The Hollywood Effect (6 page)

“Sorry about that...”

“Not your fault, I suppose. Really. It’s that damn Matt Rivers. Slimy bastard. What was he even DOING there anyway?! Despicable man.” I shook myself and headed into my room. I found a nice pair of jeans that I knew made my butt look nice, and sorted through a pile of shirts. After deliberating for a few minutes I settled on a fitted pale blue shirt. I spent a bit more time than usual on my make-up - I wiped off the first attempt after Liam came in, laughed, and said I looked more like I was going to Vegas than a cemetery. “I normally just put some mascara on! I have no idea what I’m doing!” I protested.
 

“Well then, just put your mascara on. I like you with not much make up on. You look real,” he said. I felt myself start to blush.
 

“How do I look?” I asked as I stepped out of the bathroom for the second time.
 

“Lovely,” he said. “How about me?”
 

I looked him up and down. Jeans and a casual T-shirt, yet he still looked like a million dollars.
 

“You’ll do,” I said with a slight smirk that I tried to hide.
 

“Shall we go? Does that shop on the main street still sell flowers?” Liam asked.
 

“Yeah, I think so.”

“Okay. Let’s run the gauntlet.”

I checked myself in the hallway mirror one last time and tucked a stray curl into place. I looked okay. Maybe even nice. Nothing on Holly Monroe though, I couldn’t help but think, and as that nasty online blog couldn’t help but point out. I should really stay away from them.
 

“Ready?” Liam turned back and asked me.
 

“As ready as I’ll ever be,” I said. He opened the door and we stepped out into the sunlight. I looked out over the sea of photographers in bewilderment. I’d always thought Tarang was a safe place. Usually when Liam came home it was an escape for him. Not this time.
 

We both headed for my little car, parked in the driveway. Liam surprised me by grabbing my hand. I looked at him questioningly, but he just smirked.
 

“What was that?” I asked as we got into the car. He just shrugged.
 

“Something for them to write about,” he laughed humourlessly.
 

“Liam Alexander Burns, are you trying to use me to make Holly jealous?” I demanded as I put my seatbelt on and started the car.
 

“No! I...”

I turned to him and gave him my ‘look’ that I usually reserved for students who were trying to tell me they forgot their USB at home but they swore they’d done the assignment. At least they’d moved on from ‘the dog ate my homework’ excuse…

“Well... maybe. Sorry.”

“So you should be.” I reversed slowly out the driveway, paranoid that I’d run over one of the paparazzi and that they’d try to sue me.
 

“Just ignore them,” Liam said as we backed through the swarm.
 

“Easy for you to say,” I said. “You’re used to this. I didn’t sign up for this - I’m not interesting. I’m nobody.”
 

“You’re not nobody.”
 

“To them I am,” I said. We cleared the crowd and their flashing cameras.
 

“They’re the definition of no-one,” Liam said dismissively.
 

He stared stonily ahead as we drove up the street.
 

“Should I give them the grand tour of Tarang?” I asked, glancing in my rearview mirror. A handful of cars had started following us. Liam laughed.
 

“It’ll be the highlight of their day. Hey, who knows, we could be doing wonders for the Tarang tourism trade,” Liam said.
 

“What tourism trade?”
 

“Exactly.”

“You probably already are. They’ve got to be staying somewhere,” I said. “They’ve probably booked the hotel and motel
and
the B&B right out.”
 

“The biggest event since the last local wedding.”

It didn’t take us long to get to the main street. I was careful to drive like a nanna and stick to the speed limits. Didn’t want to give them anything else to write about that my students could hold over me.
 

