Chapter Twenty
It was
late when Sasha's phone rang, the last glow almost gone from the
sky. He picked up, said his lover's name, and then just
listened.
Strange, that a satellite could take up into itself and then
convey such a silence. Curled up in the window seat, the arch that
looked out over the pool and the burnished hills, Sasha cradled the
phone to his ear. He didn't watch a lot of TV, just Laurie's
favourite shows and the political news channels he needed for his
work. It had been Mrs Alvarez's shriek of anguish that had brought
him running. She liked the set on in the kitchen while she cooked,
and NBC had interrupted a game show with the breaking news. She was
a staid, stolid lady, not obviously one to grieve for a teen actor.
Sasha had made her sit down and, when she had stopped
repeating pobre muchacho, pobre
muchacho, drink a glass of iced
water.
Poor boy. Laurie hadn't said much
about Bailey either, but Sasha had gathered that the kid had been
the only one to show him any kindness. Laurie had never come up
against death until Sir William's heart attack two years before,
and he'd shoved that to a frantic good-riddance distance and kept
it there. Sasha listened to the silence again. He was certain
Laurie was still on the line—coldly terrified that he wasn't
talking. He smoothed the fear out of his voice. “You liked Bailey,
didn't you? He was your friend.”
An odd sound came down the line. It was one broken-off
syllable. Sasha, who had known and loved this man from first sight,
as if there had always been a Laurie-shaped emptiness inside him,
read the noise clearly. Oh, not enough of
a friend. I couldn't help him.
Sasha
took the phone from his ear for a moment, trying to think. He'd
wanted Laurie to fight off this demon on his own terms, but he was
growing afraid that it was too late. “They said on the news that
one of his fellow actors found him, tried to revive him. I think
that was you. So now you're distraught, and you've had a lot to
drink, or... a lot of something.” He paused, long enough for hopes
of an angry denial to fade. “All right. Are you safe?”
Another
sound. Faint but affirmative, rocked by a sob. Sasha nodded,
caressed the mobile handset with his thumb as if Laurie could feel
it. “You're on the set? People around you? Not hanging upside down
from a cactus in the desert somewhere?” He waited. He hadn't raised
a laugh, but the inbreath and short moan would do. “I want you to
listen. Some people can drink and get stoned. It's fun for them, or
it's anaesthetic when they're hurt, and... it's not a big deal.
You're not one of those people, Laurie.”
A
distinct sob this time. Sasha would have backed off if he could.
“If I don't say this now I never will. Your dad was an alcoholic,
and I love Marielle but I know there isn't a prescription pill in
this world she wouldn’t try. You can have a few drinks when you're
out with me—I think you can, anyway—but anything more than that,
anything else... Not you, ves'tacha. You can't touch that stuff.
You can't touch it.”
They
could sit shoulder to shoulder in a twilit silence for hours, he
and Laurie. Sasha closed his eyes. He pretended that the warm stone
he was leaning on was flesh. Not another sound came down the line,
not so much as a breath, but he knew that somewhere under desert
stars—right here, if he imagined it strongly enough—Laurie had
heard him. “Okay,” he said softly, when almost five minutes of warm
night breeze and cicada-chirr had washed over his skin. “Okay,
listening again? Tomorrow, when you're stone-cold sober, you get in
your car, drive to the airport and come home. Or I can come to
you.”
The line
crackled. “No. Stay there. Stay there. Stay there.”
Sasha
bit back a cry. What the hell was this monomania of Laurie's, that
could squeeze words out of him when even love and death had tried
and failed? “Stop it. Just stop this.” His voice shook. “There
isn't a flight I can get till tomorrow afternoon. But if I don't
hear from you—if you don't come...”
“No. You stay there. I don't want you.”
The line
went dead.
Sasha
drew up his knees to his chest. After a moment he put the phone
down. He misjudged the edge of the window ledge and the handset
clattered to the floor, its casing flying open, battery leaping
out. He looked it it—three useless bits on the floor, easily
rejoined, restored to purpose.
He let
them be. He leaned his brow on the window's arch, which was just
stone again now. A huge moon had risen, fat and full. Its
alchemical light turned the buildings around him to gold, the
pool's dark water to a shifting liquid bronze. There by the
poolside stood Mateo—sculpted in moonlight, hands in his pockets,
immortal and ordinary as day. He was looking up at Sasha's window.
Mateo smiled, and uncertainly raised one hand.
***
“You had it all, back in England, didn't you?”
Laurie
looked up. That was an effort, with a big numb rock lying
deadweight in his skull, and he wasn't interested in the question.
