‘She really doesn’t need to do this,’ I pointed out. ‘It totally wasn’t her fault. Besides, I’m OK.’ I held up my hand and wiggled my wrist to prove it.
‘Good to hear it. But Natalia wants your trip to New York to be memorable for all the right reasons and she thought this might do it.’ Charlie looked as if he’d carried out his instructions and was ready to leave.
‘Cool!’ Orlando said. He’d got over the lookalike situation and seemed eager to accept.
‘Except I have my workshop,’ I reminded him.
‘Well, listen – you two can think about it,’ Charlie cut in. ‘You have the passes. You decide.’ There was a cab waiting for him at the kerbside, throwing out clouds of exhaust, red tail lights winking.
‘Thanks,’ Orlando told him as he made his exit. ‘Tell Natalia we really appreciate it.’
‘Be good to see you there,’ Charlie threw over his shoulder as he jumped into the cab.
Then he was gone.
My course wasn’t actually in the Lincoln Center but in a smaller building between the giant theatre complex and the Julliard School. It was a small, poorly funded place that stored archives and ran courses for movie obsessives like me. On the ground floor there was a cinema seating eighty people, currently running a biographical film about Andy Warhol. The rest of the building was for storage, with a few rooms dedicated to a variety of courses on the history and preservation of film.
Our tutor for the morning was a guy named Adrian Ross, and a fellow student on the course was … Macy Osmond!
I stepped in the elevator to take me to the sixth storey and there she was, with silver studs in her nose and ears and wild magenta hair.
‘Tania?’ she asked as she checked me out from head to toe – my black jacket, my dime-store striped scarf with matching hat and fingerless gloves, circa 1975.
‘Macy!’
‘What are you doing here?’ we asked simultaneously.
‘I’m studying film preservation,’ I answered. ‘The weekend course.’
‘Me too,’ she said.
Honestly, what are the odds? Except, when you think about it, she was definitely a movie fan like me, committed enough to stand out the whole morning in sub-zero temperatures, waiting for Jack Kane to arrive. And not just blockbuster movies, it turned out. She was also into indie films from Eastern Europe and Italy, especially recent low-budget videos shot on camcorders, which she told me about as we went up in the elevator.
‘So you live here in New York?’ I asked as we stepped out and walked along the corridor to the room where the workshop would take place.
‘I wish. No, I’m from Idaho – Nowheresville. How about you?’
‘Likewise. Nowheresville in Colorado – actually a town called Bitterroot.’
‘So where did you find a guy like – what’s his name – Orlando?’
I laughed and held the door open for her to walk through. ‘He’s from my home town.’
‘Jeez, are there any more like him on the shelf?’
I liked it that she openly admired my boyfriend but not in a threatening way. It made me feel that I had good taste. ‘Orlando is a one-off deal,’ I solemnly told her.
She sighed. ‘So thank him for chasing after me to give me back my purse.’
‘You can thank him yourself if you like. He’s meeting me after the workshop. Why not come for coffee?’
‘Deal,’ she replied as Adrian Ross began his talk on film decomposition, shrinkage and chemical disintegration.
The morning was everything I wanted it to be and I was learning a lot – all excellent information to help me in my college major except for a thirty-second blip when our lecturer showed us a piece of footage from a movie from the silent era.
We’re talking pre-1920, a melodrama starring a fragile, eerily beautiful actress named Lillian Gish – a girl with a halo of curls, huge eyes in a pale, heart-shaped face and a small, baby-doll mouth. In the scene we were studying, the camera shows her in close-up, acting out a combination of fear and despair. She’s totally expressive and surrounded by shadows. The 35mm film clicked and whirred through the projector. It started to jerk and falter. Lillian Gish’s terrified face froze.
And yet I saw those celluloid shadows keep on moving, closing in on Lillian, sliding from the screen and across the floor towards me, enveloping me in darkness. I caught my breath.
‘Are you sure you’re OK?’ Macy whispered. She was sitting next to me so she got a good look at my pale face and trembling hands. She handed me her bottle of water. ‘You’re not going to pass out?’
