Finally – when every biscuit in the house has been pushed under my door and then thrown out of the window – my parents eventually get the message and leave me alone.
I lie face down on my bed in my Mickey Mouse T-shirt and turn my phone on. It immediately beeps five times.
H, sorry I didn’t call earlier – stuck in college. Can we Skype tmrw? So sorry. :( Bet you had the best birthday in NY EVER. Miss you so much. Nat xoxoxoxo
I’m SO SORRY. I screwed up. Please talk to me. LBxx
PS I’m sorry I’m sorry xxx
PPS You can have ALL the postscripts
PPPPPPPPPPPS? x
With my nose pressed into my duvet I delete everything, and then click on my email. Among offers to enlarge various parts of my body which I don’t actually own, there’s just one waiting in my inbox.
Just one email from somebody I recognise.
FROM: Alexa Roberts
TO: Harriet Manners
I thought Twilight was boring but your delusional fantasies are even worse.
I’d stay in New York if I were you.
A
The only person without an apology on my birthday is the person currently wading through my most precious memories for something to hurt me.
That’s nice.
I stare blankly at the empty walls of my new bedroom.
Not a single thing in this house has a memory wrapped around it. I don’t know what has been accidentally dropped between the floorboards or what’s been secretly stored at the back of these cupboards. I don’t know what the stains on the carpets are, or what angle the sunshine hits my bed in springtime.
I can’t climb down the stairs in the middle of the night without turning a light on. There’s nobody waiting for me in the bush outside. Nobody sitting on the bench on the corner of my road with her legs on the armrest.
It’s just a house. With floorboards and cupboards and carpets and unrecognisable sunshine and empty bushes and benches.
It’s not my home.
For the first time in my life, I am totally on my own.
I sulk for the next three days non-stop. I refuse all offers of belated birthday weekend fun from my parents. I don’t even bother switching my phone on again. I think about Skyping Nat but decide she’ll be too busy drinking coffee with Jessica to answer. And Toby will be too busy stealing the affections of my dog to have time for me either.
So on Sunday evening when I finally switch my phone back on and it immediately starts ringing, I reach down to cancel the call. I don’t want to talk to anyone. Not Nick, not Nat, not my parents who are probably ringing me from downstairs like obsessive weirdos.
It rings again, and I cancel it.
Then again, and I cancel it again.
Finally – on the fourth call from an unknown number – curiosity gets the better of me. “What?”
“My little Bacon-chops,” a voice says. “Let’s try for something a little more welcoming than that. Hello is a traditional way to start a conversation. Go again.”
I stare at the phone and then put it back to my face.
“Wilbur?”
“Trunkle-bum, I like that even better. Answer every phone call like that forever. We could start a trend.”
“Wilbur, is that really you?”
“Why of course it is, my little Storm in a Teacup.” Wilbur tinkles with laughter. “Who in diddle-cats else was it going to be?”
or a few seconds, I don’t say anything.
Luckily I don’t have to, Wilbur continues talking regardless.
“Possum-feet. Isn’t this fun? It’s just the same as normal, except we’re in a different country again. At least, I assume we both are, Kitten-munch, or this is a very strange number for you to have.”
“Where are you?”
“New York, Bunny-buttons. Where else?”
“But …” I don’t even know where to start. “How did you get this number?”
“I have my sources,” he says. “I’m like Tom Cruise except with a better physique and swishier hair. And I don’t move my arms so much when I run.”
“I didn’t think I’d ever hear from you again.”
“Don’t be such a silly Sausage-cake. I was just biding my time. Gaining infinite power, like an iPod plugged into the mains.”
As usual, I have no idea what he’s talking about. It’s so comforting. “OK.”
“And now we must reunite for the benefit of mankind, like Take That. So where precisement are you? A tiny birdy tells me you’re in NYC too. Is this true, or is it like the time somebody told me Oprah was in the bagel shop and she wasn’t and I was devastated?”
“I’m an hour and a half away.”
“Close enough. You’ll just have to get up at super-dawn, like an early worm so the birds can catch you. I need you here first thing tomorrow morning. There’s a magazine job I want to put you forward for.”
“But …” How do I put this nicely? “I’m not actually a model any more, Wilbur. Infinity Models dumped me.”
There is literally no way to put that nicely.
“Nobody here knows that, so potato potato.” He says them both the same. Potato potato. “Just meet me in Manhattan and we can take it from there. Don’t eat any chocolate between now and then. We can’t have any more skin explosions, Baby-baby Panda. They’re a lot less forgiving about that in America.”
I blink a few times. Baby-baby Panda. Manhattan. A job. A familiar, excited wriggling starts at the bottom of my stomach.
“But—” I object, about to sensibly tell Wilbur it’s Monday tomorrow, I have to study, my parents will never allow it and then I stop.
I’m sixteen and I’m not a child any more.
Miss Hall clearly thinks I’m useless anyway and I appear to be learning nothing so it’s not as if I’m missing anything here and …
I’ll finally get to see New York.
I can model again.
