‘Technically it’s not an upgrade.’ Jenny coughed and handed me a glass of champagne. I took it, looked at it and set it down on the counter. There were a remarkable number of surfaces at just the right height to set down drinks in this suite. ‘Technically we’re kinda couch surfing.’
‘Technically I don’t give a shit,’ I replied. ‘This is amazing.’
‘Of course it is. I only do amazing.’
Silhouetted in a glowing doorway, Sadie gave me a triumphant look.
‘So there you are. You win after all, Jen.’
‘What do you win?’ I hated it when she called her Jen. No one called Jenny Jen. It was proprietary and annoying and, well, I was jealous.
‘Nothing.’ Jenny knocked back her champers and refilled quickly. ‘Go take a shower. I need to eat.’
‘I said you’d decided Vegas wasn’t for you and you’d gone back to New York,’ Sadie explained, slithering into the room in bare feet and a bikini so tiny, her gynaecologist would have been embarrassed by it. ‘And Jen said you’d probably just got lost.’
‘Sorry to disappoint you both.’ I cast Jenny a quick, narrowed-eye glare to which she rolled her eyes in an awkward apology. ‘I was just by the pool and I didn’t know we’d switched rooms.’
‘I tried to call you,’ Jenny said hurriedly. ‘It went to voicemail.’
‘Yeah, I always stay here.’ Sadie flung her long legs onto one of the coffee tables, knocking a silver box of tissues onto the floor. ‘I like space.’
‘But you could fit your entire apartment onto that sofa,’ I replied, desperately fighting the urge to go and pick up the tissue box. This room was not supposed to be untidy. It was supposed to be clean and neat and not have me in it.
‘But that’s home.’ Sadie stretched out, showing us all just how thorough her waxing technician had been. ‘Home should be cosy. Hotels should be so big you can lose a horse in them.’
It was fair to say Sadie had a lot more experience of hotels than I did. She was the one running around the world, letting men take photos of her in her pants. And you know, all the other stuff a model did that I didn’t want to think about because it made me insanely jealous. Maybe you did need a lot of space to unwind properly. Maybe Red Rum was somewhere in here. Had anyone ever thought to check?
‘I need to charge my phone,’ I said to Jenny, ignoring Sadie’s yoga stretches on the couch. I had no great desire to see her vagina before dinner. Or after. ‘Where did you stash my stuff?’
‘It’s in your room.’ She pointed down the corridor Sadie had emerged from. ‘Second on the right. I gave you the view.’
Happily skipping by the sofas, eyes avoiding Sadie’s downward dog, I marched into the second room on the right and burst out laughing. When Jenny said I had the view, I sort of assumed she was taking the piss. At best I’d imagined a billboard of the Thunder from Down Undermale revue, but no, she wasn’t joking. From the windows of the lounge, we had an unparalleled view of man’s devotion to Having a Good Time. The windows from my super swanky bedroom showed something so far away from the fluorescent fantasy of the Strip that it took my breath away. Behind the casinos and clubs, I was finally able to see where the sun had run away to hide, and I didn’t blame him one bit. Who wanted to see a bunch of drunken tourists walk up and down what now looked like a ponced-up bit of Blackpool in comparison with my bedroom view, miles and miles of desert stretched out in front of me, painted orange and red with broad strokes. The nearby mountains were silhouetted against the twilight sky – dark grey highlighted with orange flecks and purple shadows. They almost passed for far-off thunder clouds threatening a soft, golden, glowing sky that bled into a pale blue and promised to turn midnight any second. I’d never seen the desert before. Now I couldn’t imagine I would ever forget it. If this was how Nevada looked at the end of the day, I couldn’t wait to watch the sunrise. I wished Alex was there to see it too.
Turning my back to the window, I found the room almost as stunning a sight as the scenery. An enormous bed was angled into one corner, all thick white quilts and giant, cloud-like pillows, while a purple velvet chaise longue was placed right by the window, perfectly positioned for daydreaming into the desert. Across the room, separated by a frosted glass partition was a walk-in shower, just the right size for, ooh, seven people? And if that didn’t take your fancy, in the middle of the room was a rolltop bath so big, I started looking for the Ark. No wonder Nevada was so dry; it would take an ocean to fill up that bad boy.
