About a Girl

  ‘Are you done?’ I asked.

  ‘Are you married?’ She countered.

  ‘No.’ I replied.

  ‘Then, yes. Hang on, did you sleep with him before or after you found out about Vanessa?’

  ‘Before.’

  ‘Ohhh. Shit.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  I held the phone to my ear and we shared a comfortable silence. There really wasn’t anything else to say.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Amy broke first. As always.

  ‘Not really.’ I wasn’t any more. I was too tired.

  ‘Are you mad?’ she asked.

  ‘I am mad,’ I confirmed.

  ‘With me?’

  ‘With everyone alive,’ I said. ‘Except maybe Ryan Gosling.’ Who could be mad at Ryan Gosling?

  ‘Shall I come over when my train gets in?’ she asked. ‘We can burn pictures of the two of them? Or we could just break loads of her stuff?’

  That best friend of mine, what a mind reader. We’d done a lot of picture burning when Amy had ended her engagement. Even though she had been the one to break it off, she was not one to leave that relationship without some righteous anger. It had been a fun time for everyone who wasn’t her ex-fiancé. I imagined he missed his twenty-year-old comic collection almost as much as he missed Amy. Possibly more so.

  ‘Yeah, I might be asleep, so let yourself in,’ I said. The exhaustion was overwhelming. My limbs felt so heavy I didn’t even know how I was holding up the phone. ‘See you in a bit.’

  ‘OK. I love you,’ she said, making kissing noises down the phone. ‘Don’t do anything stupid.’

  ‘I’ve never done anything stupid in my life,’ I replied. ‘I wouldn’t know where to start.’

  Collapsing on the closest soft surface, Vanessa’s bed, I exhaled loudly and tried to have a Feeling, the phone still in my hand. But there was nothing there. My brain felt like a clown car, crammed full to overflowing with rainbow wigs, red noses and tutu-wearing bears. I should get out of Vanessa’s room. I should get dressed. I should call my mum and apologize for my behaviour. But I didn’t actually want to. At some point, I was going to have to speak to Charlie. And, must not forget, the council tax needed playing. Priorities, Tess.

  Before I could decide which item on my did-not-want-to-do list was up first, the phone rang again. Once again, just in case it was about the council tax, I answered it.

  ‘Hello?’ I answered, so, so tired.

  ‘Kittler,’ a woman snapped down the line. ‘Don’t say a single fucking word. I am fucking furious with you.’

  Oh no. There was no way I was taking an earbashing on Vanessa’s behalf. Not today.

  ‘I’m not—’ I started.

  ‘I said not a fucking word,’ the woman continued. ‘Do you know how hard it is for me to get you jobs? Do you?’

  ‘No?’ I answered. Because I didn’t.

  ‘No, of course you don’t, you selfish bastard. It’s really fucking hard. And after last week’s fucking no-show … I should fire you. I should refuse to even put you up for jobs. And now your fucking BlackBerry is out of service? What the fuck is wrong with you?’

  I had, by this time, worked out that I was speaking with Vanessa’s agent, Veronica. She had a certain way with words that gave her away. That way was commonly known as ‘swearing’.

  Vanessa’s career as a photographer was, at best, patchy. I’d only ever seen maybe ten photos she’d taken. For the most part, she seemed to take a lot of portraits of her friends, who used them for vanity projects and then randomly got her hired for fashion jobs or indie magazine shoots that never seemed to pan out. My shutterbug sensibilities were offended. The pictures that I had seen were flat, oversaturated and, quite often, completely out of focus. I’d seen better shots on Instagram and I hated Instagram. But no one cared what I thought. They cared that she was stupid hot, knew all the right people, and did I mention she was stupid hot?

  Before I had a chance to explain to Agent Veronica that (a) I was not Vanessa and (b) just exactly what was wrong with my flatmate, namely that she was a see-you-next-Tuesday (incidentally one of Agent Veronica’s favourite terms of endearment), she had already started shouting at me again.

  ‘Luckily for you, someone is desperate. This new magazine has landed a last-minute interview with Bertie Bennett and they need a photographer.’

  ‘Bertie Bennett?’ I didn’t know who Bertie Bennett was.

