Ricky's Hand E-Book

David Quantick

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 322

Beschreibung

From the Emmy Award-winning writer of Avenue 5, Veep and The Thick of It comes a funny, violent and thought-provoking horror story like nothing you've seen before.Ricky Smart is a nobody, a Miami Beach paparazzo who scrapes a living snapping celebs. One day Ricky wakes up and realises there's something wrong with his hand. It's not his hand. In fact, it's someone else's hand. How does he know it's not his? Because it looks different, feels different and – perhaps the biggest clue – has a four-letter word tattooed across the knuckles.But hey, it's still a hand, and it works just fine, so that's ok. Except a week later, his other hand changes. And a few days after that, Ricky gets a new arm…Ricky is losing his mind as well as his body parts, but he has to pay rent and those seedy photos aren't going to take themselves. The world needs candid shots of pop sensation and local girl Scala Jaq, almost as much as Ricky's bank account does. Yet Scala has a secret of her own, a secret that leads them to an unlikely partnership, the strangest support group ever, and revelations that threaten existence as they know it.It's up to the celebrity and her tormentor to work out what to do with a world of misfits, explosions, and other people's bad tattoos. Because when you've looked for redemption in all the right places, you might need to try the wrong ones.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Praise for the Author

Also by David Quantick and available from Titan Books

Title Page

Leave Us a Review

Copyright

Dedication

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Interlude

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Thanks

About The Author

PRAISE FOR THE AUTHOR

“David Quantick is one of the best-kept secrets in the world of writing.”

NEIL GAIMAN

“If you choose to only live in one alternative reality make sure it’s the one in which you read Sparks by David Quantick.”

BEN AARONOVITCH

“A Kurt Vonnegut for a new generation.”

SARAH PINBOROUGH

“Ricky’s Hand [is] like nothing I've ever read before – the literary equivalent of sticking your head out the window while driving 100 MPH on the highway: an absolute rush, wild and exhilarating.”

RIO YOUERS

“I hadn’t planned to read all of Night Train in one sitting, but I found myself doing just that. David Quantick’s novel sets up a vast mystery and barrels deliriously toward a conclusion you’ll never see coming like, I don’t know, some kind of railed vehicle that operates in the dark.”

JASON PARGIN

“A dark, nightmarish journey into a brand new sort of Twilight Zone, David Quantick’s Night Train is breathless, frantic, and creepy as hell. You’ll never see the twists coming.”

CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN

“Night Train is pacy, amusing and gory and an entertaining companion on a dark journey.”

LOUIS GREENBERG

“David Quantick has a medical condition whereby he literally cannot be unfunny.”

CAITLIN MORAN

“Darkly funny.”

THE INDEPENDENT

“Revels in strangeness and snarky dialogue.”

FINANCIAL TIMES

“An unnerving horror story... Quantick delivers a fine sense of mystery.”

MORNING STAR

“Ingenious, likeable, funny and entertaining.”

THE SPECTATOR

Also by David Quantickand available from Titan Books

All My ColorsNight Train

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Ricky’s HandPrint edition ISBN: 9781803360461E-book edition ISBN: 9781803360478

Published by Titan BooksA division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UPwww.titanbooks.com

First edition: August 202210 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

© David Quantick 2022

David Quantick asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

To Matthew

ONE

One morning Ricky Smart looked down at his hand and screamed.

Ricky thought of himself as an observant guy. It went with the job, which was taking photographs of people who didn’t know he was taking photographs of them. Ricky called himself a paparazzi, although the right word was paparazzo, and everyone else just called him a creep. But he made money selling the pictures to websites and newspapers, although it wasn’t a lot of money because nobody cared about quality anymore and any clown could take a picture of a celebrity with their phone.

It wasn’t much of a living, but it was a life. Until the day he looked down at his hand and screamed.

He woke up that morning without a hangover, which was a bonus. Ricky checked all the things in his head that he might need to know before he got up: where was he, had he done anything last night he needed to be worried about, would he fall over if he got up, and so on. The list complete – in my ownbed, no, probably not – he opened his eyes and lifted his arm to look at his watch. His eyes were still gummy from sleep and dehydration, so for a moment it was hard to focus, but after he screwed up his eyes and blinked, Ricky could see that his watch was not on his wrist.

