‘Like they don’t even know you exist.’
‘And they won’t communicate. You try every which way but you can’t get through.’
We were so deep in conversation that I hardly noticed the route we took across the Plaza and up Broadway towards the nearest entrance to Central Park. ‘Give it to me straight, Macy – you saw how Orlando was with Gwen yesterday. What did you think?’
‘Do you mean, was he coming on to her?’
‘Or the other way around?’
Macy wrinkled her nose as she thought it through. ‘Gwen’s a couple of years older than Orlando,’ she pointed out. ‘And every day she meets seriously hunky guys through the work she does. I’m not saying Orlando’s not a hunk – don’t get me wrong.’
‘So you think I imagined it?’
‘Gwen definitely didn’t mention him over supper.’
‘I imagined it,’ I repeated, this time with a thudding, sinking, sickening sensation that I’d made a total fool of myself.
We’d reached the security barrier inside the park and the usual band of fans. I recognized big Mike on duty in his high-visibility jacket. Macy paused and gave my arm a reassuring squeeze. ‘Yeah, Tania. You have to cut Orlando a little slack while we’re on set, then as soon as you find the chance to get him on one side – girl, you grovel!’
Today, on the afternoon of the last day of filming in Manhattan, Larry King was working with Jack on an interior sequence inside the boathouse. Orlando told me that Jack was sober. He greeted Macy and me at the door to the make-up trailer where Gwen was working her magic on Angela Taraska, the newcomer who was getting lots of press coverage for her off-screen antics with Jack. She had the typical starlet looks – blonde hair, wide-apart blue eyes, small nose, lush mouth – that could put her on the cover of every gossip magazine across America and the whole of the western world.
‘Maybe that first day with Jack and the whisky bottle was a one-off,’ Orlando suggested, paying close attention to Gwen’s palette of shaders and blushers.
‘Let’s hope.’ I stood to one side as Angela, ready for the camera, stood up from her chair and squeezed past us. ‘Can we talk?’ I muttered to him.
‘I’m shadowing Gwen,’ he explained. ‘Can’t it wait?’
Gwen overheard our whispered conversation and straight away let Orlando off the hook. ‘Take a break,’ she told him. ‘I’m finished here for the afternoon. You’ll find me on set when you and Tania are through talking.’
So we left the trailer and walked by the frozen lake, treading carefully – I mean literally and metaphorically here.
I began. ‘How was your morning?’
‘Cool. How was yours?’
‘Not so good. I couldn’t focus on the course because I was too busy running action replays of last night.’
‘Let’s not go over it.’
‘I feel bad.’
‘Forget it.’
‘No, you’re right. I don’t know why I do this to myself. And to you.’
‘So you admit it? Gwen is giving me her time; it’s a professional deal, end of story.’
‘I know it is. I’m sorry.’ Our feet crunched on the packed snow. Across the tree-lined park, the skyline of tall tower blocks glinted under a weak sun. I decided to try and lighten the mood between us. ‘You can thank Macy for this. She made it clear that it was time for me to grovel.’
Orlando stopped and stared out across the reservoir. ‘You talked with Macy about us?’
‘Yeah. She knew something was wrong and she dragged it out of me.’ Wait – why was I even trying to justify this? Girls talk to their buddies about emotional issues – what’s wrong with that?
‘You go into our private stuff with someone you only just met?’
‘I didn’t “go into our private stuff”! I just told her what was bugging me. She said for me to say sorry. What’s the big deal?’
He shook his head, turned and walked back towards the trailers. ‘You told her I was cheating on you,’ he muttered.
‘I did not. Orlando, wait!’
But he didn’t look back. He just kept on walking.
Jack was sober and Natalia was happy.
‘The airport reopened all their runways at midday,’ she told Macy and me. We were drinking hot tea in her trailer and Orlando was on set with Gwen and Charlie. ‘Tomorrow we fly out to Aspen.’
‘Aspen, as in the ski resort?’ Macy sighed enviously.
‘Yes. We drive from there to a little town called Mayfield. We shoot for five days on the ski slopes then finally we get to spend Christmas in the Bahamas.’
