Ok, so it's been a while, but there are two reasons for this. First has been a stupidly intense work schedule as we got a new show ready for Christmas, and this is my first day off in forever. Secondly and more importantly is that SJ has been critical – very dangerously ill, and I couldn't work out what would be the moral thing to do with this, to continue or to stop. However, the doctors have tried a new treatment and she seems to be responding. The girls who are with her have been told to read to her, so I am writing more so they can do just that. And once again, I urge you to send any positive energy you can to the girl with nine lives. She's fighting, but she needs your help.
I don't own Skins but I am sure as fuck they wouldn't mind me borrowing it for this.
That's it. Be festive. Spread the love. Hypes xx
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5. Cuckoo In The Nest
Katie
"This has got to be the stupidest idea you have ever come up with in your life," I told my Dad.
"You'll be fine, Katiekins," he assured me. "And we need to know what we're dealing with."
"I don't like lying to people," I protested.
"Oh so all those tall stories you told me when you were a teenager to cover your behaviour were the truth then were they?" laughed my mother.
"Well, what if they find out and they batter me?" I asked, hoping to appeal to their protective parental sides.
This time both of them laughed.
"I think I'd be more worried about them lads getting battered by you, Katie love," sniggered Rob.
Great. I was starting to run out of excuses.
"Think of the family, darling," urged Jenna.
"Fitches stick together," said Rob, nodding seriously.
Fucking Fitch family trump card played again. However much I might moan, they knew I loved them, like fierce, and would do anything to protect them in the end, but I had to have one last stab.
"Then why can't Emily do it?" I pleaded.
"Darling you know Emily's going to LA with Naomi," said Jenna. "She'll be meeting all sorts of people out there. It's going to be a great opportunity for her."
Both Mum and Dad were absolutely thrilled that Emily was dating a budding supermodel. Funny how they never seemed that thrilled about it when it was me, but the pair of them had fallen under the Diamond spell, and they couldn't get enough of fucking Naomi. Mind you, the fact that she treated Emily like a fucking princess might have swayed their opinion.
"Well what about James?" I said.
Yeah I know. I was getting desperate.
"James would…" said my mother. "Well, James would just be useless."
"You're the smart one," encouraged Rob. "This operation needs someone with a bit of nouse. You know, someone subtle."
I shook my head in resignation. I have been called many things in my life, but 'subtle' has never been one of them. I looked back at my parents expectant faces. There was no way I was getting out of this.
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One week later I was stood outside the door of some kind of converted barn type thing in a field on the outskirts of Bristol with trepidation buzzing through my brains. Much as I was still convinced this whole thing was a fucking farce, I took a deep breath and raised my hand to knock. It was now or never. The face that greeted me seemed friendly enough as it formed its features into a welcoming smile. The face belonged to a tall thin boy with floppy black hair. He was dressed kind of scruffily, but he was still pretty fit. Underneath his raggy clothing I could see some half decent muscles, and he had a lovely olive skin tone that made me wonder if he was one of the French guys. I ignored the flutter that rippled through my stomach when I thought 'French', and tried to focus on feeding him my bogus cover story.
"Hi, I'm Katie Ford," I said. "I'm the MA student that wanted to come and find out about your company."
It was Emily who had come up with the idea of me being a research student. At first I'd scoffed at the idea. Imagine it, me as an academic. I'd always been much more of a doer than a thinker. But she had gotten right into it, even thinking up the premise of my thesis, an investigation of spectacle as an art form, saying I could incorporate my knowledge of fashion shows into it as well. She assured me I was smarter than I thought I was and a champion bullshitter, and that this idea would give me free reign to come and go as I pleased and spend as much time as I wanted with Le Coeur Explosif. Which up until now was as little time as possible.
"Oh yeah, I'm Freddie," said friendly face, opening the door and gesturing for me to come in. "I'm the guy you spoke to about it. Welcome to our secret lair."
"Not that secret," I smiled. "The address is on the internet."
"You know what I mean," grinned Freddie. "Explosif HQ. Let me show you round and introduce you to the team."