I led my train of vehicles down the wide, tree-lined main street. The rose bushes were looking particularly lovely at the moment. Maybe one of the paparazzi moonlighted as a garden photographer. Another thing that I liked about living in a country town was the parking. I hadn’t had to learn to parallel park or reverse park or anything like that until I’d moved to the city. The bays were long and plentiful in Tarang. All you had to do was drive right in. If there wasn’t a park in front of the shop you wanted, you’d just drive around the block and more often than not there would be a spot when you came back. My ex-boyfriend Evan - a complete city boy if there ever was one - would laugh at me doing laps in Melbourne trying to find an easy park.
 

Today was a good day. One empty spot right in front of the florist. I parked and stopped the car. The paparazzi started to slow down, but a large B-double truck with a load full of cattle was bearing down on them, and they seemed to decide it was safer to keep going. I watched out of the corner of my eye as they drove around to the other side of the avenue and set up with their camera’s pointing our way.
 

“Do you want to stay in the car?” I asked as I undid my seatbelt and fished around the backseat for my handbag.
 

“Nah,” Liam said and got out of the car. “Secret’s out, no point hiding anymore. I’ll just be as boring as possible. Buying flowers and going to the cemetery, not sure how they can sensationalise that. Come on.”
 

I followed him into the florist, and tried to resist glancing over my shoulder at the waiting camera’s. I had the mad urge to wave at them. It didn’t take us long to pick out two bunches of flowers - one a nice purple and pink bunch for mum, the other a slightly more masculine looking arrangement, although I’m not quite sure how you can make a bunch of flowers masculine.
 

We paid for the flowers, and both held a bunch as we walked back to the car. The false calm was too good to be true.
 

“Miss Pike! Miss Pike!” a familiar voice called out. I turned, slowly and with a small amount of dread. Marnie and some of her friends were standing there, with varying degrees of bulging eyes and open mouths.
 

“Er… hi, girls,” I said. “Some of my students,” I murmured to Liam on the side.
 

“Hi, Miss,” said two of the girls at the same time. None of them were looking at me though. They were all staring at Liam. I wasn’t quite sure what to do.
 

Marnie quickly glanced at me, with something like awe in her face.
 

“Miss, can we… can we please get his autograph? Pretty please?”
 

I half laughed. “It’s not up to me. Ask him!” I waved my hand casually at Liam who was standing there, a bit like a lump. He shook himself.
 

“Of course you can,” Liam said with a disarming grin that he seemed to pull out of nowhere.
 

“And a photo too?” one of the girls asked hopefully.

“Sure thing,” Liam smiled.
 

Somehow I ended up as the designated photographer, and took over a dozen photos of the girls and Liam, going through all their phones. Of course, they all needed their own photo. The girls stared avidly up at Liam and I did my best not to laugh at them. After handing them back all their phones, and after they all got a quick hug from Liam (Marnie went back for two) they walked us to my car and waved us off. I glanced over at the paparazzi on the other side of the avenue. Their cameras had been pointed at us the whole time.
 

I led our trusty followers out of town, past the high school and up to the cemetery.
 

“Are they really going to follow us into a cemetery? It seems wrong somehow,” I said.
 

Liam shrugged. “We’ll see.”
 

Some of them did. We tried to ignore them. It was a pretty spot, the Tarang cemetery, one of the nicest cemeteries that I’d been to. It was on a hill outside of town, and there was a lovely, peaceful view over the dry lake bed that was now home to the golf course, cricket club and pony club. You could see most of the town, and out over the paddocks to Mt Ngoora. It was all very green and pretty at this time of year.
 

“I hope they’re enjoying the view,” I said.
 

“Yeah.”
 

We walked slowly down the slope to where our friend’s grave was waiting for us. I absentmindedly reached for Liam’s hand. He gave it a quick squeeze and smiled down at me.
 

The graves had grown again. There was a whole new row that had been filled up since Grant had been buried here six years ago. It seemed like too much for such a small town. My mum was one of them. That still seemed surreal at times. Even now, almost two years after she’d died, I still sometimes expected her to call me, or to pick up the phone when I dialled home, or like my latest post on Facebook, or send me some silly email about the benefits of turmeric and how I should put it in all my food.
 

