Sirens, page 2
understand. It is the terrorization of mind that is the ultimate danger;
the effect it has on one He pursed his lips contemplatively. ' all,
Duell is not so much different from you or the millions who will see
this film. 17 'Up to that moment which so drastically alters her life,
what contact has she had with terrorism, violence, the torture of the
soul? James has kept all of that from her.
"But nove - he jabbed his finger as if he were a schoolmaster on the
trail of a particularly salient point - ' she is hit between the eyes
and - this is what will fire the film - with this new confrontation with
terrorism, how will she be changed? What will happen to her? You see?
"Here is the true power of Heather Duell - why I have come so far to
direct it; why Rubens has put so much of his own money into it - not the
guns, the masks@ the stench of cordite and fear. These are marvellous
appurtenances and used judiciously they will help make this into a
blockbuster film. ' that's not enough. Along the line one must make a
conscious choice, d'you see? It's not enough to make films that merely
entertain, Daina. We are the dream makers for the world and as such we
have a terrible responsibility not to continually fill people's heads
with sawdust. We must strive to be bringers of emotion, to offer the
public something it would not otherwise discover. This is our
uniqueness.' Marion was on the tips of his toes now, his cheeks reddened
by a rush of blood. ' is a horror story of the mind; a clash of wills;
the delicate tickings -of fears that escalate with every passing moment;
an unexploded bomb that threatens the fabric of civilization because it
cuts to the core. And what of Heather Duell in all this, eh?
This is what you must ask yourself, Daina. Will she live or will she
die?' Marion was like that, Daina thought now as she changed down to
take a particularly sharp curve in the road. You had to begin to live
the role for him and for yourself before he let the cameras roll and
catch your expression for all time. She remembered the last scene she
had done with Elkalaarn. The clash of wills, as Marion had called it.
And those memories of anger and energy set images of Manhattan billowing
through her mind: blue shadows in the street; muscular canyons of smoked
glass and steel; the hot August wind laughing down Riverside Drive; the
park filled with Puerto Ricans in sleeveless shirts cooking plantain and
black beans over makeshift charcoal burners, the brown butt" 18
sprouting from the back of a waistband. Street Spanish through her head
as if from an old, out-of-sync film. "Only five years ago? ishifted down
again. The narrow road was nearly vertical h was why she came this way,
loving the colours textures streaking by her, the challenge to her
reflexes co-ordination. The top was down. The Los Angeles @,stole in, a
luminescent, fleeting lover. spun into a sweeping S-turn and abruptly
felt herself "verge of some great adventure, as if she were Cortez g an
intimation of greatness on the plunging seas, for gold-encrusted Mexico.
was so right. Heather Duell was her film now and it either make her or
break her. She felt a shiver trace fingers down her spine and she
twisted in the leather seat. So much depended on other people.
Everything 01 come together, all the divergent strands, for success to
@.Was she riding a rocket or - fingers twitched on the wheel, cream and
pale blue walls flew by, she pushed savagely at the gear lever, iput the
clutch through the carpeting in her anger. What worrying about anyway?
She was an actress. It was her to take those dead lines typed across the
white page them life. She had to become Heather Duell, allowing 0 e to
grow up around her without conscious thought e entered into a new
reality. A new life. Leaving her - that was Daina Whitney - apart and
drifting, merely sted observer of another personality. by what arcane
process was she able to accomplish t? She did not understand it, only
knew that it gave her e power. stepped hard on the acclerator.
excitement was a fever pushing her onward. She ed in the night scents of
the foliage on the hillside. Mark be back from location by now, she
thought. Their times from LA had overlapped, he leaving after she had.
They spoken to each other infrequently and written not at all
',increasingly, she had heard disquieting stories about the ' progress
of his film: a war movie - virulently anti- 19 41 war: "Coppola
failed to cut it,' he'd often told her - that because of his constant
script revisions he was far behind schedule. And the money - it had to
come from somewhere. She felt a warmth seep into her as she dismissed
those thoughts. Now was day's ending and she drew her image of him
around her like a quilt, feeling his strength enter het flesh, her
bones, as she imagined him caressing her back, hi@ hot open mouth over
hers ... She turned into the driveway of her house and cut the engine.