This was odd. Ricky was very much someone who slept with his watch on. Not only was it practical, it also saved messing with the complexities of a strap while drunk. Also, Ricky had no memory of taking the watch off. True, he had no memory of a lot of things – including all of July 2009 – but taking his watch off was something he would have remembered, if only because last night had been so dull that taking off his watch would have been a high point. And yet there it was. No watch.

Ricky lifted his hand to look more closely at the place where his watch should be – and then he froze.

There was something wrong. It was his hand.

It was different.

Ricky rotated his wrist to examine it more closely. His hand looked perfectly OK as hands go. Four fingers, a thumb, all the nails, everything present and correct.

But it wasn’t right.

First, it was the wrong weight. Ricky had no idea how much his hands weighed, because they’d never been detached from his arms and put on a set of scales, but he would have said they were probably the same weight as each other. But this hand seemed to be a little heavier than the other. All his life, Ricky had felt fairly balanced in the matter of hands, but now he felt like someone had stuck two large and differently sized vegetables on the ends of his wrists.

Second, there was the shape. This hand seemed to be a bit stockier than the other one, like it was the hand of someone who worked outdoors, or lifted weights, or some physical shit like that.

And third, there were some scars that he had definitely never seen before. Not new scars, either, but the kind of whitened, hard scars that time had worked on.

“What the hell?” Ricky mumbled to himself. The whole thing was stupid. People didn’t wake up with new hands like Frankenstein or something. They woke up with their old hands and the only thing that ever changed was that the hands got older. It must be his eyes, or the light, or some stupid thing.

He rolled off the bed, dislodging his watch and its broken strap – there it is, he thought – and made his way into the bathroom. Ricky wasn’t a fat man, not exactly, but he was a little busty and his navel stuck out of his hairy stomach like a whale’s eye. He flip-flopped his way across the tiled floor, turned on the light above the bathroom mirror, and lifted his hands up like he was about to surrender.

Now Ricky could see that his hands weren’t the same as each other. The right hand was entirely familiar to him – the skin quite soft, almost downy, the nails badly manicured – even down to the small, sickle-shaped scar on his palm that he’d got in a fight with a girl as a teenager. But the left hand – the left hand was different somehow. The skin seemed more weather-beaten, harder and maybe even tougher. The nails were small and ground-down. And the fingers were chunky, the knuckles like nuggets of bone under the skin.

Ricky brought his hand (the new hand, as he was trying not to call it) closer to his face; and then he saw it. At first he couldn’t understand why he hadn’t seen it right away. Maybe it had been the light, or maybe he just hadn’t looked properly. All he could do, once he’d realized fully what he was looking at, was stare.

On the knuckles of his right hand, carved in faded but deep ink and written in a shaky, just-legible hand, were four letters.

F U C K

Ricky had never seen the letters before. He hadn’t put them there. But someone had. The person that the hand belonged to.

And that was when he screamed.

Ricky screamed so hard he stepped backwards and fell over. He grabbed at the bathtub but too late to stop his fall, and went over like a toppled penguin.

“Oww!” he shouted as his head slammed into the hard floor. He lost consciousness for a moment, and when he came round a few seconds later couldn’t remember where he was or even who he was. He gazed up at the ceiling, groaned, and pulled himself upright with his other hand on the side of the toilet.

Ricky sat on the side of the bath for a few minutes, feeling the new bump on the back of his head.

“What a crappy start to the day,” he said out loud to himself.

He frowned. Something had happened. Something to do with his—

He looked down. There it was again.

F U C K

“Fuck,” said Ricky, agreeing with his hand.

He stood up, went over to the basin, turned on the water and put his hand under the stream. It gushed out nearly boiling but Ricky didn’t care. As the water scalded his hands, he rubbed at his knuckles with soap. I’m gonna wash that fuck right offa my hand, he hummed to himself.

Ricky looked down. Nothing had changed. He reached under the sink for a bottle of bleach, its neck encrusted blue, and poured some onto an old nail brush. Ricky winced as he scrubbed at his knuckles. The writing wasn’t coming off, but quite a bit of skin was. He stopped. All he was doing was hurting himself. He rinsed the bleach off his burning skin, gently dabbed his hand dry with a towel, and went back into the bedroom. He sat down on the bed and tried to think.

