A Lovely Way to Burn Read Free Page A

practising her twirls, the sequins on her top glittering like a mirror ball beneath the lights.
     
    Stevie felt the heat of the car park tarmac through the soles of her sneakers, the surface sticky and pliant beneath her feet. It was the seventh week of the hosepipe ban and the air was dry and gritty against her skin. She walked towards her Mini, rummaging in her bag for her sunglasses, remembering too late that she had left them on the hall table in her flat.
    ‘Shit.’
    Stevie shaded her eyes with one hand and in the other she carried the jacket she had been wearing, when she had arrived at the studio in the cool of midnight. She hadn’t bothered to cleanse her face of the make-up she had worn for the broadcast. She imagined it melting from her face in one smooth mask: café au lait skin and red lips, a flutter of mascara trimming wide-set eye sockets, minus her brown eyes. The thought was grotesque. Stevie pressed her fingers to her forehead. Her headache was back, and the sun, surely too high in the sky for eight in the morning, felt strong enough to burn her eyeballs from her head.
    The air inside the car made her cough. Stevie opened all of its doors, and sat in the driver’s seat with her feet on the ground, hoping she wasn’t coming down with something. She checked her phone for missed calls. In the two days since Simon’s no-show, irritation had given way to anger, which had in turn been replaced by a faint prickle of doubt. Stevie dialled Simon’s landline, feeling like a stalker. The answering machine kicked in and she hung up. There was no point in calling his mobile. She had left enough messages there already.
    They had never talked much about their friends and family. Stevie remembered a brother who lived in Thailand, a father who had travelled a lot to America on business. Was Simon’s father still alive? She knew that his mother had died when he was a boy. He kept a photograph of her on the chest of drawers in his bedroom, a studio portrait of a smartly dressed woman hidden behind her make-up. Stevie couldn’t recall Simon mentioning any particular friends, but then neither had she. It had been part of the pleasure of their encounters, their disconnection with the rest of her life. She did know where he worked though. Simon had referred to St Thomas’s Hospital more often than Joanie mentioned Derek.
    ‘Are you all right?’
    Stevie looked up, shading her eyes. She hadn’t noticed the security guard approaching the Mini and now the sun’s glare was conspiring with the shadows thrown by his uniform cap, so that she could barely make out his features.
    ‘I’m fine.’ She had been grinning for hours and it was an effort, but Stevie managed to raise a faint smile. ‘Just letting the car cool down before I drive off.’
    ‘It’s going to be another hot one.’
    The guard spoke with an accent, Polish or Russian. It made him sound like a movie villain, the Mr Big of a human trafficking ring. He moved into the shadow thrown by the car and she saw his face, pale and thin, the kind of skin that needed to be careful of the sun.
    ‘I should get going. It’s been a long night.’ Stevie swung her legs into the car and closed the door, then, in case it had seemed like an unfriendly gesture, she rolled down the window and said, ‘You’re new here. Is Preston on holiday?’
    ‘No.’ Sweat was beading the man’s forehead. He took a hanky from his pocket and wiped his eyes. ‘Preston’s sick. I’m Jirí, I usually work days. That’s how come we’ve never met before.’
    ‘Well, good to meet you now.’
    Stevie turned on the ignition and the engine growled into life, but instead of stepping away from the car Jirí moved closer.
    ‘I watch you. On television.’
    She wanted to be gone, somehow to cut out the journey home and arrive magically in bed, freshly showered and tucked between clean sheets, but Stevie resurrected another small smile.
    ‘I would have thought you’d get enough of this