  ‘Don’t fuck around with me today, fuckface. Bertie. Fucking. Bennett.’ Agent Veronica snapped. Agent Veronica liked swearing a lot. ‘It’s a piece of piss. Couple of portraits of Bertie, couple of shots of some of his favourite archive pieces, his favourite up-and-coming pieces. Nothing even slightly resembling hard work. It’s a better job than you deserve, and if I wasn’t shit out of luck with the first three people I’d called, you wouldn’t even be hearing my dulcet fucking tones right now.’

  She did have a lovely voice.

  ‘You’re on a plane to Hawaii tonight. You’ll be back by Friday.’

  ‘Hawaii?’

  ‘What the fuck is up with you this afternoon?’ she asked. ‘You sound like you’re stoned. Are you on a juice detox or something? You haven’t been fucking born again, have you? I can’t be dealing with God botherers.’

  ‘Sorry, I’m not—’ My mouth was open and words had started to come out of it. All I needed to do was finish the sentence. All I needed to say was ‘I’m not Vanessa’ and then I could go back to watching shit telly in my shit Eeyore T-shirt on my shit settee, hating my own guts until Amy came over and agreed with me about how shit everything was.

  Or I could go to Hawaii.

  ‘Kittler, you’ve got exactly ten seconds to say yes or I’m never putting your tiny fucking arse up for a job ever the fuck again. So say yes.’

  Ten seconds.

  Hawaii.

  Piece of piss.

  I looked up at the mirror above Vanessa’s bed (no, really) and took a moment. Ratty hair. Sad donkey T-shirt. No job. No boyfriend. No friends. Shit family. Council tax due. Turning opinion round on Tess Brookes was going to be hard bloody work. But what if I just wasn’t Tess Brookes any more? What if I was Vanessa Kittler? Just slightly less slutty and with a faint Yorkshire lilt?

  ‘Three. Two.’

  ‘I’ll do it,’ I told my reflection and Veronica in my best Lahndahn drawl. ‘I’ll go.’

  ‘Too fucking right you will,’ Agent Veronica replied. ‘I need to email you the brief. I know you’re a twat about flights, so book the ticket yourself and claim it back and don’t give me any shit about how expensive it’s going to be. I’m sure there’s room on Daddy’s credit card.’

  ‘No, that’s fine.’ My pulse was starting to race again. For different reasons this time. ‘Uh, my BlackBerry is, um, fahcked. Can you send it to my flatmate’s address? It’s Tess S Brookes at googlemail. And, uh, I’ll give you another number. Don’t call the BlackBerry.’

  Hawaii.

  ‘Whatever. Just get your shit together, Kittler.’ Agent Veronica sounded very unhappy with Vanessa. Agent Veronica needed to get in line. ‘I won’t have you fucking up on me again. This is it. Your last fucking chance. These photos need to be as good as the photos that got me to sign your pathetic arse in the first place and not as wank as the ones you sent in last month. We did discuss the fact that they were indeed wank, did we not?’

  ‘Yes?’ I really wished I could see those photos. Presumably she’d been drunk when she took them. Or possibly she’d been too busy shagging Charlie to concentrate. Who knew? There was a world of possibilities.

  ‘Too fucking right, yes,’ she snapped. ‘This is your last fucking chance. Do not let me down.’

  Last chance. Fresh start. It was all the same, really.

  CHAPTER SIX

  It was only when I arrived at Honolulu international airport and saw a driver waiting in arrivals with a big sign saying ‘Vanessa Kittler’ that it occurred to me exactly what I’d done.

  I didn’t kno
w why I’d told Agent Veronica that I would go to a place I’d never visited and take pictures of someone I’d never heard of for a magazine I’d never read. I didn’t know why I had picked up my old camera, grabbed Vanessa’s kit bag and started packing. I couldn’t explain why I wrote a note for Amy that just said, ‘Gone to Hawaii. Call you when I get there. So sorry. xxx’ and stuck it on the front door. I had a sneaking suspicion it had something to do with the fact that my life had become an unspeakable disaster and I didn’t really fancy living it any more. And it wasn’t as though the real Vanessa was doing such a spectacular job of her existence, wherever she was. It all seemed to make sense at the time. Same way as two plus two equals three and one. It wasn’t wrong; it just wasn’t quite right.