‘Hey, Clark.’ Jenny was yelling from the lounge, but I was too busy staring to reply. ‘Get your ass dressed – we have dinner reservations in an hour.’
So, sixty minutes to stare out of the window. I could work with that.
CHAPTER NINE
‘Oh, honey, what are you wearing?’
I stopped dead in the middle of the lounge and felt my jaw drop. I thought I’d done quite well; my outfit was very classic. It was a vintage, floor-length midnight-blue silk gown with a deep V in the back and what I thought was a terribly seductive keyhole cut-out in the front. Together with my little gold clutch and gold vintage strappy sandals, I was the vision of sophistication. Very Julia Roberts in Ocean’s Eleven. Apparently I had missed a memo. Jenny and Sadie were also channelling Julia Roberts; however, they had taken their inspiration from the Pretty Womanera. Sadie had been poured into a pair of leather leggings that gave the impression she’d been dipped in oil from the waist down and was topping off the ensemble with a hot pink scooped-back tank top. Jenny was in the same red Leger bandage dress she’d worn to her Christmas party, but somehow it seemed short and tighter. It could have been the spiked bondage heels she was wearing. They really didn’t look that Christmassy.
‘You look like you’re going to a funeral,’ Sadie commented, lining her lips with a bright red bullet bedazzled with Swarovski crystals. ‘Only, don’t wear that to my funeral, you won’t get in.’
‘Do you have a date in mind so I can clear my diary?’ I asked brightly.
‘Angie, honey, it’s beautiful.’ Jenny pushed me back towards the bedroom. ‘It’s just, you brought a knife to a gunfight, honey. This is Las Vegas. You need to go a little wild.’
‘This is very low in the back,’ I pointed out.
‘It is,’ she agreed, patting my shoulder. ‘It is. Now, what else did you bring with you?’
I looked towards my wardrobe and pulled a face. ‘I’m not sure you’re going to find anything “more Vegas” in there.’
Jenny took a deep breath and opened the wardrobe door.
‘I blame myself,’ she muttered. ‘I should have helped you pack.’
‘What’s wrong with my clothes?’
I’d been studying shopping under Jenny’s tutelage for almost eighteen months and I thought I was doing well. I hardly ever called her before I bought something these days, and she’d only sent me home to change once in the last twelve months – and that wasn’t my fault. Fancy dress means something very different in New York. Jenny wanted me in a cocktail dress. She got me dressed as Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. We had words. But my wardrobe for this weekend was impeccable. I’d put together a capsule collection of vintage glamour, lots of long skirts with seductive slits (I’d read enough magazines to know they were in), silk blouses, a sparkly little capelet I found in Beacon’s Closet and some very pretty strappy sandals.
‘They’re not tight enough, they’re not glam enough and they’re not cool enough,’ Sadie declared without even looking. ‘They’re kind of like you.’
No. Words.
‘No offence,’ she shrugged, leaving the room.
‘Oh, none taken,’ I called after her with forced ease.
‘It just … maybe it needs Vegas-ing up a little.’ Jenny was back, trying to be diplomatic, but I was still disappointed. I didn’t want my Vegas experience to be tequila shots off frat boys. I wanted it to be martinis with the rat pack. Possibly my problem was I also wanted to travel back in time.
Befor
e she could even make a suggestion, Sadie sailed into my bedroom brandishing a giant pair of shiny silver shears and stopped in front of me. A giant shiny smile on her beautiful face.
‘Problem solved,’ she announced, lunging at me with the blades.
Oh dear God, she was going to kill me. I closed my eyes and raised my hands over my face. I couldn’t believe this was how I was going out. Slaughtered by a supermodel for crimes against fashion. But instead of slashing at me, she dropped to her knees and hacked three feet off the bottom of my dress.
‘Hey!’ I swatted at the top of her head like an angry cat, but she just ducked and carried on chopping. By the time she stood up, triumphantly displaying yards of silk, I could feel a distinct breeze around my nether regions.
‘Better.’ Sadie stepped back to examine her handiwork. ‘Not great, but better. Now, can we eat?’
