6

I need a new story.

This becomes clear to me three days after the interview, the Monday, when at four-forty in the afternoon it’s growing dark and I realize I have accomplished nothing. There are two galleries due up on the site tomorrow which I haven’t started. Everything since the canyon feels irrelevant, laughably so, but I only have three weeks left at Nest and I can’t afford to slip now. I need to use this as a springboard to something else.

Skye will live. The cuts on her arms were horizontal, the blood loss severe but not fatal, and now a throng of reporters and paparazzi have set up permanent residence outside the hospital, accosting everyone who emerges on the off-chance that they know something or have seen something.

I saw him for the first time in pictures, emerging from the hospital on Saturday evening looking shattered, his eyes bloodshot and his gait hunched like he’d aged twenty years in as many hours. He seemed smaller, and though I loathed myself for it I couldn’t resist watching the twenty-seven-second video clip of him, lit up by camera flashes as he darted from the hospital doors alone, trying half-heartedly to shield his face. It was his ears that needed shielding as they peppered questions at him like rifle fire, trying to get a rise.

‘Clark! How’s Skye? Is she alive?’

‘Mr Conrad, was this a suicide attempt?’

‘Was it because of the divorce? Are you in touch with Carol?’

‘Any comment on the nude photo leak?’

This story has been around for weeks, as it turns out, but through some kind of wilful ignorance I had managed to avoid it until after that Friday, when I really began Googling Skye. There are supposedly nude pictures of Skye online, barred from publication by any legitimate outlet but still easily available for anyone with rudimentary knowledge of the internet’s darker corners. Pictures allegedly taken by Brett Rickards, the creep I actually let myself feel sorry for the other day. His team issued a denial, of course, but there’s no real doubt that it’s him. Given too much wealth and privilege, too young, he now sees women as just slightly less than human, as something to be consumed.

I’m less interested in the pictures than in the other new development, which is that Carol and Sarah haven’t been seen at the hospital once. Initially it was speculated that they were using a secret side entrance to avoid the cameras, but then candid photographs emerged of them in New York: Sarah buying coffee in Washington Square before her day starts at NYU, Carol leaving a yoga class in Brooklyn, the two of them attending a Broadway premiere together. Up until now they have avoided being photographed, which suggests that they’ve started calling the paparazzi. Whether deliberately or not, these photographs spell out a clear message of lack of interest in Skye, and now all the questions I failed to ask Clark are deafening in my mind.

I’ve been ignoring Tom’s texts for the past three days. He wants to know, of course, what happened at the house and how much of this unravelling scandal I witnessed first hand. But I’ve barely processed the thing myself yet, and the idea of describing it to him is draining.

The person I did not ignore when they texted, desperate for dirt, is my sort-of-friend Faye, who I met on a red carpet my very first month in LA. It was an unspeakably hot and shadeless afternoon, my first real (though unpaid) assignment as a film blogger in the city, and though she was a fan who had somehow lied her way into the press pen, we felt like equals. She was there simply to see stars up close, to gather their autographs and take selfies so as to have permanent proof that she was physically in their presence, and though I was there as an ostensible professional our goal was the same. To get close. To get almost inside.

The film was an early spring release; a blockbuster planned as a tentpole release until the first test screenings made it clear that this was not a crowd-pleaser. March is not called ‘the dead zone’ in film release parlance for nothing – it’s after awards season and before summer blockbuster season, a no-man’s-land of mediocre money-pits and misunderstood indie gems. But both Faye and I were there to meet the same actor, a curly-haired former Broadway star who was the lead in a cable drama we were both obsessed with, and in that first conversation I could tell that we shared something. The need to cling a little too hard to fiction.

It’s like waiting for a fever to pass, the feeling of being truly enmeshed in a fictional world, so overwhelmed with it that reality is grey and small by comparison. All you can do in the throes of it is wait it out, distract yourself, do things that force you to be physically in your body. As dissimilar as we are in every other respect, Faye is one of the few people I have ever met who understands this.

I give up on getting anything done at 5 p.m., and head out into the too-dark night though it’s too early to be seen leaving. I need to rediscover the part of myself that cared about impressing people here.

‘Hey, love!’ Faye is an explosion of curly bottle-blonde, her voice high and always childlike, but I’m warmed by how genuinely thrilled she seems to see me, how tightly she hugs me. How she hesitates for a second, but does not say the most predictable thing: you look tired. I do. I couldn’t sleep last night, and when the jittery feeling of lying in bed trying to force myself unconscious finally became unbearable, I turned instead to Netflix and lost myself in him.

‘You need to tell me every single thing that happened on Friday,’ Faye almost yells, once we’re seated on a low couch with twin Cosmos in hand. So I tell her, realizing as I do that this is the first time I’ve really laid it all out and tried to make sense of it for someone else.

‘Wait,’ she interrupts when I’m almost to the pool. ‘It sounds like you got a legit amazing interview with him. Like, I’ve never read anything where he got this personal.’

‘Yeah, it was going really well until his publicist showed up!’

‘Stitch that on a cushion, honestly,’ she says, clinking her glass against mine. ‘It sounds to me like he was enjoying talking to you, just as people, but then his publicist showed up and turned it back into a work thing.’

‘Maybe.’ I can’t stop the corner of my mouth from turning upwards.

