Muse (17 page)

I wave a hand at her to diffuse my words. ‘I’m older than you are,’ I say, ‘for all the jibes I made earlier. And I’m tired. A tiredness that sleep cannot mend. I thirst, I hunger, for freedom. I do not thirst, or hunger, for your blood.’ I laugh at the words, but it’s a despairing sound.

She hovers beside me, uncertainly, and I say harshly, ‘
Go
, while you can. People, like me, are coming for me soon.’

Her unusual eyes, one blue, one brown, grow even wider, more fearful.

‘When I … leave Irina,’ I add more gently, ‘it could get … messy. It has to happen sometime before Irina’s scheduled to leave Milan. Maybe we
should
pull the plug on all this. I don’t want to be responsible for anything happening to Giovanni or his final
collection. This time it’s me calling the bad luck down on everyone. It’s not Irina’s fault.’

‘Don’t you see?’ Gia says. ‘It doesn’t matter what you decide, because the thing you’re so afraid of is already here, it’s already happening. You can’t stop it. So you either give in to your fear, or just carry on. What other choices are there? You’re just going to submit? Give up? That doesn’t gel with what I … know about you.’

We stare at each other for a long moment. ‘I can’t be responsible for you,’ I warn. ‘I couldn’t bear it if you …’

I look down at my hands, and for a moment I see Lela Neill’s small, capable fingers and trim wrists. She’s going to be buried on Monday. I hug myself tightly so that Gia will not see me shaking.

She reaches out and gives my shoulder a small squeeze. ‘I can take care of myself,’ she replies quietly. ‘What do you think I’ve been doing all this time?’

‘Now just put them on,’ she says, pointing at the red shoes, and I hear some of the customary steel return to her voice. ‘And start channelling Irina, wherever the hell she’s gone. I’ll work out something for you to wear.’

‘No, no, no!’ Gia shouts, throwing up her hands as I flounce towards her up the ‘runway’ she’s cleared down the centre of the sitting room. ‘More hips, more hair, more arms, less shoulder. Chin up, head back, bum in … This is
hopeless
.’

Her mobile phone rings and she waves both hands frustratedly at me to stop.

She’s speaking in rapid Italian but I understand every word she’s saying to whoever’s on the line. ‘Another hour,’ she pleads. ‘Run through the other girls first without her, and as soon as we arrive do a final run-through with Irina’s looks included, okay? No need for hair and make-up. There’s no time. Yes, I know, but yesterday she could barely walk …’ She shoots me a look. ‘Yes, yes, I understand, but her feet are still a little sore. We’re just giving them a final assessment before we head over. No, she doesn’t need more sedatives, it’s the last thing she needs. She’s just very stiff. We’re just doing a few … stretching exercises’ — I have to stifle a laugh — ‘and then we’ll get down to the cars. I’ll call you if there’s any delay, okay? I appreciate your patience.
Ciao, bello.
’

She hangs up and glares at me. ‘We have a serious problem. A five-year-old girl could do better “top model” than you can. The models Giovanni’s assembled for this love fest are the best-of-the-best, and they’re mostly humourless robots spliced with piranha — they will
eat you alive
then fight over your bones, and your clothes. You have to get this right or Irina’s ruined anyway. Her new donkey walk might even push the Lake Como disaster off the front pages. As soon as everyone at the Galleria gets a load of the way you’re moving right now? Pandemonium.’

I can’t even visualise the things she’s told me to incorporate into my walk, let alone put them all together.

‘Could you have put me in jeans that are any tighter or longer than these?’ I complain as I duck-walk past her. ‘And what’s with the chain mail shirt? The gold dress Giovanni made for me is lighter than this.’

‘Oooh,’ Gia snarls, ‘I wish I could
show
you how Irina does it!’

I’m suddenly reminded of the memories I lifted straight out of Giovanni Re’s head when I touched his skin that first time. Of how Irina had gotten up on that makeshift catwalk and transformed from a
sixteen year old with bad hair, clothes and eye make-up, into a steely-eyed, ground-shaking Valkyrie.

‘Is this how?’ I say as I recreate how I saw Irina move in my mind’s eye.

