Extract taken from Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock
By Maud Woolf
Published by Angry Robot

CHAPTER ZERO 

The Fool 

The sun is shining as the fool sets out on his journey. Everything he owns in the world is slung over one shoulder and in one hand he clutches a white rose. A carefree vagabond, his eyes are fixed on the horizon, unaware that he is about to walk off the edge of a precipice… 

Lulabelle Rock takes another swig from her Pepto-Bismol pink smoothie. A single pastel raindrop escapes onto the front of her white bathrobe, where it is immediately absorbed by the terry cloth. She doesn’t notice or, if she does, she gives no indication. 

Instead she smacks her lips, and levels a frank and serious gaze in my general direction. 

“Can I tell you about my new movie? It’s a total flop. A disaster.” 

I’m not sure if I should nod. I don’t get the impression that she’s actually asking for my permission. She doesn’t go on, her head tipping slightly to one side as she waits. 

We watch each other for a moment, and then I relent.  “Please do.” 

Lulabelle preens, patting the white silk scarf around her head more firmly into place. A solitary blonde curl escapes and dangles perilously by the big wet strawberry of her mouth.
“Well,” she starts, leaning across the table. “When I signed up, I thought it seemed a sure thing. Spencer, my agent Spencer, he called it a hit and run idea. Hit and run. Isn’t that clever?” 

I murmur in agreement. 

“Well, it’s an adaptation. Of some art house thing. Swedish or Polish or Italian or something. Black and white. Subtitles. The whole shebang. The director, and he’s a good guy you understand, one of the best… Well, he’s always loved it, ever since he was a starving film school student. Medea, it’s called. It’s about a mother.” 

“Your part?” I ask. 

We’re sitting outside on the balcony and between us is a large glass table. When the sun comes out from behind the clouds it becomes a blinding disk of light. In those brief moments I feel as though we could be talking to each other over the surface of the moon. 

“Of course,” she says, clearly a tad offended. “Anyway, this mother, she has children.” 

“Naturally.” 

“Two children. Two little boys. And a father, of course…  Anyway, they all live in this big old house out in the countryside.  It’s very damp and misty. England probably – it’s soggy.” 

“Are they happy?” I ask. 

“Oh, I suppose so,” Lulabelle says, slurping her drink. “The must be. But then a war starts. Or it’s been going on for a long time… I don’t think it’s clear. Anyway, the father has to leave.  He’s a soldier you see. So, he leaves and then the mother is alone.” 

“With the children?” 

“Obviously. And years pass in that spooky house and all the time they’re hearing more and more news of the war through the radio, in those old-timey broadcasts, you know the ones…  And this mother she’s so frightened and paranoid and she’s all alone in this big old house–” 

“With the children,” I remind her, and she waves her shiny lacquered nails impatiently. 

“Yeah, yeah, obviously. But she’s scared. She’s jumping at shadows. She keeps thinking, what happens if there’s an invasion? If the enemy finds us? What will they do? And then after years and years and years she hears a knock at the door.” 

She pauses and looks at me significantly. 

After a moment I realise I’m expected to jump in. 

“Is it the husband?” I venture. 

“Well,” she says and deflates a little. “Yes. But you aren’t supposed to know that. It could be anyone. Anyway, she thinks it’s the enemy, here to slaughter her and do unspeakable things to her babies. So, she kills them.” 

“Who?” I ask. “The enemy?” 

“No… the children,” she says, letting the horror drip from every syllable. “She murders her own children before the enemy can hurt them. And then, when they’re both dead, she goes to open the door with a kitchen knife. But who’s on the other side?” 

She arches a single pale eyebrow over the hard rim of her dark glasses. For a moment we stare blankly at one another. “The husband?” I say. 

“The husband!” She claps her hands in delight. “And that’s the end.” 

I think about it. 

“Hmm,” I say. “And this was black and white?” 

“The original was,” she says with a shrug. “But our version isn’t. Our version has the most beautiful lighting. Red and blue and so on. Have you ever seen Suspiria?” 

“No.”   

“Neither have I, but I’m told it’s a dead-ringer. We weren’t going to make one of those trashy big studio remakes you see, where everything is pastel and toned down and safe. We wanted – well the director wanted – to go all in on the blood. Raw. That was the word he used. Unflinching.” 

