‘God, you’re annoying sometimes.’ Lily scooped up the card with an aggrieved air because there was no truer sign of friendship than a shared pin number.
Grace watched Lily walk to the bar with an automatic sway to her hips, which made every man in the place, even the too-cool-for-skool boys with their mullets and fugly trainers, look longingly at her like she was a Siren about to lure them on to the rocks and not a former Pony Club stalwart from Godalming who still couldn’t pronounce Nicholas Ghesquiere’s surname properly, no matter how many times Grace drilled her. Boys never seemed to care about stuff like that though.
J. Vaughn Acquisitions Consultant
She wondered what the J stood for. Jeremy? Jonty? Jacob? Jonathan? Justin? Jezedbiah? Julian? Job?
Lily was flirting with the Aussie barman as Grace tucked her itchy palms under her arms and looked up. The door burst open and a crowd of people came in: a crowd of lanky-arsed, floppy-haired, unwashed people. And as usual, that first sight of Liam made her heart flip over because he really was pretty, but the stubble and the tattoos gave him a dangerous edge. God, the bad boys were Grace’s kryptonite.
Grace steeled herself to smile faintly at Liam. She needn’t have bothered. He was too busy attaching his mouth to the neck of a waifish girl wearing a ratty rip-off of the Alexander McQueen skull scarf, which, hello, was beyond three years ago.
‘Gracie! How’s life in the fashion fast lane? Let you out of the cupboard yet, have they?’ Dan, Lily’s boyfriend who was the Mick Jagger to her Marianne Faithfull, bellowed as he strode over and took the bottle straight out of Lily’s hand before she could put it on the table. ‘I’ll get some more glasses, shall I?’
‘Hey, baby,’ Lily cooed, patting his bottom with a proprietorial air. Grace couldn’t blame her - The Waif was travelling in a pack.
‘This is Grace,’ Liam said, sitting down and almost pushing her off the sofa so he could make room for his little friend. ‘She’s in fashion.’
Grace assumed a nonchalant expression as she was scrutinised by four sets of eyes all clocking her vintage Ossie Clark sundress and finding it sadly lacking.
‘Nice dress,’ Waify smirked. ‘I think my mum has one just like it.’
‘Oh, do you still live with your parents?’ Grace asked sweetly. ‘That’s so retro of you.’
She got a glittering smile in return and then Waify played her winning hand. ‘Well, duh. Of course I live with my parents, I’m only seventeen.’
‘You utter, utter bastard! You replaced me with a younger model!’ Grace screeched much, much later. Two bottles of wine and a really ill-advised burger from a dodgy kebab shop on York Way later. There had been a vague plan to flag down a taxi but the glowing orange light of an empty cab had been an elusive sight as they trudged past bleak industrial sites and even bleaker council estates. Still, it had given Grace plenty of opportunity to get her rant on. ‘I had to sit there and slowly metamorphose into Patricia Routledge. What time is your curfew, young lady?’
‘Who the fuck’s Patricia Routledge?’ Dan asked and Grace wished that he and Lily would piss off so she could scream at Liam in peace.
‘Hyacinth - someone you don’t know because you weren’t brought up by two people in their seventies,’ Grace snapped. ‘And I was talking to Liam.’
Liam was staring at the peeling toe of his sneakers and looking as if he wished he had an elsewhere to be. No one had asked him to walk home with them, but Heather and her public-school posse had piled into a parental people-carrier so they could go home and braid each other’s hair. Or whatever it was seventeen year olds did for kicks these days.
‘Have you fucked her?’ Grace grabbed Liam’s arm. ‘Did you dump me because you’re hitting that fashion-backwards teenybopper? It didn’t stop you from trying to get into my pants last week, did it?’ Being drunk really brought out her inner vicious bitch.
Liam obviously thought so too because he shook free from her grasp and gave Grace a thoughtful look. It was strange to see something pensive flash across his face for once. ‘I’ve been trying to figure it out all week,’ he said. ‘’Cause you’re cool and stuff, but you know what? You really want to know why I broke it off?’
