Chapter Three
This is not going to be fun, thinks Keera, as she stands in the huge queue at Corfu airport passport control and decides that if hell is a place, it’s here.
The line is five people wide and has no end in sight. Fractious children are crying, there’s a low rumble of discontent from the queues and if the airport air-con is on, it’s at its lowest setting.
Keera’s head is sweating from the sheer weight of her long blonde hair, currently tied up into a pony with a baseball cap on top.
A marl-grey sweatshirt hides the tattoos on her right arm – there’s one that says ‘Keera ’n’ Cat for ever’ and another one with a full-colour Irish tricolour flag rippling over a full-colour American flag.
If anything symbolises the moment when drinking and drugging got the better of her, it’s the flags.
They took six hours to ink in a tattoo parlour in the Tenderloin where there was a sign that said clients could not get inked if they were tripping.
‘Not tripping!’ Keera had said triumphantly, weaving through the ink shop into one of the big leather-and-chrome tattoo chairs and sinking into it.
‘It’s your arm, baby,’ shrugged a guy with a handlebar moustache. ‘But we don’t do discounts or compensate for people’s dumb choices.’
‘I never make dumb choices,’ Keera had declared, sitting on the chair, laying her arm out and displaying the picture of the flags. That was a lie for sure.
She had a water bottle full of tequila with a bit of orange juice in it for extra Vit C and by the time her flags were done, she was entirely numb pain-wise.
She’d relived the experience six months ago in rehab.
‘What were you feeling when you said that?’ asked Sasha, the toughest counsellor in Little Rock’s Haven Clinic.
‘I was feeling on top of the world,’ Keera said. ‘I always felt on top of the world when I was early on in the drinking or drugging experience.’
‘And later?’
‘Later I felt either sexy—’
Someone in the group sniggered and Sasha shot them a filthy look.
‘—or really sad.’
‘What did you do when you felt really sad?’ Sasha asked.
‘Drink more and do more coke, have something to take me down when I got too high, a little kiddie coke to straighten me out.’
After six weeks in Little Rock, Keera now knows that this is not the correct answer to future clean and sober living.
Six weeks in rehab has battered her into shape.
When she feels really sad now, she has to live with it, and it hurts. So much. Living without substances means she has to feel everything.
To distract from these thoughts, Keera thinks about getting her tattoos lasered off as she stands in the Corfu airport passport queue.
Some things make people very recognisable.
The hair and the tats were the trappings of the old Keera, the one who was on gossip magazine covers when she was ‘dating’ fashionable guys. Her mom, Dr Bobbi, had come up with the boyfriends for times when Keera needed a photogenic date.
The ‘dates’ were generally shy or awkward and both parties knew it was a business relationship.
‘Cool DJ or upcoming actor seen with singer Keera’.
‘IS IT LOVE?’ the supermarket tabloids would ask in giant letters.
It was never love, and Keera is astonished that any website even gave these dates the barest of credence.
It was just business.
But not any more.
That version of Keera is gone.
The new one wears boyfriend jeans, loose T-shirts and sweats that cover her body up because she’s obviously not as thin as she was when she was doing coke, smoking way too much and basically living on straight tequila.
It transpires that no food plus a diet of pills, margaritas and thirty cigarettes a day is an excellent if precarious way to stay incredibly thin.
Keera mourns the loss of her concave stomach but likes that nobody recognises her any more.
The last thing she wants is to be snapped with somebody’s iPhone and displayed all over social media.
‘Mystery of Firebird Singer Keera’s Disappearance Solved!’
‘Firebird’ is her most famous song, the one that shot her from Disney-Channel-cute-star fame to one-name-only singer fame.
Keera’s amazed that her time in rehab hasn’t emerged onto social media – but then, her mother would have been the person to leak it.
Dr Bobbi, her mom and Keera’s manager, didn’t agree with rehab at all.
‘You don’t need it! So you drink a little, and doing coke is not a good look, but nobody has shots of you using! You just have to stop the cocaine,’ Dr Bobbi warned. ‘You’re the girl next door, Keera! That’s your brand. Rehab would destroy that.’
Thanks, Mom.
Keera knows that her girl-next-door image would have been destroyed for sure if anyone had heard her addiction diaries in Haven Clinic.
Even a guy named Sketch (addicted to crack) had opened his slitty eyes long enough to look at her when she told them all the worst thing. Telling people about your drinking and using was a big part of Haven Clinic.
Sketch had looked her up and down when he heard Keera’s drugging confession with everyone else in the group.
‘I would,’ he’d hissed, because he didn’t have much of a voice left thanks to years spent smoking crack.