Macy loved hearing how the glamorous life of her idol stacked up. ‘Does Jack get to ski, or does Charlie do the dangerous stuff?’
Natalia laughed. ‘They won’t let Jack anywhere near a pair of skis, or even a cable car. Their insurance doesn’t cover it. But Adam and Phoebe will definitely get to play on the nursery slopes without a mob of photographers spoiling it for them.’
‘Hey, Tania, how close is your family’s home to the place Natalia’s talking about?’ Macy asked.
‘We’re an hour away.’ A drive from Bitterroot took you through the National Forest, to the foot of Carlsbad and the small, lesser-known resort of Mayfield.
‘That’s so cool.’ Natalia beamed from her silk-cushioned chair. Her beautiful dark copper-coloured hair was carelessly pinned back, with wavy strands escaping in tendrils. ‘An hour’s drive is nothing, Tania. It means you and Orlando will be able to join us on the new set. You can still be part of the team.’
‘No way.’ Macy was blown away. ‘Lucky, lucky.’
‘So come with us.’ The sudden invite to my new friend took even me by surprise, though I already had it in the back of my mind. ‘Spend Christmas in Bitterroot with me and my family.’
At first it was as if she hadn’t heard me right, then she choked up and there were tears in her eyes. ‘You really mean it?’
‘Of course Tania means it,’ Natalia assured her kindly. ‘That’s what people do – they look out for their buddies. So it’s a done deal. You all three visit me and the kids in Mayfield. Orlando gets to do more work on make-up and I’ll ask Larry to find you two girls some experience on the technical side – editing the day’s rushes, whatever. How does that sound?’
‘How does it sound?’ Macy sighed. ‘Pinch me. I feel like I’ve just died and gone to heaven!’
Jack was sober, but only until shooting finished for the day.
Then there was a small wrap party in a private room at the back of the boathouse and he fell spectacularly off the wagon.
‘I blame the other famous Jack – Jack Daniels,’ Charlie grumbled as he and I stood watching the megastar maul Angela Taraska. ‘Whisky is his poison of choice. No Class A drugs – just pure, hard-core alcohol.’
We saw Angela simper and sigh. She didn’t make a whole lot of effort to extricate herself from Jack’s paws.
‘You wouldn’t believe how hard Natalia works to locate the bottles that he stashes away. Problem is, there’s always a sound guy or a cameraman’s assistant who’ll buy a new one for him.’
‘And someone with a camera to take the picture.’ I noticed Natalia in the background instructing a security guy to delete images from a guest’s phone then eject said guest. The pictures of Jack staring drunkenly down his co-star’s cleavage would have been snapped up by the gutter press. ‘It’s her and the kids I feel sorry for,’ I sighed.
Charlie nodded then went to help the security guy forcibly separate the sneaky guest from his cell phone, taking out the SIM card and destroying it in a candle flame on one of the tables . Scanning the dimly lit room – the improvised bar in the corner, the crush of people on a small dance floor, the big sound system by the door – I picked out Orlando deep in conversation with Gwen (no surprise there) and then Jack suddenly lurching away from Angela, across the room in my direction. I called for Charlie, who headed my way. But Jack got close enough for me to see that his eyes were unfocused
and that the pores of his skin seemed to ooze alcohol before Macy suddenly stepped in between us. Charlie was too late to stop her.
It’s dark. The air is stale. I inhale dust, I hear men cry out. Way above our heads a rescue drill grinds its way through the rock. There are corpses all around, and sightless, nameless, writhing creatures creeping out of the earth, bursting through solid granite to claim the dead men. There are bones stripped of flesh in every recess, bare skulls with black eye sockets and grinning jaws. I cower in the darkness.
Jack saw Macy and forgot all about me. He grabbed her round the waist and leered/danced/lurched/staggered with her until they’d done a full circuit of the floor and come back to where I stood. When he let her go, he almost fell full length at my feet. It was Charlie who broke his fall.
‘Du-duh! So you see the real Jack Kane,’ I muttered to Macy, who could now judge for herself the raw, unedited version. I was still shaking from my vision of an underground hell and so felt less sorry for her shattered illusion than I might have done at some other time. ‘Not pretty, huh?’