I pivot sharply at a point near the front door of the suite and stalk back the other way, pausing dramatically near the dining table Gia shoved to one side before angling my body first one way, then another, and pivoting again to stalk back down the cleared area towards her. To say there’s a tearing pain in my arches, ankles and calves from trying to move quickly in the eight inch heels would be a giant understatement. Everything is simultaneously numb and on fire.

Gia’s tight expression clears as I get nearer to her. ‘Better,’ she breathes. ‘That’s much closer to the way she walks — we can work with this. But straighten your head and neck — imagine a string pulling you up by the top of your scalp. Loosen your arms, but don’t throw them out too wide; more weight on the ball of the foot, more length between the steps; and the eyes, give me knowing and sultry and —’

‘Go to hell?’ I finish for her.

I make subtle adjustments to Irina’s posture, her speed, her stalk, and do the pause, angle, pause, angle
I picked up out of Giovanni’s memory, then pivot and power back down the room away from Gia. When I get there, I place Irina’s hands on her bony hips and look at Gia over my shoulder, shaking out Irina’s mane of burnt caramel-coloured hair.

‘Exactly,’ Gia murmurs. ‘You’ve got it. That
go-to-hell
stare of hers. It’s perfect. Better than perfect. There’s nothing robotic about you, you don’t seem as jaded as Irina’s been lately. She’s been phoning it in. But you? It’s like you’re doing it for the first time.’

I burst out laughing at her words, and Gia — looking startled — can’t help but join me a second later.

‘I suppose you are,’ she says.

But then her laughter dies and she doesn’t say anything more for several minutes, she just twirls her fingers a few times, indicating that I should turn, keep moving, turn, keep moving.

The doorbell suddenly peals loudly and Gia claps her hands.

‘You need
fuel
, right? That’s what you called it the other day; it kind of stuck in my head when you said it, because Irina likes to pretend that food is entirely unnecessary to sustain life. Let’s have a quick pit stop to get your story straight. We need to come up with
something that will convince all the people it took to restrain you last night — physically and medically — that you’re well enough to walk. And then we need to hustle. Everyone’s waiting impatiently for the star to arrive.’

‘Juice, toasted
panini
filled with roasted vegetables and goat’s cheese, fruit salad,’ Gia says as she lifts the silver domes off the food on the tray. ‘Just eat. We can move all this furniture back later.’

We perch on armchairs close to each other as Gia fires questions at me.

‘You thought you saw a …?’

‘Dog,’ I reply firmly, taking a bite of the still warm, golden-brown, crescent-shaped sandwich. ‘A large dog. Standing in the road. Directly in front of the car.’

‘O-kay,’ Gia says with her mouth full, ‘that could work. But why couldn’t anyone else see it?’

I take another big bite of my
panini
, and lick a splodge of thyme-encrusted goat’s cheese off my lower lip as I think. ‘I had a reaction to the stuff Felipe put in my drink. It wasn’t my fault. I didn’t know the drink was spiked. Felipe’s not around to contradict me, is he?’

Gia shakes her head. ‘Won’t wash. Giovanni’s physician took a blood sample and it showed negative for traces of drugs or alcohol. You were stone-cold sober and drug-free when you saw that “dog”. How do you explain that?’

I finish my sandwich, and drain the glass of pineapple juice Gia’s placed in front of me in one hit before reaching for the bowl of fruit pieces and a fork. ‘The way I tried to pass myself off to you as Irina,’ I say, as I chew. ‘I have a mental illness …’

Gia’s eyes widen and she puts her
panini
back down on the plate on her knees. ‘And what Felipe gave you exacerbated some underlying condition you’re too afraid to have checked out. It’ll mean a stay in a rehab facility in the not-too-distant future, but even though you’re feeling very fragile, you’re physically well enough to do one last charity appearance …’ She crosses back to the trolley and puts her half-eaten
panini
back on it. ‘Works for me.’

She takes a sip of her juice, then puts it down, lost in thought. I cross over to her and put my glass and plate down next to hers. I see her shoulders tense as she zeroes in on the backs of my hands. Is it my imagination, or is Irina’s skin the tiniest bit …
luminescent? When I stare harder at it, it just seems like ordinary skin to me.

