‘You like that, huh? Like it when I talk about dividends and stock specific risks?’
I groan, and he bites me quickly, urgently, on the tender part of my neck. I gasp at the pain of it, surprised. He is still smiling.
‘How much is she asking for? A hundred? More?’
‘A bit more.’
‘Oh, Stella. How much is a bit?’
‘Another two hundred, towards her party.’
‘If you give it to her you can kiss it goodbye.’
‘She’s my friend.’
‘When was the last time she did something for you?’
I hesitate.
‘It’s my money.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘I’ll do what I want with it. If I want to squander it, I will.’
‘Uh-huh, move over a little.’
He moves between my legs, running his tongue over the mound of me, pressing his hot breath into the soft fabric of my knickers.
‘I wouldn’t dream of telling you what to do, Stella.’ Another sharp bite, near my hip. This time I clench my fists. He is smiling, I can hear it in his voice.
‘Can we stop talking about this, please?’
‘Just promise me.’ A soft kiss, another. ‘Promise me you’ll tell her no if she asks again. Stop enabling her.’
I know what he means. Every time Carmel takes her credit card out she jokes about the smell of burning plastic, about how she hopes to marry someone old and rich with a heart problem. She’s always been that way, ever since we were students together at university. I’d once told Marco about how she’d spent her entire grant on an original Seditionaries T-shirt and had to shoplift food for two whole terms.
He takes my hand and kisses my fingers one by one. He is tentative again, almost reverential. If I couldn’t feel the throb from the places where he has bitten me I would think he was harmless.
‘Did you find out who’s been calling you?’
‘No,’ I say sharply, and don’t offer any more.
The phone calls had begun four days ago, in the middle of the night. I’d woken cold and uncomfortable, my neck stiff. My phone had lit up the dark of the room with a pale, eerie glow. Number Withheld, the display said. When I’d answered there had been nothing for a second or two and then a long, low exhale before whoever it was had hung up. Since then it has happened five or six times, always the same. Carmel wants me to go to the police.
‘She’s worried,’ I tell Marco now, who snorts derisively. ‘She said Marigold! has been in the papers a lot recently with Lesley Patterson’s funeral and now this thing with Anne Gregor. It always stirs up the weirdos.’
‘Did you hear Anne Gregor didn’t make it?’ He makes it sound like she’d been running a race. I stare at him open-mouthed.
‘You’re kidding.’
‘I’m not, babe, no. I read it last night on Twitter, of all things. They’re calling it the “Marigold! Curse”.’
‘God. God. She was only a bit older than me.’
Anne Gregor had been Bonnie, the second-youngest of the Marigold siblings, with corkscrew hair and a round, moon-like face. She’d originally tried out for the part of Katie Marigold but, as my mother never failed to tell me, she couldn’t get the voice right. That soft, waxy lisp.
‘Well, I’m just warning you. It’ll probably be in the papers again. They’re calling it heart failure, but what they mean is coke, surely. She was an addict at fifteen, if I remember right.’
‘God,’ I said again. I’d read all the stories, of course, when I was a teenager. How Anne Gregor had snorted so much coke her septum had perforated. Five grams a day even while pregnant. But that had been a long time ago, and hadn’t I also read, fairly recently, that Anne Gregor had been clean a decade or more? It had been a feature in a Sunday supplement, I was sure of it.
‘Joey’s back in the news, of course,’ Marco says, his hand running over my hip. ‘Talking about how hard fame is.’
I laugh out loud.
‘Joey Fraser loves a bandwagon. He should have tried walking in my shoes and dealt with some of the shit I had to.’
Marco looks surprised. His hand glides over my stomach, draws me close enough that I can feel the prickle of his stubble.
‘Like what, babe?’
I sigh. He kisses me in the place between my ear and collarbone and asks again.
‘I used to get weird post. Really weird. My mum couldn’t always – what’s the word, to get to something first?’
‘Intercept.’
‘Intercept it, yeah. And it came to my home address, which fan mail didn’t, usually it went to the TV studio. And of course when I saw my name, so beautifully written in ink, I opened them.’
Marco is waiting, watching me with his dark eyes. I can remember when we had met thinking he looked sleazy, too old for me. I had been wrong. He presses his mouth against mine for a moment, and I think I feel the faintest stirring of an erection pressing against me. He says, ‘Go on.’
‘Are you sure?’
He nods. So I tell him about the letters I used to receive containing hair clippings and used tissues, handfuls of dirt and dead flowers. I’d unfold spidery hand-drawn maps with red lines drawn on them to show all the different routes to my house. One afternoon in the spring, just after my tenth birthday, I’d opened an envelope to find a little doll made of wax with pins bristling from its mouth. It had been wrapped in a single frilled sock, the twin to a pair I’d worn and lost on set a week before. The director had been furious because we hadn’t been able to find another pair, and he’d said it would ruin continuity. My mother had told him to be a fucking professional and just shoot me from the fucking knees up. I can remember hearing her outburst through the partition wall of my trailer, shocked at her language.
Marco looks genuinely shocked, his eyes round and glassy.
‘That’s awful. I’m so sorry.’ He shudders, and there are goosebumps running up his arms. ‘Some people are sick.’
I nod, plucking at the sheet between my thumb and forefinger. Marco lays a hand gently on my arm.
‘Did you tell your parents?’
‘Yeah. My mum went to the press. Said people like that needed exposing. They came to our house and did a photoshoot in the garden with the two of us in front of the buddleia. She made me hold up one of the letters for the camera. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to touch it. It didn’t feel good. She said all publicity was good publicity.’
‘Did you ever go to the police?’
‘Of course. But it wasn’t considered a threat unless they did something to physically harm me.’
‘This is unbelievable.’
‘My mother was furious. She called it voodoo. Said it was someone on the set, someone jealous of me. She wanted to interrogate everyone to find out who. The director said no. Probably the only time he ever stood up to her.’
I lie back against the pillows as Marco moves on top of me, and now I can definitely feel his erection, heavy against my leg.
‘You must have been frightened.’
‘I was.’
He leans over and kisses the inside of my arm. There is a tattoo there; a hummingbird about the size of a coin. He had laughed when he first saw it, surprised. Katie Marigold with a tattoo, he’d said, shaking his head. The good girl gone wild.