‘Are you sure it wasn’t Durdon?’ Some of the girls sniggered at Pascale’s comment but knew enough not to identify themselves.
‘Piss off, Devereux,’ said Eugenie. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’
‘What happened next?’ Allegra murmured.
Eugenie bristled. ‘I went back to sleep, didn’t I? It was freezing, mind you.’
‘Why didn’t you pull the covers back up?’ asked Aurora.
Eugenie shot her a withering look. ‘Every time I did,’ she explained slowly, ‘this midget or whatever it was pulled them back down, didn’t it?’
‘So this thing just stood at the end of your bed, all night, holding your sheet?’
‘Oh fuck you, it’s not my fault you’ve got no imagination.’
‘Or you’ve got too much,’ snapped Aurora. ‘Has anyone here
actually
seen a ghost?’
There was silence before Pascale spoke. ‘I haven’t seen a ghost,’ she said. ‘But I have seen something. extraordinary.’
Eight pairs of eyes turned to her.
‘Perhaps I shouldn’t tell you.’
‘Go on, tell us! You have to now!’
Pascale inhaled deeply. ‘Very well. We were in the Dordogne, many years ago.’ She repositioned herself, waited for the last rumbling objections to die down. ‘The house is old; it belonged to my father’s parents and his grandparents and their parents before that. When I was young, my cousin would tell me a story: a village superstition about a split in the ground that led straight to the Underworld. The village was built on this fissure. They used it to frighten children into behaving, he told me, and it worked because I was afraid that if I did anything wrong then the Devil would come up and try to find me, and take me back down there with him.’
She paused. No one spoke. ‘But one day I did do something wrong. My cousin saw me do it. We had a cat, you see, and she gave birth to a litter of kittens …’
Allegra shrieked. ‘Oh no, I don’t want to hear this!’
‘Shh!’
the others hissed. Even Eugenie looked faintly interested. Aurora wondered if Pascale was making it up.
‘One of them was born sick, so my uncle killed it by hitting it on the head. He put it in a sack with heavy stones in and he said, “Take it to the well, Pascale, and drop it in the water.” But on the way I felt its tiny body wriggling about in the bag, just a mess of fur and bones. He hadn’t finished it off, it was still alive, in all that pain.’
‘Oh nooo!’ Allegra plugged her ears with her fingers.
‘And I knew I should have killed it again. Properly, this
time. But I was afraid. So I dropped it straight into the well and let it drown. I let it drown—a slow, horrible, agonising death. And I knew what I was doing, but I just waited there. Waited for it to die.’
‘You’re sick,’ Eugenie announced. But Pascale wasn’t finished.
‘My cousin knew what I’d done. He told me bad things would happen. I’d let something helpless suffer. I’d ignored my responsibility. He told me I would be punished.’
Silence.
‘It snowed that night, very heavily,’ Pascale went on, barely a whisper, ‘so when we woke up the next morning there was this undisturbed blanket of white covering everything. It was deeper and thicker than any snow I have seen before or since. Beautiful and pure, so white it hurt to look at it for too long.’ A beat. ‘And only one thing disturbed the immaculate snow. A chain of footprints that seemed to come from nowhere, so abruptly did it begin and end, as if whatever had made it had landed here and flown away there. And I say footprints, but these were like.’ She searched for the word. ‘
Horseshoes
. But the horseshoes had two toes at the front. An animal’s print, or a bird’s? Or a man’s. We could not tell.’ Pascale looked at each of her audience in turn. ‘Odd that they did not appear in pairs, but in a single straight line, as if the person making them had only one foot, or a certain …
twist
to their walk …’ Another pause, a longer one. ‘But the strangest thing about these footprints?’
‘What?’ someone breathed.
‘They did not run only across the ground. They ran up the side of the house, over the roof and down the wall to the river. They ran across the garden and up a tree and around
its top, on branches, up, down, here, there, everywhere. I believe the Devil came for me that night. Only the Devil could not find me. Not that time, at least. But whenever I am out in the country—like now—I wonder if he might try again …’
Silence enveloped the group.
‘Is that true?’ Fran Harrington wailed, her mousy face panicking in the half-light. Eugenie Beaufort looked sick.
Pascale started laughing. ‘What do you think?’
‘I think you’re full of bullshit,’ said Eugenie.