I know Gia’s biting back a million questions as she crosses over to the console table near the door and picks up the telephone receiver. She looks down and dials a number.

‘I’ve always liked puzzles,’ she mutters as she waits for someone to pick up. ‘Who knew one day I’d end up working for one?’

It’s probably a ten-minute walk from my hotel to Galleria Vittorio Emanuele — the place where the parade’s supposed to take place. But when you’re Irina Zhivanevskaya you don’t ever walk anywhere unless you’re paid to do it. So we drive there, and it takes us twenty minutes to make it from my suite to the car. The whole time Vladimir watches me, stony-faced, with his wise-guy eyes, and says nothing. He doesn’t even try to make nice, because at some subterranean level, he doesn’t recognise who I am any more.

Gia watches him watching me and calls Gianfranco, feeding him the fake story we’ve worked out together, in fluent Italian. Then she calls Giovanni’s head of security and tells him the same story, in the same language, and says we’re on our way. Lastly, she
calls someone at Irina’s management company’s head office in New York to let them know that Giovanni Re won’t be suing for breach of contract now, because Irina’s feeling much, much better.

It takes us another half-hour to reach the edges of the Piazza del Duomo, where paparazzi surround the car, shouting twenty questions in almost as many languages. Some of them even start banging on the outside of the limo. But the driver just keeps crawling forward at a snail’s pace and, like an overcrowded life raft complete with clinging humanity, we edge closer towards a grand, triumphal arch at least one hundred feet high.

I realise as we get closer to the giant arch that it’s the main entrance to the Victorian-era Galleria: a building with a wide frontage onto the Piazza del Duomo that’s punctuated by graceful arched windows. The few people allowed to pass under the arch by the burly security guards standing on either side, look like ants.

Everybody seems to be focused on my car. Nobody’s looking at the sky, which is filled with billowing grey storm clouds as high as mountain ranges. They look like the massed sails of a fleet of Spanish galleons setting out to war. Nuriel and Luc
are out there in that, somewhere. If one of them hasn’t already killed the other. The thought makes my stomach lurch.

Don’t force me to choose sides
, I think feverishly.
Please.

Gia sees me shiver, and knocks on the glass screen between the three of us and the driver, telling him to turn up the heating.

As we draw up to the entrance of the Galleria, she points out the two giant banners hanging down either side of the high, open archway and murmurs, ‘You see how much faith Giovanni placed in you? The gamble he took on you was huge.’

The left banner, at least one hundred feet tall, features a colour photograph of a model with strong eye make-up and a sky-high beehive wearing a stunning red, vintage-style evening gown, the kind that Gia herself would kill to own. I realise belatedly that the dress looks vintage because the photograph itself is from another time, maybe the 1960s. And it’s in Giovanni’s signature red,
rosso Re
. It’s from the start of his career.

The right banner depicts a model whose small, symmetrical face is dominated by smoky, smouldering eyes; her long, caramel-coloured hair is tousled and
unbound, and pulled forward over her shoulders. She’s wearing a gown that looks as if it’s made of chain mail created from molten gold. Her hands are wrapped around the bejewelled pommel of a golden sword, which she’s holding point down before her, like a medieval knight in a painting or on a tombstone. The model’s long, narrow feet are bare and she looks like a pagan warrior queen, a powerful sorceress.

The two images side by side are so stunning, and so unlike each other, that it takes me a moment to realise that the figure on the right is Irina. It’s the opening look from the parade, without the wings.

‘When was it taken?’ I whisper, craning my head up to study the vast image through the tinted windscreen of the limo. I would have remembered the sword. It would have made me recoil even more than the wings.

‘When
we
arrived three days ago,’ Gia replies softly. ‘But before …
you
did.’

Vladimir startles us both by saying loudly, ‘We’re in position.’

The car door on my side is suddenly thrown open and I have to shield my eyes from the sudden glare of camera flashes. Giovanni’s head of security leans in and Vladimir hands me out towards him.

‘Well, if it isn’t Little Miss Crackhead,’ I hear someone say nastily as I make my way under the arch, blinking as my eyes adjust to the level of light inside the Galleria.

