Past Secrets (50 page)

‘What day it is?’ he echoed genially. He had a Californian tan now. His skin was naturally dark and even though the band had spent a lot of time in the studio, he had a fabulous glow about him.

He looked different. It was as though he was moving away from her, thought Amber, with growing despondency.

‘Yeah, do you know what day it is?’ she repeated.

‘No.’ He shrugged. ‘The fourth day of the rest of our lives?’ Karl had said recording an album was like starting a new life, the one he’d been dreaming about since he could dream. ‘I don’t know, what day is it?’

‘It’s the day the exams end,’ Amber said.

Right now, she knew Ella was probably still asleep. Back home it was late afternoon and the gang at St Ursula’s would already be planning to go out partying to celebrate the end of school and the end of exams. How many times had she and Ella thought about that moment, imagining what it would be like, especially in the dark days of winter when they trudged home, school bags heavy with books, their hearts weighed down with the thought of all the study.

‘I know what I’m going to do when it’s all over,’

Ella would say dreamily, ‘I’m going to go home, get into bed and lie there and turn my TV on and

read magazines. And paint my nails and have a bath, oh, and do my hair and put on my makeup and dance around and go out!’

‘Sounds perfect to me,’ sighed Amber, although she didn’t have a TV in her bedroom. Her mum disapproved of televisions in bedrooms. But she’d put on her CD player and dance around and do nothing, have absolutely nothing hanging over her.

And now, here she was thousands of miles away in beautiful sunshine surrounded by arguably some of the most beautiful people on the planet, doing nothing and it should have been wonderful. Except that it wasn’t. The boys were going off into the studio soon and she’d be alone again.

She’d never been so much on her own in her whole life. She’d always been with people: Ella, girls from school, Mum, yet now here she had vast tracts of time to herself and not really anywhere to be or anything to do. It was odd.

Doing nothing wasn’t as much fun when there was nothing else you should be doing. The fact that she felt so out of place here added to her sense of sadness.

‘Bet you’re glad you missed all that exam crap,’

Karl said, taking another bran and cranberry muffin from the pile. ‘What’s the point of all that kind of bourgeois garbage? Exams didn’t get us where we are today, did they?’ he said, with a touch of the smugness that was creeping into everything he said these days. The band were going to make it, they were going to be on the cover of Billboard. He didn’t say these things quietly to Amber in the privacy of their own suite as they lay in each other’s arms and shared dreams. She wouldn’t have minded that. But no, this unshakeable self-belief was said publicly and without a shred of embarrassment. Even Syd, who was the voice of reason, was affected by it and grinned when Karl went on about how big the band were going to be.

‘I keep thinking,’ Amber blurted out suddenly, ‘I should have stayed at home to do the exams after all. I feel guilty now. I mean, it wouldn’t have made any difference if I’d come late. I could have got on a plane tonight and been here tomorrow.’

‘But you’d have missed all the fun,’ said Kenny T. ‘Exactly,’ said Lew, who was stuffing his face with an omelette, a full egg one, a fact which had astonished the waitress.

‘Not an egg white one?’ she’d said, because nobody here ever ate full egg omelettes. Think of the cholesterol, the fat?

‘No, the whole egg, the yellow bit and all,’ said Lew happily. Lew planned on never learning how to spell cholesterol. If he couldn’t spell it, it couldn’t get him.

‘I mean, think of the fun we had on the road, the adventures,’ he said now.

Amber looked at Lew. He’d rewritten the road trip in his mind. She remembered it exactly as it

had been: miserable, scary, cockroach-ridden.

Being totally broke was not a nice way to travel through a foreign country where you knew nobody.

‘You’d have missed being part of the adventure,’

Kenny T added. ‘You wouldn’t have been part of our history, the history of the band.’

‘You see, when they write about us in Rolling Stone,’ Syd said, with a sly grin in Karl’s direction, ‘we’ll be able to talk about how the five of us trekked across America with only a dream in our hearts and you’ll have been a part of that.’

A part of the trip, thought Amber. But not a part of what had happened afterwards. Having survived the travails of the road didn’t make her a member of the band. Instead, she was a hanger-on, the girl with the band.

