‘I blame men,’ Paige announced. ‘Is there anything else to drink in here?’
‘There’s wine in the fridge,’ I said, watching her slink off in search of more booze. She really was perfect looking. If I hadn’t known what a neurotic crazy she was, I would have hated her guts. ‘I have to work on these pictures, though. I’m OK.’
A loud popping sound suggested she wasn’t really listening to me, unless she was planning to drink an entire bottle of champagne by herself. Not entirely impossible, I reasoned.
‘We should get some food,’ I suggested as she moseyed back over with an open bottle of Veuve Clicquot and two glasses. My headache coughed quietly in the back of my head, reminding me of our precarious truce, and my stomach rumbled so loudly, I was almost sure it would start a tidal wave and wash the island away.
‘I’m trying not to eat too much at the moment,’ Paige, the world’s skinniest girl who still had boobs, replied. ‘I’ve got to lose five pounds before fashion week. I know it’s clichéd, but seriously, if I want to go to the New York shows, I more or less need to look like I’m in recovery for something or I’ll get eaten alive.’
‘Which is ironic because there would be nothing on you to eat,’ I said, reluctantly accepting the champagne and wishing I wasn’t so painfully polite. Thank God no one had ever thought to offer me crack; I wouldn’t know where to put myself.
‘What’s more delicious, Tess ? food or compliments?’ Paige asked.
‘F? ompliments?’ I offered. The look on Paige’s face suggested I had not got the answer correct. ‘No, it’s definitely food.’
‘I know it sounds horribly pro-ana, but I work in fashion,’ she went on, sipping the champagne and making such intense happy noises, I felt a little bit uncomfortable. She needed to get laid even more than I did. ‘I think it was Kate Moss who said, “Nothing tastes as good as being thin feels.”’
‘Kate Moss is incorrect,’ I said, mentally telegraphing Kekipi to come over with some pork or sushi or chicken or a mouldy slice of bread he’d found on the side of the road a week ago. I was so ridiculously hungry. ‘Kate Moss has never eaten an entire Domino’s pizza.’
‘Coke does do wonders for curbing the appetite,’ Paige admitted before eyeing me awkwardly. ‘Allegedly.’
‘Allegedly,’ I echoed and clinked my glass against hers in a toast. ‘So. Why are we blaming the men for today’s debacle? Aside from the Bennett boys being a couple of tosspot drama queens?’
Emptying her first glass of champagne while she contemplated her answer, Paige rested her head against the arm of the sofa and stretched her long, denim-clad legs out over my lap. I looked down at them, not knowing quite what to do. Good to know we were back on friendly terms. She really was just another Amy in a slightly shinier package. And just as crazy, as she had proven at the shoot that afternoon.
‘Oh, Tess.’ She sighed my name and threw her hand against her forehead like a Jane Austen character. A rubbish, secondary Jane Austen character whose spunky sister would end up having to defend her honour and marry her off to some soft twat who had an income of more than a thousand a year. ‘I feel like such an idiot.’
‘Hands up who here doesn’t?’ I looked around the empty room. No hands up.
‘No, I’ve been a total moron.’ She dropped her head even further back so that her hair cascaded all the way down to the floor. ‘I told Nick I’ve got a crush on him.’
Oh noes.
Even though I sort of knew she was going to say something along these lines, even though I was kind of pushing her to admit it, hearing it first-hand did not feel good.
‘You, Paige Sullivan of undetermined age, told Nick Miller, thirty-six, that you have a crush on him?’ I asked. Just to make sure.
‘I’m thirty, so fuck off, but yes, we were supposed to go out for dinner last night, but he made me go on this stupid boat ride and I threw up over the side and he was so lovely about it that it just sort of came out.’ She loved a run-on sentence, did Paige. ‘And he was totally lovely about it, but he so isn’t interested, and now it’s dead awkward and I feel like I’m fourteen or something.’
‘He’s not interested?’ I asked, picking out what I considered to be the keynote of the rushed speech. ‘How do you know?’
‘Well, aside from the fact that I more or less threw myself at him, and even though we’re in Hawaii, and even though there’s no one else here for him to fancy …’ She paused for breath and to take in my slightly angry thin line of a mouth. ‘What?’