“The original wasn’t bloody enough for him?” I ask. I’m starting to get a headache from the sun. I’m not used to headaches. I don’t like them. 

Lulabelle Rock has big dark sunglasses on. She can look at me all she wants, but I have to squint to make out the pink blot on her white swaddled body and the manicured gardens that stretch out behind her, the distant azure swimming pool and immaculate topiary hedges. It’s nice out here in the countryside. It could be a film set or a painted background, it’s so perfect. There must be fences at the perimeter to keep it so untouched but from here I can’t see them.

“The original was…” She pauses, tapping an electric blue nail against her canine tooth. “It was mostly implied. The violence. Reaction shots, tasteful splashes of blood on a wall. A child’s hand dropping a toy truck in slow motion. Yadda yadda.  We didn’t want to do that. We wanted to go all in. We wanted to create something so horrible that the audience would want to look away. But they couldn’t. You see?” 

“You showed the murders?” 

“In excruciating detail. It was disgusting really. And inventive. It took twenty minutes for each child to die.  Buckets of blood. Which of course was annoying because first of all, it stains and secondly, it was edible, so of course the kids kept licking it off their lips when they were supposed to be dead.” 

A dark shadow passes over her face. 

“Never work with children,” she advises me gravely. “They think it’s all just make-believe. They take away all the dignity of acting.” 

“I won’t,” I promise her. 

“But anyway,” she says, with a sigh. “It was supposed to be a masterpiece. My shot at recognition. No more playing the wife or the timid secretary or the party girl. No more big budget motion capture green screen CGI bullshit or voiceover cameos as Snicklesnork the troll.” 

“I’m sure you were magnificent in that role.” 

“The critics were kind.” She gives a gracious shrug and pulls out a packet of cigarettes from her pocket along with a cheap plastic lighter. The cigarette hovers in front of her mouth; her face is turned towards the sprawling grounds. For a moment she looks like Lulabelle Rock the movie star. 

“Medea was supposed to be my redemption,” she says with lip-quivering Shakespearean gravitas. “But it looks as though it will serve as an epitaph to my career. The pre-screenings have been a disaster. Catastrophic, that’s what Spencer says.” 

“They found it offensive?” 

“No,” she says glumly. “Worse. They found it boring. Funny, at best. Spencer said they cackled when little Robbie got the axe.” “I’m sorry.” 

“I guess art is dead – but no use crying over spilled milk.” 

I smile sympathetically but I’m not really listening. I’m looking at the cigarette packet. It is placed almost exactly between us. LUCKY GIRL the packet reads in stark black letters. There’s something authoritarian about the blockiness of the font. 

Am I being told I’m a lucky girl? I wonder. Or are they exclusively for girls who are already lucky? Perhaps simply smoking them makes you luckier. 

“It comes out in a week,” Lulabelle says, suddenly business like. “I need some press. Something to generate interest.  Something to turn this from an embarrassment to a cult hit. I think it’s alright to have made a bad film if it’s a cult hit. That’s what Spencer says anyway. Which is where you come in.” 

“Me?” I ask, surprised. 

“Of course,” Lulabelle says. “Aren’t you wondering why you’re here? Why I made you?”
I blink. Until this moment I hadn’t thought about it. I feel a sudden, jarring sense of dislocation. 

“How long have we been sitting here?” I ask. 

Lulabelle Rock gives me a cool look over the rim of her sunglasses. 

“Your whole life,” she says. “Twenty minutes, if you want specifics. You know who you are, don’t you?” 

I blink again and look down at my electric blue nails. I wiggle them experimentally and they seem to blur and leave trails behind them in the air. My headache has reached a shrill, piercing climax. 

“I’m Lulabelle,” I say. “Lulabelle Rock.” 

Lulabelle smiles sympathetically and gives me a brisk pat on the hand. 

“A Lulabelle Rock,” she corrects. “I am the Lulabelle Rock.  Have a cigarette. It helps.” 

“I don’t smoke,” I say. “It’s bad for my complexion.” 

“No,” Lulabelle says with a faint impatience. “I don’t smoke.  I have a career to worry about. And my health. And magazine covers. You can do what you want.”

Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock by Maud Woolf is published by Angry Robot, priced £9.99.