Chapter Twenty-Eight #4
With her coffee and her cigarette, Keera sits and looks out at the parts of the bay where the fog is lifting.
Peace.
Blissful peace.
And then she hears her mother’s roar of temper.
Dr Bobbi has clearly seen the article too.
Wearing an old Disney TV tee as a nightshirt, her hair askew and last night’s make-up still mashed into her eyes, her mother does not paint a pretty picture. Her evident rage doesn’t help.
‘Did you see this?’ she demands, waving her phone at Keera. ‘Why didn’t you wake me when you got it? Look at it, just look!’
‘I did.’
Keera gets up but holds on to her cigarette, almost as a defence. She tenses, every muscle now locked tight.
‘You didn’t think it was worth waking me?’
This is a rhetorical question.
Dr Bobbi rages on. ‘See this crap about you having curves! She means fat,’ screeched Dr Bobbi. ‘How many times have I told you?’
Again, rhetorical.
The fog is lifting.
Keera hopes the neighbours have already left for the day or they’ll hear every word of the row.
Her mother is in a full-on temper now.
‘I don’t care if a hundred women “with curves” make it on the socials – they might sell a few hundred control knickers and slimming corsets but they will never be players. Never!’
She screams this last bit.
Keera thinks what she might say: It’s a lovely article, apart from that one bit. The journalist made me sound like a decent person …
No, that would never do.
Dr Bobbi has spent years patiently explaining to Keera that stars are not normal. Stars have to be different. Special.
It was tough but, one day, Keera would appreciate all her mother’s work …
‘I thought I sounded nice in this, normal—’
That’s a mistake.
‘Normal? Stars aren’t supposed to be normal,’ Dr Bobbi hisses. ‘Normal writes the music for other people or stays in the background, never making it, always on the fringes. You’re supposed to be a star, stupid girl!’
Keera steps back, as if the words are physical.
‘That’s what I’ve taught you for years and you’ve never understood it, have you?
Were Vuitton or Dior offering you gowns for the last Grammys?
’ Dr Bobbi is in her stride now. ‘Any of the big fashion houses? No! You get offered cheap tramp clothes or dresses from people who want to revitalise their careers after being cancelled.’
Keera winces.
Her mother is so into social media and watches the guillotine of cancellation closely. Women who pop their head up get brutally eviscerated.
That’s why women like Keera can’t be trendsetters, Bobbi often says. They have to follow the crowd.
‘And why is that? Why do you not get offered vintage Balenciaga or JW Anderson? Because of your weight! I work so hard and fixed up this interview and you blow it by not being able to stick to any fucking diet or exercise plan. I have given up my whole life to take care of you, to be your manager, and this is how you treat that sacrifice.’
In the distance, someone slams a screen door and it brings Dr Bobbi back to realising she’s not in a sound-proofed room.
‘Look what you made me do. I hate shouting at you,’ she says in lower tones.
The shift from anger to recrimination is sudden.
Dr Bobbi’s eyes suddenly glisten with tears and Keera knows the worst of it is over.
Relief means that Keera’s body unlocks.
But coming back into herself means she can now feel everything. Her heart thudding in anxiety. Her body slowly creeping out of its taut rictus.
She drops her cigarette in the ashtray and pulls the blanket around her.
Her mother loses it sometimes but this feels like another level.
‘I told you to get a handle on your weight, didn’t I?’
Dr Bobbi is calmer now.
But the ache of rejection means that Keera suddenly wants something to take away the pain of not being enough.
A few Xanax, maybe with a tequila shot or six. Tequila works wonderfully fast. She wants that bone-melting sense of not being able to feel.
Her neck aches. Tension, she knows.
A massage will not touch this, nor even one of her mother’s chiropractic sessions.
No, only the soft release of Xanax to soften her edges and a meltingly fabulous amount of alcohol. Then some coke to make her happy and she’ll want to dance, whirling in an energetic haze and she won’t have to feel anything.
‘Did you take something to calm yourself?’ asks Rose.
The sunny terrace in Villa Artemis comes into view again.
‘Yeah,’ says Keera. ‘I took a lot of stuff.’
‘What’s it like reliving that moment?’
The group are silent.
‘Scary,’ says Keera finally. ‘Shocking. I didn’t see how negative it was until I told you all. It was a huge interview to get, the interviewer was positive about me and that one thing made Mom go off at the deep end. I was fat and I was disappointing her, ruining all her work by that one thing.’
She pauses.
It’s a tough moment, Rose knows: speaking about her relationship with her mother makes Keera see it through other people’s eyes.