‘No, there’s no one else here. Carry on,’ I said tightly.
‘Well, no ? it’s just he’s not into models, I know that,’ she explained, only succeeding in making matters worse. ‘And you’re all in love with that bloke back home, aren’t you?’
Her rationale was sound, and I understood why she would think that I wouldn’t be into Nick when I was supposedly so head over heels in love with Charlie ? I was head over heels in love with Charlie after all, I reminded myself ? but I couldn’t help but think she’d disregarded me as competition very easily. Not that I could blame her ? she was beautiful, she was successful, she was funny and clever when she wanted to be, her hair was incredible, and when they were together, she and Nick looked like an ad for a very expensive denim brand. Like those really annoying print ads you always saw on the underground for Uniqlo that had ‘real’ people in who were a thousand times more attractive than anyone you ever saw on the Tube. I totally would have cast them in an ad to sell high-end kitchenware. Me and Charlie would probably have been booked for a job advertising Nando’s or something.
‘Go on,’ I said, taking one more tiny sip of champagne, just to see how it felt.
‘Well, yeah, so I threw up and he was being all lovely and funny and brought me water and stuff, and I said that he was going to make someone a lovely wife one day, and he said he should be so lucky, and I just sort of laughed and said, “Oh, I’d marry you,” and then we both laughed, and then I put my hand on his, erm, leg, and then he went a bit quiet, and then he said that he was “sort of seeing someone”, and then I laughed too loudly and said I was only joking and he said of course he knew that and then I left because I was absolutely mortified.’
It was a lot of ‘and thens’ for one sentence.
My first reaction was ‘poor Nick’. He’d come all the way to Hawaii to interview someone who didn’t want to be interviewed, and then spent his entire trip looking after girls who kept throwing up. It was not a dream come true. Unless you had a very particular fetish.
My second reaction was, ‘he was sort of seeing someone’. Wha?
‘Have you spoken to him since?’ I asked.
‘Only when he showed up this afternoon,’ she said, sitting back up to drink her champagne. ‘It’s fine. I just have to stop falling for knobheads.’
‘Oh, just that little tiny thing.’ I patted her leg. ‘Piece of piss.’
‘You can talk,’ she snarked, kicking me back. ‘Excellent choices you’ve been making lately.’
Oh dear God, I thought, forcing myself to laugh loudly. If only you knew.
‘You’re not, like, really, really into him, though, are you?’ I asked, my conscience really hoping for an answer that would help me sleep through the night. ‘Nick, I mean.’
‘I don’t know.’ She twirled a lock of hair around her finger and shrugged one shoulder. ‘I just haven’t really even fancied anyone since my ex, and Nick is just so, you know. He’s such a bloody man. And I know he likes to talk a load of shit, but my mate Jackie’s boyfriend is mates with his friend Steven, and Steven reckons he hasn’t had a girlfriend since this girl he went out with in America years ago.’
‘Right,’ I said, adding this information to the profile I was building slowly. The LA ex. The one who was too lazy to walk to the waterfall. ‘You don’t think that might be because he’s a filthy shagger who can’t keep his trousers on?’
‘I definitely think he’s a filthy shagger who can’t keep his trousers
on.’ Paige’s eyes lit up and she looked positively thrilled at the prospect. ‘But men like that, they’re just waiting for the right girl. I know that sounds naïve, but you get to a certain age and you realize it’s true.’
She seemed so convinced, I didn’t have the energy or the heart to argue with her. But who was right, Paige or Nick? Were men just sitting around in their cave, scratching themselves and waiting for the love of a good woman, or were they out climbing mountain after mountain after mountain until they just couldn’t be arsed any more? Either way, it seemed like Cupid was out of a job. The recession really had hit a lot of people.
‘So you do really like him?’
‘You know, my heart says yes, but my head says probably not,’ she replied with a scrunched-up face. ‘Although my vag says something altogether different. Maybe I actually love him. Maybe I just want to cover him in Nutella and lick it all off. I don’t think anyone can actually make sane decisions about their emotional state when they’re wearing sunscreen. Just the smell of it makes you crazy.’