‘I hate to admit it, Angie,’ Jenny said, taking a step back until she was side by side with the emerging designer. ‘It looks pretty awesome.’
Folding my arms in disgust, I reluctantly went over to the giant freestanding mirror in the corner of my room to review the damage.
Shit. It looked pretty awesome.
‘I’m always telling you to show off your legs.’ Jenny was trying to sell Sadie’s handiwork hard. And while I knew that the dress did look good, it physically pained me to be too enthusiastic. She’d ruined my beautiful dress. I could have just got changed, for God’s sake. What sort of mental slashes someone’s dress to shreds while they’re wearing it? What sort of mental slashes someone’s dress to shreds without asking? The kind of mental who was now fashioning the bottom of my dress into something akin to a boob tube.
‘You’re welcome,’ she overenunciated while wrestling her arms through a complicated series of knots, turning two feet of discarded skirt into a skin-tight halter top. Annoyingly, it looked really, really good. ‘Come on, Jen, let’s jet.’
‘You look so great,’ Jenny whispered, taking my arm and moving me towards the door. ‘And now I can see your amazing shoes.’
‘Your amazing shoes,’ I replied, trying not to stare daggers into the back of Sadie’s head. ‘That you’re this close to never getting back, Jen.’
When Jenny said we had dinner plans, I had figured we were off to some nice little restaurant inside the hotel, so I was a little concerned when Sadie swept out of the lift and into a waiting limo as though it was second nature. Which it probably was.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked Jenny as she folded herself into the leather seats like she did this every day, while Sadie shouted into a shiny silver iPhone. I didn’t know they made silver iPhones.
‘Dinner,’ she repeated. ‘Just try to relax, honey. I know Sadie can be a little … off plan, but she’s fun. Once you get past the attitude.’
‘She has an attitude? I wouldn’t have known.’
‘She just needs some real people around her,’ Jenny said, standing firm. ‘She’s always difficult when she comes back from a job. Imagine being surrounded by assholes pushing and pulling you into place, telling you what you can and can’t do. I’d be ten times worse than she is.’
Good friend that I was, my first reaction was to shout her down, tell her she couldn’t ever be that way. But it wasn’t true. She’d be a right bell-end.
‘You’d be a monster,’ I translated out loud.
‘Damn straight,’ Jenny said, leaning back against the leather bench and nodding. ‘Damn. Straight.’
As soon as we pulled out onto the Strip, I was too distracted to carry on arguing. Looking at the bright lights of Las Vegas from a hotel-room window was one thing; to be slap-bang in the middle of them was another. It was like driving through the middle of a neon snow globe that was constantly moving, constantly being shaken up by an unseen hand. I felt almost seasick from the undulating lights, flashing billboards and promises of what could be.
‘Isn’t it amazing?’ Jenny whispered, pressing her nose against the darkened glass beside me. ‘Don’t you love it?’
‘I do,’ I said, my eye catching its first wedding chapel as I uttered the words. ‘I actually do.’
‘It’s like, nothing bad could happen while you’re in Vegas. Like, real life is suspended,’ she said with an excited intake of breath. ‘We’re going to have a great weekend, Angie. Everything is going to be OK. Like, life and everything.’
I couldn’t decide if she was making a promise or a threat, but either way …
‘Who are you trying to convince?’
‘Why would anyone need convincing?’ Her tone was light and Jenny-like, but her expression, reflected in the black glass of the window, was tight and tense. ‘Everything is A-OK in Jenny-world. Work, good. Stud of a man, good. Keeping off the carbs, getting there. A-OK.’
Right. Because that was the sort of thing you said if it was true.
‘Is everything all right? At work?’
‘Mm-hmm.’ Her eyes stayed locked on something I couldn’t quite catch in the middle distance.
‘And with Sigge?’
‘Yeah. What are you going to have for dinner?’
Ahh. Attempting to distract me with the promise of food. So there was something wrong. It might have worked before, but it would not work again.
‘Jenny, what’s going on?’
She turned to me with a bright smile, shaking the troubles from her face.
‘Vegas, baby!’ She barrelled me over with a very aggressive hug and knocked me onto my back. Legs in the air, knickers on display, right on my back.
‘Angela!’ Sadie was off her phone call. ‘I think my mom wears the same underwear as you.’
