Dark Angel 03: Broken Dream (3 page)

Seven forty-five p.m. I had fifteen long minutes to wait. Seven fifty came and went. At seven fifty-five I heard Orlando’s key turn in the lock.

Suddenly it was as if all my Christmases had come at once.

I threw myself at him and clasped my arms round his neck, held him as if I would never let go.

‘Hey, Tania,’ he breathed, kissing the top of my head. ‘Take it easy. Nobody died, did they?’

‘You idiot!’ I cried, flipping from relief into anger and pummelling his chest. ‘What happened? Where did you go?’

‘Where did
you
go?’

‘I was there, in exactly the place you left me. I waited for ever. I didn’t move from the spot.’

Orlando winced and caught me by the wrists. ‘Ouch, that hurt.’

‘Ouch!’ I retaliated. He’d grabbed my sore arm. ‘You didn’t come back,’ I sobbed into his chest.

‘Sorry, sorry, sorry!’ he told me when he understood my distress and saw the bruising on my wrist. ‘How did you get this?’

‘A guy jumped me. He stole my bag.’

‘When? Tania, are you OK?’ Now he held me at arms’ length and looked into my eyes. ‘Jeez, I’m beyond sorry. Sit down, tell me what happened.’

We sat on the bed and I began at the beginning, telling him everything, including the bad moments with the shape-shifting stallion, which is where he interrupted me.

‘The spirit stuff has started over?’ He frowned deeply and let his shoulders sag.

‘Yes. No. Maybe. What can I say?’

Orlando shook his head then took a deep breath. ‘Wait. This guy was attacking you, right?’

‘He dragged me into the bushes at the back of the carousel, stomped on my wrist and put his foot in my back, right here.’

‘Poor baby. You were scared out of your mind. And that’s when the horse thing happened?’

I nodded. ‘I just looked up and he – the stallion – came to life. You know how it is.’ Carved masks jump off walls, painted forests are real, men in wolf cloaks are transformed into wild beasts. It’s happened to me so often that I’ve stopped thinking how weird that must sound, written down like this.

‘Wait … wait!’ Orlando insisted. ‘Maybe it doesn’t mean what you think it means.’

‘It’s not my dark angel?’ I asked in a tiny voice. My bottom lip quivered; I felt five years old.

‘No, baby, it’s not,’ he said, slamming the door on the psychic stuff. ‘You were under pressure, you lost control and your imagination went into overdrive – end of story.’

Hold it right there! Orlando’s over-hasty protests plus my own sixth sense told me that I hadn’t got it wrong. I always know when the fallen angels are gathering. I won’t see them right away, might not identify them when I do, but I definitely sensed they were here in New York.

But Orlando’s arms were round me, protecting me and persuading me to override my intuition so I chose the easy way out. ‘You’re right,’ I whispered. ‘I got rid of my dark angel for good when Turner Lake broke its banks.’ In late fall, when the whole army of them shape-shifted into wolf men and fell howling into the flood.

‘I’m here. You’re safe,’ Orlando promised.

I so wanted it to be true.

We turned down the lights and threw back the quilt. The bed was soft and narrow, all the better for moulding our bodies together and feeling the warmth, the smoothness of our skin.

‘I love you,’ I murmured, my lips against his chest so that the words blurred.

Orlando tilted my chin and kissed my mouth.

We were gentle and slow, cocooned in cool white sheets until he peeled them back to free our limbs. Then he leaned back and rested on his elbow, blocking out the soft glow of the bedside lamp. His face was in shadow – I could just make out his dark hair falling forward over his forehead and the gleam of his grey eyes.

‘In Dallas,’ he began.

I leaned in and kissed him.

‘In Dallas I try to store up these moments in my memory and replay them – exactly the way you look, the shape of your body, the way your hair is spread out on the pillow, the angle your collarbone makes …’

‘And?’ I said, kissing him again.

‘Sometimes I can do it, but other times it all just fades. The image goes and it feels like I’m losing you.’

‘You’re not,’ I told him. There was no distance between us; my heart was always his.

We slept sweetly, Orlando on his back and me on my side with one arm resting on his stomach. All night long we hardly stirred.

It was still dark when we woke.

Here’s one of the differences between us – Orlando always clicks straight into action, launches into the day, while I lie half asleep with a warm, fuzzy, floaty feeling, longing for ten more minutes in bed.

‘You cancelled your bank cards, right?’ he asked.

‘Hmmm. What time is it?’

