Chapter Six
Keera steps onto the terrace, an expanse of beautiful stone with a wooden pergola and a long wooden table under it, set with cushioned chairs.
The scent of pink bougainvillea drifts lazily in the air and, when she walks to the edge of the terrace, Keera can see down to a different level where there’s a gleaming infinity pool that looks almost too perfect to be true.
In the distance is Xanthe, a village of blue-roofed houses, whitewashed terraces and abundant greenery. Below is the sea: a blue so shimmering it seems unreal in its perfection, only a few small dots of boats sprinkled on the horizon.
Keera can understand why Rose Talisman is having a retreat here.
Even Keera, whose personal natural setting is a low-level hum of anxiety, is feeling a little calmer in this blissfully peaceful place.
She picks a chair with fat cushions embroidered with traditional Greek whitework and puts her stuff on the table.
A buffet breakfast of juices, coffee, fruit, rolls, yogurt and honey is laid out to one side but Keera’s too nervous to eat.
Please let this not be as hard as rehab, she thinks.
Rehab was hell – she’d thought she’d be OK coming off all the stuff she took because it wasn’t as if she was on opioids.
Boy, had she been wrong.
Shivering at the memory of detoxing off the pills, cocaine, uppers, downers and tequila she’d been happily consuming all her life, she gazes around at the stunning view of turquoise sea below the hotel.
Despite the calmness of Xanthe and the beauty surrounding her, she feels nervous at what the morning will bring.
All this ripping into your inner self is incredibly hard.
Four months ago, when Keera came out of Haven Clinic, she felt as shaky as a newborn foal.
‘The good news is that you’ve got your feelings back,’ Lexi, one of the counsellors and a one-time heroin addict, had reminded Keera in her final session before she left. ‘The bad news is that you’ve got your feelings back.’
Since rehab, Keera hasn’t written a song or contacted a producer about her album. She’s out of contract with her record company and they haven’t been in touch. It’s like she’s disappeared off the face of the earth.
She’s changed her look for Greece. She doesn’t want to be recognised on the island. Hence the blonde hair.
She feels relief at disconnecting from her stressy world but it’s also scary. Who is she if she’s not a singer/actress? Who is she without the drugs blurring the world and making it liveable? What does her future look like?
A tall man walks onto the terrace.
He looks as if he runs marathons, but seems very tightly wound.
Keera’s good at figuring people out. She knows she’s an empath. She must be, right?
She can feel the mood of any room she goes in, has been able to since she was a small child. It’s her superpower but it’s a difficult one to have as it makes her nervous.
In a room with shouting, Keera’s stomach swoops into a tight knot. That’s why drugs and booze helped so much.
This tall man does not give off angry energy, though. He feels safe to be around.
Keera watches him surreptitiously, pretending to be arranging her notebook and pens on the polished table.
He’s sad and confused, she decides.
Maybe this might be OK. If the people on the island retreat are also messed up, Keera can cope. If they’re all uber sorted out, then she’s not going to enjoy it.
Behind him is another woman, not much older than Keera: very pretty with huge blue eyes, a smile on her face and wearing a floaty amber chiffon dress that looks as though it came from a 1930s film.
She has long, slender legs that end in narrow elegant feet, which Keera would love instead of her solid feet with the ginormous big toes.
Her eyes are beautifully made-up with inky black lashes, and a fat silken peony in a combination of pinks holds her stunning hair back. It’s the same glossy red of the fox-fur jacket Keera’s mother picked up second-hand and insisted on wearing all last year.
‘It’s dead already,’ Dr Bobbi pointed out whenever Keera objected to the coat on animal rights grounds.
Keera bites her bottom lip. She has to get her mother out of her head. If only removing people’s reproving voices was as easy as uninstalling computer programs.
Delete Mama voice: 1 minute.
Install Rehab Life Tools: 2 minutes.
Perhaps Rose has a mantra for that.
Rose watches the guests arrive on the terrace from her vantage point in her bedroom.
A tall man with olive skin, unruly dark hair and a high-boned face that speaks of Eastern-European ancestry is now standing at the breakfast buffet in front of the fruit, seemingly unable to decide between the slices of watermelon or the figs sitting beside blue pottery bowls of local yogurt swirled with honey.
He’s in old denims with leather sandals on long feet and wears a ragged-looking band T-shirt that should have been thrown out with the clothes recycling years ago. A man unused to taking care of himself, perhaps?
He certainly appears uncomfortable, out of his comfort zone.
The scientist.
Dr Dan Talbot from Bristol, who has been at the forefront of some breakthrough in genetic research only for it to falter at one of the last hurdles, or so it had said in her quick research of him.
Rose pictures Dan in a lab coat, staring at mice, wondering, was this batch going to cure disease?
