Divas (62 page)

‘Drink,’ she said firmly. ‘You must relax for the healing to be most effective.’

Melody looked up at Aniela over the steam rising from the mug of tea, inhaling the delicate scent of infusing camomile and knowing that Aniela was right: she needed to stay as calm as possible.
But how could Aniela understand how she was feeling? The stolid, capable expression on the nurse’s square, farm-girl face, her wide shoulders and air of extreme competence all made Melody
feel hopelessly fragile and pathetically weak by comparison.

I should show her
, she thought suddenly.
She can’t realise why I’ve had the surgery – she can’t have seen the film. Well, why would she? It was just a piece of
trash, it bombed in the cinemas. And Aniela looks much too sensible to go to see that kind of exploitative nonsense.

Melody hesitated for a moment.

Is it too soon? Can I bear to see it, or will it tip me over the edge?

And then she looked at Aniela’s calm, composed demeanour, took a deep breath, and stood, carefully, so she didn’t strain her chest.

I do need to look at it sooner or later. And who better to hold my hand while I’m watching it than a hospital nurse?

‘I’ve got something I’d like to show you,’ she said, picking up her mug and walking over to the flatscreen TV, which was set in a black glass panel hanging from the
ceiling, dividing the living room from the dining area. Below the panel was a matching black glass unit into which were set the music system and the various consoles, topped with a black marble
shelf stacked high with a pile of DVDs: Melody was catching up on everything she’d missed while working flat-out for the last few years. Right at the bottom of the pile was the one she was
looking for, though she couldn’t even glance at its cover without wincing in as much pain as if Aniela were removing her nose splint.

Swiftly, Melody clicked open the jewel case and dropped the disc into the built-in player.

‘Brace yourself,’ she said dryly, indicating that Aniela should sit down on one of the sofas. Aniela might have drawn up a dining-room chair so she could examine Melody’s
surgery, but Melody sensed that the nurse’s training would not permit her to sit on a sofa without being invited to do so.

Melody fiddled with the remote controls. The TV sprang to bright, multicoloured life: a few seconds later, even Aniela’s professional poise was momentarily shattered as she drew in her
breath on a soft, short inhale of surprise at what she was seeing on the 52-inch screen.

It was the short loop of film that played in the background while you decided what to choose from the main menu. Quite naturally, the editor had picked a clip of Melody in action. But it
wasn’t the Melody sitting beside Aniela on the sofa. It was a pumped-up, lurid version, devoid of all the delicate beauty she had possessed before she took the part. Her cheeks were
artificially high and plump, squinching up her deep blue eyes, so she had to open them wider than was natural to compensate. Her nose was unnaturally ruler-straight, her chin protractor-round; her
lips were swollen like pillows, as were the round white breasts squashed up almost to her collarbones by the tight red corset she was wearing. On her bottom was a pair of bright blue pants, which,
like the corset, were covered in gold stars and trimmed heavily with gold edging. And as she threw her arms wide and spun around and around, around and around, her lips parted into an O, and her
implants bounced up and down, up and down, the sight of those plumped-up white breasts almost hypnotic—

‘You look like a porno doll,’ Aniela observed with crushing Eastern European bluntness.

Melody huffed a short, bitter laugh and clicked off the DVD again.

‘
Exactly
,’ she said. ‘That’s why the film tanked. I was supposed to be playing Wonder Woman. She’s a goddess. Strong, independent, sexy on her own terms. Not
a porno doll.’

‘Well, men must have liked that,’ Aniela commented, nodding at the now-blank screen. ‘Many of them like the porno dolls.’

Melody laughed again. And even though the sound was still bitter, she couldn’t help thinking:
This is the first time I’ve been able to look at that piece of rubbish since leaving
LA – and I’m laughing. How weird that it’s a complete stranger who helped me do it.

‘I don’t think a single woman went to see it in the cinemas,’ she said ruefully, turning to look directly at Aniela. ‘Or bought the DVD. They rushed that out after the
film tanked. With lots of extras of me doing stunts.’

Melody raised her hands, only to waist-height because of the breast surgery, and made little quotation marks as she said the last two words.

‘Stunts?’ Aniela said, her mouth relaxing into the hint of a smile. ‘You mean, more of this?’

