Finn clenched his teeth and turned his wild eyes on her. ‘Can’t you see we’re in the middle of a fucking conversation? Do you think you could give us a minute?’
‘Finley!’ Kelly said. She stood up and put her hand on the waitress’s shoulder, a young woman of about twenty whose eyes had immediately filled with tears. ‘I’m so sorry,’ Kelly said.
The woman rushed to the back of the cafe.
Kelly remained standing. ‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’ she hissed.
Finn sprang up, knocking the table with his knees and causing a small vase to tumble off and shatter on the floor. ‘What’s wrong with me?’ he spluttered. ‘What’s wrong with you? You’re the psycho who was cutting herself open the last time I saw her and now somehow I’m the one with the problem.’
Kelly’s eyes stung. ‘Finn, what’s happened to you?’
‘All that’s happened to me is I’ve finally started to get my shit together. I’ve got a huge audition coming up with Jessica Meadows that’s going to make me so fucking famous, I wouldn’t be caught dead in a shithole like this with you.’
Kelly’s heart was deadened by a visceral, physical ache. ‘You wouldn’t be caught dead in this shithole or you wouldn’t be caught dead with me?’
‘That’s not what I meant.’
‘Hey, arsehole, how about you get the hell out of my cafe?’
Finn swung around to face the owner of the voice: a middle-aged man, Italian looking, with a balding head and generous belly. He was shorter than Finn but stockier and he looked like he knew how to handle himself.
‘I beg your pardon?’ Finn said indignantly.
‘I said, get the hell out of my cafe. We don’t serve cowards who abuse the staff.’
Finn drew his shoulders back and bared his teeth.
Oh, fuck, Kelly thought. She looked around. Everyone was watching them now. One young man had taken his phone out to film the show.
‘Finn!’ Kelly hissed. ‘We’ve got to get out of here.’
Finn turned to Kelly. She nodded at the guy filming the exchange.
It was a mistake. Finn advanced on him. The man stood up and backed away from his chair but wouldn’t put the phone down. Despite her concern for Finn and the panic that was kindling inside her, Kelly had a moment to feel utter disdain for the amateur cameraman. She could almost see the dollar signs in his eyes as he refused to drop his weapon. The more Finn reacted, the juicier the footage. She knew that brutal equation from personal experience and knew she had to act before this spiralled completely out of control.
She moved fast, ducking between Finn and the cameraman. She gave the man her brightest smile and it momentarily stunned him into inaction. In that vulnerable second, Kelly whipped her arm out and snatched his phone away.
She turned to Finn. ‘Run!’ she barked.
Finn hesitated but, even in his drug-addled state, managed a second of comprehension and darted away. Kelly turned on her heel, eyes on the phone in her hand, navigating to the door by instinct.
‘Give me my fucking phone,’ the young man yelled.
Kelly deftly flicked her thumbs, deleting the video, then emptying the trash so it was erased forever. She threw the phone in an arc over her head but didn’t look back to see if the action had its desired effect: slowing down their pursuer. Instead, she focused on the woman one table from the door, who was pulling her own phone out of her purse. Kelly reached her just as she raised it to begin filming. She zigzagged to the side to stay out of shot and, as she passed, slapped the phone out of the woman’s hand, sending the device crashing into the cafe window and then to the floor.
Kelly fled through the exit and ran as fast and hard as she could for as long as she could until her lungs burned and her legs screamed in protest. Heaving for breath, she turned around and dropped to a squat, elbows on her knees, head in her hands. She looked up to see if she’d been followed but there was nobody on this quiet back street. Sweat mingled with the tears in her eyes and turned the world into a watery blur. She blinked rapidly and then wiped away the confusion. Stood up, regained enough breath to carry on and headed back to her apartment.
***
Finn was seriously out of shape. By the time he made it back to Kelly’s place, he was sweating profusely and struggling to breathe. It hadn’t been that far to run but it had been enough to completely exhaust him.
Kelly wasn’t back yet so he used his key, which he had never taken off his key ring, to let himself in. He stood in front of the bathroom mirror. He looked absolutely bloody dreadful. Sickly pale, sweating, hollowed-out cheeks and eye sockets. He spent as little time looking at himself as possible these days. It didn’t matter once he sat in the makeup chair. They always restored him to health for the screen.
Finn drew two bags out of his jeans pocket. One contained a small quantity of white powder; the other, half-a-dozen pills. Finn stared at them.What will I need for Kelly’s return? Up or down? Fight or flight?He remembered what she was like at the cafe, eviscerating him with her eyes, commanding him with her tongue.
It was a simple choice in the end. To go up against a powerhouse like Kelly, you needed to be at least ten feet tall. He opened the bag, carefully prepared two lines on Kelly’s bathroom counter and lined up his nostril with the specially designed metal straw, ready to suck in the powder. He placed his thumb over his unoccupied nostril, drew hard on the other and ran the straw along the line.
His head filled with a million bees, darting around inside his skull. Once the buzz in his brain calmed enough to focus, he lined the straw up along the second line and repeated the movement. Only his time, when he made it to the end of the line, it wasn’t the sound of bees’ wings that rang loudly in his ears. It was Kelly’s voice.