Ricky had read something once about the five stages of denial. They were, he vaguely remembered, something like denial, anger, depression, acceptance, and lust. After a moment’s thought, he shortened the list to four by excluding lust. After a few more moments’ thought, he decided that he was passing through denial quite quickly – it was hard for him to deny the existence of something as solid as a fucking hand, after all – but he was still a long way off acceptance. Anger, then, was his current state and, Ricky mused as he stared at the fleshy interloper on his wrist, who could blame him?

He looked around for his phone and found it plugged into the charger by some miracle. Picking it up, Ricky jabbed at the home screen, but with no luck. The words “Fingerprint not recognized” appeared on the screen.

“Shit the fuck!” Ricky shouted. “Shit the fuck this and piss on it!”

He smashed his new hand into the wall, remembering too late that, while it might not be his hand, it was still attached to his muscles and nerve endings. The pain was quite considerable, and made it even harder to type in his old security password with his new fingers.

A few moments later he had the number he needed, and he dialed it.

“Fuck you,” said a woman’s voice.

“That’s no way to talk to your brother.”

“Says you.”

“Listen, I wouldn’t normally call—”

“Then don’t. Bye.”

“Wait! This is a fucking crisis.”

Ricky’s sister sighed.

“It’s always a fucking crisis with you,” she said, and rang off.

Ricky swore for a while, then called the hospital.

“Mount Ararat Medical Center,” said the voice at the other end of the line. “Which department do you require?”

“Hi,” said Ricky, and stopped. What department did he require?

“I need the emergency room,” he said finally.

“If it’s an emergency, you’ll need to come in yourself. Unless you’re unable to, of course.”

Ricky waggled his fingers.

“Nope,” he said, “I can come in.”

Ricky put a plastic glove on his hand, the kind they give out in a chicken restaurant where the food is extra greasy, and took a shower. He didn’t know why he had put on the glove, but it seemed like a good idea. Maybe it’s infectious, he thought, and an image came into his head of touching his dick and his dick turning into something else. He tried to shake the picture out of his head and concentrate on being a regular person just taking a shower. But the image would not go away. Ricky’s hand on Ricky’s dick. Ricky’s new hand on Ricky’s old dick.

New dicks for old! thought Ricky. He remembered a story about a king called Midas, who made everything turn to gold when he touched it, and wondered if Midas had ever touched his own dick in the shower.

Ricky hurriedly finished his ablutions, dried himself and got dressed (he rarely shaved, believing – wrongly – that his stubbly cheeks were alluring to women). Then, because deep down he was a practical man, he made himself a bowl of cereal and ate it hurriedly, Cheerios spilling from his milky mouth.

He took off the plastic glove, wiped his mouth, picked his coat up from off the floor, checked for his car keys and, after a moment’s thought, went to a drawer full of mismatched socks, old underwear, balaclavas, and gloves. Ricky took out his favorite pair of gloves, but the right glove didn’t fit. Swearing a little, he found a second, woolen pair that fit both hands fine. Ricky pulled them on and left the house.

Ricky’s car was parked right outside his apartment. It was a yellow Pontiac Aztek, which Ricky had chosen because it was cheap and inconspicuous, or at least it had been before Ricky had filled it with Burger King debris. It also had a tent in the back that folded out, which Ricky was sure might be useful on a long stakeout, but so far had not been. He checked the location of the hospital on his phone and started the engine.

Twenty minutes later, Ricky was crossing the Mount Ararat parking lot to the emergency room.

“Hi,” he told the receptionist, a portly man called Steven, “I called earlier.”

“Yeah,” Steven replied. “We don’t really do bookings. Take a ticket.”

Ricky sat down. The room was half full with people who seemed to have been stabbed, cut or just battered with varying degrees of success. He was sure people were staring at him and noting with disapproval his apparent lack of flesh wounds.

After some time, his name was called and he went into a small room with a large window, where a cheerful-looking woman in her forties introduced herself as Nurse Mike.

“Don’t I get a doctor?” Ricky asked.

“This is the emergency room. You get Nurse Mike,” said Nurse Mike.

Ricky worked in the entertainment industry, so he was used to people referring to themselves in the third person. He said, “OK. But this might be something for a doctor.”

“And you might be hurting my feelings,” Nurse Mike replied. “Now please, shit or get off the pot.”

Ricky took off his gloves, first the left, then the right. He thrust his hands out at Nurse Mike.

“You see it?” he asked.

“See what?” answered Nurse Mike.

“My hands,” said Ricky.

“I see your hands,” Nurse Mike agreed. “What about them?”