She put her hands under her own smallish breasts and wobbled them up and down with the nonchalance of a nurse who’s seen so many naked bodies that she has no embarrassment left about her
own.

Melody burst out laughing.

‘
Exactly!
’ she said. ‘Ow, that hurts . . .’ She pressed her hands gingerly to her chest. ‘There was a whole bikini sequence – I had to wear the tiniest
bikini you ever saw in your life, it was awful – they did all these shots of me diving into a lake, again and again, and that’s literally all you see in one of the clips. Just my bum in
a tiny string bikini.’

She started to pull a face, and stopped immediately.

‘You see now why I had all the surgery?’ she said passionately. All her emphasis was channelled into her trained actress’s voice, since she was unable to use her features.
‘I wanted to go back to who I was before. Pretend the whole thing never happened.’

‘But why did you do it?’ Aniela asked, curious. ‘I have seen photographs, of course, for the surgery, of what you looked like, so that Dr Nassri could copy it. You were very
beautiful. You had no need to do that to yourself.’

Melody heaved a long sigh, and sipped at her tea.

‘My agent was so keen for me to go to Hollywood,’ she said. ‘I had loads of offers after
Wuthering Heights
. But my boyfriend wanted us to stay here. We’d made a
pact – we met in drama school, and we got together almost straight away. We said we’d be serious actors, we wouldn’t go to Hollywood till we’d done some years of stage in
the UK first. I meant it, I really did. And James – that was my boyfriend, James Delancey—’

‘I know him!’ Aniela said, smiling. ‘He is Doctor Who! He is very handsome, I think.’

‘Yes,’ Melody said softly, thinking of James, his floppy fringe, his sweet smile, his long, lean body. He was a real posh boy, a public-school, cricket-playing posh boy, but a lovely
one, with a gentle nature, always ready to see the funny side of things, to lighten tension with a joke. She’d fallen for him the moment she saw him; she’d always fancied that type of
boy, the kind that looked great in cricket whites or an officer’s uniform, who’d be cast as the young hero in any TV adaptation of a historical novel; James had already played Pip in
Great Expectations
, Larry in
The Alexandra Quartet
, and Charles Ryder in a stage version of
Brideshead Revisited
. He’d been over the moon to be cast as Doctor Who, not
just because he loved the show, but also because it was a pleasant change to be acting opposite aliens and wearing modern dress.

‘And he is your boyfriend? Why does he not come to visit you? Siobhan says that you have no visitors. You are always by yourself,’ Aniela commented.

Melody recoiled a little. It was all very well having a nurse who was completely unshockable to confide in, but the downside, clearly, was that Aniela had absolutely no British reserve
whatsoever.

She looked at Aniela over the rim of her mug. There was nothing gossipy about the nurse, Melody could tell. Her years in the celebrity spotlight had made her very familiar with the tell-tale
indications: the gleaming, beady eyes, the head cocked forward, eager for a snippet of juicy information that could be instantly tweeted as soon as they left you. Siobhan had been like that, always
trying to pump Melody as she changed her dressings, casually dropping the names of James or Melody’s other co-stars into her stream of chatter, hoping to prompt an unguarded response from
her. Melody hadn’t trusted Siobhan as far as she could throw her – which, in her current bruised, post-operative state, was no distance at all.

Aniela, Melody could already tell, was the polar opposite.

‘We broke up,’ she said. ‘I haven’t seen him in over a year. I went to LA, and the distance made things just too difficult.’

Well, that’s the official line, anyway.

‘But he could still visit you,’ Aniela said. ‘Or your family. It’s good for the healing, to have people around. Not to be all alone, especially with Christmas
coming.’ She cleared her throat. ‘You do not need to be here, you know,’ she informed her patient frankly. ‘You could go back to your home, and maybe have a nurse come every
day if you wanted to. Though even that is not really necessary. Dr Nassri told you that, correct? There is really nothing for me to do any more, now that your wounds have closed and you are healing
well.’

‘I don’t want anyone to see me like this!’ Melody said, her voice rising. ‘
Look
at me! I want to hide out here and not see
anyone
, not until my face is
recovered. I want to just hole up and hibernate till I don’t look like—’ she glanced at herself in the black glass border to the TV – ‘like I got the worst of it in a
street fight.’ She looked down again. ‘Besides, I don’t have anywhere to go. I was sharing a house in Shoreditch with my boyfriend, and I moved out when we broke up. I don’t
have a place in London, and if I go to my family the paparazzi are bound to find out. There’s nothing they’d love more than to get photographs of me looking like this.’