‘I’ve heard worse theories about holiday romances, actually.’ I had to admit, she might have been on to something.
‘I reckon when you get home, Charlie is going to be all turned around on this situation,’ Paige said, sitting up, pouring herself another glass of champagne, and topping me off, despite my refusals. ‘He’s going to be all freaked out that you went off and did something amazing without him, and he’ll be so jealous and so worried about missing out. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, Tess.’
‘Does it?’ I wasn’t so sure.
‘Yeah, definitely,’ Paige said, agreeing with herself so aggressively that she was spilling champagne all over the settee. I surreptitiously grabbed a bit of kitchen towel and dabbed at the wet mark while she wasn’t paying attention. ‘Or at least, absence makes the dick get harder. Not to be coarse or anything. He’ll be all over you like a rash. A hot rash. He’s hot, isn’t he?’
‘He is.’ I folded up the damp paper and tossed it onto the coffee table, trying very hard not to think about Charlie’s penis.
‘Let me see a picture.’ She scrambled onto her knees and passed me my laptop. ‘Come on, just one. I want to see what’s so special about him.’
With all the enthusiasm of a beached whale, I logged onto Facebook and immediately found a thousand different pictures of me and Charlie. I’d been doing so well. It had to have been at least twenty-four hours since I’d looked at them, and now it did not feel good.
‘Oh, he is cute,’ Paige said with approval. ‘Tall, too. Really, like, boy-next-doorsy. I bet he’d be dead good at changing light bulbs and playing sport. You make a really cute couple.’
‘Hmm,’ was just about all I could manage.
‘Oh, shitting hell ? I’m sorry,’ she said, slamming the laptop shut. ‘I’m doing it again. I’m not thinking. But really, I do think he probably just needs a bit of space to adjust to things. Coming here was the best thing you could have done.’
I nodded. Getting on a plane and flying to Hawaii may well have been the best thing I could have done. I’d found a great new friend in Paige, I’d remembered how much I loved photography, and, more importantly, it turned out that I was actually pretty good at it. That made me really happy. But I’d also effed my new friend’s crush, lied about my name and stolen my flatmate’s job. That made me a little bit concerned. So: swings and roundabouts.
My plan not to get wankered so I could work on my pictures was offset nicely by Paige’s plan to get absolutely obliterated so she could get right on my tits. Within an hour, she was three years deep into my Facebook photos and two bottles of champagne into her own personal pit of misery.
‘You all look really happy,’ she said with a telltale snort. ‘You and your mates. My mates are all arseholes. All my mates were my ex’s mates and now all I’ve got left are fashion mates. No one is mates in fashion, not really.’
‘But magazines?’ I tried to give her a glass of water, but she pushed it away and poured more champagne. Badly. I had to remind myself this was not my sofa and I was not responsible for the stains. ‘Aren’t there fun journo girls?’
‘I came in from the fashion side, though.’ She shook her head, clicking on a pic from Amy’s twenty-fourth birthday party. I took her to the Natural History Museum to see the dinosaurs. She did not have as much fun as I did. ‘All the writers have known each other for ever. I don’t know, I don’t make friends that easily. Girls don’t like me.’
I took a momentary step back and watched the beautiful yet shit-faced woman knocking back booze on the sofa, still looking like she’d stepped off her own fashion shoot. She didn’t have so much as a wrinkle on her tissue-thin sweater, and it was white, for God’s sake. I was only allowed to wear white shirts on the days I only drank clear liquids. ‘I can’t think why,’ I replied.
‘Oh, it’s because I’m, you know …’ She waved a drunken hand at her general appearance. ‘Whatever. It’s fine.’
If nothing else, you had to admire her honesty.
‘I like you,’ I offered, taking the dead bottles of booze into the kitchen and putting on the kettle. Paige might be halfway to hangover heaven, but I was knackered and I still had stuff to do. ‘And I’m a girl.’
‘Yeah, but you don’t care, do you?’ She rested her head against the back of the sofa and gave me a sloppy smile. ‘You’re not competing.’
‘Right.’ I slapped my hand on her thigh, hard. ‘I think it’s time you nicked off back to your cottage and I got some work done. I’ll have the photos over to you in the morning.’
