No Cure For Love (2 page)

With all the love in my bursting heart,

M.

Sarah Broughton’s hand shook as she let the letter drop on the glass-topped table. She wiped her palm on the side of her jeans.

It was the third letter in two weeks, and by far the most detailed. The others had merely hinted that she should begin to prepare herself for a special event. This was also the first one to contain anything even remotely sexual.

Sarah walked over to the sliding glass doors. Beyond the deck and the narrow strip of lawn, the rocky promontory on which her house stood dropped twenty feet. Below, fine white sand sloped down to the Pacific Ocean, darkening where the breakers pounded the shoreline not more than fifty yards out.

Sarah stood and watched a wave swell until its rounded peak turned translucent green then burst into a crest of foam that rushed horizontally along its length until everything churned into a roiling white mass. Sometimes she thought she could stand and watch the waves for ever. The roar was deafening, and through the open door she could smell salt and seaweed and something dead, that odour of primordial decay that always seemed to linger around the edges of the sea.

Though the temperature was in the mid-sixties, Sarah shivered and hugged herself. Her nerves weren’t that good to begin with, hadn’t been for over a year, and now she felt defiled, violated and scared. But even as she trembled, she found herself probing the feeling, storing it for later use. If she ever had to play a victim again, this memory could be useful.

She walked back to the table, picked up the letter and made to rip it up like the others, but she stopped herself in time. No. She would show this one to Stuart. No more procrastination.

It was close to eleven in the morning, and she was due to have lunch with him in a couple of hours. She would show him the letter then. Stuart would know what to do.

She looked at the envelope again. It was postmarked Pasadena, dated 14 December, which was Friday, four days ago, and addressed to Sarah Broughton at the beach house address on the Coast Highway.

So how had ‘M,’ whoever he was, found out her address and phone number? Like most people in the movie and TV business, Sarah guarded her privacy well. Or thought she did.

He could have found out from the article in
TV Guide
that mentioned she lived in Malibu. Which wasn’t quite true. Strictly speaking, the house was in Pacific Palisades, close to the Los Angeles city limits, but that probably didn’t sound quite as glamorous to Josephine Q. Public, Ottumwa, Iowa, who liked to read about actors and actresses in
TV Guide
.

All in all, Sarah supposed, the secrecy was probably something of an illusion. When it came down to it, no address was that hard to come by in Hollywood. Everything was for sale.

Stop worrying, she told herself, folding the letter and putting it back in its envelope. There are millions of perverts out there drooling over actors and rock stars, and this is probably just one of them. A harmless one, more likely than not.

She imagined some overweight, pimply nerd with Coke-bottle glasses, dandruff and halitosis masturbating in a candlelit room with nude pictures of her plastered all over the walls. Somehow, it wasn’t a comforting image.

Sarah slipped the letter in her purse and decided to take a walk on the beach. She slid open the door, walked down the wooden steps from the deck to lawn, then down the stairs carved in the rock. At the bottom stood a gate made of six-foot-high metal railings, painted black, all with very sharp points. It didn’t offer much security, though, Sarah realized. Anybody who really wanted to could climb up the rocks beside it easily enough.

On the beach, she slipped off her sandals and wiggled her toes in the sand. Though the sun was only a white ball through the haze, its brightness made Sarah squint and reach in her purse for her sunglasses.

There was hardly anyone around. For Sarah, the mid-sixties was warm enough for sunbathing, but it was chilly to the natives. Also, while this area of the beach wasn’t exactly private property, access was difficult because of the solid wall of houses, flanked on both sides by low-rise office buildings.

Out towards the horizon, water and sky merged in a white glare. A light ocean breeze ruffled Sarah’s cap of short blonde hair. It would soon dispel the sea-mist. She walked with her hands in her pockets, eyes scanning the beach for interesting shells and pebbles.

To the north, the mountains were almost lost in the haze, and to the south she could just about make out the Santa Monica Pier with its restaurants and amusement palaces. Funnily enough, it reminded Sarah of childhood holidays in Blackpool, staying at Mrs Fairclough’s boarding-house. Of course, it was rarely over sixty degrees in Blackpool – more often than not it was about fifty and raining – but her mum and dad would always splurge on one good variety show at the pier theatre, and it was there that her love of show business had begun. And just look at her now. Top of the world, Ma. Well, getting there, anyway. Such a long journey, such a long, long way from Blackpool to Hollywood.

As usual, thinking of her mum and dad brought her other problem to mind: the family she had put off dealing with for too long. She hadn’t been home in two years now. Her mother was dead, had been since long before the rift, but there were still Paula, her dad and the kids. Well, she would be facing them at Christmas.

And now, on top of everything else, the letters.

As she walked along the edge of the beach, Sarah felt uneasy. Not for the first time these past couple of weeks did she keep looking over her shoulder. And whenever she did notice anyone walking towards her, she felt herself tense, get ready to run.

There was something else as well. Earlier that morning, when she was coming back from her run, she had seen something flash in the sun, way up on the crest of the hills above the Coast Highway. Of course, there were a lot of houses up there, and there could be any number of explanations – windows opening, even car windshields glinting in the light – but she had felt as if someone were looking down on her through binoculars.

Now she thought she saw something flash again, further up the beach this time. But she was being silly. It could be someone’s glasses, a ring, anything at all. Maybe just a birdwatcher.

She told herself not to be so paranoid, but she couldn’t shake the feeling. There was something else that bothered her, too. This time, in the letter, he had called her Sally.