‘Go on! Enlighten me with your amazing insights, Dr Freud.’
‘It’s because you’re not any fun, Grace.’
‘Grace is fun,’ Lily protested loyally. ‘She dressed up as a chav last Halloween, and that was hysterical.’
Dan was forced to agree, even though he wasn’t Grace’s biggest fan, because her shellsuit and Croydon facelift had been a comedic tour de force.
‘We did loads of fun stuff,’ Grace insisted as they crossed over Brecknock Road. ‘I came round and baked you brownies. And, hello,
I invented the Ugly Betty drinking game. And what about the time you played that gig in Brighton and we dropped some E and I made you go on the waltzers . . .’
Liam nodded dumbly as Grace gave him example after example of what a fun-loving girlfriend she’d been. ‘Yeah, yeah, I know all that,’ he conceded. ‘But that’s it. You’re funny, but you’re not happy.’ He nodded again, a short, decisive dip of his head. ‘You have no happiness in you, Grace. You just fake it.’
The four of them had come to a halt by a zebra crossing so they could watch the bus they should have caught sail past, making a faint breeze out of the hot summer’s night so Grace’s dress fluttered against her legs as she felt the warm gust of the exhaust envelop her. The faint shrieks from a gaggle of drunken girls stumbling home echoed in her ears and she looked over Liam’s shoulder at the City stretching out in the distance. She’d never get used to looking up at the London sky and not being able to see the stars, but the neon and the streetlights would do instead.
‘You’re the fake,’ Grace said bitterly. ‘You’re just a lame, tenth-generation copy of Kurt Cobain in your dreams.’
‘Why can’t you two just kiss and make up?’ Lily begged. ‘You wouldn’t be getting so mad if you didn’t still care about each other.’
‘The only thing I care about is the three months I wasted on him,’ Grace sulked, taking a sharp left. ‘Fuck this!’
Lily’s hand was in hers before she could take another step. ‘Come back to ours for tea and toast. You shouldn’t walk home on your own.’
‘I’ll be fine,’ Grace hissed so Liam and Dan wouldn’t hear. She tried to pull free of Lily’s hand but Lily just tightened her grip. ‘I can’t do this. I can’t pretend that everything is OK and I’m not bothered about Liam being here, because I am. He dumped me so he doesn’t get to flaunt his new girlfriend in my face then act surprised when I call him on it.’
‘He could have handled it better but maybe he was just trying to make you jealous,’ Lily whispered. ‘Or he wants to be friends. That wouldn’t be so bad, would it?’
‘It would be beyond bad.’ Grace succeeded in tugging her hand free and tried to smile to soften the blow. ‘I just want to go home and be by myself for a bit. I still have at least a week’s worth of wallowing time.’
‘Are you sure? It’s not really safe . . .’
Grace rummaged in her bag. ‘Look, I’ll have my keys in one hand and the rape alarm my gran bought me in the other.’ She took a step away from the concerned expression on Lily’s face. ‘I’ll call you later and I’ll take a break from wallowing so we can go out for a fry-up.’
Another step, then another until there was a huge expanse of pavement between them. ‘OK,’ Lily agreed grudgingly. ‘But you’re still going the wrong way.’
Lily was right, but there was no chance of Grace retracing her steps and having to walk all the way down Brecknock Road with the three of them until they parted ways. ‘I fancy some fresh air,’ Grace lied, and finally Lily was nodding and she was able to walk away.
Going home via a three-mile detour to Kentish Town hadn’t been one of Grace’s better ideas, she thought as she finally reached Junction Road. As far as her grandparents were concerned, Grace lived on the ‘Highg
ate borders’ but actually Junction Road was firmly situated in Archway and was a great greasy smear of late-opening convenience stores, workmen’s cafés and shops selling a variety of plastic household goods and non-brand detergents, even if it was hemmed in on all sides by Highgate and Dartmouth Park, which the estate agents of North London called ‘charming enclaves’ or ‘bustling cosmopolitan villages’ or ‘in the catchment area for several outstanding local schools’.
