Her father looked up and frowned. “What’s up, lass?”
Sarah wiped her forearm over her eyes. “Nothing,” she said. “I’m fine.” She grasped the back of a chair and steadied herself. “Still a bit tired. Must be the flight.”
“Like a drop of brandy?”
“No, no. I’m all right, really, Dad. Don’t bother.” She rubbed her eyes again, this time with the backs of her hands.
He jerked his head. “It’s in that cabinet over there. I wouldn’t mind one myself.”
When she was a child, there had always been “medicinal’ brandy in the house, and the one time Sarah had been given a drink, after the shock of falling off her bike and spraining her wrist, she had hated it. She had tried it since, however, and didn’t mind the taste too much now.
She found the brandy and two glasses. She poured generous measures and put one in front of her father, then sat down with her own. He looked at his glass, smiled and said, “Hand slipped, did it?” then took a sip.
An awkward silence followed. Sarah didn’t know what to say. She didn’t want to ask him about his emphysema — no more, she imagined, than he wanted to talk about it. Finally, her father broke the silence: “Doing all right, then, are you, lass?”
“Yes.” Sarah cradled her glass in both hands and looked into the dark amber liquid. “Yes, I’m doing fine.”
“Being ill like this... ” He paused. “It changes you. Puts things in perspective. Know what I mean?”
Sarah nodded. She didn’t know what to say. Had he forgiven her?
“Aye,” he said. “Well... ” Then he shifted in his wheelchair, probably from embarrassment. As Sarah knew too well, he wasn’t a man given to easy expression of his feelings. Well, no men were, really, but some were better than others.
“So what’s Tinseltown like?” he asked.
“I... I don’t really... ” Sarah felt stuck for words. She had almost said she didn’t live there, but of course she did. What on earth could she be thinking of? “It’s all right, I suppose,” she went on. “It’s warm most of the time. I miss the change of seasons. The snowdrops and daffodils in spring, the leaves changing and falling in autumn. I mean, I don’t mind living there, but it’s so... ”
Lonely, she almost said, but she didn’t want to expose herself, certainly not to her father. Let’s bury Daddy in the sand! She shivered. Besides, isolation was what she wanted, wasn’t it? Seclusion, no complications. And the beach house was where she had begun to find herself, begun the reconstruction of Sally Bolton. Instead, she simply said, “Impermanent.”
“You’re not planning on staying there?” her father asked.
Sarah shrugged. That wasn’t what she meant at all, but she didn’t think she could explain it to him.
“Do you still live by yourself?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Isn’t it dangerous? We see things on the news. Muggings, gangs, riots and fires and suchlike.”
Sarah shrugged. “I suppose so. I’m working at the studio a lot. It’s safe there. They’ve got very good security. And it’s very quiet where I live. By the sea, like this.” Except for the maniac on the hill watching me through binoculars, she wanted to add. “You should come and visit,” she said, not realizing until she had spoken that he probably couldn’t travel very easily.
His lips formed a smile that his eyes didn’t echo. “I doubt I could survive that there smog,” he said.
Sarah laughed. “Oh, come on. You’d probably be better off than the rest of us, what with your oxygen and all. Besides, it’s not so bad these days. There’s a lot of emission controls.”
He grinned, showing crooked black and yellow teeth. “Aye, who knows? Maybe one day. I’d like to see all them stars on the pavement there before I die. Ronald Colman. Greta Garbo. Charlie Chaplin. Jimmy Stewart. I’ve always wanted to see those.”
Sarah was surprised. “I’ll take you,” she said. “I’ll show you them. I didn’t even know you liked movies.”
He shrugged. “Used to go to t’pictures a lot when I was a young lad. Before I met your mother and went down t’pit. Never had time for owt like that when you were a kid, though. I were always on some bloody awkward shift or another. That or sleeping.” He paused and took several deep breaths of oxygen before going on. “And there weren’t no videos and the like back then. It’s a lot easier now. I can’t get out and about much these days so I watch at home. Paula’s a good lass, she goes and fetches them for me. Old ones mostly. Black-and-white. They’re still the best. You can keep your sex and violence.” He looked directly at Sarah as he spoke, and she blushed and turned away, remembering the row they had after he’d seen her do a nude scene in a Channel Four film. The beginning of the end. “Nay,” he went on, “I hadn’t time for t’pictures back then, had I? Your mother, though... now that were another matter.”
They fell silent for a moment, Sarah contemplating the times when her mother took her to the pictures. More stimulus for the budding actress. All kinds of memories came rushing back. She remembered the first film she had ever seen, when she was five or six — Walt Disney’s One Hundred and One Dalmatians — and how scared she had been of Cruella De Ville.
When she next looked at her father, his eyes were closed and his chin rested on his chest. At first, she thought something terrible had happened to him, but she could still hear his struggle for breath and the slow hiss of oxygen.
Slowly, Sarah crept upstairs and picked up the envelope. She had been in two minds about it all evening: half afraid of opening it and morbidly curious about the contents. Now, while her father and the children slept, while Paula was at work, she opened it and slipped out the two pages. Then she read the words with mounting horror:
My Darling Little Star,
Oh my Love, if only everyone could see what I see. Patterns of the most delicate intricacy. Patterns of Spirit stripped of Flesh and Muscle. Sometimes I see Fountains of bright Blood gushing across a hundred television screens at once. Sometimes I hear you speak to me over the Electromagnetic Waves, telling me what I must do to prove my Love.
Don’t you know who I am, my Little Star? You are the Detective now. Look into your past and find me. I am there, the dark Shape in the Shadows of your Memory. Find me, my love. Speak to me. Love me. Let me free you. Tell me you Know. I will rescue you. I will win you back from Them and we will look into each other’s eyes over the candlelight and hold hands beyond the Flesh for centuries through the Mirrors of the Sea where none can live but us.
Tell me you accept my simple Offering. Now do you see how I can provide for you, how I can Honor you as no one else can? With your Love, there can be no Fear. With your Love, there will be no Limits.
But you must not think I enjoy causing pain. No, that is not it at all, that is not my purpose, surely you can see? The boy wanted Death. Every night he cruised the Boulevard looking for Death, for someone who would deliver him to his Destiny. The Boulevard of Death. I put him to sleep like a kind Anesthetist before I performed my Operation. My Knives were sharp. I spent hours sharpening them. I was gentle when I bent over him. He didn’t feel a thing. Please believe me.