‘No, I’m cool.’ The projector whirred back into action. The film moved on.
At the end of the morning I kept to my plan of meeting up with Orlando, and Macy came too.
‘I hope you don’t mind,’ she told him. ‘If three’s a crowd …’
‘No way.’ He said he was happy to buy her coffee. ‘You heard what happened to Tania yesterday afternoon?’ he asked. And he told her the story.
‘Shoot, that was my fault,’ Macy sighed. Beneath the piercings and the delicate unicorn tattoo on the inside of her wrist, she was old-fashioned and demure. She actually did soften the word to ‘shoot’. ‘Orlando, if you hadn’t split from Tania to play the good guy and give me back my bag, none of that would have happened.’
He shrugged. ‘There’s a silver lining. Did Tania also tell you about our special passes?’
‘No way!’ she cried as he described Natalia Linton’s generosity. ‘Do you guys know how lucky you are!’ Then she paused to think it through. ‘They might even include you as extras in the scene they’re shooting today. You could be diners in the boathouse. You’ll be in a Jack Kane movie!’
‘Wait – this is only a pass to get through security,’ I reminded her.
‘No, no. You’ll get to meet Natalia and the kids on set, maybe even Jack!’ Macy began to gabble and hyperventilate. ‘Yeah, you’ll be doing what a million other people would kill to do – get up close and personal with movie royalty. I’m telling you, it’s so worth having your bag stolen!’
She was serious but I was laughing. I pushed my piece of white card across the table. ‘Here, you have it. Go on set with Orlando.’
She gasped, touched the magic entry into her dream world with her fingertips.
‘Take it. I can see it means a hundred times more to you than it does to me. Me, I’m happy to spend the afternoon at MoMA with Vincent while you two schmooze with the stars.’ I had my own starry night, plus my own dark angel reasons for not going anywhere near the park again.
I should have checked this out with Orlando first, I realized. A glance his way made me see that. He was silent, avoiding eye contact and fiddling with his coffee spoon.
To her credit Macy picked up on it too. ‘No.’ She withdrew her hand from the card. ‘Thanks, but no.’
‘So why not come along with us; let’s all three go,’ Orlando suggested, realizing that he’d come across as mean and looking at me intently now to see if I approved. ‘Maybe we can sneak Macy in with us.’
‘I should be so lucky,’ she sighed, following his lead out of Starbucks.
There was no fresh snow today and the heaped piles of slush looked tired and dirty. The puddles were deeper, the sidewalks if anything more treacherous than when the flakes first fell and covered the patches of black ice with a crunchy white layer. Christmas carols were piped from every gift shop and hotel lobby as we walked along Central Park West towards a different entrance. While shepherds watched their flocks by night, all seated on the ground.
‘Watch out for the—’ Orlando warned Macy as, distracted by a giant Mickey Mouse dressed as Santa Claus in a toy-shop window, she walked straight into an overflowing trash can attached to a lamp-post.
The angel of the Lord came down and glory shone around.
Macy backed off from the lamp-post then tripped over the kerb. She laughed as the choir sang on about mighty dread and troubled minds. ‘Go ahead, disown me, I don?
??t blame you. Pretend I’m not with you!’
‘Fear not,’ said he …
We laughed with her and made a big thing of guiding her the rest of the way to the park gates. Macy, who looked so urban-cool, was turning out to be anything but.
‘No way should they let you out on your own,’ Orlando told her with a grin. But once we were in the park, he turned to me. ‘This way we avoid the carousel,’ he confided as he squeezed my hand.
You can see why I love him and miss him when we’re apart and want to be with him always.
We joined a steady flow of people converging on the lake to catch another glimpse of Jack Kane. Again there was security tape stretched across the volleyball courts, a helicopter at rest and in the distance a gang of movie technicians by the boathouse, preparing to go to work.
‘Jack came early today,’ Macy sighed when she saw the empty helicopter.