Thinking of this, she glanced at Karl, hoping he’d say the right thing and make her feel that her presence was still important to him. She wanted to hear him say that it wouldn’t have been the same without her, that her presence - as his muse - had made it all work.

But he wasn’t even listening and was flicking through the papers again.

A helicopter buzzed overhead, breaking up the perfect sky for an instant before disappearing.

Amber looked up to see the glint of the chopper between the fronds of the palm tree shading their table. This really was a slice of paradise. Except it wasn’t her paradise. She wasn’t here on her dime, she was here on someone else’s. Karl didn’t really care whether she was here or not.

She’d been stupid to think he had. It had been fun while it lasted, but she’d given up so much for him and he neither understood nor appreciated her sacrifice. That realisation was crystal clear.

The boys sat there eating, and talking, all openly admiring an extremely attractive, very skinny blonde who sashayed past in a sliver of a dress hardly covering the most phenomenal breasts Amber had ever seen. They were clearly not real, but the boys didn’t seem to realise that, or they didn’t care. They just stared anyway, watching her skinny flanks appreciatively, even Karl.

Amber found that she didn’t mind very much, whereas, once, she’d have been outraged at Karl ogling another woman so openly. Was this her Damascene conversion, she wondered, and then grinned, thinking that at least Sister Patricia would be pleased that Amber had been paying attention at some point in religious education at St Ursula’s.

She got up from the table. ‘I’ll see you guys later, right?’

‘Yeah, sure, right,’ they all said. ‘Bye, babe.’

‘Yeah, see ya,’ said Karl absently.

Amber walked back to their suite. She shouldn’t have given up her life for Karl and the realisation didn’t make her feel stupid, it just made her feel sad.

She’d burned a lot of bridges for him. Even her eighteenth birthday had turned into pretty much another day with Karl.

Instead of Ella and her friends organising a night out after the exams, Amber’s birthday had been celebrated in a pub in Dublin just before they left when Karl had given her a silver bangle which was now tarnished, proof of how cheap it had been.

She thought of the lovely portfolio her mother had bought for her and wanted to cry.

She’d been so blind to his faults, she realised.

At least she was wiser now.

That night, while she was still working out what she was going to do, Michael took them to another party. There were parties every night but nobody stayed out late. Nobody got drunk either. LA was, as Michael reminded the band, a working town.

Going to parties was a public relations exercise, not an excuse for wild behaviour.

Tonight’s party was in the Hollywood hills and Amber, who’d worked out in the hotel’s gym and then swum lengths in the pool, felt physically tired as she got ready in her bathroom. She was wearing her green thrift shop dress and pendant again. It looked lovely and she did have a faint tan too, not Hollywood gold but certainly something she’d have considered mahogany in Dublin.

The house they were driven to in the requisite convoy of jeep Grand Cherokees was hotel-sized, appeared to be mainly made of glass and sat perched on a hillside with an intricate terrace and a gently curving pool filled with Japanese carp.

Walking in the door was like walking into an interiors magazine.

Not that it was ostentatious - quite the opposite.

Painted a warm vanilla, with dark floors, creamy upholstery, and carefully placed modern lighting, the effect was of simple elegance, like the guests. The music was muted jazz, the drinks were clear cocktails, champagne and plenty of juice, and the band loved it.

Within half an hour of arriving, Karl had left Amber’s side and when she saw him a few minutes later, he was talking to Venetia, who looked as exquisite as the first time Amber had seen her, white linen pants and a white silk halter top emphasising both her figure and the rich colour of her skin.

Amber didn’t feel threatened by Venetia tonight, although she couldn’t have explained why, if anyone had asked her. Venetia was so beautiful, she was in another dimension of beauty. Normal people like Amber could never compete with Venetia’s exquisite ebony limbs, those dark, flashing eyes and lips that were full of promise.

Lew wandered up to Amber and put an arm round her.

‘How’s it going, babe?’ he said, then, when she didn’t reply, he followed her gaze and saw Karl sitting with Venetia.

‘She is one amazing-looking woman,’ he said

with the sigh of someone who knew Venetia was way out of his league. ‘No offence, Amber, I mean you look pretty good too.’

Amber smiled’ wryly. ‘None taken, Lew.’