“They’re different!”

Nurse Mike smiled. “Everyone’s hands are different,” she said. “I mean, a little bit. Look at mine.”

“I don’t want to look at your hands,” said Ricky. “I want you to look at my hands.”

“Oh,” said Nurse Mike. “I get it now. They are different.”

“Finally,” Ricky said.

“You’ve got that offensive tattoo on your right hand.”

“What?”

“Right there,” Nurse Mike said. “The F word.”

She gave Ricky a friendly, understanding look.

“But this is the emergency room,” she said. “We don’t do laser removals here. You need—”

“It’s not the tattoo,” said Ricky. “It’s the whole hand.”

“You want the hand removed?”

“No!” Ricky said. “I mean, maybe… I don’t know.”

Nurse Mike shook her head.

“If this is a body image thing, I sympathize. We had a guy in here, wanted his leg off. But again, this is the—”

Ricky shouted, “It’s not my hand!”

“Excuse me?”

“This! My hand! It’s not my hand!”

Nurse Mike frowned.

“It’s not your hand?” she repeated.

“No,” said Ricky. “I woke up this morning and this fucking thing was where my hand should be.”

Nurse Mike leaned in.

“It does look a little different,” she admitted. “But that could be for any number of reasons.”

“Like what?”

“Allergy, bee sting, animal bite, various kinds of infection… all of those would make it swell up.”

“Yeah, but none of those would make a tattoo appear on my hand.”

“Listen, pal,” said Nurse Mike, sitting upright. “Maybe you got bit by something, you freaked out, got drunk, had a tattoo done for some reason, I don’t know. But whatever it is, it’s not an emergency, and this—” she said, getting up and opening the door, “—is the emergency room.”

After sitting in the Aztek for a few minutes and banging his head on the steering wheel, Ricky considered his options. He could ask to be admitted to the correct department, but he had no idea what the correct department was. He could forget the whole thing, which was hard to do when he had this fucking hand. Or he could just take a few deep breaths, make an appointment with a doctor, and in the meantime get back to work. Ricky decided this was the best option. If nothing else, he still had to eat.

Ricky lifted up his hand and addressed it directly.

“I don’t know who you are or what the fuck is going on,” he told it. “But I have a full day ahead of me and you are not going to mess with it.”

The hand did not reply so Ricky drove home.

Once back at the apartment, Ricky went into his bedroom and opened his tiny closet, most of which was taken up by a bulky safe. Ricky’s safe was his number two prized possession. Ricky’s number one prized possession was inside the safe. He jabbed at the electronic display until it beeped at him and the small but hefty metal door swung open. He crouched down and was about to reach inside when he remembered his hand and put the plastic glove back on. He was almost sure that touching the contents of his safe with the hand would be alright, but better to be cautious; besides, the glove was opaque so he didn’t have to keep looking at what was written on his knuckles. He reached into the safe with his other hand and took out a large black case with a strap. Closing the safe, he placed the case on a table and opened it.

Inside was Ricky’s camera, a slightly scratched but impressive-looking Olympus. Ricky stroked its smooth black casing: he and the Olympus had been in a few tight spots together, and almost always come out on top. He checked that the camera was fully charged and ready to go, slung it over his T-shirt (MILEY CYRUS LIVE 2010), picked up the camera bag, and headed out the door.

Ricky got into the Aztek, pushed out several burger wrappers, placed the camera bag delicately in the passenger footwell, took out his cell phone and looked at his schedule.

9AM LEGALLY BLONDE IV SCRNG was the first entry. Ricky looked at his watch: 9.40. Ricky shrugged: nobody went to screenings.

10.30 REGALITY HOTEL SCALA JAQ. This was more like it – if it was true. Ricky’s contact at the Regality did a little too much coke for Ricky’s liking and had a tendency to spin gold from bullshit. Scala Jaq – singer, actress, and influencer – could be checking into the Regality at 10.30, but equally Ricky could be getting scammed for a hundred bucks.

Ricky shrugged again. He had nothing to lose, and if Coke Boy was right, it was going to be a nice payday. He turned on the engine and pointed the Aztek toward the city.