Lights were on inside, a cheery greeting, but the exterior lights were
off. Typical of him, she thought. He's so involved in the political, the
mechanical has no meaning. She went happily up the steps, swinging her
handbag as if il was a baton, humming. The deep green ivy, jauntily
over. grown on each side of the doorway, was glossy in the last of the
light reflected in the vast bowl of the sky. She put her key into the
lock in the wide oak door and went through. She stopped, frozen, just
over the sill and watched in a kind of horrified fascination the two
bodies coupling on the bare parquet floor. Blood shot through her as
rage pumped adrenalin and there was a rushing in her ears as she stared
at the animal thrusting of Mark's black buttocks back and forth, back
and forth like the pendulum of an infernal clock ticking off the
instants of love left in the world. Oddly, dazedly, she found herself
thinking that it must be cold for the girl there on the floor. Then,
dimly, she heard the panting and the soft liquid sucking and the
knowledge of this reversal humiliated her, made her feel as lost as a
little girl, recalling her first - and only - silent intrusion upon her
parents' bedroom early one morning. She felt a kind of vertigo, a
strange frightening pressure along her chest as if she had somehow
wandered into a pocket of heavy gravity. She fell terribly chilled;
numbed into imm ility. Then the girl moaned and the spell was broken. It
was as 9 Daina had been touched by electricity, violent and elemental,
She drew her arm back, flung her bag and leaped forward. '!' His neck
twisted as his head came up. He began tc lift off the girl. 20 ,@so, no
1' Her voice rose to a scream, her long pale ing along his bunched
biceps. ''t leave me ot yet! Don't - Ohl' Her breath shot like an explo-
' clenched fist'drove towards Mark's flushed face. It into his ear. He
panted. Then her shoulder crashed s and he tumbled off the girl with a
pop like a cork out of a bottle. arms came up. ', hey. What the hell
-PHis rampant was already deflating. stupid bastardv was all she could
cry. ' stupid P She thought she would choke on all the unsaid words. on
the floor the girl bucked and rolled, her fingers between her wet
thighs, her red breasts shaking. A ble of fluid still linked her with
Mark. t. Daina V hitting him, she would not let him speak. He had done
far too much of that. She swung at him not as a might but as a man, the
training she had undergone ration for the film coming to good use, added
to what learned in New York where she had grown up, learning defend
herself, how to throw a football thirty yards in spiral.
Red, red rage altered nothing. Daina, for Christ's - oof! - for Christ's
sake will to me?' she would not, knew he was good at that, his logic,
ning the heart of his political stance. Her fist caught h on the mouth,
her knuckles twigting at the last instant her gold and jade ring - the
one she had bought herself going-away present when she had said good-bye
to scored lengthwise across his York to come out here lip, tearing
through the tender flesh. Blood spouted in bons. leaped away, his eyes
wide with fear of her. He knew, s terrifying moment, that he could not
control her. She contorting his dark handsome face. ina's eye burned and
she reached for her heavy handpin. ' the hell out of here, you
sonovabitch!' She not use his first name now. ' out now! And take 21
this' - she swung a foot into the girl's thigh, bringing her out of her
thrall - ' you.' Warily, never letting hisgaze waver from her, Mark
circled around until he could safely pull the girl on to her feet. She
was slim, frail almost, her perfect skin burned brown by the California
sun. She had no tan line, indeed, even now, exhibited no sign of shame,
and now that Daina got her first good look at her, she realized with a
tiny thrill that she could be no older than fifteen. Her small breasts
seemed to be all erect nipple and she had shaved her pubic mound. Mark
tried one last time, his clothes and the girl's clutched under one arm
like moulting feathers, but she cut him off: ''t. Just don't say a word.
You were just a lodger and nothing more. I don't want to hear anything
you have to tell me.' Tears glistened in the comers of her eyes and she
was having difficulty seeing. ''s no excuse - nothing ..
.' And he was out of the door, stumbling into the night, pushing the
naked and now shivering girl in front of him@ around to the side of the
house where he kept his car. As if from somewhere deep beneath the sea,
she thought, she heard the brief cough of a motor starting into life,
the echoes raking the hills, fading far too slowly. Through the window
she saw two ruby pinpoints like adder's eyes flickering in eerie
afterlife, now visible, now extinguished by the sighing trees, the lemon
bloom of the headlights. already expunged by distance. She stood quite
still, listening to the sibilance of the wind in the trees, felt like
some freak hauled out of her habitat, a mermaid stupid enough to have
been caught in a fisherman's net, dragged from the depths of the cool
dim sea into the bright breathless world above where all was new and
strange and certainly quite frightening. She whirled away from the
window, went limply into the living room, paused at the bar. She stared
at the array of liquor and, in reaching for the bottle of Bacardi, gave
a galvanic start so that the clear liquor roiled inside. She poured
herself three fingers of the rum, swallowed it all in one grea gulp as
if it was medicine. Her eyes closed and she shuddered.. 22 the thick
cut-crystal glass away from her, shook and ran into the hall. herself
into the bedroom, she flung open the closet, -,;,down all his clothes,
went to the bureau and dumped -of his things on to the centre of the
carpet. She threw e could into his one battered suitcase which, so he
isaid, had felt the heat of La Paz and the glitter of -Aires, the
mysteries and miseries of Moulmein and She snapped it shut. With this
weight in one hand remainder of his clothes under her arm, she loped
through the house, banging her toe on a chair leg, to the front door.
ide birds sang sweetly, flitting through the treetops. A d angrily from
the other side of the hill, perhaps sly encroachment of a coyote upon
its territory. A radio rock music briefly before being shut down. went
to the side of the hill where the long grass grew d the brambles were
thick and clawing. She looked at tcase as she hefted it. It had been his
constant corn- as he had moved from Burma into Thailand and so he
maintained, across the border at great personal into forbidden Cambodia.
