I Heart London

by Lindsey Kelk

  ‘So I talked to Grandpa before you came in and the plan is that you’ll meet with the London Spencer Media publishing team next week while you’re over there, and I’ll take the advertisers’ conference in Paris.’ She paused, took in the look of abject horror on my face, and recovered herself. ‘Unless you want to do Paris and I’ll do London?’

  ‘Paris?’ Not bloody likely, I thought to myself. ‘You can take Paris. But, um, wouldn’t you like to come to London too?’

  ‘Love to,’ Delia laughed, calming down slightly and settling into her desk chair. ‘But the advertisers’ conference is next Friday and I need to get everything together for that. Grandpa is going to schedule your meeting for Wednesday, maybe Tuesday? Keep it clear of your mom’s party on Saturday.’

  I nursed my coffee as though it were the Holy Grail. As long as I had coffee, this would all be OK. ‘Tuesday?’ I tried not to cry. Again. ‘As in four days from now?’

  ‘You’re going to be totally fine,’ she soothed from across the office. ‘All you have to do is go in and give the presentation you’ve already given a thousand times to, what, three people? This is a formality. This is a hoop for us to jump through.’

  I pouted. So she went on.

  ‘People are already predisposed to be nice to you because their boss has told them to be.’ I could tell she’d already switched into business mode and that meant she had no time to pander to my insecurities. When Delia turned on her monitor and started tapping away at her keyboard, she was almost never on Facebook. ‘You’re going to be amazing. You’ve been amazing so far, haven’t you?’

  In all honesty, I thought, so far I had been a liability. Sure, I could sing my own praises with regards to the creative side of things. I was happy enough to say I was a good writer, I had good contacts and great ideas and was perfectly capable of stringing together an attractive sentence. But in meetings? Not so much. First, there was my uncontrollable tendency to be massively overfamiliar with everyone I met. Within fifteen minutes of our first meeting with Trinity’s global marketing director, I was merrily telling him about my adventures with my junior school’s guinea pig, Alex’s terrible haircut and my intense love for Les Misérables. He’d only asked if I’d had a nice weekend. My mouth had a tendency to run away with itself. And that was before we took into consideration turning up to meetings barefoot, outing celebrities, almost blogging myself out of the love of my life and getting into catfights on stage at music festivals in France.

  I had enjoyed quite the career.

  ‘You’re doing it, Angela.’ Delia closed the conversation with her final say-so. ‘And besides, this will give you a day away from your parents. That’s got to be good news, hasn’t it?’

  She really was a very bright girl.

  The rest of the day was spent obsessively reading over the Gloss publishing presentation, making to-do lists and ignoring text messages from my mother. I was booked on the 9.25 p.m. flight back to London. Alone. For all Jenny and Alex’s promises of supporting me through my family reunion, neither of them was able to fly in with me. Jenny, having remembered that she actually had a job, had to manage an event for Erin and was flying out tomorrow. Alex had studio time booked to record live sessions for iTunes or B sides or something else band-related that I couldn’t quite remember and was coming on Monday.

  To be fair, I was struggling with everything I’d been told for the last five days because the only thing I could think about was London. One minute, I’d be super-excited about going. Share Topshop with Jenny, hug my dad, sniff Louisa’s baby, generally show Alex off like a shiny new toy. But then I’d remember the flipside. For every trip to Topshop, there would be a cup of stewed tea with Aunt Sheila. For every dad hug, there would be a passive-aggressive dig from my mum. For every sniff of the baby, there would be a shitty nappy, and it was going to be very hard to show Alex off if my mother poisoned him five minutes after he’d entered the house. And given her cooking skills, she might not even do it on purpose. Of course, there was a chance everyone would just be happy to see me, and my mum would hand me the biscuit tin and forget that I hadn’t been home in two years. There was just as much chance that the house would be picked up in a tornado during the night and dropped on top of a witch in the wonderful world of Oz.

  As the office clock ticked towards five, I kept looking at my phone, waiting for the car service to buzz. So far I’d had five texts from Louisa detailing how very excited she was that I would be back on British soil in twenty-four hours, three texts from Jenny asking whether or not she should pack her Jimmy Choo over-the-knee boots, and one from my mum and dad confirming that it was supposed to rain so I should bring a coat. And if I didn’t have a coat, I should get a coat.