‘Fine,’ she said from inside the wine glass. A bottle and a half ago, she had realized she could get much more champagne in a red wine glass than a champagne flute. ‘I’m tired anyway. What is it, two a.m.?’
I glanced at the clock on the kitchen wall. It was half past eight in the evening.
‘It’s very late,’ I replied gravely. ‘You should probably go to bed.’
‘Yeah,’ she nodded, hoisting herself off the squishy sofa. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow. Thanks, Tess.’
‘Get back safe,’ I called as she tottered out in her heels. The cow still looked amazing.
‘I’m going thirty feet away,’ she laughed, reaching for the door frame and missing. ‘You worry too much.’
Even as she was saying it, I was trying to work out the likelihood of her falling in the pool and drowning on her way home.
As the door swung shut, I closed my eyes, breathed out and thought, for all of fifteen seconds, that I might be allowed five minutes’ peace. Until my phone started to rattle across the tabletop. It had been on silent since the shoot and I’d forgotten all about it while I was managing my favourite new alcoholic, but now she was gone and there was no one loudly complaining about how hard it was to be so beautiful, I heard the quiet buzz of vibrating iPhone against paperback book and spotted a flashing screen over on the bookcase, where it was charging. All I wanted to do was let the kettle finish boiling, make my tea and pretend I hadn’t seen it. But it was Amy. And I had already hung up on her once in twenty-four hours. Twice absolutely would not fly. Better to just get it over with.
‘Hey.’ I pulled the charger out of the phone and flopped down on the settee, stretching out from top to bottom. ‘Dear God, today was horrible.’
‘Hi, Amy! How are you, Amy? Have you got a new job yet, Amy? I’m so worried about you, Amy.’ She started her rant before I had even finished my sentence. ‘I’m doubly sorry I’ve been ignoring your phone calls and haven’t been in touch for days, and I’m even more sorry that today you found out that your ex-fiancé got engaged again because his new girlfriend of half a fucking second is pregnant.’
‘Ohhh.’
‘But no, please do go on. Tell me all about your horrible day.’
The silence that followed was not comfortable.
‘Amy, I’m sorry.’ I didn’t really know where to start. I’d only been away for five minutes and it felt like a lifetime
. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Of course I’m not all right,’ she said with a choking sob. ‘He’s engaged. He’s having a baby. I haven’t got a job, my mother hates me, and I haven’t got a clue what I’m doing with my life. Come home, I need you.’
‘I’ll be home on Sunday,’ I promised. ‘Don’t get this upset over someone so rubbish. You don’t want to marry him, you don’t want to have babies with him. He’s crap, remember?’
‘I don’t know,’ she sniffed, her voice still woolly and unreliable. ‘It wasn’t that bad. I wasn’t unhappy.’
‘You weren’t happy,’ I reminded her, telling her everything that she had told me when she’d dumped him in the first place. ‘You were settling. You ended things because you’re brave and you know what you want and you’re better than a miserable relationship in a sad semi in Ruislip with a man you don’t love.’
‘It was a nice semi,’ Amy replied. ‘And how are things better now? Honestly, Tess?’
‘You’re not wasting your life?’ I wanted to shake her so badly. Amy wasn’t one to get maudlin and self-indulgent, but when the mean reds really took hold of her, it was impossible to drag her back out without a metaphorical kick up the arse and, on occasion, a literal slap. ‘You’re not plodding on day in and day out with someone else’s plan?’
‘I’d rather be with Dave than be on my own,’ she whispered.
It was a good job I was thousands and thousands of miles away. I really would have booted her up the backside for that one.
‘No, Amy. Just no.’
She let out one more reflexive howl, and I waited until her crying calmed to a ragged squeak.
‘I’ll be home on Sunday,’ I said again, closing my eyes and trying very hard not to think about what that would mean. ‘Don’t work yourself up over Dave. It’s been years. You know you’re happier without him.’
‘But how come he’s getting married and having a baby and I’m not getting married and having a baby?’
Ahh. Now we were getting somewhere. Her tears gave way to a temper tantrum and the volume of her voice went right up to eleven.