For this was the cause he to espouse, bleeding for a maimed and dying
people other side of the dawn because he felt at least partially ' for
their torment and destruction. But what he exposed to there in the
crossing must have, like blinded him to other just as basic concepts
closer %own home. Like some spaceman returning home from on the moon,
she thought now, he had changed, his "bent out of shape, his emotions a
grotesque parody of ethey had once been. The flames of some unknown pyre
red him. t she lofted the heavy thing out into the night, watchtumble as
if in slow motion, end over end over the ed - 5"an( gi filled with dark
bracken, a jungle's dense underbrush. yards down, it hit the earth,
comer on. The lid flew under the impact and clothes spewed forth in a
silent ion. quite deliberately, Daina let fly Mark's loose clothing, 23
one piece at a time until there was only one item left. It was a silk
shirt she had bought him for his last birthday - his favourite, he had
once told her. Crumpling it into a ball; she hurled this too into the
wake of the other debris. It caught for an instant partway down the
hillside in a branch of the giant acacia, waving there like the last
pennant on a battlefield already lost. Then the cool night wind, tugging
at it, took it upward high in the air like a kite loosed from its
governing string, away and away. But she had turned from it before it
was out of sight. She shivered inside the house, the front door closed,
locked and chained for the first time in many months. The cicadas. The
ticking of the kitchen clock. She stared sightlessly, clutching at
herself. Numbness was ebbing slowly. She reached for the phone and
dialled Maggie's number, but on the fourth ring, when she got the
service@ realized that she must be in the studio with Chris and,
tonight, she had no desire to get involved with that frantic scene. Said
"Goddamnit, went back down the hall to change. The thing to do, she
decided, was to get out of here herself. The Waterhouse was a place
where she could cool off and relax. She paused, seeing herself in the
bathroom mirror, a ghostflash across time and space. A tidal flow pulled
her into the cool tiled room. All movement ceased for a moment. She .
have been a statue adrift in the diffuse inarticulate light. With an
abrupt jut of her slim tanned arm, she stabbed on the vanity lights, a
rainbow framing her face in illumination. Without taking her eyes from
the reflected image, she sat slowly down. Lifting her hands, she pulled
back the forest of honey hair spilling across her shoulders. She
observed her face as she would an image on the screen, noting the strong
oval structure, the wide-apart eyes, long and slightly tilted at their
comers, with the spray of gold amid the violet irises, the high
cheekbones. She thought she looked more like her mother than her father.
She began to cry even though a moment before she was quite certain she
would not. She put her head down, cradled on her folded arms, and
sobbed. She rocked a little, finding 24 omll comfort in the motion. When
it was over she got up !:;turning on the taps, washed her face. the
water in the sink sounded like Mark's voice ring, Darling, Darling! And
she shook, disgusted by self-pity. : up! she told herself savagely.
What the hell do you him for? Her body had a ready answer for that. It
was thing all evening that made her smile. undressed in quick bursts and
stepped into the shower. ts later, she was pulling on a blue silk shirt.
She had ' first of jeans but, somehow, tonight they seemed all and she
drew on a deep blue and pale yellow print wrap She looked at herself, at
her hard high breasts - Kim ak breasts, Rubens had once said to her,
jokingly - her not thin, waist, her long dancer's legs. the night and
the silver Merc, she throttled down, around hairpin turn, then launched
herself on a mattress of The wind spun her hair and the lights of the
valley, in haze, seemed to wink at her through the onrushing stge, black
as the sky. he car throbbed beneath her like a heart. She sped past a
rock-an&concrete retaining wall and for an instant it back to her the
sharp scent of gasoline, masking the e of the honeysuckle. It made her
think of the streets ew York, roaring and drunk with life, careening
onward, oppable, majestic in their rawness. se were odd, disquieting
echoes from a time in her life she had nothing of her own, no one to
turn to. Alone, of fear and suppressed anger, she had found the only -
to survive was to turn to the streets; only the people 0 treated her as
a whole person who thought and felt and as a separate, discrete entity.
ow she felt the old longing for Baba and tears rolled down cheeks again.
