally.
‘Like, yeah!’ Holly laughed from the back seat. ‘There are only a million Romanians living in the United States as we speak!’
‘Be back before midnight!’ Dad called after us.
So we set off down the road, three little Cinderellas totally thrilled to be going to the ball.
Holly demanded music. Grace played a CD by a girl singer she’d just discovered. She was only the same age as us but she sang wise, soulful songs about her boyfriend leaving, the world lying at her feet in fragments but finding the strength to carry on. The album title track was called ‘Out of the Ashes’.
‘I thought it was Tania who was fixated on things burning!’ Holly sighed.
‘Listen, I just like her voice, that’s all.’ Grace drove through town, along Main Street, already in deep shadow, out along the tourist route up towards Black Rock.
‘I’m not fixated,’ I protested.
‘Yeah, you are,’ they chorused.
‘I don’t like the word “fixated”.’ Meaning, I personally think my preoccupation is justified even if they don’t. I pointed to the mountain looming ahead of us. ‘Look around – what do you see?’
‘Smoke,’ Grace admitted.
‘My point exactly.’
We were entering burnout territory from a small forest fire two years earlier, where you get those weird, blackened tree stumps pointing like crooked, witchy fingers towards the sky, with toppled trunks criss-crossing the hillsides and green grass just returning. Beyond that we could see a heavy cloud clinging to Black Rock, backlit by the setting sun so that grey turned to white at its fluffy rim.
‘I cried the day you left me.’ Grace’s singer had a broken voice to match the message. ‘Tears fell like rain.’
‘Jesus!’ Holly groaned as she reached over my shoulder to press a button and change the disc. She tilted her silver helmet back from her face. ‘I thought we were supposed to party.’
‘We will when we get there,’ Grace promised. The Botticelli angel was driving fast into the white-rimmed smoke cloud, through the burnout, on up into the mountain towards the blue peak when a line of guys in helmets and yellow jackets hiked wearily along the side of the road towards us.
‘Here come the firefighters,’ Holly pointed out.
There were about twenty of them in single file, some with goggles strapped to their helmets, most carrying a pickaxe or a shovel, all wearing backpacks and all dog tired after twenty-four hours on Black Rock. As we approached, someone gave an order to halt and wait for transport. Silently unslinging their packs, the men sank on to the sloping grass verge.
‘Poor guys,’ Grace muttered, remembering their dead colleague. ‘Does anybody know how the fire started?’
Holly and I shook our heads. The missing firefighter. No shelter, a wall of flames a hundred feet high, what hope did he have? I felt my own throat constrict and my lungs struggle to suck in air.
‘It makes you feel kind of guilty,’ Grace went on, glancing down at her fancy-dress costume.
It was time for my told-you-so moment and, passing those slumped, worn-out figures, I was about to rub this in – ‘I said this earlier, but did anyone listen to me?’ – when Holly got there first.
‘Life goes on,’ she insisted. ‘They got the fire under control, didn’t they? They did their job.’
We coasted by and were silent until we drove right into the smoke, which had risen in a column then spread out into a mushroom cloud to descend towards us. Grace took her foot off the accelerator pedal. ‘It’s a good thing Jude didn’t come along,’ she muttered. ‘It’s hard enough trying to breathe enough oxygen with a normal, healthy pair of lungs.’
Suddenly red brake lights winked on the road ahead. ‘Watch out!’ I warned.
She braked and we joined a slow crawl of traffic.
Holly lowered the window to peer out. ‘What do you reckon – are all these people going to the party?’
‘Where else?’ Grace knew the road up Black Rock didn’t go anywhere except Zoran’s place. ‘Let’s hope the smoke eases before we get there.’
‘Close the window,’ I told Holly. Fumes had filled the car and caught in the back of my throat. Last night’s nightmare began to play out in my head again. I wondered what I would do if ever I had to face the choice the Witneys had faced and knew instantly that I and ninety-nine point nine per cent of parents would do what they had done, regardless.
Grace glanced sideways at me. ‘You OK?’
I nodded and stared out at the burned hillside. Yesterday’s tragedy jostled for my attention and shouldered the Witneys to one side – a guy alone on the mountain without shelter, facing a hundred-foot wall of flame, putting all his effort into a hopeless, breathless sprint towards the entrance of an old mine shaft – then oblivion.
‘Cool. The smoke’s lifting – see.’
Sure enough, we were driving clear of the aftermath of the fire, able to see the steep road rising ahead of us, plus the smoking ruins of ponderosa pines to
either side. They rose from the rocky ground, jagged and charred, with smoke tendrils still curling at their feet. The smoke spilled over cliffs and snaked its way along a lower ledge, and down again towards the town.