She brushed the air with the back of her hand. ‘Give the guy a break. There’s a stack of pressure on him to get this movie made. He’s entitled to let his hair down once in a while.’
Dream on, I thought. But I didn’t say anything, just watched Charlie try to straighten Jack out.
‘Jack told me I was cute,’ Macy sighed. ‘He said he liked my hair – said it made me look—’
‘Italian?’ I sniped.
‘Hot,’ she said. ‘Jack Kane said I looked hot!’
And I realized that it would take more than one drunken circuit of the dance floor to cure Macy’s terminal case of hero worship. Meanwhile, I tried my hardest not to look in the direction of Gwen and Orlando.
As the evening went on, the music grew louder. At around ten thirty, when I was chatting with Charlie by the bar, I noticed Natalia slip away from the party.
‘Come on, let’s make sure she gets out of here safely,’ Charlie told me.
I followed him out of the boathouse in time to see Jack’s wife climb into a car and get driven away. The driver took her north out of the park on a kind of decoy route and, so far as Charlie and I could see, there were no paparazzi on her tail.
‘It’s good to get some air.’ He took a deep breath and looked up at a clear, starlit sky. ‘We made it through to the end of the week,’ he murmured, as if he’d reached the final stage of a tough journey.
‘As in, Jack is still in one piece and Larry got the footage he needed?’
‘We got through the New York section. I won’t say it was easy.’
‘I hope they pay you plenty.’ Under the stars I realized how close I felt to Charlie. It had been this way ever since he rescued me in the park. Besides, he single-handedly shouldered the burden of keeping the Jack Kane–Natalia Linton show on the road. ‘I mean, they see you as more than just a body double.’
He gave me the trademark, knockout grin. ‘You’re sweet, Tania. I really hope you’ve got something out of all this.’ He jerked his head back towards the boathouse and the sounds of partying. Then he gazed up again at the stars. ‘Don’t you just love the night sky? I look at the stars and I get a new perspective. Whatever we’re dealing with here on planet earth, it’s good to remember we’re all just micro-dots, tiny specks of dust.’
I felt sad as I took in the crescent moon, a million stars. I thought of Vincent and his whirling, crazy vision. I thought of Orlando and me.
‘You’re going to be in Mayfield,’ Charlie mentioned quietly. He waited with me in comfortable silence, in the quiet heart of the world’s greatest city. ‘So this isn’t goodbye,’ he added.
An hour later, Jack fell down and broke his crown. That is, he dropped to the floor dead drunk and they carried him out to his helicopter.
The party went on without him. For a while I talked art-house films with Larry King’s assistant director, the woman named Lucy Young, then I danced with Charlie before handing him over to Macy, who, now that Jack had left a big vacuum in her life, seemed to target Charlie like a scud missile.
‘I love this track!’ she cried. ‘It’s my favourite. Dance with me, Charlie. Tania doesn’t want to party any more. Come on, dance!’
My gaze followed them for a bit – him listening as she bawled above the sound of the music, smiling, keeping a steady hand round her waist. Macy was having the best time, laughing and dancing, coming on to Charlie as if he was the great man himself. I recognized from the way she moved in close and used her body that she didn’t have to work hard – seduction came naturally to her.
And all this time you’re wondering, what about Orlando and Gwen? No surprise – I hadn’t actually had the willpower not to look. In fact I’d hardly been able to tear my eyes away all night. And every time I glanced, they’d be locked in conversation – no dancing, no physical contact, nothing that I could legitimately charge him with, except that Orlando had stayed away, had not said a word to me all evening and I felt that he was deliberately giving me a hard time. Yes, he was totally punishing me.
The party finished for me at one thirty with a single picture imprinted on my brain – Gwen with her soft, fair curls, dressed in tight jeans and a close-fitting silver sequin top, using her hands to demonstrate what she was talking about, with Orlando pushed too near to her by dancers spilling over from the dance area, catching her hand to stop her from knocking another guy’s glass, listening and nodding, not letting go of her hand.
I left the boathouse straight away. Either that or make a big scene, storm across to confront Orlando and kill any chance that he and I would emerge from New York unscathed.