In the strange way I sometimes have of seeing too much almost at once, I see that the building — a kind of glorified shopping mall that’s four storeys high — is cruciform in layout, shaped like a giant cross. That fact alone raises instant goose flesh on the backs of my arms. It’s formed of two covered arcades at right angles to each other, each with a vaulted, arched ceiling built of struts of iron and thousands of panes of glass. Where the two arcades meet in the middle, there’s an octagonal space, topped by a giant glass and iron dome that has to be over one hundred and sixty feet across. The floors of the Galleria are inlaid with mosaic tiles that form symbols and patterns of great beauty and rich colour, and there are colourful painted scenes upon the pendentives beneath the gigantic dome. It’s all stunningly beautiful.

The arcade I’m facing down forms the north–south axis of the cross. A team of black-clad men and
women are putting the finishing touches to a narrow white catwalk that runs down its dead centre, and laying out white chairs in rows on either side. The catwalk features a circular platform that’s centred beneath the giant dome, and narrows again as you move away from the dome towards the northern end of the arcade. There it ends abruptly in a white, featureless ‘wall’ with a concealed opening, which is actually one wall set in front of another that runs back behind the first. The effect is such that the people I see coming and going through the narrow aperture seem to suddenly just appear or disappear.

More people are busy setting out white chairs around the central, circular platform, while others are standing at the iron railings of the third-floor balconies, carefully making final adjustments to the false wall of giant video screens that hides the shopfronts inside the Galleria from the audience. It’s as if real life is not allowed to intrude on the spectacle Giovanni has planned. I realise suddenly that all these people are busy turning this glorious building into a kind of giant blank canvas on which his final vision is to be projected.

Gia takes me by the arm as Juliana materialises in front of us, surrounded by security men in dark
suits. There’s a worried crease between her strong, dark brows, but a smile lightens her expression when she meets my eyes.

‘You are just in time,’ she says to us both. ‘While they test the sound and the light, we make you ready, yes? Come this way.’

We’re absorbed into Juliana’s security detail and move as a group towards the northern end of the catwalk, through a sea of stares and whispers and gestures.

Someone abruptly turns on the lightshow. My hands fly up to my face in awe as the entire space — the blank white of the catwalk, the video screen-covered walls, even the chairs — is suddenly transformed into a moving, changing panorama of the universe. Giovanni has brought the cosmos inside: everywhere I turn, I see comets, black holes, supernovae, strange fissures in time and space, twisting and curling overhead, all around. Along one side of the arcade, a solid wall of stars melds into the weird towering shapes of stellar spires — so much like reaching fingers, the expelled breath of the universe itself. On the other, the remnants of supernovae morph into the surface of distant Io, then Saturn’s rings, then the boiling fury of the sun. Celestial bodies wheel
and turn all about us, in every colour, in every hue, as if painted by an artist’s hand. And almost every person inside the Galleria stops what they’re doing to witness these acts of creation and death, time itself, unfolding all around us, moving across our skin, our faces.

As we walk beneath the giant dome, it comes to life, dripping with a cobweb of tiny, sparkling blue lights. A blue so pale and luminescent it’s almost the colour of holy fire.

And the music that suddenly bursts forth from the speakers is the operatic duet that was playing when I walked through the atrium of Atelier Re yesterday. Two voices, two
soprani
, singing a piercing melody so haunting, and so familiar, that I screw up my face in pain, trying to remember where I’ve heard it before, how I know it.

‘It’s the closing song,’ Juliana bellows cheerfully. ‘
Your
song. You appear in the white bride’s dress, the wings and
boom
— the voices, like the angels. The end. Happiness.’

Happiness?

It’s too much for me to process. I feel as if I’m spinning weightlessly, out of control, through space as those disembodied
soprani
sing:

It’s French. Someone told me that once. From Léo Delibes’
Lakmé
. The Flower Duet. And it means:
Under the thick dome where the white jasmine … Ah! We descend, together!

Lauren Daley and Jennifer Appleton sang that duet together one night, at an inter-school concert in the tiny town of Paradise. After that, their lives were never the same again.

I don’t believe in fate. I believe in coincidence, that’s how I’m wired. But when I hear the words Paul Stenborg uttered in another life, in Carmen’s life, coming at me from the surround-sound system at a volume loud enough to split my head open, I actually swoon. I fall to the ground.