Did they use mice? Would someone at his level of research be at the mice stage?
She had no idea.
It’s not that Rose’s life has been without science, but her involvement has been more at the cutting-edge connection between neuroscience and therapy. She used to talk on the show about how therapy works with the brain to help hardwire recovery.
Listen to yourself, Rose: you’re sounding a bit like your old self.
The trickle of self-belief begins to swell in Rose.
She was always good at this. For a while, she lost confidence, that’s all.
Next, Rose watches the arrival of a tall, slim red-head with an exquisitely cut bias frock dancing around skinny ankles. India.
A beautiful boho girl with a history of lots of jobs and a very happy Instagram feed full of fun holidays, pictures of vintage clothes finds and quotes on happiness – according to Adriana.
India smiles at the other two, folds herself into a chair and sets up lovely pens and a big notebook in front of her.
Beside her is Keera, the American singer, clad in jeans and definitely the youngest of the group. Keera also has lovely pens.
Rose, who has to keep her stationery habit under control, grins to herself and flicks a glance at her watch.
Five to ten now. The last three are skating on thin ice time-wise.
In her former life, in private practice, Rose had strict rules about lateness.
It was part of her therapist’s training to enforce the sense that the participation was a contract. The keen-to-be-healed were entering into a contract with her, therefore lateness – unless accompanied by phone footage of a bona fide disaster – meant you got turned away.
Maybe the business magnate, Sir Bernard, if you don’t mind, thinks that rules are for the little people.
What fun to have to take his money and send him home unfixed, Rose thinks with glee. Time spent with wealthy narcissists – and a lot of the ultra-rich are narcissists – means she’s extra fierce with the aggressively rich clients.
You pay, you commit. If you don’t turn up, you forfeit your fee.
But at the last minute, three people arrive together in a rush.
First, a tall, statuesque woman with a sleek chestnut high pony, wearing a one-sleeved pink-patterned Pucci jumpsuit, strides in.
She’s tanned, early fifties perhaps, and wears a gold coiled snake bangle on one wrist, a piece of heavy metal that speaks of serious money spent in the beautiful jewellery shops in Corfu Town.
Rose, who loves jewellery, drools a bit.
She’s definitely Bernard’s wife, Grazia: a former model, Adriana has told Rose.
The elegant Grazia gives off no sense of herself at all. She’s not nervous, not proud, merely calm. Eerily calm, perhaps.
Rose can’t get a read on her at all.
Beside the glacial Grazia is Dianne Wilkins.
If Grazia is precisely what Rose imagines as the wife of a very, very wealthy and status-conscious man, Dianne is nothing like the woman Rose has been expecting.
Her adult children have pushed her to be here, her daughter Lauren saying, ‘Her anger is corrosive. Dad died suddenly and, of course, that was hugely difficult, but she was never angry before he died. She’s said to me: We all die. That’s it.
‘She’s obviously affected by grief but she’s going to end up in prison for driving into a random stranger in a road rage incident if she doesn’t get help. She has lovely neighbours and, since Dad died, she’s fallen out with them all. She doesn’t want to go on the course but it’s an ultimatum.’
Dianne had been the first person Rose had picked for the retreat. She’d felt kinship with this angry, obviously lost woman and yet, in the flesh, Dianne appears the opposite of a person teetering on the edge.
She’s small but very athletic, sports the healthy glow of someone who’s spectacularly fit and wears a pink polo shirt with white shorts, neat socks and trainers.
All she needs is a tennis racquet and she’ll be another sixty-something tennis lady, the one you want on your team and your fundraising committee because she’s a dynamo.
As a mask, it’s a spectacular one constructed of a neutral gaze, alongside age-appropriate make-up including bright lippie and perfect silvery-blonde hair in a neat to-the-shoulder cut that she probably fixes with hairspray and Velcro rollers every morning.
Rose is still staring at Dianne when she gets the weirdest sensation that the Melbourne lady knows she’s being watched from inside the hotel. For a second, fear flashes across her face.
Interesting.
Making up the final member of the class, definitely shorter than his model-wife which makes Rose grin, and with the skin of a man who has spent far too much of his life in the sun, is Sir Bernard.
He’s now white-haired, liver-spotted and wrinkled like an old lizard. Just like the crocodile he resembles, he looks as if he hides in the shallows of the river and waits till the bodies of his old enemies float past.
He’s no longer quite the handsome silvery fox from his Internet publicity photos.
Older now, his eyes are hooded and he appears to be a great man for smiling without engaging the eyes. He’s doing it now, smiling at the others and shaking hands, as if he’s running the retreat and they’re all his guests.
Enough already, Rose thinks, spurred into action.
This is not your show, Bernard: it’s mine.
She grabs her things and silently opens the door onto the terrace.
‘Welcome to Villa Artemis,’ she says.