He turned around and walked in front of me, granted me a fine view of his tight little ass. Not bad. Not bad at all. He led me past some stairs and through a door into a big open space, filled with all sorts of weird and wonderful metal creations, large scale sculptures and two dimensional metal drawings enhanced with rope light, or built to house pyro or fire sculpture. It was fascinating stuff, and proof enough that this lot were interested in more than your average pyro blaster.
"This stuff is amazing," I said.
"Yeah, we started off with small scale shows, which were more based around Cook's creations," said Freddie.
"Cook?" I asked innocently.
"Fucking hell, Freds. Where did you dig up this beauty?" boomed a loud voice from behind me.
"Cook," grinned Freddie, and I turned to see a shirtless man, dressed in heavy work trousers and boots, wearing thick welding gloves and carrying a piece of red hot metal with some tongs in one hand. Oh dear lord, that was one fine torso. He looked like he came from a calendar.
"Cook's our metal guru," said Freddie. "There's nothing he can't do with a piece of steel."
"And there's a piece of steel waiting for you right here, baby," said Cook, grabbing at his crotch with his free hand. "Any time you want it."
He was crude, but his eyes were sparkling, and although I wasn't about to throw myself at him right away, I was definitely mentally filing him away as a possibility for later.
"Fuck's sake Cook," said Freddie, shaking his head. "Katie's a guest. She's the MA student who wants to write about us for her research."
"I'm all for the furtherment of knowledge," said Cook. "You can pump me for information any time you like."
"You get used to him," sighed Freddie. "He's actually an alright guy, underneath it all."
"Well, obviously I'll have to wait for evidence before I can make a final assessment," I said cheekily. "But I do like to be thorough in my investigations."
Cook beamed back at me.
"Sassy," he said. "I like that. I can see you and me getting on very well, Katiekins. Very well indeed."
"Why don't I show you our fusing room?" said Freddie, putting his hand on my arm and guiding me away. "We've got a little gig at the weekend, so Thomas is preparing some stuff."
I noticed his hand had stayed on my arm as we walked, and I for one was in no hurry for him to take it away. He was much more gentle and polite than the walking ego that was Cook, but he was still pretty damn hunky.
"The fusing room is where we put all the individual fireworks together to make sequences," he was saying. "They have to be joined together, so that one firing impulse will trigger a whole array of material. Or if they are to be fired separately, each firework will need it's own igniter."
I let him prattle on as we walked. Of course I knew all of this stuff already, but I wasn't about to let him know that. We left by the back door and crossed a yard to a smaller outbuilding.
"Obviously, the fusing has to be done well away from Cook's workshop," said Freddie as I nodded attentively. "There's a lot of black powder about and you can't take the risk of any sparks. The pyro itself is stored way over there till we need it."
He pointed down a trackway to a metal shipping container.
"Is that safe?" I asked innocently, despite knowing every detail of the rules on storing pyro.
"Best place for it," smiled Freddie. "You know when you get your fireworks for bonfire night, they tell you to store them in a metal tin? Well that's just a bigger tin."
"Is that why you work all the way out here?" I said.
"Yeah," replied Freddie. "The material has to be stored so far away from any residential area."
With good reason too. Most of the fireworks we get in this country are imported from China, and in the year of the Beijing Olympics there was a shortage in the amount of material being let out of the country. Which led to some unscrupulous operator trying to steal stuff from other users. Except that the idiots he had hired to do the deed, were not really aware of what they were dealing with, and in the end they were trying to angle grind their way into someone's store. Needless to say it did not end well.
"Here we are," said Freddie, opening the door for me. Unlike his friend, he appeared to be a gentleman.
Inside the outhouse, the boy that Pandora had described as 'a complete blinkin' dreamboat' was working at a table. Spread out in front of him were a set of candles he was putting on firing frames, boxes of igniters, rolls of match, and various sorts of parcel and gaffer tape. Thomas looked up from his labours and as his white smile split his dark-skinned face, I was forced to agree with Panda's assessment.
"Thommo, this is Katie," said Freddie. "She's a postgrad student who is going to be hanging out with us for a bit."