She shuddered.

‘I understand. You want to be a bear,’ Aniela said, a glimmer of amusement in her voice.

‘A
what
?’ Melody, asked, completely taken aback.

‘You want to be a bear,’ Aniela repeated, standing up. ‘To hibernate, like you said. To hide in your cave all winter, until spring comes.’

And again, despite herself, Melody couldn’t help giggling.

‘Ow!’ she said. ‘Don’t make me laugh!’

‘I am sorry,’ Aniela said, smiling down at her. She walked over to the DVD player, pressed the Eject button and popped out the
Wonder Woman
disc. ‘I don’t think
you should watch this any more,’ she said. ‘No more porno doll.’

Snapping the disc into its case, she dropped it into one of the storage drawers and slid the drawer shut with a decisive click.

‘I will come back tomorrow at the same time,’ she said. ‘You have my pager number? It is the same as the one for Siobhan.’

Aniela patted the little black gadget clipped to her belt.

‘You may ring me when you need,’ she said. ‘It will not be a problem. There is only you and one more patient staying here over Christmas and New Year. I have plenty of time for
both of you.’

‘Are you here over the whole holidays?’ Melody asked.

Aniela nodded.

‘I look after only two patients here at Limehouse Reach,’ she said, ‘I sleep in the Clinic next door, and there are no operations until the first week in January, no one there
to look after. So you may ring me without any worry. I am here twenty-four seven.’

‘Won’t
you
be lonely?’ Melody said unguardedly, her dark blue eyes looking up at Aniela, full of concern. ‘Sleeping in the Clinic with no one around? And not
seeing your family?’

Aniela shook her head briskly.

‘No,’ she said, a brief smile flitting over her face. ‘Not at all. I will be very quiet and peaceful. Now—’ she looked at the shadow clock on the wall over
Melody’s head – ‘I must go to meet my other patient. It was very nice to meet you, Melody.’

‘You too,’ Melody said, biting her lip to stop tears coming to her eyes;
you’re being pathetic!
she told herself savagely.
Remember at ComicCon last July, you had to
have a whole phalanx of security guys around you because the geeks would have torn you to pieces? You could barely breathe for all the crowds and reporters shoving mikes in your face and fans
screaming questions at you! You couldn’t wait to get back to your hotel suite and be by yourself! And now you’re feeling sorry for yourself because the duty nurse is going and leaving
you on your own . . .

Pull yourself together, Melody. You made this bed and now you’ve got to lie in it.

The door of the apartment shut behind Aniela. Melody closed her eyes, determined not to cry. Over the past few months, she had cried enough for years to come, at the loss of everything that had
fallen so easily into her lap: a wonderful boyfriend, a brilliant career. Now it was all in ruins at her feet.

I should never have done that bloody film.

‘I know you said no blockbusters, no action films,’ her LA agent had said eagerly over the phone. ‘But, Melody, you gotta read this! They’re mad for you –
you’ve got the perfect colouring for Wonder Woman, and you can handle comedy. You gotta at least have a
look
at it . . .’

It was everything a comic adaptation should be. Funny, sexy, witty, packed with breathtaking action sequences. Wonder Woman herself was tough, wise-cracking, with the dry sense of humour of
Robert Downey Jr’s character in the first
Iron Man
film, a woman entirely in control of her own destiny, flicking her golden lasso, ensnaring the baddies. The showdown between her and
the Nazi villainess, Baroness von Gunther, was both hilarious and genuinely dramatic. Melody couldn’t put the script down; she spent the day wandering round the house she shared with James,
reading out juicy lines to him, and when she finally finished it she drew a deep breath, dragged him down onto the sofa with her and begged him to read it, to understand why she was going to break
the pact that they had made and audition for the part.

‘We said we’d stay here for the next two years!’ James had said passionately, pushing back the lock of hair that always fell over his forehead. ‘We
promised
each
other! You know what happens – people go off to LA before they’ve done enough stage here and you can never get that experience back!’ His hazel eyes widened as another thought
occurred to him. ‘And when are they shooting? What about
Romeo and Juliet
? Rehearsals start in three months, Mel!’