Infinite Ghost

Chapter 1

YESTERDAY’S WISDOM

Okay, fine. I can be honest. Being tongue deep in Benji Robert’s throat wasn’t my best look.

But, in my defence, the entire night wasn’t my finest hour.

And it’s not exactly my fault that him and Caro haven’t announced they’re separated yet. That they’ve been too cowardly to disappoint their adoring fans.

‘Sienna!’ My mum’s shrill voice echoes through the dense air like a tuning fork before she’s even taken her key out of my front door. She over-enunciates the final ‘argh’ as she’s done since I was a child, always striving to be the poshest-sounding inhabitant of the council estate.

My breath hitches, the thumping of my heart echoes in my ears and blocks out my entourage’s noise – a team of people fussing around me, touching my hair, brushing make-up on my cheeks, spraying perfume at my nose. All before I’m allowed to get in the car.

I need to clear my throat, but I keep the lump lodged there for a moment longer. The moment I make a noise, all of this will stop. I’ll have to leave the house, get in the car, prepare myself for a live tele performance, and I don’t know if my legs will carry me for that yet.

‘Sienna…’ My mum – who became Mauve, over-pronouncing the ‘Mow’, since I outgrew ‘mummy’ – prompts.

I know that she’s seen the papers. The photos online. The videos on social media claiming that my career is ‘over’. I know she’ll want to have words about what I did last night. I had advanced warning that the pictures were going to be published. We couldn’t stop them.

My body rejects my brain and clears my throat against my wishes. My team steps back, leaving room for Mauve to re-open the front door. I force a smile at each of them individually – some of them even smile back.

I can sense they’re here. Men with cameras. Long lenses ready to capture me in my worst moments. I don’t have to turn around to know they’re hiding in the bushes at the front of my house like snakes in the grass, blending in among the shrubs.

What are they hoping to capture?

Devastation? Regret?

My security guard, Dennis, walks in front of me before I climb in the back of Kareem’s car.

James dabs my face with an orange sponge and Dina touches up a dislodged auburn curl before the door finally shuts.

Kareem starts the engine, and I think I’ve managed to make a lucky escape before Mauve jumps in the seat next to me.

This hour-long drive is going to be a demonstration of my expertise in Tuning Mauve Out.

I haven’t let her come with me to things like this for years.

Not since 2016, when she was overheard by a journalist asking me, ‘should you really be eating that now you’re getting older?

’ I was twenty-two. She said she was only trying to look out for me, but it made the front page of the paper.

It was a lesson for us all: even the walls have ears.

I have learned to tune her out. To let her say what she has to say into the abyss. I’m not a teenager anymore. I don’t need her with me for work appearances.

I clear my throat again, silently cursing the fact I was stupid enough to get a cold right as the new album came out, meaning all the promo was done with a slightly nasal, hoarse voice.

My voice hasn’t fully recovered, even though the blocked nose and the cough is long gone.

I still don’t know how my voice is going to sound when I sing at the end of Eric Lancaster’s Laughs tonight.

King Regards is an easy enough song to sing if I don’t do the ad libs I’d planned on the final chorus.

I hate disappointing people.

I try not to think about the fact that this is my first official appearance since Grampy’s death.

Grampy had been to most of my performances since the start of my career.

I spent hours in his company before taking the stage, neither of us talking in the lead-up to a show so I could rest my voice.

We’d enjoy a silent game of charades – a pre-performance ritual for me to be with Grampy.

I’ll have to find a new ritual now.

He died not long after I finished up the tour last year, so I’m lucky that I’ve been given the space in my schedule to grieve, to breathe.

But going back to work officially tonight, after releasing an album earlier this week for the first time without Grampy listening to it first… it’s hit me like a ton of bricks.

The whistle of the wind through the small gap in the back window of the car swirls around my head, a high-pitched ringing in my ears.

‘Sienna.’

I startle at the sound of my own name even though I know what’s coming.

‘I would really like to speak to you about those pictures from last night,’ Mauve says, her voice blurring with the volume of the radio.

I silently pray that Kareem will turn it up to drown her out even more.

‘I can’t help you if I don’t know what happened,’ Mauve says.