Ricky grew up in Miami Beach and so, being Ricky, he had always lived in Miami Beach. When his parents died, Ricky bought an apartment on the outskirts of town, and that was the only thing that had changed about his life. That, and the job. Growing up where he did, Ricky had seen so many celebrities that they seemed to be part of the scenery, in the same way that the tourists, the retired people, and the homeless were part of the scenery, with the difference that none of the homeless, the retired, and the tourists were always stepping out of limousines, walking into clubs, dining at fancy restaurants, staying at beautiful Art Deco hotels – or being photographed.

Unlike many people, Ricky knew that he would become a celebrity only by killing someone or being killed by someone. He was not photogenic, had no screen presence, and whatever “it” was, Ricky had never had. But he did belong to a Camera Club, for the simple reason that he was lonely and he had a camera (his dad’s) and, after a local nature photographer came to Ricky’s club and revealed his actual source of income, Ricky evolved a career plan.

Since then, Ricky could be seen most mornings, afternoons, and nights hanging around outside hotels, bars, and clubs, camera round his neck, trying to get famous people to move a little to the left or the right, so that he could take their picture and then sell it to someone else for anything up to ten thousand dollars. Most of the time he just got a middle finger or a blurred head turning away, but occasionally (like with Miley Cyrus back in 2010), he hit the jackpot.

It was a tough life, by Ricky’s standards anyway. He was outdoors most of the time, competing with other, more ruthless, paps, and he was always at the mercy of cops, rentacops, private security, angry fans, and jealous stalkers. Nevertheless, Ricky thought of himself as a Zen-like patient fisherman, prepared to wait for hours for the perfect time to cast his rod and reel in a big catch. Of course, very few fishermen ever got punched in the face, but so it went. Ricky was a pap now, and that was all there was to it. He made a living, he sometimes took vacations, and one day he was going to hit the motherlode.

But for now he was taking the Aztek at a moderate speed toward a hotel that was right on South Beach itself, on a tip that might be solid gold and might equally be bullshit. He had a full tank of gas, a reliable camera, and the whole day ahead of him.

And someone else’s hand on the end of his wrist.

TWO

Ricky didn’t want to think about the hand, but he supposed he had to. And he was enough of a pragmatist to know that if he ignored it, it wouldn’t go away. So he forced himself to think about the hand.

One, it was at least a hand. Whatever malevolent force – and he was sure it was malevolent – was after him had at least given him a hand in the place where a hand should be, and not a claw, or a foot or (a dick) something worse. It looked like a hand and – from all the evidence so far – it acted like a hand. Ricky could hold things with it, open doors with it, drive a car with it, and (he checked) scratch his ear with it.

Two, it wasn’t actually harming him. Despite being clearly not his, the hand didn’t hurt, throb, or ache. It didn’t lunge at him or try to gouge his eyes out. It wasn’t attempting to drive the car or write Satanic messages. It was just a hand.

Three, it was fucking weird. This was Ricky’s main issue with the hand. No way was there supposed to be someone else’s hand on the end of his arm. It was technically possible that he might have had a new hand sewn onto him, but that would be something that would take time – the sawing, the sewing, the arrangement of muscles and nerves and so on – and Ricky was pretty sure he hadn’t lost three days of his life and forgotten about it. Last night he had been a man with both his hands in the right place, and now he wasn’t.

Four, which was still part of three, it didn’t hurt. At all. Not only was there no Frankenstein-style ring of stitches around his wrist, but his new hand just felt… normal. It was completely ordinary in the way it just sat there at the end of his wrist and, basically, did hand stuff. Even if it had been surgically added in some mysterious surgical process that Ricky could not remember, it surely ought to throb, or at least itch a little; but it felt fine.

Five – and five was the summary of all the other points, the grand total after adding them all up – Ricky’s hand was completely impossible. This was the conclusion Ricky was reluctant to make. He could cope – just – with the hand being not his. He could live, more or less, with the hand acting like nothing was off, and hands were always just appearing on people’s wrists. What he couldn’t cope with, however, was the idea of the thing.

Hands don’t do this, thought Ricky, watching the hand that was not his hand flick up the turn indicator.

He realized that he was nearly at the Regality. There was a small crowd outside that might have been there for Scala Jaq or might not have been. Either way, it was enough to make Ricky forgot about the hand for five minutes and focus instead on finding somewhere to park.

The Regality was one of the oldest hotels on South Beach, and had for many years also been one of the most run-down. In 2007 it was bought by a new conglomerate and given an extensive makeover that removed most of the original features but retained the ocean front; it was thus the only hotel in Florida that looked better from behind.