And I can live the dream, just like Nat.
What other options do I have? Sitting here, waiting for everybody to get on with their lives without me?
I close my eyes.
I can either stay here, ignored and alone. Failing and being forgotten about.
Or I can run away and have the life I choose.
Scientists say that if you went into space without a spacesuit, you would explode before you suffocated because there is no air pressure. I may not be in space, but that’s precisely how I feel now. As if – if I don’t do something – that’s exactly what’s going to happen to me.
“I’ll do it,” I say defiantly, opening my eyes.
“Of course you’ll do it, Bunny-face,” Wilbur laughs. “It’s fashion. New York. What else is there?”
he next morning, I simply get up and leave.
That’s it.
I consider other, more elaborate options. I think of carefully planned strategies: pretending I need library books from New York, or that I’m sick and in need of a doctor with city expertise. I consider tying my bed sheets into a rope and climbing subtly out of the window, like a heroine from a Famous Five novel.
Then I realise that my poor knotting and rope-climbing skills might probably result in a much more permanent departure than I’m aiming for.
So at 6am on the dot, I jump out of bed and stand in front of my wardrobe, trying to decide what a sixteen-year-old would wear to a model casting in New York City.
I experiment with a few options.
I try my Eeyore jumper and jeans, followed by my spotty vest and shorts, then I take them off and try a yellow T-shirt and zigzag leggings. In a moment of desperation, I even consider the conjoined white trousers and red jumper I wore trick-or-treating a few years ago when I was dressed as a can of Campbell’s soup. But then I realise you can still see the vague outline of the word TOMATO painted across the middle.
And I’m not sure that a fruit pretending to be a vegetable is the style icon I should be channelling.
Finally, I chuck my childhood back into
the wardrobe and crush it down as hard as I can. Then, slightly cautiously, I walk over to the corner of the room where the red and white heart dress is lying in a crumpled heap, from me throwing it there four days ago.
I don’t think this is scientifically possible, but somehow it looks sad. Flat. A bit resentful.
I did stamp on it quite a few times.
“Sorry,” I whisper, picking it up and trying to straighten it back out. Somehow, it feels like Nat might mystically know. “Can we try again?”
The dress doesn’t say anything so I wave it around a few times to try and get some creases out, and then carefully climb back in and zip it up. I wash my face, apply some more of Annabel’s mascara and stick some lip balm on my lips.
Then I stick a blue stripy hoody on over the top and put my New York guidebook and my birthday money in my satchel.
There’s a jam jar on the windowsill, stuffed with a messy bundle of ‘emergency kitty’: several twenty-dollar bills, crumpled up together.
After a few seconds of guilty deliberation, I grab that too.
Then I run down the stairs.
“This is very early for you, sweetheart,” Annabel observes, coming out of the living room still blinking in the morning sunshine. “Where are you going?”
“Out,” I say, opening the front door.
And I close it firmly behind me.
Greenway train station is no longer empty. There are people quietly lining the edges of the platform like a sleepy army. Men in suits, women in smart dresses and heels. A couple of young girls in jeans, talking on their mobile phones. A lady and her little dog. A man with a suitcase.
I look up and down for Dad with another pang of guilt, and then lift my chin defiantly and take my place in the line.
This is it, I realise as the bell rings, the barriers lower and the silver train starts slowly approaching. From this point, everything changes.
The train stops, the doors open and I climb up on to the top deck and take a seat, accidentally spreading my dress out on to the lap of the girl next to me. For the first time in weeks, there’s no weight in my stomach. No ripples of panic.
Nothing.
And as Greenway and everything in it retreats behind me, I don’t feel sad or invisible.
If things won’t be perfect for me, I’ll have to make them perfect myself.
And there’s no going back.
ere are some interesting facts about Grand Central station in New York:
But none of these are my favourite facts.
The best one is this: if you look up there is a vast, bright turquoise ceiling, and on this ceiling are painted 2,500 individual stars depicting the zodiac of the Mediterranean winter sky.
Even better, the stars are backwards because they were inspired by a medieval manuscript that shows the constellations as they would have been seen from the other direction.
In other words, when you look at the sky of Grand Central station, you are viewing it as God.
Which means that where you’re standing is supposed to be heaven.
I can kind of believe it.
The second I step off the train, the sleepiness of Greenway instantly evaporates.
As I stand in the middle of the station, staring at the ceiling and clutching my satchel, it feels like the whole world has opened up to its proper size and I can finally breathe again.
There are hundreds of people everywhere.
Taking photos, eating cheesecake with little plastic forks, checking the train timetables. According to my guidebook, there are 4,000 bulbs in this station, and every single one of them is on and shining: the room is full of warm light and noise. Dozens of conversations and questions and accents blur into each other until they form a comforting, drone-like hum. It’s like being in a warm, friendly beehive, if a beehive cost two billion dollars to build.
I stare at the star-filled sky until my neck starts aching, and then open my map and wander slowly into the street.
At which point the world opens up even further. And further and further.
And then it just keeps opening.