  I was looking longingly out of our twenty-fifth-storey window at the bright spring sunshine when my phone buzzed into life. The car was here. The end was nigh.

  ‘Want a hand with your bags?’ Delia piped up from her corner. I looked up and considered throwing myself on her mercy, begging her not to let me go, but it was no use. Not only had Delia been very vocal on the subject of me ‘reconciling’ with my mother all week, but she was now one hundred percent committed to me giving this presentation in London. I’d have more chance appealing to her twin sister’s good nature.

  ‘I’ve got them.’ I closed down my laptop, heaved myself up out of my chair, grabbed my notepad off the desk and tossed them both into my satchel. It groaned with the weight, echoing my sentiments.

  ‘What exactly do you have in there anyways?’ she asked as she stood up, offering a hug in commiseration. ‘It looks like you’re packed for a month.’

  ‘I have every item of clothing I own,’ I explained, heaving the bags along the plush carpeting. ‘And as many bags of peanut-butter M&Ms as I could pack. And a shit-ton of Tide pens for my mum. I feel like she’ll like Tide pens.’

  ‘Good call,’ she said, hugging me quickly and shoving me towards the door. ‘Even my mom loves Tide pens, and she hasn’t as much as looked at laundry her entire life.’

  I bit my lip and shook my hair out from behind my ears. ‘It’ll be OK, won’t it?’ I asked.

  ‘You can call me any time,’ Delia assured me, arms folded in front of her. ‘You’re going to kill at the presentation.’

  ‘Weirdly, I’m not so worried about the presentation any more,’ I muttered. I wanted to get changed. I shouldn’t be wearing jeans. My mum hated it when I wore jeans. And I should have tied my hair up, she never liked it down. And all in the space of ten seconds, I’d regressed ten years.

  ‘Your mom is just going to be happy to see you,’ she replied, holding open the door while I shuffled through. ‘You’re going to be surprised.’

  I pressed the glowing grey button to call the lift and looked back over my shoulder. ‘Well, yes,’ I nodded. ‘That’s pretty much a given.’

  Obviously, my taxi did not get stuck in traffic and my flight was not delayed. As if that wasn’t bad enough, when I got to JFK airport I discovered Alex had upgraded my flight. What a bastard. Before I could even think to tell someone I had a bomb in my shoe or fake a panic attack, I was on the plane and downing tiny glasses of champagne like they were going out of fashion. I swiped at the screen of my iPhone and reread Alex’s last text. ‘Be calm, be cool, don’t punch anyone and I’ll see you Monday. Love you.’ I closed down the screen and closed my eyes. Easier said than done, Reid.

  ‘Is there anything I can get for you?’ A tall, blonde flight attendant in a smart red suit smiled at me in the dim cabin lighting.

  ‘Oh, no, thank you,’ I hiccupped. ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Just let me know if there’s anything at all.’ She rested her hand on my shoulder very briefly and then disappeared, presumably to tell the rest of the crew it was OK, I wasn’t going to drink them dry.

  I had planned on sleeping through the flight, but I already knew I was too restless. Every time I closed my eyes, something started niggling. I’d spent the first couple of hours going over and o
ver and over my presentation for Gloss. I’d spent the next hour eating peanuts. And then I’d gone over the presentation again. And I couldn’t quite get my head round how much had changed since I’d flown the other way, out of Heathrow. I was proud of myself, I was. Two years ago, I’d been scared and alone and entirely directionless. Now I was so close to realizing so many dreams. Which didn’t stop me being scared. The more you have, the more you have to lose.

  And then there was the wedding. The non-existent wedding. Thanks to Delia, Erin and Sadie, I was really starting to worry about my lack of preparation. Maybe watching Breaking Dawn was a bad idea. Edward and Bella were making me feel bad. I switched off the screen and pulled out my notepad, along with the wedding magazine Delia had given me. Maybe if I made a list. Maybe if I had an idea of what needed doing, I’d be able to get my head round how to make it work for me. Dress. Guest list. Venue. Catering. Dog and pony. Bleurgh.

  Where was that stewardess? Why had I said no to more champagne?