Mrs Durdon came back and they ate their gelatinous dessert in pensive quiet. Afterwards, some of the girls still visibly unsettled, they went to bed.
Inside the tent, Pascale was undressing, wriggling out of her hiking clothes and slipping on a Raconteurs T-shirt. It wasn’t the first time Aurora had seen the French girl’s body: whenever they showered, or tried on each other’s clothes, she had no qualms about getting naked. All the girls back in LA were painfully body-shy, all in competition with each other about who had the perkier ass or tits. Pascale didn’t care.
‘
Was
it true?’ asked Aurora once they were in their sleeping bags.
‘What?’
‘That story.’
Pascale faced her in the dark. ‘Does it matter?’
‘I suppose not.’
They lay in silence for a bit. ‘Tell me about when you were a child,’ said Pascale, pushing herself up on one elbow. ‘Tell me a story like that.’
Aurora thought about it. She was conscious that her youth had been one excess after another. Tom and Sherilyn
had never taken her away, the three of them, somewhere where they just chilled out away from it all. Come to think of it, they had never done much as a family.
‘I don’t have any,’ she admitted. The words hung between them in the darkness, hollow and sad, and Aurora thought about qualifying it but she didn’t have anything else to say.
‘Do you ever wonder what life would be like if they weren’t your parents?’
The question was so unexpected, and Aurora so exhausted, that she felt tears prick her eyes. ‘What do you mean?’
The rain had started up again. They could hear it pattering on the tent.
‘Doesn’t matter.’
‘No—go on.’
‘Just that yours is kind of a messed-up life.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Don’t be sensitive. All I mean is that it’s hard to be you—just you, for what you are—because you’re Tom Nash’s daughter. You’ll always be Tom Nash’s daughter, all your life.’
Aurora hadn’t thought of it like that before. Now she did, she felt horribly claustrophobic.
‘So?’
‘So you have to be your own person.’
‘I know that.’
‘And make your own choices.’
‘I do make my own choices,’ snapped Aurora. ‘No one tells me what to do.’ But she knew that for all her proclamations of independence she lived the life she did solely because of her parents’ status. Tom Nash was a world-famous
A-list performer. Sherilyn Rose was the darling of the country scene. Aurora Nash was … well, she was their kid. Nothing more. She never would be. She’d never be exciting and original like Pascale.
Pascale’s voice dropped. ‘Have I upset you?’
‘No.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Don’t be.’ Aurora bit her lip. She had always been content with her cars and cash and clothes, her status as Hollywood princess, but her friendship with Pascale was widening her horizons. Maybe there
was
more to life than album sales and wild parties and boys. She was lucky, right? So lucky, just like everyone said. Why, then, did she feel empty? A salty teardrop slid down her cheek.
‘Are you OK?’ asked Pascale.
‘I’m cold.’
‘Come to me.’ Pascale reached out and put her arm round Aurora. She unzipped their sleeping bags so their bodies were touching, warmer in the embrace. The French girl smelled clean, like violets, her hair touching Aurora’s cheek.
The wind was picking up, tugging at their canvas shelter. Pascale began stroking Aurora’s skin, at first over her tank top and then, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, slipping her hand beneath it. Aurora didn’t breathe. Pascale’s touch was light, barely there, her fingers small, the nails long. She traced over Aurora’s stomach, slowly, affectionately, and then, almost by accident, it became something different, her touch creeping up, finding the crescent swell of Aurora’s left breast, following it till she met the bud of her nipple. It didn’t occur to Aurora to object. She hardened under Pascale’s touch, moved her
position ever so slightly, without really meaning to, so she filled Pascale’s palm.
‘Can I kiss you?’ Pascale whispered, her accent stronger in the dark and with the quiet.
Aurora was aware of every hair on her body, every pore. ‘Yes.’
Pascale’s lips were soft and yielding, her tongue inquisitive. She was wearing gloss and the girls’ mouths locked, their tongues entwined in sweet curiosity. Gently Pascale bit Aurora’s bottom lip. It sent a charge of desire through Aurora and she found herself reaching for the other girl’s body. Pascale lifted her T-shirt and peeled it off, then her knickers, revealing a smooth-skinned body that shone whitish in the moonlight. Between her legs, a bush of dark hair, two pale nipples high on her chest. Aurora took one in her mouth and tentatively kissed it. It was a new sensation but at the same time oddly familiar, as if she were loving her own body and knew all its contours and pleasure points. Carefully she bit the tip. Hearing the French girl’s sigh, she pulled harder, till Pascale was holding her and drawing her close.