I was in the park alone, running without any clear idea of what I was doing or where I was going, just running.
I’d come to the area they call Shakespeare Garden and only then realized that I was heading in the wrong direction if I wanted to get back to our TriBeCa hotel. Jealousy, the green-eyed god had possessed me, confused me, sent me crazy.
I turned round, set off walking back across the deserted Ramble and past the boathouse, where party music still pounded out its heavy beat, then down the east side of the lake until I reached a huge bronze statue of an angel surrounded by cherubs, set in a frozen pond. She stared down with blind eyes, wings outspread – the Angel of the Waters.
She stands for cleanliness. Her cherubs are called Purity, Health, Peace and Temperance. She provides an ideal place for a night stalker to lurk.
He sprang out in his hunter’s hat from behind her billowing bronze skirt. He’d prowled through the park after me, kept to the shadows, never made a sound. And now he confronted me, again with a knife and with a cruel smile. He didn’t speak. He raised the knife and came towards me.
Terror shot through me as I turned and ran. There was a stone arcade ahead, with wide steps to either side. It felt as though my attacker was herding and pushing me wide of the arcade towards Bow Bridge, so I resisted and ran straight for the sheltering arches, stopping to catch my breath only when I believed I was out of sight. Leaning back against the cold stone and closing my eyes, I waited.
Ten, fifteen, twenty seconds passed. I heard nothing – no footsteps down the tiled arcade, no heavy breathing. After half a minute I ventured out from behind the pillar. Wham! He was there in front of me, eyes gleaming, close enough to touch. I gasped and fled down the row of arches. Again he seemed happy to let me go until I came out the other end of the arcade. Wham again! My stalker was there to meet me. He was behind me, to either side, a dozen versions of him materializing and vanishing at will.
He wasn’t real. He sprang from the darkest corners of my psychic sensibility, my nightmare manifestation of a dark angel. There was no point running another step. I dropped to my knees.
The ground opens up beneath me. I’m Alice falling down the rabbit hole, tumbling out of this world. There are tree roots like tentacles trying to grasp me, underground tunnels leading nowhere, angels following me, blocking out t
he light.
I fall for ever. Deep under the earth the dead inhabit crumbling caves, endless tunnels. They cannot be counted. Bones pile upon bones, they crumble to yellow dust.
And there are terrible, agonized creatures there with gaping, slavering jaws, flesh burned black and eyes that glint like dying coals. They writhe and fall into the phosphorescent fires of hell.
Among the hopeless dead are groaning, suffocating ghosts – men naked to the waist and carrying pickaxes, who were caught in a tidal wave of slurry when tunnels they were building collapsed. Their eyes are wide with fear. I am with them in the dark, struggling for breath.
I slumped on to the snowy ground, fall unconscious. When I came round, a guy in a peaked cap with a star badge on his jacket raised me and supported me towards the nearest bench.
‘Relax. I’m Central Park Police,’ he told me.
7
I guess he saved my life. Without him passing by on his regular night patrol, I might have died from hypothermia.
He was detached and professional, assured me I was hallucinating when phrases like ‘dark angel’ and ‘spirit world’ fell from my lips. He said it made no sense that I was being chased by multiple ghosts but that he would look out for the guy I tried to describe: short, stocky, mixed-race, wearing a black jacket and a hunter’s cap.
He asked me where I’d been and why I left the party alone.
‘Do you need to get checked out by a doctor?’ he asked when he considered I’d come round enough to talk sense to him.
‘No, I’m not injured.’
‘The guy didn’t touch you?’
‘No.’
‘He stalked you but didn’t follow through with any physical assault?’ The park cop was starting to wonder how much I’d had to drink. His tone grew more judgemental. ‘I’m thinking you don’t want to put this on file at the precinct?’
‘No, I already tried that.’ Standing up, I felt dizzy and disconnected from my surroundings and it was obvious I wasn’t going anywhere under my own steam, so my cop decided to escort me out of the park. He got the address of my hotel and gave it to the cab driver who he flagged down on Columbus Circle. ‘Don’t try this again,’ he warned as I sank on to the back seat. ‘No one’s going to believe your story, OK?’