Obviously she realized she’d missed her best chance of getting close to her hero again and I felt for her. I joined Orlando in thinking maybe we could sneak her past Security. At the same time I found Macy’s celeb worship a little surprising in someone who otherwise seemed pretty smart – take her knowledge of obscure Eastern European films as an example.
We were threading our way through the mass of people standing right against a metal barrier separating them from the lake, having to shove a little but this time ignoring the cries of protest. When we came to two guys guarding a gap in the fencing, Orlando and I waved our passes, simultaneously trying to hide Macy and slide all three of us through.
Guy number one took my pass and scanned it while guy number two did the same for Orlando. They were chatting to each other and didn’t seem to be taking their job too seriously until envy struck someone in the huddled crowd.
‘Hey, the one with the red hair – check her pass!’ a woman cried. Although she wore a thick jacket and scarf, her nose was almost blue with cold. ‘Would you look at that,’ she muttered in pure disgust.
The security guys went up a gear. Keeping hold of the two valid passes belonging to me and Orlando, they hauled Macy into the open to demand hers.
Feebly she felt in her pockets. ‘It’s here somewhere.’
‘Try looking up your ass,’ someone else in the crowd mocked, followed by other suggestions.
‘No pass, no entry,’ the first security guy told Macy. He joined shoulders with his co-worker – together, dressed in heavy black jackets and staring down at her, they were like a military tank facing down an unarmed civilian in an iconic Tiananmen Square moment.
‘Is she with you?’ the bigger of the two guards asked Orlando, looking as if he was tempted to turn us back too for attempting something so dumb.
‘Are you kidding? I’ve never seen her before,’ Orlando shrugged.
In case you’re running away with the impression that my boyfriend is Mister Perfect, there are many times like now when he unhesitatingly looks after number one. ‘Let’s go,’ he told me before the security duo could change their minds.
So we were through without Macy, treading the hallowed ground that Jack and Natalia had just trodden, taking a path around the side of the lake, heading for the film set for Siege 2.
3
With my rational head on I was telling myself not to be too impressed. After all, Jack Kane and Natalia Linton were only human.
A member of the crew wearing headphones walked quickly towards Orlando and me, warning us to step clear of cables. A lighting technician ran through cues, flicking lights on and off. Production staff glanced over their shoulders at us as we reached the Loeb Boathouse steps and hesitated.
I was doing OK, keeping a cool head, absorbing technical details about camera positions when Natalia appeared in the doorway to a trailer beside the boathouse.
Maybe it was the flashing lights, maybe the unacknowledged build-up of excitement – all I knew for sure was that it happened again. One second I was normal, seeing what everyone else sees. Next thing I’m plunged into nightmare.
The ice on the reservoir cracks and monsters rise. It’s Lake Turner all over again. There are skulls beneath the surface, drowned souls who didn’t deserve to die. There are black water serpents with scaly, hissing heads, a creature with broad shoulders and claw-like hands heaving himself on to the bank. I’m in my dark angel’s presence and there is nowhere to run.
My breath came short, my heart raced. I looked again at the smooth white lake, its surface unbroken.
‘You must be Tania.’ Natalia came down the steps and out into the cold to greet us. ‘And Orlando. So glad you made it.’
Shaken and tipped off balance, heart still beating dangerously fast, I turned my back on the lake and followed Orlando as Natalia Linton led us into her husband’s trailer.
Time for a catch-up on Natalia. There was a period, ten years ago, when she was a bigger star even than Jack. Growing up in Bitterroot, I’d seen a thousand pictures in magazines, copied the Linton hairstyle, read a hundred interviews, watched all of her movies. But nothing prepares you for meeting an icon in the flesh.
She was one hundred per cent stunningly beautiful. It hits you, takes your breath away. Unbelievable, you think. How is it possible for a human being to be so perfect?
‘So, Tania, this is your first time in New York,’ Natalia began after she’d invited us to sit down on a sofa under a TV screen playing a kids’ Power Rangers video with the volume turned down. In a whirl of primary colours, Lycra-clad superheroes turned robotic and lifted up trucks, scaled tower blocks, flew through the air. Spotting a red Power Ranger toy on the arm of the sofa, she sprang forward to move it out of Orlando’s way.