‘Has anyone seen Zoran’s place before?’ Holly looked eagerly ahead for the first sign of the rock star’s spread. ‘I hear it’s spectacular.’
‘Leo was skiing up here last winter,’ Grace reported. ‘He saw the place under construction but only from a distance. There was big security even then, and that was before we knew who’d bought the land.’
‘Swimming pool, jacuzzis, a tennis court.’ Holly listed the amenities we’d all read about in the local newspaper. ‘A private gym, staff quarters for fifteen people, a self-contained guest wing, his own recording studio even though he’s officially stopped making music …’
‘Helipad?’ I asked in a voice dripping with cynicism. I mean, how come a guy who wanted to put his starry past behind him and become a mountaintop recluse put out all this information? And why this party? I agreed with Mom – the rock god was preparing a comeback.
‘Yes, helipad.’ Holly went tight-lipped on me.
‘Zoran is seriously loaded,’ Grace sighed. ‘Think of the royalties and the cover versions.’
‘The advertisements, the merchandising, the modelling contracts …’ Holly was talking to Grace, not to me. ‘It was about two years ago, just before he released his final album, that his brand went beyond global into the stratosphere, which proves something.’
‘What?’ Grace asked.
‘That retirement was his best move ever.’
‘Smart,’ Grace agreed. ‘Leave your fans begging for more.’
‘But what do you do afterwards?’ I wondered. ‘After you stop being famous?’ It was a question I asked myself when I saw kids my age explode on to the music scene. The same with sports stars, I guess. They shine and burn out way before thirty.
Holly shrugged. ‘Anything you want.’
‘But what? You’re way up there, an A-lister – everybody wants a piece of you. Being in the public eye, dealing with fans, the press, all that crap – it’s full on. Then suddenly you step back, close the door and what you get is silence, day after empty day.’
‘How do you know?’ Holly demanded. ‘Maybe Zoran had a game plan in place – something more than a few rounds of golf and buying an island in the Caribbean.’
‘Yeah, I don’t see him in a golf buggy,’ Grace agreed. ‘Or in an infinity pool overlooking the ocean.’
‘He built this place instead. He must have had a reason.’ Holly was still eagerly looking for signs of civilization.
‘First, it’s breathtakingly beautiful. Second, it’s breathtakingly—’
‘I hear you. Maybe he wants to adopt a bunch of cute kids from Africa and let them live the American dream.’
‘Or maybe he actually, genuinely likes silence,’ Grace suggested.
‘Again – why this party?’ I wasn’t enjoying this trip and didn’t care if it showed.
‘What was that?’ Holly asked from the back seat. ‘Did our little ray of sunshine just make a contribution?’
‘No. Forget it.’ In fact, I was the first to spot the split in the road and the cars ahead taking the dirt track up to Black Eagle Canyon. Grace swung a left and we rumbled on to the rough surface, stones spitting out from under the tyres as the car’s suspension took a beating. ‘Anyone scared of heights?’ Grace asked, glancing at a sheer drop into a rocky ravine. Down in the depths, white smoke had settled over the winding creek that wound on through the valleys until it joined Prayer River out beyond Bitterroot.
Yeah – me. I gripped the wheel and stared ahead. I’m scared of heights. What a bag of neuroses and phobias, you’re thinking. Flames and fear of falling are just two of the terrorist snipers lurking inside my head.
‘We’re here!’ Holly leaned forward to point at the ranch-style entrance to Zoran Brancusi’s spread. It was constructed in traditional style, as a square archway of rough poles topped with a sign that spelled out the words “Black Eagle Lodge” in lettering burned into the pale wood and giving no sign of the luxury that lay beyond.
It was Grace’s turn to lower her window. ‘I hear music!’ she announced.
We’d reached the point in the evening where the sun had sunk below the horizon but before darkness falls. It’s light without shadows, flat and still, when pale colours shine, white looks whiter and a summer tan darkens.
‘Magical!’ Grace whispered.
We parked the car and walked side by side with a hundred fantastical creatures dressed in feathers, face paints and glittering silver, all drawn towards the open-air stage erected in the base of a natural amphitheatre surrounded by rocky slopes. Following the dreamy, mesmeric notes that floated skywards, we three heavenly bodies crowded together with a thousand others and stood gazing up at two guitarists and a drummer playing soft and slow.
I saw angels everywhere, eyes shining in the dusk light, mouths parted, bodies swathed in white, silver, gold. The sky darkened to indigo.