Grace turned into Montague Terrace and ran the last few yards home just so she’d get there that little bit quicker, then slowed down so she could quietly open the front door and creep down the hall and up the stairs without waking Eileen on the ground floor.
Although Mrs Beattie, her landlady, charged Grace £140 a week for a one-bedroom flat, it was a bedsit with ideas way, way above its station. Grace had two rooms, which were meant to be separated by a screen door but it had shifted off its castors. One room was the kitchen and dining area but the stove was so old it had vents rather than gas rings, and the other room was where Grace slept on a sofabed, which threatened to give up the ghost each time she transformed it from bed to sofa or back again - it mostly stayed a bed.
The flat could have been lovely. It had high ceilings and a huge bay window behind her bed, but the damp had taken hold and wouldn’t let go. The place had been freshly painted when Grace handed over her deposit, but now there were streaks of moisture staining the walls and mildew collecting on the insides of the windows, and Grace had packed all her worldly goods from clothes to books to magazines to handbags, in huge vacuum-sealed plastic storage bags so they wouldn’t rot.
If she wasn’t always six months in arrears with her rent, Grace could have found somewhere else to live, except she remembered the poky rooms in shared houses she’d looked at when Dan moved into Lily’s and she’d moved out. Still, it would have been nice to have her own bathroom rather than sharing the one on the ground floor with Eileen and Anita and Ilonka, the Polish girls who had the flat above Grace’s.
She could hear the two of them clumping up the stairs now as she realised that drunk and depressed had become sober and depressed and actually it was too cold to be standing in her underwear eating peanut butter straight out of the jar with a teaspoon. It was almost four in the morning and staying up so late that the dark was turning into smudges of light always made Grace feel the chill.
Grace licked the teaspoon thoughtfully and tried to find her happy place, though according to Liam she didn’t actually have one. Liam wasn’t big with the perception, but he’d half-glimpsed something that she thought no one else ever saw. A girl who drifted through life without ever touching the sides. A girl who didn’t get the most cake, because she was something less than all the other girls.
Then again, there was a Marc Jacobs bag in her oven that said otherwise.
Maybe she hadn’t sobered up completely. She definitely had the early morning blahs. That’s why Grace was opening the oven door, her phone clutched in the other hand. If he hadn’t wanted her to call, then he could have just ixnayed on the business card.
And before she could pontificate on the wheres and whys and the absolutely spectacular what-the-fuck-are-you-thinking-Grace? she punched in the number.
The plan was that she’d leave a message. A breezy, insouciant ‘thanks even though you don’t do thanks’ voicemail because . . . because . . . because it was rude not to.
‘Hello?’
Grace took the phone away from her ear so she could stare at it in disbelief. Why was he answering on the first ring? That wasn’t part of her plan.
The next ‘hello?’ was tinny and tetchy.
‘Hi,’ she said quickly, mind racing through possibilities of why he was up and why she was ringing before the cock crowed. Not that Archway had a huge number of crowing cocks. ‘It’s Grace. We met in Liberty’s.’
‘Oh yes, I remember.’ There was a delay on the line, which threw Grace into even more confusion.
‘I’m sorry to call you so late. I was just going to leave a message,’ she babbled, her words sticking together in a garbled rush.
Vaughn gave the tiniest chuckle. ‘It’s not that late where I am.’
‘Where are you?’
‘In Miami, just coming back from a very boring business dinner.’
‘For real?’ Incredulity won out over breezy and insouciant.
‘Yes, for real. I could stick the phone out of the car window to see if I can pick up some salsa music if you need proof.’ Vaughn snickered again and God, Grace thought, this had been such a bad idea.