  Number one, I needed a dress. Flipping to the pages Delia had marked for me to look at, my eyes popped. I had imprinted. Suddenly, life had new meaning for me. On the page in front of me was a light, frothy concoction of sheer beauty. Layers and layers of ivory skirts floated around the model, making it look like she was walking through a cloud, and a high slit up the front revealed a hint of leg, giving the dress an edgy look without seeming slutty. Up top, a delicate bodice gave her boobs that she quite clearly did not have. Models did not have boobs. I did not have boobs. It was simple. It didn’t look like I would have to starve myself for six months to get into it. The slit led me to believe I might not trip.

  This was the dress. I closed my eyes and imagined myself wearing it, getting married in it, and it was easy. I could feel sunshine on my skin, I could see Alex smiling at me, and in that moment, all I wanted to do was jump off the plane, grab Alex and march him down the aisle. Now I really wasn’t going to be able to sleep.

  Full of wedding beans, I picked up my pen, turned the glittery vampire wedding back on and started on the guest list. How come there wasn’t a magical page in a magazine that would make this easy for me? Obviously Jenny, Erin and, I supposed, Sadie. Probably my friend Vanessa. Definitely Delia. Mary, if she would come. And Louisa and Tim would have to come over. And I assumed my dad would insist on bringing my mum. Alex’s side was even easier to whittle down than mine. I drew a line down the middle of my notepad and added all my people to one side, then added Alex’s band members Graham and Craig, his parents, his brother, his manager, and his slightly creepy old roommate who came over once every couple of months, brought himself two cans of beer and peed sitting down. I knew this because he left the door open when he did so.

  So that was the dress and the guest list sorted. Who knew I would turn out to be a wedding planner extraordinaire?

  I tapped the pen against the tray table, incredibly pleased with my progress. My seat neighbour, however, was not so pleased with the tapping. He raised his eye mask and gave me the frowning of a lifetime until I pursed my lips and carefully laid the pen down on the table. How dare he not care that I had just solved two-thirds of the world’s most pressing problem? Global economic crisis be damned, I had a wedding to plan. So if I could pick a dress and sort out my guest list without slashing my wrists, where was all the drama coming from with other people’s weddings? Perhaps I was just supernaturally talented. I considered the likelihood of this while quietly judging Bella’s wedding dress. My main thought was that it was very tight. Maybe incredible event-organizing skills would be my vampire talent. It must take a lot of organization to be a vampire these days. After a few minutes, I felt my eyelids getting heavy and began to doze pleasantly, losing myself in a dream where Alex’s skin sparkled and my ex, Mark, crashed our wedding, howling at the moon. Although he was considerably less Taylor Lautner and considerably more Home Counties Werewolf in New York.

  Hmm. I felt my earbuds slip out of my ears as I nodded off. No doubt about it, I was Team Alex all the way.

  CHAPTER SIX

  When I woke up, I’d missed the breakfast service and my several tiny glasses of champagne had added up to one big headache. Between my dehydrated skin and crumpled clothes, I was far from my most fabulous self and there was very little I could do about it between getting off an aeroplane and getting into a car. Louisa’s car, I reminded myself, a little thrill of excitement splitting through my headache for a moment.

  I pushed up the shade and looked out of the window. There it was, that green and pleasant land. OK, so it looked a bit grey and murky from the air, but that was probably just the drizzle I’d been warned about. Drizzle. A word I hadn’t used in two years. It had never occurred to me before, but we didn’t really have drizzle in New York; we had light rain, heavy rain or fuck-me-is-the-world-ending rain. But never drizzle. It was perfect really. Now I would have frizzy hair to match my grey, bloated face and scruffy clothes, and my mum could be entirely certain that I had spent two years peddling crack under a bridge and definitely not eating vegetables.