‘Seven thirty. Visa. Amex. Tania, you called your bank?’

Slowly I opened my eyes and looked at him. He was wearing his jeans but his belt was unbuckled and he was still naked from the waist up. I carried on gazing at him and feeling happy.

‘I guess you didn’t.’ Sliding off the bed, he unhooked his phone from its charger. ‘We need to report your stolen cards. What time does your workshop start?’

‘Nine o’clock.’ The thought of making it uptown to the Lincoln Center in less than ninety minutes brought me fully awake. Day one of my three-day course was on transferring old 35 millimetre film to a digital format. We would finish at one thirty, leaving the afternoons free.

‘So we need a small miracle to get you there on time.’ Orlando had his phone pinned to one ear. He grinned as he watched me jump out of bed and head for the bathroom.

‘I can do it!’ I yelled. ‘Five minutes in the shower, five to dry my hair, five to put on make-up, five more to get dressed.’

‘Really? I never saw you get ready in under an hour.’

‘Watch me.’

Five minutes later I was towelling myself dry and experimenting with the controls on the hotel hairdryer. ‘What are your plans for today?’

‘Number one – to buy you a new phone.’

‘So sweet,’ I murmured, finger hovering over the On switch. Orlando was more together than me over practical stuff and he enjoyed fixing this kind of problem.

Gently he took the dryer out of my hand and put me well behind schedule with a three-minute kiss.

‘Number two on my tourist to-do list is take pictures from Brooklyn Bridge. Number three, visit the Flatiron and Empire State …’

‘Meet me outside the Lincoln Center, one thirty?’ I checked as he handed over twenty dollars for emergency spending.

OK, so it was more like thirty minutes before we made our way to the elevator, but still impressive. I was wrapped up in scarf, hat and gloves, planning our subway route as we exited into the lobby.

‘You have a visitor,’ Mrs Waterman told us from behind her desk.

We thought she’d made a mistake until she pointed to Charlie Speke waiting by the front door.

‘Whoa!’ Orlando cried.

We caught sight of Charlie in profile, hands in pockets, scanning the rules of the B&B pinned up on the wall.

‘No – it’s not …’ I began to tell Orlando. ‘It’s his stuntman double, the guy who paid for my taxi fare – I think.’ My voice tailed off. Really, the resemblance to Jack Kane was mind-blowing.

‘Hey, Tania!’ Charlie’s greeting was warm and relaxed. ‘And you must be the missing boyfriend, Orlando?’ he added as he came across the Persian rug to shake hands. ‘Glad you finally showed up. Listen, I can see you’re all fired up and ready to go but I’m glad I caught you before you left the hotel. I have something for you.’

‘Dude!’ Orlando still couldn’t take his eyes off Charlie’s face.

‘Sorry.’ Charlie clicked his tongue against his teeth. ‘I’m always pissing people off this way.’

‘No, no problem.’ Swallowing and trying to act normally, still Orlando couldn’t help shaking his head in disbelief. ‘Do you ever – I mean, have you?’

‘Faked it? Pretended I’m really him?’

Orlando nodded.

Charlie gave us his dimpled Jack Kane smile. ‘I’d be lying if I said no. Sometimes with girls I meet in a bar. Just at first – maybe for a couple of minutes before I fess up. It’s so wrong, huh?’

‘No,’ Orlando assured him. ‘Dude, anyone would.’

‘But hey, here are the passes Natalia wanted me to give you.’

‘Passes?’ I took what Charlie was offering and read the print on the top card. ‘
Siege 2
– Crew’, with a bar code beneath.

‘These get you past Security,’ Charlie explained. ‘It’s like an admission into the non-public areas. Natalia’s idea.’

‘Why?’ I asked. ‘What did we do?’

Charlie found my amazement funny. In fact, he seemed permanently amused. ‘It’s not what you did, it’s what you had done to you. I met up with Jack and Natalia last night at their hotel. Me and a few other guys on the crew, we all got together for drinks in their private suite. I happened to mention the story about you and Orlando watching the shoot and how you two got split up. When Natalia heard about the attack, she was kind of upset. Natalia’s like that – she hates violence of any kind. So she said why not try to put it right and give you special passes for today?’

‘She really doesn’t need to do this,’ I pointed out. ‘It totally wasn’t her fault. Besides, I’m OK.’ I held up my hand and wiggled my wrist to prove it.

‘Good to hear it. But Natalia wants your trip to New York to be memorable for all the right reasons and she thought this might do it.’ Charlie looked as if he’d carried out his instructions and was ready to leave.