2

She should have left for work hours ago, but he hadn’t seen her go. Usually a cab or that grey-haired man in the Cadillac picked her up to take her to the studio around eight-thirty. Not today. She had to be still in the house. He hadn’t seen her leave, and he knew he couldn’t have missed her; he had been in the area for four hours, since before dawn, watching her house just like he had every day for the past two weeks, first up in the hills, now down on the beach.

As usual that Tuesday morning, he had found his safe, secluded spot in the hills before dawn and watched her run. His powerful Zeiss binoculars silhouetted her moving image against the slowly brightening sea. Every morning she ran at least a mile up the beach and back as the sun came up. She was always alone, the only one out at that time.

As he had lain high above her, though he could sense the city throbbing and buzzing behind him, hardly a soul stirred nearby. He could see the lights of ships twinkling out at sea, the headlights of cars on the Coast Highway, already pale in the light of the rising sun as they arced around the long curve between Topanga and Santa Monica.

She timed herself against the sunrise, as if following and emulating its natural rhythms, in tune with it, like the dawn goddess. Or so it seemed to him. Every day now the sun rose a little later, but it was always just hidden behind the eastern hills when she started out and balanced on top of them like a huge fireball when she got back.

He watched the tide, too, how it ebbed and flowed. She always ran right along the water line. He had seen the spent waves foam and sparkle around her feet as if she were the very rebirth of Venus.

Suddenly, here she came again. Walking out of the gate onto the beach. Not to run this time, but just walking, looking contemplative. His heart expanded so much he thought it would explode in his chest. She was thinking about him. He knew it. She must have received his latest letter and read it. Now she was walking alone on the beach thinking about him.

He lay on a rock about a quarter of a mile further west, on the Topanga State Beach. It was eleven in the morning now and there were a few people around, some brave surfers and couples walking hand in hand. They didn’t bother him, though. He knew he just looked like someone lying on a rock watching the seabirds. Plenty of other people did that. It didn’t look strange at all.

In fact, living here, you would have to think very hard to find anything that really did seem weird, he thought. His kind of city. The place where he had finally become what he had been from the start but had only vaguely sensed before; where he had recognized himself at last; the place where he had both lost and found his soulmate, his life’s companion.

He pulled her into focus through the lenses. The binoculars were so strong that he could fill them with her head and shoulders. She wasn’t silhouetted now, and he could see her downcast eyes, see her chewing softly on her lower lip, that slightly crooked tooth overlapping at the front, the only blemish on a perfect face. Well, that could easily be altered.

He could almost hear her thoughts, how she was racking her brains to remember who he was, who it was loved her so much, so she could come to him. He felt her calling out to him. But no, not yet. There was still much to do before they could truly be together. For a moment, he felt guilty for torturing her so, but it passed. After all, wasn’t anticipation one of the sweetest parts of conquest? And he had yet to conquer her.

While he didn’t know what would happen after the consummation – when he thought of that, everything turned red – he knew that he would continue to feel this exquisite blending of aching and longing, of joy and desolation, while he courted her from a distance. And he knew that she could feel it too.

There was also something special, something subtly erotic about watching her through the binoculars. To the naked eye, she was nothing but a dot in the distance, but when he raised the lenses, there she was, right in front of him, in his face, her thoughts clear for him to read in her almost-perfect features. And when she made those little unconscious gestures, the things he loved her for so much, like scratching the side of her nose with her pinky, and he knew he was the only one in the world watching her, he felt such pride and power in his possession that it was all he could do to stop himself from jumping up and running into her arms.

But no. Not yet. For now, he must give himself up to the alternate waves of ecstasy and terror that swept through him, made him dizzy and wild, that whispered to him what he must do to win her love. He must worship her from a distance. It was all too new; he wasn’t ready yet, and he didn’t think she was either. Oh, he loved her; Lord knew how much he loved her. But he had to make her realize that she loved him, had to make her see that he was the one. Soon, it would be soon . . .

As he lay there on his stomach watching her poke at small shells and pebbles with her bare toes, her little nails painted pink, his hands started to shake and he felt himself getting hard against the rock.

3

They ate lunch at one of those Hollywood restaurants where six red-coated valets drag you out of your car and drive off with it if you so much as slow down out front. The first time it had happened, Sarah had seriously thought they were being carjacked, having read about such things in the papers, but Stuart had just laughed. He often laughed at her English ways. Stuart himself was Southern Californian all the way through.

Sarah recognized a couple of bit-part actors she had worked with on the series and said hello as she passed by. Most of the diners, however, were tanned, female shoppers taking a break from Rodeo Drive, the ultra-chic Melrose or La Brea.

Wherever she ate, Sarah tried to guess whether the waiters were aspiring actors or screenwriters. This one, who introduced himself as Mark, was tall, with dark good looks, a muscled body and sleek black hair tied in a ponytail. Definitely an aspiring actor. Rarely had Sarah known writers to look as good as that.

Stuart looked at the tables crammed close together in the small patio area. ‘Fuck,’ he complained, ‘these things must multiply overnight. And I thought this place was supposed to be so crowded nobody comes here any more.’

Sarah raised her eyebrows.

‘Yogi Berra,’ Stuart explained.

‘What?’

‘Yogi Berra. You know, the baseball guy. Known for his redundancies and
non sequiturs
.’

Sarah shook her head. Mark scraped her chair back over the terracotta and beckoned her to sit. Sunlight filtered through the trellises, where a parkful of greenery climbed and entwined, occasionally offering a white or red blossom to the close observer. Mark explained the specials, then handed them menus, handwritten on laminated fuchsia cards about four feet by two.

‘“It ain’t over till it’s over,”’ Stuart tried. ‘“It’s
déjà vu
all over again.”’

‘Oh, yes. I’ve heard that before.’ Sarah thought she should mollify him a little.