Tinseltown. Victoria Fox

eloquently captured the spirit of the show, and moreover she delivered a rarity: a performance that was all about the voice. No gimmicks, no innuendo, no winking to camera – just a beautiful, pure-as-driven-snow voice. It was, for many who voted, a happy antidote to young women raging half-naked through the charts singing about sucking the tip off a lollipop. The week since Laney’s victory had been one of back-to-back interviews and performances, the latter of which she’d got through fine because, somehow, when she was immersed in her favourite songs, she was a different woman. A stronger woman, the woman she wanted to be: poised and gifted and elegant and maybe, in the right light, even a bit beautiful. But as for the interviews and the publicity, she couldn’t bear it.

      She had never expected to win, had never thought she’d get past the first round of auditions. The only ears to have properly heard her sing up to that point belonged to her sister Philippa and her Labrador, Bugsy, back home in Connecticut, whom she missed desperately. The dog, that was, not the sister. As the one who had steamrollered her into entering Sensation in the first place – ‘You’re pathetic, Laney. When are you going to do something with your life?’ – Philippa was on the phone to her five times a day, wanting to get a piece of the action, and if it wasn’t her it was the girls’ equally pushy mother. No, Laney chided herself: that was unkind. Philippa only wanted the best for her. It was just that some days she wished none of it had happened – not the show, not the winning and definitely not the public appearances. She’d prefer to go home and curl up with Bugsy and shut the blinds and wait until the whole thing had blown over.

      Only now it was Christmas. And that meant …

      ‘You look pale,’ commented Julian, thinking the last thing he needed was another client breakdown on his watch – he had an executive meeting in ten. Plus Laney Allen was proving to be quite the cash cow. ‘Are you all right?’

      ‘I – I’m fine.’ She managed a smile. There was no way she could tell this man, this strange, polished man who claimed to be her friend but didn’t feel like one, how she felt about this time of year. She’d been naïve to imagine she could disappear, like she did every December, until Christmas was done.

      ‘Great.’ He clicked the nib of a pen in and out several times. ‘The Celebrity Christmas Parade is one of the biggest celebrations in Hollywood – it’s historic, a city tradition, something for the people. Perfect for your profile.’ The way he said ‘perfect’ brought to mind a cat licking cream off its whiskers. ‘OK?’

      She swallowed the lump in her throat. ‘OK.’

      Laney Allen hated Christmas. Not in the way some people hate Christmas – the crowds, the cost, the endless carols or the way it starts in September – but in a way that had, for over twenty years, disabled her for several weeks over the festive period and left her unable to think of anything except how to avoid all associated with it.

      Others embraced this time of year. They loved red noses blooming in the chill, cosy sweaters and roaring fires, friends and family gathering to celebrate. She could recognise the appeal, but only in the way someone with a phobia of air travel dreams of visiting a distant shore and understands they’ll never reach it. Many times she’d attempted to rationalise, tried to work out the root of her dread, but it was impossible. Every so often she’d catch a shadow, what she thought was a memory corroded by the sands of time, and stretch for it, only to have it slip away. It seemed Laney had been born like this and there wasn’t a thing she could do about it. Christmas was her private torture, her cross to bear.

      It was a gauntlet of horrors. ‘Silent Night’ brought her out in a rash. Mistletoe made her flush hot and cold. The reindeer with their twisted thick antlers and their names like gunfire – Blitzen, Vixen, Dasher – prompted a panic attack. Waxy holly and bleeding berries. Sticky figgy pudding, dense and cloying. Turkeys with their innards ripped out and stuffed. Crackers exploding. Stockings like empty legs. Pine needles in the soft pads of her hands. Elves. And there, at the helm, the worst of the lot: Santa Claus. The mere sight of his chuckling pomposity was enough to make her vomit: his ruddy fleshy cheeks, the skewed combination of size and stealth as he tiptoed into children’s bedrooms and lurked at the feet of dreaming bodies, his heavy black boots tramping dark shapes in the snow… .

      Of course it sounded ridiculous, this pathological fear, but that was what it was. In the past she had seen doctors, psychiatrists, you name it, in an attempt to get to the bottom of it. Nothing had helped. And so every November, like clockwork, Laney would quietly vanish.

      Wearily she slipped her key into the hotel room door. She was staying downtown in a place organised by Pierce Productions, all glass and palm fronds and sunlight bouncing off polished floors, and no one could say they weren’t treating her like a princess. The past months didn’t seem real: she’d been on live TV every weekend, singing for millions, meeting her idols, wearing jewels worth more than any money she had ever known.

      This was what triumph felt like … so why didn’t it feel better?

      The room was gloomy. She’d been up at dawn for a radio interview and it had still been dark outside so she hadn’t opened the blinds. She pulled them now and, in the glass, met her reflection: dark hair curled softly to her shoulders, a full mouth and clear, pale skin. Her eyes, hazel in some lights and green in others, eyes that glittered when she sang, were sad.

      It was only a song. Only singing, and singing was what she loved – whoever cared if she was surrounded by Christmas? It was just a thing, just an idea, just a word …

       Pull yourself together, Laney, for goodness’ sake … It’s only Christmas …

      Philippa’s voice shrilled through her mind. Any moment now, her sister would call and Laney would have to tell her what Julian had proposed, have to hear that silence as the understanding went between them that this ‘problem’ of Laney’s would finally have to be addressed, but neither of them would put a name to it, just leave it hanging, each second making her feel more like the pariah.

      Philippa. Capable and confident, successful in her job as a real estate agent, the blonde shrimp who’d pushed her head-first down a slide when they were kids, knocking Laney’s front teeth so they turned grey. She was, at thirty-three, someone Laney found faintly terrifying. Philippa played squash. She holidayed with a woman called Hilary to five-star palaces in Mauritius. She ate steak rare. She turned up at their mother’s place on a Sunday in sherbet-coloured shorts and huge suspension sneakers, having baked a batch of iced brownies because she had ‘five minutes to spare’.

       What the hell’s the matter with you? Don’t be a freak all your life …

      Laney backed away from the window, her own image dissolving till it was replaced by the parking lot outside.

      This was her last chance. A chance for Laney Allen to show the world – show her sister, her mom, everyone back home – that she was stronger than they thought she was.

      If she was.

      The Celebrity Parade. She would do it, even if Christmas killed her.

      Chapter 3

      That same afternoon, twenty-year-old Clare McCarthy was having sex with her boyfriend in a Bel Air mansion – the kitchen of a Bel Air mansion, to be exact.

      ‘How’s that feel, baby,’ Calvin Johnson rasped, ‘that feel good?’

      It felt a bit uncomfortable, actually, leaning back against the brushed steel cabinets as Calvin ploughed into her, trying to prevent her head from slamming into them. Or maybe it was the background hum of the Sub-Zero refrigerator that was killing it.

      ‘Amazing,’ Clare breathed nevertheless. ‘You’re amazing.’

      He lifted her, legs wrapped around his waist, a slight shape against his six feet of dark muscle. Physically, they couldn’t have been more different. Clare, with her lemon-blonde bob and big blue eyes; and Calvin, with his size and swagger and perfectly honed body, who had reminded her on sight of 50 Cent, only a bit more polished and with the ability to say his