Natalia Linton – beautiful in a smooth-as-porcelain way. Taller than you would imagine, even more slender than you expect, with a mass of dark-red hair piled on her head and unbelievable green eyes. Today she was dressed down in designer jeans, high-heeled black ankle boots and warm grey sweater, with a flame-coloured scarf wound loosely around her neck. A handbag that must have cost the same as a small car sat on the floor beside her chair.
‘I feel so sad for what happened to you yesterday,’ she confided, idly pressing buttons on the toy man’s chest and turning him into a caped crusader. ‘We like to think that they cleaned up the city, but I guess we’ll always have crime on the streets. You’ll have seen the warnings on the subways – keep your purses and bags safe.’
She was soft-spoken, warm and generous. And in the trailer where she spent so much time with the kids while Jack was filming she’d surrounded herself with luxurious things – silk cushions with delicate Japanese embroidery of birds and flowers, soft russet-red and jade-green rugs, Tiffany lamps casting warm pools of light.
‘Lucky Charlie came by when he did,’ she added.
I fell into heartfelt thanks, stumbling over my words, feeling myself blush. Any coherent idea that I might not be overawed by Natalia Linton’s presence had disintegrated. A quick glance at Orlando told me he was suffering the same reaction and then some.
‘This is so nice,’ Natalia sighed, smoothing a cushion with long, white tapering fingers. ‘To be sitting here chatting with someone who’s not a journalist or a critic or any kind of media whore. Charlie told me how sweet you were, Tania. He said how much I would like you.’ She offered us coffee, which we turned down and she said good because the coffee they made on set was the worst and she couldn’t drink it herself; she stuck mainly to hot water with a squeeze of lemon.
Then she asked Orlando about himself and sighed with envy when she learned he wanted to be a costume designer for the theatre. ‘Great job!’ she declared enthusiastically. ‘And you must design for movies too. We need talented newcomers – ones who give us costumes that don’t half kill you. You know, the male fantasy-driven shape that no woman ought to be or ever was, plus wigs and stupid hats for historical dramas that cut into your head and weigh fifty pounds.’
OK, again – beautiful and charming, funny, smart and easy to be with. Plus all of the above. We were
under her spell, scared to pinch ourselves in case we woke up.
‘Here, put your number into my phone,’ she told Orlando, handing it to him. ‘I’ll keep it on my contact list. Maybe our costume designer or even our make-up people can offer you work experience. Would you be interested in seeing how that works?’
Orlando nodded then entered his name and number, eager as a puppy dog. ‘About the media whores remark – I guess you’re no fan of the press?’
Natalia arched her eyebrows. ‘What’s to like? Did you see them in the hotel lobby earlier this week? They’re like hunters with dogs; they hound us everywhere we go.’
‘Nobody believes what they read,’ I said hastily, sensing a whole lot of backed-up emotion.
‘Even with the kids,’ Natalia sighed. ‘You’d think they’d respect our privacy when we’re on vacation, on the beach, by the pool, having a meal in a restaurant. But no, they’re up in their helicopters, zooming in on us. And everybody on the street has a camera phone, all wanting a piece of us. Hey, it comes with the territory, I guess.’ However strongly she felt, which she obviously did, I gave her credit that she managed to wave it aside.
‘No, it’s OK. We understand.’
‘Which is why I reach out to people like you,’ she explained.
People like us? Normal, everyday joes. She’d struck a wrong note and for the first time I felt patronized. The movie goddess was making the assumption that we were naive kids from out of town, not really able to take care of ourselves.
‘Oh sorry, I didn’t mean …’ she began before I’d even formulated the negative reaction. ‘That came out all wrong.’
She finished speaking just as the trailer door opened and the oldest of Natalia and Jack’s kids charged in, followed closely by the other two. Adam, Phoebe and Charlie – all adorable – threw themselves at Natalia, trampling on her designer handbag and scrambling over the arm of her chair.