by Lindsey Kelk
Jenny was my New York. You could keep the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building and your exceptionally good bagels, without Jenny Lopez, this city had nothing and no number of bacon, egg and cheese sandwiches (that I suddenly realized I had not paid for) could change that.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
‘Angela?’
I woke with a start and no idea where I was. This was not my bed. Ow. This was not any bed.
‘Babe, you OK?’
Turning my aching neck I saw Alex standing in the doorway of our living room, looking worried.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, feeling around the settee cushions for my phone. What time was it? Why was I in the living room? Instead of my phone, I felt something hard and sharp digging into my hip. It was my laptop.
‘I told you to come to bed when you finished,’ Alex whispered, walking over to take the laptop out my hands. ‘Go to bed, get some sleep. I’ll deal with Alice.’
‘What time is it?’ I asked as the events of the evening slowly filtered back into place.
‘Almost six,’ he said softly as he set the computer on the dining room table next to a stack of paper.
‘Is Alice awake?’
‘Not yet.’
I rubbed my eyes and rocked my head from side to side, my neck was so tight. This really was a settee that needed to be reserved for naps only. My eyes rested on the stack of paper.
‘I printed it out,’ I said, my voice croaky as the final pieces fell into place. ‘I have to take it over now.’
‘Take it over?’ Alex asked, puzzled. ‘To the publisher? Babe, it’s a Saturday. Please go to bed.’
After Jenny had left the diner, I’d walked almost the length of Manhattan and, just before I got to the F train stop at Delancey, it had hit me. I knew what my book would be about. And I spent the rest of the night writing the proposal.
‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to go now, before they leave.’
‘I don’t want to say you’re starting to scare me but you’re kind of starting to scare me,’ Alex said, kneeling down in front of me and placing his hands on either side of my face. ‘Do I need to stage an intervention? I never thought I’d have to beg you to get some sleep.’
‘I swear I’m OK.’ I leaned forward to plant a quick kiss on his lips, wishing I’d brushed my teeth before I did. ‘There’s just one more thing I have to do and then I’m going to sleep for so long, you may need medical assistance to wake me.’
‘None this sounds like a dream come true,’ he replied. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen you up and awake before seven a.m. unless it’s Alice or you’re on your way to an airport.’
‘Time to add one more reason to the list,’ I assured him, stuffing my arms through the sleeves of my coat and slipping the pages of my proposal into my satchel. ‘I’ll be back before you know it.’
‘Bring pastries,’ he called as I let myself out the front door. ‘Or I’ll know for sure you’ve been possessed by aliens.’
The city was beautiful early in the morning. At night, it was sexy and in the day, electric, but first thing in the morning, New York seemed shiny and new, its empty streets filled with possibilities. I exchanged a smile and a nod with the postman as I flagged down a cab, watching him push his little mail cart down the next street. People were happier first thing in the morning. There was more optimism to go around at sunrise than there was at sunset.
‘Pearl and Cedar,’ I said, bundling myself into the back seat.
‘You got it,’ the driver replied as we tore away from the kerb.
Before the weekend rush hour had a chance to kick in, we raced through Brooklyn, only stopping for red lights and one particularly foolhardy pigeon who thought it a good idea to test the brakes of a yellow cab.
‘You can’t just hit ’em,’ the driver explained as I braced myself against the Perspex partition. ‘If they hit the grille, they’ll be stinking up the car for days. At first it ain’t so bad, smells like chicken, but a couple of days in, after a twelve-hour shift, you better believe you’re thinking, “If only I hadn’t hit that damn bird.”’
‘No problem,’ I replied, fastening my seatbelt and clutching my bag tightly against my chest.
‘So, the tunnel is closed and we gotta take the bridge,’ he added. ‘Probably faster this time of day.’
‘That’s fine,’ I said. All I wanted was to get to Jenny’s place. I’d sent Mason a text, asking what time they were leaving, but he hadn’t replied, either because they were still asleep or because Jenny had seen my name come up on the screen and tossed his phone down the building’s trash chute, I didn’t know which.
