SNEAK PREVIEW
A Beautiful Way to Die is out May 8.
Here’s a taster…
PROLOGUE
At night, when we’re strapped to our beds, the lights have clicked off and the screams have settled into sleepy moans, that’s when I see it. The Hollywood sign. I close my eyes and picture the towering white letters winking down at me through the violet-sore sky. That one word: HOLLYWOOD. Promising so much, stealing everything.
And now here I am, in this place of wild women, where the rats grow fat as my hope wastes away. Where orderlies pinch and slap at whim, and if you retaliate you’ll disappear for hours – days perhaps – and come back broken and spent. Disobedient women are punished here, just as they are out there. They dragged Jean away last week because she’d thrown a cup at Matron. I haven’t seen her since.
I’ve stopped complaining about being tied down at night. There’s one nurse who, when she’s on duty, leaves my buckles a little loose. What does she want? Is it a trap? I don’t know who’s good or bad anymore, and yet I’m grateful for her flashes of kindness.
Today was Matron’s birthday. I watched through the bars as an orderly pinned a large grey sheet to the wall of the nurses’ station. Then a sound from my other life made me jump: the familiar clack of film rolling through a projector. Distorted music boomed and everyone rushed up behind me, pushing to see whatever they could.
As the picture sprang to life on the wall, the first words writ large, with an extravagant flourish, were his name – above the title, of course. His agent would’ve made sure of that. A few women started shouting and laughing, excited as they reeled off the cast of famous actors. I gripped the bars throughout, ignoring the shoves and pokes at my back, keeping my spot as the story unfurled. Every movement he made, every line he spoke, I drank it all in, mesmerised. That face, that smile, as devastating as the first day I saw him. A glance from him and you can come undone.
During a misjudged musical number, I turned to Nancy who was wedged next to me.
‘I know him,’ I whispered.
She looked at me and laughed. ‘Of course you do.’
‘No, I know him.’
‘It’s Max Whitman, you idiot – everyone knows him.’
I started to say something, but the whole cast began tap-dancing as if their lives depended on it. To hell with it. Who’d believe me anyway?
But the truth is I do know him. I know that he likes his martinis strong and his women weak. That he has a birthmark, the shape of a crescent, on the inside of his arm. That he owns the world yet is terrified of losing it all. And I know that when he yearns for something, nothing will stand in his way. He’s destroyed people like this.
Up on the screen, I watched as he embraced his leading lady for their final kiss. As he tilted his head, I tilted mine and stared at his ridiculously straight nose, those elegant cheekbones, the perfectly dimpled chin. Then I remembered what he’d looked like, the last time I’d seen him, the night of the Oscars party. And the nausea rose in me again. The chaos, the screams, the blood.
During the dark hours when I cannot sleep, the memory of what happened that night prowls my bedside like a hungry tiger. I daren’t move in case it pounces. Maybe this is what will drive me mad in the end, the fear that I will open the door to that night and lose myself forever.
But this can’t be how my scene ends. No. My story isn’t over yet. There are scores to be settled, secrets to be told, players to be destroyed. First, I need to get out.
Copyright Eleni Kyriacou
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