He did wonder who was asking it, though. Possibilities suggested
themselves. Not Sasha. Sasha was a cut-off line, a silence when
Laurie had tried to call him back. He let the phone go. Briefly its
screen lit up the darkness behind Bailey's trailer. A fence of
police tape was pegged into the sand all around: Laurie had crawled
under it awkwardly, bottle in hand, to get here. Now there was
someone else. Not Sasha.
Not
Bailey, obviously.
Laurie
was being a bad host. “What did I have?” he asked obligingly,
playing for time while he struggled to fit a name to the voice.
“Would you like a drink, by the way?”
“What have you got?”
Laurie
held the bottle out to the stranger, who had come to sit beside him
on the ground. “Tequila. Bailey said I should help myself from his
fridge.”
“Yeah. A party wasn't a party for that little runt unless he
was dragging somebody else down too.”
“Don't call him names,” Laurie said distantly. “He
died.”
“All right, all right, Sir Laurence.”
The
stranger's voice was deep and good-natured. He took the bottle and
drank off a long swig. By the light of the grapefruit moon that had
suddenly leapt out of the tumbleweed, Laurie finally recognised
Wesley Lombard. That was progress, but now he couldn't recall what
Wes had asked him. Something about England, wasn't it? Oh. Yes,
that was right—England, and having it all. “I did,” Laurie told him
sincerely. “It was great. I was gonna be Romeo.”
“So I heard. What possessed you to come over here and horn in
on my little piece of the action?”
The
question wasn't aggressive. That was odd, because from what Laurie
had seen of Wesley so far, he was a charmless, discourteous sod.
Various things were surprising. No shaper vest tonight, just a
plain white shirt, concealing nothing of the big, broad-shouldered
man he was. A relaxed and companionable air, as if he and Laurie
met back here to share a bottle all the time. “Reasons,” Laurie
said, feeling that covered most things. The tequila was good, but a
handful of Valium by moonlight was better, floating him far, far
away from the memory of Bailey's skinny corpse being carried away
beneath a blanket. “This is like a wake for him, isn't it? I didn't
mean it—to horn in on you particularly. It just worked out that
way.”
“And you wouldn't think about packing up your accent and your
cute young British ass and going back home?”
“But... they'll stop filming now, won't they?”
Wes snorted. “Doug can't afford to stop. He's got to claw back
his outlay on this, or the whole Blood
Moon franchise will go down.”
“How will he end the film without Bailey?”
“Ah, he'll mix up the footage he's got in the can already.
He'll use stunts and CG for the rest. Yeah, the circus will roll
on.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Well, you'll roll with it, won't you?”
Laurie
couldn't think about it. He was sure of one thing only. “I just
know I can't go home.”
“Okay.” Wes was close enough that Laurie felt him shrug. “Fair
enough, then. I wanted to give you a chance.” He glanced towards
the other trailers, as if looking for something or someone, but
when Laurie tried to follow his gaze, all he could see was blurring
silver light.
“A chance for what?”
“Never mind. Forget it. I just wanted to say—we haven't been
good friends, have we? I haven't been very kind to you.”
Laurie
would have laughed aloud if he hadn't felt so sick. “Apart from
asking who the fuck I was, this is the first time you’ve spoken to
me at all.”
“Yeah. I've been a jealous bastard.” He shifted, put an arm
around Laurie's shoulders. “Look, I know you liked Bailey, and I
heard what you did for him. Nicole told me. Everyone else just
stood around, but you went in like a war-zone paramedic, puke and
all.”
Laurie could still taste it. He'd washed and washed, cleaned
his teeth half a dozen times. He grabbed the bottle back when
Wesley offered. It wasn't the puke he minded: growing up
in loco parentis to
Clara, he'd dealt with worse than that in the shape of nappies and
fairground-ride accidents. It had been the empty, endless tang of
death behind it. One of the medics had taken him aside.
You did all you could. But we think he died right
away from the overdose. He'd probably been gone for half an hour or
so before he was found.
Laurie
turned to face Wes. The arm around his shoulders was heavy, too
warm, but it had a pulse. He didn't resist when it drew him in. He
rested his spinning head with relief on the broad chest. “I'm
sorry,” he said, muffled against cotton. “Dunno what's the matter
with me. Just... give me a minute, okay?”
“No hurry.” Fingers probed through Laurie's hair, pushing damp
strands of it out of his eyes. “You're pretty drunk, you know. Want
to hang out with me for a little while, just forget about it
all?”
That
sounded bloody marvellous. It was what Laurie had been out here