  And then it appeared. The opening titles of EastEnders rolled out underneath me, the ribbon of river curling up and stretching out across the landscape, punctuated by large patches of green. My stomach slipped when I spotted the Houses of Parliament, the London Eye. I’d grown up a little less than an hour outside London, less if I managed to catch the fast train (I never did), but it always felt like a million miles away. Louisa and I used to sneak off on Saturdays and get the train to Waterloo, just to wander up and down the South Bank before buying chocolate and riding straight back home. (Nights out in the big smoke were verboten.) I’d always got a kick when the train rolled into Waterloo, even as an adult. The city always made me feel like a little girl. It was so much older and more serious than I could ever be. New York was a little more encouraging. Fewer men in suits stroking their beards and more women running around in high heels. Clearly it was the media’s fault. London was defined by books and poems and centuries of words written by men. NYC had been culturally claimed by skinny-jean bands, cocktails and four ladies into Manolo Blahniks, brunch and Mr Big.

  Passport control was painless and, thanks to a bargain I made with the devil for the soul of my firstborn child, my suitcases all came off the carousel intact and unexploded. Forty minutes after we touched down, I was wheeling my bags through the exit and out into the wild. The first thing I saw was a Marks & Spencer Simply Food. The second thing I saw was my mother. Without exerting any control over my own feet, I stopped stock-still and wondered whether or not I had time to duck into M&S and grab a bag of Percy Pigs before she spotted me. It was only after I’d considered this gummy treat that I realized my mother was in the airport and Louisa was not.

  ‘Angela!’

  Whatever time I’d had to recover myself was gone. I had been seen. And now my mother was waving like a loon, shouting my name and hitting my father on the arm. ‘Angela Clark! We’re over here! Angela!’

  Wow. There they were. Not a hair on my mum’s head had moved since Louisa’s wedding or, to be more specific, since 1997. As much as I had prayed to find out I was adopted as a teenager, there was no denying she was my mum. We had the same blue eyes, the same dark-blonde hair – or at least we did when I didn’t highlight the shit out of it – and the same tendency to go a bit pear-shaped when we got lazy. Which we both did. All the time. At her side, my dad was wearing the same old Next cardigan that he kept in the car in case it got a bit chilly. On one hand, it was sort of reassuring. On the other, bizarre.

  ‘Are you deaf?’ My mum marched towards me, handbag on her shoulder, arms outstretched. For one scary moment I thought she was going to hug me, but instead she reached out and rubbed a tough finger on my cheek. ‘You’ve got mascara all under your eyes.’

  ‘All right, Mum,’ I said, nodding at her and wishing I’d put on more lip balm. ‘Nice to see you, Mum.’

  ‘Hmm.’ She looked me up and down quickly. ‘New bag?’

  ‘We
ll, not really.’ I looked down at my Marc Jacobs satchel and thought back to when it was new. ‘But new to you.’

  ‘I don’t even want to know what it cost,’ she said, turning on her sensible heel and taking off across the arrivals lounge. ‘Come on − the car park costs a bloody fortune.’

  ‘Yes, Mum.’ I looked down at my handbag and, not for the first time, wished it could talk. It would have been lovely to get a quick reminder that I’d actually spent the last two years in New York and that they weren’t picking me up from my first semester at uni.

  ‘All right, love?’ Dad patted my shoulder and took the handle of one of my suitcases. ‘Flight all right?’

  ‘Not bad,’ I replied. ‘Although I do appear to have flown into the Twilight Zone.’

  ‘Eh?’ Dad trundled after my mum, leaving me behind. ‘Twilight? Your mum was reading that. Nonsense, if you ask me. I watched the film. Not my cup of tea but it passed an evening. Come on − I’m gasping for a coffee and she won’t let me buy one at Costa now I’ve got a Gaggia at home.’

  Not ready to discuss my mother’s progressive choice of reading material or my dad’s new espresso machine, I played the dutiful daughter, stuck out my bottom lip and did as I was told.

  Home, sweet home.

  ‘News, news, news.’ My mum looked over her shoulder from the passenger seat to make sure I hadn’t bolted out the back of dad’s Volvo. Fat chance, since Dad had activated the child locks. ‘You know Vera from the library?’

  ‘Yes?’ I was clutching my phone so tightly my knuckles were white. I didn’t have a blind clue who Vera from the library was.

  ‘Dead,’ Mum announced. ‘Cancer.’

  And now it seemed I never would.

  ‘Brian as well, from the butchers,’ she continued, looking to the heavens as though more dead people I’d never met were going to wave down and remind her they’d carked it. ‘Who else? Well, Eileen, but you didn’t know Eileen. Oh! Do you remember Mr Wilson?’