Giraffes have the same amount of vertebrae as humans, and I’m genuinely concerned that mine are going to stay stretched out permanently as I try to take it all in.
New York City is enormous.
It shoots into the sky and just keeps going: like a normal city that’s been sprayed with fertiliser and has suddenly grown in every possible direction. Upwards, outwards, across. Sprouting everywhere simultaneously, like a jungle made of concrete and glass and marble.
The buildings are huge. The roads are huge. The buses seem bigger and brighter; the crowds faster and louder. Everything seems more, except for the sky, which suddenly feels smaller and much, much further away.
In the corner next to the station a man in a bright blue T-shirt is playing a golden saxophone next to a yellow cap on the floor. Opposite him a man in a tracksuit is smashing at a makeshift drum kit made out of pots and pans.
A woman in shiny black leather boots with a tiny dog tucked under her arm pushes past, and a small girl wheels a ladybird suitcase over my toes.
A stand selling pretzels and doughnuts is next to a stand selling fried noodles, and the air is sweet and smoky and salty.
Everywhere is noise and colour. A couple are yelling at each other: “Don’t talk to me like that, yo,” “Don’t you talk to me like that, yo,” and another girl is crying hysterically into her friend’s shoulder. A bright yellow taxi pulls to an abrupt stop in front of a group of tourists looking at a map.
“Are you trying to get yourself killed?” the driver shouts in a heavy accent out of the window, beeping four times.
They stare at him, eyes wide.
“Move it,” he yells, and they do: stumbling backwards on to the feet of more pedestrians who look equally annoyed. The entire city seems to be divided into two sets of people: people who belong here, and people who do not.
Of which I am definitely the latter.
It’s all strangely familiar, yet also unfamiliar. Like when you meet an old great-aunt you haven’t seen in ten years and you recognise her face and smell and the way she leaves a wet mark on your cheek but at the same time you don’t really know her. I’ve known this city all my life, but after sixteen years and hundreds of films and TV shows and four guidebooks, I’m finally here.
I’m in New York.
Happiness bubbles into my chest and up my throat until I can’t help it: I squeak a couple of times and jump up and down on the spot, hugging my guidebook to my chest.
The saxophone player is watching me, so I stop jumping, put a dollar bill into his yellow cap and beam at him.
“You have a nice day,” I say experimentally.
He winks and keeps playing.
I wink back.
And, slowly but surely, I start pushing my way through New York City.
ow, I know some basic facts about navigating New York. In fact, through personal research and also a lifetime of growing up with America as a cultural backdrop, I know quite a lot.
I know that the roads run parallel to each other in a grid shape based on an Ancient Roman system called centuriation.
I know that the distance between one road and another is a block. I know streets run east and west, and avenues run north and south, and that they’re all numbered sequentially: 39th, 40th, 41st, and so on.
I know that one direction is uptown and the other is downtown.
And I know I like it, because it’s incredibly logical. Unlike in England, where landmarks and etymology and history and destination and famous individuals are all welded together in a hotchpotch that makes no sense unless you’re a road historian. Which almost nobody is.
So I start out optimistically.
The address Wilbur has given me is only six blocks away from Grand Central station, and according to Google it should take eight minutes to walk there.
I walk down 42nd Street humming a tune, staring at the tops of the buildings and the
glitzy shops and the food stands and the inexplicably gold fire hydrants.
I pat a dog on the end of an orange rope, buy a pen that says ‘I HEART NY’, a pencil that says ‘You have NY heart’ and a triangular slice of extremely hot pizza.
I say hello to somebody dressed up as a Mario Brother.
I watch an enormous red truck drive past with slabs of pavement attached by ropes to the back.
I take an arty photo of myself in a shop window reflection and then send it to Nat with a carefully constructed, breezy message:
Wearing the red dress! New York is AMAZING. Such a shame you can’t be here! Hxx
Then I hit the river.
Which means I’ve gone the wrong way.
So I start walking back: past the shop window and the food stands and the hydrants and Mario.
Except at some point I must have turned off 42nd Street, because now I’m standing outside a shop I don’t recognise.
It turns out that if you don’t actually know New York, there is no way of telling which direction you’re heading in. Uptown or downtown. East or west. North or south.
It’s like being Alice, falling through the rabbit hole. Except when you come out the other end, it’s not even properly signposted.
“Excuse me,” I say politely to a woman walking past with bright lilac hair and a fur collar.
She blinks a few times.
“Umm. Could you tell me which way is up, please?”
“What?”
“Which way is up and which way is down?”
She leans close and squints. “What language are you speaking?”
“Umm. English?”
“English? Where are you from?”
“England.”
I’ve been to two non-English-speaking countries in the last six months, and at no stage has anyone queried whether I speak my own language. “I promise I am,” I add, because she still looks doubtful.
“Right. Well, that way is up.” She points to the sky. “And that way is down.”
She points to the pavement.
I flush so hard I can actually see the tip of my nose turning purple. I obviously look like the kind of person who doesn’t understand three dimensions.