And the uncaring universe that swirls and turns and changes above me, that reminds me so much of home, goes dark for a little while.

‘Irina?’

‘It’s a gigantic publicity stunt, I tell you.’ It’s a woman’s voice, malicious. Hint of an Irish accent. ‘The gold dress should’ve been mine, anyway. Couldn’t you just see it with my hair? I told Giovanni it was a mistake to cast her, from the word
go
.’

‘Irina?’

‘
Was ist los?
’ Another woman, speaking German, sounding curious.

Voices are coming at me from everywhere, in languages I don’t ever recall knowing or speaking — Japanese, Dutch, Korean, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, Sudanese — almost all asking:
What’s wrong with Irina? What’s she on? What’s she playing at? What’s her game?

I open my eyes to find that I’m backstage. I’ve been carried behind that blank white wall at the northern end of the building. I’m slumped untidily in a raised armchair before a mirror surrounded by light bulbs. It’s a make-up chair, I realise, as I see, on either side of me, models having their faces touched up or painted, all craning their swanlike necks, trying to get a look at me between brushstrokes. There are people everywhere, crammed into this narrow area alongside racks and racks of mind-blowingly
beautiful, intricately detailed gowns. Some are in various states of undress, curlers piled high atop their heads; others clutch the weapons of beauty in their hands: brushes, dryers, tongs. A parade of elongated, idiosyncratic beauties passes behind my chair constantly, all wearing that fearsome demon facepaint Tommy devised: smoky eyes touched with gold, strong brows, and blood-red lips and nails.

I see Irina’s face in the mirror. Free of any make-up.

Giovanni’s, Juliana’s, Gudrun’s, Gia’s and Tommy’s faces are reflected there, too, crowded around Irina, all looking concerned.

And my own face is reflected there, though visible only to me and to Gudrun. She meets my eyes, knowingly, in the mirror and I wonder again why she always wears modest, high-necked, old lady’s blouses when she has such killer curves.

‘Say something,’ Tommy pleads in his light, silvery voice. ‘Don’t tell me you fractured that multimillion-dollar skull of yours when you went down.’

‘You say she has the trouble with her
feet
,’ Juliana murmurs to Gia. ‘Not the balance. Feet and balance together — that’s very bad. How can she walk?’

I see Gudrun — her skin faintly gleaming, but only
to my eyes — wrap one of Giovanni’s arms in hers. She pats him on the hand reassuringly, her blood-red nails glistening.

‘It’s too late to change the banner now,’ Giovanni confides to her worriedly. ‘It must remain. But Orla will have her way. We must end with the silver gown.’

A woman with flaming red hair, dressed in a heavily beaded, blue-green bustier, blue jeans and bare feet, gives an excited little clap at the periphery of my sight.

‘Over my dead body,’ I say, refocusing the attention of everyone gathered around me. ‘And, clearly, I’m not dead.’

The redhead’s expression congeals as Tommy calls, ‘Let’s do this, people! In ten. From the top.’

I place my hands upon the padded armrests of my chair and hoist myself upright, then lift my arms resignedly as a phalanx of complete strangers rushes at me, shouting at me to take my clothes off and
for heaven’s sake, be quick about it
.

When we return to the hotel suite around midnight, I’m in no mood to talk.

‘Get some rest,’ Gia says at the door to my bedroom. ‘You were unbelievable today — I had
shivers down my spine every time you appeared. And when Orla stepped on the hem of her silver dress and fell out of it
and
her shoes right before you came out in the fantasy bridal gown, I nearly died laughing.’

‘Just one more day … Mercy,’ she says my name hesitantly, ‘then maybe you’ll get to go … home.’

I don’t reply. I just lock myself inside the ensuite bathroom and stare at my reflection, at Irina’s, and shed her clothing as if it is contaminated.

Then I sit on the floor of the marble shower stall and just let the water pound down on me for a while.

When I fall asleep, it’s as if I slide into a black and formless pit.

It’s out of habit that I reach for Luc in my dreams, search for that slender thread that continues to bind us together, even though I still can’t reconcile the horrors I witnessed through his eyes, through the news footage, with the Luc I love and remember.