At first the evening was fun, seeing people who looked vaguely familiar, people from the music industry, people whose albums Amber had bought.

But it wasn’t always easy to join the groups of people who already knew each other and eventually, she and the band, minus Karl, ended up relaxing in a split level part of the house in front of a huge stone fireplace where vast expensive candles burned in the grate.

Syd was holding forth on the parties they’d been to, insisting that the people with the entourages and bodyguards were faking it, despite the bling.

‘The quiet ones in jeans with those discreet watches you’ve never seen in any normal jewellery store, they’re the multi-billionaires,’ he pointed out shrewdly. ‘The bling, blings aren’t that bling at all.

Take away the diamonds and the bulked-up bodyguards and there’s nothing left.’

Amber laughed. She liked hanging around with Syd. He had a sense of humour similar to Ella’s.

She’d thought about calling Ella earlier, having had one of those moments when she’d longed to hear her friend’s voice, to hear someone say ‘How nice to hear from you’ and really mean it.

Nobody here needed her like the people back home did. Kenny T and Lew were sweet guys, while Syd was a genuinely kind, good man, terribly in love with his Lola. They liked Amber, were fond of her, probably in the same way you’d be fond of a puppy or a kitten that clambered on to your lap and wanted to be patted. Nothing more. And Karl? Karl had moved on.

She’d chickened out of ringing Ella. So much time had gone by. In their whole friendship it had never ever been weeks since they’d talked. Even when Ella’s family had gone to Italy to visit relatives, they’d kept in touch, Ella facing the wrath of her mother for making so many international calls.

But it had been worth it because they were best friends, weren’t they? And now, weeks had gone by without hearing Ella’s laugh or hearing her joke or moan about her grandmother. It was funny the things you missed.

She sighed and tried to stop thinking about back home in case she cried. She forced herself to observe the party and the Hollywood hierarchy. In some subliminal way people from lower down the celebrity power chain ignored each other as they tried to attach themselves to upper groups.

Amber wasn’t part of any of the groups, but she didn’t care. It would all make a wonderful painting, she thought suddenly, her artist’s eye trying to imagine how she would sketch it out.

She could see it in her head and itched to record what she’d seen. Paper and a pencil, that’s what she needed.

In the kitchen, in clear contrast to the cool calm

of the rest of the house, the catering staff ran around frantically. They didn’t notice her in the bustle when she appropriated a pad and a pen lying on a table. She went back to the lounge, leaned against the fireplace and began to sketch.

It felt great to be drawing again. Energy burned within her with each deft stroke of her pen. As she drew the room and outlines of the people in it, quickly, speedily, because they were moving all the time, she felt that buzz she’d always felt when she had a pen in her hand. That was how she saw the world: through her eyes directly into her hands and on to the page. Maybe that’s why she screwed up so much with Karl. She’d seen him only with her eyes, she’d never made the connection and put him down on paper. If she had, then she might have seen that he was insubstantial, not what she’d first thought.

A tall man, dressed in a simple white shirt and khaki combats, walked over to her with a glass of wine in his hand.

‘I’ve been watching you,’ he said. ‘Are you drawing us?’

He stood beside her and looked down at the picture.

‘That’s really good,’ he said, in both shock and astonishment, ‘really good.’

He looked at her again, this time with renewed respect. ‘You’re an artist?’

Amber turned her amazing grey eyes with their copper flecks upon him.

‘Yes,’ she said, feeling a surge of self. ‘I’m an artist. I’m not really sure what I’m doing here, hanging out with a band and a man.’

‘Which band is that?’ asked the man. He was probably in his forties, way old, sort of a bit like Ella’s dad actually.

‘Ceres,’ she said, pointing over to where Karl was sitting on a low couch with Michael and Venetia. She hadn’t sketched them in her picture yet, she’d been working on the people around them.

‘He’s the band? Or is he your boyfriend?’ asked the man.

‘Both,’ said Amber grimly.

The man said nothing, just assimilated the information.

‘Who

are you?’ she asked.

‘I’m Saul, this is my house, my party.’

‘Pleased to meet you,’ Amber said. ‘Where I come from, you generally know the people whose party you’re going to and, if you don’t, as soon as you get there you’re introduced and you say thank you so much for inviting us. It’s different here.’