It wasn’t a compliment.
Dinner in the Palms was a relatively tense affair. I ate everything put in front of me. Jenny ate and drank everything put in front of her. Sadie just concentrated on the drinking. The restaurant was amazing – everything in the room was shiny, from the shining walls to the stainless-steel surfaces; even the fabric on our chairs was a slippery silver leather. Platinum, I thought more accurately. Everything was platinum. Sadie and Jenny fitted in perfectly. Even in my ‘customized’ dress, I felt like my nan. Clearly I needed to try harder tomorrow. If I’d been going out in NYC, I’d have been perfectly happy with my look, but here I needed to up my game. It looked like I was living through fear of clothing in Las Vegas, rather than fear and loathing.
‘I wish I could eat like you,’ Sadie commented as I speared my second mouthful of perfectly cooked steak. ‘I’d love to just pig out whenever I wanted.’
‘I can’t even begin to imagine how you would cope with solids,’ I replied. ‘If you had to keep them down, I mean.’
‘You have to make sacrifices for your dreams.’ Sadie stretched her arms over her head and arched her slender back. And then without missing a beat, added, ‘Jen tells me you’re gonna get kicked out the country for sucking. What’s going on with that?’
‘Jen’ spat her cocktail across the table and exploded into a coughing fit.
‘Angela’s got it all under control,’ she spluttered, pressing a napkin to her glossy lips. ‘Dontcha, Ange?’
‘All under control,’ I lied, ready to put all my gambling monies (all thirty-six dollars) on Cici Spencer and Sadie Nixon being BFF.
‘And did I tell you Erin’s having a baby?’ Ever the diplomat, Jenny steered the conversation in the opposite direction as quickly as possible. But it was too late. Sadie had her foot down for a head-on collision.
‘Wow, Erin’s having a baby?’ Her eyes never left mine. ‘So exciting. And you’re being promoted. And you’ve got that delicious man. Everyone has so much going on right now. So, Angela, how is it that you’re not going to get your ass-hand delivered back to England?’
She snapped a breadstick in two and leaned back in her chair.
The cow.
‘I have to use the loo.’ I threw my napkin down on the table and pushed my chair backwards in a hurry. I would not cry at the table; I wasn’t a child. We
were about as far removed from a youth hostel in the Peak District as it was possible to be, and Sadie was not Karen Thompson, my year nine nemesis. I would not rise to her heckling.
Safely locked in a stall, I let a couple of frustrated tears escape. What was wrong with some girls? Why did they have to make you feel like shit to give themselves a happy? And I hated myself for knowing that the prettier and more successful they were, the more it stung. Now there was a throwback from Robinstone Comprehensive. It was all Fuzzy Peach perfume, Boots 17 lipstick and tears before bedtime. I distinctly remember my sixteen-year-old self swearing it would all be different when I was older, but here I was, all Chanel perfume, MAC lipstick and Christian Louboutins, snivelling in the toilets. And this time Louisa wasn’t here to talk me down. Because Louisa was at home, with her husband, having a baby. Just like Erin. And super-successful Jenny was too busy talking to her new best friend. I’d seen Mean Girls(loads of times). I knew how this worked.
Not ready to go back out to the table, I went through the crying-girl-in-the-toilet motions. I carefully wiped away any mascara smudges with a tissue, reapplied my lip gloss, powdered my nose and scrolled through my phone. Nothing from Alex yet. An email from my dad telling me to have fun on holiday. Thank God it didn’t say ‘don’t do anything I wouldn’t do’. A text from Louisa to say the baby had just kicked her awake. More reminders that life went on without me. If I had to leave New York, how long would it take my friends here to forget me? It had only taken eighteen months for everything I knew in England to change completely. Louisa was married and pregnant, my parents were crack-head swingers. My ex hadn’t even waited for me to leave to replace me. How long would it take Alex?
‘Angela, are you in here?’
I heard Jenny’s hooker heels click-clack across the bathroom tiles before she spoke, which gave me just enough time for the ol’ flush and blow. I waved my hand in front of the sensor, waited for the toilet to flush and gave my nose a good old honk so she wouldn’t know I’d been crying. The perfect crime.