We passed the big hotel at the entrance ramp to Brooklyn Bridge and began to slow down, a sea of bright red brake lights ahead of us.
‘Is something wrong?’ I asked as a police car zoomed past us on the opposite side of the road, sirens blaring. It was never a good sign when a police car was going the wrong way on a main road, this much I knew.
‘Don’t look good,’ he grunted. ‘We might be here for a while.’
I stayed buckled in, tapping my fingers against my thighs. We wouldn’t be here for long. No matter what was going on, traffic would start moving again any minute. I’d be at Jenny’s in fifteen minutes flat. Twenty, tops.
And then two more police cruisers followed the other, followed by a fire engine, followed by an ambulance.
‘Nyaah, shit,’ the taxi driver groaned. ‘That’s it. We’re fucked.’
‘Can’t you turn around and go another way?’ I asked, craning my neck to look at the lengthy line of cars sitting behind us.
‘Can you magically make the car fly?’ he replied. ‘No, I can’t turn around.’
‘OK, I don’t have time to wait, I’m in a rush.’ I unbuckled my seatbelt, threw the strap of my bag over my head and fished two twenty-dollar bills out of my wallet. The meter only read eighteen dollars but I had a feeling he was going to be sitting there for a while. ‘Here you go.’
‘Forty bucks? To sit in traffic for an hour? Forget about it, lady, you’re looking at a hundred,’ he said as he snatched them through the tiny slot in the Perspex partition.
‘I don’t have any more,’ I lied, my mother’s influence coming through. Actually, no, she wouldn’t have even given him the extra twenty. My mum didn’t believe in tipping as a concept. ‘Sorry.’
Before he could lock me in, I opened the cab door and took off in a run, ignoring the blaring car horns as I scooted in front of cabs and trucks and miserable-looking commuters to find myself on the pavement. OK, fifteen minutes away by car couldn’t be more than half an hour on foot, I told myself, running as fast as I could, for as long as I could.
But it wasn’t long enough. I’d only gone a few hundred yards when I realized the footpath of Brooklyn Bridge was a steady incline until you reached the middle. I was so out of breath, I’d be lucky if I made it to Jenny’s apartment by Christmas.
‘Christ,’ I gasped, pushing my arm into my side to stretch away the stitch that threatened to slow me down even more. ‘I really have got to start going to the gym.’
But I kept going, one foot in front of the other as the sun rose over the city. It would have been a beautiful photo if I trusted myself to stop and take it but I knew, the second I stopped moving, it was all over. Eventually, I wheezed my way over the halfway point and began to pick up speed again.
‘Thank god for gravity,’ I panted, studiously ignoring the dozens of runners who were overtaking me, especially the ones pushing prams that carried judgemental babies. I wasn’t sure what they were looking so smug about, it wasn’t as though they were running themselves.
After what felt like forever but was really much closer to forty painful, sweaty minutes, I let myself in through the back door of Jenny’s building. I couldn’t guarantee the same security guard would be around and, if Erin thought I looked like an extra from Law & Order the night before, she really ought to get a glimpse of me now.
Th
e lift buzzed up to the twenty-third floor while I caught my breath. It didn’t matter that I didn’t know what to say this time. I had it all written down. Crossing my fingers for luck, I found myself outside Jenny’s apartment for the second time in twelve hours, hoping against hope that this time she would be home. Closing my eyes, I knocked.
And knocked again.
And again.
Eventually, I heard a door slam and footsteps, followed by a muffle of swearing that definitely sounded like Jenny.
Bollocks. I winced and pressed myself against the wall so she wouldn’t see me. I’d expected Mason to come to the door with it being so early in the morning, damn my internalized misogyny. There was no way Jenny would let me in.
‘Angela,’ I heard her say through the door.
‘No?’ I replied in a fake American accent. ‘It’s your neighbour, uh, Lucy.’
‘No, it’s you,’ Jenny replied. ‘We have a camera above the door. I can see your dumb ass.’