She also feels that Keera doesn’t entirely trust her own version of events. There’s no other child to ask how such a situation looked. No sibling.
There’s only Keera with her memories.
‘How does it make you feel physically?’ Rose asks.
The body doesn’t lie.
‘Fat, ugly, like a whale-sized piece of blubber …’ Keera’s voice breaks a little.
‘You’re not,’ shrieks India and suddenly she’s on her knees beside Keera’s chair, holding her. ‘You’re so beautiful. How dare anyone tell you otherwise. That’s a fucking lie!’
They stay like that for several minutes, Keera sobbing and India sobbing too, holding on to her.
Dan finds a pack of tissues and hands them gently to both women.
Finally, Keera stops crying and she’s wiping away the tears with the tissue Dan handed her.
Rose can feel that he wants to say something but he’s not sure if he can speak. ‘Dan, do you want to say something to Keera?’
‘Actually, yes,’ he says in his soft deep voice.
‘In your story, you talk about being famous from when you were nine. I lecture students in my university and when they come in first, at eighteen, nineteen, they’re very vulnerable.
I know what I was like then: scared, unsure of myself.
I found friends in uni, and I had met Julia at school … ’
He pauses. Nobody says anything.
‘But you’ve never had these experiences. Never had a normal chance to grow up. You were almost an adult from when you were nine? What age were you when you started in TV?’
‘Nine,’ confirms Keera.
‘I can understand that your mother wanted you to use your talent, but there’s nothing there about taking care of you as a child. She treats you like a commodity and that’s a betrayal … Sorry,’ he adds, ‘that’s a harsh word.’
Keera is nodding now, tears drying on her face, which is blotchy.
‘It is the right word,’ agrees Grazia fiercely. ‘Your mother is a terrible person. When you tell your story, I can see that she bullies you. Why does she not make the money? Why always you? I do not like your mother.’
Grazia crosses her arms and Rose hopes that Dr Bobbi does not ever encounter her. Grazia may have perfectly manicured nails and wear expensive clothes but there is something of the street fighter in her.
Interesting.
‘Thank you all,’ sniffs Keera. ‘I feel sick now – like I’m bitching about Mom and I love her and everything but it’s just …’
‘It’s all a bit much,’ finishes Rose. ‘Keera, you’ve touched on so much here – the world-wide body shaming of women primarily, the pressure to be thin in your particular career.
Then your mother is not on your side in this battle.
That’s a lot to handle. Can you see how powerful you are to have decided to go to rehab?
Nobody booked you in: you chose it. That’s very powerful, that’s taking control over your life. ’
Keera nods.
‘I know but I know it intellectually. I can’t feel it.’
‘You will,’ says Rose. ‘The fact that your mother is the person who is angry with you over the sort of body she thinks you need to have: do you have any insight into why she is that person? I’m not looking for blanket forgiveness, but an understanding of where she came from.’
‘She wanted to be famous,’ says Keera shrugging. ‘But it didn’t work out.’
Rose nods. ‘You can see the misguided love there,’ she says. ‘Your mother has done everything she can to give you the gift she wanted most in the world: fame. Now you know it’s her dream, not yours. You have decisions to make. Let’s take a break.’
Christos is in his chef whites and he’s looking at a message on Adriana’s phone.
‘Don’t show Rose,’ says Christos to his wife.
‘We need to!’ says Adriana. ‘She’s been emailing this person in Los Angeles about what to do. We have to tell her.’
I know what you did, Alys, and I will tell the world if you don’t shut down your so-called retreat, the message says.
This time, it’s come in to the villa’s website email from a very anonymous-sounding address.
Christos shakes his head.
‘This time it’s different,’ he says thoughtfully. ‘I will ask Marco for help.’
‘Marco? This is just about us, it’s hardly Europol business,’ says Adriana.
‘Someone is blackmailing our business,’ Christos replies. ‘I think that’s very much Europol business.’
‘Rose says she can handle it,’ protests Adriana.
‘She has handled so much, my darling,’ says Christos. ‘Let me take over now. Please.’
Dan wants to join India and Keera at the acropolis, where they’ve gone with some iced lemonade and sun cream. But he thinks Rose is going to be onto him again for not doing his homework, so he goes back to his room, finds his blasted notebook and picks up a pen.
He still loves Julia but she’s mercurial, if he’s honest. Her moods change in the blink of an eye and what she wants changes all the time.
He wanted to marry her and she said she didn’t want to be tied down. It had nearly killed him. He’d felt wounded, rejected.