‘Cool!’ Orlando said. He’d got over the lookalike situation and seemed eager to accept.

‘Except I have my workshop,’ I reminded him.

‘Well, listen – you two can think about it,’ Charlie cut in. ‘You have the passes. You decide.’ There was a cab waiting for him at the kerbside, throwing out clouds of exhaust, red tail lights winking.

‘Thanks,’ Orlando told him as he made his exit. ‘Tell Natalia we really appreciate it.’

‘Be good to see you there,’ Charlie threw over his shoulder as he jumped into the cab.

Then he was gone.

My course wasn’t actually in the Lincoln Center but in a smaller building between the giant theatre complex and the Julliard School. It was a small, poorly funded place that stored archives and ran courses for movie obsessives like me. On the ground floor there was a cinema seating eighty people, currently running a biographical film about Andy Warhol. The rest of the building was for storage, with a few rooms dedicated to a variety of courses on the history and preservation of film.

Our tutor for the morning was a guy named Adrian Ross, and a fellow student on the course was … Macy Osmond!

I stepped in the elevator to take me to the sixth storey and there she was, with silver studs in her nose and ears and wild magenta hair.

‘Tania?’ she asked as she checked me out from head to toe – my black jacket, my dime-store striped scarf with matching hat and fingerless gloves, circa 1975.

‘Macy!’

‘What are you doing here?’ we asked simultaneously.

‘I’m studying film preservation,’ I answered. ‘The weekend course.’

‘Me too,’ she said.

Honestly, what are the odds? Except, when you think about it, she was definitely a movie fan like me, committed enough to stand out the whole morning in sub-zero temperatures, waiting for Jack Kane to arrive. And not just blockbuster movies, it turned out. She was also into indie films from Eastern Europe and Italy, especially recent low-budget videos shot on camcorders, which she told me about as we went up in the elevator.

‘So you live here in New York?’ I asked as we stepped out and walked along the corridor to the room where the workshop would take place.

‘I wish. No, I’m from Idaho – Nowheresville. How about you?’

‘Likewise. Nowheresville in Colorado – actually a town called Bitterroot.’

‘So where did you find a guy like – what’s his name – Orlando?’

I laughed and held the door open for her to walk through. ‘He’s from my home town.’

‘Jeez, are there any more like him on the shelf?’

I liked it that she openly admired my boyfriend but not in a threatening way. It made me feel that I had good taste. ‘Orlando is a one-off deal,’ I solemnly told her.

She sighed. ‘So thank him for chasing after me to give me back my purse.’

‘You can thank him yourself if you like. He’s meeting me after the workshop. Why not come for coffee?’

‘Deal,’ she replied as Adrian Ross began his talk on film decomposition, shrinkage and chemical disintegration.

The morning was everything I wanted it to be and I was learning a lot – all excellent information to help me in my college major except for a thirty-second blip when our lecturer showed us a piece of footage from a movie from the silent era.

We’re talking pre-1920, a melodrama starring a fragile, eerily beautiful actress named Lillian Gish – a girl with a halo of curls, huge eyes in a pale, heart-shaped face and a small, baby-doll mouth. In the scene we were studying, the camera shows her in close-up, acting out a combination of fear and despair. She’s totally expressive and surrounded by shadows. The 35mm film clicked and whirred through the projector. It started to jerk and falter. Lillian Gish’s terrified face froze.

And yet I saw those celluloid shadows keep on moving, closing in on Lillian, sliding from the screen and across the floor towards me, enveloping me in darkness. I caught my breath.

‘Are you sure you’re OK?’ Macy whispered. She was sitting next to me so she got a good look at my pale face and trembling hands. She handed me her bottle of water. ‘You’re not going to pass out?’

‘No, I’m cool.’ The projector whirred back into action. The film moved on.

At the end of the morning I kept to my plan of meeting up with Orlando, and Macy came too.

‘I hope you don’t mind,’ she told him. ‘If three’s a crowd …’

‘No way.’ He said he was happy to buy her coffee. ‘You heard what happened to Tania yesterday afternoon?’ he asked. And he told her the story.

‘Shoot, that was my fault,’ Macy sighed. Beneath the piercings and the delicate unicorn tattoo on the inside of her wrist, she was old-fashioned and demure. She actually did soften the word to ‘shoot’. ‘Orlando, if you hadn’t split from Tania to play the good guy and give me back my bag, none of that would have happened.’