‘Then let me in,’ I pleaded, searching for the camera as I fussed with my hair. ‘I want to show you something.’
‘I told you yesterday, I’m done,’ she said. ‘Go away.’
‘Wait,’ I shouted, battering my fists against the door one more time. ‘Wait, I want you to read this.’
I dropped to my knees and fished the printed pages out of my bag. I slid the first page halfway under the door and waited. After what felt like an eternity, it disappeared, snatched up on the other side.
I pressed my palm against the door, my heart thudding in my ears. I tried to breathe slowly, counting to ten before every exhale.
‘Is there another page or is this it?’ Jenny said, finally.
‘There’s another page,’ I confirmed, pushing the rest of it under the door, page by page. ‘A few more actually.’
The white paper slipped out of my view as I squatted on the floor, leaning against Jenny’s front door, cold, tired and, once again, desperate for a wee. When would I learn to go before I left the house?
As the first lock clicked inside the door, I tried to stand up but my tired, aching legs betrayed me, wobbling with the effort and sending me backwards to land hard on my bum as Jenny’s face appeared above me.
‘Why are you on the floor?’ she asked, her face tear-stained, her hair tied up on top of her head.
‘Because I’m a dickhead,’ I replied.
‘Get your ass inside, dickhead,’ she said, brushing away a fresh tear with the back of one hand, the other pressing my pages against her chest.
‘Are you going to burn that if I go for a wee first?’ I asked, scrambling to my feet.
‘Maybe,’ she sniffed. ‘Let’s find out.’
She moved to the side and I hurtled into the apartment before she could change her mind, dropping my satchel on her sofa and shutting the toilet door without locking it.
When I emerged, she was standing at the kitchen island, the kettle boiling on the hob behind her while she read through the pages. She’d spread them all out on the marble counter top, stark white rectangles against the black and white.
‘When did you write this?’ she asked. She pulled her dressing gown tightly around her and I noticed she was wearing the same T-shirt she’d been wearing the day before. I wasn’t the only one who had slept in her clothes and, according to the blankets on the settee, not the only one who had spent the night on the sofa.
‘Last night,’ I said, lingering in the living area of her open-plan apartment. Behind me, the sun was stretching all the way across Brooklyn, stretching across the city like a warm yellow blanket. It was a beautiful sight to see but it wasn’t what I was there for. ‘It’s my book proposal.’
‘It’s not really long enough to be a book proposal,’ she said. ‘You need three chapters and a synopsis.’
I gave her a look before walking over to the cupboard and taking out two mugs. When she didn’t tell me to get the fuck out of her kitchen, I opened the next cupboard, looking for the Tetley teabags I kept in there.
‘The writing is good,’ she said, opening the fridge and taking out the milk. ‘I like this Jessie character, she seems like a real stand-up gal.’
‘Much better than the Anna character,’ I agreed. ‘Who is basically useless.’
‘Total asshole,’ she agreed. ‘I don’t know what Anna sees in her.’
‘It’s a love story,’ I explained, my eyes darting over my own words, rereading them for the first time since they’d come pouring out. ‘Only it’s not about a boy and a girl, it’s about two soulmates who find each other in New York when they need each other most and all the adventures they go on together.’
Jenny set her features in a pout, determined to look unmoved.
‘Because that’s what best friends are,’ I added before picking up the boiling kettle. ‘Soulmates.’
‘You’re being incredibly cheesy right now,’ she said as her air conditioning kicked in to make the pages dance around on the counter top. ‘Is this for real?’
‘Yes.’ I wiped away a tear as I poured out hot water through blurry eyes. The one thing I could do blindfolded was make tea. ‘Because sometimes friends cock up but, when they’re meant to be, they’re meant to be. I can’t imagine not having my best friend in my life so I thought I ought to write a story about that.’
She passed me the sugar bowl.
‘Did you write the part where one of the friends makes an absolutely colossal fuck-up and costs the other friend everything?’
‘Not yet,’ I replied. ‘Might save it for the sequel.’