‘Anyway, sorry, go on.’

I tell her the rest, now distracted by the memory of just how good that interview actually was, and watch Faye’s eyes gradually widen as the story reaches its climax.

‘Have you heard anything since? Like, has anyone kept you in the loop?’

‘God, no. I’m just reading the same as you online.’

‘The poor guy,’ she sighs. ‘So he was as nice as everybody says?’

‘Yeah, he was just… normal. He didn’t act like he was one of the most famous people in the world and I was a pleb being graced with his presence.’ I take a hard sip of my drink. ‘But I mean, it doesn’t matter. Nobody’s ever going to read the interview because Nest is never going to run anything that actually risks being newsworthy.’

‘Burn,’ Faye purrs. ‘I mean, just take the story somewhere else if they’re too basic to run it.’

‘I don’t think I can do that. He and his publicist agreed to Nest specifically, because it’s fluff.’

‘And? You’re sitting on a goldmine here – I mean, Clark Conrad’s last interview before his daughter’s suicide attempt? Are you kidding? Who cares what the editor of Nest thinks of you once you get that published?’

‘Yeah, but I also don’t want to…’ I stop.

‘You don’t want to piss him off,’ Faye finishes for me.

‘I mean, he just almost lost his daughter. It’s traumatic enough without some reporter trying to milk it. And who knows when he might be useful to me in the future? It’s not worth it.’

‘Fair.’

‘I do need something, though. A story that’s industry-focused, something I can pitch to actual culture editors and be taken seriously.’

‘Does it have to be an actor? I mean, obviously that’s the most fun, but would you consider something with a producer or an exec?’

‘Sure. That might actually be better, because I need to get a foot in the door at Reel. Why, do you have something?’

‘You know Ben Schlattman is leaving Scion?’

The Schlattman brothers are two of the most powerful producers in the industry, but their company has been struggling for years, losing money – haemorrhaging, by some accounts – on a series of high-budget gambles which only just broke even. But the brothers’ power is in combination; they come as a unit, a one-two punch. I’ve heard them referred to as good cop-bad cop, Ben the charmer who reels you in, and Bill the hard-nosed tycoon who comes in at the end to make the deal.

‘Wait, really? I thought that was just a rumour.’

‘Nope, it’s real, he wants to go out on his own. They had a blowout, I guess. He plays golf with my uncle,’ Faye continues casually. ‘I can get you his email address, if you want to ask for an interview. He’s kind of a nightmare, but—’

‘That’s perfect.’

I order us another round, already feeling less adrift, imagining my Q&A with Ben Schlattman as the lead story on Reel.com, maybe even a page in the print edition.

‘Wait, I can’t believe I didn’t ask you this before,’ Faye exclaims, clutching my arm. ‘Was Amabella Bunch there? Clark’s still dating her, right?’

I nod with a grimace. Amabella has been by Clark’s side in every photograph coming or going from the hospital, looking directly at the cameras with a practised smoulder as he shielded his face beside her.

‘She wasn’t at the house, and he didn’t mention her. But I had to write a post about her this morning, actually.’

‘Ugh, you’re still doing those 4 a.m. news shifts?’

‘It’s just for this month. Probably.’

‘They’ve gotta be paying you enough at Nest that you don’t need to take this extra stuff.’

‘Barely.’

‘You’re a workaholic.’

I smile. People say this as though it’s a bad thing.

‘I mean, having to write about Amabella’s “hashtag fitspo” post this morning definitely gave me second thoughts about carrying on.’

‘She is always doing the most. I don’t know how much that raw food brand pays her to shill for them, but her Instagram is fifty per cent sponsored content at this point.’

‘They pay her a lot,’ I reply. ‘And I mean, fair enough – if you have no discernible talent except taking selfies you’ve got to hustle.’

‘Your burns are on point tonight.’

‘I’m sorry, I’m actually being unfair to Amabella. After all, she did have a supporting role in that YouTube original drama series last year, the one where she played the cheerleader who got eaten. That was a pretty nuanced part.’

‘She has her own lifestyle brand now too, and a fragrance, because of course. Also, I don’t want to be slut-shamey, but—’ Faye lowers her voice conspiratorially. ‘She was married to that Silicon Valley guy for, what, four months? Are they even divorced yet?’

I shrug. This is an aspect of Clark I simply do not want to know any more about, the part of him that sees any value in Amabella Bunch. The man I met would see through her right away, especially given his distrust of influencers, but maybe she’s a better actress than I’m giving her credit for.

‘She’s garbage,’ is all I say to Faye, with a smile.

Back at my apartment, another roach corpse awaits me in the kitchen, and I suppose I should feel blessed that they’re always dead now when I see them. The exterminator warned me this might happen – ‘It’s the chemicals, dries ’em out, draws ’em into the open to die’ – but the sight of them still jars me so violently I have to soothe myself afterwards with a shot of whiskey. And, of course, with Loner.

This is how I spend my evenings, now. Watching him, one episode after another after another, murmuring the dialogue under my breath as I cook, exercise, clean my apartment. As I sleep too, probably. Once it finally begins to sink in that I may not see him again, that my Friday afternoon at the Laurel Canyon house will soon start to feel like a memory, I have to hold on somehow. This is how I used to feel close to him.