‘Are these all mine, too?’ I say idiotically, knowing the question is basically rhetorical and that I fully deserve the look Gia is giving me now. The crazy-long inseams on the crystal-studded, low-rider jeans draped across the nearest case are a dead giveaway. Plus, Irina has long, bony, ballet-dancer’s feet that match the pair of towering snakeskin stilettos slung carelessly near the door. Gia’s feet are like something from the days of Imperial China: doll-sized.
‘You know I’m not even going to dignify that with an answer,’ Gia replies as she ushers me out of the room and back into the warmly-lit sitting room.
She paces across to an antique secretaire against one wall and retrieves a pile of glossy magazines from it, thrusting them in my direction.
‘You’re Irina Zhivanevskaya, remember? Supermodel, tabloid darling. One of the most recognised faces on the planet? Women all over the world copy the way you dress, the way you wear your hair, the places you hang out. They follow your every move, every disastrous hook-up, with morbid interest.’
I quickly scan the covers in my hands and Irina’s mesmerising face is on every one.
Gia gives a small laugh. ‘You’re one of the “one name” girls — like Gisele or Daria, Elle, Lara or Iman. You can’t just “go out”,’ she says. ‘You haven’t been able to just “go out” for several years. It takes full hair and make- up and a decoy car or two for you to just get up and leave any place. Let alone here. And especially now.’
She takes back one of the magazines in my hands and flicks through it until she finds the cover story and hands it back to me. I frown as I read about Irina’s latest battle with a very public addiction to drugs that’s left her dangerously erratic. I look up to see Gia’s cool eyes on me.
‘It’s mostly just old gossip hurriedly cobbled together because no one’s quite sure how bad it really is, not even me, because you lie and lie. I’ve quit on you three times already and you’ve somehow always managed to lure me back. You always know which buttons of mine to push. And I’m no fame whore, but I still kind of like the crazy shit that happens around you. Nobody else on earth gets a chance to see what you see, be where you are …
‘I expect you’ll sack me now,’ Gia says, looking down at the floor, ‘for talking out of turn like this …’
I shake my head. ‘On the contrary,’ I reply in Irina’s distinctive smoke-and-whiskey voice. ‘I value your honesty.’
I didn’t used to. When I’d first begun to realise there was something really wrong with me — that the face and body I happened to be inhabiting never seemed to bear any correlation to the person I was inside — I was so wound up and brittle, so wary, that I’d truly believed that honesty was for simpletons. But that was then, and this is now, and I could use more of it. The Eight? Luc, even? They’re all keeping something from me, something bad. I can feel it in my bones.
I rifle quickly through the other magazine articles about Irina and it’s clear that she may be famous, beautiful and rich beyond reason, but she’s a monster. Irina’s been pulled off an aeroplane for slapping a flight attendant who asked her to get off her mobile, she’s thrown champagne and punches at a love rival in a Berlin nightclub, had nude photos uploaded onto the net by a vindictive ex-boyfriend, been filmed scoring, mainlining and passing out, and already labelled a has-been at the ripe old age of nineteen. She’s a bitch-slapping, hair-pulling, tantrum-throwing piece of work.
As I hand the magazines back to Gia in amazement, she says, ‘The fact you’ve had to give yourself a refresher course and don’t appear to remember the highlights from your own life speaks volumes …’
I’m silent for a long while. There’s no getting around it. Irina must be some kind of highly-strung, celebrity clotheshorse. With a self-destructive streak a mile wide. I’m beginning to see the extent of my problem. Somehow, I need to locate Ryan again, vanish Irina right out of her very public life, and give the Eight the slip so that I can rendezvous with Luc back in Ryan’s hometown of Paradise. Have I covered everything?
I curse the Eight under my breath for their eternal interference, the tests within tests they seem determined always to set me.
‘You know this city better than I do,’ I say cajolingly. ‘I have to go out, I have to find someone. Couldn’t we just go — you and me? Walk out of here right now?’
Gia meets my eyes in astonishment. ‘You’d be screwed,’ she replies. ‘Even though the paparazzi are camped outside your usual hotel, as soon as you set foot outside here, a crowd of ordinary Italians with phone cams will be in your face broadcasting your whereabouts to the entire world. Everyone knows who you are and why you’re in Milan. And they’re all waiting for you to fall flat on your face.’
‘I really am “clean”,’ I say simply. ‘And I really do need your help. Because it’s important I find this guy — you don’t know how much.’
Gia rolls her eyes. ‘They’re always “important” until you leave them begging and broken and move on to your next victim. No way,’ she says firmly. ‘I’m under strict orders from management not to let you out on the street during the hours of darkness. You’re too much of an insurance risk these days. It’s not worth my hide to try and smuggle you out.’ Her eyes soften a little as she stares into my mutinous face. ‘I know it’s seemed like a prison sentence lately, but the arrangements are in place for your own good. You know that, don’t you?’
I feel a surge of anger at her words that makes the fingers of my left hand ache. Why does everyone think they know better than me?
Gia jerks a thumb at the bed. ‘Ask me again in daylight, okay? It can at least wait until after sunrise. Now get some rest. Final fittings begin in about three hours and they’ll be brutal. Giovanni’s already warned me that he won’t stand any more tardiness or attitude from you or you’ll lose the global print advertising contract, as well as the catwalk gig. Remember, you’ve only got this because your management called in all their favours. Somehow, the great Giovanni Re still has a soft spot for you even though you’ve always been a complete bitch to him. No one else is prepared to touch you right now, so don’t stuff this up. Sleep. Now. Capiche?’
I climb into bed reluctantly and she stares down into my face. ‘Let’s just start over, okay? Let’s just get through today as if none of this …’ she gestures in the air between us, ‘ever happened. I still might quit, you know. If I don’t kill you first.’
Gia walks over to the windows and draws the curtains shut again before heading back towards the door. She snaps off the light and closes the door firmly behind her.
I pull the plump, feather-light bedclothes right up under my chin and lie there in the dark, looking up at the ceiling.
It’s covered in an original Renaissance fresco, with lots of fine brushwork in gold and blue and blush pink. Maybe Tiepolo? Definitely in the style of Tiepolo, with all those luminous clouds and long-limbed, vigorous people. Who seem, like so much else, achingly familiar, but so very far beyond my reach.
3
I’m unable to sleep, even though I want to so badly. In all these years, sleep has been my only source of solace. In dreams, I feel most like myself, capable of anything, not limited by the human face and form I happen to be wearing.
And in dreams, I have access to that most longed-for of things — time with Luc. Though even that, the Eight would deny us, if They could.
When Luc first picked me out of that throng of elohim — each more beautiful than the last — to be his love, he said, to be his queen, some small part of me had refused to believe that it would last. Because when I looked at him, and then looked at me, I couldn’t understand what he saw in me, what set me apart from all the rest. But in a funny kind of way, we have lasted. Though it’s been years since we last touched, or even met face to face.
Gabriel told me himself that while I sleep — when the linkages between soul and body are at their weakest — Luc somehow still has access to my thoughts, access to me. It’s a connection that has persisted despite everything the Eight have done to keep us apart.
And though in my dreams, Luc sometimes seems more angry, more goading, more desperate, cruel and spiteful than I have ever remembered him to be, just the sight of him — golden-skinned, golden-haired, broad- shouldered, snake-hipped, long and lean, with eyes as pale as living ice, like broken water — is like a shot of pure adrenaline to the heart. He’s the most beautiful thing in creation, more beautiful than the sun. Call me shallow — and I’m sure plenty have; it’s just a feeling I get — I’ve always loved beautiful things.