Fucking aneurysm.
 

We stopped in front of Grant’s grave. There were already fresh flowers on the headstone. I imagined his parents had already been up here this morning. I saw Grant’s mum rather regularly these days. Her eyes still looked so sad and haunted. I wondered if mine looked like that sometimes, too.
 

Grant Matthew Fitzgerald
 

29-03-1990 - 25-04-2009

Our clever, loyal son

Beloved son of Debbie and John

Loving brother of Isabelle and Chloe

Never forgotten.
 

We carefully laid down one of the bunches of flowers.
 

“Hard to believe it’s been six years,” Liam said again.
 

“I know.”
 

“So much has changed.”
 

“I know,” I said.
 

“What do you reckon he’d be doing now? If they hadn’t...”
 

“I don’t know. He didn’t sound so sure about engineering when we were hanging out those holidays,” I said.
 

“Yeah... I dunno, either. He’d been flip flopping between engineering and trying to transfer into med. Maybe he’d be a doctor. ”
 

His life had been cut so short. Grant had only been eighteen. We’d only been at uni for a few short weeks. All that work, all the study to get there... and a month and a bit into it a freak car accident takes it all away. It wasn’t fair.
 

“I mean, who could have predicted back then that I’d become a teacher at Tarang High and be stalked by paparazzi for one weekend?” I tried to joke.
 

“Yeah, who knows, maybe Grant’s music career would have taken off,” Liam said with a sad smile. Grant had been a pretty good guitar player, and was pretty wicked on the old recorder. I’d never realised you could make that instrument actually sound good until he’d played a few tunes on it.
 

I laughed. “He could have led the recorder revival.”
 

Liam chuckled, and then abruptly sat down in between Grant’s grave and his neighbour, an old man named Thomas MacDonald who’d died when he was 94. That was how it was meant to be. I sank down next to him. I wasn't sure how long we sat there for. I looked around a few times, but the paparazzi were keeping a respectful distance for once. I glanced over in the direction of Mum’s grave, and got up, leaning heavily on Liam’s shoulder. My foot had gone numb. I hobbled over the well tended grass and looked down on Mum’s gravestone. I’d memorised it months ago.
 

Margaret (Margie) Anne Pike (nee Wilson)
 

30
th
March 1960 - 2013

Beloved wife of Bill
 

Cherished mother of Stephanie and Jennifer

Always in our hearts
 

I
 
always felt a bit strange coming here. For both Mum, and Grant. I didn’t believe in any gods. I was 99% sure I wouldn’t be meeting them in any afterlife, as much as I wanted to. Here was the place their bones rested. It was a strange thought, when I thought about it too hard. This wasn’t where I felt comfortable talking to Mum. I did that sitting at the kitchen table, over a cup of tea. Or wherever I was, really. But I still liked coming up here every now and then. I patted the grass covering Mum and almost jumped when Liam leaned down and put his hand on my shoulder. I hadn’t heard him come over.
 

“I miss Margie,” he said, squatting down next to me.
 

“Me too,” I sniffed.
 

“She was way more supportive of my acting career than my parents were at first.”
 

I smiled. Now that I thought about it, I remembered walking in on Mum and Liam huddled over the kitchen table more than once. “Is that what you guys used to talk about?”
 

Liam just nodded.
 

“I guess you creative types need to stick together.”
 

“You should write more,” Liam said after a moment. “Your Mum always said you were good.”

I scoffed.
 

“Hey, she should know.”
 

“I think she was a bit biased. I’m her daughter. Everything I did was wonderful.”
 

“Nah. Well, yeah. But, usually when a New York Times best-selling author says you write well, you should probably listen to her.”
 

I looked at him speculatively. “You know that you and your brother are the only people that know about Mum’s secret life as a best-selling romance novelist?”

Liam laughed. “Yeah. She always told us not to tell anyone. I don’t know why…”