She paused again, looking into the fire as she finished her wine and stood up to find another bottle and pour herself a glass. She motioned to Luke.
‘No, I’m good,’ he said. His glass was still half full. ‘So what happened next?’
She sat back down next to him, took another sip of wine, wishing with all her heart that she could rewind time and make different choices.
‘I started getting a lot more fan mail,’ she went on. ‘Bags of the stuff. Silly, really, because I certainly wasn’t the youngest or prettiest model around. Some of it was lovely, but some of it was really disturbing. I had to stop reading it after a while. I couldn’t cope. I had to hire somebody to deal with it all and they were the ones who spotted the letters from . . .’ She paused.
‘Who?’ Luke asked gently.
‘Brandon.’
Orla swallowed hard after saying the name aloud and she felt Luke watching her as she drank her wine.
‘You okay?’
She nodded and wondered if she could go on. She didn’t have to, she knew that. She didn’t really owe Luke an explanation, yet she had promised him one and so she continued.
‘He started with the odd letter via my agent. The odd odd letter. I’m told it’s usual in the business to receive marriage proposals and personal questions from strangers, but it felt so weird. Just a few months before, I’d been an unknown photographer, hiding behind the camera, and now, all of a sudden, I seemed to belong to the public. I hated it. Then the letters became more frequent. My agent told me to stop reading them and started keeping a separate file of them. I told Kelli about them and she said she got letters like that all the time. Emails, too, and tweets. She told me to ignore them, and I did, but then he showed up.’
‘Oh, my God! Where did he show up?’
‘At one of my modelling assignments.’
‘How did he know where you’d be?’
Orla shrugged, feeling again the cold terror she had felt at the time. ‘How do these types of people find anyone? Because they want to! Anyway, he started showing up wherever I went, calling out to me. “Orla! Did you get my letters? Why haven’t you written back to me?” I did my best to block him out, but it was pretty hard. He had a way of getting in my eyeline and I’d have to think of more and more elaborate ways of evading him, getting my taxi driver to go miles out of the way until we lost him. I was terrified of him following me home.’
‘And did he?’
‘He found out the block of flats I lived in, yes. I used to see him hanging around the corner of the street by a lamppost. But I don’t think he knew the flat I was in and I was lucky to move shortly after that. I got a flat where there was a porter and a code for the lift. I felt safer there. But the letters via my agent continued. Flowers too sometimes. And he always managed to find out where I was working and be there – hanging around studio car parks and shouting over at me. Kelli told me to report him to the police, and I managed to get a restraining order.’
Orla took another sip of her wine.
‘I’ve often thought how scarily quickly a fan can turn. One minute, you’re their favourite person on the planet and they’re singing your praises and then, the next, they want to destroy you.’
Luke puffed out an anxious sigh. ‘What happened?’
‘I turned to Kelli. We’d been working on the same project together. It was funny but, since I got that job she’d walked out of, we’d become something of a pair in the industry. It felt good having an ally and I learned a lot from her, but she was becoming more reckless. I think she was drinking or doing some kind of drug. I’m not sure. Anyway, she didn’t seem completely there most of the time. She had this sort of glazed look and her behaviour was erratic. I tried to reach out to her, but she kept pushing me away, denying that there was a problem, even though she was constantly late for assignments. It was so sad to see her going downhill so rapidly. She was a really beautiful woman. Far more beautiful than I ever was, but I ended up getting more jobs than her simply because she was getting a bad reputation in the industry and was either turning up late or not at all. Anyway, I shared my fears about Brandon with her.’ Orla paused.
‘And what did she say?’
‘“Get used to it, honey. It could be a lot worse.”’
‘Ah, so not exactly helpful.’
‘No.’ Orla stopped again, her vision fixed on her now empty wine glass.
‘And I’m guessing it got a lot worse?’
‘Yes,’ she said, her voice barely above a whisper now. ‘I was walking home one day after a shoot. I usually got a taxi, but the weather was so glorious and I wanted to walk through the park. It was warm for March and I was wearing this big heavy coat because the week before had been so cold. I remember stopping to take the coat off, but my phone went and I was trying to get it out of my bag when I heard these footsteps running towards me. I thought it was a jogger and I went to scoot out of the way but, when I looked up . . .’ Orla stopped, her eyes gazing straight ahead as if seeing into the past at that very moment. Her heart was hammering and her palms felt sticky with sweat.
‘Orla? Are you all right?’
She nodded, but tears pricked her eyes.
‘I haven’t talked about any of this. Not since . . .’
‘It’s all right,’ Luke told her. ‘Just take your time.’
She was shaking now, and One Ear came forward, licking her hand and sticking his wet nose into her face and whining.
‘When I looked up, I saw a man wearing a dark jacket. The hood was up and I didn’t pay much attention, to be honest, because I was still trying to find my phone, so I looked down into my bag, and that’s when it happened. He threw something at me. I thought it was water at first, but then it started to burn. Really burn.’
Luke cursed. ‘It was acid, wasn’t it?’
Orla nodded. ‘If I hadn’t turned slightly at the precise moment he threw it, the damage would have been a lot worse. The doctors say I would probably have lost my left eye completely. As it was, I just lost my vision for a few months. And my ear. Well, you can see I lost that. My hair, too, and half my face, the skin on my neck. If my phone hadn’t gone and I’d taken my coat off, it would have been much worse. I was just wearing a cotton dress underneath. But the acid ate right through the coat. I managed to get it off in time and a passing jogger doused me with her water bottle before the ambulance came.’
‘God, Orla!’
‘I never knew a pain like that could exist. There was no getting away from it. It just seemed to go on and on for ever. And I couldn’t stop screaming. I wondered what it was at first – this inhuman sound – and then I realised that it was me.’ She closed her eyes for a moment. ‘Have you ever smelled burning flesh?’ she asked him. ‘No, of course you haven’t. I hope you never will because, once you do, you can never forget it. It never quite leaves you. It’s like nothing else. I think it was the smell that scared me the most. I mean, the pain was bad. Indescribable. But the smell – that was truly terrifying. I couldn’t get away from it.’
She got up and picked up the wine bottle, motioning to Luke, who shook his head.
‘Please tell me they got him?’