Thomas wiped his hands down on his overalls before extending one towards me.
"I'm Thomas," he said. "So pleased to meet you."
"Pleased to meet you too," I said, accepting his firm handshake. "So what are you doing here?"
As I listened to him explain the process of linking the individual units of pyro together, I could feign attentiveness whilst assessing the latest of the Explosif boys to grace my eye line. Thomas's delicious French African accent and athletic physique had certainly piqued my interest. Maybe coming here wasn't going to be such a chore after all. Surrounded by such a fit bunch of lads, maybe my biggest problem was going to be deciding which one of them I was going to fuck first. It seemed that there were indeed plenty more fish in the sea, and I had just managed to land myself in the lushest part of the ocean.
"So how many of you are there?" I asked, keen to know if I was going to be treated to any more hunky delights.
"There's four of us," replied Freddie. "We were all friends before we started any of this stuff. Although we all muck in together, Cook's always been into making stuff, Thommo's more on the technical side, and I handle most of the admin."
"So who's number four?" I asked intrigued.
From what I'd seen so far it seemed quite sweet. Just a bunch of lads having a laugh. Childhood friends who had been bitten by the firebug, and loved it too much to stop. But none of this explained what I had seen at the end of the Mayfest. That was pure class. That had managed to thrill me and excite me, despite my own cynicism. I couldn't imagine any of the boys I had met so far being responsible for such astonishing art. The mind that had created that was something very special.
"Number four's our secret weapon," grinned Freddie.
"Secret weapon?" I said sceptically.
We had crossed back into the main building and gone through the big workshop, before climbing the stairs we had passed on the way in. Freddie paused with his hand on the door handle and turned back to me.
"Yeah," he said, his voice filled with admiration and what I would soon discover was love. "The brains behind the operation. She's a genius."
She? The word ricocheted around my head. Even in these modern times the pyro game was still incredibly male-dominated. You didn't find many women on crews, and you certainly didn't find them in positions of power. Freddie opened the door and strode purposefully through.
"Katie Ford," he said theatrically. "Allow me to present the beating heart of Le Coeur Explosif, our designer…."
Time slowed down, and Freddie's voice sounded like it was echoing through treacle as he introduced her, but I didn't even need to hear the name. Something told me in the nanosecond before I stepped into the room that it would be her. I never asked her what she did for a living on that wonderful night that we spent together. It didn't seem important. What I had discovered was that she was special, and now I was being proved right. Not only was she beautiful, intriguing, fun and ridiculously sexy, she was also a fucking genius. It felt like someone had let off a six-inch shell inside my chest. To think that the stunning images I had seen at the show had come from inside her mind left me speechless. Effy had looked up from her computer, and the instant I found myself locked into those incessantly searching blue eyes, all thoughts of sexytime with any of her boys exploded into nothingness. Effy's presence invaded me, and there was no room for anyone else.
"Murder," I said quietly.
Effy smiled to herself as she caught the joke and the room was bathed in incandescent light. I just wanted to run and hold her in my arms, but there was something in the way.
"Murder?" frowned Freddie.
"I'm parched," I said. "I could murder a cup of tea."
"Of course," he smiled. "I'll go put the kettle on. Eff do you want one?"
Effy shrugged nonchalantly, which Freddie seemed to take as a yes and headed off to the kitchen leaving Effy and I alone. We stared at each other wordlessly for at least a minute, until she broke the silence.
"So I guess it was meant to be after all," she smiled. "Unless you're stalking me."
"I had no idea," I replied.
"Student?" she said, raising her eyebrows.
Fuck. The realisation hit me that this was who I was supposed to be spying on. My beautiful Effy. How the fuck was I supposed to do that? Even for my Dad? I had a violent urge just to spill everything out right there and then, but what if she threw me out? Ever since the night of the party she had been burning away in my brain, appearing uninvited at the most inappropriate of moments. I had daydreamed my way through work, and there had been more than one instance of nocturnal alone time that had featured her image. I had figured it would just be better to go with it, let myself work through the teenage crush and get over it. But faced with her in all her real life glory the emotion exploded messily through me again. I couldn't stand the thought of not seeing her, even if I had to make do with being friends, and I realised that my cover would give me the perfect opportunity to spend time with her. I could still report to my Dad, telling him useless information that anyone with an internet connection could find out, but I wouldn't really be betraying her. And maybe familiarity would ease this obsession, and we really could be friends. My mind was made up. I decided to run with the deception.
