Stitch-Up (2 page)

“Excellent.” He carried on, pretending he hadn't heard. “Everything is in place for your launch, Dash. We've had teams on it night and day. The good news is I'm now turning my focus on the star attraction. Which means you have my undivided attention, precious.”

“Lucky me!” I snapped. “And I wish you'd stop talking about my launch, Dad. I'm not a perfume.”

He laughed. “Okay. Okay. Your
rebirth
begins tomorrow. So how does it feel to be weeks away from perfection?”

I rolled my eyes. Rebirth was just the creepy kind of word my father loved to use.

“I'm not going to be born again, Dad. I hate your cult talk.”

“The cult of Dasha Gold. We can channel that. The brand's new goddess.”

“Yeah. Whatever. Get to the point, Dad.” I was totally sick of his sticky sales pitch.

“A limo is waiting to take you to City Airport. Big Stevie knows the drill. Our jet is scheduled to leave at nine-thirty sharp.”

“Great,” I said, giving my bodyguard the evils. When he smirked back I got up and left the carriage, only half-listening to Dad as he talked me through ‘the procedures' – another of his smarmy words – for about the millionth time. Then, realising this really was the last-chance saloon, I quickly gathered my thoughts and gave it one final shot: “Dad, I don't know about this. It's just not me…”

“Fine. See you at nine.” He hung up.

Typical
, I thought angrily, staring down at the smartphone's blank screen.

Big Stevie entered the empty carriage, as if an invisible cord attached us. I pretended not to notice him. Moments later, a cheesy ringtone jived from his Puffa jacket. He answered with a grin. “Mr Gold. Yeah. I've got my eye on her.” He gave me a sly wink. “We'll be there. City Airport for nine.” When he spoke, he rubbed his huge hand back and forth across his shiny head, like he was trying to warm up his brain. A barbed-wire tattoo, which circled his thick wrist, flashed from beneath his sleeve. This marked him out as one of Dad's elite security detail – the Golden Knights.

“Yeah. I heard her. The same old baloney. No worries. I'll see to it.” His mafia routine was seriously toe-curling.

“Fraud,” I said when he hung up. Anger was bubbling up again, pushing against my skin. I had been guarded all my life.

“Boss wants me to keep you on side, Dasha. And at the end of the day, you've gotta do what the boss says, innit?” He couldn't resist the football clichés.

“Whatever!” I zoned out.

Suburbia. London sprawl. Grim-faced houses, abandoned trampolines and cheap-looking conservatories slid past. I imagined living in one of the nondescript little homes backing onto the railway tracks, leading a civilian life, going to the local academy, hanging out with the cool kids. Doing normal things – trips to supermarkets, shopping malls and cinemas, eating burgers. Not living in billion-pound penthouses in the sky. Not attending an elite finishing school. Not going to premieres, parties and VIP everything…

The train passed an advertisement featuring my dad's goddaughter. Someone had scrawled
pretty vacant
across her forehead. Although I'd seen the poster a million times before, a shiver ran down my spine when I read the graffiti. That would be me soon, I thought. Operated on. Stitched up into Dad's ideal of beauty. Face zeroed. I screwed up my face, enjoying the sensation of my skin crinkling up around my eyes. Soon I wouldn't even be able to do that. My parents were seriously messing with me. No, they were trying to control me in every way.

I checked my watch. The charms on my bracelet clattered – one for each of my sixteen birthdays. In a matter of hours, I would be on my parents' jet heading for our private Caribbean island with its state-of-the-art operating theatre and recuperating suites. Once there, GoldRush Image Inc's most qualified cosmetic surgeons were going to use groundbreaking technology to transform me beyond recognition – or, to use another of Dad's dodgy phrases, ‘turn me into a living logo'.

I pressed my fingers to my temples. My head was throbbing. All ‘the procedures' sounded so sci-fi, so unreal. In six months' time I would be…
what?
I pushed my temples more forcefully.
A complete fake? A freak? A prototype?
Dad's ideal version of me!