Which was where Ricky found himself after parking the Aztek and hurrying to the front of the hotel, where the hardcore paps had gathered, along with the TV crews and the legit journalists. Sent on his way for not having the right pass, Ricky had simply gone around the back of the hotel and – at a nod from Coke Boy, keen to get more dollars – had skipped in through the bar and was now lurking behind a tall baggage cart, cramming a flash unit onto the body of his Olympus. A tag flapped in his face and he was about to flick it away when he saw the name scrawled on it:

SCALA JAQ.

Ricky couldn’t believe his luck. Coke Boy had come through! Scala Jaq was staying here. He looked at his watch. 10.30. If she was on time—

“Take this to the Tangerine Suite,” said a voice, and for a microsecond Ricky thought it was talking to him.

“Yes, sir,” a bellboy replied, and the trolley began to move.

Ricky thought fast. He took a baseball cap and a pair of sunglasses from his pocket, dropped the camera bag onto the cart, and followed the bellboy into the elevator, thus negating any need for a key card.

The bellboy swiped his own key card and, looking uncertainly at Ricky, asked:

“What floor please, sir?”

Ricky knew the layout of the Regality like (the back of his…) he knew his own name.

“Tenth,” he said, because in his clothes “Penthouse” would have aroused suspicion.

“Very good, sir,” said the bellboy and pressed 10 before pressing P.

They rode in silence, Ricky recovering his camera bag from the cart.

“Thanks,” he said as the door opened onto the tenth floor.

He stepped out, waited for the elevator to go on up, and made his way to the service stairs.

Arriving out of breath on the Penthouse Floor, Ricky leaned against the wall for a moment, then, satisfied he wasn’t going to die, sat down at the top of the stairs. He wasn’t going to do anything dumb like walk up to the Tangerine Suite and shout, “Room service!” because Ricky’s job was a waiting game. He looked at his watch again, sat down on the stairs, took out his phone, and waited.

Half an hour later he had just finished his tenth game of Snake when he heard the elevator doors open. Ricky opened the fire door, stepped out, and flattened himself into an alcove containing a large fire extinguisher.

He could hear voices now.

“I’m not doing it.” A woman’s voice, young.

“Scala, it’s ten minutes.” An older man.

“It’s never ten minutes, Jonty. Is the room ready? I need to lie down.”

“You just got here.”

“I don’t feel great. Is that OK? Or do I need to clear it with you first?”

“These people have been waiting for hours.”

“Then they won’t mind waiting a few more. Just give me a half hour.”

“It’s never a half hour.”

“Touché, you shot me down. OK, a half hour.”

“A real half hour.”

“Alright.”

Ricky heard the elevator doors close. He gingerly poked his head out of the alcove. The woman beeped her key card at the door.

In videos and on posters, Scala Jaq shone, her dark skin accentuated by jewelry, expensive clothes and the retoucher’s art. In person, wearing an olive-green flight jacket and a cheap baseball cap, she still possessed – Ricky had to admit – some kind of glow, as if stardom came from within. It was an interesting thought, but not one Ricky had time for. He reached for his camera, then restrained himself. She might hear him, and besides, who would pay for a photo of someone opening a door?

Ricky had no plan but he was a born improviser, which was another way of saying that he had no idea what he was doing. Seconds later his patience was rewarded as Scala Jaq unzipped her jacket and took out – a bottle? a baggie? a gun? – a small dog. It was scrawny and had fur the way an ageing rock star has hair.

Ricky fired off a few shots. They weren’t much, and Scala was dressed like she was about to fly a helicopter – that jacket, combat pants, leather gloves for God’s sake – but it was a candid shot and the agency liked candid shots.

“Be quiet now, Jonas,” she told the dog. The dog snuffled rebelliously but did not bark. Scala opened the door, put the dog down, and closed the door behind her.

Ricky checked the images on his camera. WHAT’S SCALA HIDING? would be a good headline, he decided, although the dipsticks at the agency never took his suggestions. The shots were OK, maybe a few hundred dollars, but there was no jackpot here.

Ricky thought about the kind of shots he needed. Exclusive was a word that came to mind. Intimate was another.

He wondered if he could get into the room.

Jonas scurried about the suite, his claws clattering like a maniac typing on a keyboard. He sniffed the couch, ran into the kitchenette, and barked at a decorative cat made of wire.