‘So cool!’ Grace began to sway to the music. I heard her gasp as a switch was flicked and the musicians stood suddenly in pools of purple light, while pinpricks of silver laser beams swept across the stage and over the black hillsides. I saw Holly’s face soften and her eyes half close as she tilted back her head and drank in the sound.
‘Hey, Holl.’ Aaron was at her side out of nowhere but he must have seen us arrive. Adonis put his arm around the waist of Mercury girl.
‘Hey,’ she whispered back, their fight instantly forgotten.
‘Have fun,’ Grace told Holly and Aaron as they disappeared into the crowd.
And now, Grace and I were two lonely Cinderellas looking for our prince.
The music grew louder, faster. Arms were raised above heads, bodies swayed. Dizzy lights spun over our heads.
Beside me, a girl wore a mask that totally covered her face. It was flame-coloured, fringed with gold. Her red and golden butterfly wings shimmered as the laser beams danced. Beyond her, another girl was dressed all in white and just ahead, a tall, dark-haired guy stood stripped to the waist. He had scrolling patterns painted across his broad shoulders and dreamcatchers tied to his belt, feathered and beaded. He wore pale, fringed trousers and when he turned his head I saw that his face was streaked white and crimson.
Grace saw him too and she glanced at me, wide-eyed. ‘Who’s that?’ she mouthed. ‘Do you recognize him?’
I shook my head and shrugged, swallowed hard as shaman-guy spotted us, turned his back to the stage and seemed to head our way.
‘That sure is one heavenly body!’ Grace giggled. Semi-naked, smooth-skinned, muscular and covered in war paint, he had dark eyes and wide, full lips. It’s amazing how much information your brain can process in the space of a few seconds when you really focus.
I grinned nervously, glad when someone stepped across his path to yell into his ear. He listened, nodded and walked off in another direction.
Grace though was disappointed. ‘Aaw – I wanted to ask him about his costume.’
‘Yeah, his costume!’
‘I’m serious. Is he the Great Spirit in the Sky, or what?’
‘He sure is taking the party theme seriously,’ admitted, switching my attention back to the stage, beginning to wonder when Zoran would grace us with his presence. By now the three musicians were deep into a long instrumental, heads bent and eyes closed in concentration, guitars and drums gleaming under the overhead lights. The pace quickened, excitement was building to a high whine of guitars, a pounding of drums, a flicker of lights, and all under a vast dark sky, surrounded by mountains.
‘So cool!’ Grace sighed as the piece reached a climax. Our arms were still raised, we were swaying rhythmically, getting lost in the music, totally in the moment.
Then suddenly, silence. The two guitarists stepped back out of the light. We waited.
There was no corny drum roll, no announcement, just Zor
an walking on to the stage and up to the microphone.
We went wild. We yelled, cheered and clapped. The sound rolled round the amphitheatre and came echoing back. Zoran stood and took the applause, perfectly still and resting in the knowledge that he was the centre of it all.
Over the years I’ve seen Zoran Brancusi on TV, I’ve watched his videos but I’ve never seen him in the flesh. I know he takes your breath away just to look at him. It isn’t easy but I’ll try to explain why.
It’s not that he’s perfect to look at like the Spirit in the Sky guy – Zoran’s no athlete, no bodybuilder. In fact he’s skinny and his face is drawn and shadowy, more so as he gets older. And he doesn’t do macho – more a weird kind of cross-gender, mostly around the eyes and lips, which are full, and especially when you see close-up pictures of him wearing mascara and a diamond in his ear. But he holds himself tall, without that usual rock-star slouch. He’s at ease with the camera on him, knowing we love to look at him. In fact you can’t help yourself; you just want to follow every move.
And when he moves, he’s like liquid – smooth, sinewy, flowing across the stage, gliding under the lights. He moved now under multicoloured lights, took the microphone from the stand, walked the width of the stage, nodded at the lead guitarist and started to sing.
They talk about the voice of an angel, and this is what it’s like. Perfect pitch, perfect timing. He sings like he’s singing just for you; the notes soar, the words enter your head and move you into an unreal space.
‘Come with me,’ he sings. And he means you, just you. ‘Fly with me/ You’re stardust, you’re heavenly …’
Our hearts opened to him; we drank him in.
‘Stay with me, I’ll never let you go …’
Guitar notes surround you, that voice ensnares you. Zoran was onstage in a single spotlight of silvery light, dressed in plain black T-shirt and jeans; he floated, he twisted and turned.
‘Forever in my arms, you’re heavenly.’
All the guys in their costumes wished they could tell it to their girlfriends the way Zoran does. All the girls longed to hear it in real life, not just in the words of a song. It’s pure and absolute; it’s the way love should be.