She can’t help me anyway. I literally hire people for things like this.

I stare from the window. The town so unlike the one I grew up in goes past in slow flashes of green and brown.

A few people stand still on the side of the street, their faces gaping when they spot me in the back of the car.

I bow my head, avoiding their eye contact, knowing I’ll become a story they tell their wives, mums, children, neighbours, later this evening.

I saw that Sienna Martin earlier. She always looks so sad, doesn’t she?

I heard her grandad’s dead now. Awful that so many people have died.

Yes, Bert. It’s very sad. Almost as sad as the fact you lost your hair to male-pattern baldness before you turned twenty-five.

If I were still at home, still a normal person in the Martin family who doesn’t own an eleven-bedroom mansion overlooking Hampstead Heath, we would be driving past The Harvester sometime around now.

We’d eaten so many of our birthday meals there growing up.

It was the only place at which Nana would eat.

Fish and chips or gammon was all she’d order – and later, when she became really sick, only desserts.

Everyone else would be eating from the main menu, a bowl of unlimited salad followed by something like chicken and chips, or a burger, while Nana was tucking in to her lemon meringue sundae.

I can’t stop my mouth from twitching in the corners.

The way Grampy would order a dessert he didn’t want, purely to share with her because she couldn’t decide what ice cream flavour to have as her main.

Growing up, I’d always wanted a love like that. Like Nana and Grampy.

I grab my sunglasses out of my small handbag and cover my eyes against the people outside.

I unlock my phone and navigate to Instagram.

There are thousands of comments on my most recent photo.

Even more than there were yesterday despite the photo being posted earlier this week in celebration of the new album, Your Email Didn’t Find Me Well.

And trust me, if someone emailed me in the last year, it probably did not find me well.

The comments make my stomach drop into my knees.

You fucking slut. He has a *CHILD*

Guys, she might not have known we don’t know the full story, let’s not be so quick to judge

Of course she knew don’t be so naive!

How does it feel knowing youve ruined a couples lives? There child is gonna have to live with this

Once again, Serena Martin takes whatever Serena Martin wants and doesn’t care what the consequences are for anyone else

Her name’s Sienna

Do I look like I care?

Omg didn’t him and Caro break up?

No!!!

I really regret buying her album now, it’s a great album but the thought of supporting her!! ICK!!!

I shut the phone away in my handbag. I count the freckles on my hand, cross and uncross my legs, trying to ignore the uncomfortable, prickly feeling all over my body.

I want to dig my nails into my flesh, drag them across the skin until it rips under my own strength.

Tearing it until I can crawl out and back into bed as though none of this ever happened.

Wake up to a voicemail from Grampy that he’s sorry he missed me.

‘Sienna, can we please talk?’

I turn to face her, and Mauve’s face is almost earnest. Almost. Nearly like she’s actually concerned about me.

‘What specifically do you want to know, Mauve?’

‘Why did you do it?’

Her words land heavily on my skin, bruising me all over.

If this is how my mother is reacting, the rest of the world will be much worse.

How am I going to go on tele tonight and talk about my new album like none of this ever happened?

I shouldn’t have done it, granted, but this is something I got away with all the time in my twenties.

Like my first year at Glastonbury when I was playing the Other Stage – I’d kissed the drummer from the headline band in the VIP area in the early hours of the morning after the final night.

I don’t even remember his name now, but I was applauded for almost a week after that kiss.

Or when I was pictured enjoying some very public dates when I was twenty-three with a member of Two Fortune, the band who shot to fame after appearing on The X Factor.

That boosted my album sales so much that my album from the previous year went back to number one.

‘Why did I kiss a man or why did I kiss that man specifically?’

‘Why did you kiss Benji Robert?’ Her voice is almost as tired as I feel.

I grab one of the emergency bottles of water from the compartment between the two front seats and pour half of it down my throat.

‘Because I was drunk, and he was nice to me, and he was flirting. And I didn’t kiss him. He kissed me and I went along with it.’

She looks at me like she couldn’t think of anything worse than remembering she birthed me and brought me up for all these years. Like she doesn’t recognise me.