"I lost my job that day in Paris," I told her.
"Figures," she said.
"You know what happened?" I asked.
"I heard somebody smacked a model in the face," she said. "I'm guessing that was you."
"Yeah well nobody would hire me after that," I replied. "So I thought it might be good to go back to school for a bit and reassess."
"So brains as well as beauty," she smiled at me.
Oh fuck, she was flirting with me. Stop flirting with me, Effy. You have a fucking boyfriend.
"Stop flirting with me, Effy. You have a fucking boyfriend."
Ok, so no filter between brain and mouth.
"Je suis desolée," she said, holding up her hands.
No, no, no, Effy. Not with the fucking French.
"So have you clocked which one is my boy yet?" she asked me.
"Aren't they all your boys, Babes?" I said.
"True enough," she said casually, knowing full well the effect she had on people.
"But then again, Cook hit on me the second he laid eyes on me, so I don't think it's him," I said.
"Can't exactly blame him," said Effy, her eyes dragging slowly across my figure. I had dressed more conservatively than my usual fare. The kind of thing I thought an intellectual might wear. But clearly it didn't make the blindest bit of difference to Effy.
"Fuck's sake Effy," I said in frustration. "I'm really trying to make this work, but how can I if you won't even make the slightest bit of effort not to perv on me?"
"I'm sorry," she apologised again, this time in English. "It just feels so natural."
"So, BOYFRIEND," I said pointedly. "We've ruled out Cook…"
"Have we?" said Effy. "How do you know my boyfriend's not a cheating cunt?"
"Because if he was, you would have slept with me the night of the Old Library," I replied.
She didn't have an answer for that, because it was the truth. We lapsed into silence again, unable to rip our traitorous eyes away from each other until Freddie reappeared with steaming mugs of heated beverage. He handed me mine, and then walked over to Effy who was still sat in her swivel chair, as dastardly as a Bond villain, and just as deadly. He handed her her tea and then kissed her tenderly on the top of the head. So that was it then. The bad girl had somehow landed herself a nice boy. In a way I was disappointed it wasn't Cook. At least he would have been a worthy adversary. But Freddie started talking again, bigging Effy up and going on about how amazing she was. Not that I needed telling, but his voice was so full of love, I realised it would be an act of extraordinary cruelty to take her from him. I was just going to have to be strong.
"So how do you want to do this?" asked Freddie. "Do you want to interview us and stuff?"
"Um yeah," I said hesitantly.
I hadn't really thought this through, and my encounter with Effy had completely thrown me.
"But today I'd maybe just like to be a fly on the wall for a bit," I said. "You know, just hang out and see how you operate."
"Sure," said Freddie genially. "I'm sure the lads won't mind having another pretty girl about the place."
My eyes snapped to Effy. She was smirking, but she wouldn't look at me. Neither will the lady, Freddie boy. Neither will the lady.
I spent the rest of the morning there, though I studiously avoided being alone with Effy. I hung out quite a lot with Thomas when Cook's incessant flirting got too much for me, and I figured it wouldn't hurt to do a little digging on Panda's behalf. He turned out to a very sweet and intelligent man, and I decided to shelve that 'on Panda's behalf thing'. Once I could bear it, I was definitely going to need something to distract me from Effy, and I decided it would be best to keep my options open for the moment. We found ourselves deep in the middle of a conversation about conflict diamonds in Africa, when Freddie popped his head round the door and called lunch. We went through to a kitchen area, where they all sat down at a table and ate a proper meal together. How very European, I thought. How very fucking French. Effy sat at the head of the table like some kind of a queen. All the boys had personalities of their own, but it was clear that she was the focal point for them all. Even though she said virtually nothing as usual, everything passed through her as they all sought her silent approval. Freddie was clearly smitten with her, but even Cook and Thomas automatically seemed to defer to her. Effy was the driving force behind this whole operation. It seems I wasn't too far wrong when I referred to them as her boys. If she chose to, she could probably have manipulated them any way she wanted. In former times I could have laughed with a pretty girl like her about how easy it was to manipulate men, but here I was, just as foolish as the rest of them, like a fat kid desperate to be chosen by the captain of the sports team.