I pictured my therapist talking me through the surgical procedures. He had spent hours trying to bring me round to Dad's way of thinking. But when he started regurgitating all Dad's slimy expressions – ‘picture perfect', ‘aesthetic archetype' and ‘living logo' – I'd switch off and begin cloudspotting, shaping animals, fish and butterflies from the cotton-wool air. His therapy kingdom was situated on the fiftieth floor so there were always plenty of clouds. I imagined these cloud creatures had fluid, ever-changing identities, and in the stories I dreamed up, they always escaped.

A scream was building up deep inside my stomach. I closed my eyes and gripped the armrests of my seat, as if this might stop me hurtling towards my future.

Suddenly a terrible cacophony engulfed the train. Brakes shrieked. Metal screeched. Then my world was spinning and, as I hit the floor in a tangle of limbs, I saw Big Stevie was airborne, too, and rocketing straight towards me like a heat-seeking missile. I scrambled out of range moments before he crashed down, his arms splayed out like a fighter-bomber plane.

The train shuddered to a halt. An eerie silence followed. A heartbeat later, the screams started. Terrifying questions crammed my head. Was it a bomb? A kidnap crew?
A collision? I shook Big Stevie by the shoulders; he was out cold. Placing two fingers on his wrist directly below the longest spike of his barbed-wire tattoo, I checked his pulse and counted the beats out loud, because that action stopped the dark thoughts crowding back in.

Then a voice was booming over the intercom, instructing us to disembark for our own safety. The doors zizzed open. The television crackled static. The announcer's voice was rough around the edges – unofficial somehow. Grabbing my Dior bag, I crept towards the door and peered out.

All along the Bullet Train, shell-shocked girls from the Star Academy were spilling out and regrouping in hysterical huddles. Some were hugging each other and crying while the more media-savvy were filming the scene on their smartphones – their eyes, as ever, on the main chance. A minder, who was carrying a girl with a gash on her head, was shouting for help to get the injured to safety.

I jumped down. There was no sign of a bomb, no toppled carriages, no mangled metal. The train, although tilting, was still on the track. The Bullet Company's cheesy advertising jingle popped into my head – ‘Bullet Trains save lives'.

The rat-a-tat-tat of gunfire sounded from the front of the train.

Then I saw them, working in pairs. Men in masks were running down the tracks, checking carriages. The girls started screaming and scrambling up the sidings while the armed security guards rushed towards the advancing snatch squads.

Oh, no, a kidnap crew
, I thought in a panic, chasing after
the girls from my class, my bag banging against my hip. These guys were hardcore. They were desperate enough to risk everything to kidnap the super-rich for massive ransom payouts. They didn't mess around.

The girls from my class stumbled and tottered in their high-heeled shoes as their minders shepherded them up the sidings. I was still running after them when an idea took hold. I slowed to a walk. Stevie was still out cold in the carriage. This was my chance!

I had exactly sixty seconds to change my life.

Peeling away from the rest of the group, I headed off in the opposite direction. About fifty metres down the track, I started climbing up the sidings, breaking a fingernail as I grabbed hold of clumps of weeds and grass to help me up, heels sinking deep into the claggy mix of mud and gravel. Reaching the top, I crouched down behind a bush and surveyed the scene. A freshly felled tree lay across the tracks. The front two carriages of the train were slanting precariously to the right. The girls from my class had vanished. Their minders stood guard.

Gunfire rang out again.

My heart was in my mouth.

Girls were screaming again.

More gunshots, closer this time.

I stood up slowly, edged along the fence until I found a gap and climbed through, skidding down an embankment into a grubby suburban street.

Reality Bites

AN hour later, the Thames snaked before me, glittering in the last rays of the sun as it swept London's secrets out to sea. Splashes of gold spangled the murky water, then for a moment the wind dropped, plating the surface, as if all the gold bars stashed away in the Bank of England's vaults had melted into the river. The breeze got up again, rippling the water, sending jagged gold lines shooting back and forth, like the hands of traders on the stockmarket floor. Ragged pink clouds stretched across the darkening sky. The city's skyscrapers flashed like gangsters' jewellery.

I glanced over my shoulder. No sign of Big Stevie. That was a first. He was probably still out cold on the train. It felt strange but good. Freedom buzzed and shimmered all around me. Everything was louder, brighter, more intense, as if I were experiencing life in high definition for the very first time. I walked over to the river, and standing there, soaking up the scene, all I could think was,
This is the real world, the freaking real world
.