  Clutching the sweaty plastic handle of my badly packed suitcase, I tripped over my own feet on the way over to the driver and nodded with as much authority as I could muster when he waved his sign in my direction. It wasn’t a lot of authority. Nonetheless, he nodded back, opened the back door and took my suitcase. Success. I had officially fooled one person. By not speaking and almost falling over.

  Packing for my spur-of-the-moment career change had been trying. What did photographers wear? My wardrobe was mostly made up of relatively sensible office separates. There was a lot of black, a lot of blue, and a lot of Dorothy Perkins. Vanessa swanned around in swanky designer stuff she snagged from her friends and bought with Daddy’s money. Happily, it transpired that the only thing she and I had in common, aside from Charlie Wilder’s penis, was our inside leg measurement. Given that I was already borrowing her job, her name and her camera, I didn’t think she’d mind if I nicked a couple of pairs of skinny jeans, an entire drawerful of T-shirts and the odd frock. And two pairs of very expensive-looking shoes, just in case. And a nice jumper for the plane. Vanessa and I both had curves, the difference being that hers were in all the right places whereas mine were everywhere. Sitting on my arse in an office for the last seven years had done nothing to help me out. Luckily, I discovered that with the help of some very restrictive underwear and a lot of breathing in, I could fit into most of her things. Which made me much happier than it should. I did pack my own pants, flip-flops and bikini. My poor, ancient bikini. I couldn’t exactly remember when I’d bought it, but I was certain it was old enough to be sitting its GCSEs.

  It had been a drizzly, grey afternoon in London when I’d boarded my flight at Heathrow, but when the plane touched down at LAX eleven hours later, it was bright and beautiful. And I was tipsy enough to believe this was a sign from the gods that I had made the right choice ? I was being rewarded for my bravery with sunshine and teeny tiny bottles of booze. But now it wasn’t a grey Sunday afternoon at Heathrow or a sunny Sunday evening in LA; it was a blazing Monday morning in Hawaii and the reality of what I’d done was starting to sink in. Not that reality was really a concept I was ready to get to grips with just yet. Instead of riding on a bus through the winding streets of London, I was sequestered away in a chauffeur-driven car, rolling along the highway. Instead of staring at bus stops and analysing their ad campaigns, I was blinking vacantly at bright blue skies and palm trees. Without a second thought, I’d traded the Thames for the Pacific Ocean. It was all too much.

  Before I could beg the driver to turn round and take me back to the airport, my car pulled up in front of a house that looked exactly like the Blue Peter model of Tracy Island that I had not made as a kid. The three-storey palace was built into the side of a hill, all floor-to-ceiling windows and soft, curving angles crowned by a giant round balcony on the very top. It was very sixties futuristic, but at the same time looked like it had been there for ever, like the house had grown out of the hill. Bertie Bennett had to be richer than Jesus. Or J.K. Rowling. It hadn’t occurred to me how incredibly rich this man would be. He was clearly not a man who usually had his photo taken by a girl whose most recent photography experiment ran to Facebooking her dinner every night for a week and downloading apps that showed you what you’d look like if you were morbidly obese. My eyes stayed fixed on the architectural wonder as the driver waved a key card at an invisible sensor and sailed through a pair of giant iron gates, leaving the mansion behind us as we swept behind the house down a driveway that led through lush green grounds with what looked like a mountain on one side and a completely deserted beach on the other. Before I had a chance to shut my goldfish gape of a mouth, we pulled up and the engine cut out.

  ‘Miss Kittler? Aloha, e komo mai. Welcome to Oahu.’

  The door to the car opened and a short, stocky man in a plain black uniform held out his hand. I sat there staring at him. Didn’t people speak English in Hawaii? Had I overlooked something else epically important? His broad smile slipped into a squint when I didn’t make a move, but all I could do was stare at him. His big brown eyes were far too pretty to belong to a man. He had eyelashes that would make Bambi blush.

  ‘Miss Kittler?’

  ‘Hi, yes,’ I croaked, my first words since immigration, and eventually reached out to take his hand. I was an idiot. ‘I’m here for the photo thing? For Gloss?’