But I was the cuckoo in the nest. I watched as the lads laughed and joked and carried on as lads do, and Effy smiled tolerantly at them. And I realised that they were a family fireworks company too. Not in the conventional sense perhaps, but it made me all the more determined to behave. Despite my attraction for Effy, despite the fact that I would do almost anything just to be around her, I was not going to fuck with them. I respected family too much for that. I found myself actually relishing my subterfuge as a researcher. I wanted to find out about them. I wanted to ask questions and discover how this odd little family came to be.
"So have you lived in England long?" I asked Effy.
"France as a child, then here as a teenager," she said. "Then France again. I haven't been back that long. I was still working for Thierry when I saw you in Paris."
"Wait a minute," said Freddie. "You two know each other?"
I ignored him.
"Thierry?" I said in astonishment. "Thierry as in…?"
"The one and only," she smiled, interrupting my question. "I trained with him."
Thierry as in Thierry LeClerc, the founder member of Groupe TLC, the rockstar of French pyro. They fired massive high stakes shows from bridges and stadia, and their Bastille Day pyro from the Eiffel Tower was the stuff of legend. They worked with famous bands, and opened fabulous Middle Eastern hotel complexes. They were fucking huge, and we had spent a considerable part of our budget for the Paris show, booking them to provide the fabulous finale that should have been Tamara's moment of glory, but which instead had fallen to Naomi Diamond. I wished I could have seen it.
"Were you firing?" I asked her.
She nodded silently.
"I missed it," I said sadly.
Another gallic shrug and a hooded look from under her eyebrows had me fighting for breath. Jesus Christ, that company was world famous. No wonder she was good.
"So you two have met before?" repeated Freddie.
"Katie used to work in fashion," said Effy. "We met briefly at a runway show in Paris."
"What a coincidence," said Freddie.
It didn't feel like coincidence. It felt like fate. Mine and Effy's eyes flashed together only for a moment, but in that moment we understood each other. We made a silent pact not to mention the night of the Old Library. Did it make us bad people? Or simply better people for trying to protect something decent? I couldn't tell any more. My head was spinning from the multiple levels of subterfuge in my brain.
"So why did you leave France?" I asked her. Lovely as the boys were, I couldn't believe she had abandoned a career with Groupe TLC for this. Effy and Freddie both answered at the same time.
"Artistic freedom," said Effy.
"For love," said Freddie.
Well that was fucking interesting.
"Art and love," I said to her. "No two finer things to fight for."
For the first time since I had met her this morning, I held her gaze. For a moment a heavy thunder rumbled across those clear blue eyes, and it held such a darkness that it scared me. I half recoiled, and she knew that I had caught her out. Within seconds, her air of careful disinterest was back in place. She turned her attention some rubbish Cook was spouting, and the moment was lost.
I excused myself from them after lunch. I needed to get some fucking air. I had bummed a fag from Cook before I left, and I only drove a little way down the road before stopping the car and getting out to smoke it. The simple option would be to stay away. Tell my dad where to shove his stupid little spygames, and to stay the hell away from the minefield that was Effy Stonem. But I knew it would never happen. I had seen her. I had seen behind the cool façade, and I needed to know more. I needed to be there for her when whatever trouble was brewing behind those stupidly seductive eyes exploded into view. Even if it was just as a friend. Even if it was going to cause me more pain than pleasure. Even if it was all going to end up in a bloody mess. There would be no escaping her. The planets had aligned and were dragging us along in their orbit. She was inevitable.
FOR SJ xx