London.

As I'd never seen it before.

Alone.

Without Big Stevie shadowing me.

“Free,” I whispered, trying the word out for size. “Free,”
I said the word a little louder. I liked the way it pushed my lips into a broad, beaming smile.

I took a deep breath. The river smelled salty. It made me think of Elizabethan adventurers gliding down the Thames in ships with big, billowing sails, off to discover the New World.

London pulsed beneath my feet.
My New World
. Pressing the tips of my middle and index fingers to my lips, I kissed them and crossed myself before touching them to the pavement, like a superstitious footballer heading onto the pitch.

Straightening up again, my excitement ebbed away. GoldRush Image Inc – my parents' headquarters – loomed on the other side of the river. The network's news helicopters were zipping off helipads, hunting down breaking news, their blades glinting in the day's last light.

Before long my parents would know that I was missing, if they didn't already.

I sat down on a bench to catch my breath. An inscription on the back read:
Everyone needs time to think
.

Understatement of the year
, I thought, trying to gather myself. I tilted my head back and looked up at the sky; the last rays of the sun warmed my face. The gulls swooped and wheeled over the Thames, riding the breeze, bellies stained pink in the evening sunlight. I was running.
But from what?
I took a deep breath. In. Out. Slowly my thoughts settled. The kidnappers had saved my skin for the time being. But I needed to crack on.

I stood up, hoping to walk myself into some kind of plan.
An arrow of light shot across the Thames straight towards me, as if singling me out. I smiled. I still couldn't quite believe that I had dodged the knife.

As I set off in the direction of the Houses of Parliament, the civilian world rushed towards me in a riot of sound and vision: chattering families strolled past, giggling girls sashayed by in high-street fashions, a crew of skateboarders slalomed between squawking hen parties, while beered-up boys in whack shirts whistled at girls with spray-on tans. Asian women out with their families caught my eye as their saris sparkled in the sunshine. Weaving through the crowds, I felt as if I'd wandered onto the set of a West End musical. Every millimetre of the seventy-two kilometres of nerves in my skin was supercharged. Electric pulses were racing round my body, as if it were a Formula One track. I was hyped to the max.

Down by the London Eye, a carousel whirled. Out of nowhere, a clown started shadowing me – invading my space, mirroring my every gesture and playing it for the crowds. I walked faster, but my fancy-dress stalker kept on mimicking me. His cheap joke spooked me. Even eerier, Mickey Mouse, Darth Vader and Michael Jackson laughed as I scooted past. I did a double take. They were shabby human statues. Totally freaked out now, I sprinted up the steps to Westminster Bridge, taking them two at a time. From below, laughter reached me, followed by the tinkle of change dropping into the clown's hat.

I stopped on the bridge, heart rocketing. It was as if the
creepy clown had tripped a switch in my head and, boom, the rush of excitement had changed into something dark. I leaned against the bridge as I caught my breath.

In the gathering darkness GoldRush Image Inc dazzled. It dominated the skyline, hogging the limelight, making the House of Commons, Whitehall and all the other government buildings look gloomy and irrelevant, like fusty old fossils. Dad's headquarters were a DNA-inspired design, two towers that twisted a full ninety degrees as they rose up into the clouds, resembling a double helix. One tower housed his media empire; the other his cosmetic kingdom. Dad used to be a cosmetic surgeon – one of the best. He was the go-to guy for the rich and famous. That was how he made his money. With this wealth he had built up his media empire. Dad was ahead of the game; he'd sussed out the power of the image decades ago.

Clips from my parents' TV shows flickered and flashed on the massive LED screens that encased GoldRush Image HQ in a glittering force field. An A to Z of celebrity guests winked and smiled. World leaders gave the thumbs up. Royalty waved. Superstars blew kisses. On the largest screen, footage of Dad interviewing the prime minister was playing on a loop – a twenty-metre-high love-in, a bromance special. This supersized image gave the impression that the two of them governed the country from right there on the sofa. A chill crept up my spine.

Across London, lights were flicking on. People were hunkering down for the night, cooking supper, putting the
kids to bed and switching on the TV. Soon they would be turning on the news and watching the train crash story.