‘Do you like that little girl, sweetheart?’
I was a stupid bastard. Still hadn’t learned that nothing was ever to myself.
Blaine caressed my face. ‘It’s all right, you can say ‘yes’, you know. I promise not to be offended.’ She raised her head to kiss me, and I cursed myself for giving so much away. As the commercial break began I returned the kiss with as much passion as I could muster in the hope she would forget all about my moment of weakness.
Lilith
I returned to my seat for what was about to be my shortest interview ever.
‘Now, what some of our younger viewers might not know is that my guest here wasn’t actually born Lilith Bresson.’ Johnny spoke directly to camera as if I were some inconsequential onlooker and I felt my heart rate quicken and my fingers clench into damp palms. ‘In fact, fifteen years ago, she was a bit player in one of the biggest scandals ever to rock the Conservative Party.’ He paused and smiled at me for effect. ‘Weren’t you, Clarissa?’
Johnny had been busy during the break. This time the monitor showed an entirely different picture: a blurred close-up of two figures huddled on the back seat of a speeding taxi. A hysterical, skeletal woman clutching the shoulders of a wild-eyed child, both faces turned pale as death masks by the glare of countless flashbulbs.
This was my once-beautiful mother. This was me, thirteen and furious as we were driven away from our home, human sacrifices in my father’s futile rite of purification.
The pictures weren’t hard to find, even for Johnny Buckle. I’d done it myself once, in an act of destructive curiosity, and knew that if you typed ‘Montfort + scandal + wife + images’ into any search engine this was the number one hit: the money shot that had no doubt bought some bottom-feeding paparazzo a timeshare in Marbella.
My triumphal host swung back to face me. ‘So, shall we talk about your mad mother, then?’
I still clutched the vodka that Jarred had handed me. Apart from one mouthful the glass was still full, and I flung the contents straight at Johnny.
He gave a suitably porcine squeal as the neat vodka splattered over his face. It must have stung like hell – especially when the alcohol began to dissolve his spray tan and trickle into his eyes in lurid orange rivulets.
‘You stupid cow!’ he howled, and staggered to his feet to take a blind lunge at my head. Six million viewers watched their corpulent hero swing at me and I saw the floor manager and the warm-up guy and even one of the camera operators rush forward to pull him away.
But I was closest. Johnny got the heel of my right hand to his nose and my left knee hard into his now-infamous genitals before I stormed from the set.
Finn
With the sound turned down I couldn’t tell what he had said to her, only that it had made her furious and that fury had instantly transformed into this magnificent explosion. I had never seen anything like it, and this time I didn’t even need to speak.
‘Oh my God, you really do find her attractive, don’t you? Just when I thought you were dead from the waist down.’ Blaine ran her hand down my thigh. ‘Next thing we know, she’ll actually manage to invoke a spontaneous hard-on.’
‘She’s pretty, I suppose. In an odd kind of way.’
‘And such a tiny little thing. She’s very different from me.’
I could see where this was going. ‘You’re beautiful. There’s no comparison.’
‘My poor Finn. So paranoid. But how very sweet of you to say so.’ She held a cocaine-laden fingernail to my nose and as I inhaled she hit me with the question. ‘So. Would you?’
Hypothetical pillow talk. Harmless banter between lovers. And not a cat in hell’s chance of the answer being correct, whatever I said.
Chapter Two
Lilith
Santa Marita cosseted me like an indulgent maiden aunt. I had lived in this small town on Spain’s east coast for nearly five years: alone, self-reliant, content. When I was painting she allowed me to disappear, and for weeks on end I would retreat to my studio without speaking to a soul. In return for this misanthropy, my neighbours would leave baskets of fruit and bottles of wine at my door for when I was ready to face the world and be a grown-up again.
When I did emerge, on a high and thrilled with my own genius, the town would welcome me back into the fold, plying me with beer in Benedicta’s smoke-filled bar, protecting me from the lurking paparazzi yet proudly displaying every positive newspaper clipping that mentioned me, until the cycle began again. I jogged around Santa Marita’s streets, sketched every man, woman and dog, and swam in the secluded mill-pond bay, yet until the day I was forced to leave I never realised it was my home.