Jenny wrapped her arms around herself and stared at the floor. ‘Then you’d better put in all the times the other friend was a totally selfish dick who put the other friend through hell,’ she said, a single tear trickling down her cheek. ‘And the times the same friend said really nasty shit because she was angry and upset and, like, literally full of hormones. Literally injecting herself with them every day and making herself crazy.’
‘I think I’m going to concentrate on all the brilliant things they did together,’ I told her, tears prickling behind my own eyes. ‘And all the times that other friend made the first friend realize what she was capable of and how she could do anything if she tried hard enough and—’
‘OK, quit it, quit it, I’m totally lost,’ Jenny roared, throwing her arms around my neck and wailing loudly. ‘I get it, I’m sorry and I love you, you asshat.’
‘I love you too,’ I cried. ‘And I’m sorry.’
‘What is going on out here?’ Mason padded in from the living room in a pair of pyjama bottoms and nothing else. His eyes were still full of sleep and his hair was absolutely everywhere but it was very hard to concentrate on anything but his abs. That was the last time I wanted to hear Jenny complain about being a CrossFit widow.
‘It’s OK, it’s OK,’ Jenny sniffed. ‘Angela is writing a book and we’re friends again.’
Mason looked at us both like we were mad before turning around and traipsing right back into the bedroom.
‘He’s happy, really,’ she said.
‘I am as well,’ I said, resting my head on her shoulder. ‘And sorry if I smell, I didn’t have a shower last night and yesterday was quite the day.’
‘I didn’t want to say anything,’ she replied, her voice thick with unshed tears. ‘But you really do. You can shower here if you want, there are a bunch of your clothes on the spare bed. I was gonna burn them.’
‘You were going to burn my clothes?’
‘Yeah, I mean, I probably wouldn’t have,’ she sighed, turning her attention back to our tea. ‘Where can you burn shit in New York without getting into trouble anyway? They even put a smoke detector in our bathroom.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, accepting the piping hot tea, made just the way I liked it. ‘Did you talk to Erin again?’
She nodded, blowing on her mug before she took a sip.
‘Last night, for like, ever. She’s giving me a severance package and she says she’ll give me a re
ference if I want to apply for another PR job.’
‘And do you?’
‘I don’t know,’ she replied. ‘I didn’t think I’d have to make this decision right now. But between the severance she’s giving me and the money I’ve saved, I think this is my opportunity to shoot my shot. I might go back to school, take a couple of psychology courses. I know people think it’s dumb but I really want to focus on the podcast. But I’m scared.’
‘Of course you’re scared,’ I told her, wrapping my hands around my mug. ‘You don’t have what I had when I had to make big, life-changing decisions.’
‘And what’s that?’ she asked, her jaw set, ready to fight.
I smiled at my best friend.
‘You.’
Jenny raised an eyebrow and tutted before looking down at the floor.
‘I can’t believe I’m friends with the next Oprah,’ I said sipping my tea. ‘How mad is that?’
‘As if there was ever any doubt,’ she muttered, taking in my emergency bin trainers, my jogging bottoms, my scrappy T-shirt and grubby sweater. ‘Angie. I’m sorry about all the things I said. I know you have a lot going on. I don’t mean to be selfish, I just miss you sometimes is all. I miss us.’
‘I miss us too,’ I said, determined not to cry again. ‘I don’t think I realized how much until last night. There’s just so much going on all the time, I don’t know how to handle it.’
‘No one does,’ she said. ‘But you’re not on your own. I can help more – hell, I don’t have a job, I can help all the damn time.’
‘I was thinking I might ask if I can work from home more.’ I pulled a face, imagining Cici’s reaction. ‘Otherwise, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll have to look for something else. Turns out there’s no such thing as having it all.’
‘No, there is,’ she countered. ‘Only what they don’t tell you is the “it” part stands for millions of dollars. Then you just buy your way out of all of this stress.’
‘So I just need to make millions of dollars,’ I sighed with mock relief. ‘Thank you for figuring that out. Maybe this isn’t the right time to give up work.’