‘Not helpful, Sketch,’ admonished Lexi, Keera’s favourite counsellor.
But the words had lingered in the air.
Keera still cringes when she thinks of Sketch.
His deadened shark gaze and hissing voice should be enough to keep her clean and sober for life, she thinks. Because when she was drinking and using, she could have easily ended up with Sketch.
Drink and drugs totally skewed her judgement. She shudders.
It’s four months since she left rehab.
Stopping using was one thing.
Keera needs the retreat to work out how to fix the rest of her life. But some of it just seems too complicated.
Plus, she’s now broke. The Keera bandwagon was an expensive show and she and her mom spent far too much early on.
This trip to Corfu is her last expense before going back to the real world.
But just what is the real world and what is her place in it?
It’s ten at night when Dan steps out onto the balcony of his room in Villa Artemis and lights up. He’s tried stopping smoking so many times and, as a man of science, he knows how ruinous cigarettes are to his health. At least he’s now down to a few a day, which is better than twenty.
He wonders if Rose Talisman can help him stop smoking, but that’s a side quest, really.
‘Sort your head out, Dan,’ his sister, Vicky, had told him when she showed him the Instagram post about Rose’s new venture.
‘Nobody has to know you’ve gone to a therapy retreat if you really think it’s weird.
Keep it private, sure. But Julia’s left you.
You’ve got to deal with that, or who knows what’ll happen.
Julia’s a complicated woman. I don’t want to wake up one morning to find that she’s dead and everyone says it’s your fault.
It’ll destroy the rest of your life thinking of the part you played in it. So you need help.’
Dan’s cigarette has gone out as he’s been staring blankly out at the view.
He relights it and inhales deeply, blowing smoke out towards the inky sea. Adriana, the woman who’d checked him in earlier and who’s one of the house’s proprietors, has told him that there will be some time off for people to swim and possibly sail but not much.
‘Rose has a pretty full schedule for you all,’ Adriana said, dark head bent over the weathered oak table where she welcomed them to the villa.
What exactly will we be doing? Dan wants to ask, but he can’t.
He’s booked this and has arrived without allowing himself to even think what’s involved in a week-long retreat. Does he have to stare deep into his soul?
Does he have to confess everything he’s ever done wrong in his life?
Dan is a neuroscientist: he has no idea how this sort of delving into the mind works.
He likes facts.
The current facts are stark, however: his beloved Julia is no longer his girlfriend. She wants a break from their relationship so she can ‘figure out what to do, babes’.
That conversation nearly broke Dan.
He adores Julia more than life itself. He sees them together for ever and cannot bear to think that anything he says or does could harm her.
And yet, here he is, forced into a therapy retreat.
There’s a fresh notebook with ‘from Rose’ written on a label ready for him to ‘journal’ through the week. Dan hates that sort of thing.
All questionnaires and holding hands to feel each other’s pain?
Answer twenty questions and we’ll tell you what sort of person you are?
Which is obvious bullshit. How is there a scientific method in asking people who they are and relying on their answers?
People lie. Over a thousand miles away from his small, spartan Bristol home, with his bike – he loves his bike – and his gaming chair – which he also loves – Dan aches at the thought of Vicky’s words.
His sister is not the swearing kind of person. She’s gentle, thoughtful.
But she was insistent that he get help. Him, not Julia.
This rankles. Why the hell does he need help?
He resents the whole concept bitterly.
Plus, Vicky never told him that Rose’s one-time-big TV show had been cancelled over a scandal, which he found out from googling in the airport.
He resents not knowing that too.
In fact, he resents every single thing about being here in Xanthe.
His cigarette has gone out again. Annoyed, he drops it into the saucer he’s using as an ashtray and lights up another one. He does not need fixing. He’ll make that plain first off and maybe he can leave early?
Dan has two decent pens with him. He takes one now and flicks open to the first page of Rose’s notebook.
It’s too small for him. He likes A4 pads and hardback laboratory notebooks.
He has tiny handwriting that’s always easy to read because no scientist wants a lab notebook with indecipherable writing.
He has no idea what to write.
I’m here and isn’t that enough?
His phone is on the desk beside him.
He is tired and irritable, tired of being blamed.
He writes Piss off in the notebook, which gives him a frisson of being a teenager again, always the good, quiet one, always doing what he was told. Until Julia came along, of course.
He fills in a whole page writing Piss off in a giant scrawl, then scribbles over it, partly in irritation, partly in shame.
Rose Talisman has him here on the damn island retreat – what more is he expected to do? Carve his own heart out of his chest and leave it on the big olive-wood table outside? Fat chance, Rose.