  I was also at my most eloquent when straight off a plane. Eloquent and stinky.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ my host replied, very politely and in perfect English, leaning in to place a lei around my neck without so much as wrinkling his nose, even though I knew for a fact I was rank rotten. Long-haul flights were the worst. Was this Bertie Bennett? I was so confused. ‘I’m Kekipi. You must be very tired from your trip. Let me show you to your cottage.’

  To my mind, a cottage was something small and thatched with roses round the door and either a talking hedgehog wearing an apron or a witch inside. The house I was taken to was not a cottage. It was beautiful, with sparkling white-washed walls and a sloping slate roof ? an immaculately decorated piece of heaven. And from where I was standing, I could see another four of them dotted along the beach, each one a perfect miniature of the main house complete with tiny veranda, huge windows and matching white wooden lawn furniture. Child Tess had watched too much Wish You Were Here …? and adult Tess enjoyed an awful lot of Location, Location, Location. If Kirstie and Phil could see this, they would die. Everything was so beautiful, I could hardly bear it. It looked as though someone had turned up the contrast on the TV. The blue sky was more vivid than I’d ever seen it and dotted with cotton-wool clouds that flew fast overhead, even though the breeze by the shore was perfect and light. The sea was clear, the sand was white, the trees were a bright, lush green and punctuated with pretty hot-pink and purple flowers. If ever there was an argument for intelligent design, this was it. It was paintbox perfect, every colour bright and bold but beautifully balancing out the next. All I wanted to do was pull out my camera and capture every single sight right away. Surely that had to be a good sign?

  ‘I manage the estate for Mr Bennett,’ said the man in black, interrupting my house porn moment and carefully resting a hand on my shoulder as he gently sheepdogged me through the front door of my new home. ‘The cottage is fully stocked for you, but please call me if there is anything at all you should need. Just press 1 on any of the phones and someone will come down right away. Mr Bennett would like to invite you up to the house for dinner this evening ? he usually dines at eight. Until then, please do make use of all our facilities. I’m happy to give you a tour if you’re not too tired?’

  There were facilities? If I were to take Kekipi to my house, my tour would take in the extra-fast kettle that boiled in under a minute, the coffee stain on the living-room carpet that I could not for the life of me get out, and the magical airing cupboard that, despite its name, always smelled damp.

  ‘I am a bit tired, to be honest.’ I gave him a very grateful smile and tried not to be too aware of the fact that even in my Converse I towered over the man. I was an ashen-faced, tongue-tied, stinky giant. ‘But I’d love to get the tour later? The place is beautiful.’

  I waved my arms around like an over-impressed Big Bird, eyes wild and red. The
real Vanessa would have been mortified by my public display of enthusiasm.

  ‘Of course, Ms Kittler,’ Kekipi nodded. ‘Just press 1 on your phone whenever you like.’

  ‘Oh, call me Tess,’ I said automatically and felt my eyes widen like saucers. ‘Ness! I mean Ness. Or Vanessa. Because that is my name.’

  ‘Of course, Vanessa.’ Kekipi didn’t even blink. What a total pro. ‘Mahalo.’

  ‘Um, mahalo?’ I repeated with a very stunted bow, not entirely sure what I should be doing.

  ‘It means “thank you”,’ Kekipi said with a small wink that I might have imagined. ‘In case you were worried that I was swearing at you in a foreign language.’

  After he had rolled my suitcase into the cottage, Kekipi aloha’d me again and then left me alone to relax. I stared out of the window in disbelief. How could I possibly be here? And what was I supposed to do now? Chuck on my swimsuit and head out to the beach? Dig out my shorts and hike up that beautiful mountain we’d passed on the way in? Bash my head against the closest brick wall until I knocked some sense into it? These were all good options. However, another option was to storm the kitchen, root through each and every cupboard, then rifle through the fridge until I found a box of chocolate-covered macadamia nuts and a huge bag of Cheetos. And so, right there in the kitchen, in the middle of paradise, I stood in all my post-flight skanky glory and troughed every last nut and every last Cheeto. Because what else was a girl supposed to do?

  ‘Tess, thank God.’ Amy answered her phone on the first ring. When I’d turned mine on, it had been full of panicked messages from my best friend demanding that I call her immediately and asking which mental institution I was in. ‘Where are you? What are you doing? Why has your phone been off for an entire day? Where are you?’