‘OK . . . I’ll take your word for it,’ she said, flicking the corner of a postcard she’d pinned to the corkboard in the kitchen, as an alternative to hurling herself out of the window. ‘Well, I just—’
‘But it’s very late where you are,’ Vaughn continued, and now Grace remembered how he’d constantly interrupted her mid-sentence when she’d been sitting across from him in that red room. ‘Why are you still up?’
‘Oh, I only just got in and I wasn’t ready to go to bed yet. Thought I’d catch up on my outstanding correspondence.’ That was better. It was almost breezy and insouciant. ‘So anyway,’ Grace rushed on, ‘how did you find out where I worked?’ That two-second pause after everything she said while the fibre optics sent her words over two continents and several time-zones, made Grace feel as if her tongue was this cumbersome thing that had found its way into her mouth by accident.
‘Would you buy that I put a tracing agent in your champagne? No? You had a very fetching security laminate around your neck,’ Vaughn replied. ‘What do you do on Skirt magazine?’
‘Well, technically I’m the Style Director’s assistant but mostly I live in the fashion cupboard.’
‘In the fashion cupboard?’
‘Yeah, the fashion cupboard. It’s where we keep the, er, fashion.’
‘And do you like it?’
‘I love the fashion part but the cupboard bit, not so much. What do you do? I’ve narrowed it down to a weapons supplier or human trafficking.’
The chuckle upgraded to a full-throated laugh and Grace wondered what Vaughn looked like when he did that. ‘Oh, it’s much worse than that. I’m an art dealer.’
That would be Grace’s cue to say something incisive and intelligent about the modern art world gleaned from all the articles she’d flicked through but not read in the Evening Standard. But she was too busy nervously twisting her legs around each other, until she banged into the side of the fridge. She settled for a hesitant: ‘Cool.’ The two-second delay stretched to five and counting. ‘So, like, anyway, I wanted to thank you for the bag but you don’t do the thanks thing, so can I take you out for a drink sometime instead?’
Where the fuck had that come from? Vaughn was saying something and she didn’t really want to hear what it was. ‘You’re offering to buy me a drink?’ He didn’t sound at all repulsed. ‘That’s . . . well, rather charming. You lower-middle-class girls do have beautiful manners.’
‘I am not lower middle class,’ Grace gritted immediately. ‘I come from Worthing and my grandfather was a bank manager, for God’s sake.’ Vaughn laughed again and being mad at him made the nerves and the awkwardness melt away. ‘I’m sorry, did I ask you out for a drink? I must have taken huge amounts of drugs at some point during the evening.’
It would have been easier to just hang up the phone instead of walking into the lounge/bedroom/ecosystem for mould and flinging herself down on the sofa, which creaked in protest, but Grace still hadn’t figured out how to do easy. She also wished she hadn’t got undressed because this wasn’t the kind of conversation she wanted to have while she was wearing a pair of rainbow-patterned knickers and a bra that had been through the wash too many times.
‘Are you pouting?’ he asked.
‘No,’ Grace lied. ‘And I take back the drink thing. Revoked. Never happened.’
‘You can’t take it back,’ Vaughn said smugly. ‘You said it, it’s out there. I’m chec
king my BlackBerry right now.’
‘Well, I’m going to New York the week after next so I’m very, very bu—’
‘I’m in New York then too.’ Of course Vaughn would be in New York too. He probably spent loads of time in New York; it was like a second home to him and he had a favourite deli, bought his cufflinks in Barney’s, and he’d go to a New York version of the club he’d taken Grace to where all the staff knew his name and his favourite brand of champagne.
‘I’ve never been to New York before,’ Grace heard herself confess haltingly, because there was something about Vaughn that made her feel so nervous that she just blurted out the first thing that came into her head.
‘Well, how fortunate that our schedules have us there at the same time,’ he said smoothly. ‘Fine, we’ll do drinks there if you can find a window in between doing the Circle Line tour and trying to find the Empire State Building. Where are you staying?’
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