Aurora had never made out with a girl before. Pascale had skin like silk, her touch tender but firm, fragile but strong. Overcome, she felt for the other girl’s wetness, sliding once into it, then raising her fingers to Pascale’s mouth and between her lips, feeling her tongue wrap around. Aurora kissed her again, more passionately this time. She felt like she was imitating the boys she’d been with, not sure why she assumed the role of the man. Not that there had to be a man. In fact, the way she felt right now, there had never been need of boys and never would be again.
‘I am going to show you something,’ Pascale whispered,
manoeuvring Aurora on to her back. Moving her head lower, she kissed Aurora’s stomach and then the ridges of her hips, till she reached the band of her knickers. Peeling the material to one side and kneeling between her legs, she inserted one small finger, then two. A thin sound escaped Aurora’s mouth. She shivered, hot and cold, raising her hips, pushing herself on to the other girl, marvelling at the exactitude of Pascale’s touch. The French girl ran a thumb over that sensitive swell, then the very tip of her tongue. Without warning Aurora crashed over waves of pleasure. It was the quickest, and most intense, orgasm of her life.
Afterwards they lay together, their foreheads touching.
Pascale dressed and rolled over. ‘Night,’ she said, as if nothing momentous had occurred.
‘Night,’ said Aurora. She stared into the dark and listened to the rain outside.
20
Stevie
Ben Reiner, Bibi’s nineteen-year-old brother, was a pain in the arse to live with. Stevie had been patient at first—he was broke, he’d split up with his girlfriend, his esteem had taken a knock: she knew from her own younger siblings it’d get better—but since arriving at the apartment all he seemed to do was sit around getting stoned, eating chicken drumsticks and watching internet porn. Ben had little if anything in common with his sister, especially where work ethic was concerned. After appearing in a couple of anti-zit adverts that he complained made him look like a ‘chump droid’, he seemed to have given up. Still, she abided him for Bibi, and if that meant picking up balls of discarded socks, turning the telly off late at night when Ben forgot to (invariably still set on the Adult Hardcore channel) and occasionally thinking he was dead because it was three o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon and he still hadn’t surfaced from his room, then so be it.
One thing Ben had been useful for, however, was in the resolution of her situation with Will Gardner. Coupled with the fact they were living in different cities and scarcely saw each other, Will hadn’t taken kindly to the fact that Stevie was about to let a bum teenager into her house, who, despite the Bibi connection, he stated she hardly knew. His attitude over the whole thing had been cheap and ungenerous. It had been the push she needed to make the break. Marty King was pleased. Now she was free and single, Stevie could throw herself into the publicity circuit unencumbered—and the timing couldn’t be better. Things were taking off with the wrap of
Lie to Me
. Critics were calling it ‘a shatteringly truthful portrayal of friendship and the many shades of love’, while her performance was hailed ‘a stunning debut’. It felt as if she’d walked straight into someone else’s life—which, in a way, she had. It never left her mind that the role of Lauren was meant to belong to someone else, and she vowed that one day she would find a way to repay her good fortune.
Bibi herself arrived in LA towards the end of the month. Stevie dropped several hints about Ben taking one of the rooms in Linus Posen’s sprawling Beverly Hills pad, but, according to Bibi, the timing was never quite right:
‘Sorry, Steve, you know what it’s like—new relationship and all! Could he crash with you just a little bit longer?’
Reading between the lines, Stevie decided that Linus had no intention of helping Bibi or her family and had likely vetoed the idea, serving only to confirm her bad instincts about the man. Try as she might, Stevie couldn’t shake the impression that there was more to the director than met the eye. She didn’t trust him.
Though she’d had plans with another friend tonight, she
had cancelled on hearing about Bibi’s housewarming. Bibi and Linus were throwing an extravagant party to mark his relocation and Bibi had made her promise to be there.
‘Cool,’ Ben had grunted when she told him. He was permanently attached to his phone, reclining as he was now on the sofa, examining what he said were football scores but would just as likely be downloaded filth: he was obsessed. ‘You can get me talking to some people.’