“It’s not real, Jonas,” said Scala. “This is a hotel, remember? None of it’s real.”

Like many people who had worked in the entertainment industry for much of their lives, Scala had gone through naivety (they love me!) and past cynicism (I’m just a cash cow) to an understanding of what it was to be a star in the modern era. She knew that, while millions downloaded her videos, watched her feeds, and sang along to her songs, she was not so much a product as the spokesperson for that product. And she was also aware, as many artists are not, that her life could be much, much worse.

Scala had begun her career in a kids’ show on a streaming network, where she’d been first a dancer, then a backing singer, and finally, at the age of fifteen, a featured performer. With a cute image and a couple of movies under her Hello Kitty belt, Scala was launched onto the teen market. She was a huge success with family audiences and even made a Christmas album. Then at seventeen she discovered she could write songs, and the second phase of her career began, in which she at least gave the impression of taking control, as both her songs and her new image suggested that here was a new, more mature adult artist who would not be doing anything cute or Christmassy.

And now here she was, in a very nice hotel with a dog that couldn’t tell real from fake and a few minutes to herself. Her luggage had been unpacked, and her tablet placed on a low black marble table. She switched it on and opened her official fan account. It was the usual geyser blast of caps-lock sycophancy, unhinged love, and veiled threats (her management had weeded out the actual threats, and police in several states were on constant alert for the real nutjobs). But a few crazies and stans got through and Scala liked to make sure she knew who they were.

Next she typed her own name into the big search engines, just to see what people thought she was up to right now. Most of it was officially sanctioned drivel: boys she was supposed to be seeing, events she had attended, movies and albums she was making, and so on. But some of it was half-deranged rumor. Her membership of a satanic coven had apparently been confirmed, as well as her sexual relationships with a congressman, a WWF wrestler and two K-Pop stars. Oh, and she had had her lips both made bigger and made smaller, which seemed rather a waste of money.

Finally, she opened her email account. This was encrypted to almost secret service levels, with three constantly changed computer-generated passwords, and so far had evaded the hacking skills of several hundred freaks and weirdoes living in their moms’ basements. Ignoring the slew of emails from family members, record company staff and management, she began to type in a name that autofill completed for her and wrote:

Hey.

A few seconds later she got a reply:

Oh, hey! Or “hey stranger,” I should say. Where have you been?

Scala typed again:

Sorry, been in transit.

That’s OK, the reply came, I had things to do as well. So – where are you?

South Beach, some dumb hotel.

I bet it’s nice.

Yeah, Jonas likes it.

She looked round. Jonas was staring at the cat sculpture, teeth bared.

Listen, she wrote, I’m still not good.

Is it worse?

No, the same. But it’s freaking me out.

Seconds went past. Scala could hear the buzz of the aircon in the room. Then:

OK. Time to do this. You ready?

She thought for a moment, then typed:

I’m ready.

“Excuse me, sir?”

Ricky woke up. He was sitting on the stairs. A large man with a huge face was standing over him. Shit.

“Yes?” he said.

“Is this yours?”

The man was holding Ricky’s camera bag. He opened it and saw it contained a charger and a flash unit.

“Not mine, no,” said Ricky. He stood up, which only brought him closer to the huge face.

The man stared at Ricky. It was like being stared at by the full moon.

“If you don’t mind, I need to search you,” he said.

“I do mind,” Ricky said, but the man patted him down anyway.

“It’s a form of words,” he said.

He found nothing, and seemed disappointed.

“If this isn’t yours,” he said, “I’ll hand it in at the front desk.”

Shit.

“No skin off my nose,” said Ricky.

“This is a restricted-access floor,” said the man. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“I’m gone,” Ricky replied, and started back down the stairs, the huge face watching him.

Three flights down, Ricky heard the fire door close. He crept back up, retrieved his camera from a windowsill, and went down to the lobby.

Coke Boy was there with his hand literally out.

“Not now,” Ricky said.

“Aw, man,” said Coke Boy.

“When I get the shot,” Ricky said.

Coke Boy said nothing, just sniffed dolefully.

Ricky walked out the front entrance, sat on a wall, and called the agency, who were keen to see the corridor shots of Scala.

Ricky was down a flash gun and a charger, but up a thousand dollars. Not bad for an hour’s work.

He looked down at his hand.

“OK,” he said. “Now we can go see a doctor.”

THREE

R